by Lisa Black
And flipping it shut would end the call. It wouldn’t keep yakking while she marched up to Mr. Hawking, would it?
Either way, nothing she could do about it now. Brazen it out. She’d done it before.
They reached the boss’s door.
Shanaya had not been inside the inner office since the day she’d been hired. It had not changed since—three cluttered shelves on the wall, forcing anyone who walked around that side of the desk to lean away from them; the other side of the desk against the wall, bisecting the room. It stank of cigarettes, though none burned in the ashtray.
She did not know the man seated behind the desk, though she had seen him there on occasion. Mark Hawking stood beside him, wedged into a corner between the desk and the shelves, looking uncomfortable from either the position or the prospect of what they might be about to do to her.
She willed her face to stay calm, and stepped up to the desk. The goon stayed at her right shoulder. She could feel his body heat even through her hoodie.
The man behind the desk took her in. She ignored him, couldn’t find the man behind the desk remotely as terrifying as the object placed on the desk, resting in the exact center of the calendar blotter.
A cell phone.
Evani’s cell phone. A silver-colored model that he’d taken a red Sharpie to during one particularly boring shift.
They had Evani’s phone. Someone in that office had killed Evani.
But that wasn’t what worried her.
“Clever,” the man behind the desk said. “You two were clever. Any cash business is prone to skimming—numbers, prostitution, drugs—because the guy at the top, like me, can never be sure how much comes in at the entry points, or persons like you.”
She could barely hear him over the blood pounding in her ears, but she tried. There had to be an opening. There had to be a crack she could use—
“This is a cash business without the cash. Data entered on a screen. All digital, ones and zeros and routed to a central server. One person couldn’t do it. But two, working together—”
She gripped the back of the chair in front of her. “Mr.—”
He didn’t supply his name. “You’d get the mark’s card number, security code, type it into your screen exactly as we instructed you. The good little employee, except before you’d hit enter, you’d—well, I bet you’d look around to make sure that idiot out there wasn’t paying attention, then pop out your phone, take a picture of the screen, and text it to your little friend Evan.”
She hadn’t thought she could feel worse, but now . . . that near-million was gone. If the cops didn’t take it all, these guys would. They had figured it out. She thought she might be sick, and felt almost glad of it. Puke all over Mr. Hawking’s desk. At least leave them a bad smell to remember her by.
“He’d buy money orders on the cards. Charge as much as he could. You’d send the card information on to the central unit, but by that time there would be a lot less available credit. We didn’t know, how could we? So the cardholder had a high balance, so what? Everybody abuses their credit, that’s why there’s a debt crisis in this country. Meanwhile your little friend cashes out the money order he bought—easy enough, he’s sitting inside a place that does exactly that. And you pick up another phone call. Never leave your desk, never shove anything into your pocket, never open an account. No trace. I never would have been the wiser.”
Admit nothing, she told herself.
“But then your little friend got greedy. Decided to skim off a few other concerns as well. Problem is, that concern also belonged to me.”
The checks, Shanaya knew instantly. Those huge medical reimbursement checks. A percent to the runner who brought it in, the rest deposited in some offshore account. Evani took out more than was requested, gave a fake receipt to the runner for the right cut, kept the difference, and deposited the bulk. It was so much money, these huge amounts coming in every day. Surely whoever owned those offshore funds couldn’t be checking each and every deposit, right?
It wasn’t fair. That two businesses would launder funds through the same money store did not surprise her. That they were both owned by the same man was karma, biting her in the ass.
Damn Evani. The one time he broke from his cautious, paranoid, too-careful persona, and it had exactly the result he had feared. She’d told him not to do it . . . but yes, not too strenuously. The faster they built up their own account the faster they could blow town. Then it wouldn’t matter who noticed what.
The classic embezzler’s downfall. They’d waited too long to get out.
The man said, “I knew it wasn’t Ralph, since he’s the one who alerted me to his own cashier consistently cashing money orders. Took him a damn long time since it didn’t leave him out any money. When he finally got curious, thought the kid was pickpocketing, stealing card numbers. Ralph wanted to be cut in, that’s all. Only your bad luck that he mentioned it to me before he talked to Evan. Once we looked at the card numbers we knew where they came from. Wayne figured your system out almost instantly. Wayne’s a millennial, like you. I guess you brats think alike.”
She didn’t know what to say to that, had no idea who Wayne might be.
“So I sent him out to take care of Evan, but even with a spike halfway to his heart, he didn’t give you up. That probably makes you feel good.”
Not especially, she thought. Poor Evani.
“We didn’t find the money, didn’t find an ID, home address, nothing. We found this”—he held up the phone again—“and I checked texts, voice mails, call history, got us nowhere. You had the sense not to answer, I’ll give you that.”
He waited for her response, but only the span of a breath. It didn’t really matter what she said now.
“I checked the photos. Well, singular: photo. But I’m old. Without my reading glasses it looked like a blank page, a picture of the floor or ceiling. I do that all the time. My toddlers can use my phone better than I can. Plus I’ve been distracted with other things this week. But when I looked again—” He thumbed to the image, turned the phone around so she could see the screen. She didn’t want to look, knowing what she’d see. A photo of the monitor at her work station. Evani had always been careful to delete each one once he’d gotten the numbers, and she would delete them from her own phone on every trip to the ladies’ room. Apparently he’d gotten careless or distracted with this last one. She couldn’t read the details on the tiny screen, the name or the numbers, but she could pick out what had betrayed her: the sticker with the cherries on the lower right-hand corner of the monitor frame.
All he’d had to do was walk through the cubicles until they found the right monitor.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said instantly, surprised at how strong her voice sounded. “That’s the computer at my workstation, but I’m not the only one who uses it. There’s the other shift. And the pit bull—boss, he sits down at it sometimes when I’m on break.” She couldn’t stand the guy anyway. If she needed to sacrifice a goat in her place, it might as well be a nasty, horny one.
“We’ve already eliminated them,” Mr. Hawking said, garnering a quick glare from the man behind the desk. In front of that man, she realized, Hawking became another flunky, no better than her.
“I want the money back,” said the man behind the desk. “Now.”
“I don’t have any money. I’ve been working so hard here trying to—”
“I want every penny you and Evan stole from me. Hand it over and I might let you live.” He held up his hands in a show of expansiveness. “A simple trade.”
“I don’t have it.” This was, of course, the truth. It rang out into the room with the peal of a silver bell and convinced the man. She could see it. He didn’t want to, but he believed her.
Which in no way meant he would give up. “I’ve already killed—well, had Wayne kill for me—three people in the past week. Making it four would take no skin off anybody’s nose, except for, well, yours. So you’d bette
r have something more to say than that.”
A silence ensued while she contemplated her next move. Despite the frantic pounding of blood in her ears, the sweat pricking out of every pore, she thought she saw a glimmer of light in the black hole of her future.
She said: “The cops have it. And I’m the only one who can get it back for you.”
No reaction at first. But then the boss pinched the bridge of his nose, rubbed the deep vertical line between his eyebrows. The other two men in the room did not move, did not seem to breathe. Neither did Shanaya.
“Okay,” he said at last. “I’m listening.”
Chapter 34
Monday, 5:35 p. m.
If Wayne had been faking his knee injury in order to keep his crutch-weapon close to him, he no longer needed to. He clutched his knee and groaned about the now-torn ligament, the lumps on his head, and the cuts on his checks and mouth. He sat on the floor of the reception desk area, its harsh fluorescent lights illuminating every grimace—not that the others spared any sympathy. Riley had called for an ambulance, but no one told Wayne that.
Maggie, meanwhile, helped herself to medical supplies from one of the exam rooms and taped a large gauze pad to the small wound next to her breastbone. It hurt, but when she steeled herself to look at it, she could see how shallow the track went. “Just a flesh wound,” she told her reflection in the mirror over the exam room sink, then repeated it more forcefully when she saw a sneaky tear well up in each eye. Death had been, quite literally, only an inch away. She pulled her stained shirt back down and opened the door, not about to give herself time to think how an adhesive bandage couldn’t fix all that had gone wrong. If she did, she would be there all night.
Jack had cleared all the rooms of the office and lights blazed from each. She passed a door, saw movement, and found Jack combing the good doctor’s office, a tiny space with framed diplomas and swag from pharmaceutical companies and not much else. Jack rummaged through the drawers of an old metal desk but stopped when she appeared. “You okay?”
She drew a shaky breath, feeling the tiny ache where the wound gaped. “Yeah.”
As if she had said no he crossed the room in two steps and grasped her shoulders. “Is it still bleeding? Do you need stitches? Can you breathe okay?”
He started to pull her shirt up and she slapped his hand, so hard and so instinctively that it gave her the giggles. The idea of maintaining her modesty under these circumstances suddenly seemed friggin’ hysterical, and she clapped one hand over her mouth to stifle it. He dropped his arm and stood back, awkwardly hovering.
She insisted through a giggle, “I’m fine. It’s nothing. Did you find anything?”
“These.” He waved his hand at the desk, where four prescription pads with Phillip J. Castleman preprinted at the top. “A fairly perfect setup. Should we come looking for Phillip J., he gives us the innocent routine—ex-partner, don’t know where he is, sorry. If we thought about asking his customers to put a face to the name, none of them would want to give up their pill supply to help us out.”
“What was he planning to do when the real Castleman comes back from the Congo?”
“He probably hoped he wouldn’t. It’s a dangerous place. Found this, too,” he added, holding out a paper. It was a bill for rental of a business space, but not the space they stood in.
“What is it?”
“It’s the link.”
They burst back into the reception desk area, where Wayne sat and moaned and Riley searched drawers while pointing out how he, Wayne, had killed a cop so whether he, Riley, turned him over to an angry mob of homicide detectives or the state with its new and improved method of lethal injection, Wayne’s future appeared less than rosy. If he cooperated now, he might spare himself a bit of mistreatment—as in, death—down the road.
Wayne wasn’t buying it. Or he writhed with too much pain to buy it. Maggie had probably dislocated his knee, about which she felt not a twinge of guilt. She felt worse for the sugar glider. She straightened up his cage, refilled his food and water, and scooped him back inside.
Jack waved the invoice in the guy’s face. “Who rents this place? You or Jeffers?”
Wayne glanced at the paper, puffed short breaths in and out, and said, “That’s got nothing to do with me.”
“Then what is it? Why is Jeffers renting it?”
“I just work here.”
“You killed three people for this guy. And you can’t tell us what’s in this building?”
Wayne looked up at Jack with the ghost of his old insouciance. “I didn’t kill nobody. And you can’t prove I did.”
Jack straightened. “Fine. We’ll go there and see for ourselves, then.”
“No.” The word seemed to burst from Wayne before he could stop it, and they watched his face as he tried to think of something clever. “I’ll . . . I’ve got information.... I can tell you about the pills—”
“Wayne, Wayne, Wayne,” Riley said, clucking regretfully. “Too little, too late, dude. Our next step is plain, and I’m kinda feeling like we don’t need you anymore.”
And on that note the backup officers and the paramedics arrived, ready to take over, and Riley and Jack left them to it. Maggie heard the nurse/killer continue to protest as they slipped out the door.
Chapter 35
Maggie had thought the cold air might make her wound feel better, like putting ice on a sprain, but of course this nonsensical piece of wishful thinking did not come to pass and the frigid air gave her only a small but sharp headache instead of functioning as a balm to her sore chest. At least it kept her alert.
The sky had turned to pitch black without even a moon to brighten the clouds. Heavy, wet snow fell, threatening to turn to ice if the temperature fell even a single digit, which of course it would do as the nighttime arrived in earnest. Riley drove past the cemetery where they’d found Evan, the tires straining for traction every time he turned a corner or changed lanes. The ballpark loomed to the left, a barren, ominous shape in the dark. Even wedged between the two men, Maggie shivered; the heater hadn’t even begun to make a difference in the temperature during the very short trip. “Where are we going and why, again?”
Riley said, “This place Shanaya works is a call center—”
Jack said, “Hospital.”
Riley stopped talking.
Maggie said, “Which is it? A call center or a hospital?”
Jack said, “No, we’re taking you to a hospital, and then we’ll go to the call center.”
Maggie protested that she didn’t need it. Jack said she’d been stabbed. She swore that she was not being funny or quoting a movie and it really was just a flesh wound. There was nothing the hospital could do that she hadn’t already.
Jack said the hospital sat only a block away and they had time and wasn’t that fresh blood peeking through her shirt after her hospital-quality bandaging?
Riley, for once, said nothing.
Jack peered down at her. She noted his expression—dying to get to the next scene, but genuinely worried about her, and suddenly she didn’t feel cold. However, she still didn’t need—
Riley spoke, or rather murmured: “Uh—”
In the street ahead, at the intersection of East Ninth and Bolivar, a man hustled across the pavement, his right hand lifting up the bottom of a stadium coat to reach the gun in his holster. He headed for a two-story building, dark with only a single light burning somewhere on the second floor.
Riley said, “Isn’t that—”
“Stop,” Jack said. To Maggie he said, “Stay here.”
“What’s hap—”
“That’s Shanaya’s babysitter” was all the explanation he had time to give before Riley slid to a shuddering halt, rim scraping the curb, and they bailed out. Two thumps of the doors and she was alone, watching them intercept the other police officer and hold a quick conference. Then all three turned toward the building.
They disappeared into the foyer.
She sat. She
waited. She hated it like hell, left to stay safe like some helpless female. But Maggie had tried all her life to not be stupid, and barging in like the standard character in some late-night movie would be stupid. She was helpless, more or less, and being female had nothing to do with it. She was not armed, not trained, didn’t know karate, didn’t even have a flashlight. She should no more try to participate in a police raid than she should try to perform an emergency appendectomy on her neighbor’s child.
Then a loud sound and a blast of light flashed from the dark foyer, and her determination to be sensible went out the door along with her body. She promptly slid on the ice and went to her knees, banging one knee good and hard but catching herself with her gloved hands. Then she was up and running, managing to stay upright long enough to reach the glassed-in cubicle where she knew she would find Jack shot to death, bleeding out too quickly for any help to—
She hit the glass door before even registering what lay beyond it.
At first, nothing made sense. Jack did not lie there in a pool of blood; no one did, not him, not Riley, not the other police officer. The foyer stood vacant, a black hole of nothing, with only a glimmer of less dark black at the center.
She stepped forward and reached out blindly, made brave by the leather gloves, that layer of protection between her skin and whatever she might touch. And when contact occurred, the glimmer wavered.
Her eyes adjusted. The inner doors of the air lock had been painted over, presenting a blank slate. The inner door must have been locked and one of the cops had shot the lock, producing the sounds and muzzle flash she saw. She pushed through it to enter a large and dark—office. A desk, then a large room of cubicles, all dark, all empty. The cops were nowhere in sight.
Well, she thought. What would be the not-stupid, sensible thing to do now? As far as she could tell, no one needed her to call an ambulance, and she remained untrained and unarmed.
She couldn’t hear the cops barking orders to suspects or moving through the place searching room to room. Three grown men shouldn’t be that quiet, right?
