Tom stood over him. “Put it on.” He tossed the monitor in Flip’s lap and stepped back.
Unfastened, the curved black band gaped on top of Flip’s sweats. The rectangular transmitter was the size of a box of cartridges. It was expensive, and it had taken Tom half an hour of wrangling to get departmental permission, but he couldn’t surveil Flip all the time. This way he could do it from the computer in his office.
Flip’s grin was long gone. He lifted up the device and examined it.
“Just put it on.”
“I don’t know how.”
“You’ve got ten seconds to figure it out, Einstein.”
Flip bent over and peeled up the leg of his sweats to reveal his left ankle. He slipped the band around and found the slot to insert the tip of the band. It clicked through but left a gap between his ankle and the strap.
The weight of the Glock felt like the handshake of an old friend in Tom’s fist. “Tighter.”
Flip looked up at him. Black eyes fixed, he snapped it one more notch.
“Now put your hands behind your back.”
Flip sat back and tucked his hands between the sofa and the small of his back.
Tom came to him and, not taking his eyes off him, kept the nose of the Glock pointed at Flip’s chest. He reached down with his left hand to the floor so his aching knees didn’t have to take the strain of kneeling. “You want to sit very still right now, Convict.”
Flip only stared at him.
Tom tugged at the monitor. Firm.
Now, to rise. Tom used his left hand for leverage.
But his knees betrayed him. A sharp pain, the deepest in months, pierced his kneecap.
Both hands instinctively went to the ground. The Glock pointed away from Flip for an instant.
Tom knew what was about to happen.
The convict snapped away from the sofa. His hands cleared out from behind him.
Flip’s close-cropped head flew at him.
The Glock clattered to the carpet. Flip was on top of him.
Flip’s fist eclipsed the ceiling lamp. The impact was a thunderbolt exploding inside Tom’s brain.
Another. Blackness.
17
Exposed by the blaring light outside Diane’s building, Flip waited for someone to exit or enter so he could tailgate his way in. No one moved on the silent street. He felt naked out here.
Finally someone came into the lobby, walking like he was wearing new feet. Drunk. He pushed through the door before noticing Flip.
Flip grabbed the handle of the door. The drunk eyed him out of his haze and mumbled, “Howyadoin?” before teetering on.
Flip couldn’t wait in the bright lobby for the elevator.
His knuckles ached every time he gripped the handrail as he went upstairs.
It took too long to get her to the door. The hallway walls seemed to shout his name every time he knocked. When she finally opened the door, she stared at him for a moment as if she’d never seen him before.
“Come in. Quick.” She backed away to let him in, and he looked her over. An oversize T-shirt reached down to the tops of her thighs.
She folded her arms. “You shouldn’t have come here.”
“I got no place else to go.” He closed the door and turned to her.
“What’s the matter with your apartment?” Flip couldn’t bring himself to look in her eyes.
“What did you do, Flip?”
“My PO—he was going to put a tether on me.”
“A what?”
“One of those ankle things where they know where you are all the time.”
Her eyes shifted to his ankles. He wanted to duck behind the sofa.
“So?”
“So I couldn’t let him do it, could I?” Her eyes leveled. “What. Did. You. Do?”
He went to the sofa and sat. She stood before him, waiting.
“I had to hit him.”
Diane rolled her eyes and turned away.
“I couldn’t let him do it, Di. It would’ve ruined our whole plan.”
She faced him. “Why didn’t you just cut it off after he left? Why’d you have to hit him?” She stopped. “You didn’t kill him, did you?”
He looked at his hands. The last thing he wanted to tell her was that he’d lost his cool, that he’d just wanted to hit the guy. “No.”
Diane brought up a hand to her lips. Flip couldn’t look up at her. As she stood thinking, her toes flexed against the carpet. Her toenails were painted pink.
“Well, you can’t stay here. Did anybody see you come in?”
“No. Look, just one night. Tomorrow night I’ll find someplace else.”
She went to the window and edged the drape aside an inch to peek out. “Nobody can see you here.”
“Nobody will. You know me. I’m the invisible man.”
Diane turned, and Flip’s eyes finally traveled up to her face.
“It’s not that I don’t want you here, darlin’.” Her posture settled, arms loosening, and she came across the room and sat next to him. A hand came to his arm, stroked. “But until we get this thing done, we have to be really careful. Come here.”
She pulled him to her.
“Let me think a minute.” She tapped a pink fingernail against her front teeth. “I know.” She rose away from him, and went into the bedroom. He heard a drawer slide, and in a moment she was back. “Here’s a hundred. There’s a place down off Sepulveda, past Venice Boulevard. Go there for tonight, and we’ll figure something out tomorrow.” She handed the money to him. “This’ll be plenty.”
He fingered the cash, looking up at her. “You’re putting me out.”
Coming to him, sliding onto the sofa next to him, a hand to his face, she pleaded. “Flip—darlin’—don’t you know this is hard for me, too? Being apart from you all this time? After you just got out? It’s agony. But it’ll be just a few more months. Soon we’ll be together. Really together.”
She brought her lips to his. They searched him out, made him melt inside, and he saw that this was what he had needed, what he had really come here for—not a roof to sleep under, not safety, but this.
She ended it. Her tongue crept over her lips, and she smiled. “Just a few more months.”
He wanted to taste them again. He bent toward her. She gave them to him for an instant and was gone.
“Come on, now.” She rose, and he followed her. She opened the door a crack, then eased it wide enough to look up and down the hall. She turned to him. “Be quick. Don’t be seen.”
One more kiss. He wrapped an arm around her, considered slamming the door and carrying her into the back room.
She pulled back. “Just a few months.”
His breath was quick, his heart slamming against his ribs for want of her. But this job was more important. It would get them where they wanted to be. “All right.” He stepped past her and peeked outside before turning to her one final time. “How much you think we’ll take?”
She came close again and pressed her body against him. “Flip, darlin’, we’ll be papering our walls with Benjamins.”
* * *
Pain knifed through Tom Cole’s skull. “Ohhh.”
His head rolled. Something was in his mouth, hard and heavy, its edge cutting at his tongue. He spit it out, and it fell onto his neck and off to the side.
He put a hand to his face, felt slickness with the consistency of oil.
But it wasn’t oil.
His eyelids split like cracking eggshells, and the reality of place and time nudged into his mind.
Flip Dunn’s apartment. A dirty carpet mushed underneath Tom’s wounded head where it lay in a puddle of his own blood. The reek of the unwashed residue of Flip’s life drifted in the air underneath the crushing pain in Tom’s skull.
Next to his shoulder, he saw what had been in his mouth. The ankle monitor. Flip had cut it off and stuffed the end of one of the straps in Tom’s mouth.
Nice touch.
He lay unmo
ving, taking inventory of his body, listening but hearing no sound beyond the cymbals in his ears. One by one he tested his limbs and found them functioning, felt for injuries in places other than his head but discovered none.
He tried to lift his head. It rang, throbbed in pain. The apartment swirled around him, tilting, walls flying. He lowered his head back to the carpet. The ceiling gradually slowed its spin, easing into a stained blur.
His eyes wouldn’t focus.
He went for his cell phone and felt for the number one key, pressed and held it for a 911 emergency call.
The operator came on and he struggled through the conversation, digging the address out of his scrambled mind. He set the phone down, and the operator stayed on, her voice drifting through his ringing ears, distant.
He wondered how he could have been so stupid. Old and lazy, that’s how. Show up at the home of a high-control parolee just a few weeks after he gated out, put yourself at his feet. . . . Gun or no gun, he should have had backup, should have called Flip into his office. Something.
But why didn’t he kill me?
18
Jason stopped.
“I tried to keep him out, Jason.” Brenda leaned over her keyboard to see around the corner. Her necklace dangled forward. “He said he had some calls to make and, since you weren’t in, he’d use your office. I couldn’t stop him.”
His ankles crossed to perch his Florsheims on Jason’s desk, Vince’s fat rear end filled Jason’s chair. He had his neck bent to wedge the phone among the folds of his neck so his hands were free to page through a report.
“I hope he doesn’t break my chair.” Jason stepped away from Brenda’s desk and into his office. He sat in a corner chair and slid his laptop out of his briefcase, powered it up. A pot of coffee at his breakfast meeting hadn’t done much to clear out the muck in his mind. He hadn’t slept after Philip’s visit last night.
Vince chatted into the receiver. “That’ll be okay. I’ll talk to Scotty and get it waived. I want that loan funded today. Six million in new outs will look good in our numbers at quarter-end. How’s that Cal Distributors deal coming?”
The screen on Jason’s laptop lit up, and he accessed the bank’s wireless network and typed in his password to get to the bank’s intranet. While it cycled, he glanced up. Vince looked away.
Online now, Jason checked his profit center’s results from yesterday. Loans were down. Deposits too. He toggled to the large transactions report and saw that Howe Brothers had paid off and the company’s deposits were down to fumes. It looked like they were leaving the bank. He logged out and set his laptop on the chair and stood. There’d better be a good explanation for this.
Vince hung up. With a grunt, he brought his feet down from the desktop. He swiveled Jason’s chair to face him. “You weren’t in yet, and I needed to make some calls before committee.”
A stack of loan reports littered Jason’s desk. Vince’s reading for committee. “Anytime. We’re real hospitable around here.”
Vince didn’t budge. His white, coiffed hair was styled into a sharp wedge over his forehead.
Jason went to the door. Brenda looked up. “Have Dan come over,” he said.
Back to Vince. With careful concentration, Vince was putting his committee reports in order, checking the agenda before putting each one in the stack. Such an important responsibility, this committee vote.
“I see your numbers took a dive.” Vince didn’t take his eyes off the reports. He had half of them stacked before him.
“Temporary. Our pipeline’s pretty packed.”
The last of the reports made their way to the stack. Vince let his eyes wander up to meet Jason’s. “I just hope our little branches can keep up.” A grin. Still he didn’t move out of that chair.
“You about done, Vince? Because I’d really like to get to work.”
Vince looked at his watch. A Rolex. He must have found it in a pawn shop or repossessed it. “I still have a couple minutes before committee.” He leaned back and managed to get his hands up behind his head. It stretched the limits of his shirt over his belly. “It’ll be good to have Patricia back on my team again. Tell me about the rest of the group.”
Jason took a step toward his own desk. “You really think she’ll report to you again? Or anybody else here? Forget it, Vince. You’ll have to be happy out in the country.”
That grin warped Vince’s face again. He leveraged off the desk to get out of the chair, then brought his tent of a jacket from where it had been draped over the back and slipped his arms through the sleeves. “Famous last words.” He brought his fingers down to Jason’s desk to dig underneath the stack of loan presentations. “You can always tell quarter-end’s coming. Volume on committee picks up.” The bundle in his hands straightened his arms. He came around the desk, his cologne drifting toward Jason like a plague. “I haven’t seen your team in committee this week. I sure hope you can pick up the pace.”
The Howe payoff simmering in the back of his mind, Jason took a breath before answering. “Don’t be late. Your vote’s important.”
Vince snorted. He leaned in. Coffee breath and the reek of his cologne made Jason want to turn away. But he didn’t back down.
“Nice little piece you got out there.” Vince kept his voice low and gestured with his eyes to the doorway. The percussion of Brenda’s keystrokes outside the door didn’t pause.
“Get out.”
The grin returned, and Jason’s palm itched to slap it off Vince’s face.
“Touchy.” He turned and went to the door. Jason followed and toyed with the idea of tripping him or maybe planting his foot in that wide backside.
Vince paused at Brenda’s desk. “Thanks, Brenda.” He used his syrupy voice. “I appreciate it. You have a good day.”
“You too.” Her keyboard clacked uninterrupted.
Vince winked at Jason and turned. He maneuvered like an ocean liner toward the chairman’s suite.
Brenda stopped typing. Her hands slid from the keyboard and onto her lap. “That guy is so creepy.”
Looking from Vince back into the jewels of Brenda’s eyes, Jason’s anger drifted. “You’re talking about one of the bank’s senior executives, Ms. Tierney.”
“I don’t care if he’s the grand Pooh-Bah of the Federal Reserve. I wouldn’t want to be stuck in an elevator with him, I can tell you that.”
Laughter ballooned in Jason’s chest, but he held it back. “You find Dan?”
“He’s out on an appointment. I told Angie you wanted to see him.” She kept her eyes on him.
Her phone rang. She checked the readout. “It’s Francine Jugger for you. You want her?”
“Always.” He turned and peeled off his jacket on the way to his chair. Francine was nearly seventy years old and had been running BTB’s wire room when Jason was bumbling through his first date. With the housecoats she wore and makeup as thick as waffle batter, she was the last person you’d want to put in front of a client, but for efficiency you couldn’t find anyone better.
“Here she is,” Brenda called.
His phone rang. “Francine, how you doing?”
“I’m good, doll. How’s by you?”
“Not as good as you, but nobody is.”
“You sweet boy. You got a PIN for me?”
“You know my rules.”
“Come on, honey.” She always tried this. But Jason knew she was just testing him to see how careful he was with his authority.
“No details, no PIN.”
“Oh, if you insist.” She recited the particulars. Nearly five million, leaving Northfield’s main operating account with insufficient funds. As usual, Randy Sloan wanted the money to automatically sweep from their interest-bearing account so he could earn interest on it until the last second. The wire room couldn’t process it without authorization from a senior executive, even though they could see the money in the other account.
Brenda stepped into the room. Her eyes seemed to drill into him.
“Is this a fax request, or did he send it over online?”
“Fax this time. The signature looks good. You want to see it?”
“No. If I can’t trust Francine Jugger, I can’t trust anybody. You ready for me to enter my PIN?”
“Whenever you are.”
He pulled out his lower left drawer and fingered through the file tabs until he found the one with his PIN. They changed it so often, he never bothered committing it to memory. He punched in the six digits on the phone’s keypad.
Silence for a moment while the system worked through the code. A moment later, she said, “Got it. Money’s flying, honey. Talk to you tomorrow.”
“Be good.”
“I always am.” She clicked off. He shoved his drawer closed.
Brenda stood with her hands behind her back. She shifted her weight onto one leg, cocking her hip. “Mark wants to see you.”
19
Mark’s face flushed violet. “Do you think we sit around and dream up policies for fun? They’re there for a reason, Jason. And this one . . . we can’t have lenders winging commitments out in the market without any oversight from the credit side of the bank!”
Jason stared at the wording of the letter and searched for the right thing to say. How could he have missed this? “These commitment letters look just like our proposal letters. We’ve got to change the format.”
“Oh, come on.” Mark shot out of his chair. “You’re running the biggest profit center in the bank, and I have to explain this to you?” He wrenched his tie loose and unbuttoned his collar. “What don’t you understand about the word commitment? And ten million—on these terms?” He turned his back.
Scotty, sitting in the other chair before Mark’s desk, didn’t say a word. He just sat there, eyeing Jason, tapping together the tips of the arms of his reading glasses like pincers. No emotion registered on his face.
Mark snatched the commitment letter off his desk and reread it. He snorted, shook his head, and flipped it back onto his desk.
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