Cash Burn

  Barnes didn’t look at it.

  Hathaway leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees. “Look, Barnes, this is just us boys talking. We’re off the record, okay? You can keep the cred for this. We don’t care, do we, Tom?”

  “We don’t care.”

  “See? It’ll be our little secret. We’re not LAPD. We’re state POs. We got no problem letting you work this. Nobody’ll mess with you for a long, long time after this. Am I right? I mean, once this gets around—what you did to Peavy.”

  Barnes worked his tongue around some more. He said nothing. But he glanced at Flip’s picture.

  Tom stepped forward. When he bent over to put his hands on Barnes’s desk, the pressure behind his forehead felt like the front of his brain was an anvil. “Hey. Barnes.”

  Barnes looked up.

  “Level with us. ’Kay? None of this gets to LAPD. I just want this guy.” He pounded his finger on the picture.

  Barnes picked up the picture and grinned. “I never saw him before.” He flipped it at Tom. It bounced off his chest.

  Hathaway said, “That’s not what your boy here says.”

  The bruised guy came away from the door. “I never said that.”

  Tom was eight inches away from Barnes’s head. He wanted to swipe his fist at that carefully combed head, but he didn’t. “Or we could leave here and go see LAPD right now. Blow up your story. Is that what you want?”

  Hathaway stood. “I guess so. He’s not talking.” He went to the tall guy at the door.

  Barnes scratched at the wound on his nose. He picked up the picture. “So his name’s Flip Dunn?”

  38

  Sea of desks. Blackened computer monitors angled toward empty chairs pushed in as employees departed for their homes, families, husbands, wives, and children their paychecks supported.

  Jason wandered among the furniture. Here was Janine’s desk, cluttered with hockey souvenirs. Jason had never asked her how a banker in LA could become a Carolina Hurricanes fan. He picked up a puck, examined the swirling red and black pattern of the logo. This puck was all he really knew about her. He replaced it in the ring of pale dust the cleaning crew had missed.

  He crossed to Dan’s office. He stared into the darkness, the shapes of chairs and desk reminders of how vacant this office would be after he fired Dan tomorrow.

  Margaret from HR or one of her flunkies would serve as Jason’s wingman on this search-and-destroy mission. He would do it as he’d been taught. Stick to the facts. Don’t let it get personal. It’s not about you, it’s a reduction in force. RIFs happen in the best of businesses, to the best of people. Talk about the severance package as soon as you can. Cover the benefits, active another thirty days and what it will cost after that to keep them going. Stave off any emotions. Have the HR rep accompany Dan back to his office so he can clear out his personal belongings—but leave that rolodex. And no computer access. Then have security escort him to the door with a cardboard box loaded with all that would remain of his life with the bank.

  It happens.

  But Dan was nearing sixty. Going back into the dating game of the job market wouldn’t be easy for him. If you put Dan and his gray hair next to some young, ambitious guy you could pay less and get more years from, the young guy would get the job every time unless Dan could convince you that his clients would cut their ties to BTB and follow him.

  Jason turned his back on Dan’s office and stared over the desks, file cabinets, chairs. He had to fight a sensation that the floor was sloped toward him. That he stood on an incline without traction. That soon this furniture would begin to drift toward him, gathering momentum and speed into a stampede of wood and metal he could never stop. Everything would slide down, drive him backward even farther than he’d already slid, into the darkness behind him. Into a pit of dark ruin.

  He’d tried to fix this. He’d fought Vince as long as he could. The mistakes he’d made were clear to him now, but at the time they had seemed like risks worth taking. If he’d made different choices—involved Mark and Scotty more in his decisions, stopped trying to protect his staff from the politics by taking blame for their mistakes—maybe he could have kept enough juice around here to stop this.

  His feet shuffled along the carpet away from Dan’s office. Tomorrow he would fire five of them. No, four. He wouldn’t fire five. Four more people in the unemployment lines was enough, four more to watch their savings dwindle as what few interviews they could schedule led to no hope, no hope at all. Four more families swallowing their pride, four more marriages cast into struggle and doubt. Tomorrow Jason would sit behind his desk and recite the salary and benefits packages the four of them would be shuttled away with like things bagged up at the end of a stick.

  Hopefully the meetings would be over before their shock wore off.

  Word would spread quickly. Soon everyone would be on edge, waiting for the next name to be called.

  Jason found himself outside Vince’s office. How convenient for Vince to deflect this dirty work to Jason. The staff that used to claim loyalty to Jason would see him, not Vince, as the hatchet man. Vince could sit in this office like a manager in a slaughterhouse, hands unsullied by the carnage played out around him.

  Vince had been gone for an hour or more, but the rank cologne he slathered himself with still drifted out of the room. Jason’s upper lip curled with the smell of it. He moved away, trying to distance himself from the abyss everything seemed to be sliding toward.

  He should leave. He should have left hours ago, when his coworkers were shutting things down, filing down the escalator, calling good-byes to one another. The escalator was shut off now.

  When Brenda had leaned through the doorway to let him know she was leaving, her glance had lingered on him long enough to let him know she would be waiting for him at her apartment.

  Serena waited for him too, he knew. At home.

  Home.

  The word lodged in his mind like a splinter. What kind of home was it when there was no trust, no honor in the marriage there? It was no home at all. Just a set of walls and floors hammered together, plaster and paint slapped over sticks and nails.

  The pastor would have him go to his wife. “You got to weed that garden,” he’d said.

  Jason stared over the unpopulated desks. The silence of the room pressured his ears with want for the ordinary clamor of any day here. He wanted the phones ringing, wanted movement in those chairs, voices calling out, deadlines impending—the pressures and the sense that the thirty-five people on his team were pulling on the oars together, with him at the helm, a pilot and navigator.

  But the place was empty. And tomorrow he would cast four of his crew overboard, and good luck with that swim, guys. Hope you make it to land. Hope your families survive intact. Here’s your severance. Here’s your last office supply from BTB: a cardboard box you can unfold and tape together and pile your few personal effects into under the distrustful eye of an HR rep standing over you to make sure you don’t take any pencils that don’t belong to you, that you don’t download something you shouldn’t onto a thumb drive, that you don’t get into any mischief on the bank’s system as your final sally before you’re cast over the rails.

  He should go to Serena. He felt her drawing him. He pictured the expression on her face when she’d pulled away from him this morning. Maybe she’d smelled Brenda’s fragrance on his cheek. Maybe guilt simmered in the whites of his eyes. She knew him well enough to see it if it was there.

  The darkness outside had turned his office window into a mirror. He meant to see if guilt revealed itself in his eyes. But he turned away from his image too fast to see anything but the face he used to trust.

  The whir of the air-conditioner cut off. At eight o’clock every night, the building’s system shut down. The silence took on an even greater depth.

  He grabbed his jacket and made for the elevator. At the push of the button, the engine that drove the car surged somewhere below, behind the closed panels he faced, an
d he had to resist the urge to look over his shoulder to see if the whole place was sliding toward him in an avalanche.

  The doors opened. He stepped inside and pushed the button to take him down to the garage.

  Wherever Serena was, that was where he belonged.

  The pastor was right. He should go to her, try to get past this suspicion. But how could she claim someone had forged that letter? It was absurd.

  And Brenda drew him as well. With her eyes, with her skin, her hair, her electric touch. Want clawed at him in his deepest places, want for her and want for something only she could give him. No one else—not Serena and not anyone since he was a very young man—could make him feel this way.

  The elevator doors opened, and his cell phone chirped. The readout said Brenda Tierney.

  He stepped into the garage and clicked on the phone icon to make the connection. “I’m on my way.”

  39

  Jason stood next to the intercom, waiting for Brenda’s voice to break the silence. She must not have heard his first ring, or maybe the system was broken. He reached toward the button again, but her voice came across to interrupt his movement. He spoke his name into the panel, and the door clicked open.

  Serena’s face floated in his mind. She was a presence behind him. He stepped faster. He couldn’t bring himself to stop to call the elevator. As if he could outpace Serena’s presence, he bounded up the stairs two at a time. At the third floor, he shoved through and saw Brenda’s door closed ahead. He had to get in there fast, or Serena would tear him away.

  He didn’t bother knocking. The door was unlocked for him. He burst into the room. It was lit by candles. Their flames dimmed with the force of the air from the door. Brenda stood beside the table. Silk the color of peaches draped from her shoulders. She smiled, her hand slipping an inch toward him over the back of a chair.

  Serena fled.

  He slammed the door and crossed the room in three steps, and she was in his arms, pulling him to her, the softness and hardness of her flesh and bones formed to his. Her lips were sweet. Her arms gripped his sides. Her hands moved over his back, and heat rose up within him threatening to explode.

  She pulled away a quarter-inch, regaining her breath. “I made this dinner.” Her hands went to the sides of his head, and she pulled him to her. Another kiss. Urgent. “But all I want is you.”

  * * *

  Later, Brenda fed him cold meat from the platter that had been steaming when he arrived. She slipped pieces of beef between his lips, and the taste of her fingertips mingled with what she’d cooked for him.

  “Don’t you want to sit at the table?” Jason said. His back rested against the front of the sofa, his legs stretched out on the carpet.

  “I’m fine here.” She had her legs stretched out alongside his. The plate she’d made for him lay on his other side, and she had to reach across him and press against him to serve him.

  She took up beet slices and held them to his mouth. A drop of bloody juice dripped from the beets onto his bare chest, a cool tap and trickle. She bent to it and licked it from his chest.

  The vinegary tang of the beets washed through his mouth. He swallowed. She plucked another sliver of beef with her fingertips and brought it to his lips. Jawing it, he watched the movements of her shoulders and arms, her skin’s swell and stretch with her motions. She had a small mole on her right shoulder. He passed his finger over it— no imperfection in the smoothness of her skin.

  He looked into her eyes over the slice of potato she held up to him. “That’s enough.”

  She took the potato into her own mouth, swallowed, and brought her lips to his. Another kiss on his cheek, and she rested against him, fit her head into the hollow underneath his shoulder. His left arm surrounded her back.

  Unease in his chest wrestled against the sensations of her skin against his. Serena had returned. A vision of her floated in his mind. Serena at the altar, veiled and facing him, expectant when he lifted the veil for their first kiss as husband and wife. He shook his head.

  “What is it?” Brenda brought her face up to his. The candles were dying, the lights flickering to cast thousands of conflicted shadow lines from her eyelashes.

  “Thinking about tomorrow.” A lie. In his mind swam the question of whether he’d told more lies in his life than truths. He spoke again so the question couldn’t surface. “I have to do some dirty work for Vince.”

  A frown drew a black line up between her eyebrows. “I hate him.”

  “He’s my favorite guy.”

  “Sometimes I wish . . . Never mind.” She pushed her cheek into his shoulder. Stray blonde hairs tickled his chin.

  “What? What do you wish?”

  She lifted her face to his again. Her eyes gleamed in the candlelight. “Sometimes I wish we could do something to get back at him. Get back at all of them. For the way they’re treating you. It’s so unfair.” In this light, her eyes were deep jade, tiny flashes from the candles glistening at the whites. Her eyelashes webbed crisscrossing shadows around them.

  The banker in him said they shouldn’t talk about it. Some things were better unexplored, were too dangerous to let your mind carry fleeting fantasies into uttered words.

  But she smiled and let her hand move over his chest, and the motion seemed to draw the fantasies out. “It’s silly, I know. But just for fun.” She brought her eyes back to his, the hand roving his skin. “You have so much authority, Jason. There’s got to be something you could do.”

  “Just for fun.”

  “There’s nobody here but you and me.” She shifted against him, bringing her face even closer, the fragrance of the food they’d shared blending with the fruity scent of the candles flickering to their smoky deaths. “What if we just went down to the vault one day and cleared it out?”

  He laughed. “Sure. Nobody would stop us from doing that.”

  “Just tell them you have to check on a customer’s cash.

  They’d buy that, right?”

  “Oh, that’s a great plan. I can see you’ve given this a lot of thought.” He smiled at her. “Anyway, if I really wanted to do something the vault’s not where I’d go. That’s not where the real money is.”

  “What do you mean? I was down there once. There are stacks of it.”

  “Hundreds of thousands. Maybe a few million on a big day. It’s not enough for the risk of doing something like that.”

  “Well, where then?”

  Jason swept his hand through the air. “In the ether. In the wires. Debits and credits. Settlements every night in the tens of millions. The hundreds of millions. Billions. Banks wiring money back and forth through the Fed. Loan advances and paydowns. Companies getting bought and sold.”

  Brenda’s lips were parted as she followed his words. He could still feel those lips on his, their tenderness and need, could still taste them.

  He touched her chin. “It amazes me when people commit a federal crime for a few thousand dollars. Get the FBI after them, not just the local police. They’d be better off holding up a liquor store.”

  “Well, I know you could do something. With all the authority you have.”

  “There’s a lot of things I could do. That wouldn’t be the hard part.”

  “Mm. Right.” She brought her lips to his ear and spoke with her lips brushing against it. “It’s getting away with it.”

  40

  Everything was different now. As Jason steered the BMW over the streets, the waking city pulsed around him to a beat that had gone out of sync with him. The ugliness of the streets, the hazy air, trash flitting along the gutters and crushed in tire tracks—all of it was different now.

  For a moment he dared to imagine they might go through with it.

  If he pursued this path, if it wasn’t just talk, if the seeds of the plan he and Brenda had planted last night took root, if they fled together with millions in their pockets, he wouldn’t have to drive these streets much longer. These buildings wouldn’t hem him in. He would no lon
ger be enclosed by these cold edifices rising around him, aloof as the stars up there somewhere you couldn’t see because of the smog from millions of Angelenos. He and Brenda could leave all this ugliness, these buildings, these filthy streets, these striving, frenzied people all a paycheck away from ruin. The two of them would be gone, their only worry the feds on their tails.

  Not that the feds were a small worry. But you could cure a lot of problems with enough money.

  Part of him still hung back from the details, not wanting to give place to them. This life of his would end. He would be flushing away everything he’d worked for in the past sixteen years.

  But where had it gotten him? Soon Vince would either fire him or relegate him to a role so menial he wouldn’t even have the authority to approve an expense report. He’d spend the rest of his career bouncing from bank to bank around town until his hair was too gray to find anyone willing to put him on the payroll. This chance with Brenda would be gone forever.

  As he turned the corner onto his street, the numbers he’d discussed with Brenda flitted through his mind. Twenty million. Maybe thirty. A couple of loan advances would be harder to catch than just one. He could set up offshore accounts over the next couple of weeks to receive the loan proceeds. He thought of the bankers he’d met from London and Japan at bank syndicate meetings. Those contacts could help a lot. And the Israeli lawyer who’d negotiated for a client, and the business manager for an actor who was a client. Guys on the edge of legal. He could sense it when they talked about certain loans and funds movements. But you didn’t ask too many questions. Even though you knew that somewhere past the part you played, something wasn’t quite right.

  They could be useful.

  He reached up to press the garage-door remote, and the sections rose. Serena had stationed her Mercedes on the left. His lips tightened. He would not engage. Just shower, change clothes, and get out, get to the office, away from her.

  He slotted the BMW in and switched off the engine. Stepping out into the garage, he was about to turn to enter the house, but the sound of nearby footsteps caught his attention. Two men were hustling from the sidewalk up the driveway. Big men. One white and tall, bruises shadowing his face and one arm in a cast, the other guy Hispanic, black hair combed back from his forehead, round face set like concrete.