The Bad Judgment Series: The Complete Series (38 page)

I smiled at her; in spite of my initial dislike and continuing distrust, she was starting to grow on me, a little. Maybe it was the fact that I hadn’t spoken to another human being besides Walker, Levi and Louise in weeks. They were all fine — of course, Walker was more than fine — but April was semi-normal, familiar, a remnant of my other life.

“We’ll be in the living room,” I said. “And April,” I said, “please don’t do anything stupid. I’m going to treat you like a guest, not a hostage. But if you do anything to try to hurt us, or to jeopardize our anonymity here, you’re not going to live very long.”

“I won’t,” she said, and her voice was snippy again. “Jesus, Walker just bent me over a car and felt me up. He ripped my bag apart. I’m clean. I brought my boss here drugged and in his
underwear.
All I want is some more money. How many times do you people have to hear it?”

“Probably more than a few. But at least Lester has some pants on, now,” I called, heading down the hall.

As comforting as it was to have someone from Boston with us, someone who knew what was going on, it was just as discomforting — having others in our space was making me a little paranoid. Leaving April behind me made me worry about all sorts of crazy scenarios…Was she working for someone else, like the government? Would she put some sort of undetectable bug in our room? Would she hide some sort of microscopic bomb and then escape, finally taking care of us once and for all?

I must have looked pale and worried by the time I got back to Walker, because he seized me by the shoulders at once. “What is it?” he asked me, lowly.

“I’m afraid to have them here,” I blurted out. “I know I’m being paranoid, but what if somebody got to April first? What if she’s working for somebody else? What if she’s going to hurt us?”

“I won’t let that happen,” Walker said, calmly. “And Nic, I searched them both — they’re clean. They can’t hurt us.”

“I don’t think we’re going to be able to let them go,” I said, looking around. “Maybe this was a mistake. I don’t want people on the outside to know where we are. It’s been our one advantage.”

He gripped me by the shoulders. “We have to find a way to get the people responsible for Mandy’s death caught,” he said quietly. “You want it as much as I do — maybe even more. Innocent people have died because of my case. Because of me. You know I don’t care about going back. But I do care about the truth. You were right. We can’t just let the killers go free, and have everyone thinking that we were responsible for this mess.”

I shook my head. “Of course,” I said. “I feel the same way. Just having them here, all of a sudden, is making me feel like we’re vulnerable.”

“We are. But that’s the risk we have to take,” Walker said, and pulled me to him. “But don’t worry about April, and don’t worry about Lester. We can keep her locked in her room if you want. I’ll stay out here with him tonight until he wakes up, so he can’t run away or call anybody. I’ll tape his mouth shut, too.”

“Okay,” I said, accepting it all at once, adapting and steeling myself for the road ahead. I needed to keep my big-girl panties on, now more than ever.

“Go get some sleep,” Walker said. “I’ll take care of everything.”

“I know you will — but I can’t sleep. Not until I hear from him,” I said, motioning towards Lester. “Plus, April’s gonna come out and have a glass of wine. Maybe she can tell us something new.”

“I’ll tell you a few things, all right,” April said, coming out into the living room in her pajamas and a smirk on her face. “Just please don’t ask me to bend over again. Unless it’s for something exciting — like a huge amount of money.”

“Done,” I said, and I shook my head at Walker.
Good thing you’re a billionaire,
I thought,
because we have a lot of people on the payroll. And they’re a greedy bunch.

I poured two glasses of wine. Walker continued to pace. And April and I sat down to have our first nice, long, civilized chat.

O
ne thing
I learned about April that night was that Lester Max had tried to get her to sleep with him approximately twelve thousand times. When she’d finally said yes in Miami, he thought he’d won the golden ticket.

“I almost slept with him before I knocked him out, just out of pity,” April said, inspecting her nails. “But then I came to my senses.”

We looked over at Lester Max, who was slowly coming to life, twitching restlessly on the couch and snoring lightly. “That was probably a good call,” I said, still feeling guilty about what I was planning.

Lester twitched again and Walker came and sat down at the foot of the couch. He rubbed his face; his beard was starting to come in and he had dark circles under his eyes, but his eyes had a glimmer of energy to them, a sparkle, as if he couldn’t wait for his old colleague to wake up and be woefully surprised.

We waited quietly. April and I were each on our respective second glass of wine. I was finally starting to relax, adjusting to having her in our space. We were going to make this work, I promised myself. All of a sudden, Lester lurched and sat straight up. I startled, gave out a yelp, and splashed some wine on the floor.

“What the …?” Lester said, and his voice sounded surprised, but also slurred, like his tongue wasn’t moving the way it was supposed to.

April and I sat there, just looking at him, as he adjusted his wire-rim glasses which had been smushed to his face. He looked from her to me, from me to her, his mouth open and closing, like he was chewing on something that refused to be swallowed. What he had for hair, which was really just a semi-circle around his shiny bald pate, was wildly askew. He had no shirt on, so his pasty chest and round belly, covered with thick fur-like hair, were clearly visible. The only thing he had on were his light-blue plaid pajamas.

Had I been capable of it, I would have felt a little sorry for him.

He looked down to the bottom of the couch, where Walker sat, grinning like the Cheshire Cat. “Hello, Lester,” Walker said, positively beaming at him.

“Walker,” Lester said, but it came out garbled, like
Wlaker.
His face looked pinched. He put his hand over his heart like he might be having a heart attack.

“It’s been a while,” Walker said. He leaned back on the couch, clearly enjoying the moment.

Lester looked around wildly.

“Where are we?” he asked, and again, it sounded like his tongue was made of lead. “What the fuck did you do to me?” he asked, looking at April.

She cocked an eyebrow at him. “I slipped you a little something, commonly known as the date-rape drug,” she said, calmly. “Nothing you wouldn’t have done to me, if you’d had the chance.”

“Wait till I get the chance,” he hissed out her, but it came out so messed up that it was only funny, not threatening. I had to hold back a giggle. Lester whipped his glasses off and proceeded to clean them on his pajama bottoms; I could see his chest rising and falling rapidly, but he was trying to regain control over himself.

“You’re not going to hurt April,” Walker said, and when Lester had put his glasses back on, he looked up at Walker with his brow furrowed.

“Of course not,” Lester said. “I might just enjoy fantasizing about it.”

“Sounds like business as usual, if you ask me,” April said, getting up and sashaying over to the bottle of wine sitting on the island.

Lester sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose, and turned back to Walker. “Where are we?” he asked again, and his voice was more in control this time.

“That doesn’t matter,” Walker said. “What matters is that you’re here. And we’re really, really happy to have you.”

Lester sighed but it sounded more like a sob. “Don’t kill me,” he said. “I didn’t hurt the girl. The lawyer. I wasn’t involved in any of that — you know me, Walker. All I wanted was the money.”

“I gave you plenty of money, you greedy fuck,” Walker said, and his voice was lethal.

Lester sat up a little and nodded, squeezing his eyes shut. “You did,” he said, “you did. But with what Milly and Lisa took every month, and the kids ….”

“Shut up,” Walker said, and he was no longer beaming or excited. He just looked pissed. “I am so tired of you blaming your ex-wives for your problems.
You
are your problem. Leave your wives and kids out of it — that’s the only place they want to be, anyway. You always loved your money more than you loved anything else,” he said. “And you might not understand it now, but at some point — hopefully tonight, when I’ve hurt you — you’re going to understand that money can’t save you. No matter who you pay off.”

“
Hurt
me?” Lester asked. “Why are you going to do that? I can help you, Walker. I can make this right. I can stop them….”

“Oh, you’re going to do all of that. And more. Don’t doubt it.”

Lester looked at him, his face pale and shiny and blank.

It didn’t look like he doubted him.

W
alker locked
Lester in the walk-in linen closet after that, just to shake him up a little more. “I have some tactics,” Walker said to me, opening a beer and pacing around. He’d sent April to bed; it was close to four in the morning.

“You need to get some sleep,” he said to me.

“I can’t leave you alone with him — you’re scaring me,” I said. “What did you mean about hurting him?” That was what was keeping me from my bed. I was worried that Walker was going to hurt Lester, and that Lester was going to make some sort of confession about something awful and it was going to push the man I loved right over the edge: and he would go from hurting Lester to
really
hurting Lester. I didn’t want that to happen. I didn’t want Lester getting so hurt that he was no use to us; I really didn’t want Walker doing something that he was going to regret later.

Lester Max wasn’t worth it.

“I’m just going to cut him. A little,” Walker said, a bit defensively. “I want him to remember that when I send him back out.”

“I heard that,” Lester yelled from the closet. I flew in there and turned on the light. He was sitting on the floor, handcuffed to the bottom of an armoire.

“Shut
up
,” I hissed. “We have neighbors. If you don’t keep it down, I’m gonna tell him to cut out your tongue.”

“I know I shouldn’t say this right now — but I never liked you,” Lester said, in spite of his best interests. “You are fucking
uppity
for a young woman.”

“I know, right?” I said, and turned the light off again, wanting to slam the door on him and not letting myself.

I turned to Walker. “I’m fine with you hurting him,” I said, stomping off to brush my teeth. “Just don’t kill him. Yet.” I made sure I said it so Lester could hear me.

“I’m sorry,” he called from the closet.

“You’re not sorry,” I called back, “you’re a misogynist.”

I caught a glimpse of Walker, laughing into his beer, as I turned the corner to our bedroom. I figure it was okay to go to sleep for an hour or two. Walker wouldn’t kill him. Not yet. He was having too much fun.

I
woke
up two hours later, startled and sweating. I heard noise coming from the other room and I ran out; Walker was dragging Lester down the hall, towards the couch.

“What’s up?” I mumbled, my heart pounding from not enough sleep.

“Lester here was falling asleep, that’s all,” Walker said. The lack of sleep didn’t seem to affect
him
; he looked tall and muscly and gorgeous, just like he always did. “I just didn’t want him getting too comfortable.”

“Can I please just go to sleep?” Lester asked. “Let me get some rest. Then please give me something to eat. I’ll do whatever you want. It’s not like I have a choice.”

“You always have a choice,” Walker said, and threw him onto the couch. “That’s why I want to make sure, before you go back out there, that we’re absolutely clear about what that choice is.”

“We need details, Lester,” I said. I went out into the kitchen and came back with three mugs of coffee; Lester was far from my favorite person, but I at least wanted him lucid. I handed him the coffee and he sat up a little and looked at me gratefully. That was probably all he wanted from any woman — to be waited on, complete with no back talk and no opinions.

I looked at him and sighed. I wanted to be able to trust him, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to get there.

Money is at the root of this.
I remembered Mimi Johnstone’s words again.
Follow the money.
And here was Lester, greed personified, sitting right in front of me. How could we trust him? Only by giving him exactly what he wanted — Walker had been right. Even if it cost Walker a small fortune, that’s what we were going to need to secure Lester’s loyalty. Money. And the possibility of another promise that I was holding up my sleeve.

We were going to need a system of checks and balances, I reasoned. If Walker gave Lester access to his vast fortune, we had to have a way to make sure that Lester wasn’t going to just take it all and run.

“I need to take your statement,” I said. “We’re going to need to go back to the beginning, when relations between Blue Securities and the government went sour, and what your role was in all that. I need to know who is involved from Proctor & Buchanan and the extent of that involvement. I also need to know the timing of everything. And I need the truth. Because I have to tell you, I’m going to be able to cross-reference you. You aren’t my only source,” I semi-lied, thinking of Alexa and the information I hoped she was going to be able to get for us.

“What happens when I tell you everything? What happens after that?” Lester asked, looking at Walker.

“If you tell us the truth, you get to live,” Walker said, and smiled tightly. “And as a bonus, you get to work for me again.”

“How’s that gonna work?” Lester asked, but Walker held up his hand to stop him.

“No more questions, now,” Walker said. “Answers. Lots of answers. And don’t be rude to my uppity girlfriend-lawyer: I won’t take kindly to it.

“Now,” Walker said, standing up and stretching, “would you like some breakfast while you spill your guts?”