He's talking now." Emma stared at the words. What does that mean? Gary said. He'd read it upside down without meaning to.
Who's Derek? I'll explain later, Emma said. She picked up her phone. Three missed calls from Patricia Cho. A text from the same number. "
Call me. Urgent." She looked at William. Go, he said. I'll sit with Gary.
I'm in the middle of Gary's got nowhere to be. Gary said without hesitation. Go. Emma went to the back room and called Patricia. Patricia picked up before the second ring.
Derek Holloway called our office 40 minutes ago, Patricia said. Not his lawyer, him directly. Emma sat down on the stool in the back room. " Why?" " Because Pinnacle fired him this morning, terminated his employment, rescinded his access to company files, and their legal team sent him a letter in the same envelope as his termination notice, making clear that any criminal liability related to his conduct yesterday would be treated as personal and outside the scope of his employment.
A pause. " They cut him loose." " They threw him under," Emma said. " Completely. Everything he did yesterday they're positioning as unauthorized conduct by a rogue employee acting outside his duties.
They're going to argue he went to your shop without company authorization that the threats he made were personal that Pinnacle had no knowledge. " That's a lie." " A provable lie with what we have," Patricia said, but that's not the point right now. The point is that Derek Holloway understands exactly what just happened to him. He went to your shop because his employer sent him.
He used company resources to identify you, to document your address, to run background on your connection to Angela. And now his employer is telling the world it doesn't know him. A beat. He's not a loyal man, but even disloyal men have a limit. He wants to talk, Emma said. "
He wants to talk. He wants protection, and he wants a deal." In that order, Emma pressed her free hand flat against her thigh. She thought about Derek's face when he'd come back through the broken service door the second time. The precision of his grip on her arm, the deliberate calm of a man who had done this many times and expected it to go the way it always went.
She thought about what it felt like to be that kind of person, to have built your entire professional identity on the ability to make others afraid and then to have your own employer look at you and say, "You are disposable." She did not feel sorry for him, but she understood the moment. " What do you need from me?" Emma said. " Nothing yet.
I need you to stay available, stay away from any contact with Derek independently, and trust that what's happening right now is actually good news, even though I know it doesn't feel simple." " It feels like it got bigger," Emma said. " It got exactly as big as it needed to get," Patricia said., " Call me if anything else changes on your end." Emma came back out to the front.
Gary was sitting in the chair telling William a story about a parent-teacher conference that had gone sideways. And William was listening with the same quality of attention Emma used when someone was in her chair. When Emma sat back down across from Gary, he looked at her face. " Good news or bad news?" Gary said. "
Both, maybe," Emma said. " Neither, I'm not sure yet." " That's usually how the important things feel," Gary said. " Right up until they become one or the other." She finished his tattoo.
Dominic, Sasha, Marcus, the three names in Emma's precise lettering running down the inside of Gary's forearm alongside the existing piece which showed a road stretching toward a horizon that Gary had never fully explained and Emma had never asked about. When she finished, Gary looked at his arm for a long time. " Good one," he said. " Just that." She cleaned the piece and bandaged it and Gary left and the morning continued in the strange doubled way that days continue when something large is moving underneath the ordinary surface of them.
At noon, Marcus arrived. He came in alone, which was itself information. Yesterday, he'd been surrounded by hundreds of people. Today, he was a man walking through a door in plain clothes, which was somehow more significant, not less. He sat down across from Emma and looked at her with the expression of someone who has spent the morning managing multiple moving pieces and has come to the person at the center of them. "
You talked to Patricia," he said. " An hour ago." Then you know about Derek. I know he's talking. I don't know what he's saying.
Marcus leaned forward, forearms on his knees. " He's saying everything. He didn't have a choice." When Pinnacle fired him this morning, they also, and this is the part Patricia may not have mentioned yet because we just found out ourselves, they also contacted three of Derek's private creditors and flagged irregularities in his personal financial disclosures. Emma stared at him. "
They're going after his finances." They're reminding him that they know where all his bodies are buried. Marcus said, "It's what these organizations do when someone becomes a liability. They don't just cut you off. They make sure you understand that cooperation with anyone else is more expensive than cooperation with them.
So when he called Patricia, he called her because he already ran the numbers and figured out that the cost of staying silent is higher than the cost of talking. Marcus paused. He didn't call because he grew a conscience. I want to be clear about that. I didn't assume he did, Emma said.