Die Again Tomorrow (9 page)

CHAPTER 13

 

“What do you think? Do you think it's
okay
that she cut off her breasts?” His voice turned outright hostile. “What the hell did I pay for?”

CHAPTER 14

 

J
oan braced herself. “What is it?”

Beside her on the bed, Greg was bowing his head and refusing to make eye contact. Possible catastrophes hurtled through her mind: he wasn't just having an affair, but a baby. He wasn't just doing drugs, but dealing them. He wasn't just getting fired from the hospital, but losing his license. Anything but what he whispered next:

“We're going broke.”

She heard the words but didn't comprehend them. She was surrounded by luxury—her bare feet rested on a heated wood floor. She was sitting on a ten-thousand-dollar memory foam mattress. Her arm hair was prickling against the sleeve of his Prada suit.

His forehead was lined with pained wrinkles. “I screwed up really bad. I didn't want to tell you, I thought I could fix it—”

“How?” she interrupted. “What? When?”

He heaved a sigh. “When the economy started going to hell about six months ago, I got nervous. We were heavily exposed—”

“Were? Or are?” As far as she knew, most of their money was invested in either stocks or real estate holdings that paid regular dividends. Greg thought it was a waste to let cash sit in safer places like banks or bonds.

“Were,” he said. “As the market got worse and worse, we lost an insane amount—but I was scared to pull out. I thought it would come back . . .”

“You should have told me.”

“You hate dealing with money. That's always been my job.”

It was true; their marriage was very traditional that way. She rarely asked about their finances, and he didn't often volunteer. She just assumed he had it under control. But there'd never been such a downturn in their lifetimes. It was only getting worse still.

“I don't care.” She felt heat radiating from her face. “You should have told me! What were you thinking?”

He stood and began pacing at the foot of the bed, his hands clasped behind his head. “Honestly I couldn't bear to see you get as panicked as I was. I just wanted to fix it. But then our condos in Hawaii and Florida went vacant practically overnight and I was stuck with the bill, plus the mortgage on this apartment, and
then
the hospital furloughed our shifts—and on top of it you wanted us to help Adam. I knew we couldn't swing it, but I didn't want to disappoint you or him. I couldn't take it anymore, so I had to do something. I had to get our money back.”

“Oh God.” If she was sure of anything, it was that Greg hated to lose. Once, on a family vacation to Las Vegas, he'd parked himself at the blackjack table for six volatile hours, doubling each bet to recoup what he'd already lost. Only when he was victorious did he finally walk away, jittery and drained, a measly two hundred dollars richer.

Before he even said the words, she pressed her fingertips to her temples. “Tell me you didn't.”

He spoke in a rush, as if to gloss over the ugliest bits. “I cashed out a lot of our remaining stocks, borrowed some additional money from the charity, and started playing online poker. I got really good, and for a while, I was making thousands a week, keeping us going. But then I got arrogant, made a few bad calls, and needed more capital again, so I pawned off a few things—my Rolex watch, my father's collection of gold coins. But the money wasn't growing fast enough, and the bills were piling up like crazy—so I put the apartment up for sale just to see what kind of offer we could get. I still was hoping the market would come back up, or our properties would start paying off again, or I would hit it really big so we wouldn't need to sell. So you would be spared any involvement in this crisis.”

He paused to gulp short bursts of air, as though his throat was closing. He gnawed on his bottom lip, snatching nervous glances at her reaction. She was glaring at him, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. Her mind flashed back to the three or four times over the last few months that he'd asked her to join him for lunch somewhere, usually at the last minute; now she realized that his desire to get her out of the house had probably been due to a Realtor coming around to show their place.

“There's more, isn't there?” Her flat tone lacked inflection. “I can tell.”

In tacit assent, he resumed pacing, keeping his eyes on the floor. “We never got an offer on the apartment, and the creditors were starting to call, so I had to do something else to raise money right away—”

She jumped to her feet, cutting him off. “You better not have touched Adam's inheritance!”

“No! Never. I'd rather be out on the street than bring him into it.”

Her pulse was racing all the way down to her fingertips. A mistake that hurt their son could never be forgiven. There was a fine line between a screwup and a savage. “You swear to God?”

“Absolutely,” he declared, holding his hands up. “It's ironclad.”

“Then why didn't you want to give him access to it before? All that talk about him needing to be independent—that was crap, wasn't it?”

He nodded. “I was trying to protect him, too. No one can touch his trust until I die.” He paused gravely. “But if I were to grant permission now, my creditors could seize it as one of my assets.”

“Jesus. They're already after you?”

“They were, until . . .” he rubbed his neck, glancing out the window. The words seemed difficult to get out. “A few weeks ago, I sold my life insurance policy for cash.”

She felt her stomach tense as if she were dropping from a great height. Of course he would think of doing that. For some years, he'd leveraged his medical knowledge into a lucrative consulting gig for one of the many hedge funds that specialized in buying up life insurance policies and that needed a doctor's expertise in predicting patient mortality. By the time the side gig eventually dried up, Greg had become inured to the creepiness of the industry in a way she never had. She knew he considered it as professional as any other sector of finance.

He still wouldn't look at her, and that's when she knew there was something more, a dagger at the bottom waiting to break her fall.

“My settlement was enough to cover our immediate bills,” he went on, “but at what cost?” He turned toward her again, and she was startled to see that his blue eyes were clouded with tears. “There's an auction website where you can put your policy up for sale. I accepted the highest bidder, a fantastic offer from some faceless hedge fund I'd never heard of, and thought that was the end of it. But I don't think it was. I know I always told you this business wasn't sketchy, but I might've been wrong.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, not sure she had the capacity to take any more.

“I started to feel like someone might be following me, or watching me. Then the other day, on my way to the hospital, some guy on the corner of Sixty-third and West End bumped into me so hard I fell into the street, right in front of a cab that had to slam on its brakes.”

“You never told me that.”

“I told Yardley”—his doctor colleague who also worked in the ER—“and mentioned my recent sale. Did he think I was being totally paranoid? I just wanted reassurance. But I couldn't believe what he said. Apparently there's been talk at the hospital of one or two patients dying from weird accidents after selling their policies, but no one can prove the connection. So far it's just quiet rumors. The targets seem to be people like me—idiots who accept offers way above market rates, so they think they got a deal.”

“You can't be serious,” she said, even as she could see a distressed vein popping out on his forehead. “Why doesn't anyone go to the police?”

“What could they do? There's no evidence of foul play. Whoever is behind this is careful and slick.” He stared at her with naked dread. “And I think I'm next.”