Cash Burn

  Time stopped. The ticking of the clock on the wall continued, but here with Brenda, the planet stopped spinning. He heard phones ringing outside the door, the murmur of dozens of voices conducting business. A different kind of business than what was happening in here.

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “They’re not going to stop until they find something out.”

  “They won’t find anything. Or if they do, it’ll be too late.”

  Her arms folded. “I thought you were all-in on this.”

  “Sure I’m all-in.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure. Like I said before, we just have to get it right. You get the IDs. Keep practicing that signature. That’s your part. I’ll handle the heavy lifting.”

  “The heavy lifting just left. We have to get rid of them.”

  “Get rid of them? How?”

  She stared at him. Jason had the sense that they were standing alone on ice so thin the wrong step would drown them forever.

  “I’m not killing anybody,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “Neither are you.”

  She lifted an eyebrow. “I couldn’t. I’m just saying—”

  “You’d better get back to your desk. We don’t want to give them anything else to talk about.”

  She held her stare for another few seconds. Then she turned and left the door open. Rounding her desk, she caught his eyes again for an instant and then disappeared behind the wall.

  He was afraid to take a step. Afraid of drowning in the icy waters.

  His own words echoed in his mind.

  “I’m not killing anybody.”

  49

  Like a ghost haunting his own life, Jason’s motions had no impact. He moved among the living, but they didn’t really see him, didn’t know him or the burdens he carried. He was only an apparition now, gliding through meetings and decisions and commutes, occupying a place on freeways and packed boulevards, among crowds on the city’s cool sidewalks. His wardrobe occupied a smaller and smaller space in the closet he shared with Serena, his gear transitioning piece by piece to Brenda’s apartment as if he himself were fading away.

  And it wasn’t really him among these Angelenos. The real Jason lived only in Brenda’s arms, in the mingling of her breath and his, and more and more as November marched on, in the planning.

  The fall LA air lacked the still, palpable quality of summertime. Today the smog didn’t veil every object in gray but funneled between the walls of glass-fronted buildings and lifted the trash of millions of Angelenos into swirling and spinning clouds of detritus. A pack of it floated toward Jason as if someone had cast handfuls in his direction. He squinted, felt dust ping his cheeks, and ducked his head to blink away what stung his eyes.

  A specter wouldn’t feel such things, would it? He had to force himself not to smile as the dust cloud passed, and he lifted his eyes to scan the faces across the street. Did they see him? Or was he the ghost of banker past, revealing himself only to the Scrooge of the day?

  At the corner of Wilshire and Camden, Jason waited for permission to enter the crosswalk. Men and women crowded around him, the curb only inches tall but enough to contain the wall of obedient pedestrians.

  He kept his eyes pinned on the box perched on the pole ahead. The red hand disappeared, and the green man flashed its footless silhouette. The instant it changed, he stepped off the curb and felt the crowd surge forward behind him.

  He wouldn’t be a Scrooge when he and Brenda disappeared together. A man could do a lot of good with thirty million dollars. He could make anonymous gifts. He would share it. He and Brenda didn’t need all of it. He would create his own private bailout, a golden parachute for the poor. Dozens of charities could benefit. Maybe he’d even send a gift to that pastor’s church, that Pastor Gates.

  The command of the red hand stopped him at the Bedford intersection.

  What had made him think of Pastor Gates? He pictured the big man, so secure, so confident when they’d met at Starbucks. Jason couldn’t imagine the pastor having a need for thirty million dollars. Or even one measly million.

  It was a bribe. Jason saw it as clearly as the flat red hand shining at him from across the street. Send a million to a church to buy off God. Would a million do it? Two?

  He shook his head. All the preparations he had to make to pull this off, and here he was thinking about God.

  But his mind would only focus briefly on the signature cards and the IDs and the credit presentation he was drafting. There was going to be a lot of fallout. This could fatally wound BTB. The regulators would descend with even greater ferocity than the feds. They would scope out and tear apart every procedure and policy, every frail structural scaffold built into the organization until each flaw and weakness was exposed at its roots.

  And they would find plenty. At the most fundamental places. They would finger the extent of authority and the lack of oversight at the higher levels of bank management. That a senior executive could fabricate a thirty-million-dollar transaction without raising any questions would put the whole institution in the defendant’s chair.

  A sudden loss of that magnitude was enough to shock the balance sheet of even the strongest bank—and BTB had problems already. The bags under Scotty’s eyes had darkened and grown deep enough to store wads of the currency they’d had to charge off over the past six months. The loan portfolio of every lender in the bank had been affected. They all had borrowers struggling, companies reeling from one quarter to the next like drunken tourists looking for a bar to collapse into.

  The walking man lit on the pole across the street, and Jason stepped out before he could be trampled. Car traffic on Wilshire powered past, knifing forward to the next light to wait again.

  Another two blocks, and the security guard opened the lobby door for him. He nodded to him, and the guard’s shoulder twitched a greeting. Jason was tempted to look at the nameplate on the guard’s lapel to remind himself of the name of this guy he passed nearly every day, but he decided not to bother. In eleven days he would walk out of this place for the last time, a rich man with Brenda at his side. What was the use of making new friends now?

  Up the escalator he climbed, his rising double-timed by the machinery. As he ascended above the lobby ceiling, the clap of his shoes on metal rang out. The second floor came into view, and forty feet ahead, Brenda lifted her eyes. She eclipsed every other person and object out of his vision. Trying to be unaffected was useless. As he stepped onto the metal plate that sucked the escalator stairs down, his palms broke into a sweat, and somewhere in a place deep inside him, a place without a name, he was whisked into a frothing, boiling stew of confusion. He tried to look away, but the pale hue of her irises and the heart shape of her face drew him toward her like gravity.

  Something was wrong. With pursed lips and a frown hardening her brow, she was trying to signal him.

  He stopped.

  She nodded to one side. She was directing him toward a conference room near Vince’s office.

  He changed course and had the conference room door closed before his cell phone rang. Her name on the readout was precious to him. He stared at it for a moment before answering.

  “Long-distance call.”

  She didn’t play along. She whispered, “I think you should go back out for a while.”

  He turned up the volume. “Why?”

  “There’s a bunch of people in your office.”

  Jason looked through the window but couldn’t see into his office from this angle. “Who is it?”

  “I don’t want to say.”

  “I’m not going to be chased from my own office.”

  “It’s her.”

  “Serena?”

  “Yeah.” Across the lobby, he saw Brenda lean over her desk to look inside. “And Kathy.” She raised her voice only slightly. “And Kathy’s pastor. I remember him from the funeral. They won’t tell me what it’s about, but I think you want to avoid
this.”

  He clicked off and stepped outside. Brenda looked up, and her frown deepened when she saw he had no intention of avoiding anything.

  He passed her desk and refused to be drawn into her eyes.

  Kathy and Serena didn’t rise from the sofa. The pastor sat in the chair before Jason’s desk and had it angled so he could take in the whole room. His fingers formed a steeple in front of his chest.

  Jason closed the door. “It’s good to see you, Kathy. How was Montana?” He wanted one of the old hugs, but she stayed on the sofa.

  So that had changed too.

  “It was good to be with Carol for a while. But I needed to come back.”

  He removed his jacket and parked it on the hanger and went to his desk. “Oh?”

  “Jason, come on. You heard the messages I left for you.”

  He keyed in his password, and his e-mail screen appeared. Eighteen new e-mails had arrived since he left for lunch an hour ago and now awaited his answer. “You know me. Busy, busy.”

  Serena spoke up. “We’re concerned about you.”

  He took his eyes off the computer screen. Serena sat forward on the sofa, knees together, ankles crossed, her elbows on her lap and her hands clasped. She did have a look of concern on her face. It was a good face—he had to admit it. And no matter how much work was piled on her desk or how little sleep she’d gotten—or whom she was having an affair with—she always looked ready for the next appointment.

  The pastor hadn’t moved. The guy didn’t even blink.

  “So you’ve got a little intervention going here, is that it?” Jason said.

  “Something like that,” Serena said.

  “And you decided to do this in my office.”

  “You’ve been a little unpredictable at home.”

  “So have you.”

  She didn’t take the bait. Only a flicker of fight in her eyes before she mastered it. “I’ve told you a dozen times, I did not cheat on you. I did not write that letter. But this isn’t about that anymore. It’s about what you’re using it as an excuse to do.”

  “An excuse.”

  “That’s right. Let’s face it—you’ve been looking for a way out for a long time.”

  Jason was afraid he was going to crush his teeth from clenching. He had to force his jaw open. “Go on. Say what you’ve got to say. That’s why you brought all this support, right?”

  She didn’t look away. “You can’t escape, Jason.”

  Could she know? He and Brenda had done nothing but plan. No, it was impossible. His imagination was taking over. “I’m waiting.”

  “You’ve built your own little prison for yourself,” Serena said. “If you don’t get over your past, you’re never going to have a present.”

  “That’s pithy. Did you get it from a positive-thinking guidebook?”

  “I’m serious, Jason. What happened with Danah was twenty years ago. You’ve lined your walls with plaques showing all the ways you’ve tried to make up for it, but you can’t. It’s done. You have to move past it.”

  “This is classic Serena. It couldn’t possibly be about what you did. It must be something else. Nice try.”

  “This is what it’s about, Jason. It’s why we’re here. No matter what happens with our marriage, you’re never going to be happy until you deal with what you’ve done.”

  Images flicked through his mind. Danah’s face. It somehow mingled with Brenda’s. But this thing with Brenda couldn’t end the same way. He wouldn’t let it. He remembered Danah looking at him that night as they fled, the expression on her face, her whole world wrapped up in him. And his in her. Their lives were beginning that night. They thought nothing could stop them. Their love was impregnable. Nothing could separate them. No one.

  Except themselves.

  The pastor finally spoke. “There can be healing, Jason.” His words rumbled into Jason’s chest. He felt them more than heard them. A promise. Those big, spectacled eyes had seen things. That mind knew things. He blocked his words together differently, as if he were reciting them out of some ancient manuscript. This man occupied some other plane of understanding.

  But Jason didn’t live on that plane. He was here. And he was a man who long ago had done something that could never be forgiven, something this pastor with his insulated holiness could never abide.

  “You can’t heal everything,” Jason said.

  “Not me. God.” Gates’s thick, steepled fingers held their upward point.

  “God. That’s your answer for everything.”

  A smile broke out on the pastor’s face, but he didn’t bother affirming.

  Jason turned back to Serena. “I’m not going to have this conversation. I’m not going to let you use against me what I’ve told you in confidence as my wife.”

  “I’m not using anything against you. I love you, Jason. I’m trying to save our marriage. I’m trying to help you. Trying to help us.”

  A current moved through the room between them. In an instant their history swirled like a palpable thing out of her eyes. Every pore of that fine, good face pleaded with him from across the room. He had loved that face. He had cupped her chin in his hand, had felt her eyelashes flutter against his cheek. He had at times held her so closely and so intimately that the pounding of her heart in counterpoint to his was a single consumption of flesh. He had loved her truly and with all his hopes. Had committed his life to her. How could he throw their marriage away, no matter what she’d done?

  Tears pressed against his eyelids. He tried to beat them back.

  Her head tilted. Auburn hair trickled forward past her cheek. That was hair he’d kissed, caressed.

  His phone rang. Brenda’s name appeared on the readout.

  “Jason,” Serena said from the sofa. Another ring.

  His wife’s eyes sharpened. He knew that look well. He’d seen it in arguments and debates. The look itself was a command. She was saying, Don’t you dare answer that phone.

  He lifted the receiver.

  50

  “You’re not leaving?” Jason asked the pastor.

  The big man shook his head.

  The door swayed on its hinges from Serena’s retreat. Kathy had run off too after casting a look at Jason meant to shrivel him on the spot. She’d opened her mouth to say something, but Jason would never know what it was.

  So now only the two of them remained.

  A trill from his phone. He let it ring this time, kept his eyes on Pastor Gates.

  Miles said, “Now you don’t answer it.”

  Jason let it go.

  “Let’s take a walk.” The pastor slid in the chair and rocked forward to get to his feet.

  “I just got back from a walk.”

  “Yes, but I didn’t. I’ve been sitting here for an hour.” He stood over Jason, looking at him across the desk.

  Jason considered telling him to buzz off like the ladies. Insult him. Get rid of him forever. The words swam around in his head, but something about the pastor’s eyes and rounded shoulders kept the words from coming out of Jason’s mouth.

  “All right. We’ll walk.”

  They left the office. Jason told Brenda he’d be back in a few minutes and endured another frown of disapproval.

  A few blocks north, a city park ran along Santa Monica Boulevard. The narrow space of grass and trees gave an illusion of someplace outside the city’s grasp. They arrived at the path, and Jason took in the place for what would be the last time.

  The pastor slowed. He chuckled. “That was probably the least-effective intervention I’ve ever been in.”

  Jason glanced up at him. “You think it was funny?”

  “I wouldn’t call it that.”

  “Then what’s there to laugh about?”

  “Wonder.”

  Jason waited for him to explain what that meant. “What is that, an inside joke or something?”

  “Yes. Between me and Jesus. But let’s talk about you.”

  “Do we have to?”
r />   “No. We could talk about anything you like. But you’re an interesting topic.”

  “How so?”

  “A man bent on his own destruction. Do you have any awareness of what you’re doing?”

  “If you think I want to destroy myself, you’ve got another thing coming. That’s the last thing I want.”

  “The last thing. Well put.”

  Jason stopped. The pastor turned to him, eyebrows lifted like a scientist peering through spectacles into a petri dish. He should have been wearing a lab coat. All this was just a big research project to him.

  “All right, Miles. Let’s have it.”

  “When you’re ready to hear it.”

  “I’m not looking to destroy myself.”

  “You talk like I’m the first one to bring this up.”

  “Serena doesn’t know what she’s talking about either.”

  The pastor nodded. “Sure. On the other hand, who knows you better than your own wife?”

  Jason tried to keep his feet still, but the awkwardness of his body was impossible to ignore. It was as if the path constantly shifted underneath him. The need to stay in motion got the better of him. His feet shuffled. His hands weren’t at home in his pockets or hanging loosely at his sides.

  He stepped away. He wanted the pastor to stay behind. But at the same time, he wanted nothing more than the pastor at his side.

  The path jutted to the right. They followed it, and after a left turn Jason found himself in front of Good Shepherd Catholic Church. One of the doors stood open. Inside, he could make out pews filing toward the front of the sanctuary, where Jesus was nailed in drooped agony, rendered in shining metal against a smooth wooden cross.

  The pastor stopped. “Do you want to go in?”

  “Not really.”

  “I only ask because I noticed you were looking inside.”

  Jason moved on. “I’ve always been interested in architecture.”

  “The master of diversion.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Someone gets close, and you move in another direction.”

  They checked for traffic and crossed Bedford. After the carefully groomed grounds of the church, they now passed into a desert of dirt and yuccas and cacti in this part of the park.

  “So, am I ready yet?”

  Miles went to a white rock and eased down onto it. He looked to the sky, breathed deep, and crossed his arms. He looked back up to Jason. “I’d like to help you, Jason. But the fact is, without Christ, there’s nothing to be done. Without him, you’re at the devil’s mercy.”