Page 48 of I Will Ruin You
“That’s crazy. The school board, the union, they’ll have your back.”
“Yeah, but if they don’t, I need—”
“Even if they don’t—Jesus, we could have found a way to pay for that without selling the boat. You’re doing it again, making decisions without—” She was too angry to finish the sentence, but then started up again. “Have you actually spoken to a lawyer yet?”
“No.”
“Picked one out?”
“No. I’ll start Monday, get recommendations.”
She looked angry, sympathetic, and flabbergasted, all at once. She took a moment to calm herself and said, “You have to talk to the union. Look, I’m not in it anymore but I know someone. I’ll make a call, put him in touch with you.”
Now that I’d committed myself to a lie about legal representation, I hoped she was right, that my legal costs would be covered, given that I needed the ten grand for something very different.
Bonnie looked at the text again. “What’s he mean here? Getting funds as requested? What’s that?”
“I asked... I asked Jack if he could do it in cash.”
Bonnie was briefly speechless. Then, “You want him to take out ten thousand in cash?”
“I don’t know. I guess I didn’t want the money going into our account.”
“Why?”
“Look, maybe I wasn’t thinking straight. I thought, it goes into your account, it looks like income, I don’t know. Anyway, he seems okay with it.”
“So once you get it, you going to go into a lawyer’s office and dump a pile of hundreds onto his desk? He’ll think you’re a drug dealer or a hit man or something.”
That almost made me laugh. “A hit man.”
“It’s not funny. Christ, when it rains, it—”
Before she could finish, the phone was ringing. Not the one in my hand, but her own cell, on her side of the bed.
“Jesus. What now?”
She grabbed her phone, put it to her ear.
“Yes... Ginny, what’s... oh my God... yes... okay. I’m coming.”
Bonnie ended the call, looked at me, and said, “My sister’s in the hospital.”
Twenty-One
Lucy Finster was up before her husband.
Billy liked to sleep in on Sunday. Well, truth be told, Billy would sleep in every day of the week if he could get away with it, but he didn’t have an airport shift today, and Lucy was due at the hospital. She was among those who got the cafeteria prepped for the midday crowd. It wasn’t as busy on the weekend. There were still plenty of nurses and support staff and doctors around, although the specialists usually weren’t to be found on Saturday or Sunday unless there was a real emergency. The admin people were nowhere to be seen, either. But there were usually more visitors on the weekend, people coming to see their sick friends and relatives, and the gift shop did well selling cards and flowers and little pink teddy bears wearing shirts with get well soon! written on them.
Lucy didn’t deal much with the public. She was in the back, making tasteless sandwiches by the hundreds, preparing huge vats of thin, bland soups, filling plastic cups with green cubes of Jell-O, pouring gravy from a can over reheated slices of meat loaf. Lucy sometimes thought that if you came to the hospital in perfect health to visit a relative, and then had lunch here, you’d be begging to see a doctor.
How she hated this job. And the pay was shit, too.
Billy didn’t like his work any better, but at least lately it had afforded him the opportunity to make some money on the side. Billy’s job unloading baggage from planes at one of the state’s smaller regional airports had put him in a position to help out what Lucy liked to think of charitably as international businesspeople, although thugs was more apt, which had become abundantly clear after one of them had nearly ripped off Billy’s nipple.
She hadn’t had a face-to-face with them. Billy didn’t want her around when they made their pickups, but Lucy had peeked through the curtains and seen the skanky-looking woman and heavyset guy showing up at the garage to retrieve the shit Billy’d taken off the plane.
Billy was picking up a few hundred here and there, sometimes even as much as a thousand. Cash. And it had been coming in on a pretty steady basis for a couple of months now.