Vero took a slow step back from it. “Who do you think it is?”
Part of me hoped it was Andrei Borovkov, just so I could tell Vero I told you so. I steeled myself as I reached for the phone. “Hello?”
“Finlay, where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you for three days! Why haven’t you been answering your cell phone?” My shoulders sagged at the sound of Sylvia’s voice.
“I know, I’m sorry,” I said, sliding into a chair and massaging a temple. I couldn’t deal with a lecture from my agent right now. She’d emailed me on Friday afternoon for an update on my manuscript, and I’d closed the email without bothering to reply. “My cell phone died. I have a new one. I’m sorry, Syl, it’s been a crazy couple of days. I’ll email you the number.”
“Your editor wants to know where you are with the book. I tried putting her off to give you more time, but she’s demanding to see what you have so far.”
“What? No!” I sputtered. “I can’t send anything.” All I had was Harris’s story. Even with the names changed, it teetered far too close to the truth. It’d be too risky to send it. “It’s a mess. I haven’t even proofread it. It’s nowhere near ready.”
“I’ll tell you what’s a mess! You are in breach of your contract. Do you understand what that means? They can cancel your next book and call back your advance. You have to send me something. Anything. How much do you have?”
“Not enough.”
“Finlay.” Jesus, she sounded like my mother.
“Okay, okay. I’ve got a few chapters I can send you.” She was going to hate it anyway. But at least she could tell my editor I’d tried. “It’s not the project we talked about, but it’s all I have.”
“How much?”
“I don’t know. Maybe twenty thousand words?”
“Get it to me now.”
“I’ll send it to you tonight.”
“No, Finlay. Now. I’m not hanging up this phone until I see it in my in-box.”
I tucked the cordless under my chin and carried it upstairs. All I wanted was to get Sylvia off the phone so I could figure out what to do about Andrei Borovkov, the cash in my kitchen, and the fifteen thousand dollars of mob money that was now parked in my garage.
Without bothering to fill in the subject line, I sent the file to Sylvia. “There, are you happy now?”
Sylvia’s nails clicked against her keyboard as she grumbled, “I’d be happy if you weren’t three months behind on your deadline. I’d be happy if I hadn’t spent the last two days leaving you unreturned voice mails. I’d be happy if Gordon Ramsay showed up in my apartment and insisted on making me dinner tonight. But this,” she said through a deflated sigh, “will have to do. Give me your new cell.”
I pulled the prepaid phone from my pocket and rattled off the number.
“I’ll give this a read and see if I can use it to buy you more time. Meanwhile, get your butt in that chair and start typing or you can kiss your advance good-bye.”
“Thanks, Sy—” There was an abrupt click as she disconnected.
I leaned on the desk, my hands planted on either side of the keyboard, my head hanging over it. I was going to be dropped by my agent. And then by my publisher. What I had sent to Sylvia was hardly intelligible. I wasn’t even sure it was a coherent story. Thankfully, Harris’s and Patricia’s disappearances hadn’t made national news. My agent and editor lived in New York. Still, I prayed like hell I had remembered to change all the names before sending it out.
Who was I kidding? My writing was terrible. Sylvia probably wouldn’t make it through chapter two before she kicked it back to me and told me to start over.
I drew in a slow breath. The entire house smelled like burned tuna and cheese and my stomach growled. Feeling hollow, I trudged back downstairs and found Vero sitting at the kitchen table, her head braced on her hands, a shot glass beside the open bottle of bourbon we’d started drinking the night we buried Harris. I wasn’t sure how much we’d have left by the end of the night.
She filled the shot glass and pushed it toward me. It burned going down. My eyes watered as I stared at the stack of money. At least if my editor dropped me, I’d have a way to pay back the advance I owed my publisher.
Three weeks … I had three weeks to finish a book and find a way out of this.
I peeled a fifty off the stack.
“Subs or Chinese?” I asked Vero. “Even killers have to eat, right?”