Cash Burn (7 page)

Who am I kidding?

He might be able to get it down to five million, maybe four, but still that level of write-off would be brutal to swallow.

It wouldn’t happen. He wouldn’t let it happen. He’d watch this one, he’d stay over Billy’s shoulder, and at the first sign of a problem, he’d make them find another bank.

Jason gritted his teeth. It was too much dough for this company. Any sane banker would know that. The “greater fool” theory would never get him out of this one.

He should take it to Scotty and talk it through, get some ideas, button it up.

And probably lose the business.

No, it was only a credit proposal. It wasn’t a commitment. These proposals were nothing close to a commitment. They had outs all over the boilerplate of their proposal letters, and if Scotty didn’t like the terms, Jason could always find an excuse in the due diligence process to change the terms of the final commitment.

There are good deals in bad markets and bad deals in good markets.
Scotty’s words.

It could work out. It would. He would make sure of it. Even in a recession, there were winners.

And losers.

12

Flip lay curled on his side, hands clasped between his knees, brow wrenched tight, eyes closed against the afternoon sun streaming into the room around the protest of drawn drapes.

The kid’s face played against his eyelids as if its image were tattooed there.

The face was gray, swollen, and cut, with blood hardening on soft skin, the way it had looked behind the gas station. Headlights of a car passing on the street on the other side of the small building flashed across the kid’s face and cast it in sharper light for an instant.

Flip rolled over on the bed, and the springs creaked like coffin hinges. The mattress stuck to his side in the hot, compacted air.

He opened his eyes.

It wasn’t his first killing. At least two others. And many more he’d left bleeding and unconscious. He played them out in his mind with a vague hope that remembering them would steel him from this haunting.

The first was when he was seventeen. The second came after all that time in gladiator school turned him from a kid into a criminal.

But this one, this boy, was somehow different.

Flip sat up. He put his bare feet flat on the carpet. He looked fearfully around the room as if the walls might fold in on him any second. The drapes glowed against the sun. On the other side of the glass the LA air was packed dense, and the sidewalk was two stories down—no way for anyone to crawl up or in. But he sensed the fragility of the glass as a thin barricade against the outside.

He walked into the kitchen. Shards of glass from the broken coffeepot still sparkled on the linoleum. He passed an instant of wanting to grind the soles of his naked feet into the curved spikes of glass winking in the light like crystal claws.

He stepped into the living room, the carpet under his feet stiff with wear and accumulated dust. Here sunlight through another window was barricaded off by blinds, parallel lines of glare seeping between and illuminating him and the yellowed walls. Where two of them joined the ceiling, a cobweb dangled, a gray wisp like a tiny hangman’s strand.

At the edge of the door, the metallic bar of the dead bolt was visible in the crack beside the jamb. Locking out. Locking in. He went to it, put his fingers on the switch. He twisted it to make sure it was locked.

His hand. He brought it up and stared at the back of it, brought up the other next to it to compare them. The right was still purple where he’d bruised the knuckles on the kid’s face, but the cut was healing. He had needed no weapon other than these bones, this skin, these muscles and tendons all clenched together into a club. These were his weapons. He flexed them into fists, regarded the tools he’d used to steal a life.

A knock on the door startled him. He dropped his hands and took a step backward.

He should look through the peephole, but his feet stayed rooted to the carpet.

It could be Cole. The prospect of seeing the PO nagged at Flip’s chest as inevitable as gravity. He couldn’t handle Cole now. In this condition, he might as well give him a signed confession.

Another knock, softer. A woman’s voice. “Flip? Flip, darlin’, you in there?”

He rushed to the door, his purple-backed hand fumbling with the dead bolt. Sliding it clear, he twisted the knob, and there was Diane. She stood in that lifeless, stained hallway like a flower crowding through a crack in the city’s asphalt. Her lips shifted into a smile, and they moved to form words, the soft pink flesh of her tongue grazing her front teeth.

Flip couldn’t process her words. Her presence in his doorway shocked his mind until she reached out to press her fingertips into his arm. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

He wanted to seize her, fold his arms around her and squeeze, feel her warmth against his chest as a denial that he could do the things he’d done.

But all he did was step aside.

She moved before him, some inches shorter even though she wore heels. Her hair passed him, its fragrance bringing to mind cleanness, freshness. He wanted to bury his face in it and drink in the scent.

He slammed the door. Locked it.

She was talking again, words with meanings that escaped him, her back to him, blouse snug against her waist where it slipped into the top of the skirt hugging her hips, covering her to where her calves emerged like twins flexing until she turned to bring that face back to him. Those lips, damp and red. Those eyes.

She dropped onto the sofa, folded her legs beside her. A hand went to the sofa cushion next to her, patted.

Mute as a crab, he scrabbled across the floor to her. He couldn’t take his eyes off her face. When she smiled, his own face bloomed into a smile too, the oppression of his memories ascending from his mind. Cradled by the sofa cushions next to her now, he brought his eyes down to her hands where they were folded on her lap, nails painted pink, fingers tapered, bending, smooth and white.

One of the hands moved to his. The contrast of this delicate hand on his made him recoil upon himself. Underneath her hand, his was a bruised mallet, his fingers like knotted, blackened sausages cobbled into the lumpy meat of his backhand. This hand was who he was. It was what he’d done.

“Flip?”

Faint eyebrows lifted over those eyes, smile angling the tissue of her lips upward at their corners to reveal her teeth again.

“Yeah?”

“I asked how you’re doing, darlin’.”

“How I’m doing?”

She nodded, chin dipping into the softness underneath it.

“I’m . . . I’m all right.”

Her hand rose from his and came to his face, cradled his jaw, and as it stroked, he heard the sandy grate of his stubble against her smooth palm.

“Tell you what, honey. Why don’t you get a shower and a shave, and we’ll see if we can make you better than just all right?”

She smacked his face with her fingertips. Her smile was back, and with no more words, he was on his feet and peeling his shirt over his head on the way to the shower.

* * *

After she was gone, the taste of her still lingering on his lips, he was able to close his eyes again. His body melted into the mattress, imageless eyelids shut, and his mind drifted with thoughts of her.

She’d whispered to him the next things to be done. She’d mouthed the words with her breath puffing softly, secretly against his ear. Her voice was warmth that passed into the deepest parts of him. Her words entered his mind as if needless of eardrum or mental process to become part of him like light absorbed through skin.

His mind rested on her, his hands still bearing the sensations of her, the gravity of his pulsing blood settled now in his veins thanks to her, his whole being as if formed by her.

He turned his head against the pillow, and her fragrance came to him out of the pillowcase. What he’d done to the boy, and what Diane had asked him to do next—it was all pushed aside with the remembrance of her touch.

13

Tom Cole’s eyes held on the blackened leaves of the wreath on the door, and he hesitated to knock.

He looked over his shoulder at the U-Haul trailer. It wasn’t hitched to anything; it just rested against the cement in front, the back gaping open to reveal the flat sides of new cardboard boxes puzzled together to fit the space.

A click sounded behind the door, and he turned. The wreath pulled away with the door opening to reveal a woman. She saw him and pulled up, startled, the box bobbling.

Tom reached out as a reflex to keep the box from falling.

She regained control of it, pulled it away from him as if it were something he might steal. She stepped back. “Who are you?”

She wore a denim shirt untucked, sleeves rolled to reveal bare forearms and hands gripping a cardboard box. Her eyes were hazel with lashes so long they might brush the lenses of her glasses.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.” He dropped his hand, reached around for his badge wallet. “My name’s Tom Cole.” He flipped open the wallet, but she didn’t look at it. She held the box as if it would protect her.

“I work for the state. I’m a parole officer.”

The air between them didn’t move. Tom became aware of the sound of birds in the olive tree behind him.

“This is about my son.”

“I’m sorry for your loss, Ms. Russell. Can I have a couple minutes?”

She seemed to see him for the first time, looked him up and down.

Tom felt out of place suddenly, more suited for convicts and jails than for this grieving mother. He straightened. “Look, let me give you a business card. This is a bad time. You can call my boss and make sure—”

“No, it’s all right.” She lowered the box to the floor and stepped out onto the porch, closing the door. To the right of the door was a small concrete bench like you’d find outside a museum. She sat there and crossed her legs, placed her palms flat on the concrete on either side of her. “What is it you want to talk to me about?”

He returned the wallet to his back pocket. “I talked with Detective Danton.”

“He thinks my son was involved in drugs. That it was a gang thing. But it wasn’t.”

Tom expected it to be denial, but it didn’t come across that way. He looked carefully at her face again, looked at her eyes. “Okay.”

Her head tilted slightly. “You believe me?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I do. You don’t strike me as someone who makes things up.”

She brought her hands away from the bench and they came together in her lap. She wove her fingers together and looked them over.

“I know this sounds kind of strange, Ms. Russell, but I have a hunch about what happened to your son, and I wanted to see if you could help me connect the dots.”

“Hey, I’m just glad somebody believes me. What do you want to know?”

“Danton let me read his report, but there are some things I’m not clear on. Can you just tell me about that night? I’m sorry to put you through it again.”

“What kind of hunch would a parole officer have about my son?”

“It’s probably nothing. Let’s just say I’m doing some moonlighting.”

“All right. I guess if you think you might be able to help . . . Tell me if this is too much detail. I got home from work around five thirty. Greg wasn’t home, but that wasn’t unusual—”

“Sorry to cut you off, but in your statement to Danton you said you dreamed there was someone in the house.”

Her eyes cut into a frown. “It wasn’t a dream.”

“But your statement in the report—”

“That’s what I thought at first. And if nothing else had happened that night, I might have just kept thinking that. But the more I thought about it . . . it wasn’t a dream. Someone was here. A man was in the house.” She looked to the door as if the place had betrayed her.

“What did he look like?”

She held Tom with her eyes. That expression of betrayal didn’t relax. “It wasn’t like that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean . . . look, I know how this sounds. You can think whatever you want about me. I didn’t see him. It was just that sensation you have when you’re not alone and it’s not somebody you know there with you. Where you know it’s somebody . . .” She looked behind him as if the words were hovering in the air, dodging her. Then her eyes returned to his face. “Somebody evil.”

He began to think he’d been wrong about her. Without any answers, her mind was working to invent some. “So, you think this guy who was in your room had something to do with what happened to your son.”

“Greg. His name is Greg.”

He thought she might stare at him until he said it. “Okay. Greg.”

“There’s more. The sliding glass door downstairs was unlocked. Sometimes Greg did that when he snuck out at night. I guess so he wouldn’t have to bring his keys. But the power was out too. When I woke up the next morning my alarm clock wasn’t on. Nothing was on. The power was out.”

“Power surge?”

“Maybe. Sure. That’s what you’d think. If your son didn’t happen to be murdered that night. Then you start wondering. You start thinking about every little detail of the day before. You go over every word you said, every touch. Every chance you could have done something different. What you’d say if you had just an hour again. A minute with him.” Her words cracked. She dropped her head.

Tom didn’t move. He suppressed the urge to step to her and put a hand on her arm. “I’m sorry.”

She waved a hand at him, the other hand drying her eyes.

“Where do you work, Ms. Russell?”

She took a deep breath. It jerked in but came out smooth. “Up off Wilshire on the west side. It’s about a twenty-minute drive.”

“What do you do?”

“Executive assistant. Up until this happened, anyway.”

“Where?”

“At Business Trust Bank for the last four years.”

“I didn’t see that in Danton’s report.”

“They never asked. Why?”

“Just fishing. What do you do there at the bank? Do you have access to the vault?”

“No.” Her forehead wrinkled in concentration. She stared at him.

“What about keys? Do you have keys to the bank?”

“I have a key that lets me in the office. But that wouldn’t do anyone any good.”