The Angels' Share (The Bourbon Kings Book 2) (29 page)

“I’m sorry?” she said as she closed things up.

“John Lenghe. The Grain God. He told me he’d get me as much information
as he had on the companies involved in WWB Holdings. And here they are.”

When he pushed the screen around, she bent down and looked at an e-mail that seemed long as a book. “Wow. That’s a lot of names.”

“Now we’ve got to find them.” Lane sat back and stretched his arms over his head, something cracking loud enough to make her wince. “I swear this is like a never-ending roller-coaster ride, the kind that doesn’t stop even after you get nauseous.”

Stepping in behind him, she massaged his shoulders. “You talked to that reporter again?”

“Yeah.” He slumped. “Oh, God, that feels good.”

“You’re so tight.”

“I know.” He exhaled. “But yeah, I just spoke with her. She’s running the story. There’s nothing I can do to stop it. One of those vice presidents must have talked. She knew so damned much.”

“How can she share that information, though? The Bradford Bourbon Company isn’t a public company. Isn’t it a violation of privacy?”

“There’s no HIPAA when it comes to businesses. And as long as she couches things in a certain way, she’ll be all right. It’ll be like when they put the word ‘alleged’ in front of almost everything when they report on crimes.”

“What will happen next?”

“I don’t know, and I’m really past the point of worrying about it. All I have to do is get through the visitation tomorrow, and then the next crisis will be honored with my full attention.”

“Well, we’re ready. Mr. Harris and I took care of the staffing, Miss Aurora is ready in the kitchen. The grounds are taken care of with a final touch up being done in the morning. How many people do you expect?”

“A thousand, maybe. At least as much as—oh, right there. Yeeeeeeeeeeah.” As he let his head fall to the opposite side, she admired the line of his strong neck. “As much as we had for the Derby brunch at least. One thing you can always take to the bank, particularly if you’ve lost your money? People looooove to stare at the carcass of greatness. And after that
article tomorrow, that’s what we’re going to look like at the butcher’s counter.”

Lizzie shook her head. “Remember my fantasy where we leave this all behind?”

Lane twisted around and pulled her into his lap. As he brushed her hair back and looked at her, his smile almost reached his eyes. “Yes, oh, yes. Tell me what it’s like again.”

She stroked his jaw, his throat, his shoulders. “We live on a farm far away. You spend your days coaching basketball. I plant flowers for the city. Every night, we sit together on our porch and watch the sun go down over the cornstalks. On Saturdays, we go to the flea market. Maybe I sell things there. Maybe you do. We shop at a little grocery store where Ragu is considered a foreign delicacy, and I make a lot of soup in the winter and potato salad in the summer.”

As his lids sank down, he nodded. “And apple pie.”

She laughed. “Apple pie, too. And we go skinny-dipping—in our pond out back.”

“Oh, I like that part.”

“I thought you would.”

His hands started to wander, circling her waist, moving higher. “Can I confess something?”

“Absolutely.”

“It’s not going to reflect well on my character.” He frowned deeply. “Then again, there isn’t a lot doing that at the moment.”

“What is it?”

It was a while before he answered. “When you and I were in my father’s office, I wanted to push everything off the top of his desk and have sex with you on the damn thing.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.” He shrugged. “Depraved?”

Lizzie considered the hypothetical with a smile. “Not really. Although I actually can’t decide whether that’s erotic or just going to create a mess on the floor that it’s going to kill me not to clean up.”

As
he laughed, she got to her feet but stayed straddling him. “But I have an idea.”

“Oh?”

Arching her back, she untucked her shirt and slowly pulled it up and over her head. “There’s a table right here—and although there’s nothing but your laptop on it, and I wouldn’t suggest throwing that on the floor, we could still … you know.”

“Oh, yeaaaaah …”

As Lizzie stretched out on her kitchen table, Lane was right on her, leaning over her, his mouth finding hers on a surge of heat.

“By the way,” she gasped, “in my fantasy, we do this a lot …”

T
he
following morning, Lane slowed down as he approached the Big Five Bridge from the Indiana side, traffic choking up the highway with morning commuters. The Porsche’s radio was off. He hadn’t checked his phone. And he hadn’t cracked his laptop before leaving Lizzie’s.

The sun was once again bright in a mostly clear blue sky, a few streaky clouds passing by on the edges. The good weather wasn’t supposed to last, though. A low-pressure system was coming in and storms were due.

Seemed fitting.

As he downshifted into third, and then second, he saw up ahead that the delay was more than just rush hour. Up ahead, there was some construction on the span, the merging lines of cars forming a bottleneck that winked in the sunshine and threw off waves of heat. Inching forward, he knew he was going to be late, but he was not going to get worked up over that.

He didn’t want this meeting now. But he’d been given no choice.

When he finally got into the single line, things started to move, and he almost laughed when he finally pulled up next to the workers in their orange bibs, hard hats, and blue jeans.

They
were installing a chain-link fencing system to keep people away from the drop.

No more jumping. Or at least, if you insisted on trying it, you were going to need to get your climb on first.

Hitting spaghetti junction, he took a tight curve, shot under an overpass, got onto I-91. Two exits later, he was off at Dorn Avenue and going down onto River Road.

The Shell station on the corner was the kind of place that was part drugstore, part supermarket, part liquor store … and part newsstand.

And he intended to go by it as he made a right. After all, there was going to be a copy of the
Charlemont Courier Journal
at Easterly.

In the end, though, his hands made the decision for him. Wrenching the wheel to the right, he shot into the service station, bypassed the gas tanks and parked by the double-doored silver freezer that had ICE painted across it along with a picture of a cartoon penguin with a red scarf around its neck.

The baseball cap he pulled down low over his face had the U of C logo on the front.

At the pumps, there were a couple of guys filling up their pick-up trucks. A municipal vehicle. A CG&E cherry picker. A woman in a Civic with a baby she kept checking on in the back.

He felt like they were all staring at him. But he was wrong. If they were looking in his direction, it was because they were checking out his Porsche.

A tinny bell rang as he pushed into the cold space of the store, and there it was. A line-up of
Charlemont Courier Journals
, all with the headline he’d been dreading splashed above the fold in Las Vegas Strip–sized font.

B
RADFORD
B
OURBON
B
ANKRUPTCY
.

The
New York Post
couldn’t have done it better, he thought as he got a dollar bill and a quarter out. Picking up one of the copies, he put the money on the counter and gave a rap of his knuckles. The guy at the cash register looked over from whoever he was helping and nodded.

Back at the Porsche, Lane got behind the wheel and popped the front page flat. Scanning the first set of columns, he opened to the inside to finish the article.

Oh,
great. They had reproduced a couple of the documents. And there was a lot of commentary. Even an editorial on corporate greed and the rich’s lack of accountability, with a tie-in on karma.

Tossing the thing aside, he reversed out and hit the gas.

When he got to the main gates of the estate, he eased off on the speed, but it was only to count the number of news trucks parked on the grassy shoulder like they were expecting a mushroom cloud to take flight over Easterly at any second. Continuing on, he entered the property at the staff road and shot up the back way, passing by the vegetable fields that Lizzie cultivated for Miss Aurora’s kitchen and then the barrel-topped greenhouses and finally the cottages and the groundskeeping shed.

The staff parking lot was full of cars, all kinds of extra help already on site to get things prepared for the visitation hours. The paved lane continued beyond that, mounting the hill parallel to the walkway that workers used to get to the house. At the top, there were the garages, the back of the business center, and the rear entrances to the mansion.

He parked by the maroon Lexus that was in one of the spots reserved for senior management.

As soon as Lane got out, Steadman W. Morgan, chairman of the Bradford Bourbon Company’s board of trustees, emerged from his sedan.

The man was dressed in golfing clothes, but not like Lenghe, the Grain God, had been. Steadman was in Charlemont Country Club whites, the crest of the private institution in royal blue and gold on his pectoral, a Princeton Tiger needlepoint belt around his waist. His shoes were the same kind of loafers Lane wore, without socks. Watch was Piaget. Tan was earned on the links, not sprayed on. Vitality was good breeding, careful diet, and the result of the man never having had to wonder where his next meal was coming from.

“Quite an article,” Steadman said as they met face-to-face.

“Now do you understand why I kicked them all out of here?”

There was no shake of the hands. No formalities honored or exchanged. But then good ol’ Steadman was not used to be anyone’s second-highest priority and clearly his Brooks Brothers boxers were in a bunch.

Then again, he had just learned he was sitting at the head of the table
at a very bad time in BBC history. And Lane could sure as hell relate to that.

With a sweep of his hand, Lane indicated the way to the back door of the business center and he let the two of them in with the new pass code. Turning lights on as they went, he led the way into the small conference room.

“I’d offer you coffee,” Lane said as he took a seat. “But I suck at making it.”

“I’m not thirsty.”

“And it’s a little early for bourbon or I’d be drinking some.” Lane linked his hands and leaned in. “So. I’d ask you what’s on your mind, but that would be rhetorical.”

“It would have been nice if you’d have given me a heads-up on the article. On the issues. On the financial chaos. On why the hell you locked senior management out.”

Lane shrugged. “I’m still trying to get to the bottom of it myself. So I don’t have a lot to say.”

“There was plenty in that damned article.”

“Not my fault. I wasn’t a source, and my no comment was as bullet-proof as Kevlar.” Although the reporter had given him quite a bit to go on. “I will say that a friend of mine, who is an investment banker who specializes in evaluating multi-national corporations, is here from New York, and he’s figuring it all out.”

Steadman seemed to compose himself. Which was a little like a marble statue struggling to keep a straight face: Not a lot of work.

“Lane,” the man started off in a tone that made Walter Cronkite seem like Pee-wee Herman, “I need you to understand that the Bradford Bourbon Company may have your family’s name on it, but it’s not some lemonade stand you can shut down or move at your will just because you’re blood. There are corporate procedures, lines of command, ways of—”

“My mother is the single largest shareholder.”

“That doesn’t give you the right to turn this into a dictatorship. Senior management has an imperative to get back into this facility. We have to convene a search committee to hire a new CEO. An interim leader must be
appointed and announced. And above all, a proper internal audit of this financial mess must be—”

“Allow me to be perfectly clear. My ancestor, Elijah Bradford, started this company. And I absolutely will close it down if I have to. If I want to. I
am
in charge, and it will be so much more efficient if you recognize this and get out of my way. Or I’ll replace you, too.”

The WASP equivalent of murderous rage narrowed Steadman’s baby blues. Which, again, was not much of a change. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with.”

“And you have no idea how little I have to lose. I will be the one to appoint a successor to my father, and it will
not
be any of the senior vice presidents who came in here every morning to suck up to him. I
will
find out where the money went, and I
will
singlehandedly keep us in business if I have to go down and run the sills myself.” He jabbed a finger into Steadman’s flushed face. “You work for me. The board works for me. Every one of the ten thousand employees getting a paycheck works for me—because I’m the sonofabitch who’s going to turn everything around.”

“And exactly how do you propose to do that? According to that article, there are millions missing.”