Monday, 5:35 p. m.
Shanaya kept her hands plunged into her hoodie pockets, not feigning the chill she felt. The temperature on the floor stayed only warm enough to keep the workers from wanting to leave. With her thumb she flipped open the phone they had given her. She’d originally greeted the phone with derision, a cheap thing with ancient technology, actual buttons instead of a flat screen, but now she saw the benefit of something that could be dialed by touch alone.
But did she want to? Pull the plug before she’d gathered enough information to ransom her money back from the cops?
The pit boss led the way up the stairs; some other goon, a guy she’d never seen before, walked behind her.
She and her escorts made an ominous little parade and some of her coworkers noticed, watching them go with worried expressions. Not concern for her—they were too busy wondering what had happened and how they could avoid it to spare a thought for the condemned. But she understood. They were afraid, walking a tightrope between the threats outside the building and the ones inside. Even the pit boss seemed afraid, his shoulders twitching, and as they approached the office door, he waved her on ahead, trying for a stern look but unable to hide his bafflement. He did not know what was going on and was just smart enough to not want to.
As she passed the second-floor cubicles, the noise level changed in her wake. The normal constant, deafening buzz turned to an agitated rolling murmur of voices raised in question, arguing, then muffled sounds of chairs rolling back and groaning under various weights. Her heart leapt in a brief instant of hope—maybe it wasn’t only her, maybe a bunch of people were being called in for some sort of shakeup or housecleaning or—award for high productivity? Maybe she had misread the whole situation—
No. From the perplexed, annoyed, slightly stunned expressions of her coworkers, the truth would not be so benign. Call-takers were rising, getting their coats and purses, hissing quick questions at the man making the rounds to inform them and not liking the answers or lack of same. Most appeared irritated, some curious, some simply relieved to have an excuse to end the day early.
They were leaving.
She passed the day care center, where the harried teacher seemed to be passing out coats to several toddlers. The kids cooperated for a change, jumping at this chance to go home early.
The big boss had decided to clear the entire building. He meant to forgo any income the rest of the evening would have brought in—it was still light out on the West Coast. This had never happened before.
He didn’t want any witnesses to Shanaya’s fate.
Run. Run. Turn and run right now, squeeze between the exiting workers and don’t stop—
Without conscious thought her body had slowed, pivoted. . . and the goon behind her grabbed her elbow with enough force to stop the blood flow to her fingers.
The running option had expired. In the last few steps before the office, she fought to still her mind and proceed carefully. Phone numbers would be set in the standard grid, three across, four down. Nine would be three across, three down. One, easy, upper left. Press, press, press. Do nothing. If the 911 operator answered and asked after her emergency, the voice would be lost in the cacophony of the call room. The goon and the pit boss would never hear it, muffled in the depths of her pocket. She strolled as slowly as she could, planning to flip the thing shut again before entering the boss’s presumably quieter inner space. The cops would have to figure it out. Supposedly the phone only dialed one number, that of the detectives who assigned her this little task, but surely it would call the main emergency line, too. Right?
And flipping it shut would end the call. It wouldn’t keep yakking while she marched up to Mr. Hawking, would it?
Either way, nothing she could do about it now. Brazen it out. She’d done it before.
They reached the boss’s door.
Shanaya had not been inside the inner office since the day she’d been hired. It had not changed since—three cluttered shelves on the wall, forcing anyone who walked around that side of the desk to lean away from them; the other side of the desk against the wall, bisecting the room. It stank of cigarettes, though none burned in the ashtray.
She did not know the man seated behind the desk, though she had seen him there on occasion. Mark Hawking stood beside him, wedged into a corner between the desk and the shelves, looking uncomfortable from either the position or the prospect of what they might be about to do to her.
She willed her face to stay calm, and stepped up to the desk. The goon stayed at her right shoulder. She could feel his body heat even through her hoodie.
The man behind the desk took her in. She ignored him, couldn’t find the man behind the desk remotely as terrifying as the object placed on the desk, resting in the exact center of the calendar blotter.
A cell phone.
Evani’s cell phone. A silver-colored model that he’d taken a red Sharpie to during one particularly boring shift.
They had Evani’s phone. Someone in that office had killed Evani.
But that wasn’t what worried her.
“Clever,” the man behind the desk said. “You two were clever. Any cash business is prone to skimming—numbers, prostitution, drugs—because the guy at the top, like me, can never be sure how much comes in at the entry points, or persons like you.”
She could barely hear him over the blood pounding in her ears, but she tried. There had to be an opening. There had to be a crack she could use—
“This is a cash business without the cash. Data entered on a screen. All digital, ones and zeros and routed to a central server. One person couldn’t do it. But two, working together—”
She gripped the back of the chair in front of her. “Mr.—”
He didn’t supply his name. “You’d get the mark’s card number, security code, type it into your screen exactly as we instructed you. The good little employee, except before you’d hit enter, you’d—well, I bet you’d look around to make sure that idiot out there wasn’t paying attention, then pop out your phone, take a picture of the screen, and text it to your little friend Evan.”
She hadn’t thought she could feel worse, but now . . . that near-million was gone. If the cops didn’t take it all, these guys would. They had figured it out. She thought she might be sick, and felt almost glad of it. Puke all over Mr. Hawking’s desk. At least leave them a bad smell to remember her by.
“He’d buy money orders on the cards. Charge as much as he could. You’d send the card information on to the central unit, but by that time there would be a lot less available credit. We didn’t know, how could we? So the cardholder had a high balance, so what? Everybody abuses their credit, that’s why there’s a debt crisis in this country. Meanwhile your little friend cashes out the money order he bought—easy enough, he’s sitting inside a place that does exactly that. And you pick up another phone call. Never leave your desk, never shove anything into your pocket, never open an account. No trace. I never would have been the wiser.”
Admit nothing, she told herself.
“But then your little friend got greedy. Decided to skim off a few other concerns as well. Problem is, that concern also belonged to me.”
The checks, Shanaya knew instantly. Those huge medical reimbursement checks. A percent to the runner who brought it in, the rest deposited in some offshore account. Evani took out more than was requested, gave a fake receipt to the runner for the right cut, kept the difference, and deposited the bulk. It was so much money, these huge amounts coming in every day. Surely whoever owned those offshore funds couldn’t be checking each and every deposit, right?
It wasn’t fair. That two businesses would launder funds through the same money store did not surprise her. That they were both owned by the same man was karma, biting her in the ass.
Damn Evani. The one time he broke from his cautious, paranoid, too-careful persona, and it had exactly the result he had feared. She’d told him not to do it . . . but yes, not too strenuously. The faster they built up their own account the faster they could blow town. Then it wouldn’t matter who noticed what.
The classic embezzler’s downfall. They’d waited too long to get out.
The man said, “I knew it wasn’t Ralph, since he’s the one who alerted me to his own cashier consistently cashing money orders. Took him a damn long time since it didn’t leave him out any money. When he finally got curious, thought the kid was pickpocketing, stealing card numbers. Ralph wanted to be cut in, that’s all. Only your bad luck that he mentioned it to me before he talked to Evan. Once we looked at the card numbers we knew where they came from. Wayne figured your system out almost instantly. Wayne’s a millennial, like you. I guess you brats think alike.”
She didn’t know what to say to that, had no idea who Wayne might be.
“So I sent him out to take care of Evan, but even with a spike halfway to his heart, he didn’t give you up. That probably makes you feel good.”
Not especially, she thought. Poor Evani.
“We didn’t find the money, didn’t find an ID, home address, nothing. We found this”—he held up the phone again—“and I checked texts, voice mails, call history, got us nowhere. You had the sense not to answer, I’ll give you that.”
He waited for her response, but only the span of a breath. It didn’t really matter what she said now.
“I checked the photos. Well, singular: photo. But I’m old. Without my reading glasses it looked like a blank page, a picture of the floor or ceiling. I do that all the time. My toddlers can use my phone better than I can. Plus I’ve been distracted with other things this week. But when I looked again—” He thumbed to the image, turned the phone around so she could see the screen. She didn’t want to look, knowing what she’d see. A photo of the monitor at her work station. Evani had always been careful to delete each one once he’d gotten the numbers, and she would delete them from her own phone on every trip to the ladies’ room. Apparently he’d gotten careless or distracted with this last one. She couldn’t read the details on the tiny screen, the name or the numbers, but she could pick out what had betrayed her: the sticker with the cherries on the lower right-hand corner of the monitor frame.
All he’d had to do was walk through the cubicles until they found the right monitor.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said instantly, surprised at how strong her voice sounded. “That’s the computer at my workstation, but I’m not the only one who uses it. There’s the other shift. And the pit bull—boss, he sits down at it sometimes when I’m on break.” She couldn’t stand the guy anyway. If she needed to sacrifice a goat in her place, it might as well be a nasty, horny one.
“We’ve already eliminated them,” Mr. Hawking said, garnering a quick glare from the man behind the desk. In front of that man, she realized, Hawking became another flunky, no better than her.
“I want the money back,” said the man behind the desk. “Now.”
“I don’t have any money. I’ve been working so hard here trying to—”
“I want every penny you and Evan stole from me. Hand it over and I might let you live.” He held up his hands in a show of expansiveness. “A simple trade.”
“I don’t have it.” This was, of course, the truth. It rang out into the room with the peal of a silver bell and convinced the man. She could see it. He didn’t want to, but he believed her.
Which in no way meant he would give up. “I’ve already killed—well, had Wayne kill for me—three people in the past week. Making it four would take no skin off anybody’s nose, except for, well, yours. So you’d better have something more to say than that.”
A silence ensued while she contemplated her next move. Despite the frantic pounding of blood in her ears, the sweat pricking out of every pore, she thought she saw a glimmer of light in the black hole of her future.
She said: “The cops have it. And I’m the only one who can get it back for you.”
No reaction at first. But then the boss pinched the bridge of his nose, rubbed the deep vertical line between his eyebrows. The other two men in the room did not move, did not seem to breathe. Neither did Shanaya.
“Okay,” he said at last. “I’m listening.”
