Outside The Lines:: Third Person Narration (24 page)

She smiled a little. “You’ve already helped. And it’s no problem.
 
I do BART.”

He smiled back. “Lucky Bart.”

His eyes met hers, and Juliette had the distinct impression that if he weren’t FBI and she weren’t part of his investigation, and if Johnny weren’t sitting right there, he’d have said something else entirely.
 

And that made her smile a little more. Men were generally not interested in her.
 
Maybe she’d found her niche: phenom accountants and hard-boiled FBI agents.
 

“I’m driving you,” Johnny interjected, his voice hard as he looked between them.

Agent Murphy took a step back, nodded and reached for Johnny’s hand.
 
“You, I’ll call about a beer later this week.”

Johnny nodded silently.
 

Agent Murphy eyed him. “Don’t be too hard on yourself, Danger.
 
There’s no way you could have known.”
 

Johnny’s face was completely blank. “Right.
 
No way to know who the criminals are.”

But there was one way. Johnny had told her about it.
 

Just suspect them all.
   

Agent Murphy left, people came in and wanted to talk to Johnny, people in expensive suits with loosened ties and a lot of questions. It was clear she was keeping them from it.
   

Johnny’s assistant, Roxy, who was as gracious in person as she’d been on the phone, arranged the company car for Juliette to use—“Absolutely no BART,” she said firmly, and for once, Juliette listened—and then, she helped Juliette slip out without Johnny knowing.
 

As she walked out, she spotted him through the half-opened door of the conference room, bathed in a glow of lights, a bunch of men and women around him, all in suits, with drinks on the table, all talking, talking, talking, and Johnny sitting there, absolutely silent, staring down at his hands.

She walked out the door.
 
It was time to go. There was no running away, with Johnny or without him. Her phone had thirty-nine messages and she had a cold apartment to get back to and an African violet to water.
 

Thirty-five of the messages were from Johnny.

Three were from zealous clients about setting up tax appointments for the new year.
 

The last was from Mrs. B.

Juliette returned hers first.

Chapter Seventeen

MRS. B TOLD HER the judge had shown up in the middle of the night, only a few hours after Juliette had called, and gone directly to his office.

“Barely moments after I scanned and sent those documents to you, dear,” she said.

Juliette thought about how close that had been, how scared Mrs. B must have been.
 
“Are the papers still there now?” she asked. “In the safe?”

“Not a one. The FBI checked. He took them all.”

Juliette exhaled, thinking about that. A few minutes more, and they’d never have known. “Did you mention to the judge that I’d asked for any papers?”

“I do believe it slipped my mind.”

She smiled. “I love you, Mrs. B.”

“And I you, dear.
 
I never trusted him, you know,” she added in a musing tone.

Juliette was shocked.
 
“But Mrs. B, you said you trusted Dan, and—”

“I did not say that.
 
You must listen better.
 
I said the
judge
trusted him.”
 

“And you trusted the judge.”

“Never.”

Juliette stared at the phone.
 

“I deferred, my dear. It is an entirely different thing. I did not
care
. I did not attend.
 
Which I see now was a terrible mistake. I should have been more involved. I need to care about many things in this world that I would rather not.”

Juliette knew the feeling.

“So I will start taking more care.”

“That’s good, Mrs. B.”

“Starting with you.”

“Me?”

“I would like you to care for my business. My antique business. It seems I require an accountant, and I would like that person to be you. And I will be selling the apartments, once I am able to do so, if I am able to do so, and donating the money. I shall need someone to assist in the financial end of those arrangements. Will you accept the position?”

“Oh, well, I—
 
Yes, ma’am. Absolutely, I accept.”

 
“Very good.” Juliette could hear her pleasure through the phone. “It’s not a large business, of course.”
 

“I specialize in not-large.”

“Yes, I know, dear.”

Juliette blinked. “Oh.”

“But I know many people who
do
have more substantial businesses,” Mrs. B went on. “And I believe in referrals.”

She smiled.

They hung up and Juliette looked around the empty apartment, feeling amped up and restless and unable to focus.
 

But whatever she was feeing, how ever odd and off-kilter and floaty she felt right now, whatever she’d lost or been hit with during all this, it was going to be a thousand times worse for Johnny.
 

And if she knew anything, it was that Johnny and she were kindred spirits. Lone wolves on an ice floe. Which meant she knew just what he’d be doing right now.

He’d be alone.
 
In his office.
 
Dying inside.

She grabbed her coat.

No more running from things. She was running
to
.

JOHNNY SAT ALONE in his office. The FBI was gone, the D.A. was gone, the accountants and lawyers and even the mayor were all gone.
 
He was alone, chair turned to the window, staring out at the glittering lights of the city at night, absolutely empty inside.

He couldn’t trust anyone.
 
He’d often said it, but deep down, apparently had not believed it, because he did have a very short list, started very late in life, of people who could be trusted.
 
Dan had been near the top.

Johnny didn’t give a fuck what it said about Dan.

He was rocked by what it said about him.

If he couldn’t trust himself to know who could trust, then he couldn’t trust anyone at all.
 

Not even himself.

And there was no take-away, nothing to be learned, nothing to do different next time.
 
No sense of purpose.
 
It was just…shit.
 
Blood.
 
A battlefield, a valley of death, filled with dead bodies, Johnny standing at the edge of it, weapons spent, no one left to die but him, no lessons to learn except the other guy should be more careful next time.

But there was no way to be careful enough. It wasn’t possible.
 
All you had was you and your capabilities, and the minefields up ahead.

If you failed, you were the bloody one, the dead body your buddies tried not to leave behind.
   

He’d failed.
   

No one got it.
 
He didn’t expect them to.
 
He didn’t care if they did.
 

He just knew he would never, ever be the same.

The office door opened at the end of the hall.
 
Then it shut.
 
A voice floated down the hall, low and throaty.
 

“Johnny?”

It was Juliette.

He closed his eyes and waited.

JULIETTE FOUND HIM in his office, lights out, staring out the window.
 
She leaned her shoulder against the doorframe, watching him a moment, then rapped lightly with the back of a knuckle.
 

“Johnny?”

He turned his head slightly, but didn’t look away from the window.

She took it as an invitation, went into the dark office, across the thick carpeting, and stopped at the desk.
 
“You okay?”

He nodded.
 
He didn’t stop looking out the window.

She looked out it too.
 
“Well, if you weren’t okay, that would be okay.”

Nothing.

She stood there for a long time.
 
Long enough for the moon to peek out from behind a building that it’d been hiding behind when she came in.
 
Dim sounds of city life drifted through the windows, an occasional car horn, a faraway siren.
 
She remembered the sounds of Christmas that had come though the windows of her office a few nights ago. It felt like a lifetime ago, like she must have been a child back then.

She walked around the desk, stood between Johnny’s chair and the window. He didn’t move, so she put her hands on the arms of his chair.
 
Still nothing.
 

She bent over so her face was directly in his line of sight.

“Johnny,” she said.
 

His gaze slid over.
 
The eyes that met hers were cold. Flinty. Impenetrable. “I trusted him,” was all he said.

She nodded.
 
“I know.”

He looked out the window again.

She straightened and leaned against the narrow windowsill and crossed her arms over her chest.

“Everyone gets hurt, Johnny,” she ventured softly.
 
“Everyone has someone who fucked them over.” He didn’t say anything.
 
The curse word made her feel powerful, and her voice got stronger.
 
“Everyone has someone who they thought they knew, but turned out to be a person they didn’t even recognize.
 
But that doesn’t mean you were
wrong
. Who knows, maybe Dan
was
the man you thought, once, then he changed while you weren’t looking.”

He didn’t get up and walk out, so she pressed on.

“Maybe you weren’t wrong about him. Maybe you can trust yourself,” she said, treading into foreign territory: guessing what Johnny might be thinking or feeling.
 
It wasn’t wise to mind-read with a man like Johnny. He might not be thinking
anything
like what mortals would think at a time like this.