Outside The Lines:: Third Person Narration Page 14

  Johnny looked as calm as ever except that his hair was a little rumpled and he was breathing a little faster than usual, and a tendril of smoke was coming up from one of his boots.

  Dan, on the other hand, looked like he’d turned into the devil.

  His face, so white a moment ago, turned red and mottled as he stared at her, his nostrils flared, his eyes wide and glaring.

  “You,” he snarled softly, but his voice rose as he went. “Your fault, you busybody, you fucking nosy nobody, you know-nothing, dead-end, piss-ant, fucking runt,” he finished in a bellow. “It’s your fault.”

  Johnny started for him, but she stepped in front and put her fingertips on his chest. He stopped. She felt as if she was holding back the tide. His hands were fisted at his side, his breath gusted against her face, his heartbeat thudded against the fingertips she’d planted on his chest. But for all that, he stopped.

  She turned and stepped toward Dan. “Here’s the thing, Mr. Masters. You really shouldn’t fuck with runts. Because one day they get big. And smart. And then they fuck you back.”

  His face flushed entirely red and he lunged for her, fist swinging.

  Then Johnny finally got to punch him. It was a little scary, because he didn’t stop.

  He pummeled Dan to the ground and smashed his fist into Dan’s face repeatedly before Juliette dragged him off and hooked herself to the front of his body like a burr to hold him back.

  She didn’t fool herself that she’d stopped him, though. Johnny had stopped because he was ready to stop.

  It was at that moment the door flew open and a herd of armed, uniformed men streamed in, wearing police uniforms and jackets that said FBI in bright yellow letters.

  She’d never been so happy to see the police before.

  They separated Johnny and Dan, agreed that it had been a terrible fall, directly to Dan’s face, over and over, then trundled Dan out of the house, surrounded by four or five big guys with guns.

  The house became a crime scene. Official-looking people swarmed everywhere, asking questions, opening cabinets, flipping on computers, making copies and packing boxes. After an hour or so, they were escorted back to the offices of Danger Enterprises to do the same thing again.

  Employees stared in horror at Johnny’s bloodied hand and the cops and the FBI and the stories about their boss and Johnny’s long-time partner and friend.

  “And who the hell is she?” Juliette could hear them thinking as they stared at her, standing at Johnny’s side.

  After the initial bustle, she was almost forgotten. Johnny was busy with the agents and officers, answering questions and sharing information, of which Juliette had very little. A couple of buttoned-up firm lawyers arrived to oversee the investigation and ensure nothing was revealed that didn’t have to be revealed from Danger Enterprises.

  Juliette had less and less to offer, until she became entirely unnecessary, and ended up shunted into the conference room, alone. That was fine with her.

  Occasionally someone brought food or water, and once a sandwich arrived. She ate a potato chip, and sat back. It had been hours since she’d had coffee. She hardly noticed. She was perfectly happy to sit, numb, in the conference room, and stare out the huge window that overlooked the city.

  Her head hurt. A hard ball had formed in her stomach and throat. It wasn’t a rock; that might have been better. This was like a wad of rolled up wet newspaper, gagging her. Smothering her.

  The soft tread of a foot sounded at the door. Turning, she saw Johnny, and got to her feet, shocked at how good it felt to see him. How her whole body almost ached at the sight of him.

  “Hi.”

  “Hey.” He shut the door behind him. He was holding coffee and a large bag of M&Ms. “How you doing?”

  She nodded. “Okay.” Her voice was rusty from lack of use. And lack of coffee. And lack of M&Ms.

  He set the candy on the table and handed her the coffee along with a handful of sugar packets. She took them gratefully. The hot cup warmed the tips of her oddly cold fingers.

  “How are things going in here?” he asked, dropping into a chair.

  She laughed a little as she tore open a packet. “Quietly. It’s good not to be needed.” The sugar streamed into the coffee in a trail of white crystals. She tore open another packet, then paused and looked up. Johnny was watching her, his green gaze level, revealing nothing.

  “How are things out there?” she asked.

  “Moving fast.”

  In silence, she finished adding sugar and mixing it with the flat wooden stick, then put the lid back on and sat. She carefully positioned the coffee just so, pushing it until it was centered directly in front of her.

  Then there was nothing else to do but talk. Or grab her bag and run.

  She looked down at her hands curled around the coffee and cleared her throat.

  The FBI probably would have stopped her anyhow.

  “You have a really nice right hook,” she said.

  That elicited a faint smile.

  “Do they teach that at lawyer school?”

  “Third year.”

  She moved her gaze to his hands, which were resting on the conference table, curled around nothing. “I’m glad you didn’t have a gun.”

  “Dan is glad I didn’t have a gun,” he said grimly.

  “Good point.”

  His eyes slid to her. They were unreadable. “I can control myself, Juliette. That was me, controlling myself. And I wasn’t going to kill him. Not my job. The last thing I want is Judge Billings or Dan on my mind every day for the rest of my life. I’ve got enough of those. I just wanted to beat him up a little.” He paused. “Or a lot.”

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  His eyes warmed up a fraction of a degree. “I got one in there for you.”

  “I saw that one.”

  His green eyes weren’t so hard anymore. They were just…unreadable.

  “Did you used to get in a lot of fights as a kid, Johnny?” she asked, because while Johnny may not have ended up in juvie, he sure hadn’t lived a pretty life. He was too hard, and it was too quiet a hardness, like a diamond formed under the weight of the world, to come from big muscles or big talk. Johnny had lived hard, she knew that.

  He was quiet for a second. “Yeah.”

  She swallowed. “I thought so. I know a fighter when I see one.”

  He gave a little nod. “Takes one to know one.”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t get in fist fights.” She reflected a minute. “Just every other sort of fight.”

  He smiled faintly. “Guess that’s why you’re so good at it.” He pushed back in his chair a little, stretching out.

  “Yeah.” She sighed. “If it breathed, I fought it. It got to be a bad habit.”

  “Me too.”

  They looked at each other across the table in silence, thinking, she presumed, of all the fights they’d got into over the years. This could be a long silence.

  Unless one of them broke it, either by asking a question that took them deeper, or one that moved them away.

  She didn’t want to move away from this man. This man who was full of such self-controlled power and such hot-blooded passion. This man who knew when she needed M&Ms, and brought them to her.

  Not wanting to move away…that was completely new territory.

  She pushed her coffee cup around a little then said, “I don’t know where I got it from. My mom was the quietest, most agreeable thing. A deer in the headlights. A beautiful deer, but a deer. She was a pushover. I don’t know why I got so good at fighting.”

  “You got good at it to survive,” he said, his voice low.

  This man who’d known her for a couple days had peered into her past and plucked out the secret truth of her.

  She wasn’t sure she liked being peered into.

  She dragged her gaze off her coffee cup and met his eye. “What about you? Why did you get into so many fights?”

  “People picked them

  S
he nodded. “People are the worst.”

  He smiled faintly.

  “Which people?”

  He shrugged. “Mostly my father.”

  “I meant the fist fights.”

  He looked at her evenly and said, “Mostly my father.”

  “Ah,” she murmured, but even so, her voice cracked. Time to stop asking questions about how Johnny got here, so competent and hard and cold, and underneath it all, so filled with the kind of heat that could light Juliette’s never-before-kindled fire.

  The world was an awful place, hard and slicing cold, but Johnny was beautiful to her, tired and haggard-looking as the light from the afternoon city glowed into the room. The clouds were breaking up as sunset drew near, lighting up his face and the green eyes that never left hers as he told her how his dad used to beat him up. And that helped. Him not looking away…helped.

  She didn’t know how or why, but somehow, it helped, that he held her in his gaze.

  A stab of orange light forked between two tall buildings, and lit up his face. The sun was low in the sky. When had she last slept? Eaten? Oh right, Thai food. After which, Johnny had laid her out on his bed and made love to her. Because whatever came next, she knew that much: at some point last night, they’d made love.

  It felt like a million years ago.

  And she wanted to do it again, right now, have Johnny take her in his arms and make her forget all the awfulness of the world.

  She opened her mouth to tell him so, maybe suggest they grab their bags and run together, when Agent Murphy strode into the room like a force of nature, long strides, and swung out a chair.

  He threw his leg over it, sat down, and looked directly at Juliette.

  “You did good, kid,” he said simply.

  She opened her mouth and…cried.

  She dropped her forehead onto the table and closed her eyes as the tears poured out of her. It was confusing, and unfamiliar, and horribly embarrassing, but it diffused the thick pain that had been sitting in her gut, and dulled the pain that had been knifing through her temples, and it seemed to be some sort of release valve for the roar that had been at the back of her head ever since she’d realized the judge had taken money to send kids to jail.

  And maybe, way in the background of all the tears and pain, possibly there was something related the survival thing Johnny had mentioned, something about feeling so powerless back then, and maybe, now, not so much.

  Also, probably a deficiency of M&Ms. She got emotional without sugar.

  She heard male voices, talking low, then someone’s arms—Johnny’s arms—around her, holding her, murmuring in her ear, holding her.

  She held him back for as long as she could.

  But eventually, it was time to sit up, so she did. She wiped her hair down with her fingers and her face with a warm rag provided by someone she later learned was Roxy. Then Agent Murphy told them where things stood.

  “It’s bad,” he said without preamble. His update was swift, efficient, and brutal. “Looks like they struck a deal about four years ago. The old center was practically falling down, and Billings campaigned hard to have it replaced. I remember seeing him interviewed about it on the news, and the videos of the old center. Billings was right, it needed to be replaced. It was a complete shithole.”

  “They usually are,” said Juliette quietly.

  Both men turned and stared at her.

  She looked at the agent’s forehead rather than Johnny’s eyes.

  “The problem was,” Agent Murphy went on after a moment of silence, when it became obvious she had no intention of expanding further, “Billings had the budgetary discretion on whether to fund the county-run detention center, and Mendine paid some pretty hefty kickbacks to ensure Billings decided exactly what Mendine needed him to. Of course, there weren’t a lot of people pounding down the door to build a jail,” he added. “Which is where Marcus Jones Powers came in. Dan introduced them all, Mendine to Powers, then both of them to Billings. From there, it didn’t take much. They were on a roll. Ten million in loans, a few mil in kickbacks, and they were in business.

  “It’s big business,” Agent Murphy explained. “Millions and millions. As long as the jails have tenants, they have money. High crime rates are good for business, and the county pays, through the nose. I don’t know who approves these fucking things. It’s a money machine.”

  Johnny and his FBI friend looked at each other for a long time without saying anything. There was some underground communication going on between them, like a subterranean exit tunnel.

  Agent Murphy assured Johnny and her that the judge had already been arrested, and that Mrs. B was being brought in for questioning as well. She’d be fine, though. Juliette was certain she’d known nothing.

  Just a feeling.

  Agent Murphy agreed, then pushed to his feet. “I’ve got both your statements. I’ll call you when we need you, but for now, you can leave.” He shook Juliette’s hand, and was slow in releasing it. “Can I give you a lift? I hear you’re without a car. I am with one, so there at least, I can help.”

  She smiled a little. “You’ve already helped. And it’s no problem. I do BART.”

  He smiled back. “Lucky Bart.”

  His eyes met hers, and Juliette had the distinct impression that if he weren’t FBI and she weren’t part of his investigation, and if Johnny weren’t sitting right there, he’d have said something else entirely.

  And that made her smile a little more. Men were generally not interested in her. Maybe she’d found her niche: phenom accountants and hard-boiled FBI agents.

  “I’m driving you,” Johnny interjected, his voice hard as he looked between them.

  Agent Murphy took a step back, nodded and reached for Johnny’s hand. “You, I’ll call about a beer later this week.”

  Johnny nodded silently.

  Agent Murphy eyed him. “Don’t be too hard on yourself, Danger. There’s no way you could have known.”

  Johnny’s face was completely blank. “Right. No way to know who the criminals are.”

  But there was one way. Johnny had told her about it.

  Just suspect them all.

  Agent Murphy left, people came in and wanted to talk to Johnny, people in expensive suits with loosened ties and a lot of questions. It was clear she was keeping them from it.

  Johnny’s assistant, Roxy, who was as gracious in person as she’d been on the phone, arranged the company car for Juliette to use—“Absolutely no BART,” she said firmly, and for once, Juliette listened—and then, she helped Juliette slip out without Johnny knowing.

  As she walked out, she spotted him through the half-opened door of the conference room, bathed in a glow of lights, a bunch of men and women around him, all in suits, with drinks on the table, all talking, talking, talking, and Johnny sitting there, absolutely silent, staring down at his hands.

  She walked out the door. It was time to go. There was no running away, with Johnny or without him. Her phone had thirty-nine messages and she had a cold apartment to get back to and an African violet to water.

  Thirty-five of the messages were from Johnny.

  Three were from zealous clients about setting up tax appointments for the new year.

  The last was from Mrs. B.

  Juliette returned hers first.

  Chapter Seventeen

  MRS. B TOLD HER the judge had shown up in the middle of the night, only a few hours after Juliette had called, and gone directly to his office.

  “Barely moments after I scanned and sent those documents to you, dear,” she said.

  Juliette thought about how close that had been, how scared Mrs. B must have been. “Are the papers still there now?” she asked. “In the safe?”

  “Not a one. The FBI checked. He took them all.”

  Juliette exhaled, thinking about that. A few minutes more, and they’d never have known. “Did you mention to the judge that I’d asked for any papers?”

  “I do believe it slipped my mind.�
��

  She smiled. “I love you, Mrs. B.”

  “And I you, dear. I never trusted him, you know,” she added in a musing tone.

  Juliette was shocked. “But Mrs. B, you said you trusted Dan, and—”

  “I did not say that. You must listen better. I said the judge trusted him.”

  “And you trusted the judge.”

  “Never.”

  Juliette stared at the phone.

  “I deferred, my dear. It is an entirely different thing. I did not care. I did not attend. Which I see now was a terrible mistake. I should have been more involved. I need to care about many things in this world that I would rather not.”

  Juliette knew the feeling.

  “So I will start taking more care.”

  “That’s good, Mrs. B.”

  “Starting with you.”

  “Me?”

  “I would like you to care for my business. My antique business. It seems I require an accountant, and I would like that person to be you. And I will be selling the apartments, once I am able to do so, if I am able to do so, and donating the money. I shall need someone to assist in the financial end of those arrangements. Will you accept the position?”

  “Oh, well, I— Yes, ma’am. Absolutely, I accept.”

  “Very good.” Juliette could hear her pleasure through the phone. “It’s not a large business, of course.”

  “I specialize in not-large.”

  “Yes, I know, dear.”

  Juliette blinked. “Oh.”

  “But I know many people who do have more substantial businesses,” Mrs. B went on. “And I believe in referrals.”

  She smiled.

  They hung up and Juliette looked around the empty apartment, feeling amped up and restless and unable to focus.

  But whatever she was feeing, how ever odd and off-kilter and floaty she felt right now, whatever she’d lost or been hit with during all this, it was going to be a thousand times worse for Johnny.

  And if she knew anything, it was that Johnny and she were kindred spirits. Lone wolves on an ice floe. Which meant she knew just what he’d be doing right now.

  He’d be alone. In his office. Dying inside.