Cash Burn (25 page)

He cursed. Hathaway glanced over his shoulder, snapped his gum, and snickered. “There ought to be an IQ test for people to drive.”

Tom waved his arm again, but the Toyota behind him had nowhere to go. “Aww . . .” He cursed and shifted back to drive and punched the gas. At the corner he turned right. One more block farther away from the Ragtop Club, he found a place to park.

“This is probably another huge waste of time,” he told Hathaway.

“Yeah, you said that already.” Hathaway levered his door open. Tom couldn’t get out before Hathaway slammed it shut. The thud resounded behind the lump on his forehead and spiked the pain deeper. He stepped out into the street and elbowed his own door closed and thumbed the remote, and the horn sounded a sharp toot against the muffled traffic noise draped behind every sound in the city.

They rounded the corner onto Venice and approached the front door of the place without saying anything else about the Ragtop Club or its owner, Shawn Barnes, or the self-defense he had claimed in the beating death of Elwood Peavy two nights ago in the back room of the club. It was a long shot, and Tom wouldn’t let Hathaway forget it, but the homicide dick assigned to Peavy’s case suspected a connection, and it was worth checking out anything that looked remotely like something Flip might do. Or that was what Hathaway thought, anyway.

The door was locked. A sign on it told them the club’s hours of operation.

Hathaway pounded on it. He stood back, and a breeze rolled down Venice Boulevard to balloon Hathaway’s print of palm trees and hibiscus away from his chest. This shirt was mostly blood-red. It was supposed to be the color of sunsets.

Hathaway stepped forward and hammered on the door again. Tom was just about to tell him to give it up when the latch clicked on the door and it swung out.

A tall guy with a bruised face held on to the edge of the door. The arm away from the door was in a sling. He looked from Hathaway to Tom. “What do you want?”

Hathaway had his badge out. “Are you Shawn Barnes?” He pocketed the badge.

“No.”

The tall guy hesitated a moment, his hand still on the edge of the door, and Tom thought he was about to slam the door. He pulled out Flip’s mug shot and flashed it in the tall guy’s face. “We’re looking for Flip Dunn.”

The guy leaned down to get a better look at it. He said, “So that’s his name. Come on in.”

Hathaway smiled and gave Tom a smug wink before he ducked inside.

“I hate it when you’re right,” Tom said to his back.

A couple of brooms were being pushed around the room by guys who seemed to need them for support. Stools scraped the concrete floor as they made room for tidying. Somebody was behind the bar counting bottles. The tall guy led them among the tables toward the back.

Hathaway said, “When’s the last time you saw him?”

They were in the hallway leading to the bathrooms. “Two nights ago.”

The night Elwood Peavy was killed. Hathaway looked over his shoulder. Another wink. Tom said, “Shut up.”

Through the door at the back of the hall marked Employees Only, they moved into another hallway. The fragrance of fried food, sugar, and oil made Tom’s stomach turn. He realized he hadn’t eaten since breakfast.

The tall guy knocked twice on a door and listened. Pretty soon someone answered, and he opened the door. “Two more cops to see you.” He nodded them in. He was about to head off, but Tom stopped him.

“Hang around.”

Behind the desk, the man who must be Shawn Barnes got to his feet, standing a shade over six feet tall. Above a carefully trimmed beard, his nose was bandaged and his eyes were bruised. His skin was creased and tanned, like a worn-out brown leather jacket Tom had owned once. He wore a short-sleeved black shirt that revealed spindly arms. The shirttail hung over black jeans, and a thick gold chain peeked out from underneath his open collar.

Hathaway stuck his hand out. “So. The giant killer.”

Barnes took Hathaway’s hand. “My lawyer told me not to talk to you guys anymore without him here.”

Hathaway plopped down in the chair in front of the desk. “Fine with me. We can wait.”

Barnes measured Hathaway for a moment before turning his eyes to Tom. Hathaway popped his gum and drew Barnes’s attention back.

Tom turned to the beat-up tall guy. “Why don’t you close that door?”

He looked at his boss, and Barnes must have given him the okay, because he closed it and put his back to it. He probably would have folded his arms if not for the sling.

Barnes was in his chair when Tom turned around. “Aw, who needs lawyers anyway?” Barnes said. “I got nothing to hide. Where do you want me to start? I said it so many times I could repeat it in my sleep.”

“We read the report,” Hathaway told him. “I really just wanted to meet you. See the guy who did Peavy.”

Barnes rolled his tongue around in his mouth like he was trying to get at something stuck in his teeth. He switched his eyes from Hathaway to Tom and kept his mouth shut.

“I mean, come on. Guy with a rap sheet like that? Big, too. I mean, hey, Tom, did you see the mug shots of that guy?” Hathaway craned around in the chair to make his point to Tom, then swiveled around again to Barnes.

Tom let Hathaway go on.

“You wouldn’t know this, Mr. Barnes, but they only got him on like a quarter of the stuff they brought him up on. And they probably only brought him up on this much of what he really did.” Tom held his thumb and forefinger a quarter-inch apart. “He was one bad dude, man. But you took him out, didn’t you?”

Barnes shrugged. “I’ve been in a few scrapes myself.”

“Oh, I’ll bet. You must have been. I mean, look at you. You could’ve spent Thursday night out there dancing instead of mixing it up with a guy like Elwood Peavy.”

“You want to go ahead and make your point?”

“What do you go, one-seventy? One-eighty?”

Barnes’s eyes narrowed; the creases around the eyes in his leathery face deepened.

“Couldn’t be one-eighty-five. I’d guess six-foot, maybe one-seventy-five. Tom, you remember Peavy’s stats?”

Tom folded his arms.

Hathaway didn’t wait for an answer. “Peavy was six-six, two-sixty when they took him into P-Bay three years ago.” He snapped his gum, shook his head. “Shoot, man, you must be some kind of black belt or something. That it?” He held his hand palm up over his head and signaled Tom by crimping his fingers.

Tom put the picture of Flip in Hathaway’s hand. Hathaway held the picture and looked at it. “Now Flip Dunn here—” he ticked it with his middle finger—“this guy I could see pulling it off. Maybe.” He tossed the picture onto Barnes’s desk.

Barnes didn’t look at it.

Hathaway leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees. “Look, Barnes, this is just us boys talking. We’re off the record, okay? You can keep the cred for this. We don’t care, do we, Tom?”

“We don’t care.”

“See? It’ll be our little secret. We’re not LAPD. We’re state POs. We got no problem letting you work this. Nobody’ll mess with you for a long, long time after this. Am I right? I mean, once this gets around—what you did to Peavy.”

Barnes worked his tongue around some more. He said nothing. But he glanced at Flip’s picture.

Tom stepped forward. When he bent over to put his hands on Barnes’s desk, the pressure behind his forehead felt like the front of his brain was an anvil. “Hey. Barnes.”

Barnes looked up.

“Level with us. ’Kay? None of this gets to LAPD. I just want this guy.” He pounded his finger on the picture.

Barnes picked up the picture and grinned. “I never saw him before.” He flipped it at Tom. It bounced off his chest.

Hathaway said, “That’s not what your boy here says.”

The bruised guy came away from the door. “I never said that.”

Tom was eight inches away from Barnes’s head. He wanted to swipe his fist at that carefully combed head, but he didn’t. “Or we could leave here and go see LAPD right now. Blow up your story. Is that what you want?”

Hathaway stood. “I guess so. He’s not talking.” He went to the tall guy at the door.

Barnes picked up the picture. “So his name’s Flip Dunn?”

40

Sea of desks. Blackened computer monitors angled toward empty chairs pushed in as employees departed for their homes, families, husbands, wives, and children their paychecks supported.

Jason wandered among the furniture. Here was Janine’s desk, cluttered with hockey souvenirs. Jason had never asked her how a banker in LA could become a Carolina Hurricanes fan. He picked up a puck, examined the swirling red and black pattern of the logo. This puck was all he really knew about her. He replaced it in the ring of pale dust the cleaning crew had missed.

He crossed to Dan’s office. He stared into the darkness, the shapes of chairs and desk reminders of how vacant this office would be after he fired Dan tomorrow.

Margaret from HR or one of her flunkies would serve as Jason’s wingman on this search-and-destroy mission. He would do it as he’d been taught. Stick to the facts. Don’t let it get personal. It’s not about you, it’s a reduction in force. RIFs happen in the best of businesses, to the best of people. Talk about the severance package as soon as you can. Cover the benefits, active another thirty days and what it will cost after that to keep them going. Stave off any emotions. Have the HR rep accompany Dan back to his office so he can clear out his personal belongings—but leave that rolodex. And no computer access. Then have security escort him to the door with a cardboard box loaded with all that would remain of his life with the bank.

It happens.

But Dan was nearing sixty. Going back into the dating game of the job market wouldn’t be easy for him. If you put Dan and his gray hair next to some young, ambitious guy you could pay less and get more years from, the young guy would get the job every time unless Dan could convince you that his clients would cut their ties to BTB and follow him.

Jason turned his back on Dan’s office and stared over the desks, file cabinets, chairs. He had to fight a sensation that the floor was sloped toward him. That he stood on an incline without traction. That soon this furniture would begin to drift toward him, gathering momentum and speed into a stampede of wood and metal he could never stop. Everything would slide down, drive him backward even farther than he’d already slid, into the darkness behind him. Into a pit of dark ruin.

He’d tried to fix this. He’d fought Vince as long as he could. The mistakes he’d made were clear to him now, but at the time they had seemed like risks worth taking. If he’d made different choices—involved Mark and Scotty more in his decisions, stopped trying to protect his staff from the politics by taking so much responsibility himself—maybe he could have kept enough juice around here to stop this.

His feet shuffled along the carpet away from Dan’s office. Tomorrow he would fire five of them. No, four. He wouldn’t fire five. Four more people in the unemployment lines was enough, four more to watch their savings dwindle as what few interviews they could schedule led to no hope, no hope at all. Four more families swallowing their pride, four more marriages cast into struggle and doubt. Tomorrow Jason would sit behind his desk and recite the salary and benefits packages the four of them would be shuttled away with like things bagged up at the end of a stick.

Hopefully the meetings would be over before their shock wore off.

Word would spread quickly. Soon everyone would be on edge, waiting for the next name to be called.

Jason found himself outside Vince’s office. How convenient for Vince to deflect this dirty work to Jason. The staff that used to claim loyalty to Jason would see him, not Vince, as the hatchet man. Vince could sit in this office like a manager in a slaughterhouse, hands unsullied by the carnage played out around him.

Vince had been gone for an hour or more, but the rank cologne he slathered himself with still drifted out of the room. Jason’s upper lip curled with the smell of it. He moved away, trying to distance himself from the abyss everything seemed to be sliding toward.

He should leave. He should have left hours ago, when his coworkers were shutting things down, filing down the escalator, calling good-byes to one another. The escalator was shut off now.

When Brenda had leaned through the doorway to let him know she was leaving, her glance had lingered on him long enough to let him know she would be waiting for him at her apartment.

Serena waited for him too, he knew. At home.
Home.
The word lodged in his mind like a splinter. What kind of home was it when there was no trust, no honor in the marriage there? It was no home at all. Just a set of walls and floors hammered together, plaster and paint slapped over sticks and nails.

The pastor would have him go to his wife.
“You got to weed that garden,”
he’d said.

Jason stared over the unpopulated desks. The silence of the room pressured his ears with want for the ordinary clamor of any day here. He wanted the phones ringing, wanted movement in those chairs, voices calling out, deadlines impending—the pressures and the sense that the thirty-five people on his team were pulling on the oars together, with him at the helm, a pilot and navigator.

But the place was empty. And tomorrow he would cast four of his crew overboard, and good luck with that swim, guys. Hope you make it to land. Hope your families survive intact. Here’s your severance. Here’s your last office supply from BTB: a cardboard box you can unfold and tape together and pile your few personal effects into under the distrustful eye of an HR rep standing over you to make sure you don’t take any pencils that don’t belong to you, that you don’t download something you shouldn’t onto a disk, that you don’t get into any mischief on the bank’s system as your final sally before you’re cast over the rails.

He should go to Serena. He felt her drawing him. He pictured the expression on her face when she’d pulled away from him this morning, knowing what he’d done, that he’d been with someone else. Maybe she had smelled Brenda’s fragrance on his cheek. Maybe guilt simmered in the whites of his eyes. She knew him well enough to see it if it was there.