Cash Burn (21 page)

“Sure. After the South Pacific. We could rent a sailboat down there, just go from island to island. There’s thousands of them. Fiji. Tahiti. Tonga. Bora Bora. I’ll bet there’s islands where there’s nobody at all. It could be just you and me on the beach.”

“And then, when we want some company, we could jump on a plane and go someplace until we got tired of other people again. Then where would we go?”

“Africa. We’d go on a safari.”

“I don’t want to shoot anything.”

“A photo safari. Just take pictures. They have guys that’ll drive you around and show you the lions and rhinos. But not like in a zoo, where they’re cooped up. Out where you can see them hunt and see the herds of wildebeest. Stuff like that.”

Brenda hugged her knees close. “You know I’ve never even been outside the US?”

“Not even Mexico or Canada?”

“Not even Hawaii or Alaska.”

Jason stroked her ankle. “We’ll have to change that. By the time we’re done, the US will be just another place in a big world.”

She stared at him, eyes gone distant. For a moment, the playfulness disappeared. Those lips drew straight and her brow hardened.

Jason sat up. “What is it?”

“What? Nothing. Nothing.”

And she was back, the Brenda he knew, the forehead smooth and lips curled up at their edges.

“For a second there you were a million miles away.”

Her eyes held on him. It was as if she was thinking of how to answer him. “It’s all too good to be true. You here, with me. This talk about traveling together. I’m afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“That this won’t last. That it won’t come true.” She eased down beside him and brought her arm across him, her face pressed to his shoulder.

“Don’t be afraid. I’ll make it work.
We’ll
make it work. Other people have done it.”

She spoke into his shoulder, her hair tickling his chin. “It’s not just the work thing. I can get another job.”

“What is it, then?”

“You’ve got your wife to deal with. . . .”

He buried his face in her hair, inhaled, fought the presence in the room. “I know. You deserve better.”

She shook her head to clear her hair away and brought her face up to him. Her eyes met his. “I told you, you’re all I’ve wanted since I first saw you. No one else measured up.”

The silence in the room weighed on Jason. He stroked the skin of her arm, put his hand to her face. She kissed it. He said, “I’m going to end it with her.
She
ended it. I’ll make it legal.” Applying the word to Serena gave him a strange satisfaction.

“You’ll do that?” She squeezed even closer to him.

“Honey, I’ll do a lot more than that for you. Just wait and see.”

33

Jason shoved through the door to Brenda’s apartment building. The morning light pressured his eyeballs. He brought a hand up and wished for the sunglasses that rested safely in his BMW a block away.

His watch read 7 a.m. He thought of Brenda standing at her door, leaning against the frame after they kissed good-bye, her hair a mess, her green eyes lidded by tiredness. A smile tugged at his lips, and he let it come.

He rounded the corner; the sun was at his back, and his eyes could focus now. He spotted the rounded edges of his car. His mind played over what had happened since he’d parked it. He thought he must look like a crazy man to anyone who saw him on the street, the way his smile wouldn’t stop.

At the car, he found his sunglasses and got the Bimmer started, and in ten minutes he pulled into his driveway and pressed the garage-door opener. As he watched the panels fold up, his mind was on a quick shower and change of clothes.

Serena’s car sat on the left. Where she used to park it before she left him.

His foot rested on the brake pedal. He stared at the black trunk lid, the three-pronged symbol in back a mockery of the peace sign. The vehicle announced her presence, and in response Jason found claustrophobia pressing in on his body from all angles.

She’d left a space for his car where she used to, but Jason yanked on the parking brake lever and turned off the ignition where he sat in the middle of the driveway. He stood outside his car, the neighborhood quiet in the still morning air, calmness all around him while his heartbeat charged and his vision clouded with irritation.

He fingered the key to his BMW as if it were some sort of magic charm that would ward her away. He could jump back in his car and return to Brenda’s apartment. Take a day off, the both of them.

But no, that would be the coward’s way out. And Serena would know he’d come home. She would have heard the churn of the garage-door opener unless she was in the very back of the house.

Jason clicked the lock button on his car key and moved into the garage. The door to the house was unlocked. He stepped inside.

There she sat. A portrait of female counsel seated at table. She wore a new gray suit, shoulders sharp enough to cut paper, skirt revealing the curve of her crossed knees beside the tabletop. The neckline of the jacket circled the base of her throat and left a gap exposing the dip at the center of her collarbone. The black fabric of a belt circled a waistline he’d rested his hands on a thousand times.

She lifted a china cup to her lips. Her lipstick had pinked the brim. She pursed her lips and swallowed, and as she returned the cup to its spot on the saucer, her left hand rose to draw a strand of her auburn hair behind an ear. She turned her eyes to him, brown, brushed upward at their edges by blackened lashes. Those eyes revealed nothing. She could have been considering a contract. Or ready to pull a trigger.

But her hair was different, trimmed at the ends since he’d seen her last, so that the curl where it rested on her shoulder wasn’t as long as it had been when she’d walked out on him. Like everything else about her appearance, it was just right.

Jason wondered if she had trimmed her hair and bought the new suit to torture him. He didn’t speak. He closed the door.

Serena’s middle fingertip circled the lip of the china coffee cup, the steam rising from inside swirling around her fingers. She’d painted her nails with a new shade of red—was that purple in it? They could have been candy.

“Long night, Jase?” Her voice had the texture of silk.

He put his keys on the counter. “Too short.” He went for the cupboard and brought out a mug. Serena’s coffee was always weaker than he liked it, but it would do. He brought it up for a sip. His hand trembled, the mug flittering against his lips until he pressed it to them. He waited for a remark from her about it. None came.

Jason took his mug to the table and sat. She watched him, her cool expression unchanging. You’d have to strap a polygraph to her to see what was going on in her head—if you could even coax a straight answer out of her. Her finger kept working around that china. Jason tried to decide if it was the maddening deliberation of the movement or her silence that was making him so angry. Or maybe it was just her presence here, sitting in her favorite perch as if nothing had ever happened and she was just having coffee with her husband on an ordinary day.

She tapped the lip of her cup twice with that fingertip. “Who is she?”

“You’ve got a lot of nerve asking me that.”

She uncrossed her legs and turned to face him. Her hands circled the cup. “So you still believe it.”

“Of course I do.”

“We’ve been over this, but I’m going to say it again and keep saying it until you believe me. I never had any kind of relationship with Pete Rossi other than a professional one. I never cheated on you. I never lied to you. Ever.” A practiced glare. A dramatic flash of the eyes and pinch of the brow betrayed the emotion behind her level tone.

It made him angrier than ever. “Sure. I believed that for a long time. All the business trips with him, the late nights coming home. I believed all of it. Until I found that letter.”

“Yes. The letter.” She leaned back. “Do you still have it?”

“I burned it.”

“Too bad. I was hoping to go over it with you. Did you really read it? The words, the sentences? I wouldn’t compose anything like that, no matter what kind of delirium of love I was supposed to be in.” She slid the coffee cup an inch to the left. “Did you look beyond the penmanship? I don’t think you did. This is what truly disturbs me about all this, Jason. That you would believe this drivel no matter how similar the penmanship looked, instead of believing words out of my own mouth.”

“You said all that before you walked out on me.”

Her jaw jutted toward him. She drew a breath in. “I can’t believe you’re thinking about it that way.” She blinked.

Jason couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her shed tears. He thought hard. It came to him.

His resolve fled.

He looked down to the table. Steam still rose from his mug, but none lifted from Serena’s china cup. The teaspoons of coffee remaining in her cup pooled tepid there.

It was on their wedding night that he’d last seen her cry. He’d asked her what she was crying about, and she’d told him she was so happy it overwhelmed her. She’d laughed through her tears and thrown herself into his arms again. They were tears of joy that night.

Now she wouldn’t look at him. Blinking back the tears didn’t quite work. She had to flick one aside.

Jason’s hands itched to go to her face, to touch the smooth skin of her cheek and wipe any tears away. But his hands probably smelled of Brenda’s perfume. He clenched his fingers together so they would stay in place.

“Serena . . .”

She held up a hand. “Don’t.” It was all she could get out. She went for the cup and swallowed what was left. A deep breath heaved the chest of her tailored suit, and she leveled her eyes at him. They shone, but no longer with tears. “Someone is trying to destroy our marriage. But that’s not what’s killing me. It’s that you’re willing to let them do it. Well, I’m not. I’ve had two months to think it through—two months of being apart from you and having to live with you believing lies about me—and I’ve decided. Whoever it is is going to have to do a lot more than forge a letter to get rid of me.” She took the cup and saucer and went to the sink.

After covering her hands with plastic gloves, she soaped a sponge and ran the water. Jason watched the slope of her neck, the way her hair folded forward until she finished with the cup and saucer and reached for a dishtowel. Busy hands always kept her from giving in to her emotions. She forced herself into her intellect with activity. Any moment she would have a plan.

The dishes dried and in their proper places, she folded the dishtowel and hung it from the oven handle. When she turned to Jason, he saw resolution in the pinched angle of her brows.

“I’m not running away again,” she said, and she folded her arms over the trim tailoring of her suit. “I’ll be back after work. You think about what I said, and I’ll think about who would attack our marriage. This conversation is not over.”

Her purse stood in its usual place next to her chair. She leaned over, snapped it up by the straps, and came to him. Her hand on his jaw, she kissed his cheek with no emotion other than deliberation. As she pulled back, her expression told him that Brenda’s fragrance still clung to him. She held his gaze for a moment, and he volunteered nothing.

“I’ll see you tonight.” She went for the door.

34

The snap of Hathaway’s gum was enough to make Tom Cole want to take another three aspirin. “You’re giving me a headache with all that popping.”

Hathaway looked at him and grinned, snapped the gum in his back teeth twice, then pressed the button to roll down his window. The bite of morning air flushed through the car, carrying the scent of asphalt cured in oil and gas and the funk of millions of sweating, breathing, spitting humans. When the window reached its low point, he spat the gum into the rushing air, and the window rose again.

The air didn’t help. Neither did the absence of that maddening popping. He would need more aspirin.

“So that’s what he said, but what
didn’t
he say?” Tom tried to imagine the look of the banker but had a hard time picturing a cleaned-up clone of Flip wearing a tie and a suit.

Hathaway reached for his pack of gum. “Like I said, he was lying like any convict. Clear as day. Covering for his brother.” He drew another stick out of the pack and sucked it into his mouth.

“I thought you were done with gum for a while.”

“No, that hunk just lost its flavor. You got to keep it fresh, brudda.” The second stick went in, and Hathaway worked his jaw around. It wouldn’t take long before the popping started.

“Grab me some aspirin out of the glove compartment, will you?”

Hathaway handed him the bottle. “So anyways, bald-faced liar, this guy. Tells me he hasn’t seen Flip when it’s written all over his face he has. Then he has the nerve to say don’t come to my office.”

Tom brought the Explorer to a stop at the light at Wilshire and Maple and rattled a couple of aspirin out of the bottle. He managed to choke them down dry. He passed the bottle back to Hathaway. “I still don’t see what good it’s going to do. We both got cases stacked up to our eyeballs. Guys with a chance to stay out of prison. It’s not like we’ve got time for this.”

“I thought you wanted to catch this guy.”

The snapping started up again. Tom’s headache drove deeper into the front of his brain and took root behind the lump that still pressed against a bandage on his forehead. He propped his elbow against the door and rubbed his forehead, silently cursing Flip Dunn for the pain. “I do. In the worst way. I keep telling myself not to make this personal.”

Hathaway snorted. “He’s the one made it personal when he hammered your noggin. I don’t leave that to LAPD.”

“I just don’t see what leaning on the brother gets us.”

“He says stay away, I show up. And not alone. I figure it’s worth a try.”

The popping could have been mortar shells going off. Tom rubbed the bandage.

“Here’s your turn. At the light.”

Tom wheeled the Explorer around. The sign over the entrance had the bank’s name on it next to a logo the shape of a warped pie with a piece missing. Tom wondered why banks all seemed to have some artsy logo.