by C. L. Stone
Even though it was warm, I pulled the jacket closer around my body. I wasn’t usually so self-conscious, but this was just plain awkward. I didn’t belong in a fancy rich person hotel-mall-cruise ship.
I followed Avery up the stairs, catching more of the surroundings as we went. On the second floor was a help desk, and then gift shops, a wine bar, an internet cafe and an art gallery. There was more beyond all that. Doors went on and on down large hallways, beyond my line of sight. Yup. The second floor felt like a fancy mall, like one of the ones I’d visited downtown in Charleston, but had decided not to do my pick pocketing business in. Too much security. Too out of my league. Misdemeanors could turn into felonies if I happened to pick up a wallet with a whole lot more cash.
On the third floor, off to the right, there was a balcony overlooking the other floors that was set up as a lounge area. The blue and white pattern continued on the carpeted floor and everything else was glass or polished wood. There were thick leather sofas and settees and low coffee tables between them. The sofas had pillows that were covered in a blue and white soft material. The windows looked out toward the water on one side, and at the far end was another bar, a smaller one, and a bakery on the other side. That was like four bars since I walked in. I couldn’t imagine the rest of the ship.
My eyes went everywhere, to every corner, every shadow. I thought I saw figures in doorways and then would focus and there was no one there. I eased closer to Avery as we walked on, gritting my teeth. I trusted him, but I was wanting to back myself into a wall, and scout the layout. There was simply too much to this large ship and my paranoid brain was vibrating at every little thing, trying to be aware of danger that wasn’t there.
I put a hand inside my jacket, over my heart. I was being ridiculous. Unfamiliar territory wasn’t a reason to flip out. Trust Avery. He wouldn’t bring me into danger.
In the very least, though, if I was done in by invisible foes, maybe my body would warn the guys to stay away and they would be safe.
How morbid. I refocused, forcing my brain to stop thinking so much.
At the far end of the room, there was a large television tuned to a news station embedded into the wall, and a settee nearby. Sitting on it was Ethan Murdock. While his attention was directed at the screen, I studied him. His curly, pepper graying hair was a little frayed on one side, like he’d been rubbing his hand through it. There were fine wrinkles around his eyes, and he had a pleasant smile on his face. His face was still, but his eyes flickered from the television in front of him to the tablet in his lap I spotted as we got closer. He was reading at the same time as he watched the news...and quickly. He thumbed through pages within a few seconds of glancing at the screen.
Speed reader. Multitasking. Was he really listening or was the news background noise while he read? No, when his eyes lifted, he was reading the changed headline text. The news anchor talked and he seemed to know instantly when the text below her headshot changed. Perceptive. How was he doing that? I suspected he was a robot. Or alien. Or robot alien. No wonder he was so smart to build an underground cell phone service...in his spare time.
“Mr. Murdock,” Avery said softly.
This drew Ethan’s attention and his eyes adjusted, focusing first on Avery and then on me. He smiled, placed the tablet on the coffee table and stood. His slacks shifted around his legs, but the small winkles in the fabric were stiff. He’d been sitting there for a while.
Unimportant detail. My brain was simply hyperactive, trying to be aware of everything and focus at the same time.
“Welcome, Kayli,” he said, in a cheerful tone. There was a croak in his tone and he coughed once to clear it. He held out his hand in offering. “Welcome, welcome.” He wore a light blue shirt and grey slacks, shiny leather shoes. Not exactly loungewear.
I reached out, putting my palm to his. He squeezed it instantly and shook it. Confident, yet excited about something. “Hi,” I said, unsure what else to say and feeling completely out of place. I was still holding onto the glass of water, too, and unable to mask my clothes in some way, not that it would help.
Ethan didn’t appear fazed at all by this. He bobbed his head in an excited nod and then motioned to the settee. “Please, sit.”
I did, sitting on one side of the sofa, close to the arm. When Ethan continued to stand, I wished I’d taken longer to sit. It was an uncomfortable moment where I wanted to continue to study my surroundings but both Ethan and Avery blocked my ability.
He looked at Avery. “And Fancy?”
“She’s with Marc and Raven, who accompanied Kayli,” Avery said in a much more formal tone than I’d expected from him. What happened to him? “I suspect they won’t take long.”
“Then we better get to the point quickly,” Ethan said. He finally sat down beside me and reached for a remote on the coffee table, turning the volume of the news down. He looked at me for a long moment and breathed out between his lips in a puff. “Kayli, I’m sorry. Please, I don’t mean to rush you.”
“Rush?” I asked.
“I know Fancy asked you for a favor, but really, it was on my behalf.”
My pulse quickened and my eyes were drawn to the other side of the ship, down into the lobby and shopping areas of the second floor. A secret meeting at a boat? Tricked into coming? This wasn’t some fun night to catch up. Warnings flashed in my head, and I almost stood, checking the shadows around us again. “Is something wrong?” I asked. “Is it your dad? Is he back?” Avery should have warned me. We should have waited for Marc and Raven.
“Not at the moment,” he said in a low tone, breaking the cycle of paranoia from me. He glanced at Avery. Avery walked the long way around the coffee table and sat in a nearby chair, putting his glass of water on a coaster on the table. Ethan redirected his attention to me. “We actually need your help.”
I settled slowly back into the sofa, putting my palm on the smooth leather material and feeling the coolness. I held to it, steadying my nerves. “With what?”
Ethan grimaced. “My father...he wasn’t exactly...” He stopped, pursed his lips and then glanced at Avery.
“It’s okay. I’ve got this,” Avery said. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped. “Kayli, there’s more bad guys inside Ethan’s company. He needs help taking them out quietly.”
I should have been surprised, but I wasn’t. It made sense. Ethan’s father didn’t seem like the type of guy who ran an up-and-up type of company. After the last catastrophe, I wondered why the company hadn’t been all over the news for the latest scandal. I’d suspected the Academy kept it on the down low because they had their people involved – but then I wasn’t really aware if the Academy had that kind of pull. “Who do you think the bad guys are?” I asked.
“We don’t exactly have a list,” Avery said. He pointed to Ethan’s tablet, the screen currently black. “That’s the problem. He’s got a second set of accounting books that was kept locked away. I found it after the police left. No names, just code.”
“I've been working to decipher it,” Ethan said. “So far, no results.”
“Okay,” I said, picking up my water glass again. I traced my fingers over the condensation along the sides. “So you suspect wrongdoing because there’s a secret set of accounts, which does sound suspicious. How do you know it involves your company and not his own little side projects?”
Ethan’s lips pinched together, his face tightening into a tense expression. “I don’t really know, but it would be irresponsible of me to let this go and not look into it. Also, if it is outside of the company, whatever it is, if it’s not good, it should be dismantled. The only reason to keep it secret is if there’s something illegal about it.”
I wanted to argue that not everything secret was necessarily wrong, but given who his father was, I couldn’t debate that point just now. I took a sip of water to consider what I was going to say. Did he want me to simply agree with the fact that he should probably check things out? “I wish I cou
ld help,” I said. “I just don’t understand how I could.”
“To be honest, I don’t have a lot of people I trust right now. My own father, and then my wife...luckily I got that annulled.”
“It probably helped that her ID was false,” Avery said. “So you weren’t legally married to anyone.”
Ethan sliced a hand through the air as if to cut out the memories and focused on me. “Look, I’m a horrible judge of character sometimes. I give everyone the benefit of the doubt. All I know is, there’s a small group of people that came to help me without asking anything in return.” He pointed a forefinger at me. “You and your friends could have given up my little software program the moment you discovered it and saved yourselves. Instead, you not only saved me, you stayed until everyone who was innocent was safe. Not just anyone would do that.”
“Yeah,” I said, unsure whether to stop him there, as it was awkward to be talked about like some sort of hero. What I’d done, it was more like survival, a wild few days where my only goal was to stop all the kidnapping and threats and possible deaths. I’d also been very careless, and unsure of what to do. It wasn’t heroics that saved us, at least on my part. Just a lot of fumbling and being lucky. “We were doing what we could, but we really didn’t have much of a choice.”
“I understand,” he said. “But you were all exceptional. I feel that with your help, I could get rid of the bad apples that still linger. I’m sorry to ask you after everything you’ve been through, but I really don’t know who else I could ask that I could be sure of. You owe me nothing and I owe you everything.”
I sucked in a breath, holding it, turning my eyes away from Ethan to look at the muted television, the anchor still talking and the day’s news still scrolling across the screen. Maybe I’d been cooped up and restless for too long. I’d become restless. I wanted to say yes to helping him, but it did feel sudden, mostly because I didn’t know what I could do for him. “What are we talking about?” I asked. “I mean, what exactly do you want me to do?”
Ethan picked up his tablet and scrolled through a document. “To break the code, we need to find corresponding missing money amounts, which would mean a complete accounting overhaul of the company.” He tapped at the screen and then turned it around, showing me a large number.
“Two billion dollars?” I asked, reading the bottom line out loud.
“Two billion, four hundred and sixty-one million, five hundred eighty-three thousand, two hundred and seventy-one dollars and thirty-one cents.” He wiggled his tablet at me. “I know every penny. I need to find out where each one is.”
I touched my fingers to my forehead, trying to wrap my brain around such a huge number. I couldn’t fathom it. If that was what was missing, then what did he actually have in the bank right now? “That’s quite the chunk of change.”
“I know,” he said. “It’s a lot to ask. He couldn’t have done this on his own, though. There’s too much money flowing through different accounts. The company accountants are either blind, stupid, or have been bribed to keep quiet. I need to get to the bottom of this quickly.”
“Why now?” I asked. “What’s the hurry?”
“Because if it’s bad, which I suspect it is, the longer it goes on, the longer the Feds have to find out and then everything goes under.” He sat back, crossing his leg over his knee, and rocked his foot. “And if I’m wrong, then at least we looked into it and fixed any issues that have popped up. I don’t deserve the help but there’s thousands of people in my employ, people who are innocent and need their jobs. I want to bring the right people to justice, but I don’t want to get companies shut down that are truly legitimate.”
That made sense. I hadn’t considered there might be employees who would be out of a job if the government came in and froze everything. The economy was bad enough. If Ethan Murdock’s company was as big as he claimed, that would be a lot of people out of work and adding to the problem.
Ethan dipped his head and sighed again. “I didn’t want to ask you back. I know you’re probably trying to forget. But...but I’m...”
Avery sat forward, and focused on Ethan with a sympathetic smile. “It’s a lot of work,” Avery said. “It’s not your fault.”
“I was an absentee boss,” Ethan said.
“You trusted your father,” Avery said. “Nothing wrong with that.”
“I was blind, but not anymore.” Ethan redirected his attention to me. “I hope you’ll help.”
It seemed like an honest request. Billions of dollars of unaccounted for money. How do you trace it? Maybe Corey could help with that, but then... why would they need me? “I wish I could,” I said. “I can try, but I’m not exactly sure how I can help.”
Ethan held both of his hands up in a stop motion. “I don’t expect miracles,” he said. “I just need trusted people by my side, doing what they can. And I’ve got a great idea as to where to start. Every year, my father has a little get-together on this ship, with various accountants and CEOs from across his many corporations and those he partners with. I could use the extra help onboard.”
“And you want us to do...”
“Just listen to them,” he said. “I need a lead on these numbers. Anything you might overhear, any gut feeling you might have about someone. We’ll do this quietly, and investigate anyone involved. I just don’t want to waste time on anyone less likely to be connected.”
“Can I see your numbers?” I asked.
He passed the tablet over to me. I scanned through the spreadsheet that had rows and rows of large numbers, but not a lot of it made sense to me. There were notes about dividends and profits and expenses, dates and code numbers. I’d need time to sit through it, not that I was any sort of accounting expert. “How do you know these codes aren’t just account numbers?”
“They could be,” he said. “But I’d like to know for sure before I start digging around an actual bank. If you start fishing around for account numbers at a bank, trust me, there’s going to be a lot of red flags. I’d have one shot at a bank once I make a connection, and that’s if we manage to secure enough information to actually retrieve what’s there. I looked for routing numbers, but he might have these in another location. I don’t know which bank, or even which country these might be associated with. So we’re fishing in the dark until we can dig up more information. We need to find one of his partners who might be willing to talk.”
I scratched lightly at my eyebrow, looking up again at the television. It sounded like something the guys would be interested in. Helping people seemed to be their thing. They had helped Ethan before. “So you want me to talk to the guys?”
“They’ve been pretty closed off since the incident,” he said. He stretched his arm across the back of the settee, settling back. “I couldn’t even call you after.”
I put the tablet in my lap. “I didn’t realize you had.”
Ethan nodded slowly. “I’m not the only one.”
I looked at Avery on the other couch. He nodded as well. He’d mentioned it before, and yet with Ethan saying he’d been blocked... That was disconcerting. How long had the boys been stopping phone calls to me? And how? I suspected Corey had something to do with it. I understood why they would have in the beginning, when I was sick in the hospital. I hadn’t felt like talking to anyone, but that was a couple of weeks ago.
And why suddenly did they let Fancy talk to me? And why...
“They cut everyone off.” A smooth, Charleston-accented voice behind us startled me enough that I knocked my knee into the coffee table. The tablet slid onto the couch. I caught it before it fell to the floor.
I turned, shocked to find Blake Coaltar coming around, weaving his way around the couches and settees to join us. He wore designer jeans and a grey sweater with the sleeves pushed up his forearm. His clothes flattered his shoulders and chest, and his slim hips. His blond locks of hair were styled around his face. He was unshaven enough to make him look sexy, like when I’d first met him. He walked forward, the
gold flecks in his eyes reflecting the lights around him.
My insides vibrated with something I hadn’t felt in a while. Excitement. Suspicion of danger. Regret. Despite my mixed feelings, there was no doubt about how absolutely beautiful he really was. He could have been an actor or model. The fact that he was smart and had helped me out of jams, even if we didn’t agree on everything, just increased all the feelings I had for him. Including the regret.
In that moment, I felt overwhelmed by disgust in my appearance. Had I gotten so comfortable around the other guys that I could lay about looking like a slob? I’d been sick and the clothes I’d stolen from the others had given me comfort. Now I just felt out of place. It embarrassed me that I looked this way in front of Blake.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, unable to stop the words from tumbling out. I didn’t mean it the way it sounded.
“Ouch,” he said, a small smile picking up on the side of his mouth. He strolled forward and walked around until he was in front of the television. “Missed you, too, sweetheart.”
“Mr. Blake stayed behind,” Avery said. “After everything settled, he came back to help us clean up, and then when I discovered the secret accounts, he started working on how to get to the bottom of it.”
“It’s kind of my specialty,” Blake said and bowed his head toward me, winking.
“Blake’s been kind enough to help us assemble a team,” Ethan said. “He brought in Fancy and works well with Avery. Then he suggested we bring in you.”
My lips parted and I stared at Blake. Technically, I owed him favors, as much as I owed Avery and Fancy. So it was Blake that called in Fancy from Florida. Why her? Why drag her into the middle of this?
