Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
Monday morning, they drove into the city center in the little convoy again, all three driving down into the underground garage. When they got out of the vehicles, the men surrounded the women in a tight tense knot of security.
Women because Nicole insisted on coming in to work, too. She said she’d go crazy staying home in bed, as Sam insisted. She was fine, just fine.
He took one look at the three huge men glowering at him and scampered away to another elevator.
As the men walked them down the hall, their entire body language was a Dirty Harryesque come on punk, make my day.
When the door of Nicole’s office closed behind them, Ellen opened her mouth and Nicole held up a finger. “If you apologize one more time, I swear I will scream. And then Sam and Harry and Mike will come running and we’ll never get anything done at all.”
Ellen felt so miserable. Nicole looked tired. The spotting had stopped almost immediately yesterday but she’d spent the day in the hospital undergoing tests before coming home and she clearly hadn’t slept well. There were slight bruises under her eyes.
Of course that was nothing compared to what was under her own eyes, because she hadn’t slept at all last night. She hadn’t even been able to close her eyes, staring wide-eyed at the black ceiling, listening to Harry’s heartbeat, savoring his solid warmth by her side, waiting for the dawn.
Thinking awful thoughts. Knowing what she had to do and dreading it.
“All right.” Nicole hung her jacket up neatly on a perfumed hangar and hung that on the brass clothes tree.
“I’ve got an urgent translation for a Luxembourg bank to finish and you’ve got to save me some more money.
So let’s get to work.” She sat down to her desktop and slid in her portable hard disk.
Her tone was brisk, but her movements were slow. She was battling her way through this in a way Ellen recognized and respected.
Nicole could use a thousand excuses and no one would think less of her.
If she wanted to stay home today—and all next week or even all next year—her husband would be more than happy.
But she had a company to run and people who depended on her for their livelihood and clients who expected her to deliver a good product in a timely fashion so here she was, tired and shaken, but ready to start her working day.
The least Ellen could do was offer her a little something. Nicole had been ridiculously behind with her accounts. Ellen had made her a simple, rational system that would be easy to keep up and was working hard on finding ways to save on taxes.
Ellen settled down at the desk, reaching down to the case at her feet.
She was using Harry’s laptop instead of Nicole’s because she’d worked on Nicole’s files over the weekend and her spreadsheets were there.
“I nailed another couple of thousand in tax deferrals and with a little luck I think I can set up a slightly different corporate structure for you so that you can deduct more stuff. That’ll save you at least ten thousand in taxes over the next five years. ”
“Wow.” Nicole tipped her head to the left of the monitor and gave her a dazzling smile.
“That’s great. Thank you so much and—" She held up an elegant pink-tipped finger, “Don’t apologize again. If you apologize I’ll do you bodily harm.
Don’t forget I can be meaner than Sam or Harry or Mike.
I don’t think any of them could hurt a woman, but I can. Don’t make me hurt you.”
Ellen had opened her mouth to thank her, and to apologize once more, but she closed it. The idea of Nicole wrestling her to the ground was so ridiculous, she just had to smile.
“Hold that thought.” Nicole’s processor beeped and she bent over the keyboard.
“Go save me some more money. Lunch is at twelve thirty. Goat cheese salad, grilled vegetable sandwich with focaccia bread, sliced apples for desert, everything washed down with green tea. I ordered the same lunch for the men. It’s a good thing these walls are fairly sound-proofed because you’d hear the groaning from here.
Now let’s concentrate.” And she disappeared into her monitor.
Ellen opened Harry’s laptop and plugged in his Bose headset. The laptop he’d given her was loaded with fabulous music. She loved isolating herself from the world with music when concentrating on work. In a second, she had a spreadsheet program open and Billie Holiday purring in her ears.
Okay.
Ellen was going to do extra good work for Nicole today.
She was going to set her up with a specially-designed program that would automatically calculate the best billing method and Nicole’s commission, weighted for urgency of the translation, technical difficulty and rarity of the language combination, together with a streamlined tax statement structure.
It was going to be her goodbye gift to Nicole.
Before disappearing.
She’d struggled with this decision all night, staring dry-eyed into the darkness, held close to Harry’s heart.
There was no way around this except for straight ahead on the hard rocky road of necessity. Montez would be after her forever. Year after year of fear and hiding. Of being afraid to be out in the open, of forcing her new friends to live under a shadow.
It was very likely that what Nicole had found out was the extent of what a civilian could discover. The next steps had to be taken by law enforcement officers, preferably the FBI.
There was a moral issue here, too. The longer Ellen waited to tip this tangled mess into the FBI’s capable hands, the longer Gerald had to mess with any evidence that might be left.
It might even be too late. Maybe she’d been wrong to spend this past year afraid and in hiding.
Maybe she should have been bolder, gone to the FBI before.
She’d been so scared, so terrified of sticking her head above the ground, that she might have ensured that Gerald get away with murder, twice.
Three times, actually, including poor Roddy.
If Gerald got away with it, it would be her fault.
Gerald would spend the rest of his life getting richer and richer, becoming ever more powerful, never paying for his crimes, while Ellen stayed hidden in the dark, worried every single second of the day that she was endangering people she’d grown to care for. And in the case of Harry, to love.
Unthinkable.
Yesterday had been a false alarm—a couple of balloons popping. But Harry was right, it could have been Gerald or one of his guys. At any moment, she could be in the crosshairs of some sniper employed by Gerald.
In five months, Nicole would have her baby and Ellen would be in a permanent sweat of anxiety that Gerald could kill her and Nicole and the baby. He wouldn’t hesitate. If he found out where she was, he’d kill everyone with her, on the off chance that she’d talked.
It was too late to keep Nicole from becoming a friend. Everything she knew about Nicole told her that she cared for Ellen and that she was intensely loyal to the people she cared about. She wouldn’t stay away from Ellen just because there was a vague possibility that Gerald would catch up with her.
It was more than just a vague possibility, though. He’d caught up with her in Seattle, he knew she’d been in San Diego. Gerald was smart and rich and had huge resources.
He’d know how to somehow track her down, he’d done it before.
Ellen had been careful when having the records produced.
The musicians, puzzled, had been in the next room and had never seen her, nothing had been signed in her name, not even in the name of Irene Ball, but in the name of a small company she’d set up where no one’s name actually appeared except that of a lawyer who worked online just for companies like hers.
But Gerald had found Roddy, had tortured him. Who knew what he’d been forced to say? Who knew if Roddy had said something that would help Gerald find her? Who knew if she’d covered her tracks enough?
It was a very lucky thing that she had kept her friendship with Kerry a secret.
Without ever talking about it, they had never shown each other warmth in public, rarely called each other and never went out together.
They had a message board accessible only to themselves and that’s where they made plans to meet. Mostly at Kerry’s place.
Not even Mario, the owner of the Blue Moon, realized how close they were. So Kerry shouldn’t be in any danger. But there were other ways to find people.
The streets of San Diego were covered in security cameras. Could she go through life here wearing huge sunglasses, shapeless dresses and wide-brimmed hats? Every single day? Without making a mistake once?
She’d go crazy. Most of all, she’d drive Harry crazy too and ruin his life. And since he was embedded in a tight group of people who loved him and were starting to love her, she’d ruin their lives too.
And Nicole’s baby…
Ellen’s thoughts kept circling back to that terrifying thought. Harm to the baby. What it would mean to Harry. Harry had lost his baby sister. He’d never survive Nicole and Sam’s child being killed. She’d never survive it either.
The longer she stayed, the worse it would be. The longer she stayed, the more she’d care for them, the more embedded in their lives she’d be. And after the baby was born, she’d love the baby too. One more hostage to Gerald’s craziness and cruelty.
Oh God.
She had to go. She had to go now before one of these wonderful people got hurt.
She wanted to stay but she had to go.
Billie’s sad, beautiful voice came over her headset. I begged on the stars/To throw me a beam or two/Wished on the stars/And asked for a dream or two.
The beams and the dreams were all gone.
The screen in front of her blurred, grew refracted as tears filled her eyes, but she willed them back, dashing the back of her hand angrily over her eyes.
Tears were a dangerous weakness.