Cash Burn (36 page)

Granger wanted Mark to step in. He looked to him. “We could boost our income on this with the syndication fees.”

Vince chimed in. “It wouldn’t offset the loss of the interest income on fifteen million.”

Jason listened to their chatter and nearly laughed out loud. They were fighting over income from a deal that didn’t exist. Everyone’s attention was turning from the merits of the credit to what to do with all the money they were going to make from it. Granger wanted the fees from partnering with another bank, and Vince wanted all the income to stay in his group. Their competing interests were so transparent a referee was going to have to make a call.

Mark spoke up. “We need the outstandings.” He turned to Jason. “But I am concerned these guys are outgrowing us. This is right at our legal lending limit. It gives us no room to do anything else for them. Do they understand that?”

“Sure,” Jason lied. “I can talk to them about getting another bank involved after this acquisition’s closed. Line up a partner to give us some room to work for them. They’ll understand. The important thing is moving fast for them now.”

Mark returned his attention to the package. No one had said a word about the quality of the credit since Jason finished his presentation. It was clear that they’d read the memo, but this was a lot of dough. The record had to show discussion. Next to Scotty, the analyst assigned to take down the minutes of the meeting dropped his hands from his laptop.

“The pro formas look solid,” Mark said. “Both companies are strong on their own. They’ll be even stronger together.”

Scotty was silent.

Vince folded his copy of the memo closed. “Well, it’s been a while since you’ve been in here, Jason. Thank God for Northfield, huh?”

Only Vince could make a win sound like a failure. Jason stared at him across the table and almost wished he could be around to see Vince’s face when the news flashed about his group taking a $30 million fraud loss. It would lead to a shakeup. Every gray head around this table would probably roll.

“Not really much to talk about here,” Mark said.

Everyone waited for Scotty to call a vote. But his head began to move slowly from side to side. As he flipped the pages of his copy of the memo, Jason saw that Scotty had scrawled all over it. Nothing unusual, but those blue ink marks could have been a judge’s handwritten death sentence for the effect they had on Jason.

Scotty brought his hand to his face and clenched his mouth. He drew a long breath. His hand returned to the table.

“I don’t know, guys. There’s something bothering me about this.”

Mark folded his arms and scowled at him. “What? What’s the problem?”

Scotty kept shaking his head. “Ever since I read this last night, something . . .” He went back to the memo.

Jason held back. Mark wanted this deal done, and it was going to happen. The CEO was digging his own grave in front of loan committee and a handful of his lenders, and he had no idea. In a month he would be consigned to a fishing pole. Jason imagined Mark seated on a dock someplace, bare feet dangling in the water, his eyes trained on a line bobbing in the water.

Mark’s face reddened, the color ascending from the white collar of his shirt and reaching his cheeks before he said, “Scotty, the numbers work. This is a good customer. There’s no reason not to do this deal.”

Scotty looked over his reading glasses at Mark. “I’m telling you, Mark, something about this isn’t right.”

“Well, what is it? Is it the pricing? The financial covenants? What?”

“No, none of that.” Scotty pulled his reading glasses from his face and sat back. From across the table, he stared at Jason.

Jason’s skin prickled with new eruptions of sweat against a T-shirt already damp. He had to say something to divert Scotty’s thought process.

“This company’s never let us down, Scotty. They always have a backup plan.”

“Why do they need to borrow so much? They’re sitting on a ton of cash.”

“I asked them that. They just want to stay liquid. They think in this market, the more cash you have the more opportunities you’ll have. And it’s a statement to the market when they have the juice to take down a new $30-million loan.”

Scotty rubbed his right hand across his face.

Mark looked like he was ready to explode. “We don’t have all day, Scotty. If you don’t want to do this deal, I need to know why.”

“Because my gut’s telling me not to. That’s why.”

His gut. Jason had gone over every detail of this plan a thousand times. He’d pored over the words and analysis of his memo, deconstructed every logical argument and propped up every invented fact with others until the house stood too tall to topple. But he couldn’t fight Scotty’s intuition. That was beyond debate.

Mark leveled his eyes at his CCO. “Your gut.”

Scotty just kept shaking his head.

“What did your gut tell you about Innovative? Or Cal Foods? Or Dale Tech? Do I need to go on?”

He seemed ready to list every problem credit the bank had charged off in the past six months. The analyst taking minutes pounded away at the keyboard. Jason knew Scotty would edit the record later, but that couldn’t take away the sting of being dressed down in front of everyone else in the room.

When Scotty finally answered, fatigue weighed on his words. “You know those were done under delegated authority. I didn’t sign a single one of them.”

“And who delegated the authority? You did. What did your gut tell you when you gave authority down the line?”

“The market turned on us, Mark. None of us saw it coming. Not me. Not you.”

“But I’m not the CCO.” Mark pointed a finger across the table. “You are. If I made a mistake, it was making that call.”

There it was.

Scotty’s eyes narrowed. “All right, Mark. You’ve made your point.” He turned to the analyst taking minutes. The kid looked like he wanted to crawl into his laptop. “New set of minutes.” The kid stared at Scotty, mystified. Scotty smiled his kindest smile and leaned over. “Leave the Northfield minutes open, but open another document, Zack.”

The instructions shook the kid loose, and he clicked away at the keyboard, then looked back to Scotty for the next order.

“Note that the Chief Credit Officer has announced his resignation. Back on the Northfield minutes, put me down as abstaining due to my resignation.”

Scotty pushed his chair back and stood. He walked around the table to the door. The sound of it opening and closing reverberated in the silence.

The color had drained out of Mark’s face. From all the way across the room, Jason could hear the muffled creak of Mark grinding his teeth. The CEO looked around him. “Vince, what’s your vote?”

“I’m a yes.”

“Granger?”

“Yes.”

“Hanson?”

“Yes.”

Mark said to the analyst typing up the record, “I’m a yes vote too. So it’s unanimous.” He turned to Jason. Something in the assurance that always chiseled the CEO’s face seemed to shift and quake. He blinked five times.

Jason didn’t move.

Finally Mark reached for the Northfield memo and flipped it over. “Get it closed, Jason.”

57

“What a mess.” Hathaway’s face lit for an instant in a camera flash. The forensic photographer scrabbled around for another angle on Barnes. Hathaway took the gum out of his mouth and turned it between his thumb and fingers. The movement pulled his eyes away from the bloody lump Barnes had become, but he must have decided not to leave the gum at the scene. He popped it back into his mouth.

“You think it was Flip,” Tom said.

“’Course it was Flip.” Hathaway pointed at the victim’s mouth. A wad of paper was hanging out of it. Maybe three pages. It was tinted red and gray from blood and saliva.

Tom ran his tongue across the roof of his mouth where Flip had jammed the end of the tether after the beating two weeks ago. The tender skin there had healed enough that it only felt like he’d burned it with hot pizza.

“You’re right.” Tom called over to the detective. “Hey, Lance.”

Lance was talking to one of the bartenders in the hallway. His gray sport coat hung open and might not have fit well enough to button even if he wanted to. He was skinny apart from that gut. When he was done with the bartender, he came back to where Tom stood with Hathaway over Barnes. The photographer circled off to snap pictures of bloodstains.

Lance started putting on the latex gloves. “What?” He was staring down at what was left of Barnes.

“We’re pretty sure Flip Dunn did this. See the paper in the mouth?”

The second glove snapped at the wrist, and both hands were covered. He flexed his fingers. “What about it?”

“It’s what he does. Stuffs something in the mouth of his victims.”

“Oh, come on, Tom,” Hathaway said. “You have to fess up.” He told Lance, “Tom tried to put a tether on Flip and got beat up. When he woke up, the end of the tether was in his mouth. That right, Tom?”

“Yeah.”

Lance looked back down to the victim. “You got a picture of this Flip Dunn?”

Tom took it out of his pocket, but before he could show it to the detective, Lance crouched down to get a closer look at Barnes. He pinched an edge of the paper sticking out of Barnes’s mouth, folded the page back. It was one of the few white spaces left.

“Looks like names and phone numbers. Some notes. Plenty to follow up on here.” He straightened and stripped off the gloves. “Give me the description.”

Tom rattled off Flip’s stats. He handed the picture to Lance, and Lance got started on the radio. Another APB on Flip Dunn, this time for a 187.

“Can we talk to the other victims?” Tom asked.

“You know better than that. I’ll get over there and do a photo lineup when I’m done here. If you want, I’ll give you a call and let you know if I get a positive.”

“Fair enough. Thanks. And thanks for the heads-up on this.”

Lance waved them off and got another set of gloves going.

Tom took one last look at what Flip had done to Barnes. For the hundredth time, he wondered why Flip hadn’t turned him into roadkill too.

He caught up with Hathaway in the hallway. The uniforms had set up floodlights. Light glinted off the thousands of shards of glass that crunched under the soles of their shoes. Hathaway was looking up at a dark hole in the ceiling where the remnants of a shattered bulb were still threaded into the fixture.

“Took his time setting this up, didn’t he?”

“I guess,” Tom said. “Let’s get over to the brother’s. See if we get lucky.”

“Seems to me you’ve already been lucky.”

“Yeah. I get that.”

At this hour, Venice Boulevard was just a string of lit-up asphalt waiting for traffic. Tom slowed for the red lights but coasted through when he was sure no other cars were coming. In a couple of minutes they were off the main boulevard and prowling toward the banker’s place. The houses here sat toward the back of their lawns like mausoleums. Most of the windows were dark. A few glowed with the lonely blue flicker of late-night television.

Tom scanned the sidewalks. It was walking distance from the Ragtop to the brother’s house.

“You think he got clipped in that firefight?”

Hathaway had his elbow propped outside, his jacket sleeve ballooning in the wind. “Maybe. A lot of holes in that room. Couldn’t tell if the bloodstains in the hallway were from the victims or what.”

Tom wheeled the Explorer onto the banker’s street, cruised past his house, and parked three doors down. “Doesn’t look like anybody’s up.”

“They’re about to be.” Hathaway opened his door and stepped out.

Tom killed the engine and followed. Nobody was on the sidewalks. He checked his watch—2:35.

Hathaway reached the door before Tom and leaned into the doorbell. It took three rings before they heard a woman’s voice behind the door asking who was there.

Tom said, “It’s Tom Cole, Mrs. Dunn. We talked over the phone a few days ago.”

No response.

Tom tried again. “We need to talk to your husband.”

The porch light lit up, and door hardware started unbuckling. She opened the door about six inches. Tom held up his badge.

Mrs. Dunn’s bleary eye peeked back, scared out of sleep. “Jason’s not home.”

Tom looked at Hathaway, then back through the crack in the door. “Where is he?”

A flicker of something painful moved across her cheek before she said, “I don’t know.” She began to close the door.

Tom put his hand on the panel. “Have you heard from his brother?”

“Philip? No.”

“If you hear from him, you need to call me. It’s very important.” He pushed a business card through the gap.

She took it. “I haven’t talked to him in years.”

“I hope it stays that way. But if you see him, try to stay away from him. And call me right away.”

That eye looked from Tom to Hathaway and back. “I understand.”

Tom turned.

“My husband doesn’t have anything to do with his brother.” The door had opened a little wider.

“Good. But Philip’s in the area. The immediate area. It’s a little too coincidental for me.”

“They hate each other, Officer. They have for years.”

Tom approached the door. “Why is that?”

She stared out at him. Tom felt that she was performing some kind of assessment of him and Hathaway.

The gap widened another six inches. “Maybe you should come in after all.”

58

The waning moon bled its light every night, becoming smaller and darker with the passage of the month. Flip stared at it, his two eyes on the single bright misshapen orb above. For once, he felt a sense of kinship with it. Endless cycles, waxing, waning, orbiting around and around, lifeless, dusty, dry.

Pointless.

From this alley he could watch its motion another hour maybe. If he lasted that long. His idea was to hide here until the sirens died down and then make his way to Diane’s. Brenda’s, that is. He didn’t even know what she wanted him to call her anymore. He would go to her. She would know what to do. After all, she was the one he orbited.

But since dropping to this spot against the bricks, he himself had waned. This alley had become too comfortable to leave. The asphalt carpet, the bricks mortared together to cradle his back, the mirrors of the puddles reflecting the moonlight—he’d even grown fond of the fetid smell of garbage seeping from the trash bins. And anyway, there was no standing now. He was dizzy enough just sitting here staring back at the moon’s prying, half-blinked eye.