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“Tha’s the way it’s always been.” She stuck her index finger in her drink and shifted around the ice cubes. “Today I hit the downside.”
“Way down.”
“I’m not looking for a pass, if tha’s what you’re thinking. I did something stupid because I din’t have a better idea. I’ll figure out how to pay you back.”
He scraped his thumbnail down the middle of the beer label, ripping it in two. “Like you said. Not a team player.”
She couldn’t take it any longer, and she began to stand so she could escape to the ladies’ room. When she wobbled, he caught her arm and steered her back into her chair.
“Do not be nice to me,” she said fiercely. “I screwed up, and I know it.”
“Yeah, you did.” His jaw set in that way he had when he was furious. “Here’s the most challenging part of being a leader. Understanding you may not always know what’s best for the team.”
“Right now, all I know is I have a client—or I used to have one—who’s being threatened, and I don’ have any idea who’s behind it.”
That wasn’t a great way to try to salvage her job—a job she didn’t deserve to hold on to—and he didn’t reassure her. Instead, he pushed back his chair. “You’re going back to the hotel.”
***
He had to get rid of her. Coop knew exactly how it felt to call an audible and have it backfire, but Pipe had thrown out the whole damned playbook, and that meant she was out.
The wheels of the 747 hit the tarmac at O’Hare, but she slept through it. She was impulsive, but she wasn’t stupid, and she had to know what was coming—had to know he couldn’t keep her around. He had no room for a blue-eyed badass who went off half-cocked doing whatever she damn well pleased.
Yet, despite the fact that he couldn’t trust her judgment, he also trusted her more than anyone he’d ever known. No person he’d ever worked with had cared more about his welfare. Sure, his teammates and coaches had cared, but they’d had ulterior motives. Piper, on the other hand, would protect him in her own screwball way even if he weren’t paying her a dime. Because that’s the way she was made. Loyal to the end. And that’s what this was. The end.
The plane pulled up to the gate, and she began to stir. Being her lover made this more complicated than it should be. He’d known the affair was a mistake, but he’d gone ahead and done it anyway. Now he had to break it off and fire her.
He’d made tough calls before, but none as tough as this.
***
WHAT’S BUGGING COOPER GRAHAM?
Cockroaches! Thousands of them are swarming the former Stars quarterback’s hot new nightspot, Spiral. “They’re everywhere,” an associate who asked to remain anonymous says. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The club is closed while exterminators try to eradicate the vermin, but whether the party crowd will return is the big question. Maybe Spiral should be renamed Death Spiral?
The news was all over the Internet. Piper sat at her office desk and buried her still-throbbing head in her hands. She only vaguely remembered collapsing on the hotel room couch last night, but she definitely remembered the strain between them at the airport. They’d barely spoken.
She wished he’d fired her on the plane so they could get it over with, but he hadn’t. Since they’d been lovers, he’d do it more carefully. He’d probably tell her she could keep the apartment for a while. He’d almost surely offer her a generous severance. The thought of his magnanimity made her want to choke.
She smacked herself in the cheek—a really bad idea, considering her jackhammer of a hangover. Until he fired her, she had a job, and she’d keep doing it right to the bitter end. She owed him that much and more.
The online smears, a mugging, a tire slashing, and a drone. It didn’t jibe. And who’d called INS—or was that even relevant? As for the cockroaches . . . Tony had told Spiral’s employees the club had to be closed for repairs to the cooling system, so the leak about the infestation hadn’t come from the staff. Coop had moved Karah and Jada to a hotel while the fumigation was going on. They knew the truth, but they also knew to keep it to themselves. Someone from the exterminating company could easily have blabbed, but Piper found it more likely that the same person who’d dumped the bugs had made sure the word got out.
She’d hit a dead end, and she had no idea where to go next, other than to make certain the club had a better video security system. She called Tony to talk about it. If it had been last week, she’d have talked to Coop directly, but it wasn’t last week.
The rest of Saturday and Sunday passed without word from Coop. She couldn’t go back to her apartment until the fumigation was done, so she slept on her office couch, not just because she didn’t want to impose on Jen or Amber, but also because she was too depressed to be around people.
The flyers she’d distributed netted a Monday-morning phone call from a suspicious wife, and by the next day, Piper had the unpleasant task of confirming the woman’s suspicions. Duke had been right. Once a wife got around to hiring a detective, she pretty much already knew the truth.
Helping others was supposed to be at least a partial cure for depression, so she tried to come up with someone she could help whose initials weren’t C.G. She thought of Jen’s problems with Dumb Ass and poked around the darker corners of the Internet for a few hours but didn’t come up with anything interesting.
Wednesday arrived, and the owner of an air duct cleaning service called. He’d heard Piper was good at handling rat-ass employees who claimed to have been hurt on the job but were goddam liars. The guy sounded like a jerk, but Piper drove to Rogers Park to meet him anyway. On the way back, Tony called to tell her the club was reopening that night, and he needed her back on duty.
“Did you check with Coop about that?” she asked.
“About what?”
