Chapter 2

"Mr. Bauer?"

The voice was timid, uncertain, and not at all familiar to Bruno. Without looking up, he knew the speaker would be one of the two new waitresses he'd hired this week. He took a deep breath, considered the arrangement of radicchio on the plate in front of him and minutely adjusted a single leaf to add symmetry. He knew it would never survive the sous-chef's handling, but it gave him something to do before he faced the hint of rising panic in her voice.

"Yes?"

"There's a man here to see you. He came around the back entrance."

Bruno considered the waitress and why the last statement seemed significant to her. Dozens of people came in the back entrance at this hour. Until the restaurant opened its doors for dinner, that was the only way in. Still, the concern on her face matched what he'd heard in her voice. That cinched her meaning for him. "He came around the back entrance" meant "He doesn't seem to belong here."

Of course, a lot of people who didn't seem to belong in a busy kitchen came in that door as well. You couldn't run a restaurant without a constant stream of health inspectors, would-be vendors, job applicants, and less savory characters coming around the back door.

"Thank you, Theresa. Give me five minutes, then send him to my office, please." Bruno stepped away from the prep station to wash and dry his hands. The waitress watched him as if waiting for further instruction. He shook his head. Soft-spoken and hesitant weren't a combination that lasted long in a noisy kitchen like this. That meant she'd probably lied on her resume about her extensive experience. Time would tell if she could live up to the lie. She was pretty enough that Bruno's regulars would forgive a few gaffes as she caught on.

Bruno recognized Liam Donnelly immediately, but Liam introduced himself, offering a hand to shake, his face void of any signs of recognition. When Bruno had been new to the restaurant trade and struggling to keep his pizza place open, Liam had run a poker club out of an unmarked brick building half a block over. Some weeks, deliveries to the club had represented half of Bruno's sales. One of those weeks, Liam had come in looking for a pay-off to keep Bruno's the only Italian restaurant among the club's delivery menus. At the time, Bruno had barely been able to afford it. But, he'd paid and kept paying every month. The orders had kept coming in. But, it had always left a bad taste in his mouth.

"What can I do for you, Mr. Donnelly?" Bruno rose to shake the man's hand, then immediately sat back down again. He kept his voice polite, but with a hint of skepticism, the same attitude he used with vendors whose wares he was unlikely to buy.

Liam folded his long, rangy body into the chair across from Bruno, "I'm looking for a former tenant of yours. His name is Jared Tyler."

Bruno kept his face carefully neutral. Jared had rented an apartment upstairs from the pizza place and played at Liam's club. He'd also been a good friend and instrumental in keeping the restaurant open, both as a customer and a lender. Bruno could still remember the sight of all those hundred-dollar bills, neatly stacked, just hours before he'd been ready to close his doors for good.

Jared had also been up to some sort of business with Liam. The two had sat in the pizzeria for hours at a time talking about poker and computers with Jared drawing cryptic diagrams on legal pads. Even so, Bruno was wary of giving Liam his friend's new address. To buy time, he frowned, "You a cop?"

Liam grinned, showing a set of almost unnaturally white teeth, wildly out of place in his pale, unshaven face, "Hardly. You think the cops are looking for him?"

Bruno shook his head in the negative before he could stop himself. Jared had hung around with a lot of people who Bruno would expect to do time at some point, Liam first among them. But, he'd never seemed like the sort to run afoul of the law himself.

"Jared was never a tenant of mine. When he lived in the same building as Bruno's Original, we were both tenants. I didn't buy the building until he'd already moved out." He'd decided to lie to Liam on the only detail that mattered. Bolstering it with a bit of truth would help sell it.

"So, you know where he moved to?"

There it was. Bruno refused to show the frisson running up his spine, giving a brief shake of the head, "Should I? It's been years since we were neighbors."

Liam frowned, "You know anybody who might have kept in touch with him?"

"No." Bruno opened a desk drawer and extracted a ledger book as if distracted. In the space the book exposed, he was reassured to see the Smith & Wesson SW1911 lying where he'd left it, loaded but with the safety on. "Why are you looking for him anyway?"

Liam's grin was probably meant to be reassuring, but gave Bruno a chill like he'd just spotted some sly predator in what he'd originally thought was an empty shadow, "We did some business together. I was hoping we could do more." He reached into his pocket and extracted a business card that looked like it had been run off on a home laser printer, "Unfortunately, I've been away for a while. If you see him, could you give him that?"

After Liam had left, Bruno frowned at the card. It had Liam's name, the word "Entrepreneur" underneath it, and a phone number. As soon as he was reasonably sure Liam was out of the building, he drew out an old address book, flipped through it, and dialed Jared's cell number. A woman answered, speaking what sounded like Vietnamese. Bruno cursed silently. He still saw Jared and his fiancee once a month or so, but it had been a long time since he'd had any reason to call.

After a few minutes of wracking his brain, he turned on the computer on his desk, logged into his credit card processor, and found Jared's billing information. He called and got an answering machine. Not wanting to get Jared in trouble with the future missus, he left only a brief message to call back. A quick glance at the clock told him he wouldn't be able to swing by the address listed before opening time. He made a mental note to swing by first thing tomorrow morning.

"I knew I should have looked here first."

Jared looked up from crouching in front of the dryer and feeding it his clothes, "Good guess. You bullied me into flying out with no clean clothes. Unless you expect me to work like this..." He indicated his sweat pants, the only article of clothing he was wearing. Then, he chuckled, "Besides, I wanted to get this done before people had to work down here and deal with the humidity from the dryer."

"Appreciated," Charlie sat down in one of the two bright yellow molded-plastic chairs in the far corner. The laundry room was bigger than Jared's bathroom back in New York. Even so, with two people, two chairs, a washer, a dryer, and a laundry basket, he had to step gingerly to avoid tripping over anything. "The one time we used it, the humidity it added to the office was pretty nice actually, but now one of the air conditioners down here is wheezing and dripping like it's got a bad..." He waved his arms. Jared knew that Charlie wasn't particularly mechanically inclined and hoping he would provide the word "compressor," which Jared declined to do, leaving Charlie to finish with the weak, " ... thing inside it. Anyway, I've got a repair guy coming in today to take a look at it."

Jared made a skeptical face, "You're doing laundry now?"

Charlie shook his head and laughed, "Not a chance. Victoria's doing it." He gave Jared an amused grin, "Not much point in dating a Chinese girl if you're going to do your own laundry. Is there?"

Jared winced, but laughed in spite of himself. Charlie loved to shock people, but it was hard to take casual racism seriously from a guy who called himself "Charlie" because he was Vietnamese.

"Is that what she is? I'm no expert, but she doesn't look particularly Chinese to me."

Charlie laughed again, "She's from Hong Kong, but has some messed up family tree. I thought she was Hawaiian the first time we met—a logical conclusion when you consider we were in Hawaii at the time. Her mother's Chinese. Her father's part Thai and part English. She ripped into me for the assumption, like I was supposed to guess 'weird pan-Asian mutt.'" He looked down at the basket full of Jared's wet laundry, "You had to get up early to do this? Did you get any sleep at all?"

Jared nodded and continued loading the dryer, "I got a few hours. But, like I said, I have no clean clothes."

Another grin, "Yeah. But, I know what that means in Jared-speak. You must have at least..."

"I have no clean clothes," Jared repeated slowly. Charlie's seemingly limitless energy and exuberance could be a lot to take at the best of times. Jet-lagged on four hours of sleep and no caffeine, even innocent badinage could grate, "I'm lucky I found that blue denim shirt or I would have been flying here in my underwear."

"You?" Charlie gave Jared a look as if he were trying to determine if he was making a joke. Apparently, he got his answer, "What the hell did that woman do to you—steal all your closet space?"

"No," Jared scowled and shook his head, but he couldn't maintain it. "Well, yes. But, you just caught me at a bad time. I just..." He sighed, knowing how it would sound to Charlie, " ... ran out of clean clothes."

"You know," Charlie looked away. "I really didn't need the visual of you answering my phone call buck naked yesterday."

Jared snorted derisively, "I wasn't naked. I had on ... jeans and a t-shirt, I think."

Charlie watched Jared continue to load the dryer without saying anything for about a minute. Jared could almost feel his friend's gaze on the back of his head, but stubbornly refused to speak first.

"You don't think I forgot the famous Jared rant about how t-shirts are underwear. Do you?"

Jared sighed and then laughed in spite of himself, "There's no precedent you to forget anything you can embarrass me with later."

Charlie went on, "So, if you were sitting around in your underwear, I can only presume that you really had no clean clothes whatsoever. And..." He sighed, "Unless you've changed completely in the past year, you weren't going outside like that. How long since you left the apartment?"

Jared sat on the floor as he turned to look at Charlie, "There really wasn't anywhere I wanted to go."

"Shit," Charlie shook his head emphatically. "I ask again. What did she do to you? The last thing I heard, you were going to marry her."

Jared lowered his head and ran his hand over the top of it, back and forth. His next words sounded like treason in his ears, "She did what women do sometimes. She left. She's dating some fucking teacher now." Dumbly, he wondered where the anger in his voice was coming from because all he felt was numb disbelief. It had hurt when she moved out. But, he'd been happy and hopeful when she started coming back. After that, the constant cycle of disappearing and reappearing had kept his emotions in enough turmoil that they just all melded together into an indistinguishable gray pastiche that felt like nothing at all.

"A public school teacher?" Charlie sounded incredulous.

"What?" Jared looked up and frowned thoughtfully. "I don't know ... I mean, I guess. He's somebody who works with Catherine ... her sister."

Charlie shook his head slowly, "Thrown over for a public school teacher. That's fucking cold. A college professor, maybe. But ... How much are they going to pay you at ADP?"

Jared knew that Charlie was poking fun at him at least a little, but going along with it felt better than the alternative, "I don't think it was a cash grab. Besides, I was still consulting at MHFB at the time." He slammed the dryer door shut. Gripping the door frame with one hand and the front of the washer with the other, he levered himself to his feet, "She decided she wanted kids."

Charlie winced, the looked up at Jared, "Might want to talk about that sort of thing before the ring goes on next time."

Jared's chuckle held little mirth, "Thanks for that, Captain Relationship." He pressed the button and heard the dryer whir to life. "Did you come down here to talk business or chat about my love life?"

Charlie rose, lifting his hands in a gesture that indicated a desire to avoid misunderstanding, "No talking business without Victoria. She needs to be satisfied that you own the software free and clear before I start making promises. I just came down here because we're sending Joy for breakfast. You want anything?"

"Did I get the wrong thing?"

Jared looked up from his attempt to unstick the top of his kaiser roll from the top of his sandwich and realized everyone in the office was looking at him. Charlie smirked. Joy looked concerned. Victoria was unreadable.

"No. You got exactly what I asked for." Jared managed a half-smile.

"Is there something wrong with it?" Joy rose and came over.

Charlie laughed, "Here we go."

"It's ... fine," Jared tried again, deliberately not looking at the lukewarm mass of scrambled eggs, cheese-colored substance, and sweet chorizo. "Just ... not what I'm used to." He shrugged, ""No big deal."

"So, you're going to eat it?" Charlie sounded almost innocent.

"I ... might rummage through the kitchen."

"Nothing in the kitchen." Victoria smirked. "Thousands of dollars worth of pots and pans and not one of us can boil water without burning it."

Jared shot Charlie a dirty look, "That's a shame. It's a beautiful kitchen."

"Jared's a great cook." Charlie chimed in immediately.

Victoria's head shot up. She didn't hide her smile, "You are?"

It was the first time Jared had seen Victoria smile and it made him realize how young she must be. All morning, she'd been sitting in the hot office dressed like she was headed to court, complete with a tailored black suit buttoned up over a cream-colored, silk blouse. Last night, she'd been decidedly under-dressed, but scowling. Jared realized now that she probably wasn't any older than he was.

That smile made him want to answer her openly and honestly, but Charlie's smirk held him back. He'd been down this road before.

"I can cook better than Charlie, anyway." If an award were ever given for understatement, that one would be in the running.

Victoria looked suitably skeptical, "I can cook better than Charlie. But, I'd still rather live on bland pizza and whatever it is we're eating now."

"It's not that bad," Joy interjected. "It's just cold by the time it gets back here."

"A mystery in itself," added Charlie. He pulled the front of his brightly-colored Hawaiian shirt away from his chest with two fingertips, like it was sweaty. "One twenty in the shade and somehow food gets cold in twenty minutes."

Joy shot Charlie a look. It was hot enough, even in the basement office, for tempers to be getting frayed. Jared jumped in, "I could cook. But, I've got a lot of work to do. I'm not getting stuck with cooking, shopping, and doing the dishes like I did in Atlantic City."

Charlie didn't even look up from his desk, "Whatever happened to that business you were working on ... the one where you were going to build out spaces with a kitchen and a dining room to rent out to New Yorkers who didn't have enough room in their apartments to cook?"

Jared glared, "You know what happened. The city decided we would need a liquor license for each place. We never got off the ground."

Victoria piped up, "If you can cook, I can shop. I'll just need a list."

Everyone looked at Charlie. He shook his head and laughed, "You guys shop and do dishes if you want to. This guy would pay for the privilege to cook. If you hold out, he'll cave."

Jared stared at the fan oscillating on a filing cabinet a few yards from his desk. For all the cool air he was feeling, Charlie might have given him a gag fan with no actual blades. As it was, the air was turgid, still, and impossibly heavy. At the very least, he thought he should feel a hot breeze.

He glared at the top of Charlie's head, willing him to be the first to say something about the stifling heat. He would have thought one of them had grown up enough not to play these pointless games with each other. Admitting discomfort would just get him called a pussy.

As dry as the air was, he wasn't even sweating. Or, his sweat was evaporating as soon as it hit the air. Either way, his face was dry. Charlie's face was dry. Victoria's face was dry, but shiny. He glanced at Joy's desk. It was empty.

"This thing is blowing hot air!" Joy called from across the room. She had her hand in front of the wounded air conditioner. "Charlie, where's that damned repairman?"

Charlie didn't bother to look up, "My telepathic link with our service people is down today.So, I'm going to say, 'not here yet.'"

Joy yanked the unit's plug out of the wall, "I'm taking my laptop upstairs. This is ridiculous." She strode back across the room to her desk. Each step seemed to dissipate her annoyance. By the time she got back to her desk, she seemed gentled by the heavy air. She sat down, pushed her hair back from her face, and quietly collected her supplies.

Victoria let out a relieved sigh and Jared matched it. He'd been expecting an explosion and none had come.

"Maybe Jared, Charlie, and I could meet at the kitchen table, too." said Victoria, already gathering folders into a slim, leather attache. "We don't really need the computers for this."

"Sounds good," said Jared. He took a long swig from his water bottle. He started shutting down his system, a complex ritual that involved jotting down notes about what he'd done and what state he'd left things in. Nothing Charlie had asked him to do was particularly challenging. Even so, it felt good to be getting back into the rhythm of working again.

By the time Jared looked up, Joy and Victoria had already left. Charlie was sitting at his desk, seemingly for no other reason than to wait until he had Jared's attention again.

"You're still a pussy." Charlie deadpanned, "You know that. Right?"

Jared was down to jeans and a work shirt by the time he got to the kitchen. Upstairs, the climate control kept the air cool enough that they could have been anywhere in the civilized world. Even the view outside the window was of a green lawn, freshly mowed.

Victoria sat at the table, still dressed in her suit, a half-dozen manila folders laid out in front of her, their tabs color coded. She handed Jared a thick accordion folder, "I don't think anything in here is germane to our discussion. In case I'm wrong, keep it close, please."