Sunset Beach(15)

She turned the key in the ignition and gently pumped the accelerator. “Please start. Please start. Please start.”

The motor caught! She gave it a little more gas, nodding in encouragement. “Attaway, baby. Attaway.”

As she pulled out of the motel parking lot she glanced to the left and spotted Jonah, head down, shirt untucked, slinking toward the motel’s coffee shop, phone in hand. The walk of shame. She knew it well.





6


Drue slipped into the bullpen at 9:55 on Friday. She went directly to her cubicle, donned the sweater she kept draped across the back of her chair and reached for her headset, congratulating herself on three days of avoiding eye contact with Jonah Kelleher. If she was careful, she could make today four days in a row.

Ben, whose cubicle was closest to hers, was on a call, his fingers racing across his computer’s keyboard as he listened. He nodded at her, then glanced meaningfully up at the clock on the wall of the bullpen.

Drue shrugged and sat down. Now Ben jerked his head toward the bullpen door. Incoming, he mouthed.

She heard the distinctive click of Wendy’s spike-heeled Louboutins on the wood floor as her tormentor approached.

Quickly, she powered up her computer and switched on her phone, praying that the next call into the firm’s twenty-four-hour-a-day phone bank would be routed to her.

“Drue?” Wendy had wasted no time in hunting her down. Her voice was low and sultry. Jonah swore that Wendy’s résumé included a stint doing phone sex. Now her pronounced Southern drawl drew out the vowels to three syllables.

Drue glanced up. “Hi. What’s up?”

“We need to talk,” Wendy said. Her voice frowned, even if her forehead, freshly Botoxed, could not. “You’re an hour late … again. I can’t cut you slack just because you’re the boss’s daughter, you know—”

The phone icon miraculously flashed yellow on Drue’s computer screen.

“Can’t talk right now,” she said, pointing at the screen. “Got a call.”

Without waiting, she launched into the scripted greeting she’d easily memorized.

“Campbell, Coxe and Kramner,” she said crisply. “You’ve reached the Justice Line. This is Drue. How can I help?”

Wendy didn’t budge.

Drue’s caller was a white male. Early twenties, she guessed.

“Yeah, uh, look here. I got hurt, pretty bad, actually, got hit by a taxi, you know? And I saw your television commercial this morning, and, uh, my leg is hurting pretty bad—”

“Sir?” Drue broke in. “Can we back up for a moment? I’m going to need your name and address, date of birth, all that information?”

She’d pulled up the firm’s questionnaire on her desktop computer, filling in the blanks and then working down the rest of the list of questions.

He said his name was Martin Sommers. “But you just call me Marty, okay?”

“When, exactly, did this accident occur?”

“I guess it’s been a couple weeks. I kinda lost track of time.”

The call was a loser, she already knew. Another time, without Wendy the Step-Witch breathing down her neck, she would have cut this potential client loose without another thought. He couldn’t tell her when his accident had occurred, and if he’d been hit by one of the local independent cab companies, whose insurance companies were notoriously shady, they’d have no case. But Wendy didn’t need to know that. For now, she just needed to get Wendy off her back. The way to do that was to keep Marty Sommers talking.

“I see,” Drue said, nodding her head encouragingly. “Head-on collision? What were your injuries?”

“Well, uh, I banged up my knee, busted my lip. Smashed the hell out of my cell phone. And it was only a year old, ya know? If nothing else, that taxi company needs to buy me a new phone…”

Wendy showed no sign of retreating to her office, so Drue kept going, winging it. She clicked yes on the boxes of the referral form, the one that would be forwarded to the big man himself, if enough yeses were checked. In reality, the box she’d just checked should have been a no. A hell, no.

“Oh wow.” Drue clucked her tongue sympathetically. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Sommers. That sounds incredibly painful. And the emergency room noted all those injuries on your discharge forms?”

“Call me Marty, okay? Now, what was that you asked about the hospital?”

She repeated herself, speaking even more slowly this time. “When you were released from the emergency room, were your injuries noted on the discharge papers? Did you keep those documents?”

“Oh yeah. That piece of paper they give me? See, I don’t think anybody wrote that on anything. Like I told the nurse there, I just needed something for the pain. Like, a prescription for Oxy? My knee was swole up something awful.”

“Do you think you can find your discharge papers, Marty? It’s kind of important.”

Wendy made a show of tapping her shoe. Tap. Tap. Tap. She poked Drue’s shoulder with a long pink acrylic nail, then twirled her forefinger in the air, the signal that Drue should wrap up this call.

“Oh my gosh!” Drue’s eyes widened in feigned horror. “Shattered pelvis? Broken clavicle? Concussion? Have you regained vision in that eye yet?”