Will “Pat” Patowski’s take on it. He was her mentor at the Miami-Dade Police Department, where she had spent seven years as a police officer. The Kingdom Come “prophet” and his “deacons” were presently serving ten to life in the state pen at Raiford.
“What seems to be the problem, Mr. Winchester?”
“I’d rather not discuss the matter over the phone, Ms. Ballanger. Please come to my office at the Seascape Building, say—” he paused as if consulting his day-planner “—four this afternoon. Winchester, Grayson & Kent Accounting is on the fifteenth floor.”
She paused, as if consulting her own day-planner, which was a scratch pad and ballpoint buried somewhere in the income tax debris smothering her office. “Yeah, that’ll work for me. Oh, my retainer’s three hundred for consultation. If I take the case, I get three-fifty a day plus expenses,” she said, figuring any guy with a Roman numeral in his name could afford a little extra.
“Very well. I’ll expect you at four promptly.”
She found herself holding a dead phone. “Jerk,” she muttered. Obviously used to getting his way. But the address was in the Brickell high-rent district and he hadn’t haggled over the price. She scanned the wreckage of the room, looking for the yellow pages, then spotted the volume on her desk next to the empty phone charger. Two feet of books and other papers were piled on top of it.
“Screw it,” she said, getting up to dig for it. As she scooted out from between the piles of IRS manuals, they toppled, then slid with a loud series of thumps onto the mess on the floor. She managed to extract the phone book without disturbing the “ordered chaos” on her desk. Sam thumbed through the accounting section until she reached the Ws, then whistled. A full-page ad, tastefully done in black and white—or black and yellow, more properly—proclaimed Winchester, Grayson & Kent had been in business for over fifty years. Corporate taxes were their specialty.
“Yeah, I did smell money. Must be a family business. Too bad I didn’t up my fee even higher. Looks like Winchester could afford a lot more than three and a half bennies a day,” she said regretfully.
Her mother, God rest her Irish Catholic soul, used to light candles and pray for Sam to abandon her avaricious ways. Avarice was one of the seven deadly sins, after all. But stretching a beer driver’s income to feed six sons who ate as if each meal was going to be their last, Mary Elizabeth Ballanger never had an abundance of time to fret over her daughter’s vices. Sam had elevated what she liked to think of as “fiscal prudence” to an art form.
Her ruminations about family back home were interrupted by a loud crash, followed by an oath as the front door slammed. “Dammit, Sam, I thought we agreed you’d call that cleaning service while I was gone,” her husband yelled down the hall.
“Welcome home. I missed you, too, darling,” she called back, walking down the hall into the living room of their condo.
Matt Granger sat like a disgruntled yoga student, rubbing the toes of his right foot while cursing inventively. “A man needs steel-toed construction boots to walk in this sty.”
Returning from a weeklong assignment for the Miami Herald, he’d unlocked the door, juggling his suiter and laptop as he entered the dark room only to trip on one of an assortment of free weights Sam had forgotten to pick up. In a last-ditch save, he’d cradled his computer in both arms and pitched forward. He landed on an empty pizza carton.
“Let me guess. Double cheese and pepperoni, right?” He glowered at the orange stain on the knee of his best tropical wool worsted slacks. “You take these to the dry cleaners,” he said, knowing it would provoke her, but not caring at the moment.
“No way. I have some cleaning solution here that will take that out in a jiff.”
“Way. You’re not touching my Natazzi slacks with some junk you bought in the discount store.”
“Well, since they’re Italian, they go with pizza,” she said, stooping to pick up the carton and toss it in the general direction of an overflowing wastebasket. “You know, we could afford professional dry cleaning if you let me—”
“Let’s not go there, Sam,” he said, interrupting before she could restart the old argument. Why had he given her the opening? On the subject of money, his wife was as tenacious as a Boston bull terrier with teeth sunk into a letter carrier’s leg. “I have a ton of work to do. Kiss and make up?” he suggested hopefully as he climbed to his feet.
She gave him a grudging peck that ripened into a long, languorous welcome. When they finally broke apart, she said, “I’ve been too busy working on income taxes to think of the mess. It is April, and besides, I have a business to run, too.”
He looked around his once neat-as-a-pin bachelor pad. When had the hurricane hit? Everything from fast-food packaging to dirty laundry littered the room. He could only imagine what the kitchen looked like. No, on second thought, he didn’t even want to imagine it. “You promised to get a maid.”
“Do you know what they want an hour just to straighten up a little? I’ll get around to it.” She gestured vaguely.
“No, you won’t. Like you said, you have a business to run and so do I. We’re both gainfully employed, Sam.”
“We don’t make enough to afford a cleaning service…but we could if—”
“Don’t start with Aunt Claudia again,” he warned. “We can afford a damn maid—if any of them are brave enough to set foot in this landfill. And we don’t need the Witherspoon millions to live quite comfortably.”
Sam threw up her hands, cocking her head so she could look up at Matt. At six-six, he towered over her, but she never backed down. “You are nuts, you know that? First, after graduating from Yale, you turn your back on a trust fund Paris Hilton wouldn’t sniff at.” She ticked off number one on her finger, then moved to number two. “Whaddya do instead of living the high life in Boston? You enlist in the army!” Finger number three. “Now you bust your ass working the news beat at the Herald when we could have the deal of the century.
“Your aunt—your very, very wealthy aunt—has forgiven you for being nuts. Or maybe she’s forgiven you because she knows I’m not nuts. She offered me—out of the goodness of her heart—a monthly stipend to stay married to you.”
“Stipend,” Matt snorted. “Try bribe!”
“Try allowance for the fodder and stabling of my jackass husband!”
Matt looked down into his wife’s stubborn little face. “You know, you mercenary little runt, if I weren’t kinda fond of you, I’d drop you off one of the causeways into the bay.” There were days that it didn’t seem like a half-bad idea. This was shaping up to be one of them.
“And if I weren’t afraid of getting a hernia, I’d do the same to you, you Godzilla-sized jerk…wait a sec, if you were fish bait, I bet Aunt Claudia would settle a widow’s jointure on me.”
Matt couldn’t help it. He burst out laughing in spite of the aggravation. “You’ve been reading those historical romances again. A jointure is something out of the last century.”
“Yeah?” Sam poked her husband in the chest with a stiff finger. “Aunt Claudia is out of the last century. Hell, she’s probably out of the nineteenth century!”
Matt
