Chương 3
Then she was gone.
I called security before she reached the stairs.
“Open the front gate for Ms. Carter.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And have somebody drive her home.”
A pause followed.
“She usually takes the bus, sir.”
“I know.”
“Should I tell her it’s your order?”
“No.”
Another pause.
“She may ask.”
“Tell her it’s late.”
I hung up.
For twenty minutes I lay staring at the ceiling.
Then I called security again.
“Did she leave?”
“Yes, sir.”
“With a driver?”
“No, sir.”
“Why not?”
“She refused.”
Of course she did.
“Where is she?”
“She walked to the bus stop on Ashland.”
I swore.
The guard waited.
“Send the car.”
“She said she doesn’t want—”
“I don’t care what she wants.”
The sentence sounded familiar in the worst possible way.
I hung up before he could respond.
Sleep never returned.
By sunrise, I had made three business calls, rejected a construction bid, approved a payment Luke had been waiting on for two days, and reread the same page of a financial report six times.
At eight thirty, Luke entered my study carrying two coffees.
He set one beside me.
“You look terrible.”
“I’ve heard.”
“Emma?”
I looked up.
He took a sip.
“Mrs. Alvarez called me.”
“Why?”
“She likes me.”
“Nobody likes you.”
“She likes me more than you.”
“That’s not difficult.”
Luke sat across from the desk.
“What happened?”
“I fired her.”
“I gathered.”
“She fell asleep in my bed.”
Coffee stopped halfway to his mouth.
I watched him decide whether he had heard correctly.
Then his eyebrows went up.
“Excuse me?”
“She was exhausted.”
“That was not the part I needed clarified.”
“Nothing happened.”
“I didn’t say anything happened.”
“You were about to.”
“I was about to ask why the woman who cleans your toilets was sleeping in your bed.”
“She got dizzy.”
“And that naturally led to horizontal employment.”
“Luke.”
He put the coffee down.
“What did you do?”
“I fired her.”
“For falling asleep?”
“For telling me I was trying to buy away discomfort.”
Luke stared at me.
Then he leaned back and laughed.
Not politely.
Not briefly.
He laughed until he coughed.
I reached for the paperweight.
He pointed at it.
“Go ahead.”
I let my hand fall.
“You finished?”
“Not remotely.”
“She overstepped.”
“You gave her a raise without telling her, monitored how many hours she worked, ordered food because she looked tired, and sent a car after her.”
“That’s called managing employees.”
“That’s called behaving like a divorced father who just discovered concern.”
“Get out.”
“Rehire her.”
“No.”
“Then stop complaining.”
“I wasn’t complaining.”
“You’ve talked about her for eight straight minutes.”
I glanced at the clock.
It had been eleven.
Luke saw me glance.
His smile disappeared slowly.
“You like her.”
“No.”
“Danny.”
“No.”
“You haven’t liked anybody in two years.”
“That’s not true.”
“You tolerate me.”
“Barely.”
“You threaten Peter.”
“He buys bad mustard.”
“You terrified six nurses.”
“They were incompetent.”
“You made a cardiologist cry.”
“He was arrogant.”
Luke folded his arms.
“And Emma?”
I looked toward the windows.
A landscaping crew worked near the west wall, two men lifting a fallen branch while another fed smaller limbs into a chipper.
The sound came faintly through reinforced glass.
“She doesn’t look at me like I’m broken.”
Luke was quiet.
I regretted the sentence immediately.
He picked up his coffee again but did not drink.
“That’s different from liking her.”
“I know.”
“Still matters.”
“I fired her.”
“Yeah.”
He rubbed his thumb along the paper cup.
“Maybe that matters too.”
I turned back to the financial report.
“Meeting at ten.”
“You going?”
“Obviously.”
“Downtown?”
“Video.”
Luke’s mouth tightened.
I ignored it.
Since the shooting, I had attended exactly two meetings outside the estate.
One had been at a hospital.
The other had been my father’s funeral.
Luke knew better than to mention either.
At ten, six men appeared on the wall-mounted screen in my conference room.
They were people who had once stood when I entered.
Now they adjusted webcams and waited for my face to appear.
We discussed shipping contracts, union pressure, a city inspection that was costing one of our legitimate companies forty thousand dollars a week, and a bartender on the North Side who had begun selling information to somebody he shouldn’t.
I gave orders.
Men wrote them down.
Everything worked.
That had always been the problem.
My empire had adapted to my chair faster than I had.
When the meeting ended, Luke stayed behind.
“You missed something.”
“What?”
“Three times.”
I glared at him.
“You asked Carl the same question three times.”
“He talks too much.”
“You weren’t listening.”
I closed the laptop.
Luke waited.
“I’m not rehiring her.”
“I didn’t say you should.”
“You’re thinking it.”
“I’m thinking you’re an idiot.”
“That’s not new.”
“No.”
He stood.
“But this version is getting expensive.”
Emma did not return that night.
At eleven forty, the private hallway remained silent.
No humming.
No squeaking cart.
No muttered complaint about somebody leaving toothpaste in the guest bathroom sink.
A replacement cleaner arrived shortly after midnight.
He was a middle-aged man named Harold who spoke so softly I had to ask him twice to repeat his name.
He kept his eyes lowered.
He apologized when his vacuum cord brushed the leg of a table.
At one fifteen, I told him to stop cleaning my wing.
His face went white.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Russo.”
“You didn’t do anything.”
“I can redo whatever—”
“Go clean downstairs.”
“Yes, sir.”
He retreated quickly.
I hated him for being afraid.
I hated myself more for understanding why.
At two, phantom pain began in my right foot.
I reached for the medication.
One tablet.
The bottle clicked against the glass nightstand when I set it down.
I looked at the empty chair near the window.
“You’re doing what rich men do when something makes them uncomfortable.”
I swallowed the pill without water.
At four in the morning, I called Mrs. Alvarez.
May you like
She answered on the seventh ring.
“Mr. Russo?”
