Vero sat up, her voice rising as she pointed a finger at me. “Youwere the one who said we should get rid of every speck of evidence! So I did.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means there was a corpse in the trunk of my Honda! I’ve watched every episode ofCSI,and you know there’s no way to cover that up.” Vero cast me a guilty look through the thick coat of mascara on her lashes. “So I sold my car to my cousin Ramón for parts.”
“And…?”
“And I bought a new one.”
I got up and threw open the garage door, blinded by gleaming graphite curves and sleek silver pipes the second I turned on the light. The Charger looked wildly obscene parked beside my minivan. A dealership sales sticker was still taped to the back window, obscuring my view of the two child safety seats buckled behind it. “What is that?”
Vero wrung her hands. “A 6.2-liter V8… with a really big trunk?”
I slammed the door.
Vero headed for the liquor cabinet. “I think we’re going to need something stronger.”
I opened my mouth to swear at her in at least five languages I hadn’t learned yet when the house phone rang. Vero and I both went still. We stared at it as it rang again. No one ever called the house phone except telemarketers or groups soliciting donations. Groups like our local order of police.
Vero took a slow step back from it. “Who do you think it is?”
Part of me hoped it was Andrei Borovkov, just so I could tell Vero I told you so. I steeled myself as I reached for the phone. “Hello?”
“Finlay, where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you for three days! Why haven’t you been answering your cell phone?” My shoulders sagged at the sound of Sylvia’s voice.
“I know, I’m sorry,” I said, sliding into a chair and massaging a temple. I couldn’t deal with a lecture from my agent right now. She’d emailed me on Friday afternoon for an update on my manuscript, and I’d closed the email without bothering to reply. “My cell phone died. I have a new one. I’m sorry, Syl, it’s been a crazy couple of days. I’ll email you the number.”
“Your editor wants to know where you are with the book. I tried putting her off to give you more time, but she’s demanding to see what you have so far.”
“What? No!” I sputtered. “I can’t send anything.” All I had was Harris’s story. Even with the names changed, it teetered far too close to the truth. It’d be too risky to send it. “It’s a mess. I haven’t even proofread it. It’s nowhere near ready.”
“I’ll tell you what’s a mess! You are in breach of your contract. Do you understand what that means? They can cancel your next book and call back your advance. You have to send me something. Anything. How much do you have?”
“Not enough.”
“Finlay.” Jesus, she sounded like my mother.
“Okay, okay. I’ve got a few chapters I can send you.” She was going to hate it anyway. But at least she could tell my editor I’d tried. “It’s not the project we talked about, but it’s all I have.”
“How much?”
“I don’t know. Maybe twenty thousand words?”
“Get it to me now.”
“I’ll send it to you tonight.”
“No, Finlay.Now.I’m not hanging up this phone until I see it in my in-box.”
I tucked the cordless under my chin and carried it upstairs. All I wanted was to get Sylvia off the phone so I could figure out what to do about Andrei Borovkov, the cash in my kitchen, and the fifteen thousand dollars of mob money that was now parked in my garage.
Without bothering to fill in the subject line, I sent the file to Sylvia. “There, are you happy now?”
Sylvia’s nails clicked against her keyboard as she grumbled, “I’d behappyif you weren’t three months behind on your deadline. I’d behappyif I hadn’t spent the last two days leaving you unreturned voice mails. I’d behappyif Gordon Ramsay showed up in my apartment and insisted on making me dinner tonight. But this,” she said through a deflated sigh, “will have to do. Give me your new cell.”
I pulled the prepaid phone from my pocket and rattled off the number.
“I’ll give this a read and see if I can use it to buy you more time. Meanwhile, get your butt in that chair and start typing or you can kiss your advance good-bye.”
