Gassing up along the way had proven to be no problem. The reports he’d gathered before leaving Sanctuary tended toward the dire, but they were more assessments of the state of the country as a whole, not the remote and lightly populated states he’d be driving through—Wyoming, Nebraska, and Iowa. The combination of low population with the sheer vastness of the Great Plains meant the power lines in those states were long, with dozens or hundreds of miles between major transformers, and the damage had been somewhat mitigated by those factors. Albany County, Wyoming, in fact, had looked to Brady’s eye to be completely unaffected, and he was shocked to find not one but two open truck stops still pumping gas. The price gouging had been horrible, but Brady had paid happily, both times, and by the time he crossed the Illinois border he still had one full battery charge and five-eighths of a tank of gas.
He slowed to a crawl on Cayuga, checked the street addresses, and turned into Aubrey Wheeler’s driveway, careful not to bottom out on the crack in the sidewalk. He’d made it fifteen hundred miles without incident this time, and the last thing he needed was to crack an axle in the last twenty feet. Brady put the car in park, put his hands atop the wheel, and said a quick prayer of thanks to Saint Christopher and the BMW, which had never given him a moment’s trouble.
“I have to admit, this is not what I was expecting,” he said ten minutes later, sitting in the living room across from Aubrey. The blue duffel was on the coffee table between them, the center of attention and topic of conversation.
“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. You had a very long drive, and I don’t imagine it was easy.”
“I’m just not exactly sure what to do now,” he said. “You saying ‘No, thanks’ was not something I’d been led to believe was an option.”
“I can imagine. I tried to tell Thom, but he didn’t want to listen to me. Sometimes my brother can be a little, you know, obstinate.”
“Which is, no doubt, how he achieved all that he has,” Brady said, without particularly meaning it.
“No doubt,” Aubrey echoed. Shit, this one drank the Kool-Aid. “Can you just take the money back to him?” she asked. “I mean, stay here, spend the night, I don’t have a guest room, but you’re welcome to the couch. Head back whenever you want, and just, you know, return it to him. With my thanks.”
“That doesn’t seem like something that will be acceptable to Mr. Banning.”
“Well, you can’t make me keep something I don’t want, Mr.— Sorry, it’s Brady what?”
“Brady’s my last name, not first.”
She frowned, confused. “Thom calls you only by your last name?”
“I don’t think Mr. Banning knows my first name.”
Maybe not all of the Kool-Aid. “Can I ask your first name?”
“Patrick.”
“OK, look, Patrick. I’m going to propose something else. I want you to hear it all the way through, because you strike me as a certain kind of person, the kind who’s not interested in this sort of thing, and that’s great, but we’re all in the middle of some crazy shit right now and I really want you to consider this.”
Brady just looked at her. He had an idea where she was going, and she was right—he was not interested. “I’m not keeping the money,” he said.
“Now hang on, just wait. My brother and I are, well, it’s complicated, and you don’t need to be involved in it. I just don’t want his money, that’s all. You have a job to do, I can see that you care about it, and what I’m suggesting never has to go any further than just you and me. Keep the money, do what you will with it, and I’ll tell him that you gave it to me. That secret goes to our graves with us. Sounds good?”
Brady smiled, immensely uncomfortable. “I am grateful for the offer, but I’m already being paid for this.”
“Well, then you’ll be paid whatever you’re getting plus this much. How much is it, by the way? No, never mind, I don’t want to know. Just take it. Nobody will know.”
“I can’t. It’s meant for you.”
“OK. I get it. I accept it.” She reached out and made a show of pulling the bag a foot closer to her on the table. “Thank you, Patrick, you’ve delivered the money. Oh, wait a second, I don’t need this. I think I’d like to give it to a new friend.” She shoved the bag two feet away from her, so it was now squarely in front of him. She shrugged. “How’s that?”