Cash Burn (24 page)

He couldn’t think about Jason without remembering Danah. Their senior year. Their absorption in one another. As a sophomore, Flip’s classes ended later than theirs. He would come home fresh from the showers after football or baseball practice or from the weight room. The house would be suspended in midafternoon stillness, the presence of a girl as distinct as a flower in a locker room. It might have been her fragrance or the distant murmuring of a keener voice or just a sense that the ordinary male doldrums had been breached by something subtler. At some point Jason and Danah would emerge, maneuvering conjoined down the hallway, enthralled with one another.

Flip, the little brother, an interference, an annoyance. He felt this new distance from his older brother and resented Danah, but he said nothing.

Until the night he came home and Jason was gone. Dad that night shouted into the phone, cursing Jason but looking at Flip as if the whole thing were his fault. Dad slamming the phone down and shouting orders at Flip before phoning the police. Flip driving south alone in his truck, driving by himself at seventeen into neighborhoods where Jason and Danah should never have gone.

Now, in the motel room, he tried to will himself not to let his thoughts go further. But they leaped ahead. A dark, crowded barroom, men older than him by decades sitting huddled over beers and shot glasses at the bar and at dimly lit tables. They looked at him, and one of them threw a joke his way, but Flip wasn’t in the mood. He asked about Danah. None of them joked after Flip popped the bartender to the floor and he was afraid to get up to face him. From the floor, the guy nodded toward the back room.

Now, twenty years and two jail stints later, Flip clamped his eyes shut, pushed his palms against the lids as if he could shut down his mind by closing off his sight. A girl like that, in a place like that.

The picture of her as he first glimpsed her in that back room was still enough to make him want to drive his fist through one of these sheer motel room walls. She’d been beaten unconscious. Her clothes were shredded. It sent him into a fury. Afterward, the cops cuffed him while two of the men lay leaking blood into the sawdust-littered floor. One of them dead.

Flip growled through gritted teeth and shook his head. Thoughts of Jason always took him there. Why had Jason left her? And why would she have entered a place like that to begin with?

Eastlake Youth Authority. No bail for juveniles, just line up for your hearing and cool your heels in YA while they figure out the plea bargain. The investigators only got out of Danah what happened with Jason. She couldn’t coax any memory of the attack back into her head. All she could recall was walking into the bar. After that, nothing. But with her injuries and the evidence of the rape, the prosecutor didn’t want to try Flip for murder and might have passed on the charges completely if the dead guy hadn’t been averaging twenty-seven points a game as a starting point guard for CSU. There were plenty of witnesses willing to put Flip at the scene, they had his fingerprints all over the baseball bat, and to cap it off, they had the confession he’d offered up.

The plea bargain for manslaughter was no bargain for Flip. Eleven years. He started off at the Herman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility in Chino and at twenty-five graduated from gladiator school to the mainstream population in Lancaster, where he had no choice but to arm himself. When he got into a fight and used a shiv he’d fashioned out of a bar from an oven rack, he nearly took his second strike, but the DA decided it wasn’t worth prosecuting. His second strike didn’t come until he was released from Lancaster the first time. A little job for Diane, but he got caught.

By then he had someone waiting for him.

He reached down and gathered up the bills. He wrapped them in a shirt and stuffed the bundle in a duffel bag. The zip of the bag ripped through the room. He sat on the bed. He’d set the papers from Mr. B’s desk to one side to concentrate on counting the bills. Now he reached for them.

As he read, daylight faded beyond the thick drapes sealing off his motel room. The hanging lamp provided him with all the light he needed. One page after another, he laid the sheets to one side, their contents drawing him into what Mr. B had kept in his safe.

It turned out that this information might be worth a lot more than thirty-two thousand and change.

38

Jason held his finger over the key on his cell phone that would delete the message. He stroked the key, the nub of it, just one more bump on a keypad, this one with the power to erase the man’s low voice. He let his finger drift two keys up, to the number one. Back to the seven.

The voice of a mechanized woman asked him again if he wanted to delete the message or replay it. His finger drifted between the one and the seven.

He pressed the one. The man’s message repeated. In a tone that reminded Jason of glowing embers in a fire pit, Pastor Miles Gates’s voice told Jason that he wanted to buy him a cup of coffee. Jason was welcome at Miles’s office, or they could meet someplace. Miles rumbled out an area code and then a series of numbers.

Jason repeated the numbers silently and ended the call without deleting the message. Miles Gates’s voice would be stored in his voicemail. He sat at his desk looking at the rectangular face of his smartphone, wondering why he would return this call of all the ones awaiting response.

But he entered the numbers on the keypad and pressed the phone icon and listened to the distant rattle that told him the line in Pastor Gates’s office was ringing.

The third ring was cut short. “Pastor Gates’s office.” A woman’s voice.

“This is Jason Dunn. I’m returning his call.”

“Hi, Jason. He’s in a meeting, but let me tell him you’re calling. Can you hold on a second?”

“Okay.”

A click, and angel music sifted through the phone line, a chorus meant to make him feel like he was lying down in a grassy field. He rolled his eyes and leaned back in his chair, held the phone just away from his ear so he didn’t have to succumb to the ethereal pace and tones.

The music stopped, and he heard his name spoken in a deep voice.

He hesitated. “Yeah, hi. I’m returning your call.”

“Yes. Thanks for getting back to me. Sounds like you’re busy too. I’ll get right to it. When we met at Kathy’s house, we talked about getting together. I’m calling to set that up. How’s tomorrow at seven thirty? Coffee.”

How could this guy remember a ten-second conversation on a doorstep weeks ago? Jason heard Brenda’s fingertips hammering at her keyboard outside his door. His mind went to the feel of her beside him, the touch of her. “Well, no offense, but things are pretty hectic right now. I don’t think I can get away.”

“Let me level with you, Jason. Kathy is concerned about you. She’s been trying to reach you. Can I tell her you’re okay?”

Kathy? Wasn’t she still in Montana? Jason shifted in his chair. “You don’t have to tell her anything. I’ll call her.”

The pastor said nothing.

“Look, I appreciate you checking in.”

“Jason, we need to get together.”

“Why?”

“Because Kathy called you four times and said you never returned her calls, but I called you once, and you got back to me within the hour.”

He was about to say that meant nothing, but for some reason, he didn’t want to lie to this guy. He went to his calendar. “All right. But tomorrow morning doesn’t work.”

Three hours later, Jason left his jacket hanging on the back of his office door and walked through the cool fall air along Wilshire Boulevard to the corner of Santa Monica. He had no desire for coffee, but as he entered Starbucks, he couldn’t help but enjoy the shift from the air outside into the same spiced, scented warmth of these stores everywhere. His banker’s mind went to the company’s business model, the refusal to franchise, the replication of every process in every store.

Miles Gates sat in the corner. His size made the table before him look like it belonged in a doll house. He watched Jason through round, gold-rimmed spectacles.

Jason went to him and held out a hand. The pastor gave him a slight smile and reached up to shake.

Jason sat. “So here I am.”

Pastor Gates lifted the paper cup to his lips and blew across the top of the cup and sipped. He returned the cup to the tabletop and kept his fingers on it. He’d removed the lid, and it sat face-up on the table, a residue of coffee pooled against the white plastic.

“Here you are.” All the time in the world, this guy. No rush. He sat like a statue in a museum. The plaque next to the ebony carving would read,
Large Man with Coffee
.

The only life in his expression was in the way his eyes bored into Jason.

“What are we going to talk about here, big guy?”

“It’s your party.” He lifted his cup again. Another blow across the surface of the drink, another sip.

“I really don’t know why I’m sitting here. I don’t know you. I don’t have time for a staring contest.”

“I think you know why you’re here.”

Looking into the pastor’s eyes, something inside Jason began to crack. Ice fractured, tentacles extending across thinning sheets, threatening to crumble and break down. Walls of ice, floors and ceilings he’d forced up to barricade himself from Serena, from Vince and the pressures of failure, from his family—he could feel all his weaknesses beginning to creep through the crumbling and breaking ice within him.

The room itself seemed to shift. He started to speak, but his first words were uncertain. “I don’t know what to call you.”

“Everyone calls me Miles. Except my kids.”

“Right. So it’s my party, Miles?”

“Your party.”

Jason leaned forward. The scent of Miles’s coffee drifted up to him. Jason could have named the blend without looking at the chalkboard, even with the sugar and cream diluting it.

“Everything’s coming apart, Miles.”

Miles scratched the side of his nose. His hand stayed at his face, cupping his chin.

“My marriage, my job. The whole thing.”

Miles swirled his cup in small circles on the tabletop. The contents lapped up to the lip but didn’t spill. “What do you usually do when things start to fall apart, Jason?”

“What anybody does. I try to fix it.”

“But that’s not working this time. Is that right?”

“Turns out some things can’t be fixed.”

“There’s an old saying: ‘That which is crooked cannot be made straight.’”

Jason thought of his brother stepping out of the shadows in the darkness of Jason’s home. “I guess that depends on how crooked something is.”

“There’s another old saying: ‘With God all things are possible.’”

“Yeah, well. I’m not really
with
God.”

Miles drained his cup. The empty cardboard clapped onto the table. “That’s your choice.”

“I don’t need one more thing right now.”

“Is that what you think God is? One more thing?” The pastor’s hands withdrew to clasp together before the orb of his abdomen.

Jason took the pastor’s smile for smugness. He felt the walls of ice reforming, the cracks receding, filling in. The atmosphere of the room returned to its normal state. “If you’re going to give me a hard sell on this God thing, we can end the conversation right now.”

“No hard sell, Jason. But don’t expect me to hold back the truth.” Miles tilted his head down like a ram ready to smash heads with a rival. But his mouth held that smile for a moment longer. Then something altered it before he spoke again. “I guess I should tell you that your wife called me.”

Jason straightened.

“Relax. Kathy couldn’t reach you, so she called your wife to make sure you were okay.”

“Then you called her.”

“No. She called me. We met—day before yesterday. At her request.”

The scene in his kitchen this morning flashed in Jason’s mind. Serena’s resolve as she reinserted herself into his life in spite of what she knew she’d done. Serena, Kathy, Gates . . . it was the same way things worked at the bank. Build your case, get consensus around what you want, pressure the outliers until they have no choice but to fall into line or until everyone thinks they’re not only wrong but obstinate.

“Now I get it.”

“Get what?”

“It makes sense. Kathy and Serena stick together, get you to talk sense into me.” Jason leaned over the table, wanted to shove it into the big man’s belly. “She cheated on me first. I gave her the benefit of the doubt as long as I could, believe me. Until I couldn’t ignore it anymore.”

“First?”

“What?”

“You just said, ‘She cheated on me
first
.’”

“No, I didn’t.” Jason’s feet itched to shift underneath him, to gather his weight on his soles and stomp out of there.

“I’m not judging you, Jason.” Miles’s hands parted, and he brought them to the bottom of the spindly wooden chair that somehow supported him. He scooted in until his face was a foot away from Jason’s. “It happens. I see it all the time. The grass is always greener. But no matter where you go, there you are.”

“I’m not trying to run away from myself. Like I said, she cheated on me. Period.”

“She says she didn’t.”

Jason snorted. “Right. Somebody forged a letter in her handwriting. It’s a vast conspiracy to destroy our marriage. Well, I’ve got news for you, Miles. Our marriage wasn’t exactly a bed of roses even before I found her letter.”

Miles was so close that Jason could see the pores on those wide nostrils. “I understand. Audrey and I have been married twenty-three years. You got to weed that garden. Got to pull out the weeds, turn the soil. It lies fallow, and it doesn’t produce anything.”

“So it’s my fault.”

“Fault’s got nothing to do with it. Not right now. You are where you are. You can accept it and sacrifice your marriage to some new thing you like better right now, or you can go back to your wife and get things right.”

“It’s all on me, huh?”

“Your life? Yes, Jason. Your life is all on you.”

39

Tom spotted the club’s unlit neon sign sticking out over the sidewalk and eased off the gas. A block ahead, he saw an Acura edging away from the curb, and he slapped on the turn signal. The cars in his rearview mirror slowed obediently, and heads behind windshields turned to see if they could maneuver around him. The Acura up ahead shot into his lane, and Tom came to a stop next to the car just beyond the empty space and turned around to find that the idiot in the Toyota behind him had ignored the turn signal and followed him to a stop so he couldn’t back into the space. Tom waved to direct the idiot around him, but the cars in the second lane filled it, boxing them in.