James Grippando - Money to Burn

“Please, don’t-”

“Shut up. I need your help.”

“Okay, mon. You got it. Anything.”

The man paused, seeming to enjoy the way silence tormented his victim. Finally, he said, “Here’s the problem.”

There was another pause, and fear coursed again through Rumsey’s veins. He prayed that it was a problem he could actually solve.

“It’s a crime to burn money,” the man said.

“What?”

“You can’t just burn money. It’s a federal offense. They’ll throw me in jail.”

Rumsey could hear himself breathing. He had no idea how to respond, so he fumbled for anything.

“But-but that’s American money. You in the Bahamas now. No worries, mon.”

“Makes no difference. It’s a crime to burn money no matter where you do it.” The man leaned closer, now speaking in a low, threatening voice: “We need to cover up our crime.”

Before Rumsey could say anything, he felt a cold wetness on his shirt and trousers, and then another glob of gel all over his face. It stung his eyes terribly, and the odor told him it was gasoline-goopy gasoline.

“No, please don’t burn me, mon!”

His plea went unanswered, except for that dread scratch of sound again-the striking of the match, a sudden burst of light, the roar of the flames, the intense heat that consumed him.

What followed was the piercing sound of his own screams.

I DIDN’T GET HOME UNTIL SIX-THIRTY. SAXTON SILVERS STOCK ended the day down almost a hundred bucks a share, so if there was a financial assassin, as Bell had put it, he was halfway there. In between phone conversations with panicked clients, I spent most of the afternoon with our director of security trying to track down my money.

Nana and Papa were trying to track down theirs, too. They were watching Wheel of Fortune in the TV room, dressed and ready to take me to dinner for my belated birthday (read: happy birthday) dinner.

“Will you buy a vowel already?” Nana said to the contestant on television. The sound of her voice startled Papa, and his sleepy eyes popped open. If we didn’t get going in the next forty-five minutes, dinner was going to be the gastronomical equivalent of a midnight snack for them.

I went to the bedroom and gently nudged Mallory to move it along. She was brushing her hair in front of the framed oval mirror on the bureau.

“I’m going as fast as I can,” she said. “I don’t see why they’re so damn set on taking you out. Especially with everything that’s going on. And you just had a party last night.”

“Which they weren’t invited to. Raising the question: Why not?”

She was still checking herself in the mirror, speaking without looking at me, her tone icy. “The party was a surprise. You have to be careful about who you let in on a surprise, or it won’t be a surprise anymore.”

I sat behind her on the bed, watching her in the mirror as she got progressively angrier at her hair.

“Who were they going to tell,” I asked, “their neighbors in Century Village?”

“You, Michael. Papa would have slipped up in one of your daily phone conversations and told you he was coming to the surprise party. Then no more surprise.”

“He kept today’s visit a surprise.”

“He probably forgot to tell you he was coming. Can’t you see his Alzheimer’s is getting worse?”

“Papa doesn’t have Alzheimer’s. That’s just the way you are when you’re eighty-three years old.”

“My God, you are so clueless.”

She tossed her brush aside, giving up the struggle against her hair. This was usually the moment at which I had to beg her not to make an appointment with some scissor-happy “artiste” named Francois or Diego and cut it all off in the morning.

“You look great, Mallory.”

She rolled her eyes at me as she headed for the walk-in closet. I sensed another wardrobe change coming.

“Don’t patronize me.”

The atmosphere had officially moved from icy to frozen solid. I followed her into the closet.

“What’s wrong?”

She was flipping through the rack furiously, still not looking at me as she spoke.

“What’s wrong? Our entire life savings has just been wiped out, and this morning Saxton Silvers suddenly moved from the top of the mountain on Wall Street to somewhere deep inside the San Andreas Fault. Nothing is wrong. Life is wonderful. Another beautiful day in paradise. Just ask Papa.”

“Things are going to be okay.”

Her forage through the hanging clothes came to an abrupt halt, and finally she looked at me-though it felt more like she was looking right through me.

“It is not going to be okay. You ruined it, Michael. You ruined everything.”

I stepped closer to give her a hug, but she pulled away and hurried out of the closet. I followed her back into the bedroom.

“Mallory, I need you to stand with me on this.”

“You don’t need me. You don’t even want me. I honestly don’t know why you ever asked me to marry you.”

“How can you say that?”

She sat on the bed, tears about to flow. She sucked them back and said, “I saw you on TV.”

“Was I that bad?”

She brought her hands to her head, exasperated. “Papa’s the blind one in the family, not me.”

I was getting annoyed by the way she kept dragging my grandfather into this, but I knew it wasn’t anything she had against him. She was lashing out, and Papa was the nearest handle in our version of Wilma grabbing a pot to clobber Fred.

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“It’s not the money. It’s not Saxton Silvers. It’s you-what’s in your heart-that’s wrong.”

“You decided this while watching me on Bell Ringer?”

“Yes. When the Money Honey said you were too smart to use your wife’s birthday as your password, I could see the guilty expression all over your face.”

I took a breath, uneasy with where this was headed.

Mallory looked at me coldly and said, “Tell me what the password was.”

“There were several different accounts,” I said.

“Tell me the passwords.”

Again I hesitated, but there was no legitimate reason not to tell her at this point. “The last three numbers of each password were different, and I changed those numbers every ninety days.”

“What about the rest of it?”

“They all pretty much shared the same root password.”

“What was it?”

I hesitated.

“What was it, Michael?” she said sternly.

“Orene52.”

A Sudoku whiz, Mallory had a mind for codes and numbers, but she deciphered this one even faster than I’d expected.

“You son of a bitch,” she said.

“It’s not a big deal.”

“It’s 25 enero backward. January 25 in Spanish-your wife’s birthday. Your half Hispanic, dead wife.”

“It’s just a password.”

“Don’t try to minimize it. She’s been dead for over four years, and you still have a bank account open in her name. You never touched the money, never told me about it. And now I find out that the password for every single one of our accounts is her birthday. How is that supposed to make me feel?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Stop saying it’s nothing! Your heart is not in this marriage.”

“That’s crazy. I love you.”

“That’s the point. You don’t. It’s not just that you’re emotionally frozen and living in the past. It’s worse than that. Even though the DNA tests proved that the human remains found inside that shark were hers, you have never given up hope that somehow, some way, Ivy Layton is going to come walking through that door.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is true.”

I took another step toward her.

“Stay away from me!”