Page 14 of Hero

“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 towork 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 theready 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.

---