have.
Staring at the ceiling, he suddenly remembered coming home after one late shift to find some old movie playing on the TV and Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly dancing up the wall. He should be able to do that, too…and better.
Behind him, Razor sighed and rolled over. Cole turned. Tension cranked tight in him. Time to see if he could pull this off. “I hope to hell you’re not ghost blind, amigo.” He stepped between the futon and drapes, grabbed one of Razor’s ears to give him a shot of cold, and hissed, “Sergeant coming.”
Razor sat bolt upright, eyes snapping open.
He heard! Would he launch into one of his start-in-the-middle conversations that made it sound to a sergeant as if he had been awake all along? It had been worth crying wolf once in a while just to see what came out of Razor’s mouth.
“I don’t know if there’s any good answer,” Razor said. “The Quakers thought their concept for Eastern State Prison was…” About which time he registered where he was and fell back on the pillow. “Sheesh. You’re starting to lose it, Kev.”
Cole laughed. “I don’t know. Your reflexes look as fast as ever to me.”
Razor jerked back upright and reached for the lamp. “Cole? Where the hell have you been?”
“No, don’t turn the light on! You’ll wake yourself up.”
Razor twisted toward him…and blinked. “What the hell? What’s with the glow-in-the-dark getup?”
Cole looked down at himself. Glow? Well, maybe a faint one. The important thing was… Razor saw him. Maybe they could skip the dream scam and just talk. Except, he realized, what happened when he came to the revelation that he was dead? No, better stick to the plan. “You’re dreaming.”
“No.” Razor squinted at him. “You look like those moon and stars we put up on Holly and Kyle’s bedroom ceilings.”
“I mean this is a dream.” Time to prove it. Cole imagined a curved surface reaching to the ceiling and trotted up it while Razor’s jaw dropped. Weird. The room appeared to revolve while he walked in place. “And, shhh.” He doubted Holly would hear him but he lowered his voice to encourage Razor to do so. “Just in case you’re talking in your sleep, you don’t want to wake Holly.” It felt like a dream…standing here with the furniture hanging overhead and Razor gaping down at him.
Then Razor felt himself and the bed around him, and squeezing his eyes shut, shook his head.
Shit! “Razor, no…don’t wake yourself up!” Cole dashed back down to the floor, mind racing ahead of him. “You need to keep dreaming. There…there are issues for you to work out, and this is the way to do it.”
Razor opened his eyes. “Issues?”
“The blood in the car for one. It’s mine and I’m dead. In your heart of hearts, you suspect that. Which is why you’re dreaming of me as a ghost.” He waded into the futon and sat down. “You know that even if I killed Sara Benay and decided run for it, I’d have contacted you and Sherrie.”
Razor stared at Cole’s legs disappearing into the futon.
Cole punched his shoulder. “Pay attention. The other issue, the most important one, is Sara Benay.”
Razor expression went baffled. “Benay? Why is she an issue?”
“She’s in some kind of danger because of me.”
“Danger?” Razor sounded skeptical.
Cole leaned toward him. “I don’t know whether it’s from witnessing my murder and recognizing the killer, or being caught searching the Flaxx company books for evidence against Donald Flaxx, but there’s this cloud of terror in the 2EC garage that I think is hers. From her apartment it’s obvious she blew out of there in one hell of- ”
Razor blinked. “What? Wait. How did she happen to be searching the Flaxx books?”
Cole winced. But he had to tell Razor. “Sara works in Flaxx’s Bookkeeping department. She’s the informant I met Monday evening. On Wednesday she left me a phone message saying she’d found- ”
“Did you put her up to it?” Razor reached for his glasses and peered at Cole through them.
Cole cleared his throat. “Not exactly.”
Razor frowned. “Not exactly? What the hell does- ” He broke off, sighing. “What am I doing? You’d think I’m really talking to you.”
Cole heard rising disbelief in that tone. He tried to keep Razor involved. “It’s your subconscious trying to work things out. Checking the books was her idea.”
Razor eyed him skeptically. “Her idea.”
“Basically.” He told Razor about the surprise call from Sara on Monday. “And we arranged to meet at Bon Vivre, where- ”
“Wait.” Razor frowned. “If she called Wednesday to tell you she’d found something, then the meeting Monday was for what…other than sending you to the men’s room to call in the cavalry?”
“Which didn’t come,” Cole said. “I had to rescue myself.”
Razor grunted. “I got tied up. I’ve already apologized for that. What happened at Bon Vivre?”
Across the table in the back booth she chose, Sara had shed her shoes and rubbed her feet, then downed nearly half the brandy and soda he ordered for her. “Here’s to Earl Lamper’s health. Preserve me from ever having Mao Tse Gao as my boss full time.”
Some interviewees had to circle a while before coming to what they wanted to talk about. Cole sat back to wait on Sara. “Lamper’s sick?”
“He had an emergency appendectomy last night.” She took another slug of her drink. “He’s such a sweetie to work for. Carries a share of the load; doesn’t give someone grief if they can’t make it in because their sitter didn’t show up that morning; doesn’t care if we come in late or play games on our work stations…as long as the work’s done and accurate. He even brings us flowers on our birthdays. But General Gao…” She grimaced. “If she’d divided Earl’s accounts among all of us, there wouldn’t be that much extra work for anyone.”
Cole sat up. His ears pricked. Lamper’s accounts?
“But she split them just between Joy and me — you remember Joy from lunch that day.”
Joy Quon, yes. A plain face but keenly intelligent eyes. She referred to accounting as having “elegant symmetry”. Kenisha Hayes, the third member of the trio, had personal elegance…tall and regal as her Masai ancestors.
Sara swirled the ice in her glass. “So I ended up with half of Earl’s accounts on top of my own. Of course Genghis Gao wanted
The skin prickled down Cole’s spine. So the books for the individual stores were divided up among the Bookkeeping staff.
Sara swung her legs under the table and sat up. “I’m starved. Have you eaten? They have great sandwiches here, especially the Reuben and the Philly beef.”
They were still circling. Cole bit back his impatience and waved down a waitress. After waiting six years for a break in the Flaxx burglaries, he was not about to blow it by rushing things. Sherrie had been warned that he would be late.
As the waitress left, Sara leaned over the table toward him. The open top buttons of her blouse gave him a view down her cleavage and a cloisonne butterfly pendant dangling into it. “You come around to see Earl every time we have a burglary. Office gossip says you think the company is involved.”
He gave her a bland smile. “An inside job is always something we have to consider. You’ve had detectives from Homicide visit, too.”
“Yes, but they were asking for more information on that Kijurian character who was throwing firebombs into our stores. I didn’t think Homicide investigated arson.”
“A firefighter died in the Woodworks fire. Any death occurring in the course of a felony is a homicide.”
She stared at him for several moments, then ran her finger around the rim of her glass. “What does bookkeeping have to do with any of it?”
He took a sip of his beer, and pushed it aside. It had gone flat and warm while he nursed it at the bar, waiting for Sara. “Which of the stores I mentioned at lunch is Lamper doing the books for?”
Sara hesitated, then named five…two that had been burglarized and three that were torched, including
