Chapter Two #3
The rest of it’s . . . Short of a name, a place, or anything Leo could use, the sentence had been severed cleanly, consistent with a lost signal, lost nerve, or something worse.
There wasn’t a second call to finish it.
He sat with that for a while, turning it over and trying to decide which one it had been.
He got a legal pad out of the kitchen drawer where he kept takeout menus and old warranty cards, and he played the message a fourth time, writing it out by hand in his own block print while Vic’s voice filled his kitchen one more time.
A lawyer’s habit. If it mattered later, and it would, he wanted a clean transcription that didn’t depend on a phone surviving the next forty-eight hours.
When he’d finished, he read it back against the recording once to check his work, then carried the legal pad to his home printer in the office off the hallway and ran a clean copy.
Leo folded the printout in thirds and carried it back to the kitchen. He considered putting it in the mailer with Vic’s note and the thumb drive but decided against it. One place for everything was how you lost everything at once.
Leo crossed to the credenza in the living room instead, the one with his contact lists, old contracts, and the playoff tickets he never threw away. He slid the printout into the second drawer from the top, behind a stack of expired coupons nobody would ever think to dig through.
Then he poured a cup of coffee, went back to the island, and read Vic’s note again. Not for content this time. For instructions.
Someone outside the industry. That described Anja. Her business was insular, private, and wholly disconnected from any sports agency in the country.
Someone who owes you nothing. Anja owed Leo nothing. The ledger between them ran the other way, and it ran heavy.
Someone you owe nothing to. This one was harder.
Leo owed Anja his life in the most literal sense available to a human being.
But Vic hadn’t meant moral debt. He was talking about the sort that gave a third party clout.
Nobody held Leo’s gratitude over him. Outside of Anja, Chloe, Kayne, and her bosses at CObrA Securities, no one knew what she’d done for him on the sidewalk in Clayton months ago.
Someone who can’t be reached through leverage.
Anja Johansen, as far as Leo had ever been able to tell, had no exploitable surface area at all.
There was no husband (thank God), no children, no aging parents within Leo’s knowledge.
She had a team of professional protectors as family.
Her career had been built on being the person who walked into a room after the worst had happened and made it stop.
If somebody had leverage on Anja, Leo couldn’t begin to guess what it was.
She passed every test on Vic’s list so cleanly it was almost insulting to the other names he’d considered.
Leo took a long swallow of coffee and let the heat of it sit on the back of his tongue.
He remembered the last time he’d seen her face.
She’d been asleep on her stomach when he eased out of bed at six in the morning to drive his parents to the airport in Indianapolis before heading home to St. Louis.
The blanket had been pushed down to the small of her back, and her pale hair had been loose across the pillow.
He’d stood beside the bed for thirty seconds, telling himself not to wake her, because that would have meant a conversation he wasn’t equipped to have that early after a night that had been very clearly labeled as a one-time event.
Leo had left a note on the kitchen counter with his number. She already had it, but he’d written it anyway.
She’d never used it.
He recalled her saying, “I don’t do anything I’m not sure about,” and the absolute certainty behind it. How that one sentence had told him more about Anja than five months of silence afterward had managed to take back.
Leo had respected the closed door for every one of those long-ass months.
He was about to put his hand on the handle and pull, and the only honest thing he could say about it was that he wasn’t doing it for the reason he wanted.
It was because a dead man had told him to find the person in his life who could not be bought, and Anja Johansen was the only name on the list.
Some part of him was relieved to have a reason. Another was having none of it. A dead man had handed him the excuse, and there was nothing to celebrate about that.
Leo set the coffee mug down, picked up his phone, and scrolled to her name in his contacts. He had saved her under Johansen, A., like a coward who didn’t trust himself with the alternative.
His thumb hovered over the call button.
He remembered Vic Shaw’s trembling hand, Chloe’s crossed eyes over a dirt-brown protein shake, Kayne’s long-suffering expression in the background, and Anja telling him to get some sleep with her head against his shoulder, trying a little too hard to sound easy.
The memories had no business belonging together, yet somehow they did.
He pressed call.