Cash Burn (4 page)

Mark didn’t acknowledge the comment. His fingers entwined in front of his chest. It was his defensive pose. “Tell me about the runoff.”

“Deposits are up, so you’re talking about loans.”

Mark glanced at the sheet before him. Apparently Vince hadn’t mentioned the rise in Jason’s deposit numbers. “Right.”

“It’s just cyclical pay-downs. Loans will be up again this month. P. Lowell and Howe got some big collections in and paid down their lines. Blackstone sold a building, so that term loan paid off, but we’ve got two others queued up for him. We’ve booked five loans this month, but they don’t draw until after month-end.”

“Good. My other concern is your WALG.”

Jason wasn’t surprised. The bank assigned a risk grade to every loan, and the weighted average loan grade was the average grade of the whole portfolio. Mark watched it like a hawk, because downgrading a large loan would move the needle in the wrong direction quickly.

“I sent you my action plan last week. Did you get a chance to look at it?”

“I’ve got it here somewhere. Vince gave me the basics”

Jason didn’t have time to beat around this any longer. He stood and went to the open door. He slammed it and faced Mark. “Vince will not run this office.”

“I didn’t say he would.”

“I won’t report to him, and my teams won’t report to him. Let him run his little branches and his business-development officers. He’s good at keeping them scared enough to put up decent numbers. It won’t work here. Not with this team. Not with me.”

“What are you—?”

Jason leaned over Mark’s desk, his fingertips touching the wood surface. “This office is pulling its weight and then some. Almost every lender is on pace to hit their numbers for the year. Don’t mess with it, Mark. Nothing’s broken. There’s nothing to fix. I don’t care what spin Vince puts on the WALG or the one month this year we had a little loan runoff.”

“It’s not the only month this year.”

“We recovered from January in February, and we’ll recover from July in August. The trends are solid. You have no worries here.” Jason took a seat again and forced his face to relax. “Put me in charge of the branch network, and you’ll have the same trends out there.”

This brought a smile to Mark’s face. “The branches are doing fine.”

“Sure, if you like high expenses and low profit. We’re even carrying part of Vince’s salary in our numbers.”

Mark’s raised eyebrows said he didn’t know this.

“It’s in the financial detail. He’s got part of his salary and expenses allocated to us because we have one BDO that reports to him. I never said anything because we’re profitable enough to absorb it no problem. Personally, I think his whole salary’s putting a crimp in the bank’s return on investment. But it’s not my place to say so.”

A chuckle sizzled out of Mark’s nostrils. “Okay, okay. You’ve made your point.”

“I mean it, Mark. I could run the branch system in my sleep. It’d be like having a couple more teams reporting to me. You’d lose the worst performers overnight, and in six months every branch would be running as well as the home office. Why not give it a chance?”

Mark’s eyes narrowed, and his smile reminded Jason of a wolf sizing up dinner on the hoof. The CEO leaned forward, and his balding pate caught the gleam from the windows. “All right, cowboy. Here’s what I’m going to do. In three months, I’m going to look at the numbers. I’m going to look first at deposit growth, then loan growth, then WALG. Whoever moves the needle in the right direction in those categories in the next three months wins. You win, Vince is gone. Vince wins—” he held up his palm—“you’re not gone, but he’s earned the right to have the home office report to him. Fair enough?”

Saying no would mean Jason didn’t have confidence in the argument he’d just used. “I think you have enough data right now to make this call, Mark.”

Three fingers went into the air. “Three months. We sit together—you, Vince, and me—on November 2, and I let you know the decision. We’ll announce it in December, and it’ll go into effect at the first of the year.”

Jason held out his hand. “You won’t regret putting me in charge.”

Mark clasped his hand. “Make it happen.”

7

Gray handles gleamed dully at the sides of the silver casket, waiting for pallbearers’ hands to lift and carry it out of the sanctuary. A jumble of flowers spilled like bony arms over the sides of the coffin.

Sifting chords from the church organ crept and echoed among the high rafters as if trying to shoulder out the silence. But that silence hovered behind the music, tangible, purposeful, an absence that Jason couldn’t escape. It was a menace, this silence. He tried to combat it by focusing on the music, by trying to think of what he might say to Kathy after her son’s funeral.

What does a man say to his secretary when her son is murdered?

He let his mind wander to his work, to the cavalcade of tasks and politics and schedules, but his thoughts managed only to taint the hollowness in the air when the organ finally silenced.

Kathy’s pastor rose from his chair and stepped to the pulpit. Jason glanced at the program in his hands and saw that the man’s name was Gates. His dark skin shone in the glare of the lights twenty feet overhead. Before his bulk the lectern looked spindly. No one else moved, as if the hush of the room were something fearful.

The minister placed a thick Bible on the lectern, closed. He lifted his eyes to those seated before him.

“Justice.” His voice resonated in the emptiness, firm, shattering the quiet. The word sat among them vibrating, quivering.

He stared at the coffin below him. Gripping the edges of the lectern as if he might tear it away, he said it again. “Justice.” His eyes searched the congregation. “It’s what we want for this boy. For his mother and father.”

Kathy sat with her sister in the first row, close enough to reach the coffin in two steps. Her head was directed away from it, the pastor holding her attention. On her other side was her ex-husband, Hal, the young man’s father, back rigid as a board.

The pastor looked from the coffin to Kathy. “We are with you, sister. We will stand by your side. As Jesus promised you, I promise you: we will never leave you nor forsake you.” He lifted his eyes to the congregation, and in a commanding voice, spoke. “Can I hear from the church?”

The people around Jason said, “Amen” and “Yes.”

Jason nearly spoke in agreement. He clapped his mouth shut. He wasn’t part of this church. Or any other.

“But there is a Savior. There is a God, who loved us enough to come himself, to put on flesh and walk this world.” He brandished the Bible. “We have his words with us. We have his testimony.” The Bible returned to its place on the lectern, and Pastor Gates scowled. “‘The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.’ He had compassion. He wept with mourners. Our God knows this pain, this sorrow. Because he suffered it too. Among his sufferings was the sorrow of this loss.

“You are not alone, sister. We are with you. Our Lord Jesus Christ is with you. God the Father, who gave his one and only Son, is with you.” He leaned back, chin tucked, mouth cupped downward, and inhaled deeply through flaring nostrils.

Jason gripped the edge of the pew on either side of his knees. Hard wood. Hard as stone. His legs itched to rise.

The pastor brought himself forward to loom over the lectern, and softly now, he spoke. “And there will be justice. Oh, our God is merciful. Yes, he is. But the murderers, the corrupt, those steeped in sin, those who have turned away from the true God and have replaced him in their lives with the sins they worship instead—for those, for those who have done things . . . like . . . like
this
!” He spread his hands to gesture toward the coffin, and it seemed that his emotions overcame him.

The muscles in Jason’s back threatened to snap. He shrugged his shoulders, tried to loosen them.

Leaning back, Pastor Gates gathered himself. “There will be justice, beloved church. You may count on this. You may stake your life on it. Because our God is a God of love. But he is complex. You cannot box this God, cannot package him and put him in your pocket. You cannot say love alone is the sum of him. He has revealed his qualities through his Word. His great compassion for us, his great forgiveness, great mercy. But it is a fearful thing, an awful thing—it is a terrifying thing to fall into his hands if you have trampled on his children.”

On the right of the platform, a cross was planted, rough-hewn, like someone had sliced at it with an axe to carve it out of a living tree. It arrested Jason’s gaze briefly before he looked away. His eyes pulsed with each throbbing heartbeat.

The pastor patted the pulpit. His dark eyes squinted at the closed Bible. “You cannot have love without defense. Even the animals know this. A mother bear is never more fierce than when her cub is in danger. How much more will God—the omnipotent God who created the universe, who has perfect love for you and for me—how much more will he love? And when that love sees itself despised, how much more will that God give vent to his horrible vengeance when the times have reached their fulfillment?

“In his time, brothers and sisters, justice will be done. Rest assured.” Pastor Gates turned and nodded to a woman who hadn’t gotten the memo about wearing black. She moved in her bright print dress to the organ and began to sing.

Her voice echoed like a ringing bell. The words were lost on Jason in the clarity of the notes she sang—and in what the pastor’s words had done to him.

Pastor Gates filled the chair to the side of the podium. He seemed not to hear the power in the singer’s voice or to see anyone in the sanctuary. Yet his words lodged in Jason, resonated in him, words too deep to name or understand. Some hard thing inside him was flayed away by Pastor Gates’s words, and he felt bare and raw.

He pulled his eyes from the pastor and rubbed his hands on his knees. Breath eluded him, and he gasped for it. He wondered if those seated nearby could see how his heart pounded at his rib cage and made his shirt quake.

He turned his head. At the other end of the pew, Brenda Tierney’s eyes met his. Emerald eyes he hadn’t seen since the interview. They glimmered with tears that shone as they caught the lights. She shook her head and looked down.

Jason couldn’t seem to turn away. The hypnotizing cut of her nose and cheeks drew him from the rawness inside him created by the pastor. Her eyes closed, her lashes joined to squeeze out a single tear that reflected like a diamond slipping onto her rounded cheek, trailing down the smooth cup underneath to her jaw, where an extended finger plucked it away. The trail of the tear remained, an icy line downward from her closed eyelids.

Silence overshadowed the room again. Its force was like a living thing, sucking all senses into it. He finally turned away from Brenda.

In the front row, Kathy and her sister rose like Siamese twins. Her ex-husband came after them and turned to stand at the foot of the coffin. His haggard face had aged ten years in the three days since Jason had last seen him. With this coffin before him, his eyes seemed to sag in their sockets.

Pastor Gates moved down the steps to meet them.

The lid was closed. There was nothing for them to see but the flowers draping the silver box.

Kathy buckled. She slid down her sister’s side toward the floor.

Pastor Gates rushed in. The silence of the church was broken by a murmuring rustle. People rose from their seats, stepped toward the aisle. The pastor wrapped his thick arm around Kathy and lifted her to her feet. But she moved in sections as if deflated, her head lolling forward.

Someone near the front said, “Let him through; he’s a doctor,” and a silver-haired man stepped into the aisle and toward the front.

Kathy’s ex-husband stood apart, at the foot of the casket, staring at it, unblinking, as if the commotion of Kathy’s collapse were a scene playing out in another dimension.

8

Every time Flip closed his eyes, he saw the boy’s face.

He couldn’t figure out why. He had beaten, maimed, even killed before. The others never haunted him the way the boy did. Their stakes were on the table, and they must have known what they were doing, what they were risking. They would have done it to him if he hadn’t done it first. Even the man he had taken down outside Diane’s apartment didn’t give him a second’s pause. He had no idea what had happened to him. He didn’t care.

But the boy was different. And he was a boy, wasn’t he? He wasn’t a man. He’d looked tall enough to have been a man when he’d rounded the corner in that dark house. But he wasn’t.

Flip tried closing his eyes. The image was there. The loose strands of the boy’s hair stuck to the blood smeared on his forehead. The gray color of his face shadowed in the light from the single bulb behind the gas station, discolored by the effects of death, blood no longer pumping through his flesh. Eyes frozen open, vacant.

He could feel the boy’s body, the lightness and jumbled limbs, joints thickening even in the time it took Flip to drive from the house out to Robertson, up to Pico, and to the rear of the closed gas station where he’d left him. Only a boy. Not fully grown. Sixteen or seventeen maybe. The same age Flip was when he had the door slammed behind him in the youth authority for the first time.

In the light of the gas station he’d leaned over the kid, to see the face that still held traces of childhood in its texture. Why had he looked?

Flip’s eyes wanted to stay closed, but he couldn’t let them. Not with this image haunting him.

He went for more coffee.

The smell of the dishes in the sink hung in the air like sewer vapor. He lifted the coffeepot out of the machine and saw only dregs swirling in the bottom of it. A little liquid, black as tar, moved in a mass of caked residue burned into the glass.

At the sink, he tried to wedge the coffeepot between the tip of the faucet and the plates and cups piled underneath it. It wouldn’t fit. He shoved the plates to one side. They clattered against the porcelain like shattered teeth. Still not enough room for the pot.

His eyes held on the blackness of the burned sediment. It pooled at the edge of the bottom of the glass pot.