Линвуд Баркли - Find You First

“Looks delicious,” the man said as Chloe set the plate in front of him.

“Can I get you anything else? Need a refill on your coffee?”

“Maybe in a second.” He looked into his mug. “Still got half a cup. Warm it up in a couple minutes.”

“Sure.”

Behind her, she heard the bell on the door jingle again.

The man tipped his head back, looked her square in the face, and said, “I hope I didn’t get off on the wrong foot before.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I was here before but you didn’t wait on me. I’m glad it was you this time.”

That was when he ran his hand up her leg.

“Jesus!” Chloe shrieked, jumping back.

And then she screamed because something very horrible happened to the man’s face. It appeared to explode, to erupt in blood.

Except it wasn’t blood. It was ketchup, streaming at him from a squeeze bottle being held by another man who seemed to have come out of nowhere.

“What the fuck!” said the man in the booth, wiping ketchup from his eyes.

Chloe whirled around, saw someone else standing there, the man who had seconds earlier gotten out of the limo. He was holding the ketchup container, ready to take another shot if need be. There was something slightly off about him. His head was rocking slightly on his neck, like he had some sort of palsy or something.

“Leave her the fuck alone,” he said.

“Get out,” Chloe added.

The man in the booth grabbed a wad of paper napkins from the chrome dispenser and wiped his face as he shifted his butt to the end of the bench and exited the booth. He looked ready to fight back, but then he caught sight of Vivian, closing the distance between them, an iron skillet in her hand. She had it raised, like it weighed no more than a balloon.

Holding up his hands in a gesture of peace, ketchup-smeared napkins clutched in his fingers, he said, “Okay, okay, I’m going.”

Once he was out the door, he made a sharp left, and did not head toward the black limo. He got into a Civic parked just beyond it and drove off.

Chloe, rattled, took the ketchup bottle from the second man’s hand and set it back on the table he’d grabbed it from.

“Thanks,” she said.

“No problem,” he said.

“Who the hell are you?”

The man hesitated before replying. “My name is Miles,” he blurted, “and I think I’m your dad.”

New Rochelle, NY

Something was not right with Dr. Martin Gold.

His assistant, Julie Harkin, noticed he’d been acting strangely for several days. Showing up late to the office, leaving early. Canceling appointments with almost no notice, yet not leaving the building. He’d just sit behind his desk, staring at his computer screen.

Julie knew he was drinking more. She believed he was keeping a bottle of something in his desk, because more than once, when he’d come out to ask her a question or hand her something to be filed, she could smell alcohol on his breath. And he was glassy-eyed. One morning, she’d been able to smell booze on him when he first arrived, like he was skipping coffee and having vodka shots with his bacon and eggs.

Gold had always enjoyed a drink, but in all the years Julie had worked for him she had never seen him this way. Good thing he wasn’t a surgeon, she thought. You wouldn’t want this guy cutting into you.

At first, she was worried that somehow his erratic behavior had something to do with her.

Maybe he’d figured out what she’d done.

The first few days after she’d given those files to that Heather woman, the one who’d approached her in the coffee shop with fifty thousand in cash in her purse, Julie was terrified she’d be found out. She’d tried to be careful, believed she’d covered her tracks. One day while Gold was out for lunch with a friend, she’d found in his desk the key to the storage unit a few blocks away where the clinic stored all the paper files from decades past. She also knew the keypad code to enter the facility — 1825, which just happened to be the length of the Brooklyn Bridge, in meters. That night she went to the storage place, entered the code, then found Gold’s locker. There were no light switches that she could find. Everything was motion sensitive. You walked down a hall, the lights came on. She located Gold’s locker, used the key to open it, and rolled up the door.

The information Heather wanted was most likely to be found in one of the many cardboard business boxes. The time period she was interested in was about a year before the ReproGold Clinic made the transition from paper to computer filing.

The locker was about half filled, and not just with boxes of files. About five years ago Gold had refurbished the office, buying new furniture for the waiting room. Rather than throw out the old stuff, he’d stored it here, probably thinking someday he might be able to sell it.

She found the files pertaining to Miles Cookson and the women who’d been the recipients of his contribution. She gathered them up, stuffed them into her bag, and went home, where she immediately made copies of everything on her home printer. And then she got back in her car and returned the files to their proper places in their proper boxes.

It was as she was leaving the facility the second time that she noticed the security cameras.

Well, of course there would be security cameras. How could she not have thought of this? The storage company had set up cameras in every hallway, at every entry and exit point. So both of her visits were recorded, monitored. Saved.

She returned to the coffee shop the next day, handing over to Heather a thick envelope of the papers she’d photocopied.

“I’m scared,” she’d said, telling her about the cameras.

“Don’t worry,” Heather told her. “As long as Dr. Gold has no idea you did this, there’s no reason for him to ask the storage people for a review of the surveillance video. Most companies keep the video for two weeks to a month. You’ll be okay. I trust you left everything as you found it?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

Easy for her to say. She wasn’t the one sneaking around behind her boss’s back. But as each day went by and the issue didn’t come up, Julie became more confident that she was going to get away with this.

Julie hid the cash in the back of her bathroom closet, behind the towels and the extra rolls of toilet paper. She got back in touch with the various contractors who’d stopped working on her house when she could no longer pay them. “Can you come back?” she asked. “And is cash okay?”

It was.

But she hadn’t mentioned anything to Dr. Gold about work resuming on her house. She didn’t want to raise any questions about where she’d found the money. She became increasingly confident he did not suspect her, or anyone, of getting into the storage unit.

So something else was bothering him.

Finally, she asked, “Dr. Gold, is everything okay?”

She put the question to him shortly before noon when he announced, without warning, that he was not coming back after lunch, that she would have to cancel the afternoon appointments.

“I’m fine,” he said without conviction. “Just do it.”

Women and their partners trying so hard to start, or enlarge, their families did not respond well to these cancellations. Some of these people, desperate for the clinic’s help, had scheduled their appointments weeks earlier. They’d taken time off from work. Some had driven long distances.

Gold seemed not to care.

If the man didn’t pull himself together, the clinic’s future would be in jeopardy. Julie would have to find herself another job.

She was starting to think she might have to rein in the contractors again. She might need that fifty grand to live on.