Cash Burn (32 page)

It was an act.

She didn’t look at Jason, but the banker let his eyes linger on her. Tom would have sensed the connection between them even if he hadn’t smelled her perfume on him. It was as obvious as the clock ticking on the wall.

She nestled into the chair and crossed her legs. Tom caught himself taking in their shape.

Hathaway’s voice shook his attention away. “So what we’ve got here is a convict on the run.” He started ticking things off on his fingers. “A brother with access to all kinds of dough. That same brother tumbling with his secretary in his spare time—”

“That’s enough.” Jason held the button in on the pen in his fist. “I told you—”

“No, see, you two kids have to get your stories straight. We caught her in a lie last time, and she spilled it about the little thing you’ve got going.”

The banker shot a glance at her. It only stumbled him for a second. “Whatever she told you, I’m a married man. There’s nothing between Brenda and me but what you see right here.”

Hathaway laughed. He sat back into the sofa and rolled his eyes. Tom could see the wad of gum pinched between the surfer’s teeth.

The banker didn’t let his eyes go back to the secretary. Tom wished he could listen in on their conversation after he and Hathaway left the room.

Hathaway settled down. “A married man. I guess not all guys wear a wedding ring, huh? We talk to your wife, what’s she going to tell us? Maybe we should go talk to Mrs. Dunn, Tommy. What do you think?”

“I think we should.” He turned for the door.

“You talk to whoever you want.” The brother stood behind his desk. “I’ve got nothing to hide, you understand? I’m not the convict here. I’m not the one who’s been in and out of prison all his life. I’ve never been him. I never will be. You getting this?”

Tom watched him. Something here. Something real. “So you’re the good one. He’s the black sheep. That’s the story?”

“Yeah. That’s the story.” The brother’s chest was pumping, his back hunched to pin both fists knotted against the desktop. “You’re leaning on the wrong guy.”

“Nothing here but more onion, huh?”

Jason stood away from the desk and folded his arms over his pressed shirt. This guy had some of Flip’s bulk, but he was softer. No pumping iron in the yard like his little brother, but there was some toughness hidden underneath.

He turned to face him. “Let me see your hands.”

“What?”

“Your hands. I want to see how clean they are.”

“Cute. They’re clean. I’m not the one you need to worry about. Like I said, if I see him, I’ll call you. You have my word.”

Tom wanted to make a crack about the word of bankers, but he let it go. He went back to the door.

“Hold on a second, Tommy. I got one more thing.” Hathaway slid forward on the sofa. That gum would be worn out soon. He leaned toward the secretary.

“What school in Philly’d you go to, baby?”

“Stop calling me baby.”

No tears now. Letting that cat with bared claws out just enough. She had it on a tight leash.

“What school? Penn? Drexel?”

“None of your business.”

Hathaway smiled. He stood. “That’s okay. We can find out. I just thought you might want to save us a little time. You know, support your local law enforcement.”

Her face shifted. Something back there behind her eyes working. It didn’t take long. “All right. I’m sorry. You just . . . I went to school at University of the Arts. Graduated in ’04.”

Tom looked at Hathaway.

“Oh, sure. That’s up by Wister Woods, isn’t it?”

She leveled her green eyes at him. “No. It’s near city hall, and you know it.”

Hathaway smiled at her again. “You caught me, baby.”

“I told you not to call me that.”

He stood. The smile didn’t fade at all, but his constant gnawing at the gum warped the smile into a smirk. “Well, Tommy, I’d say we better get on.”

* * *

Jason watched Brenda shut the door behind them. She turned the latch to keep everyone out, put her back to the door, and locked her eyes on Jason.

They melted him every time. That color, the shape of them. They were visual music. Nothing else was like them. They hit him in a place he’d forgotten existed.

“I’m getting the IDs.” She said it quietly. A secret between them like all the others.

He came around to the open space between them, and as soon as he was past the desk he wanted to close in on her. A smile spread across his face, and she answered it.

“Then it’s on.”

“It’s on.” She put her arms around him, and all space went away.

This close, he lost himself in that greenness, sunlight refracted inside green jewels. He kissed her.

She nodded over her shoulder. “What about them?”

He pulled away. “You’d better unlock the door. We’ve got to play it cool around here. It’s hard, though, being so close to you and keeping my hands off you.” He touched her side. Her hand ran down his arm.

“We have to do something about them, Jason.”

“I’ll rub them out.” He made a gun with his fingers.

“I’m not kidding.” Those eyes, so clear, crisp as a cloudless country sky. They held something he hadn’t seen before. They’d become cold.

Time stopped. The ticking of the clock on the wall continued, but here with Brenda, the planet stopped spinning. He heard phones ringing outside the door, the murmur of dozens of voices conducting business. A different kind of business than what was happening in here.

“What do you have in mind?”

“They’re not going to stop until they find something out.”

“They won’t find anything. Or if they do, it’ll be too late.”

Her arms folded. “I thought you were all-in on this.”

“Sure I’m all-in.”

“You’re sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. Like I said before, we just have to get it right. You get the IDs. Keep practicing that signature. That’s your part. I’ll handle the heavy lifting.”

“The heavy lifting just left. We have to get rid of them.”

“Get rid of them? How?”

She stared at him. Jason had the sense that they were standing alone on ice so thin the wrong step would drown them forever.

“I’m not killing anybody,” he said.

“Okay.”

“Neither are you.”

She lifted an eyebrow. “I couldn’t. I’m just saying—”

“You’d better get back to your desk. We don’t want to give them anything else to talk about.”

She held her stare for another few seconds. Then she turned and left the door open. Rounding her desk, she caught his eyes again for an instant and then disappeared behind the wall.

He was afraid to take a step. Afraid of drowning in the icy waters.

His own words echoed in his mind.
“I’m not killing anybody.”

52

Like a ghost haunting his own life, Jason’s motions had no impact. He moved among the living, but they didn’t really see him, didn’t know him or the burdens he carried. He was only an apparition now, gliding through meetings and decisions and commutes, occupying a place on freeways and packed boulevards, among crowds on the city’s cool sidewalks. His wardrobe occupied a smaller and smaller space in the closet he shared with Serena, his gear transitioning piece by piece to Brenda’s apartment as if he himself were fading away.

And it wasn’t really him among these Angelenos. The real Jason lived only in Brenda’s arms, in the mingling of her breath and his, and more and more as November marched on, in the planning.

The fall LA air lacked the still, palpable quality of summertime. Today the smog didn’t veil every object in gray but funneled between the walls of glass-fronted buildings and lifted the trash of millions of Angelenos into swirling and spinning clouds of detritus. A pack of it floated toward Jason as if someone had cast handfuls in his direction. He squinted, felt dust ping his cheeks, and ducked his head to blink away what stung his eyes.

A specter wouldn’t feel such things, would it? He had to force himself not to smile as the dust cloud passed, and he lifted his eyes to scan the faces across the street. Did they see him? Or was he the ghost of banker past, revealing himself only to the Scrooge of the day?

At the corner of Wilshire and Camden, Jason waited for permission to enter the crosswalk. Men and women crowded around him, the curb only inches tall but enough to contain the wall of obedient pedestrians.

He kept his eyes pinned on the box perched on the pole ahead. The red hand disappeared, and the green man flashed its footless silhouette. The instant it changed, he stepped off the curb and felt the crowd surge forward behind him.

He wouldn’t be a Scrooge when he and Brenda disappeared together. A man could do a lot of good with $30 million. He could make anonymous gifts. He would share it. He and Brenda didn’t need the whole amount. He would create his own private bailout, a golden parachute for the poor. Dozens of charities could benefit. Maybe he’d even send a gift to that pastor’s church, that Pastor Gates.

The command of the red hand stopped him at the Bedford intersection.

What had made him think of Pastor Gates? He pictured the big man, so secure, so confident when they’d met at Starbucks. Jason couldn’t imagine the pastor having a need for $30 million. Or even one measly million.

It was a bribe. Jason saw it as clearly as the flat red hand shining at him from across the street. Send a million to a church to buy off God. Would a million do it? Two?

He shook his head. All the preparations he had to make to pull this off, and here he was thinking about God.

But his mind would only focus briefly on the signature cards and the IDs and the credit presentation he was drafting. There was going to be a lot of fallout. This could fatally wound BTB. The regulators would descend with even greater ferocity than the feds. They would scope out and tear apart every procedure and policy, every frail structural scaffold built into the organization until each flaw and weakness was exposed at its roots.

And they would find plenty. At the most fundamental places. They would finger the extent of authority and the lack of oversight at the higher levels of bank management. That a senior executive could fabricate a $30 million transaction without raising any questions would put the whole institution in the defendant’s chair.

A sudden loss of that magnitude was enough to shock the balance sheet of even the strongest bank—and BTB had problems already. The bags under Scotty’s eyes had darkened and grown deep enough to store wads of the currency they’d had to charge off over the past six months. The loan portfolio of every lender in the bank had been affected. They all had borrowers struggling, companies reeling from one quarter to the next like drunken tourists looking for a bar to collapse into.

The walking man lit on the pole across the street, and Jason stepped out before he could be trampled. Car traffic on Wilshire powered past, knifing forward to the next light to wait again.

Another two blocks, and the security guard opened the lobby door for him. He nodded to him, and the guard’s shoulder twitched a greeting. Jason was tempted to look at the nameplate on the guard’s lapel to remind himself of the name of this guy he passed nearly every day, but he decided not to bother. In eleven days he would walk out of this place for the last time, a rich man with Brenda at his side. What was the use of making new friends now?

Up the escalator he climbed, his rising double-timed by the machinery. As he ascended above the lobby ceiling, the clap of his shoes on metal rang out. The second floor came into view, and forty feet ahead, Brenda lifted her eyes. She eclipsed every other person and object out of his vision. Trying to be unaffected was useless. As he stepped onto the metal plate that sucked the escalator stairs down, his palms broke into a sweat, and somewhere in a place deep inside him, a place without a name, he was whisked into a frothing, boiling stew of confusion. He tried to look away, but the pale hue of her irises and the heart shape of her face drew him toward her like gravity.

Something was wrong. With pursed lips and a frown hardening her brow, she was trying to signal him.

He stopped.

She nodded to one side. She was directing him toward a conference room near Vince’s office.

He changed course and had the conference room door closed before his cell phone rang. Her name on the readout was precious to him. He stared at it for a moment before answering.

“Long-distance call.”

She didn’t play along. She whispered, “I think you should go back out for a while.”

He turned up the volume. “Why?”

“There’s a bunch of people in your office.”

Jason looked through the window but couldn’t see into his office from this angle. “Who is it?”

“I don’t want to say.”

“I’m not going to be chased from my own office.”

“It’s her.”

“Serena?”

“Yeah.” Across the lobby, he saw Brenda lean over her desk to look inside. “And Kathy.” She raised her voice only slightly. “And Kathy’s pastor. I remember him from the funeral. They won’t tell me what it’s about, but I think you want to avoid this.”

He clicked off and stepped outside. Brenda looked up, and her frown deepened when she saw he had no intention of avoiding anything.

He passed her desk and refused to be drawn into her eyes.

Kathy and Serena didn’t rise from the sofa. The pastor sat in the chair before Jason’s desk and had it angled so he could take in the whole room. His fingers formed a steeple in front of his chest.

Jason closed the door. “It’s good to see you, Kathy. How was Montana?” He wanted one of the old hugs, but she stayed on the sofa.

So that had changed too.

“It was good to be with Carol for a while. But I needed to come back.”

He removed his jacket and parked it on the hanger and went to his desk. “Oh?”

“Jason, come on. You heard the messages I left for you.”

He keyed in his password, and his e-mail screen appeared. Eighteen new e-mails had arrived since he left for lunch an hour ago and now awaited his answer. “You know me. Busy, busy.”

Serena spoke up. “We’re concerned about you.”

He took his eyes off the computer screen. Serena sat forward on the sofa, knees together, ankles crossed, her elbows on her lap and her hands clasped. She did have a look of concern on her face. It was a good face—he had to admit it. And no matter how much work was piled on her desk or how little sleep she’d gotten—or whom she was having an affair with—she always looked ready for the next appointment.