Page 142 of Take Your Breath Away

“Anyway, I finish making the call and I notice this satchel the guy’d been carrying. It’s kind of opened some, and there’s some cash that’s spilled out. A lot of cash. I mean, like a hundred grand in cash, although I didn’t know it was that much until later, when I counted it.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“The guy’s still unconscious, the ambulance hasn’t arrived yet. And there hasn’t been another car along that stretch for a while, but you never know when one’s gonna show up. So I had a decision to make, right?” He paused. “I made the wrong one.”

“Did the guy live?” I asked.

“Yeah, he made it. I guess he’d made some kind of drug delivery and was coming back with the cash when he wiped out. He’d been ripped off but it wasn’t like he was going to tell the cops. But he and his buddies figured it had to be whoever made the 911 call.”

“You didn’t leave your name, but there was a record of your number.”

Another nod. “I don’t know how they got it, but they did. And once they had the number they were able to track me down. Paid me a little visit. I hadn’t spent much of the money, just a few hundred. Gave it back, but my apology didn’t cut it.”

“That’s when they broke your leg.”

“Yeah. Held me down, went at it with a sledgehammer.”

Isabel winced, but there was no sympathy in her eyes.

“They weren’t done. They said, you rip us off, you pay us back double. They wanted another hundred grand. Or the next time, we hammer your skull, they said.”

“You could have gone to the police.”

Greg rolled his eyes. “Yeah, tell them I ripped off some bikers, could you help me out? And if they had someone inside who could trace my call to 911, maybe they had someone inside who’d tell them I’d tattled.”

“The hundred grand,” I said slowly. “Let me guess. This is around the time we started losing all those jobs.”

Greg grimaced. “This is hard to talk about.”

I waited, feeling the gun at my back like it was a huge stone in my shoe.

Greg moved the reciprocating saw from one hand to the other. It had to be getting heavy. “Believe me when I tell you I never wanted to do this. I felt sick about it, still do. It was a shitty thing to do. At the time, I didn’t see any way out, you know?” He paused, then said, “I sold us out.”

“How?”

“I went to our competitors. Leaked our bids, allowing them to undercut us, even offer more for less.”

“And they paid you off,” I said.

He nodded. “They were big projects. It was worth it to them, slipping me twenty or thirty thousand to get those jobs. They’d recover it all on the back end. I fucked us over on enough bids to get almost all of it, then sold the MG to get the rest. I got the hundred grand I needed to keep the bikers from bashing my head in.”

“You destroyed our company. All that we’d worked for.”

He broke eye contact with me, and when he did I took a second to adjust the gun at my back so it wasn’t digging in quite so uncomfortably. Greg might have missed it, but Isabel didn’t.

I couldn’t believe he’d done this to us, sabotaged our entire enterprise, and yet I knew there was an even greater betrayal to be told about.

“You could have come to me,” I said. “Told me the trouble you were in. Figured a way out of it. You didn’t have to sell us out.”

“And what would you have done?” he said. “Were you going to pull a hundred thousand bucks out of your ass? Huh?”

I shook my head sadly and said, “Why don’t you get to the part where Brie found out.”

Sixty

Jayne was in the kitchen when the phone rang.

She’d been holding one of the cordless receivers that was linked to the household landline, given that Andrew had taken her cell phone with him. She’d been hoping he’d call, tell her more about what he planned to do. He’d been vague about his intentions when he’d left. Wanted to drop by Isabel and Norman’s house to return his phone, he’d said. But she knew he had much more on his mind than that.