The Promise (The 'Burg Series)

by Kristen Ashley

  “I work in a bar, Ben, I know that shit’s not true,” she returned.

  “Then you either got an eye for assholes or you aren’t payin’ attention. And, looks of Merrick, I’ll tell you straight up, it’s you not payin’ attention.”

  She stared at him.

  He ended it with, “’Night, babe,” and without her reply, he walked away.

  He was backing out of her driveway, arm hooked behind Frankie’ seat, when she asked, “What was that about?”

  “Your girl doesn’t wanna get laid,” he told her. “She wants to stop bein’ lonely. She’s got the tools to do that but she’s not usin’ ’em. I pointed that out to her.”

  Frankie was silent as Ben put his truck into drive and headed them home.

  Ben thought it was done until he stopped at a light and Frankie spoke.

  “Have I told you you’re awesome today?”

  He looked at her and grinned, replying, “Nope.”

  His grin died when he saw her face lit by street and dashboard lights and he heard the tone of her words, saying, “You’re awesome, Benny Bianchi.”

  At that, Ben lifted a hand, curled it around her neck, and pulled her to him, dropping his head and taking her mouth.

  The car behind them had to honk to get them to break it off.

  And that was all good, since where they were going, he could fully show his appreciation, and to be able to do that thoroughly was not in the time he had at a red light.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Awesome

  The next morning, sacrificing greatly for all the unknown people out there who might possibly get messed up by my company putting out a bad drug, I left Benny Bianchi in my bed and went to the office early.

  I wasn’t the first one in.

  Travis Berger was in.

  So was Randy Bierman.

  I hit my office, started my day, and every time I saw movement outside my window, I looked to see who it was.

  So I saw it when Heath walked in about twenty minutes after I did.

  I also saw it when Sandy walked in only two minutes after Heath did.

  Heath was not stupid, and yet, he still was.

  I gave them time to settle, Tandy coming in while I did this, but she was not first on my list that morning.

  Heath was.

  “Hey, honey,” I greeted Tandy, leaving my office and making a beeline to Heath’s.

  “Mornin’, Frankie,” Tandy replied.

  I threw a smile at her over my shoulder and didn’t miss a step.

  “Hey there, Frankie,” Sandy said when I got close.

  “Hi, Sandy.” I smiled at her but, again, didn’t miss a step and went right to his office. I saw Sandy open her mouth to say something, but by that time, I had a hand lifted and was knocking on the jamb of Heath’s door.

  When he looked up, I asked, “Got a minute?”

  Heath looked to me, out the window to Sandy, then back to me before answering, “Sure.”

  I walked in, closed the door behind me, and moved directly to the chairs opposite his desk. I sat in one, then asked the more truthful question.

  “You got more than a minute?”

  He looked to the closed door before he studied me and asked back, “Is everything okay?”

  I gave him more truth. “Not even close.”

  He studied me more intently. “What’s not okay?”

  “No way to put this out there and do it delicately,” I started. “So I’ll just put it out there. I know you and Sandy have something going on outside this office. I know it because neither of you are very good at hiding it. I also know it because a PI is watching you and he knows it.”

  Heath’s face had grown pale as I talked. He’d also leaned forward before I was done.

  Watching him react, it hadn’t escaped my attention that he was very good-looking. Sandy brown hair. Nice blue eyes. Trim and fit. Not exactly tall, but he wasn’t short either. He was just too lean and too classically good-looking for my taste. I liked them darker. Rougher. Bigger. The kind of man you looked at and knew he’d order a beer but hoped he wouldn’t mind drinking Champagne with you during happy occasions.

  Heath probably drank martinis.

  Nothing wrong with that, but I liked it that Benny ordered beer.

  “I got nowhere to go with that lead in,” Heath replied, “except to ask what the fuck you want.”

  I blinked.

  Then I told him, “I don’t want anything except for you to go to Lloyd, share that you and Sandy are in a relationship, thus cutting off at the knees whoever hired this PI to get the dirty on you.”

  “It wasn’t you?” he asked.

  “Why would I do that?” I asked back.

  “Why would anyone do that?”

  Was he serious?

  “Uh…Heath, maybe you need to look around and start paying attention,” I suggested.

  “What?”

  God, he was serious.

  I leaned toward him. “I have no idea who hired him. I just know the PI was hired and what he found. That is, I don’t know who hired him yet. But Randy is riding your ass just as he’s riding mine, so I have my suspicions.”

  “Yeah, because he’s a dick. Riding my ass at work because he’s a dick and gets off on swinging it around is one thing. Hiring a PI because I’m banging my secretary is insane.”

  I had hoped he wasn’t just banging his assistant.

  Obviously, he was.

  “I’m not going to Lloyd and telling him I’m nailing Sandy,” he continued.

  “Your call, but if you don’t, whoever’s behind this will, and he probably won’t go to Lloyd. He’ll go to Berger.”

  “Whoever’s behind this…right,” he said snidely. “You want me to go to Lloyd and get my ass fired, so when Bierman takes Lloyd down, even though you got two less years than me in your chair, it’ll be you with a direct shot to Lloyd’s seat.”

  I was seeing Heath was a dick too, he was just better at hiding it.

  This wasn’t surprising, he was a salesman. Not nice to say about one of my people, but they were my people so I could say it.

  He kept going.

  “Ambitious. Driven. A slave driver to your reps so they’ll bust their asses to make you look good while you hang with your boyfriend in Chicago.” When I just stared at him, stupefied, and remembering how much I hated office politics, he said, “Yeah. Trey told me about it while asking me if I could swing a transfer for him into my territory.”

  Trey was my rep in Chicago, and I wasn’t surprised about that because I already knew Trey was a dick. What I hoped was that he was only spreading that bullshit to Heath and not further.

  Unfortunately, Heath wasn’t done.

  “You probably don’t have a private dick, just makin’ your play to get me to swing my ass out there. Well, fuck that, Frankie. I’ll call your bluff.”

  “I am not aiming at Lloyd’s seat, Heath. I like Lloyd,” I informed him.

  “I do too. That doesn’t mean I don’t want his salary and his title.”

  Yep. Total dick.

  I ignored that and continued, “Furthermore, you tell him, that doesn’t mean he’ll fire you.”

  He leaned further across his desk to me, the look in his eyes ugly, the twist of his mouth nasty. “Maybe not, but he could tell me to end it and I like getting head from Sandy. She’s a fucking virtuoso at head.”

  Way too much information.

  I tried not to curl my lip while suggesting, “Uh…can we get back to the matter at hand?”

  “That being some unknown entity has hired a PI. Seriously? Are you for real with this crap?”

  Okay then. I did my best. He wanted to be a shark, when the bigger fish gobbled him whole, that was his call.

  “Then don’t tell Lloyd,” I said. “But watch your back and brace, Heath.”

  “I don’t go to him, you won’t?” he bit out.

  “Of course not,” I returned sharply.

  “Berger?”

&nb
sp; “Your business isn’t mine. I know it sounds weird because it is weird, but I’m only making it mine because I’m trying to do you a favor.”

  His eyes narrowed. “How do you even know this shit? Sandy and I have been cool.”

  Okay, maybe he wasn’t that smart.

  “I can’t say since I don’t know yet who hired the PI, just what he got,” I told him, deciding not to tell him that he and Sandy have not been cool.

  “You can’t say, and you know it, but you aren’t behind it?” he asked acidly, not to mention dubiously.

  “If I was behind it, wouldn’t I ask for something or threaten something rather than just giving you a heads up?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never had someone do something as totally jacked as hiring a PI to follow me, so how would I know what they’d do?”

  I leaned forward and said softly, “Clue in, Heath. Now. Seriously. Clue in. And if you don’t care about Sandy, I hope you care enough to know she’s sticking her nose into something that’s happening around you that’s obviously escaping your attention. At best, it could get her fired. At worst, no joke, it might get her dead.”

  His brows shot up and he clipped, “What?”

  Definitely not as smart as I thought.

  I didn’t reiterate.

  I told him, “I’ve got someone on this, and when I know the name of the PI and who hired him, I’ll tell you.” I thought about Sal, who was on that and who loved me, and shared, “Odds are, I’ll know soon. You want, you can wait that time before whoever’s behind this hits Berger with it or hits you with it to get you to do what he wants you to do. Or you can man up and sort your shit. And, just sayin’, bangin’ your assistant…” I shook my head and finished, “Love is never wrong. If it’s not that, and it’s in the workplace where she might not know that it isn’t about that, it is.”

  “Don’t need you lecturing me on ethics, Frankie, or making bizarre threats to my secretary.”

  I wanted to shake some sense into him, but obviously I couldn’t.

  “You’ll see I’m doin’ you a solid, Heath. If that isn’t right now, I’m okay with that. I’ll accept your gratitude later.”

  “You’ve lost your mind,” he muttered, staring at me just as the door to his office opened.

  I turned, expecting to find Sandy there.

  My skin started crawling when I saw Randy Bierman there.

  “Francesca, I need Heath,” he stated, his meaning clear: no matter what we were talking about, I needed to get the fuck out and now.

  I looked to Heath, gave him big eyes, got up, and moved out of his office.

  As I passed Tandy on the way to my own office, I said, “Give it five minutes and come in. We’ll go down to the coffee cart to get a latte.”

  Her eyes were on me. They moved to Heath’s office, came back to me, and she nodded.

  I walked into my office, checked my cell on my desk to see if I had any missed calls, and when I saw I didn’t, I faked working for five minutes until Tandy came to my door and asked somewhat loudly, “Hey, wanna hit the coffee cart?”

  I grinned at her, grabbed my wallet out of my purse, and got out of my chair. I rifled through my inbox and grabbed a random file, hoping I looked like I wasn’t grabbing a random file.

  I looked to Tandy. “Get your notebook and your phone, would you?”

  Her head gave a slight jerk before she went to her desk and did as I requested.

  We were standing alone in the elevator bay when she asked through the side of her mouth, “What was that with Heath?”

  “Don’t worry about Heath, honey. We’ll talk in the lobby.”

  She looked fully at me, but she was still whispering when she asked, “Am I in trouble?”

  This clearly stated she’d done something to be in trouble for, and since her work was stellar, I knew why she was worried about being in trouble.

  “We’ll talk in the lobby,” I repeated, but I did it gently, hoping to assuage her fears.

  We got to the lobby and got our lattes. When we were sitting in a comfortable waiting section that was far from the cart and not close to the reception desk, I knew I hadn’t assuaged her fears because, by the time we sat down, she looked about ready to cry.

  Shit.

  “Tandy, do you know Peter Furlock?” I asked.

  That got me pale face number two of the morning and her voice was a squeak when she answered. “Yes.” She leaned toward me and rushed on, “But, Frankie—”

  I cut her off. “Is he checking to see if the Tenrix documents Bierman gave Lloyd were amended?”

  “He already knows that,” she whispered, looking terrified. “He found the backup files and downloaded them before Mr. Bierman got someone to get to them and replace them with the tampered files.”

  Oh man. They were a lot further than I would have imagined.

  Which must be why Peter Furlock had been targeted.

  “You got his number?” I asked, and she nodded. “Call him, right now. Make sure he’s at his desk.”

  Her eyes got huge and she asked back, “Why?”

  “Just do it, honey.”

  She set her latte aside, gave her attention to her phone, and put it to her ear. I sipped my latte, leafed through the file on my knee I didn’t see, and listened to her connect with Furlock, as well as give a lame excuse why she was calling, totally no good at cloak and dagger.

  I looked back to her when she disconnected and told me. “He’s there.”

  I nodded. “So the files on the server that people can see are the tampered ones?”

  It was her turn to nod.

  “And the other ones have disappeared, outside what Furlock has.”

  “Yes, Frankie.”

  “Did you take this to Lloyd?”

  “Not yet,” she said. “We wanna make sure all our ducks are in a row.”

  All their ducks.

  Shit.

  “What ducks?” I pressed.

  She drew in breath, grabbed her latte, and took a sip, trying to look cool and casual doing it—and failing—then she looked back to me.

  “Okay, Frankie, there’s a lot,” she said quietly.

  “Tenrix is dangerous,” I stated, also quietly.

  She nodded again. “In five percent of test subjects who were on the product for more than three years, serious and irreparable heart conditions formed that could be traced directly back to taking Tenrix.”

  Shit, shit, shit.

  “How did this get by everybody?” I asked.

  “Because Bierman is just the henchman. The mastermind is Barrow.”

  I sucked in breath.

  Clancy Barrow. CEO of Wyler Pharmaceuticals.

  The top of the food chain. The number one shark.

  Shit!

  I leaned toward Tandy and hissed, “How do you know?”

  “Okay, Frankie, okay…” she semi-chanted, then leaned toward me. “My big sis, she went to school with this girl—totally cool—her name is Roxie.”

  “Babe, point,” I warned.

  “I’m gettin’ to it,” she squeaked. “Roxie moved to Denver a while back. She met this guy, married him. He’s a cop.”

  “Okay,” I prompted when she stopped talking.

  “But his brother owns this big investigations firm.”

  And there it was.

  She kept going.

  “And we did trials for Tenrix at a research facility in a hospital in Denver.”

  “So you called her, she engaged the brother-in-law, and what happened?”

  “What happened was, the guy he put on it found out two, Frankie”—she leaned deeper toward me—“two nurses on that trial got in bad car crashes. Bad. One lost her legs. One, such severe head trauma, she can’t work anymore.”

  “Whistle-blowers,” I whispered.

  Tandy nodded. “We think so. We also know the turnover in nurses during that trial was severe. Nearly all of them went in and out the door. The investigator tracked some of those nurses down and they w
ould not talk. Not at all. The investigator suspected this was because of fear, but maybe payoffs. And Bierman may make some dough, but we figure he doesn’t have the resources for that kind of operation.” She paused before she finished, “But Barrow does.”

  I figured they figured right.

  “They find evidence of the payoffs?” I asked.

  Tandy shook her head. “We only could pool so much money together to pay the investigator guys, so no. We couldn’t ask them to dig deeper. They’re really cool guys and they offered to keep going, get us on a payment schedule. But we really couldn’t do that.”

  Fuck.

  “But Peter found something,” she stated, and I again focused on her.

  “What?”

  “He’s really clever with computer stuff. He did some of his voodoo and found out Dr. Gartner was getting payoffs. He’d put it in an account under his stepmother’s name. His dad’s dead so that’s probably why the cops didn’t catch it. I don’t know how he managed that, but he never touched it and neither did she. And we all figure—because, apparently, he was a super guy—Gartner was playing the game, pretending he was taking payoffs, but amassing his own evidence to take to Berger or the board or whoever could do something to stop Tenrix getting out. They found out and he got killed.”

  I’d totally forgotten about it until that moment, but it was then I remembered the tense phone call I partially overheard Bierman having. It was before Gartner died. But it could have been anyone in this drama he was threatening.

  “Miranda and Peter are working that,” Tandy informed me, and I focused back on her.

  “Working what?”

  “She’s in production now and Dr. Gartner’s computer, files, and assistant are in production. They’re looking to see if he left anything behind or if they cleaned up after him. ”

  Jeez, they totally had it going on. The Miranda move was a ploy to get her into production.

  I was impressed.

  But I still didn’t get it.

  I looked away from her and asked, mostly to myself, “Why would Barrow be behind this?”

  “Because we need a winner,” Tandy answered.

  I looked back at Tandy. “What?”