Read Plan B for Free Online Page B

A smell like cheap air freshener.
    She looked at the back of the driver’s head. He had shaved black hair. On the back of his neck, a strange tattoo crawled up from beneath his sweatshirt. Her first thought was: angry eyes. A bird?
    “What happened to Lorenzo?” she tried to say, but she wasn’t sure what came out.
    “Just stretch out and have yourself a nice rest, Alexa,” the man said. He had an accent too, but harsher, more guttural.
    That sounded like a good idea. She felt herself drifting off, but then her heart started to race, as if her body realized even before her mind did.
    He knew her real name.

3
    “Here’s the thing,” the short guy said. “I always like to know who I’m doing business with.”
    I nodded, smiled.
    What a jerk.
    If Short Man’s Disease were recognized by modern medicine as the serious syndrome it is, all the textbooks would use Philip Curtis’s picture, along with those of Mussolini, Stalin, Attila the Hun, and of course the patron saint of all miniature tyrants, Napoléon Bonaparte. Granted, I’m over six feet, but I know tall guys with Short Man’s Disease too.
    Philip Curtis, as he called himself, was so small and compact that I was convinced I could pick him up in one hand and hurl him through my office window, and by now I was sorely tempted to. He was maybe an inch or two above five feet, shiny bald, and wore enormous black-framed glasses, which he probably thought made him look more imposing, instead of like a turtle who’d lost his shell and was pissed off about it.
    The vintage Patek Philippe watch on his wrist had to be sixty years old. That told me a lot. It was the only flashy object he wore, and it said “inherited money.” His Patek Philippe had been passed down, probably from his dad.
    “I checked you out.” His brow arched significantly. “Did the whole due-diligence thing. Gotta say, you don’t leave a lot of tracks.”
    “So I’m told.”
    “You don’t have a website.”
    “Don’t need one.”
    “You’re not on Facebook.”
    “My teenage nephew’s on it. Does that count?”
    “Barely anything turned up on Google. So I asked around. Seems you’ve got an unusual background. Went to Yale but never graduated. Did a couple of summer internships at McKinsey, huh?”
    “I was young. I didn’t know any better.”
    His smile was reptilian. But a small reptile. A gecko, maybe. “I worked there myself.”
    “And I was almost starting to respect you,” I said.
    “The part I don’t get is, you dropped out of Yale to join the army. What was that all about? Guys like us don’t do that.”
    “Go to Yale?”
    He shook his head, annoyed. “You know, I thought the name ‘Heller’ sounded familiar. Your dad’s Victor Heller, right?”
    I shrugged as if to say, You got me .
    “Your father was a true legend.”
    “Is,” I said.
    “Excuse me?”
    “Is,” I repeated. “He’s still alive. Doing twenty-some years in prison.”
    “Right, right. Well, he sure got the shaft, didn’t he?”
    “So he tells people.” My father, Victor Heller, the so-called Dark Prince of Wall Street, was currently serving a twenty-eight-year sentence for securities fraud. “Legend” was a polite way of referring to him.
    “I was always a big admirer of your dad’s. He was a real pioneer. Then again, I bet some potential clients, they hear you’re Victor Heller’s son, they’re gonna think twice about hiring you, huh?”
    “You think?”
    “You know what I mean, the whole…” He faltered, then probably decided he didn’t have to. He figured he’d made his point.
    But I wasn’t going to let him off so easily. “You mean the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, right? Like father, like son?”
    “Well, yeah, sort of. That might bother some guys, but not me. Uh-uh. Way I figure it, that means you’re probably not going to be too finicky about the gray areas.”
    “The gray areas.”
    “All the fussy legal stuff, know what I’m saying?”
    “Ah,