Outside The Lines:: Third Person Narration Read online

  “Cowards,” he said at once. “You get one shot at this life, you don’t throw it away. Not when some people get it ripped out of their hands, and all they want is one more chance to not fuck it up, one more goddamned minute. Have you ever seen someone want just one more minute?”

  Juliette stared. She shook her head.

  He gave a clipped nod. “You get a chance, you take it. It’s the only rule. You don’t throw it away. Fuck that.”

  He looked back at the road.

  Her jaw dropped at his intensity. Then she thought about the scars she’d seen traversing his body like a topographical map, and said, “Yeah,” real softly. “That’s a good rule.” She shifted around to stare through the windshield. “I don’t think people like us get irony.”

  “Never been a fan,” he agreed.

  She stared at the swirling snow, Johnny’s words echoing in her mind, about chances and cowards. Silence filled the car except for the muted strains of music, so low she could hardly hear it.

  “I spent some time in juvie,” she announced abruptly. She had no idea why. Nor why she’d done it so loudly.

  Silence came from the driver’s seat. Then Johnny looked over. “Did you?”

  “Yeah. I was young and stupid.”

  “Maybe just young.”

  “No,” she countered sharply. “Almost entirely stupid.”

  He nodded, accepting that. “What happened?”

  She pursed her lips, looked out her window. “A lot of things. Mostly, my mother died. Well, first she did drugs, then she married a low-life, then she died. My brother tried raising me. That didn’t work out.”

  “It rarely does,” he said, his voice never leaving the calm, low-pitched range.

  “No.”

  “How much time were you in?”

  All added up? Years. “Not a lot,” she said vaguely. “So I don’t think this was about proving myself to Mrs. Billings, or impressing anyone, so much as…I just…had a feeling.” She looked out at the dark, whirling snow. “Just a feeling. I know that sounds crazy. It’s just…after spending all that time with all those budding criminals, you get a sort of sixth sense when you’re with someone who’s up to no good.”

  “Yes, you do,” he agreed quietly.

  Something about that made her shift around, peer at him closely. “Did you spend any time in juvie?” she asked suspiciously.

  He was quiet for so long she figured the conversation was over. She figured she’d done what she usually did, pushed too hard, pissed someone off, the usual m.o., then Johnny said, very quietly, “Only to pick people up.”

  Uh-oh. That didn’t sound good.

  It sounded almost as bad as all the things Juliette wasn’t saying.

  “Family?” she asked tentatively.

  He nodded. “I have a lot of brothers. Some of them couldn’t follow the rules.”

  She took a breath, released it. “I’m sorry.”

  “So am I,” he said, and for the first time, she heard something in his voice that went beyond cold reason or detached amusement or body-firing lust. He sounded…weary.

  She inhaled deeply.

  Nothing more got said. Now the conversation was definitely over. She was sure done with it. She had no idea why she’d brought it up in the first place. It made her skin prickle every time she talked about the past or her family. It was the same thing that happened when the ominous music started playing in an old movie, right before the scary creature leapt out of the shadows.

  When she thought about her family, she felt like covering her head with a blanket.

  She gave her scalp a hard, vigorous, all-over scratching with both hands, wiping away the prickling.

  Then Johnny’s voice rumbled out of the driver’s seat. “You should trust your feelings, Jauntie.”

  She looked over slowly. She couldn’t look quickly, because her head suddenly felt light, buoyant, like a balloon. It might float off.

  “I do trust them.” Her voice seemed to come from a long ways off. “I just piss off a lot of people in the process.” Her family. Her probation officer. Coworkers. Most of her bosses. Just about every person she’d ever met, in fact, including a good portion of her clients.

  Everyone, really. Except Johnny.

  “Fuck ’em,” he said, still looking forward at the road.

  He sounded so sure about that. His certainty was like a little boat, sailing past her as she bobbed in a sea of self-doubt.

  “Yeah. Fuck them,” she echoed softly, then settled back in her seat and practiced it a few times “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck them. Fuck ‘em all,” she added in a fit of enthusiasm.

  Johnny laughed.

  She snuggled back in the seat, leaned her head back, let her eyes drift shut. After a moment, eyes still closed, she said quietly, “Johnny?”

  “Hm?”

  “Did you really think my valuation was science fiction?” She shouldn’t care. She didn’t care. She just…wondered.

  He was silent. She opened her eyes and looked over. He was looking at her, his gaze level.

  “I thought it was a thing of fucking beauty,” he said.

  A smile spread over her face and she let her eyes close again.

  They drove home that way, Juliette occasionally napping, Johnny driving, listening to music, not all of it from the eighties. They even found a late-night talk show where people insulted each others’ opinions about the Oakland A’s prospects for the upcoming season as they drove across the long, lonely, snow-swept highway. Sometimes they talked, mostly they didn’t.

  At some point, Johnny’s hand ended up in her lap—she might have reached for it, she didn’t recall, exactly—and it stayed there. Maybe because she was gripping it. But he didn’t pull away.

  She slid her legs out, toward the center stick shift, and pushed her jacket behind her back. His hand, warm and heavy, rested on her thighs. She dozed.

  Later yet, the snow turned to rain, then went away entirely and the sun rose behind them, pushing a long pale cape of light over the world they were driving into.

  Chapter Fourteen

  JULIETTE SHOOK herself awake when the morning sunlight glowed too bright against her eyelids to be ignored anymore. She sat up clumsily. They were almost over the mountains. Down below lurked the city. People. Problems.

  Johnny was driving silently, looking straight ahead. Tousled hair and a day’s growth of beard suited him. His eyes were a little tired, but mostly he looked rumpled and sexy. He had one forearm slung over the steering wheel, his hips rotated slightly to the side, pressing his faded jeans against the musculature of his thigh. His dark grey cotton long sleeve clung to his chest and flat belly.

  “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 in
to 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.

  Who was renting those properties now? To the tune of seven hundred thousand dollars?

  She moved soundlessly to her bag and heaved it up onto the table that formed the anchor for a small sitting area off to the side in Johnny’s office, framed by a low couch and two chairs.

  She pulled everything out and started reading.

  She didn’t know how much time passed before she heard footsteps in the carpeted hallway. The handle rattled softly and the door swung open, spreading a triangle of light across the carpet. Johnny stepped in and shut the door behind him, plunging the room back into shadowy dimness.

  “What did he say?” she whispered. She didn’t know why she was whispering.

  “He said he called the FBI,” he replied, just as quietly.

  So, they were both whispering. Coldness trickled through her.

  “So, it’s over?” she said uncertainly.

  “It’s not over, babe.” His voice was grim.

  She got to her feet quietly. “I don’t think so either, Johnny. I think we missed something.”

  “What?”

  “The—”

  Johnny’s hand snapped up and she stopped mid-syllable. Footsteps sounded outside the door, muffled by the carpet. Johnny swung the door open and stood in the opening, blocking her from view.

  Through the half-opened doorway, she spied a handsome man standing in the corridor, with salt-and-pepper hair and beard, looking a little unkempt but still like a movie star. Johnny seemed to be surrounded by movie stars.