Read Need You Now for Free Online

in danger, how about calling the cops?”
    “Then they really would have killed you.”
    Again I recalled the thug’s warning to me: Don’t even think about calling the cops. “How did you know they weren’t going to kill me anyway?”
    “They told me.”
    “They told you?”
    “If I’m going to find the money, they know I need a helper inside the bank, now that I got fired. I’m sure you heard about that.”
    “Yes, I just heard. But hold on a second. Is that why you’re here—to ask me to help you find the money?”
    “No. I’m here because I’m sorry you had to become a part of this. But you need to understand the message they are sending me. What happened to you today . . . they want me to know that they can—and will—hurt people I care about if I don’t meet their demand.”
    Part of me wanted to follow up on “people I care about,” but I stayed on task. “By ‘demand,’ do you mean handing over the money you put in Cushman’s hands?”
    She nodded.
    “How much are we talking about?”
    “Two billion.”
    “Whoa. I didn’t know it was that much .”
    She leaned across the table, held my hand, and looked me in the eye. “Patrick, I had no idea Abe Cushman was running a Ponzi scheme. I wish I knew what happened to all that money, but anyone who thinks I do is flat wrong.”
    Her hand felt nice in mine, but old feelings weren’t the way to the truth. I withdrew and said the same thing Joe Barber had said to me. “I’d like to believe you.”
    “You have to believe me.”
    “You’re going to have to explain an awful lot.”
    “All right. Where do you want me to start?”
    She was touching my hand again, and despite my effort not to get caught up in old memories, my mind pulled up a funny one. Lilly and I shared a passion for old movies, and we’d rented The Sound of Music after working late one night at our Swiss bank, only to laugh our way into bed upon realizing that the DVD was entirely in Chinese and that the original story was set in Austria, not Switzerland anyway. It was one of my favorite nights with Lilly—sort of the standard by which our future lovemaking would be measured.
    “We could make like von Trapps and start at beginning,” I said in a lame Chinese accent.
    The Do-Re-Mi allusion seemed to trigger the same pleasant memory for her, even if she did screw up her line:
    “Not a bad place to start.”

5
    “I met Gerry Collins about four years ago,” said Lilly. “At a conference in Maui.”
    I was massaging behind my ear as she spoke. The ringing had stopped, but even with a suppressor, a gunshot at such close range was enough to cause serious discomfort.
    “It was more than business,” she said.
    That was enough detail for me. “How long did it last?”
    “I was working in New York then, and he came to the city on business pretty regularly. We probably saw each other eight or ten times over the next few months.”
    “Then what?”
    “Then it just sort of fizzled out. No big dramatic breakup, no speeches.”
    “No seagulls.”
    She gave me a weak smile. Enough with the jokes about the breakup.
    “We completely lost touch until I was in Singapore. He called me. This time, it was purely business.”
    “What kind of business?”
    A waitress came by, but there was no pressure to order. Puffy’s Tavern is one of the few remaining places on lower Hudson Street where you can sit as long as you like and not feel obligated to buy a fifteen-dollar bottle of sparkling water to justify your stay. Amid a spate of trendy restaurants and pricy bars, Puffy’s is a blue-collar throwback to old Tribeca, a shot-and-a-beer haven for artists and truck drivers alike, still with its original tile floor and an old-fashioned bar that dates back to Prohibition. Lilly ordered a diet soda. I could have used a couple of aspirin, but I went for a shot of tequila. To each his own, I say, when it comes to pain management.
    Lilly continued when the waitress stepped away.
    “Gerry had