Everything to Lose. Andrew Gross

all the “new age” shit didn’t get anywhere. Not that that assignment lasted long. A couple of drunken brawls and a messy sexual harassment charge got him a general discharge, hastening his new career. Now he was in private practice. With one highly notable but confidential account. His new specialty was digging up dirt on people. Or creating it when there was none.

      Though there was always something, if you pulled up the rock and looked under.

      Mirho tossed a twenty on the counter, and had gotten up to leave when something on the overhead screen caught his eye.

      A car accident. By the looks of it, a bad one. It was the headline that grabbed him.

      FATAL ACCIDENT NEAR BEDFORD

      IN WESTCHESTER COUNTY

      He stopped and said to the bartender, “Mind turning that up, Al …”

      “An old-model Honda, with only the driver inside …” was what he heard.

      Then the camera zoomed in on the car and Mirho realized things had just gotten a whole lot more complicated.

      In the parking lot, his cell phone rang. Mirho glanced at the number. Only one person it could be. He answered, not relishing how it would go. “Mirho here.”

      “Do we have it?” the caller asked. Mirho was supposed to have gotten back to him by now as well.

      “No, not yet.” Mirho sighed. “There’s been a complication.”

      “What do you mean by ‘complication’? You met with him, didn’t you?”

      “I met with him,” Mirho acknowledged. He’d worked for a lot of tough men in his day. But this was one who knew how to use the hammer. Someone you didn’t want to be feeding excuses to.

      He laid the whole thing out for him as best he could.

      “So where’s my money, Charlie?” his boss replied indifferently.

      “I don’t know, maybe in a police station somewhere,” Mirho said, until something else occurred to him. “Unless someone got there first.”

      “Someone got there first? Well, that wouldn’t be good for business, would it, Charlie?”

      Mirho opened his car door. “Or for them.”

      “Find that money, Charlie. And more important …”

      “I know what’s more important,” Mirho said.

      But just to make sure, the caller added, “More important, you find me the rest of what we’re looking for as well.”

      Mirho’s father, an oil lease salesman from East Texas, always had a saying that selling didn’t even begin until the customer said no. In this trade, it was more like it wasn’t work until something went wrong.

      Mirho shut his door and started up his car. “That’s what you pay me for.”

       CHAPTER SIX

      The next day I started sending out e-mails to see what might be out there for me. The first was to Steve, my ex-boss, reminding him to keep his antennae up as he had promised. How Brandon and I were in a real bind. Then I started sending them to people in the industry. Some had already heard and were shocked; others offered to help. Finding a new job was Priority Number One.

      I tried to put the accident and the money out of my mind.

      I poked around the employment sites. Looking at openings for advertising sales managers, media planners, corporate comptrollers. Nothing seemed on the money. I envisioned crowded cattle calls for positions I was totally overqualified for. Going up against young Ivy League grads with resumés far deeper than my own. Standing in lines at job fairs in front of junior-level human resources managers just out of school.

      I pulled my old resumé up on the computer. It seemed woefully thin. I updated it for what I’d been doing these past four years, but it still had this pretty wide gap for the time when I’d just been at home being a mom. I even called the admissions director at Milton Farms, hoping I might qualify for financial aid. They loved Brandon there. They’d never let me have to pull him out.

      I was told she was at a conference and would have to get back to me.

      As much as I tried to ignore it, the thought of last night kept drifting back.

      Taking a break, I went online to the local newspaper’s site up there, the Bedford Record Review. I needed to know who the crash victim was. What kind of person was he? A solid citizen? Or dirty? Had I taken someone’s life savings? Or a bundle of cash no one would ever even know was missing?

      On the paper’s website, I scrolled past articles on safety in the Pound Ridge Elementary School and one about a Bedford investor who had been bilked out of millions in an insurance scam.

      There was nothing on the accident.

      Sipping my coffee, I switched over to the Westchester Journal-News, which I knew had a daily police blotter.

      The big story of the day was of a Yonkers teenager who’d been eliminated from the TV show The Voice. And something about the second in a series of home break-ins in Chappaqua and Mount Kisco.

      I kept scrolling down, passing over dozens of local stories, until under the heading of “More Top Stories.”

      Then I saw it: “Fatal Crash on Route 135 near Bedford.”

      My heart kind of spurted up, then became still. I told myself that whatever ultimately happened, I didn’t cause what happened to take place and the only reason I’d gone down there was to help. I put down my coffee and clicked on the link.

      A man, identified as Joseph Kelty, 65, of Staten Island, New York, was killed last night at approximately 6:40 P.M., when his Honda Civic, driving east on Route 135 between Bedford and Fairfield County, drove off the road and down an embankment, rolling over several times and striking a tree. Mr. Kelty was the only passenger in the car.

      Sergeant Neil Polluto, of the Bedford Hills Police Department, said an eyewitness spotted a deer cross the road just before Mr. Kelty’s car began to swerve. It was possible the deceased had been texting at the time of the accident. Mr. Kelty was described as a retired line maintenance manager with the New York City Transit Authority, and it was not known why he was in the area at the time of the accident.

      My first reaction was relief. There was no mention of any missing money. No mention of anyone else being on the scene. I’d covered myself well.

      My next thoughts were about Kelty. A retired line manager with the New York MTA. I brought back the lifeless, bloodied face. So he wasn’t a criminal. A job like that paid what, I guessed only seventy to eighty thousand a year? So what would he be doing carrying that kind of cash? And all the way up there? In rural Westchester.

      I’d promised myself that if the money was legitimate, I’d find a way to get it back.

      Fate had intervened. For both of us, I guessed. Before I decide to could keep it, I had to find out as much as I could about him.

      I went back to the article.

      Funeral services for the deceased are being made through Dellapone Funeral Home in Midland Beach on Staten Island.

       CHAPTER SEVEN

      That same day two men stood near a construction site on West Forty-fourth Street in New York City, just off Times Square.

      One was large, with bushy dark hair in a black leather jacket that he wore open, as if he didn’t feel the February chill. He was devouring a sausage in a bun from a nearby food cart.

      The other was in a blue-and-orange