Outside The Lines:: Third Person Narration (20 page)

“Hi,” she mumbled.

He nodded like a cowboy. “Morning.”

She struggled up and wiped her hand though her hair, then grumbled quietly about the lack of caffeine in the car.

“I’ll stop when we get into the city,” he said.

A shot of contrition went through her, almost as good as espresso for waking a girl up.
 
“I’m sorry.” She straightened the rest of the way in her seat.
 
“I didn’t mean to snap at you. Usually there’s no one around when I need coffee.”

He nodded. “I understand. You’re an addict.”

Well.
 
She didn’t like how that sounded. She hid a huge yawn behind her arm, then looked around.
 
“I guess we go straight to the office?”

He looked grim as he nodded.
     

She freshened up as much as one can in a pickup truck. She drank a bottle of water Johnny provided, wiped some of it over her face, then ate half a protein bar and three mints she found in a tin at the bottom of her bag. She offered the other half of the bar and the last three mints to Johnny, but he declined.
 

She pulled her hair out of its band and tossed her head down, between her knees, so her hair hung down, then finger-combed through it, not an easy task, then flipped it back in an arc so it settled on her back.
 
Band looped over her wrist, she swirled the hair around her palm, ready to fasten it back into bondage.

Feeling eyes on her, she looked over.

Johnny was watching her with a tired sort of hunger. “That looks good.”

Heat slid through her, quiet, morning time heat.
 
“So does that,” she said.
 

A dark eyebrow quirked up. “What?”

“That.”
 
She waved at his whole body.

A corner of his mouth tilted up.
 

They made their way silently into the pre-dawn city, down quiet narrow streets until they arrived at their office building.

Johnny parked in the underground garage. There weren’t many cars there at six a.m.
 
Juliette dragged her bag out behind her as she slid out.
 
Her feet hit the ground with a thud.
 
The concrete slabs and columns bounced the sound back in a sharp, grating echo.

Johnny put his hand on the small of her back and they took the elevators up.
 
She hit the button for the fifth floor, where her office now seemed to exist in a fog of memory, but when the doors opened there, Johnny just shook his head.
 
She let them close again and they continued up to forty-three.
 

He was absolutely silent as they sailed up, floor after floor.
 
About the thirty-eighth floor, she cleared her throat.

He snapped his gaze off the elevator doors and pinned her in it.
 
It was like getting caught in a Taser; a low hum of electricity rolled through her body.

“You like paper, right?” he said.

She stared.
 

“Can I have some?”

“Some…?”

“Paper.”

Good Lord, when Johnny didn’t want to talk, he sure was good at it.
 
She scrambled into her bag and came out with a pencil and an old receipt for gas.
 

He scribbled something on the back of it as they sailed up.
 
When they hit the forty-third floor, the doors dinged open.
 
Fat and liquid, the sound echoed throughout the deserted hallway.
 
Ahead stood the heavy double doors of Danger Enterprises, the logo like lightning with its sharp, sword-like strokes.
 

Johnny unlocked the door and swung it open, ushering Juliette in ahead of him.

The faint sound of a voice could be heard down the long hallway, from a far room.
 

“—never fucking told you to do that,” was all they could hear clearly, then the voice dropped to a murmur.

Johnny shut the door.

The voice stopped. “Johnny?” it called. “Is that you?”
 
Sounds of muffled footsteps on carpet.

“Go into my office,” Johnny said grimly, looking down the hall. He tossed her a heavy silver key ring. There was one key on it. “Door on the right.”

She felt wavery, shaky.

“Johnny, be careful,” she whispered.

“Call this number.”
 
He slipped her the scrap of paper just as a door opened down at the far end of the corridor.

She backed up into the darkness of his office.
 

A male voice at the other end of the long carpeted hallway said, with obvious relief, “Johnny, thank God you’re here.”
 

 
Heart hammering, she moved through his office as fast as she could, not daring to put on a light.
 
She scrabbled inside the depths of her bag with one hand as she went, searching for her phone, but hit the desk before she found it, and instead shimmied around the desk like she was on a sinking ship, hands out as she felt her way, and eventually fumbled the receiver of the desk phone into her hand.
 

With trembling fingers she put it to her ear and, by the light coming in between the blinds from the sunrise outside, dialed the number Johnny had written down.
 

A voice answered and said curtly, “Agent Murphy, FBI.”

“Oh shit,” she whispered.

“Yeah, I get that a lot,” he muttered. “Who are you, and how’d you get my number?”

DAN BLEW OUT a huge sigh of relief as he came down the hall toward Johnny, his hand outstretched.
 

He looked more disheveled than Johnny had ever seen him, even after a late-night session of deal making or poker playing.
 
He wore a light sweatshirt and jeans, and sprouted a stubbly grey and brown beard.
 

“Thank God you’re back,” Dan said, and clasped Johnny’s hand tightly as he drew him into the conference room.
 
“This is bad.”

Johnny stepped just inside and stopped. “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

“I can only tell you guesses.” Dan spun one of the conference chairs around and sat down, facing Johnny.
 
He thrust out an arm and pushed a box of doughnuts across the table. They made a soft hissing sound.

“Want one?” Dan said.

Johnny’s eyes never left him. “You going to tell me what’s going on?”

Dan shook his head slowly and slumped back in his chair. “I’ve never seen any of those papers before, Johnny.
 
Now that I have, well, I admit, they’re pretty damning.”
 

“I thought so.”

“I called the judge. After your message, I couldn’t
not
.
 
He says the money was originally just a finder’s fee. Common practice in the building trade, you know that. Nothing illegal about it, but who wants to go on record as receiving a couple million dollars from a juvenile detention center developer when you’re the one sending kids there?”
 

“No one.”

“Look, Johnny, it’s over. I swear to you. As of now. I told him, it’s over.”

“You were right about that.”

“I’m devastated. We’ve been friends for years, the judge and I, and he….” Dan’s words drifted off.
 
He swiveled his chair around, stared bleakly out the window.
 
“He asked me to do the accounting on his wife’s rental, so I did it. It was no big deal. The accounting was simple, we go way back, you just…do those kind of favors for friends.
 
Fuck,” he muttered and put his face in his hands for a long silent minute.

Johnny waited by the door and looked around the familiar office, where they’d had so many late work nights, so many deals closed.
 
Some nights, so many people crowded into this office there was hardly room to breathe, lifting champagne glasses as yet another multi-million dollar buy-out was finalized, another round of bonuses assured, another windfall about to blow through Danger Enterprises.

“I fucked up,” Dan muttered and wiped his hand over his face. “I admit it. I was distracted. I wasn’t paying attention. I wasn’t rigorous with the valuation. What the hell, I didn’t think I needed to be.
 
He was my friend.” A flash of anger touched Dan’s voice, and he looked up, his face both red and washed-out looking. “Thank God you brought in that Jauntie character, right?
 
Thank God.”
 
He sounded bleak.
 
“I just—”
 

Dan broke off and sat back suddenly in his seat, wiped his hands over his face again, then slapped them on his thighs and looked up.
 

“Well, whatever.
 
Fuck it, right?
 
Everyone’s entitled to a mistake.” He gave a hollow laugh. “Anyway, I called the FBI.
 
Told them what we found.
 
What
you
found.”

Johnny said nothing, just nodded slowly.
   

Dan gestured at the box of papers sitting on the table.
 
“I’m taking these over to the FBI now. They’re waiting for me.”
 
He looked at Johnny, his eyes almost unrecognizable, weary and old.
 
“You can’t trust anyone, Johnny, my boy.”

“I know that.”
 

Dan got to his feet.
 
“Yeah, you know.”

But the thing was, Johnny had trusted.
 
He trusted Dan.
 
But right, now, he was thinking about the fact that he’d never actually told Dan what he and Juliette had found in the books.
 
The names, the implications.
 
He’d never said a word.

But somehow, Dan seemed to know all about it.

Or…did he?
 
Because now that he thought about it, Dan hadn’t actually said a word, either.

Dan really should have been a lawyer.

JULIETTE SAT in the dimness of Johnny’s office, staring at the shadowy walls that were filled with framed diplomas and even bigger framed photographs of happy Danger Enterprise clients doing celebratory things, like sharing champagne toasts with important-looking people—she recognized the governor in one—and men in three-piece suits and hard hats holding shovels at groundbreakings. One picture looked to be a book signing.
 

She strolled idly beside the gallery of happy rich people, looking at the pictures, but thinking about the judge. About jails and kids and money and power.
 

And percentages.
 

The Mendine payments had totaled more than two million dollars. They comprised almost three-quarters of all rent payments ever made to the Billings’ condo. It was a huge chunk of money. A huge chunk with suspicious connections.
 

But it wasn’t the whole chunk, and seventy-five wasn’t a hundred.

So now, Juliette was thinking maybe she should have been paying attention to that last twenty-five percent. The payments that had come in over the last year and a half, after the centers were built, after construction kickbacks would have been paid.