The Bad Judgment Series: The Complete Series

by Leigh James

  I wasn’t sure which was worse.

  There were more sirens and yelling from back at the house. “They’re over here!” The crumpled form near us yelled.

  “Be quiet,” Walker said. He pointed his gun at him. “Or you’re dead.”

  “It’s not like I’d put it past you,” the guard said. He sounded young, like he was in his twenties. But I could only barely make out his broken outline on the ground.

  “We’re innocent,” Walker said, holding his hand out to me. I took it and he pulled me up. I realized, once he had his hand clasped over mine, that I was shaking pretty violently. “All we need is to get out of here. So keep your mouth shut for a minute. Otherwise, I’m coming back for you.”

  The guard grunted. I couldn’t tell if he was grunting assent or dissent, but Walker didn’t wait to find out. Police sirens were screaming through Back Bay. We started down the street and soon we were back to a flat-out sprint, all the way to the park.

  “Let’s get to Boylston,” he said, when we’d finally slowed to a walk. A frenzied sprint through this part of downtown would only call attention to us and make it worse. “Then we’re getting back on the T, just to Brookline. We can get a car there and get out of the city.” He heard me wheezing and he looked at me, concerned. “Are you okay?”

  I shook my head, no.

  “It’s probably not going to get any better,” Walker said and squeezed my hand. “But maybe you’ll get used to it.”

  I realized then that he wasn’t just talking about sprinting. He was talking about everything.

  I didn’t say a word. I just wheezed and shook a little as I held his hand, following his lead, wondering how we had gotten to this place. And if we were ever going to get out.

  Chapter 4

  “I still can’t believe you had forty-five thousand dollars in cash at your house,” I said. “You never included it in your Financial Affidavit.”

  Walker laughed as he drove down the Mass Pike. “Nic, that wasn’t a lot of money to me at the time. I forgot about it. My entire life and my business were at stake, you might remember. My head was spinning. And oh yeah — and my hot lawyer was being a cock tease. That made me forget just about everything else.”

  “Walker!” I spluttered at him. “I was not being a cock tease! That’s not nice language!”

  Walker laughed some more but didn’t even bother to look apologetic. “You were totally teasing me back then,” he said, shaking his head at the memory. “Walking around in your fancy lawyer outfits, sleeping in my room with no bra on, giving me sexy, good-girl longing looks all the time,” he said, shifting uncomfortably. “It makes me hard just thinking about it.” He grabbed my hand and put it on his crotch, which was bulging in a way that made me hot and achy with need.

  “Walker,” I said, laughing at his shamelessness but yanking my hand away. “Don’t be vulgar.”

  “There you go with that ‘good-girl’ routine again. It’s hot,” he said, a big smile on his face. “And I know you like vulgar. I thought you might before, back when you were representing me. But now I know for sure.” He wagged his eyebrows at me lasciviously and I blushed a hot, flaming red.

  I looked at him and sighed in defeat. “Let’s get back to talking about the affidavit. And everything else,” I said, trying to shake off the desire that had pooled in my belly and spread between my legs. We had Federal and probably State law enforcement chasing us, or trying to figure out where we were so that they could chase us. Walker had shot those two guards back at his house. We were driving a car with hot plates that we’d just bought from a wary used-car dealer in Allston. We were in more trouble than we’d ever been in, and that was saying something. The hardness, the vulgarity, and the hot good-girl routine were all going to have to wait.

  Boo hiss.

  I had to keep my head on straight. Walker had informed me that we were heading to Florida, to look for Blue Securities’ Miami office. We needed to find out about Advent, the name that had kept surfacing with both Lester Max and at my firm. We needed to know what it was, and who was responsible for what.

  “So, you had quite a bit of cash that we didn’t declare,” I said, “and now you have less than that — significantly less. Because you had to buy an Audi, not a Honda.”

  “We had to get the faster car,” Walker said defensively. “We’ll probably have to outrun someone.”

  “The billionaire gets what the billionaire wants,” I said lightly.

  “Except right now I’m a thousandaire,” Walker said grimly.

  “Right,” I said. “We’re going to have to be very careful with what’s left of the money. We don’t know how long we’re going to have to hide out. When it will be safe to go back.” If it will be safe to go back, I added silently.

  Walker continued driving the speed limit. He checked the mirrors, but he seemed calm; they hadn’t caught up to us. Yet.

  He gave me a quick look. “Nicole, have you considered the possibility that it might not ever be safe to go back?”

  I stared out the window for a moment and watched the darkness. “I can’t let myself believe that,” I said.

  “Because why?” Walker asked.

  “Because it’s not fair,” I said. “Because that wouldn’t be justice. And I still believe in justice.”

  “Well, we might have to make our own justice,” he said. “Because life isn’t always fair. Sometimes you have to take things into your own hands. To bend life towards fairness. It’s called karma.” He gripped the steering wheel. “Proactive karma.”

  “Proactive karma is fine — as long as we don’t end up killing people and still can’t clear our names,” I said. “I don’t want people to think that we’re responsible for Mandy’s death. And the others. The people who committed the crimes need to be held responsible. They need to pay for what they’ve done.”

  “They will,” Walker said. “I guaran-fucking-tee it.”

  “Good.” I looked back out the window. “But it’s not just about that. About revenge,” I said. “We have to be able to go back. I have to get back to my family. They need me.” It wasn’t just about Walker’s case; it was about Richie and my brothers. I’d always been there for them. I wasn’t sure they could make it, financially, without my contribution.

  Or just without me in general.

  Walker reached over and squeezed my hand. “We’re going to help them, no matter what. I’ll take care of your family,” he said, “and the rest of your debt, Nicole. Your apartment, your loans, everything. I’m going to take care of all of it.”

  I took a deep breath. That debt was the very reason I’d said yes to David Proctor when he asked me back to the firm. “In addition,” he’d said, “if you come back to the firm, as a signing bonus — as re-signing bonus, really — we’d like to offer you full payment on all of your student loans. Law and undergraduate. I’ll wire the funds today.”

  My mouth had dropped open. That was almost three hundred thousand dollars. In one pop. I was staggered by the offer.

  But then he’d tried to blow me up. And I was staggered for other reasons.

  My student loans were still sitting there, unpaid, most likely in default at this point. Thinking about it made me panic, but I’d made the choice to borrow the money to go to school. That debt was my cross to bear, no matter what my present circumstances were.

  “I can’t let you do that,” I said.

  “No, I’ve been thinking about it,” Walker said, watching the road. “I knew you’d give me a hard time, but it doesn’t matter — I insist. You’ve given up everything for me, including your ability to practice law. There are too many things for us to worry about right now. This is the one thing I can do for you. Once we get my money back, let me. Please.”

  I kept looking out the window. I knew that for him, three hundred thousand dollars was nothing. To me, it meant a lifetime of indentured servitude. Only now I couldn’t be the kind of indentured servant that made a professional wage. I couldn’t practice la
w anymore. My future was shaky, uncertain, for a whole myriad of reasons.

  “No,” I said, being stubborn.

  “No is not an option,” Walker said, effectively dismissing me. “It’s as good as done.”

  I sighed in both frustration and relief and looked back out the window.

  “I love you, too,” he said.

  * * *

  We were both lost in our own thoughts for a while after that. We left the city behind us in the darkness.

  “What are we hoping to find in Miami?” I asked, finally, after I had rearranged my thoughts. I needed to focus on what we were doing, and how we were going to do it.

  “I want to see the Blue subsidiary office, to see if there’s any sort of real infrastructure there — personnel, office space. People having meetings. I want to see if there’s anyone I can talk to about Lester Max. And your former law firm,” he said grimly.

  “About that,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about the timeframe of everything. If Proctor & Buchanan is involved, they can’t have been from the beginning. They had to have come to the table late. Because that bomb was on your boat a whole year before the firm represented you. They couldn’t have been involved in that.”

  “No, you’re right. I don’t think they were involved until after. But they could be like sharks — they smelled blood in the water and they came circling,” he said.

  “Crocodiles, not sharks,” I said, mostly to myself. An image of Norris Phaland slithered into my head. “And maybe Lester Max recruited the firm for his cause after you hired us,” I said, thinking it through.

  “Or maybe the government approached both of them. With offers they couldn’t refuse,” Walker said.

  “We don’t know for sure that the government’s involved, though,” I said. Images of the people who’d been following us swirled in my head, the man with the dog who’d peed on Walker’s steps, the blonde who’d followed us to the grocery store.

  “The fact that they weren’t happy with the contract terms I was offering, coupled with the fact that they brought me up on twenty federal charges shortly thereafter, makes me kind of suspicious of them,” he said.

  “So we’re still at square one,” I said. “Surrounded by people we don’t trust, except now we’re running away from them across state lines.”

  “I keep playing a couple of things over and over in my mind,” Walker said, watching the road. “The guy who delivered the pizza — the people who killed him were after your credit card. At least, if they knew it was you who paid.” His voice sounded puzzled. “And the car at the firm — it was waiting for you. And David Proctor tried to put you into that car. But why? Did he know about the bomb? And if he did, why would he do that? What is it that you know that’s so dangerous?”

  I sat there, my thoughts swirling. I’d asked myself the same questions so many times I didn’t know what to think anymore. Was David responsible for the car bomb? Did he really want me dead? Was the person who killed the delivery man really after my credit information? If so, why?

  “I still don’t understand it,” I mumbled, feeling a headache coming on. We were no closer to the truth — in fact, we were further away from the truth than we’d ever been. We were cut off from the rest of the world and now we were fleeing our home and our enemies, both real and imagined.

  “All I know about the case, about your company, your proprietary inventions, etc. — I learned all of that from the documents my firm collected, and from my time with you. Everything I know comes right from the Proctor electronic server, or from information that you gave me. And I was very meticulous — anything you told me, I put it in a memo to David. Which is saying something. We’re trained not to take notes or tape conversations that could be deemed admissible and harmful to our clients.”

  “They train you to lie and tamper with evidence?” Walker asked me. He raised his eyebrows skeptically. “I guess I really was getting my money’s worth.”

  “Ha-ha,” I said. “No, they don’t tell us to lie and tamper with evidence. But if we have admissions of guilt in our file — then there’s only one way to play that. You can’t plead your client not guilty and get away with it. You’ll both go to jail. And it’s not that you want to lie, per se — it’s more that you want to keep your options open when you’re representing someone. Sometimes you have to get creative with how you present the truth.”

  Walker was shaking his head. “You never fail to surprise me with your ingenuity, Counselor,” he said. “But just to clarify — everything I told you, you told David.”

  “Yes,” I said, thinking it through, “except about the bomb and the people following us. I didn’t tell him anything about either of those things.”

  “Well, I think that proves that David is guilty of at least something,” he said, his face thoughtful.

  “How’s that?”

  “He knew what you knew…and he wanted you to keep quiet. About something,” he said. “Maybe about Miami and the payments.”

  “It could be,” I said. “But you knew about that, too, and he didn’t want you getting into that car with me. And still, the thing with the credit card….”

  “We’ll figure it out,” Walker said. “I think we’re going to have quite a bit of time on our hands.”

  Chapter 5

  We drove for almost four hours straight, which seemed impossibly long and uneventful after everything else that had just happened. We passed New York City just before the sun rose. I was surprised that there was traffic that early, but Walker said the George Washington Bridge always had traffic, no matter what time of day it was.

  No one had followed us that we could see. But they had to be looking for us. And they had to have others looking for us, too. I didn’t know how long our luck would last with our new car and the reconstituted plates.

  New York was glittery from the bridge. I imagined that some of that glitter was people just going to bed; the other half was people just waking up to take on the day. I wished we were stopping there, going to museums and to dinner, holding hands and being tourists. I wasn’t sure if that was ever going to be in our future. There might not ever be a normal for us, I thought. Maybe this, driving away from trouble, on the run and trying to figure out who the enemy was, this was our normal. Maybe it would always be like this. I was going to have to concentrate on the present and make the most out of it.

  I didn’t know what was going to happen next. But I certainly couldn’t picture us going back to our old lives, me sitting at my desk until two am, Walker running his company and continuing to sell technology to the government. It wouldn’t be like that if we went back, anyway. I would be disbarred and Walker would be in prison.

  Or we’d both be dead.

  The thought exhausted me. “Shouldn’t we stop to sleep?” I asked, yawning, once we started moving again, getting south of the city.

  “No,” Walker said, not taking his eyes from the road. “The best thing we can put between us and everyone else is time and distance. If we can stay ahead of them, and if they don’t know where we’re headed, that will give us at least a tiny window of opportunity. We need to use it to hide. We can make it to Miami by early tomorrow morning, if we drive straight through. We might have to dump this car, though, and get another one — I don’t think the guy who sold it to us was very promising. The extra five-thousand I gave him should be wearing off right about now. I expect he’s calling the police.”

  “Can’t we just change the plates?” I asked. We didn’t have enough money to keep buying cars every day — Walker was going to have to adjust to his non-billionaire status.

  “Nic, where do you think new plates come from? The license plate fairy?” He laughed.

  “No, I think they come from other people’s cars,” I said. “Just like the ones we have now. They’re stolen, right?”

  “Misappropriated,” Walker said and shrugged. “I think the dealer took them from a repossessed car.”

  “Well, we can misappropriate some more p
lates,” I said, putting practicality over morals.

  “Are you suggesting we break the law again, Counselor?”

  “It’s not like we’re shooting someone,” I said, and yawned again. “So let’s go get some food and misappropriate some plates.”

  * * *

  We went to another superstore first. We needed a screwdriver so we could remove our license plates, prepaid credit cards so we could stay in a hotel, more prepaid TracFones, snacks, bottled water, toothbrushes, and underwear. I picked up a package of white cotton briefs and put them in the cart.

  Walker picked them up and studied them.

  “Really, Nic?” he asked, sounding disappointed. “Has our relationship gotten to that point already?”

  “All my sexy underwear are back at your house,” I said, furrowing my brow at him. “And we don’t have time to go lingerie shopping right now. Oh, but that reminds me of something else,” I said, leading him to the personal care section. I blushed harder and picked out a box of condoms, throwing them quickly into the basket.

  Walker picked them up and studied them.

  “Aw, you got…extra-large…you really care about my feelings, don’t you?” He cooed at me. I just looked at him, my face flaming. He picked up five more of the boxes and threw them in the cart and then looked at me smugly.

  “I told you we were going to have some time on our hands,” he said, lowly. My stomach lurched with hot desire, but I marched away from him, towards the checkout. I didn’t have time for six boxes of condoms and smugness.

  But I wished I did.

  The young man who checked us out watched in awe as Walker grabbed as many one-hundred-dollar prepaid credit cards as he could and put them on the conveyor belt. Our total came to slightly under three thousand dollars. Walker handed the cash over to the clerk, whose mouth was hanging open by now, and I pulled my hat down lower over my eyes. Even when he was being low-key, Walker had a way of making people notice him. Which was bad. Very, very bad.