The Ice Between Us

The Only One Who Says No

The thing about being worth two billion dollars is that you forget some problems can't be wired.

I have a number in my phone for a man named Anton who solves things. Not violence, nothing like that, I want to be clear, Anton is a lawyer's lawyer, the kind of fixer who makes a problem financially uninteresting to the people creating it. You owe a man money, Anton finds out who he answers to and makes that person a better offer to make it go away. I've used him twice. Once for a contractor who tried to lien a property over a dispute that didn't exist, once for a tabloid that had photos from a weekend I'd rather not relive. Both times the problem evaporated inside forty-eight hours, and I never had to know the details, which is the whole point of having an Anton.

So when I find out who Marcus Reyes is, I call Anton.

I find out the way I find out everything now, by having Pavel pull the vendor logs and cross-referencing the badge to a shell company called Castellan Risk Solutions, which subcontracts to our security firm, which is how a debt collector ends up with a key to my building. And underneath Castellan, three layers down, is a consumer-debt portfolio, and inside that portfolio, line item, alphabetical, is a name.

Quinn, T. Deceased. Outstanding: $41,000.

T. Not Eleanor. T.

It takes me an afternoon and a forensic accountant on retainer to learn that T is Thomas Quinn, Eleanor's younger brother, dead since last October, and that the debt didn't die with him because debts don't, Reyes told her that himself, and that the woman whose hands have been on my hip for two weeks is carrying forty-one thousand dollars of a dead man's gambling and being hunted for it by a man with a badge to my own garage.

I have the number. I have Anton. I could make Reyes financially uninteresting by Thursday. I could buy the debt outright through three shells so it never touches my name, retire it, burn it, and Eleanor would walk into a world where the grey coat in the parking garage simply stopped existing and she'd never know why.

I'm reaching for the phone to do exactly that when she walks in for the evening session, and I make the single worst tactical decision of my life, which is that I tell her first.

"I know about your brother," I say.

"I know about Tom. I know about the forty-one thousand. I know Reyes works through a shell that subcontracts to my own security firm, which is how he got the badge, and I know the salary you're being paid matches the debt almost to the dollar, which means someone built this, which I'm still working on." I keep my voice level because if I don't, she'll bolt. "And I know a man named Anton who can make the whole thing disappear by Thursday, and I'm going to call him, and you never have to think about Marcus Reyes again."

For a second, she doesn't move at all.

Then she sets her bag down, very carefully, the way you set something down when your hands want to throw it, and she says, "No."

"Eleanor.."

"No." She turns to face me, her face white, her voice shaking, and it's not the tremor I've felt in her hands; it's something with teeth in it. "You don't get to do that."

"It's forty-one thousand dollars. It's a rounding error. It's less than I spent looking for a woman in a mask, which, by the way, was you, we both know it was you, I haven't said it because I didn't want to lose you out the door, but it was you." The words are coming faster than I want them to. "Let me fix this. I can fix this. This is the one thing I'm actually good for, let me be good for something, let me....."

"Be good for something." She laughs, and it's an awful laugh, nothing like the ones I've been collecting. "There it is. You think this is about Reyes. It's not about Reyes. It's about you needing to be the reason I'm okay."

"That's not.."

"It is. I've met you, Sasha, I know how you work. You can't stand owing anyone anything, so you make sure everyone owes you. You fix it, you pay it, you wire it, and then they're yours, and you tell yourself it's generosity, but it's a leash with a bow on it." She's crying now and furious about it, swiping at her face like the tears are an insult. "My brother asked me for money the last time I talked to him. March, the year before last. And I said no. I read all the books, I said I love you, and I'm not funding this. I was so proud, so clean about it, and he went and got it from the kind of people who put a man in a grey coat across the street from his funeral. I said no to the one person I should have saved, and he's dead, and now you want me to say yes to you so you can feel like the kind of man who fixes things. I will pay it. Me. With the money I earn putting your hip back together. That's the only version of this I survive."

And I look at the phone in my hand, Anton's number two taps away, the easiest fix of my entire easy-fixing life, and I put it down on the table, screen dark, and I have never in my life chosen not to fix something I could fix, and it costs me something I don't have a word for.

"Okay," I say. "Your way."

She blinks. Like she didn't expect to win.

Nobody's ever just let her win. I can see that land on her, the not-being-overruled, and it does something to her face that two weeks of clinical detachment didn't, it cracks her open for half a second, and I understand with total clarity that I would put down a thousand phones to see that c***k again.

What I don't know, what I won't know for two more weeks, is that Lena is standing in the hallway outside the door, and she heard the whole thing through the frosted glass.

She heard the salary matches the debt almost to the dollar. And Lena, who pulled a requisition this morning with one name on it, signed in January before the job existed, takes out her phone and does not call me.

She calls a private number for a forensic records analyst named Cass, who owes the Volkov family a favour from a bad year, and she says, very quietly, into the parking-garage echo of P1, "I need everything on Daniel Cho. Personnel file, financials, and whatever he was doing three years ago during the Brennan doping case. Tonight."

Because the salary matched the debt, dollar for dollar.

Which means whoever named Eleanor Quinn in January didn't just know she was the best soft-tissue specialist in the country.

They knew exactly how much she owed.