Justine stood by the window of Ben’s office and watched the Spenglers make their way past the desks and into the hallway toward the elevators. After a few seconds she heard the ding and the elevator doors opening, then closing.
The early shift bodyguards had gone. They were all probably a little bit late because of the visit of the Spengler siblings. It probably wouldn’t matter because the clients today were mostly the sort who liked to take their time showing up to events. She knew because she had worked with all of them on the night shift. It occurred to her that she had been strapping herself into party dresses with pepper spray, tasers, and handcuffs hidden in them since she was twenty. She was a favorite for actresses and female executives because she could accompany them into restrooms and dressing rooms, and she was a favorite for some males because she could make herself look like a date.
As she left Ben’s office and walked toward her desk in the open bay, she realized that this would probably be her very last few minutes in the Spengler-Nash headquarters. She turned fully around, looking at the space and letting her eyes pick out swirls and arches in the grain of the woodwork that she had been looking at for nine years. There was no use trying to memorize the look of the old office. In a month the details would probably be smoothed out of the image in her mind anyway.
She had felt the shock of Ben’s death like a devastating wound, the kind that left a person breathless and in pain, and then the deep sadness for him and—she had to admit it—for herself had taken hold of her for hours. She loved him, and he was gone, taken away from her. She had not been able to stop crying at first, and then had forced herself to stop by throwing herself into work. She had goaded herself into a manic fervor, trying to assume the tasks he would normally be doing, as though keeping his company running smoothly was keeping him in existence. It was not some magical way of not letting him die. She wasn’t crazy. In keeping this day’s operations on track she was preserving his work, his accomplishments, intact. This was the only favor and tribute she could give or he could receive. That had ended with the visit of his brother and sister. She hated them. She hated them so much that she knew she shouldn’t sit here thinking about them.
She tried to remember why she had decided to take such an outlandish career. She had been nineteen, going to the California State University at Northridge, chosen because it was close. She was poor. Her mother and grandmother’s combined savings and the surplus they could produce by denying themselves more than she could bear to know, together with the student loans she was piling up, kept her there. She had needed a summer job that paid more than she had been making as a waitress and barista. She had seen the Spengler-Nash ad for someone to do research and reporting. She remembered wondering what that meant, but the pay looked great to her after the jobs she’d had for the years of high school and college. This might be a chance to work harder and do better, so she was interested.
She sent in her application, got an interview with Benjamin Spengler, and listened to his description of the job. It was office work, eight A.M. to six P.M. five days a week. He asked the usual questions, like “Do you have your school ID on you?” She figured a security guy was supposed to be suspicious so she’d shown it to him. He’d said, “What’s your major?” She’d said, “I don’t have to declare one until fall.”
He’d asked some questions she was pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to ask. “Do you get offended if a man where you work asks you out?”
“Only if he’s an asshole,” she said.
“How do you tell?”
“If it’s the second date, I’ll know. Or if he’s cheating on somebody, touching me when I don’t want him to, the usual stuff.”
“Do you have a job now?”
“I’ve got two now—one at a restaurant on weekends and one at Northridge serving coffee.”
“When does that one end?”
“When school ends on May 10.”
“What will you do if this job starts April 25?”
“Do all three until May 10. I can shift the Northridge job to weeknights.”
“You’re hired. You start May 11.”
The job started and it didn’t evolve over time. It changed in abrupt shifts. One day they needed an extra female on a job, and she was called away from her desk, given a nice outfit and a radio, brought to a giant wedding, and told to watch for crashers. Another day the martial arts sensei the company retained came to start another round of classes, and she was told to join in to fill out the class and do her regular work later.
The Spengler-Nash office was in downtown LA, so getting there brought its own set of problems, a question of driving her mother to work early and then heading south on whichever route was least jammed with traffic, or starting on foot, then making the transitions among the tangle of bus routes to Broadway.
She did the job for two more summers. When she came to work the second summer, Ben Spengler said, “Haven’t you turned twenty-one yet?”
“I have. About a week and a half ago.”
“Happy birthday. You start firearms training on Thursday.”
“As what? A target?”
“Good question. Here’s the first thing you need to know about guns. If you need one, the job is crap.”
“Even this job?”
“Especially this one.”
Justine liked the agents at Spengler-Nash. They all seemed to be ex-somethings—ex-cops, ex-military, ex-intelligence—so the ones who told stories had good stories, and even the ones who didn’t tell stories knew things they could teach her. She liked the jobs that she increasingly got, going to fancy parties at night and spending days on yachts and golf courses and horse trails. And as she worked, the company trained her. She learned defensive driving and became adept at evading pursuers and spinning a car to change directions. She learned the private, invisible ways that important, vulnerable people entered and left certain buildings in Los Angeles, how to get access and how to guide clients through them without attracting attention.
When she graduated from Northridge, she had to scrounge extra tickets from classmates to let six people from Spengler-Nash see it happen, and two more were there working because the commencement speaker was a client. The following Monday, Ben Spengler had her on the schedule to work.
She stayed. She knew that this was a detour from the route her life should be taking, but she was making good money and she was in her early twenties and change was always far away; the sunny days all seemed endless and beautiful, and the supply of them was infinite. Her nights were spent in the company of glamorous, intelligent people, and the supply of them seemed infinite too. She went with them to events that she could never get admitted to alone. People liked her and praised her, and there seemed to be no reason to do anything else.
She’d known even at the beginning that it was time to leave, but she had not decided what to do or where to go. She had been accepted to graduate programs at three universities, but had not returned any of the enrollment forms sent with her acceptances. She had not told herself that she was making a permanent, lifelong decision to stay at Spengler-Nash, only that the idea of rushing away from what she was doing in Los Angeles to an unfamiliar city to face more years of earnest drudgery seemed insane. It was always too soon.
She knew that she was not being entirely honest with herself about the other reason she had let it go on so long. When Ben’s awful brother and sister had grilled her about her relationship with Ben, she had lied. She had not had a romantic relationship with Ben, that much was true. But the rest of the truth was that if he had given things an ever-so-slight push in that direction, she would have. When she had started working at Spengler-Nash during college breaks, she had been disappointed and bored with the male students she had dated. Even the graduate students seemed to still be boys, and Ben was something else, something she’d mostly imagined, because she’d grown up in an all-female household—a reliable, strong, and good man. The contrast was clear and vivid, demonstrated before her eyes every day.
Soon the fantasy of a relationship with him had died from neglect. A few times in later years during odd moments, or when she had just broken up with a boyfriend or Ben had done something that she particularly admired, she would think of the possibility again. As she approached thirty, the difference in their ages seemed to her to matter less. They were both adults, and he’d always treated her like one, but he had never let things go beyond business. It occurred to her that the one person she would have turned to in such a disaster—if a protector, teacher, and friend had been murdered—was Ben. Who did this to him? There were people at Spengler-Nash who had worked in law enforcement. She could use them to help her find out.
No, she couldn’t. Justine stared down at her desk. She had just been told by the new owners that Spengler-Nash was over for her, and she was expected to stay away. As she opened the drawers and packed the few possessions that she’d kept at work into a box that had held printer paper, her mind revisited the central facts. Ben had said she was in danger, and now she was alone. The police still had her Glock 17 pistol. The Glock actually belonged to the company, so the police would probably never release it to her. She couldn’t sleep in the office again tonight, and Ben’s house was now a crime scene.
She picked up the box and walked across the large room full of desks to the hallway. She stopped at the doorway to the communication room and stuck her head in. The two dispatchers on duty, Dave and Cindy, had earphones on, and they looked busy. She called out, “I’m leaving.” They looked up and saw her, but both were listening to the constant chatter of updates from the on-duty bodyguards. They gave friendly smiles and waved, still listening to the electronic chatter.
Justine had an urge to say, “No, you don’t understand. I meant forever.” Then she thought, Why? She turned and walked through the ready room, smiled at the people coming in from the locker rooms, and responded to their “See you tomorrow” promises with smiles and nods.
She kept going to the elevators, rode one down to the underground garage, put the box in the trunk of her car beside her overnight bag, and stared at it for a moment. It occurred to her that when she got it home, she was going to wonder why she had bothered to take any of the things in it. She saw the trash can in the place where it always was, picked up the box, held it over the can, turned it over, and dumped the collection of old hair ties, half-used pencils, dried-up pens, sticky notes, rubber bands, paper clips, old hairbrushes, out-of-date schedules and calendars, and other by-products of office work. She considered breaking down the cardboard box to throw it away too, but instead left it intact beside the can. It could still be useful to somebody who still worked here. She got into her car and drove out of the garage.
She glanced into the rearview mirror as she pulled away and saw the old five-story brick Spengler-Nash building one more time. She remembered Ben telling her, “LA is a place where everything is for sale and about to get torn down and replaced. Every building is a placeholder for the next building. The only exceptions are City Hall and Spengler-Nash.”
She felt as though she was waking from a long dream to find that Ben Spengler, the reason why she had ever come to Spengler-Nash, the man who had kept the dream going, was gone. There was no Spengler-Nash without him, and now she was alone and in trouble. For the first time since she was a child, she began to feel afraid.
Could she go to the police and ask for some kind of protection? They would probably relish the irony after all the clients she had protected. She couldn’t do it anyway. She would have to tell them that the reason she needed help was that she’d been fired, so her former colleagues couldn’t help her. That would make the cops think she must have been in the wrong when she’d fired her weapon at the two robbers. It would also let them know she was no longer working in the profession. That would void her reason for a gun permit, and if she had no protection, she would need to have a gun.
She would have to buy one, but that was going to be tricky. The state of California required a gun buyer to prove residence and had a ten-day waiting period before she could take possession of the weapon. After the ten days she would have to accomplish the very dicey business of substituting the new gun on her carry permit, which was borderline fraudulent to begin with. Virtually no carry permits were approved in Los Angeles County, but it was legal to carry in Los Angeles if a person had a permit issued in another county. Spengler-Nash’s employees who were armed had permits based on their supposed main residence at a ranch the company owned in Kern County. She would have to lie, change nothing on official paperwork, and keep the permit she had.
To Justine’s growing uneasiness was added the maddening knowledge that being unarmed was her own fault, another proof that she had been asleep instead of anticipating what could happen. Many of the bodyguards she’d worked with—especially the men—owned more than one pistol. They liked guns, some of them maybe too much.
Justine wanted to drive home to her condominium, but she knew it would be insane not to begin dealing with her vulnerability immediately. She drove to Burbank and parked near the gun store where she had bought ammunition and gun cleaning supplies a number of times. She walked in and picked out a man about sixty behind the counter. She said, “I would like to buy a Glock 17.”
“May I see some identification, please?”
She gave him her driver’s license to supply a government-issued ID, and her car registration because they were both in the name she was born with, Anna Sophia Kepka, and had the same address, and then filled out the forms he gave her on the glass counter. She used her Anna Kepka credit card to pay the $625 plus tax for the pistol and added in the cost of two fifty-round boxes of 9 x 19-millimeter ammunition. She left her phone number so the store could call her when the government clearance came through so she could pick up her purchases.
When she left the store and got into her car, she felt a bit less panicky because she had done something in her first hour out of the office. Her mind instantly reminded her she would be stupid to soothe herself with such a small step. She was still unarmed and about to drive toward her home, which was certainly no safer than Ben Spengler’s, and a hell of a lot smaller. She sat in the driver’s seat and studied each of the cars parked within her sight, paying particular attention to the ones in her mirrors. Then she started her engine and pulled out, her eyes flicking back to her mirrors long enough to be sure none of the cars pulled out to follow.