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CHAPTER
29
WHEN DEVINE RETURNED TO HIS office, he found several of the other Burners staring daggers at him as he walked in. He retook his seat. Something was up. Somebody knew what was going on and had shared it with others. Emails and texts must have been flying since he’d been gone.
Devine had a few people here he’d gone out with on occasion for beers or meals and a couple of concerts, and he counted Wanda Simms as a friend. His direct supervisor had lots of newbies just like Devine to oversee, and the unwritten rule at Cowl and Comely was you never got close to any Burner because chances were very good they would be gone in less than a year. And the competition here was so fierce that close friendships were just not possible, at least that was the perennial vibe around here.
But he knew what his fellow associates were thinking.
Devine has the cops all over him. Devine killed Sara. I knew he looked creepy. Maybe PTSD. Asshole. Hope they fry him.
Maybe that was overkill on his part, but he was still feeling it.
He lumbered through his tasks. His job right now was to help analyze a slice of risk on a deal between two corporate titans, on which Cowl and Comely was advising the buyer. On the other side was the mobilized army of venerable Morgan Stanley. Both clients wanted this spin-off of a subsidiary in a management-led buyout to be completed, so the dealmaking was fairly amicable. It was what was known in the business as a “shit sandwich.”
The management was buying the company on the cheap because that was part of the plan. It was all front- and back-end-loaded with fees for the M and A boys. The sub would then issue debt that it never intended to repay. They would use the proceeds from the debt offering to pay management a huge dividend. Then they would go back to the bankers, wrap the junk debt with some decently rated stuff into a CBO, or collateralized bond obligation, and then sell it off to pension funds, police unions, and grandmas. Management would next bleed the company dry, sell whatever of the assets it could make money off of, fire a quarter of the workers, raid the pension plan in such a complicated way prosecutors would never be able to prove anything, and eventually leave the remaining workers hanging without paychecks or health care. When the debt went bad, which it was designed to do, they would go back in, peel off the good stuff, and make even more money off that, while the grandmas and the workers went to the poorhouse. They had no recourse because to have recourse you needed to hire lawyers. And even if the grandmas had any money left, folks like Cowl already had the best attorneys in the business. The litigation would take years and by the time appeals were done, the deep pockets would have vanished under a wall of legalese and there was no money left to pay off any judgment.
Heads I win, tails I win even bigger. And you, Grandma, you lose every single damn time.
He hated every tap of the keys. He despised every dollar moving across his screen. He loathed the fact that the rich were getting unbelievably richer by pitting everyone in this room against one another. And in twenty years the ones who survived would be at the top looking down at a new crop of suckers and doing the very same damn thing. It was a hamster wheel of plutocratic proportions, aiming straight for something maybe even worse.
The man next to him got up abruptly, holding his stomach and looking a bit green.
Devine knew he was from Connecticut and had gone to Yale. His father was the CEO of a Fortune 100. The guy really wanted to be a full-time gamer, he had told Devine. But the old man had threatened to cut him off if he did. So here he was, looking ready to puke.
When Devine gazed up at him, he stammered in an embarrassed manner, “S-stomach b-bug. Had it all night.” Then the man rushed out of the room.
Thanks, bud, you’ve only been sitting next to me all morning.
He glanced over at the guy’s screen, which had not gone blank yet. Streams of numbers flew across it. He didn’t know what his fellow Burner was working on, so the data lines didn’t make much sense to him. Actually, nothing made much sense to Devine now.
At lunchtime he swam against the current once again and rode the elevator down to the third-floor dining hall. He got his food and was going to sit by himself. Until he saw her.
Jennifer Stamos, looking stricken and lost, was sitting alone at a table with a nice view of the East River. However, from her expression, the woman didn’t appear to even be seeing it.
He carried his tray over to her and said, “Want some company?”
She looked up at him in a daze. “Um, okay.”
He sat, sipped his iced tea, and looked her over. Her makeup had hidden some of the dark circles under her eyes, but not every fragment of them. Her face was pinched and her normally luxuriant hair seemed thinner, less robust.
“You doing okay?” he asked.
“No, I’m not.” She glanced at him. “I heard the cops talked to you earlier.”
“They were asking about me and Sara. Did you know she was pregnant?”
Stamos tensed for an instant. “How do you know she was?”
“Because the cops told me she’d had an abortion.”
She said aggressively, “Did they want to know if you were the father?”
“They did, actually.”
“And were you?”
“No.”
