The Devil Gets His Due (The Devils #4)(26)

I quickly send a text to my second in command, asking him to get the staff researching a new vaccine that looks promising, and head downstairs. The British guy at the front desk, Jacobson, greets me like an old friend, though we only met for the first time last weekend. “Keeley ran late again, did she?” he asks with a fond shake of his head. “She’s always telling me to let myself in and move her clocks forward fifteen minutes.”

I stare at him. I can’t begin to imagine what’s led Keeley to tell this man to enter her apartment at will, but that fucking key under her mat is coming in today. For good.

Paul, the doorman, grins, leaning with his hand against the wall. “Keeley’s finally settling down. You’ve won the lottery with that one.”

Jacobson lifts his coffee cup to me as if it’s a flute of champagne. “She’s a great girl. Cheers, mate.”

Clearly, these two have very little real-life knowledge of Keeley.

I walk outside, still expecting the chill of New York in April, and LA’s sunshine and balmy air hits me like an unexpected gift. I suppose there are a few things about living here I don’t hate. Bringing breakfast and the paper to some homeless guy is not among them, however.

Fortunately, there’s only one person sitting on the street, using what appears to be a full bag of garbage as a backrest.

“Uh—Mark, right?” I ask. In my experience, the homeless are more likely to grunt at you or expose themselves than they are to read The Wall Street Journal, and I wouldn’t put it past Keeley to have set this whole thing up as a joke.

He raises his eyes to me and grins. “You must be the father,” he says, taking the toast and paper.

I blink. “I didn’t realize she was telling people yet.”

“Well, I’m not people. I’m one of her best friends.”

Fifty percent of LA thinks they’re Keeley’s best friend, I’m guessing. And every last one of them knows where she keeps her key. “Okay…uh, enjoy.” I step backward, preparing to walk away.

“She needs a 529 plan,” he says.

I still. “Excuse me?”

“A 529 plan. To save for college. If she just cut back by one pair of shoes every month, she’d cover it.”

This is the last conversation I ever thought I’d have with a homeless guy sitting on a street corner in downtown LA. “She doesn’t even contribute to her 401k.”

“Don’t even get me started on that one,” Mark replies. “I told her when she took that job—‘Keeley,’ I tell her, ‘have them take the money out of your check before you even see it. With moderate growth on the stock market, you could retire in—’”

“Twenty years,” I say.

He shakes his head. “Don’t tell her that. We’ve got a few shaky years ahead, and if Keeley sees that money hasn’t increased the way you promised, she’ll give it a month and decide it’s best spent on a trip to Cabo. You’ve got to keep her expectations low.”

It troubles me that he’s probably right. “I can’t even convince her to tell her office she’s pregnant,” I mutter. “I don’t see her listening to anything I suggest about a 401k.”

Mark gives me a sympathetic smile. He has perfectly straight white teeth, incongruous on his very tan, very weather-beaten face. “Give her time. She’s overwhelmed right now, and you know how she is…when she’s overwhelmed, she needs a second to pretend nothing’s gone wrong.”

Except I don’t know Keeley, which means the homeless guy outside the building understands my wife better than I do. And I can blame a lot of things on her, but probably not that.





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16





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KEELEY





Once again, any hope I had for a lunch break is decimated when I have to take two “emergency” patients, and just as I’m rushing out to grab something, Trinny calls me to say Dr. Fox is stuck in traffic and needs me to take the patients who are already here waiting.

“And she was behind,” Trinny warns, “so they might be a little pissed off.”

By the time I race out of the office, I’m hungrier than any character in Les Misérables, but every fast-food place has a line around the block and I’m too fucking tired to wait or walk inside anywhere.

I go straight to my apartment without even stopping to pick up the mail, and then grab a bag of Mike and Ikes from the pantry, which is the moment Graham emerges from his room, dressed to go out. I don’t want him staying here, obviously, but seeing him looking hot as hell in a button-down, makes me sad too. It’s like he’s throwing my captivity in my face.

“You’re going out?”

“I’m meeting a friend,” he says, and I want to grill him the same way he did that night about Mark—'what kind of friend?’—but I refuse to be the one of us who turns into my father first.

“Let me guess,” he says, carefully rolling up a shirt sleeve, “you didn’t get a chance to eat again.”

There’s a small, stupid part of me that feels sorry for him. For a micromanager like Graham, it must be excruciating to have no control over your offspring whatsoever. Also, he’s replaced the burned-out bulbs in all the light fixtures I couldn’t reach, and the refrigerator is now full, so he’s tentatively on my good side.