Billy gathered up his files and followed him out.
Across the tops of the cubicles, Jason saw three of his lenders lined up at the entrance to his office. He stopped Billy outside the door to the chairman’s suite. “Give Randy a call and let him know we’re approved. Are the docs ready for Ed to sign?”
“Just about. Glad it got approved. That legal bill would’ve been tough to swallow.”
6
Jason flexed his neck to try to dispel his tension. The first thing he saw when he powered up his computer was an e-mail from Mark Cornwall, looking to meet with him as soon as loan committee was over. With Vince on the committee, there was no telling what would come next.
Ninety minutes later, through his open doorway and beyond Kathy’s desk and a dozen others, Jason saw Mark hurry from the chairman’s suite and out of view. His phone beeped, but before he could obey the impulse to reach for it, he rose and left his office and moved through the sea of desks to Mark’s door.
BTB’s president and CEO sat at his desk, phone pressed to his ear. He looked up and waved Jason in.
Jason went to the window rather than cooling his heels in one of the chairs in front of Mark’s desk. The traffic on Wilshire pocketed between stoplights, the cars at the front of the line inching forward into crosswalks as if that would speed up the change to green. He noticed a new BMW 730i, a black one that looked like it had just been detailed. Jason thought of the series of door dings on his own Bimmer. It wouldn’t hurt to swing by the dealer some afternoon and check out the new models.
Mark finished his call and swiveled to face him. “Sit down, Jason. You’re going to give me a crick in my neck.”
Jason picked the chair farthest from the open door and was ready with his opener. “We’re going to win the Triton business. Two million in loan outs and a good seven-fifty in deposits.”
A smile yanked up the right edge of Mark’s mouth. “Good job.”
“It’s Patricia’s deal. The team’s a good one.”
Mark didn’t acknowledge the comment. His fingers entwined in front of his chest. It was his defensive pose. “Tell me about the runoff.”
“Deposits are up, so you’re talking about loans.”
Mark glanced at the sheet before him. Apparently Vince hadn’t mentioned the rise in Jason’s deposit numbers. “Right.”
“It’s just cyclical pay-downs. Loans will be up again this month. P. Lowell and Howe got some big collections in and paid down their lines. Blackstone sold a building, so that term loan paid off, but we’ve got two others queued up for him. We’ve booked five loans this month, but they don’t draw until after month-end.”
“Good. My other concern is your WALG.”
Jason wasn’t surprised. The bank assigned a risk grade to every loan, and the weighted average loan grade was the average grade of the whole portfolio. Mark watched it like a hawk, because downgrading a large loan would move the needle in the wrong direction quickly.
“I sent you my action plan last week. Did you get a chance to look at it?”
“I’ve got it here somewhere. Vince gave me the basics”
Jason didn’t have time to beat around this any longer. He stood and went to the open door. He slammed it and faced Mark. “Vince will not run this office.”
“I didn’t say he would.”
“I won’t report to him, and my teams won’t report to him. Let him run his little branches and his business-development officers. He’s good at keeping them scared enough to put up decent numbers. It won’t work here. Not with this team. Not with me.”
“What are you—?”
Jason leaned over Mark’s desk, his palms on the wood surface. “This office is pulling its weight and then some. Almost every lender is on pace to hit their numbers for the year. Don’t mess with it, Mark. Nothing’s broken. There’s nothing to fix. I don’t care what spin Vince puts on the WALG or the one month this year we had a little loan runoff.”
“It’s not the only month this year.”
“We recovered from January in February, and we’ll recover from July in August. The trends are solid. You have no worries here.” Jason took a seat again and forced his face to relax. “Put me in charge of the branch network, and you’ll have the same trends out there.”
This brought a smile to Mark’s face. “The branches are doing fine.”
“Sure, if you like high expenses and low profit. We’re even carrying part of Vince’s salary in our numbers.”
Mark’s raised eyebrows said he didn’t know this. “It’s in the financial detail. He’s got part of his salary and expenses allocated to us because we have one BDO that reports to him. I never said anything because we’re profitable enough to absorb it no problem. Personally, I think his whole salary’s putting a crimp in the bank’s return on investment. But it’s not my place to say so.”
A chuckle sizzled out of Mark’s nostrils. “Okay, okay. You’ve made your point.”
“I mean it, Mark. I could run the branch system in my sleep. It’d be like having a couple more teams reporting to me. You’d lose the worst performers overnight, and in six months every branch would be running as well as the home office. Why not give it a chance?”
Mark’s eyes narrowed, and his smile reminded Jason of a wolf sizing up dinner on the hoof. The CEO leaned forward, and his balding pate caught the gleam from the windows. “All right, cowboy. Here’s what I’m going to do. In three months, I’m going to look at the numbers. I’m going to look first at deposit growth, then loan growth, then WALG. Whoever moves the needle the most in those categories in the next three months wins. You win, Vince is gone. Vince wins—” he held up his palm— “you’re not gone, but he’s earned the right to have the home office report to him. Fair enough?”
Saying no would mean Jason didn’t have confidence in the argument he’d just used. “I think you have enough data right now to make this call, Mark.”
Three fingers went into the air. “Three months. We sit together—you, Vince, and me—on November 2, and I let you know the decision. We’ll announce it in December, and it’ll go into effect at the first of the year.”
Jason held out his hand. “You won’t regret putting me in charge.”
Mark clasped his hand. “Make it happen.”
7
Every time Flip closed his eyes, he saw the boy’s face.
He couldn’t figure out why. He had killed before. The others never haunted him the way the boy did. Their stakes were on the table, and they must have known what they were doing, what they were risking. They would have done it to him if he hadn’t done it first. Even the man he had taken down outside Diane’s apartment didn’t give him a second’s pause. Flip had no idea what had happened to him. He didn’t care.
But the boy was different. And he was a boy, wasn’t he? He wasn’t a man. He’d looked tall enough to be a man when he rounded the corner in that dark house. But he wasn’t.
Flip tried closing his eyes. The image appeared, the way the boy looked behind that building. Loose strands of hair stuck to the blood smeared on his forehead. The gray color of his face shining in the light from the single bulb behind the gas station, discolored by the effects of death, blood no longer pumping through his flesh. Eyes frozen open, vacant.
He could still feel the boy’s body, the lightness and jumbled limbs, joints thickening even in the time it took Flip to drive from the house out to Robertson, up to Pico, and to the rear of the closed gas station where he’d left him. Only a boy. Not fully grown. Sixteen or seventeen maybe.
The same age Flip was when he had the door slammed behind him in the youth authority for the first time.
In the light of the gas station he’d leaned over the kid, to see the face that still held traces of childhood in its texture.
Why had he looked?
Flip couldn’t keep his eyes closed. Not with this image haunting him.
He went for more coffee.
The smell of the dishes in the sink hung i
n the air like sewer vapor. He lifted the coffeepot out of the machine and saw only dregs swirling in the bottom of it. A little liquid, black as tar, moved in a mass of caked residue burned into the glass.
At the sink, he tried to wedge the coffeepot between the tip of the faucet and the plates and cups piled underneath it. It wouldn’t fit. He shoved the plates to one side. They clattered against the porcelain like shattered teeth. Still not enough room for the pot.
His eyes held on the blackness of the burned sediment. It pooled at the edge of the bottom of the glass pot.
In desperation, he shoved the pot between the faucet and the plates. A crack appeared, thick, deep, running the length of the side.
With a shout, he wheeled and threw the pot against the wall. It shattered into a hundred pieces. The circular top spun on the linoleum.
Black sludge smeared the wall in the shape of a spider.
He jammed his cap onto his head. He would get coffee somewhere else.
In the hallway, there was no sound. He moved past the closed doors with his ears attuned, wanting noise to distract him, needing some kind of exchange to draw him away from the image that plagued him whenever he closed his eyes. Even when he blinked.
His legs were weak as he descended the stairs. They felt like needles joined together by frayed thread.
How long without sleep? Three days?
He’d slept the first night. When he came back to his place, he had laid his head on the pillow and closed his eyes without the boy’s face accosting him. After an hour or two, his juices had settled from their seething boil, and sleep had come. But the dream of the boy had awakened him before sunrise. In the dream, he was leaning over the body, looking at the bloody face in the light from the bulb behind the gas station, and the boy’s dead eyes turned in their sockets to look back at him.
On Melrose now, people passed him. When they approached, they looked under the bill of his hat to see his open eyes, and quickly looked away.
They always did that. Didn’t they?
He came to a coffee place. His hand went to the cool metal handle and pulled.
Reggae music bounced behind the swoosh of a barista frothing someone’s drink.
He went to the line. A woman had her back to him. Middle-aged, a scarf restraining pony-tailed hair with strands of gray in it like worms in earth. She stepped away. Then it was Flip’s turn.
The cashier was about the age of the boy. A girl, freckles sprinkled across her cheeks and nose, she could be a cheerleader or somebody’s high school sweetheart. Her smile held, then drifted. She’d said something to him. She shifted her feet. Her eyes left him, returned.
He spoke. “Large coffee. Black.” His voice sounded alien to his ears.
The smile returned, automatic. “Any room for cream?”
“No. No cream.”
She turned from the counter and tilted the tall cup underneath the spigot to fill it and returned.
The black coffee trembled in the cup, smoking. “Sir?”
He looked back to her face.
Her smile was frozen in place. “It’s $2.10.”
He dug into his pocket, and a wad of cash came into his hand. He sorted through it and found a ten. With a start, it occurred to him that it belonged to the boy. Flip couldn’t seem to open the bill. As if something sinister might be on the face of the dead president pictured there.
Her hand reached out for it. He put it in her white palm.
With the coffee, he turned away. She called to him, wanting to give him the contaminated change, but he waved at her, ignoring her thanks for the tip.
He paused with his back to her. She could have known him—the boy. She might have been his date. Flip turned to look over his shoulder at her. Her eyes met his. Something about the way he looked at her cratered her smile. She stepped back from the counter, bumped into the machine behind her, but couldn’t seem to look away from him.
He rushed for the door. His uncovered coffee sloshed out, searing his knuckles and the back of his hand. A man on the other side of the glass door yanked it open. Flip passed him, head down, the bill of his hat shading his open eyes.
On the sidewalk a half-block away, he stopped. Pain simmered in his hand.
He brought the cup to his mouth. The brim quivered against his lips, and he sipped. Hot, hot, it coursed down his throat, into his chest, the heat spreading there, finally slamming into his stomach.
He put his back to the wall, held his eyes wide to watch the pedestrians and the cars hurtling down Melrose.
Don’t close your eyes.
8
Jason approached Kathy’s front door, but when it opened, it was the pastor—Gates was his name—who emerged from behind it. He recognized the big man from the funeral for Kathy’s son, and something inside Jason shifted again, something raw. He’d first felt it at the funeral, listening to the pastor speak, and now it came on him again.
Head bowed, brow fixed as if his gaze held the ground in place, the pastor moved onto the stoop and lifted his eyes to Jason.
“Hello,” Gates said.
“Jason Dunn.” Jason extended his hand upward. The pastor reached down to shake.
“We met at the funeral, didn’t we? You’re her boss?” A paternal smile came onto the pastor’s face.
“How’s she holding up?”
Gates stepped down to Jason’s side and drew his hands into the pockets of his slacks. “She is doing her best. As well as anyone could. She has great faith.”
Faith? “I hope that’s helping her.”
“How could it not? Our God is all any of us has. Everything else will be taken from us in the end.” He said it and waited, in no hurry, as if sons were murdered every day.
Jason looked into the big man’s brown eyes. The expression in the laugh lines around his eyes was piercing, and that raw feeling from the funeral nudged at Jason some more. “Do you know what her plans are?”
Pastor Gates’s eyebrows lifted. “I expect she wouldn’t mind my telling you that she’s decided to go to her sister’s ranch for a while. She feels she needs to leave the city. I think it’s a good idea to be with her family.”
“Right. That is a good idea.”
The pastor was as still as a great boulder on a plain, as if centuries of erosion had revealed him where he stood.
Within Jason, the rawness pulled at him, a magnetism that seemed to open undiscovered pores in his mind. “This God you keep mentioning . . .”
“Yes?”
Jason’s iPhone chirped in his pocket. An e-mail. He pulled the device from his pocket and reset it to vibrate mode. “Nothing. I need to see Kathy.”
“Of course.” But neither man made a move. Jason returned the iPhone to his pocket.
“Jason, why don’t you come by my office for a cup of coffee sometime?”
“Sure. I might do that.” Jason stepped around him and sensed the big man’s eyes following him as he moved into the house, leaving the pastor outside.
“Kathy?”
“In here.”
He found her in the kitchen. She came to him and hugged him but pulled back quickly.
“I was just making some lunch. Want a sandwich?”
“Thanks anyway. I’m on my way to the gym.”
No comeback. None of her usual gibes about staving off advancing age. She returned to the kitchen and reached for a knife to swab mayonnaise onto wheat bread.
Lettuce lay with sliced tomatoes darkening a paper towel. Jason plucked one up and had it in his mouth when he spoke. “You having a lettuce sandwich there, Kath?”
“Cold cuts are in the fridge. Sure you don’t want something?”
He sat at the counter on a bar stool. She wore jeans and an oversize T-shirt. It might have belonged to her son.
“Your pastor tells me you’re going back to the ranch with Carol.”
Kathy turned to the refrigerator. She pulled out what she needed and let the door close on its own, then removed a few slices of beef from a plast
ic container and layered them onto the bread. When the container was back in the refrigerator, she closed up the sandwich and cut it in half.
“I feel funny eating in front of you. Have half.”
He took it. “I can hold your job open for you.”
She didn’t answer. Her chewing seemed to take all her concentration. Finally she said, “I’m going to have some milk.” She drew a glass from the cupboard and returned to the refrigerator, pulled out a carton, and poured a glassful and held it out to him.
“No, thanks. I’ll just get some water.” He rose and crossed behind her, got down a glass, and filled it with tap water.
They were silent until the sandwich halves were gone. Kathy stared at the milk in her glass as if tea leaves floated there to resolve a mystery. “You know,” she said, “the night it happened, I had a dream.” She took a drink of milk. “I dreamed someone was in my room.” She wouldn’t take her eyes off the milk. As she brought the glass up to her lips again, her eyes followed it. She swallowed, her smooth throat pale, flexing.
“Anybody in particular?”
Her eyes rose from the glass to meet his. “No, it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t that kind of dream. I was lying in bed, and someone was in the room with me. A man was in my room. Standing there. I could feel him there, close by the bed.” Blood vessels traced tiny red lines in the whites of her eyes. She didn’t blink. “I could smell him.” She let the glass rest on the counter.
“You don’t think it was a dream.”
She tilted the glass, and the milk residue gathered in a bend at the bottom. “In the morning, the sliding glass door downstairs was unlocked. And the electricity was off.”
“That’s strange.”
“The circuit breaker was switched off.”
“Probably just a surge or something.”
“Sure. That’s what I’m telling myself. But it’s the first time it ever happened. The breaker box is outside, so someone could get to it easily enough. And that dream . . . the same night Greg—Greg’s killed. Some coincidence, huh?”
Jason worked his tongue to clear his teeth of the remnants of the sandwich pasted there. “You tell the police about it?”
She nodded. “They took a look around, but their heart wasn’t in it. After I told them about Greg, what was going on . . .” She brought her hands to the countertop, and her head dropped.