They did have a $12,000 overdraft and room on the American Express, though, so it wasn’t as serious as it sounded.
Had he done it to buy himself another month in case Hailey left him and took her salary with her? Or had he done it just for the reaction,anyreaction? Mack couldn’t say for sure.
Gulliver stopped to sniff at a streetlight that was supposed to look like the old gas lamps from Victorian England, its false flame flickering like a jet-lagged firefly in the ten a.m. daylight. Mack stood looking across at their house and trying to figure out whether he really minded if it all came crumbling down. Boy, would Simeon look stupid then.
As Gulliver cocked his stubby leg for the thousandth time, Mack emerged from the fantasy of Simeon beneath a pile of rubble and saw that their garage door was open, and that the Cherokee was inside it, next to his ancient Audi. He tugged Gulliver on.
Inside the house, he found Hailey sitting on the steps, still in her high heels. The first thing Mack noticed was the pallor of her skin; it looked like his mother’s, and like the faces of his students during the pandemic. Mack’s and Hailey’s eyes met in a fresh kind of souped-up wordlessness, and he waited for her to tell him she was leaving him. It took an eternity for her voice to reach him, and when it did, her volume was so low that Mack had to crouch down to hear her:
“That money originated in Liberia. It was sent from an unregulated Liberian bank.”
Mack let out his breath as Gulliver sniffed at Hailey’s feet. “Jesus,” he said, careful not to expose himself with any hint of analysis. Except Hailey was looking at him, for once, like he should know what to do. “That can’t be right.”
“It’s right. Our researcher found it.”
Mack took a stab in the dark: “Could it be a banking thing then? Like maybe how money gets routed through different banks as it’s moved around—” Mack was blowing smoke; he had no idea how money moved, except that it tended to flow away from him a lot faster than it came toward him.
“I don’t think so. It’s a real account, if that’s what you mean. This researcher—Dennis—he can... I don’t know the specifics, but somehow he can monitor other people’s banking activity. He’s like a hacker, that’s why we hired him. He says this account is all transactions withothershady banks and foreign individuals. He said he can’t believe the payments haven’t been flagged, that it’s only because they are small amounts.” She scooped up Gulliver and pressed him to her. “I just—I can’t believe someone like this would bother with us. This is crazy.”
Mack tried to identify the most immediate threat. “So this hacker—does he know we got the money? Does he know you’re personally involved?”
“He’s a kid, Mack. He needs his job. He’s not interested in getting us in trouble.”
Mack turned to follow Hailey’s gaze; Simeon’s van had pulled into the driveway. Gulliver squirmed until he fell to the floor and then ran like a madman toward the front door.
“I think we just go to the bank now, like we said.” Mack fought to be heard over the sound of Gulliver’s yapping. “I tried to call that personal banker who gave us his card when we did the mortgage, Colin something, but I didn’t leave a message. I’ll try him again.” This was not technically the truth; Mack hadthoughtabout looking for Colin’s card. He hadn’t actually done anything yet.
“I don’t know... the account is overdrawn.” Hailey’s expression told Mack she 1,000 percent already knew he’d made the Sandy Hollow payments. “And now that we know this money is... oh God, I don’t even know what the hell this money is! I mean,Liberia? National City will be all over us.”
This was not right. He, Mack, was supposed to be the irresponsible one, the one who fucked around and played loose with the rules. (Dreamy, is how he liked to characterize it.) Now Hailey, the straight arrow, the one with a goddamn JD, was suggesting they not do the obviously by-the-book right thing?
Even though he could see Mack and Hailey through the glass in the front door, Simeon went right ahead and rang the doorbell. Twice.
“Then I guess we call the police,” Mack said as softly as he could, though just the word put him back in Favre’s office, back to when he’d had his first little taste of feeling on the wrong side of the law. He realized in that moment that he’d been waiting weeks for the cops to ring his doorbell, and now he was going to have to invite them over. How exactly would he explain taking $47,000 of random money from Liberia? His bit of homegrown weed might start to look more like a drug cartel when you threw 47K into the mix.
Hailey was shaking her head. “No. The thing is, Mack, I think I know who might be—” She went silent as Mack turned the door handle and Simeon stepped across the threshold. Entirely by accident, of course, Mack had forgotten about Gulliver. The dog launched himself on the builder, snarling and snapping, and in that moment, Mack forgave him for every errant drop of piss he’d ever squeezed out.
* * *
Simeon stood, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, sucking air between his teeth, shaking his head. “Now this I haven’t seen.” They were all three outside in the flower bed, shivering in the cold. Simeon’s dimples wilted as he frowned. He ran a finger over one particularly deep crack and flicked a chunk of loose brick onto the ground.
“Huh,” he said, and Mack could have hit him.
“It can’t be good that it’s downstairs and out here too,” Hailey pressed him. “The whole bottom half of the house could be full of cracks, right?”
Simeon shook his head again. He had alreadyhuh’d andyeah’d over the cracks in the basement. “It’s a puzzler, this one.”
He stood there for an eternity, until Mack finally said, “Well, then, what do wedoabout it?”
Simeon turned to walk back toward his van. “Let me talk to my concrete guy,” he said over his shoulder. Mack would have just let him go, but Hailey slipped around the hedge and got to the van before Simeon did.
“So that’s the next step? And then you’ll get back to us? Because I’m sure you can appreciate that this is really stressful. I mean, this is a brand-new house, and it looks like it’s about to fall down.” Hailey sounded on the edge of hysteria, Mack thought, and he wondered whether this would work for them or against them.
“Now don’t let’s all panic,” Simeon said, calm as could be. “This is just one of those joys of the construction business. I’m sure it looks scary to you, but this is the sort of thing that gets blown out of proportion. The cracks might be the house settling on the lot, might be the time of year... Biggest thing is, you folks don’t panic and ruin the enjoyment of your new home. Keep your heads, I’ll get my concrete specialist out and we’ll get you all fixed up. Okay?”
“Right,” said Mack. “Like the garage door?”
Simeon pretended not to hear. As he drove off, Hailey watched Mack struggling to untie his new running shoes. “Where’d those come from?”
