“Aw, Sam,” she said. “That is so sweet, but I’m dieting. You eat it for me.”
“Oh, Ms. Hammer, you’re the last woman on earth who needs to diet.”
She patted him on the shoulder and walked away. Joe better watch out. One more night like the last few and she might say yes.
Ten feet from her office, she stopped. She could hear Doom’s voice coming out of her open office door.
“We are going to make Maddington a city built on books, and we are going to honor the woman who gave us the vision and determination to do it. The cornerstone is going to read, ‘Serenity Hammer Annex.’ People are going to know who did this.”
Then a man came out of her office. It was Seth Burroughs, the general contractor who had been selected for the expansion before the expansion stalled. He walked up to Serenity with his hand out.
“Congratulations to all of us, Serenity,” he said. “I don’t know how you made it happen, but this city needs this.” He laughed and jerked his chin toward the door. “I don’t know how you created that firebrand, either. That’s a fine little Serenity Hammer you’ve got in there.”
He moved on, tucking a sheet of paper into his clipboard.
Serenity turned the corner. Doom had her back to the door, hands on her hips, studying a set of blueprints spread out on Serenity’s desk.
“Busy?” said Serenity.
Doom jumped and spun in the air. “Oh, Ms. Hammer.” She threw her arms around Serenity and almost lifted her from the floor. “You should see what we’re doing. I just signed the contract with Burroughs for him to start work on the expansion.”
“You signed?”
“I signed your signature for you.” She plucked a pink page off the top of a stack of papers. “I know I don’t have the authority. Technically.”
Serenity looked at the signature, SSHammer, with the two S’s like lightning bolts. “Technically, no, you don’t,” Serenity said. “And, my signature doesn’t look like something from the Nazis. More than that, I don’t want my signature done by you. You can get fired for that. Hell, I ought to fire you for that.”
“You wouldn’t fire me.”
“Well, you can go to jail, and I won’t be able to stop that. This is fraud, and what’s going to happen when the checks bounce? Even with the residuals, we don’t have nearly enough to start this.”
Doom smiled. “We do. Here’s the best part. You took the wrong account. What you transferred was the daily—as in the Residuals for yesterday only. And it was only a small part of yesterday, because of when you made the transfer. The total Residual fund, the one that no one has ever accessed or checked on, is huge, like millions of dollars every week.”
“Can’t be. From residuals?”
Doom shrugged. “I don’t know either. But it is. And I’ve locked it to the library. Permanently.”
Serenity raised an eyebrow.
“Yes,” said Doom. “I did it under your login.”
“Good. It will get me to jail sooner.”
“It’s huge, Ms. Hammer. That’s why I came in here this morning. I wanted to surprise you by getting a start on fixing things up.”
Serenity picked up the next sheet on the stack.
“Plumber?”
“Yeah. Got a guy to fix those toilets in the front women’s room that have been broken forever. He’s working on them now.”
Serenity looked at the signature on the sheet. “Yeah. I can see that I told him to do that.”
Doom beamed a proud smile. “I’m only doing what I knew Serenity Hammer would do. But that’s the tip of the iceberg here. The Residual fund has more than we can spend, and more coming in faster than I can count. Since it’s being transferred automatically, that means the Special Projects fund has more money than we can spend.” She smiled a smug little smile. “So, I authorized the start of the expansion. But we’ve still got to find more ways to spend money. A lot of money, fast. The Special Projects fund has a cap, and it does get audited if it ever goes over the cap. If we don’t spend money—lots of it—we’ll be in trouble.”
“How much?”
Doom pointed her to the screen.
Serenity looked past Doom to the display on her computer. “Doom, that’s bigger than a few pennies off of everybody’s cable bill. That’s more than…” As she was calculating in her head the balance jumped again. “Doom, we’ll never get away with this. This isn’t just nickels and dimes. This is millions of dollars. God knows where this is coming from, but they’ll want it back.”
Doom drew herself up. “Then we have to spend the money before they come for it, and before the Special Projects fund gets too big to hide. We’re doing the right thing here, and I’m proud of it. We won’t back down. No matter what we have to do to protect this.”
Serenity looked at her. “Doom, there’s a line we’re not going to cross.”
Doom’s smile came back. “But what we’re doing is right. And we won’t get caught.”
Serenity thought of all the books on the shelves that started with that sentence.
twenty-eight
my little friend
SERENITY SAT AT HER DESK, trying to arrange all the contracts and work orders that Doom had signed into some kind of order, and feeling like she needed to be just a librarian again, if only for a few minutes.
She stood up and Faulkner scooted away. “Oh, big baby. I’m just going to go empty the drive-up returns box, do one librarian thing, then fire up my computer and get back to playing master criminal.”
She found Joy was wrestling a cardboard box the size of a desk in front of what used to be the checkout box.
“I got this from the moving company. Even though we just declared free books at the MAD on Friday, by Monday morning, we have more returns coming in than we ever had with the old system. Got books that aren’t even ours, people bringing in anything they think someone might want to read.”
“Don’t throw them out,” said Serenity. “If they want them in their library, we want them here, too. Get—what’s the name of that know-it-all woman, the one who comes to every book club and has read twice as much as anyone else?”
“Ms. Pethel?”
“Yeah, that’s her. Get her down here to sort through what we can take and what we can’t. Pay her, too. But not by the page.”
Serenity shivered as she went out the door to the drive-up return box. She hadn’t expected a cold breeze on a mid-August morning, but there it was. She touched her hand to the metal and felt a chill go through her. Then she took out the key and opened the door, which gave a screech that old metal usually made. She scooped the pile of books and DVDs into a stack and carried them to the check-in desk. One DVD had a yellow post-it on it. She slid the Scarface DVD from the pile and read the writing.
librarian,
give our money back, or say hello to my little friend.
She looked at the cover, which featured Al Pacino cast as pure evil and pure meanness, his face twisted into a grimace as he fired his automatic weapon at someone below him. So this was who she was robbing. Not small-city bureaucrats pretending to be big dogs, but real monsters.
Good. Let’s be real heroes.
It was still a losing game. But, before she lost, she could add a book, a room, a library—and steal a few more bullets from the little friend of the snarling man on the DVD cover. And protect girls like Doom, she told herself.
Four days ago, she was weak-kneed at speaking to bureaucrats. Now, the thought of real monsters made her stronger. The things you do when you get mad.