Greg Iles - Sleep No More

“What else have you done? Is this why you didn’t pay the liability premium? You used that money to pay debts?”

“No.”

“Am I going to have to audit every goddamn line of our books? Tell me the truth.”

Cole distended his cheeks like Dizzy Gillespie and expelled air in a repentant rush. “Okay…I was in a bind then too. Not as bad as now, but bad enough. I slid the premium money into a different account and cashed it out.”

Waters felt like the earth had opened beneath his feet. “Do you realize that I could lose everything because of that? My retirement? Ana’s college money?”

“Uh-huh,” Cole said in a dead voice. “I’ve agonized over it ever since they found the leak. But goddamn it, John, you put all that at risk yourself when you started screwing Eve. What’s going to happen to them if you go down for murder?”

“Why would I go down for her murder?”

Cole’s eyes glinted. “You can’t fool your partner, Rock. I know you were with her that night.”

“You’re full of shit. What do you think you know?”

Something like satisfaction crossed Cole’s face. “I know what I know.”

“You don’t know shit.”

“No? Maybe I got curious about why you’d given up your true-blue work ethic after seventeen years. Maybe I followed you for a couple of days. Maybe I saw you go into the Eola to meet Evie. You should have taken me up on that alibi offer.”

“You couldn’t have seen me go into the Eola that night, because I wasn’t there.”

“Whatever you say, Rock. Just don’t push me, okay? Don’t even dream about going to the cops over this pumping unit thing.”

Waters shook his head in disbelief. “Is that what you think I’d do? Turn you in to the police? I’m trying to help you, man.”

Cole looked uncertain.

“You know what this tells me? You wouldn’t hesitate to turn me in for something. Is that what you’re doing? Threatening to turn me in if I don’t pay off your debts?”

“Have I done that?” Cole snapped. “Have you heard me say that?”

“It sure sounded like you were leading up to it.”

“Goddamn it, Rock, everything’s just gotten fucked up. And I can’t see how to unfuck it.”

“This is a sad day, partner. We’ve known each other almost forty years. And this is how it ends up?”

Cole suddenly looked close to tears. “You don’t understand, John. This isn’t just about money. I don’t pay these guys? They take it out of my hide. And maybe they don’t stop there, you know? There’s no way Jenny can make it if something happens to me. I gotta find a way to pay this off.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know. I been doing stuff like selling that pumping unit just to keep up the interest on the debt. I mean, what the hell? If the EPA thing goes against us, we’re going to lose it all anyway.”

This was true enough. And given his present difficulties, Waters could care less about the dollar value of a pumping unit. “Listen to me,” he said. “Think about when we were kids together. Those summers by St. Catherine’s Creek. The forts we built…the stuff we did together. You at my father’s funeral.”

Cole nodded. “That was a long time ago.”

“Not for me. For me it was yesterday. Now I want you to tell me something. Were you in with Eve on this thing from the start?”

“What thing?”

“Don’t lie, Cole. This is me. Did you feed Eve a bunch of stuff about Mallory and me so she could make me think I was going crazy?”

Cole did a first-rate impression of being shocked. “Why the hell would I do that?”

“You could sell a lot more pumping units with me out of the picture. Maybe even some production, if you forged my signature. And if you did it before the EPA lands on us with both feet, it might just buy your ass out of the hole.”

Cole’s mouth was hanging open. “Are you drunk?”

“I’m stone sober. I’m as sane as I’ve ever been, and I’m not going anywhere. You got it? I’ll be running this company till the EPA chains the door shut. And as of now, you’re making no solo decisions regarding cash flow, production, or anything else.”

“If you’re not drunk, you have gone crazy. You think I’d fuck my best friend like that?”

The hurt in his voice almost made Waters turn away, but this was no time to be soft. “I don’t know what to think anymore, partner. We’ve come to a pretty bad place.”

Cole shook his head, stepped forward, and put his beefy hands on Waters’s shoulders. “Rock,” he said in a cracked voice. “I’m under some real pressure, no lie. All told, I’m over six hundred grand in the hole. But I’d go down with my legs broken and a bullet in my head before I’d do something to hurt you or your family. That’s God’s truth.”

Despite his shock and fury, Waters felt tears sting his eyes. There was no doubt that Cole at least believed what he said. He started to press on with his accusations, as Penn would have wanted him to do, but he simply didn’t have it in him. He squeezed Cole’s arm and said, “I know you would, partner. I know.” Then he gave Cole a hug. He felt the big man shaking, and he knew then that Cole really was in the kind of trouble that some people never walked away from.

“Don’t sweat the little shit,” he said.

“And it’s all little shit,” Cole replied automatically.

They forced a laugh, and then Waters took out his keys.

“What are you going to do?” Cole asked.

“I don’t know. You just stay safe, okay? And don’t worry about that three-twenty.”

Cole took a step toward him. “Listen, John. I don’t know what you did exactly. But my offer for an alibi still stands. If you can’t figure a way out, come see me. We’ve dug ourselves out of holes before. Maybe we can do it again, if we stick together.”

Waters tried to smile but couldn’t manage it. Cole sounded so sincere, yet every word of it could be a lie.

The office was busy that afternoon. Monthly billing was going out to the coowners in all the wells, and Sybil couldn’t handle it alone. Since Cole was busy drinking and playing cards, that left Waters to fill in for him.

The printer jammed halfway through the job, and as he helped Sybil clear it, he felt tempted to ask her some questions. If she was sleeping with Cole, as he suspected, she might know a lot about his financial problems. She might also know if he’d had any recent contact with Eve. But Sybil seemed to be in a down mood, and he didn’t want her to think the company was in more trouble than she knew about already.

At a quarter to five, Sybil headed out to the post office to mail the bills. Cole still hadn’t returned, so Waters locked the office and headed home. He was nearly there when his cell phone rang, and he saw a mobile number he didn’t recognize.

“Hello?”

“This is your fellow Eagle Scout,” said a male voice.

Waters almost laughed at Penn Cage’s choice of code. “What’s going on?”

“We’re both on mobile phones. Where are you?”

“State Street, on my way home.”

“We need to talk. Your house?”

“Ah…I’d rather meet elsewhere.”

“Okay. How about the parking lot of Heard’s Music Company?”

The lot was only a few hundred yards from Waters’s driveway. “I’ll see you there.”

Waters hung up and sped past his driveway, then crossed one boulevard and turned into the music store parking lot. Waters had bought his last piano here, a nine-foot concert grand. As a boy, he and his mother could only dream of an instrument like that; now he owned a house that seemed incomplete without one. But for how long? he thought.

As he parked the Land Cruiser, Penn leaned out of a green Audi TT and motioned for him to get in. When Waters climbed into the convertible, Penn shook his hand and smiled.