Page 21 of The Whisper Place (To Catch a Storm #3)
Jonah backed it up again and we watched Kate cross the yard, approaching the back door and the camera.
She kept her head down, one hand gripping the bag slung over her shoulder, the other holding her keys.
She didn’t seem to be in any hurry, maybe tired or lost in thought.
She looked older than I’d assumed based on the picture Charlie had given us.
It was something about the way she moved, a carefulness I didn’t associate with anyone under forty.
Or maybe it was just because she didn’t have a screen glued to her hand.
“I’d still say mid-twenties.” Jonah weighed in on my internal debate. “She’s got some baby fat left in her cheeks.”
“How is baby fat different than regular fat?”
“Gravity.”
Before she disappeared inside the bakery, Kate looked around, scanning the yard behind her in a move that seemed automatic.
“Yeah, she does that every time,” Jonah said, again talking to my thoughts. “Sometimes she pauses for longer.” He flipped back to the other footage, hitting play and slumping further down in his chair.
I went to the safe. “We got another payment from Charlie.” The brick of cash had weighed down my coat pocket the whole way back to Iowa City, but I hadn’t felt comfortable putting it on the passenger seat.
Even now, the pile of bills stuffed on top of the random papers crammed into the safe gave me heartburn.
I locked it quickly and went to find some Tums.
“What is it?” Jonah asked.
“Nothing.” The Tums jar was empty. Shit. I trashed it and made do with an aspirin. But by the time I came back to our desks, Jonah had turned around and was frowning at me.
“I said it’s nothing.”
We both knew I was lying. Jonah waited me out, scanning me like an emotional MRI.
Stalling, I grabbed a beer out of the fridge. “Want one?”
He shook his head.
I sat down at my desk, directly across from his, and took a long drink. There was no avoiding this anymore. Frankly, I was shocked Jonah hadn’t heard me thinking about it once in the past year. I must have been better at compartmentalization than I’d thought.
“I was worried when we started out. About getting enough clients. Making ends meet.”
“That’s changed?”
“Christ, just let me say it.”
He leaned back, crossed his arms, and waited.
“One day, a few months after we opened this place, I got a package.”
I’d been alone in the office, listening to the sound of the furnace heating with money we didn’t have, a hundred dollars for each degree, while I went through the books.
Every column ended in red at the bottom, and every red number sent my blood pressure rising that much higher.
We had some clients, but this was before ACT had come on board with their steady monthly checks and cascade of referrals.
We didn’t have enough cash to pay rent next month, let alone our paychecks.
The idea of explaining to Shelley that the business had failed less than six month after it started sent me to a new tab on my browser looking through part-time jobs.
I skipped past the few private security positions advertised, even though that was the natural fit; the thought of a knockoff uniform and the little self-important desks where those jack-offs sat on their asses doing nothing made me angry just thinking about it.
Bartending could have been good money, except I barely knew how to do anything other than open a beer can.
I was considering a second-shift warehouse job—the pain in my shoulder had been getting better and I could easily forget to mention it on the application—when a FedEx truck arrived.
The package didn’t look like anything special—a cardboard box, blank except for the postmarks. The return address was a rural route in Iowa I wasn’t familiar with. It was addressed to Celina Investigations, c/o Max Summerlin. The handwriting looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
I opened it and dropped the box cutter on my desk, staring at the contents.
It was cash. Stacks and stacks of cash.
There was no note, no indication of who sent it or why, but in my gut I already knew. I took it to the back room, even though the odds of a client walking through the door were slim to none, and counted.
“How much?” Jonah asked.
“Two hundred thousand.”
He made a noise and leaned against his desk, face in his hands. “Kara.”
“I think so.”
Kara Johnson had been my quasi partner during a DEA task force operation, which turned out to be my last assignment in law enforcement.
The DEA had been hunting for the money from a mostly busted drug empire.
I didn’t know if they ended up finding any after I resigned, but apparently Kara had. And she was sharing.
I traced the return address to an animal sanctuary in the middle of the state. Nothing on their website indicated Kara was there, but there wouldn’t be. She lived firmly below any standard radars.
“And you decided to keep it without telling me.”
“I didn’t want your hands to be dirty, too.”
Jonah shoved away from the desk, standing up. “What are you, my father? You don’t get to decide that for me, Max.”
“I know I—”
“No, you don’t.” Jonah slammed the laptop closed and pulled the cord out of the wall. He grabbed his coat off the desk, making papers fly. Photographs of missing persons flapped across the office, black-and-white faces landing everywhere. “You don’t know what having a partner means.”
“Believe me, I—”
“Right.” He laughed, shoving the front door open before turning around. “Carrying more than your share is one thing. I knew that was going to happen. But this?” He shook his head, looking at me with an open disgust I’d never seen on my best friend’s face, before walking out.