Sky High (Three Contemporary Novella's) (20 page)

What?

“What?”

“We went to dinner and he walked out and I don’t know where I am or where to go and—”

“You haven’t been abducted?”

“Abducted? No.”

“Where is Spencer?”

And just like that, she was weeping again. Garrett cursed under his breath. If he ever got his hands on Spencer, or the piece of shit who made him up, he’d make him pay for this.

“Meg? Meg, can you tell me where you are?”

“I don’t know,” she wailed. “He drove us here from the airport and it’s all so confusing and—”

“Hand the phone to the waiter, Meg.”

He heard more shuffling and a few murmured words, then a male voice came on the line. “
Hola
?”

They had a brief exchange in Spanish. Garrett ascertained the address of the restaurant and asked the waiter to let Meg stay inside until he got there. The man readily agreed, sounding relieved that someone was coming to take responsibility for the hysterical, weeping female abandoned in his restaurant.

Meg came back on the line. “Garrett?”

“Listen, just stay put inside. They’ll keep an eye on you. I’ll be there in twenty minutes, okay?”

“Okay.” Her response was whispered and fragile. Fuck Spencer. Fuck him for doing exactly what Garrett knew he was going to do. But fuck him anyway.

He paid his cab driver an extra wad of cash and got there in fifteen. Meg was huddled in a chair by the window. She’d stopped crying, but she was staring vacantly into space like she wasn’t all the way there. When he walked in the door, she stood abruptly, locked eyes with him, and broke down again. He didn’t say anything because there was nothing to say. He crossed to her and pulled her into his arms, his hand cradling the back of her head as she clutched his jacket. She cried, her shoulders shaking and heaving with each indrawn breath. Her voice was raw from crying, and her face was puffy and red. They didn’t exchange a word as he tucked her under his arm and led her out to the waiting cab.

She still hadn’t said anything by the time they were back in his apartment. He fished through his suitcase, not yet unpacked, and came up with a weather-beaten sweat shirt.

“Here, you can sleep in this,” he said, handing it to her awkwardly. She stared at the wad of fabric in her hands.

“I don’t know…”

Garrett sighed and grasped her shoulders, crouching slightly to peer into her face. “Don’t try to talk tonight. Just go wash your face and get some sleep. We’ll talk in the morning, okay?”

She swallowed thickly and nodded, then he gave her a gentle push toward the bathroom. When she was gone, he turned to start making up the couch for himself. The first time he’d been friendly to a stranger in years and she landed in his bedroom, and not even in the interesting way. He should have known this would come back to bite him in the ass.

#

Meg cried herself to sleep somewhere around two a.m. Garrett knew this because he could hear every bit of it through the thin bedroom walls. Once or twice he entertained the idea of going in to comfort her, but what the fuck did he know about comforting anybody? He knew all about asshole liars like Spencer and the awful things they did to people. He was not well-versed in cleaning up the messes they left behind.

Considering the long day she’d had and the emotional fallout she’d endured, he was surprised to be woken by the sounds of Meg poking through the kitchen at somewhere just shy of eight a.m. She was trying to be quiet about it, but there was only a partial wall dividing the kitchen and dining area from the living room so he heard every move she made.

Rolling off the couch and stretching the knots out of his back, he made his way around the corner to the dining room, only to be brought up short by the sight of her sitting at the corner of the long table, one leg folded underneath her, the other knee drawn up under her chin. She was still wearing the sweat shirt he’d loaned her—and nothing else. All things considered, the sight of her long, shapely legs should not be rendering him speechless. He closed his eyes, exhaled, and opened them again. Nope. Still all long, pale legs and sleep-tumbled curls. Fuck.

She was sipping on a cup of coffee and nibbling on a pan dulce.

“I don’t know what these are, but I think I’m devoting the rest of my life to them,” she mumbled, her mouth full of bread.

“Pan dulce,” he said gruffly, averting his eyes from the legs and the hair.

“I tried not to wake you, but I needed coffee.”

“S’okay. You always get up this early?”

“Early riser,” she said with an apologetic smile.

“Really? Even after yesterday?”

Her eyes dropped to the table and every bit of color drained out of her face. Garrett cursed himself. She’d been in remarkably good shape and then he had to go and remind her. He still didn’t know exactly what happened, but he figured it could wait until they’d both had their coffee. Then maybe she could get through it without tears. He turned into the kitchen and set about getting himself some coffee.

“Sorry to steal your bed,” she said. He couldn’t see her where she was sitting, but already her voice sounded better. More normal. How strange that he already knew what “normal Meg” sounded like, after just one day.

“It’s okay. It wasn’t a bad couch, as far as couches go. And hey, if you like those pan dulce, wait until you try them fresh. Those are a day old.”

He walked back into the dining area with his coffee to see Meg with one of his work files open on the table in front of her. He’d left all his files there when he’d unpacked his bag, along with his laptop. She was staring at the file like she’d seen a ghost.

“Meg? Is something wrong?”

Abruptly she shoved back from the table and stood, still staring at the file. “Why do you have this picture?” Her voice was soft and shaky.

“What picture?” He craned his head to look. It wasn’t even the file from his current story, just one of several back-burnered investigations he was always following.

“His
picture. This. Why do you have Spencer’s picture in this file?” She looked up at him then, her face a mask of horror. “Oh God, you guys are in on it together, aren’t you? This is all some elaborate sting, and now you’ve fucked me over
twice
.”

Garrett took a step toward her and she automatically retreated. He held up his hands in defense. “Meg, it’s me. I’m not in on anything with anybody. Look, right there on the table. Those are my AP credentials. See for yourself.”

She glanced where he pointed and snatched up his laminated ID. “Then why do you have Spencer’s picture?”

“Wait…
what
?”

“Spencer!” she shouted, pointing at the file again. “That’s Spencer!”

“Wait…are you telling me
that
is the guy you were with yesterday?”

“Yes!”

“That’s the guy you’ve been emailing with?”

“Yes!” She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. “No. It was a lie. Everything was a lie. There
is
no Spencer. Not the way I thought. But that’s the guy who picked me up at the airport yesterday. He’s the one I’ve been talking to all this time.”

Garrett thrust a hand into his hair and fisted hard. “Fuck. Meg, are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. Why?”

“Because that guy is Mark Rubiak. He’s wanted by the FBI and the Department of Justice. Interpol is sniffing around, too. They call him the Sheep of Wall Street. That’s their little joke because he was this mild-mannered investment adviser who nobody would ever suspect until it was discovered that he’d spent years embezzling his investors out of over thirty million dollars. He’s been on the run for a little over a year now, one of the most wanted fugitives in the country.”

Meg stared at him. Her eyes dropped back to the picture. Then she began to laugh, high and hysterical, before she dropped back into her chair and laid her forehead on her palm. “Of course he is. Because he sure as
hell
isn’t Spencer.”

#

Garrett left the room for a few minutes. When he returned, Meg saw that he was wearing a shirt—which was good, because his bare chest was crazy-distracting—and he was carrying a glass with an inch of something amber in it. He slid her coffee away and replaced it with the glass. She started to protest that she didn’t drink, especially not at this hour, and then she decided that yeah, today she did.

It burned like hell going down, but within a few minutes, it started wearing away the ragged edges inside of her. Maybe there was something to this. Garrett pulled out the chair next to her and sat, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.

“I’m down here covering the ambassador’s corruption trial, like I told you. But I’m always working on several other stories at the same time. One of the stories I’ve been following is the Mark Rubiak story. I shelved it when the FBI’s leads on his whereabouts went cold. Just before I left, a contact told me there was some unofficial buzz that he might be in Mexico, so I brought my file, just in case. If what you’re saying is true, it turns out that they’re right.”

“Oh, it’s true,” Meg said, glancing again at the picture on the top of Garrett’s file. He looked different. It was obviously taken before, when he still worked on Wall Street, because he was wearing a dark suit and a crisp white shirt. His hair was short and tidy and he was clean-shaven. He’d changed a little bit on the run but not that much. He probably thought he didn’t need to. He had the most forgettable face she’d ever seen. Something didn’t make sense, though.

“How much did you say he stole?”

“Thirty million dollars.”

She shook her head. “That can’t be right. He’s broke.”

Garrett scowled. “What do you mean?”

“Well, I don’t know the details, but he certainly wasn’t rolling in cash. You should have seen his car. And his clothes. And… Oh, God…” As another piece slotted into the puzzle, an even more miserable picture was emerging.

“What?”

“He got really mad about my money.”

“What money?”

Meg pushed her hair behind her ears and took another sip of the drink—
scotch
? It made talking about all of this much easier. “Well, when we were planning my move, Spencer—Mark—told me it would be much easier if I closed my bank account and opened a new one in Mexico City. He wanted me to get the balance as a cashier’s check.”

Garrett closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Please tell me you didn’t give it to him.”

“No, that’s why he got mad. The bank wouldn’t give me a cashier’s check for that much money. They said they’d wire the funds directly to my new bank when I opened the account. Mark was really pissed about that. I asked him what happened to all of his money, since he was supposed to be loaded. He said it was tied up in some Caymans account that he was having trouble accessing because of a tax issue. Just paperwork, he said. But yeah, he was clearly planning on living off of me until he got it sorted out.”

“Meg, you said the bank wouldn’t give you a cashier’s check for such a large amount. How much are we talking?”

She told him. Garrett sat back and let out a long, slow breath. “You told me you haven’t worked in three years. Why are you sitting on that kind of money?”

“My dad died a few months ago, remember? He left me some money.”

“He left you a small fortune.”

She shrugged. She hadn’t really thought about it that way. First in her grief over losing her father, then in the whirlwind of meeting Spencer, it hadn’t seemed to matter. She was glad to have it, since it made it easier to leave her old life behind and follow Spencer to Mexico. Now an unpleasant suspicion was unfurling in her belly.

“There’s no tax issue,” Garrett said. “When he was siphoning funds, he would move them through a number of offshore accounts, splitting and resplitting the balances to make it harder to track. The bulk of it was in several accounts in the Caymans awaiting the next move when the FBI caught up with his electronic trail. They froze the accounts. He stole it, but he can’t access it. He got some out in the beginning, but not enough to last for long. The FBI has been waiting him out, knowing he’d need to make a move to acquire more funds.”

“So you think he’s planning something else?”

“No, I think
you
were the plan.”

She looked at him and blinked. “Me?”

“Do you remember where you told me you met him?”

“In a bereavement chat room, after my dad died. Oh, God. You think he was there on purpose? Looking for some stupid girl who’d just inherited a bucket of money?”

“Did he ever ask you about the money?”

Meg closed her eyes and tried to remember. It was so long ago, and it was buried deep inside other conversations. She’d been so focused on everything else they’d been discussing, that little conversational aside had completely slipped past her. But he
had
asked. Way back in the very beginning.

“Yeah, he did. A long time ago. He asked me if I was going to be okay financially now that my dad was gone, because I didn’t have a job. He seemed so concerned. So I told him my dad had left me some money. I didn’t need to work, not for a while. And then he changed the subject and I forgot all about it. Later, when we were planning my move, we talked specifics. He knew how much I had. But I thought…we were together, so it seemed fine to tell him. He was this investment guru. He was going to make sure it was safe.”