Colin Harrison - The Finder

"Better than good," Tom lied, half a smile on his face as he slipped the message into his breast pocket. "We try to avoid using wireless for very sensitive info. My secretary sent a messenger… it's a big, big deal that just got approved and we need to keep hush about it-you understand. Can't announce anything yet."

He nodded conclusively in response to himself and returned his gaze to the game. How convinced were the men? Maybe not enough.

But he bluffed his way through the end of the inning, then rose to go use the men's room, where he waited urgently in the long line, then bolted to the toilet, closed the door, and sat studying the typed message again.

Tom, we know that you know there is a problem. We have asked politely but you have not responded to our inquiries. We are talking about real money. And real consequences if we don't get it back. Tell us now, while you still can.

For a moment, he felt sick. Hot dogs full of crud, mixing with the beer. A feeling he had too often lately. But he fought back the urge. I still have some good moves to make, he muttered bitterly to himself, a lot of goddamned good moves. Like the New York Giants quarterback ducking out of the rush from a couple of enormous linemen intent on sacking him. A quick step sideways, backpedal to get a moment of safety, then throw long into the end zone. Escape doom with the great play. His mind was a blur of sports images and Good Pharma spreadsheets. He crumpled the yellow paper and threw it into a bin full of beer cups.

When he returned to his seat, the two men from Miami were-what? Gone? He looked up and down the aisles for them.

An older man in the row ahead of him turned around.

"You see those Cuban guys who were here with me?" Tom asked.

The man nodded. "That messenger came back while you were away. He handed them another letter." The man pointed under the seat and Tom leapt to pick it up.

Gentlemen, your affable host this evening, Mr. Tom Reilly, is in deep trouble. He may be an accessory to large financial crimes. We suspect that it is not in your best interests to be seen with him in such a public venue.

A great cheer went up. Rodriguez had lifted a giant homer into the center field seats. The crowd stood, roaring exultantly as the big man loped around the bases. No one saw the pharmaceutical company executive curled in his seat, fetal in his dismay, at last vomiting at what he knew was going to happen.

Her name is not important here. She was in her late thirties and working as a legal secretary for a firm on Park Avenue. The attorneys there, men and women alike, disgusted her with their self-importance, their preening fatuousness. But she kept this to herself. She had tried the single life and mostly found disappointment. In her early years some of the young associates tried to date her and she let herself be taken to dinner and then into bed, but these men were, whether they knew it or not, auditioning wives. They talked love and devotion but were in truth matrimonial credentialists; they wanted a wife to have a degree from a good college at the very least and an advanced degree as well. And this she did not. Within a few years it got around the firm that she was easy, that she opened her legs after a few dates, and this, of course she knew, was true. So what? If you liked a guy, why wait? Why is it called easy? Why not eager? Yes, eager. Once in an associate's office after a late-night race to prepare a court document. Bent over on the windowsill, watching taxis fly down Park Avenue. It was exciting. So she liked men, eagerly. Liked their muscles and penises and whiskers. Hands and shoulders. Even a man's Adam's apple could be sexy. Who could blame her? But once she'd been labeled, the associates of any promise and discretion steered away from her, and this meant that the younger associates, new to big city life, took their shots, as did some of the older partners, the divorced, almost divorced, and never married. Mostly a disgusting lot, wheezers and nose-hair neglectors. Her boss, one of the most senior partners, pretended not to notice, and in time the associates and the younger secretaries cycled away to other jobs and people forgot who she had been and began to see her as yet another unmarried, now aging, and lonely woman, which, even though she was only thirty-eight, was true.

As her boss got on in years, he had come to depend on her more and more. She began to catch important errors in his memory and in the letters he wrote, and to his credit he recognized that she was extending his career. But more to his credit, he quietly siphoned off part of his yearly bonus to her-a secret cash arrangement that occurred outside of her regular salary. She worked longer hours and by degrees realized that she did not have the energy and hope necessary to sift and sort through the men still available to her, the thin-fats, the optimistic depressives, the probably/actually gay, the pervomaniacs, all of them. How disappointing! How tiresome! The men in their forties were looking for thirty-two-year-olds, the men in their thirties looking for twenty-five-year-olds. She knew the drill; she'd been those women once, enjoyed the attention of older men. Swooned over their sophistication, their power, their sexy salt-and-pepper hair. Good grief. What was wrong with her now? Her breasts hadn't dropped much. She was still juicy, still wanton — maybe. Some of her unmarried friends who suffered from perenially disappointed ovaries had decided to have babies without men, buying sperm on the Internet, lighting a bunch of candles in a dark room, lying back and inseminating themselves. But she didn't want to be a lonely single mom. She didn't know what she wanted, except that something interesting, anything, had to happen before-before she turned into her mother!

So she moved from her cozy, so-totally-hip apartment on Twelfth Street in Greenwich Village, where everyone white under the age of fifty was addicted to the Internet, to a three-bedroom house in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, one of the many little tribal neighborhoods that fed the city each day. Still largely Italian but now everybody was living there-Brazilians, Chinese, Russians, Indians, Mexicans, Vietnamese, Africans, even Iraqis. All working crazy hours trying to squeeze onto the jammed, hot-breathed dance floor called American turbo capitalism. Rang your doorbell, asked if you had work. Painting, roofing, cut grass, you need car washed, lady? Bay Ridge was also the same neighborhood where her parents lived, so she could keep an eye on them. She bought the house using the money the old partner had funneled to her, and this pleased her. She could walk to the subway and always get a seat going into work. Easy, a little shopping on the way home. But her life became quieter and even lonelier. She paid her bills, she planted marigolds and peas and lettuce in the spring, she drank a glass of wine with the news and another before going to bed. The months flew by. She perused the newspaper but forgot what she read, she never remembered her dreams, she bought sensible shoes, she didn't bother to masturbate. Nothing was happening. She considered actually going to church, for the social interaction. How terrible was that?

Certainly she never expected to meet anyone. But one warm Saturday afternoon she opened her door and saw a man in a baseball cap and green T-shirt standing in the yard next door. He was shielding his eyes and inspecting the roof, a short yellow pencil and clipboard in one hand. Meanwhile, she inspected him. "Hi!" she suddenly called, surprising herself. He turned toward her and slipped his pencil into his breast pocket. They got to talking. His father owned the house, he said, and he was just taking care of it, for now. His old red pickup truck sat in the driveway and she realized she'd seen it there a few times before. His name was Ray Grant, he told her. She liked Ray, liked him in the way women will sometimes like a certain man. He seemed unaware of how his shoulders and arms looked in the T-shirt, the way his jeans hung on his hips. She didn't see a wedding ring. His fingernails were clean. His eyes were the bluest blue, which she always loved, and she saw both confidence and aloofness in him. He wasn't going to tell her anything, or not much, even.