I looked straight into Carter Holbrook’s eyes:
“What did you say?”
Carter smiled—a razor-thin, terrifying flash of porcelain veneers that held zero warmth and zero mercy:
“The woman you pulled out of the gravel, Sebastian,” Carter murmured, leaning down until his breath brushed the weather-stripping of my window:
“Did she give you something?”
“She was having a myocardial infarction, Mr.
Holbrook,” I said, my voice dropping into that quiet, fifty-decibel register that cuts through corporate boardrooms like an industrial saw:Health
“I was performing chest compressions until the state patrol arrived.”
“Did she give you a folder?”
Carter pressed, his knuckles tightening against the top of the door frame until the leather of his gloves groaned:
“A red-wax-sealed vellum portfolio from the glove box of that Maybach?”
“No,” I replied.
“Are you certain, Sebastian?”
Nick chimed in, leaning over Carter’s shoulder with an ugly, sycophantic grin:
“Because Sebastian has a terrible habit of taking things that don’t belong to him.
Like our agency’s time.
Like our clients’ patience.”
Carter Holbrook didn’t laugh.
He stared at the blood on my cuff for three seconds in absolute, terrifying, un-blinking silence.
Then he reached into his blazer pocket, pulled out an unsealed corporate envelope stamped with the gold-embossed seal of **The Holbrook-Vance Maritime Trust**, and dropped it flat through the two-inch opening of my window:
*FLUTTER.
*
The envelope landed on my passenger seat.Doors & Windows
“Inside that envelope, Sebastian,” Carter said softly, every word an iron rivet driven straight through my windshield:
“Is a cashier’s check for **fifty thousand dollars**.”
“Drawn on the Northern Trust of Chicago.”
“It is a severance bonus from my private family office.”People & Society
I stared at the paper.
“A severance bonus?
I don’t work for you, Carter.”
“You don’t work for anyone now, young man,” Carter Holbrook said, his voice dropping into an arctic, un-forgiving whisper that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up like copper wire:
“Take your wife.
Take your two little daughters.
Take your old car.”
“Pack your furniture into a rental truck before five o’clock this afternoon.”
“And drive across the state line to Wyoming.”
Carter tapped the glass with his heavy gold signet ring:
*TACK.
*
“Because if your face appears within forty miles of the Denver financial district on Monday morning…”Death & Tragedy
FULL STORY on the next page.