Everything to Lose

“I know you do. I like it here too. I just meant, if you could go somewhere else, somewhere new. Different. Where do you think it would be? The beach? Like in California. Or the mountains? You remember we went skiing once.”

He paused a while and closed his eyes, and I thought he had drifted off. Then he opened them again. “The North Pole.”

“The North Pole? Wow. That’s interesting. Why there?”

“That’s where the Polydragons live. Underneath the ice.”

“Oh, I see …”

He nodded into my chest, his voice growing sleepy. “But I don’t want to go away, Mommy …”

“We won’t,” I said softly. “It was a silly thing to even ask. I like it just fine here too. With you.”

“Me too,” he said, closing his eyes.

He yawned and I felt him snuggle his face in my chest. “Nighty-night, Brandon.”

He didn’t speak for a while, and I stroked his hair, a tear rolling down my cheek. This is what I had, I realized. All I had. This is what God gave me to protect, to keep safe. To help grow into a whole person so he could one day go out into the world and prosper, which I was sure he would. This wasn’t his fault. He didn’t choose how he was. Life did. And I wasn’t going to let life set us back. With whatever options I still had.

Brandon’s voice trailed off one last time. “I love you, Mommy …”

I drew him close, knowing what I had to do. “I love you too, honey.”

Sweet Brandon.

CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_935a8e20-6676-5898-8883-56b07d0f9a14)

Charles Mirho nursed a bourbon at the end of the bar in Stamford, Connecticut, waiting for the call that never came.

He was supposed to have heard back by nine. That would have given the old man time to get back home and do what he had to do.

But now it was ten fifteen and the phone still hadn’t rung; the two calls he had placed back to him from his throwaway phone had gone unanswered. He was starting to feel pretty certain something had gone wrong.

That or he was being set up—and not even a fool would do that.

Even an old fool.

The local news was on the TV. Something about a four-year-old who had fallen out of an apartment building in Stamford.

It left two options, and either one meant he was going to have to earn the money he was being paid. Mirho had spent three years as a sergeant in the military police before moving into intelligence. His specialty was interrogations. He was the guy they brought in when all the “new age” shit didn’t get anywhere. Not that that assignment lasted long. A couple of drunken brawls and a messy sexual harassment charge got him a general discharge, hastening his new career. Now he was in private practice. With one highly notable but confidential account. His new specialty was digging up dirt on people. Or creating it when there was none.

Though there was always something, if you pulled up the rock and looked under.

Mirho tossed a twenty on the counter, and had gotten up to leave when something on the overhead screen caught his eye.

A car accident. By the looks of it, a bad one. It was the headline that grabbed him.

FATAL ACCIDENT NEAR BEDFORD

IN WESTCHESTER COUNTY

He stopped and said to the bartender, “Mind turning that up, Al …”

“An old-model Honda, with only the driver inside …” was what he heard.

Then the camera zoomed in on the car and Mirho realized things had just gotten a whole lot more complicated.

In the parking lot, his cell phone rang. Mirho glanced at the number. Only one person it could be. He answered, not relishing how it would go. “Mirho here.”

“Do we have it?” the caller asked. Mirho was supposed to have gotten back to him by now as well.

“No, not yet.” Mirho sighed. “There’s been a complication.”

“What do you mean by ‘complication’? You met with him, didn’t you?”

“I met with him,” Mirho acknowledged. He’d worked for a lot of tough men in his day. But this was one who knew how to use the hammer. Someone you didn’t want to be feeding excuses to.

He laid the whole thing out for him as best he could.

“So where’s my money, Charlie?” his boss replied indifferently.

“I don’t know, maybe in a police station somewhere,” Mirho said, until something else occurred to him. “Unless someone got there first.”

“Someone got there first? Well, that wouldn’t be good for business, would it, Charlie?”

Mirho opened his car door. “Or for them.”

“Find that money, Charlie. And more important …”

“I know what’s more important,” Mirho said.

But just to make sure, the caller added, “More important, you find me the rest of what we’re looking for as well.”

Mirho’s father, an oil lease salesman from East Texas, always had a saying that selling didn’t even begin until the customer said no. In this trade, it was more like it wasn’t work until something went wrong.

Mirho shut his door and started up his car. “That’s what you pay me for.”

CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_7dd00301-efaa-5c8b-84ab-bddd9cd028f5)

The next day I started sending out e-mails to see what might be out there for me. The first was to Steve, my ex-boss, reminding him to keep his antennae up as he had promised. How Brandon and I were in a real bind. Then I started sending them to people in the industry. Some had already heard and were shocked; others offered to help. Finding a new job was Priority Number One.

I tried to put the accident and the money out of my mind.

I poked around the employment sites. Looking at openings for advertising sales managers, media planners, corporate comptrollers. Nothing seemed on the money. I envisioned crowded cattle calls for positions I was totally overqualified for. Going up against young Ivy League grads with resumés far deeper than my own. Standing in lines at job fairs in front of junior-level human resources managers just out of school.

I pulled my old resumé up on the computer. It seemed woefully thin. I updated it for what I’d been doing these past four years, but it still had this pretty wide gap for the time when I’d just been at home being a mom. I even called the admissions director at Milton Farms, hoping I might qualify for financial aid. They loved Brandon there. They’d never let me have to pull him out.

I was told she was at a conference and would have to get back to me.