“Shut up,” she said.
“Allie, please…”
“Start walking.”
“Allie…”
“Start walking,” she said, summoning every ounce of self-will not to punch him in the face right then and there.
“Allie,” Walter said as he walked in front of her. “Please listen to me. I did all of this for a reason. No one was supposed to get hurt. I swear to you, I didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt.”
“You did this,” she said. “All of this. Tonight. You.”
“Yes — no. I mean no. It wasn’t just me. Someone else was involved.”
“Who?”
“That doesn’t matter. It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. I swear, no one was supposed to get hurt.”
“How was it supposed to work, Walter?”
He didn’t answer right away, and even though she was behind him, she could glimpse his face from time to time and knew he was struggling, trying to pick the right words. Walter was always so easy to read.
No, that’s not true. I just thought he was, but he’s not. He’s never really been.
She kept at least five feet between her and Walter, with Monroe walking to their left. The mercenary’s head was slightly bent forward, and she caught him blinking every now and then. His face was paler than before, a clear indication he hadn’t dealt with his blood loss quite as well as he had wanted her to believe earlier. If his blazer weren’t black, she would have probably been able to see the blood that soaked through the material. She didn’t know how the man was even still on his feet, much less walking next to them.
She kept expecting Monroe to make a run for it, especially since Apollo had begun vanishing at random intervals. She first noticed it five minutes ago when the dog simply disappeared into thin air, only to reappear on the other side of Monroe a few minutes later. Then he was gone again when she wasn’t looking. She didn’t know where he went and was always a little concerned until he returned. She couldn’t decide if he was scouting the area around them for potential dangers or if he was just doing what dogs did and chasing the variety of animals inside the woods.
“The company’s dying,” Walter was saying in front of her. “No one knows except the higher-ups.”
“Like you.”
“Yes.” He paused before continuing. “There won’t be a Gorman and Smith in a year. We’ll be lucky to survive the next few months. Everyone who knows about it is already looking for a way out. Including Dan.”
“Dan never said anything to me.”
“No, he wouldn’t. Can’t let something like the dissolution of the company get out to the masses. Everyone would panic, especially about their retirement plans and 401Ks.”
“What about them?”
“That’s the question. No one knows what will happen to them. To anything connected to the company.”
“Is that what this is about, Walter? Your retirement plan? Money?”
“Of course it is, Allie. Money makes the world go ’round. Why do you get up and go to work every morning, or answer all of Dan’s calls even on the weekends? Money.”
“You were stealing from Gorman and Smith.”
“Yes…in a way.”
“How?”
“There are money accounts in the company system that…don’t belong there.”
“I don’t understand…”
“Gorman and Smith has a lot of clients, and not all of them are the type of people you’d want to have brunch with. Dangerous people.”
“Criminals.”
“Yes.”
She took a moment to process what Walter was telling her. Could it be? How was that even possible? Wouldn’t she have spotted the signs? Could she even believe anything he was saying now, especially after everything that had happened tonight?
“Are you telling me I’ve been working for a company that launders money for organized crime and never knew it?” she said. “I was there for seven months, Walter.”
“And they’ve been perfecting the façade for ten years before we showed up.”
“But you found out.”
“It took a few years, but I started noticing things. Strange money movements, accounts that didn’t seem to have real histories behind them. Very small details that most people wouldn’t see unless they spent too much time reading numbers…and had access.”
“Like you.”
He nodded. “Eventually, they came clean with me.”
“And you still kept working for them,” she said. It wasn’t a question, and he probably knew it by the way his shoulders stiffened slightly.
“You have to understand, Allie, they didn’t really give me a choice. It was join the team or put everyone I love at risk. You know Lucy means everything to me. Lucy and you—”
“Don’t.”
He sighed. Deeply, as if the world were crashing down on his shoulders.
Now you know how I feel, she thought.
“It’s the truth, Allie,” he said. “All of it.”
They walked in silence for the next few minutes, neither one saying anything. She spent the quiet time turning over everything she thought she knew about Gorman and Smith. About Dan, her boss. How had she missed the signs? Were there even signs to be missed? The idea of working blind all these months gnawed at the pit of her stomach. More than that, it pissed her off.
Walter, in front of her, sneaked a look back at her, maybe to gauge her reaction. “Allie…”
“The three that were waiting for us at the house,” she said. “Who were they?”
“Mercenaries.”
“Did Gorman and Smith send them? Did they find out what you were doing?”
“No.”
“Who were they, Walter?”
“I hired them.”
“Jesus, Walter…”
“It wasn’t supposed to go down like this.” His voice had sped up noticeably, as if he was afraid she might not let him finish. “Once Gorman and Smith found out what I had done, they weren’t just going to take my word for it that I was held at gunpoint and forced to move their clients’ money around into places where they can’t access it. So this was the only way.”
“You needed witnesses. Lucy and me.”
“Yes.”
“You needed us to be believable, which we would have been because we didn’t know any better. For all we knew, we would be telling the truth.” She paused, and because she didn’t know what else to say, “Jesus, Walter.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “They weren’t supposed to hurt anyone. They had very strict orders not to hurt anyone. If Apollo hadn’t attacked one of them…”
“They didn’t know you hired them.”
He shook his head.
“Because you had an accomplice,” she continued.
He nodded. “Someone else communicated with them throughout the week leading up to the job, then, if necessary, during it. They were supposed to threaten me using you and Lucy, and I would eventually buckle and do what they wanted — move a sizable amount of money out of Gorman and Smith and into dummy shell accounts that only I could access later.”
“Not all of it?”
“No. We needed to leave enough behind for the Feds to uncover. That was the other part of the plan. The U.S. government.”
“They know about Gorman and Smith. The real Gorman and Smith. That’s why you said the company only has a year at most before it goes under.”
“They’ve suspected for years, but they only started actively investigating recently. This — what happened to us out here — would be the excuse they’d need to get their hands on company records. Once that happened, Gorman and Smith would have other things to worry about than trying to pick apart my story. And before anyone knew what I’d done, we’d be gone. You, me, and Lucy. That was the original plan, anyway.” He sighed. “Things…got complicated.”