Working Stiff (21 page)

“And for the lady?”

“Whatever you’re doing is fine,” she said hastily. What did rich people eat for lunch? Finger sandwiches with the crusts cut off? Oysters? She had no idea. This place made Mr. Fairview’s fancy French lunch look like the corner deli had slapped it together. “Where are we going?”

That last was directed at McCallister, and he chewed and swallowed a large bite of eggs before he said, “I told you that I had a contact who might be able to help with your … unique problem. A therapist. We’ll be visiting him shortly.”

Again, he was talking in code, and the reality descended hard on her shoulders, like hands pushing her into the chair: someone was always watching. Listening. Even here. No matter where she went, she couldn’t shake off Pharmadene’s leash around her neck.

She took a bite of bagel. It was probably delicious, but she tasted almost nothing. At least it would keep her going, along with the coffee. “I need my shot,” she said.

“You’ll get it once we’re at the therapist’s.”

“You have it with you?”

“Yes. I keep two with me at all times in case of emergency.” When she frowned, he continued. “If you get severely injured, you may require a booster shot. I don’t want to be unprepared, as long as you’re with me.”

“In other words, I could knock you out and take them, and I’d be all right for two days.”

The smile went back to a tight, controlled, almost humorless expression. “Your problem is assuming you could knock me out.” She knew that glint in the eye; McCallister wasn’t confident because he was arrogant. He was confident because he had historical evidence he was right. “And I don’t think one more day of running would take you out of the reach of Pharmadene.”

He was right about that. Without resources, she’d be delaying the inevitable, and very messy, end. Pharmadene wouldn’t even have to chase her, unless they really wanted to. They could just literally let her rot.

Bryn ate her bagel in silence, and by the time she was finished, Liam had already neatly packed her overnight bag and loaded it in McCallister’s car. He even included a new dog bed for Mr. French to travel in comfort. Lunch was in modular little boxes. “I think he
is
Alfred,” she said to McCallister, who was downing the last of his coffee as he watched.

“Actually, I often wonder if he’s Batman.” McCallister handed Liam back the cup and saucer and opened the passenger door for her. “Time to go.”

She let Mr. French jump in and take his seat in the dog bed before slipping in herself. McCallister got behind the wheel, and in ten seconds or less they were heading down the gravel path. Bryn let the crunch of the tires fill the silence for another five seconds before she said, “Your family has a shitload of money.”

“That’s one way to put it.”

“But it’s not
your
money?”

“I told you. I’m the trust administrator. I decide where the money is spent, but I’m not allowed to touch it personally.”

“Is that why you took the job at Pharmadene?”

“Even ex-rich people need salaries.”

“But why
there
?”

He didn’t glance at her. His focus stayed on the long, winding road down to the gates. “I don’t think we need to discuss my job, Bryn. It’s not healthy for either of us to dig too deep into the details.”

“But back at Joe’s you said—”

“Bryn.” He cut her off, cold as a guillotine blade. “Change the subject. Now.”

She hadn’t been going to spill anything top-secret, damn it; she wasn’t that stupid. It offended her that he thought she would. “Fine. Tell me about your family.”

“Pick something else.” He finally reached the estate’s gates, which silently opened for them, and they hit the open road. She could sense his frustration in the way he edged the accelerator up past legal speed.

“Oh, no, you already warned me off of one topic. Liam said your family got its money the old-fashioned way.”

“By oppressing others? Yes, there was a lot of opportunity for that around the early industrial age, and they took full advantage. Great-Granddad was a rival of Rockefeller for a while, only he lacked the civic responsibility. It’s not a glamorous story, Bryn.”

“It is to someone whose biggest family celebrity was a cousin who made it to the second round of
American Idol
. Nobody’s ever going to mention the Davises in the same breath as the Rockefellers.”

“That’s almost certainly a good thing.”

She laughed. “And you really don’t have a clue what it’s like to grow up poor, McCallister.”

“I know what it’s like to grow up—” He stopped himself, shook his head, and said, “Let’s not talk about this.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not germane to the problems you face.”

“I didn’t think you wanted to talk about my problems. What with all the secrets.”

To her surprise, he laughed. It was a strange, almost humorless little laugh, but closer than she’d ever heard from him. “You can be infuriatingly right; did anyone ever tell you that?”

“I can safely say it’s not a problem that’s really bothered me so far in my life.”

“All right then,” he said. There were crinkles at the corners of his eyes, and a ghost of a smile on his lips. “You tell
me
about your family.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No.”

“You probably know everything about all of them.”

“I know facts. Tell me what they’re actually like.”

So she did, as the miles hummed by under the tires: Annie, her sweet but financially incompetent sister; her brother Tate’s current deployment to Afghanistan; her older sister Grace, the know-it-all, working as a department manager at Wal-Mart, but with embarrassing secrets; George, the asshole Bryn never spoke to, who was still the apple of her mother’s eye because he ran his own business; and, last, Kyle. “But you know about Kyle,” she said.

“Do I?”

She sighed. “He’s serving fifteen years for armed robbery. Don’t tell me you don’t know about my big brother. I barely know him, though. He took off when he was fifteen years old, and I was just a kid. He was smart, though. Smarter than George, for sure. He got in with bad people after he left home.”

“Isn’t this where you tell me he’s not a bad guy?”

“No. As far as I know, he’s a hard-ass Aryan Brotherhood member. It’d be stupid to say he’s not a bad guy.”

McCallister let that lie for a moment before he said, “What about Sharon?”

“What about her?”

“You didn’t tell me about her.”

“I didn’t really know her, either.” That was a lie, though; Bryn remembered Sharon well. Sharon was pretty, with flowing red-blond hair, a teasing laugh, big lovely eyes. “She was a lot older than I was.”

“You refer to her in past tense, you know.”

“I know. She’s dead. I mean, the family party line is that she’s missing, but she’s been missing for a long time, and you know the odds on that. If a pretty eighteen-year-old girl with no history of behavior issues goes missing …”

McCallister nodded slowly. “Still, she could be out there somewhere.”

“If she is, she’s got no interest in contacting any of us. Not even Mom, and they were close right up until the day she walked out of our lives.” Bryn took in a deep breath. “No. She’s dead. Whether it was an accident or murder, she’s lying out there somewhere, waiting to be found. I know it, and so do you.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. It sounded like he meant it.

“Then it’s your turn,” she said. “I’ve been talking for more than an hour, spilling my entire family history. What about you?”

“Bryn—”

“I’m not asking for classified secrets. Just tell me about your family.”

He didn’t want to—she could see it—but he finally said, “Nothing much to tell. Rich people are remarkably boring; they’re either big philanthropists, like my mother, or self-absorbed, like my father. Either way, the effect was the same. They didn’t spend much time at home. I had more in common with my tutors and nannies than I did with my parents.” He shrugged. “I’m not trying to be poor-little-rich-boy about it. It’s what it was. My mother was a good person; she just felt that the family’s responsibility was to do good with what we had, so she was always out at fundraisers, contributing to causes, attending charity events. She was beautiful, and I think she would have made a ruthless businesswoman if she’d been required to do that. She wasn’t.”

“And your father?”

Patrick just shrugged and said nothing, but she saw the skin tighten at the corners of his eyes. Not a smile this time—something else. Something darker.

“Liam said your brother’s name was Jamie.”

“That’s right.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“And what
happened
?” Nothing. He might have been a mannequin, for all the emotional response he gave to that. “Oh, come on. I spilled about everything, including Grace’s secret adoption. I went all talk-show about it. And you won’t even give me more than his
name
?”

McCallister said, “What made you go into the funeral business?”

“Oh, no, you’re going to tell me
something
. No changing the channel. Was he older or younger?”

“Older,” McCallister finally said, after what seemed like a pretty fierce internal argument. “Two years older.”

“Did you get along?”

“I was the younger brother of a filthy rich family. The surplus child. No, we didn’t get along.” From the way McCallister’s hands tightened on the steering wheel, then deliberately relaxed, that was putting it mildly. “Jamie died. That’s all the story you’re going to get.”

“And you were disinherited.” He didn’t bother to answer that one at all. Silence fell, deep and uncomfortable, and Bryn finally sighed and said, “When I was in Iraq, I saw a lot of death. Not just our people, but the Iraqis, too. I didn’t mind helping gather bodies after a bombing; some couldn’t handle it, but I could. It felt like something I could do to restore some kind of dignity to them. So when I came back, I thought … I thought it might be a good thing to do for a living. There’s something honorable about it. Something real.”

McCallister looked over at her, nodded, and said, “I was in the military, too. I can kill, but gathering bodies—that always bothered me. It takes a special kind of strength to devote yourself to that.”

“True believers,” she said, and smiled.

“What?”

“Something one of my instructors said. Two kinds of people in the funeral business: true believers and freaks. I guess I’m a true believer, after all. Except that what you did to me does make me a bit of a freak, I suppose.”

“Different kind of freak, perhaps, than what he was referring to.”

“Yeah. Fast Freddy was the kind he was talking about. Me, I’m … life-challenged.”

“I think that could apply to any of us, Bryn.” McCallister downshifted, and the car slowed for him to make a turn onto the interstate. “We’ve got another hour, if you’d like to take a nap. Mr. French has already beaten you to it.”

So he had; she looked back to find the bulldog snoozing away, comfortably curled in his fluffy new bed. And truthfully, she
was
tired. Aching, actually. She caught herself yawning. “What about the shot?” she asked.

“When we get there,” he said. “Rest.”

It didn’t take much for her to drop into a dark, uneasy sleep filled with flashes of nightmares. Fast Freddy leering at her. The decomposing, impossibly moving corpse in the mortuary. Her own image, dead on a TV screen, until it screamed.

Last, she dreamed of her sister Sharon the final time she’d seen her—carefree, laughing, heading out on a normal afternoon and walking right out of the family’s life, forever.

Only this time, Sharon wasn’t laughing.

She was screaming as someone carried her away. Reaching out for help, while Bryn stood frozen and silent.

The sound of voices outside the car woke her, finally. Bryn yawned, made a face at the horrible taste in her mouth, and blinked to clear her eyes. She couldn’t see much.
Is it already dark?
No, it couldn’t be. A jolt of shock and fear went through her.
My shot. Is it late?

Then she calmed down and realized that she could see daylight in the distance. McCallister had parked the car inside a windowless building, something like an open, deserted factory. She could dimly make out an empty expanse of concrete, some dilapidated wooden crates, and a few bolts where large machinery had once been installed.

It didn’t look like anyplace she’d have voluntarily visited.

Bryn listened more carefully. She heard McCallister’s voice, and saw him standing outside the car talking to … no one. Wait. He was addressing a speaker grille set into the wall next to a solid metal door.

“… message, Manny. I know you don’t like it when I bring strangers, but I didn’t have a choice. Open up. It’s dangerous to let her sit out here.”

“No, it’s not,” the speaker said, with a faint crackle of static. “We intercepted the tracking signal half a mile out and jammed it. Your satanic bosses will be looking in all the wrong places by this time, especially since I ghosted the signal out to some repeaters. They’ll get random blips through half the state for as long as I want.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me, Pat. As far as I’m concerned, you can take her and go.”

“Manny, we talked about this. You said you had something for me.”

“I do. And I’ll give it to you. But she’s not coming inside— Wait. Pansy,
Jesus
, don’t go and—” Manny fell silent, then sighed. “Well, crap.”

A light switched on above the door, and it opened with a heavy scrape. On the other side was a small-framed woman with dark hair cut in a pageboy style; she had a lovely, heart-shaped face, and a wicked smile for McCallister. “Well, bring her in, Pat. I can’t stand to hear the two of you yammering at each other anymore, and I know how stubborn you both can be.”