Page 60 of Always Salty

There was nobody that would find any hint of illegal wrongdoing in our money.

Cutter sighed. “Just as long as you don’t start helping us until you’ve fully gotten yourself situated.”

“That’s a promise I can make,” Copper agreed. “Keely, I estimate that I’ll need you about six more months.” He paused. “Full-time.”

Keely opened her mouth and then closed it.

“You want me to quit my job?”

I crossed my arms over my chest, waiting to hear her reply.

I knew she didn’t much like her job at the sleep center, but that didn’t mean that she couldn’t find a better job somewhere else in the nursing field.

“You hate nursing,” Copper said. “I’m doing you a favor.”

“And what happens after six months?” I asked.

“She can stay on in any capacity that she would like, with the knowledge that all she’ll have to do is what she wants to do, and nothing more. Or she can pull a salary and take time off until she figures out what she wants.” He shrugged. “In six months, we can revisit.”

Keely looked intrigued. “I know you think that I know this place well, and that everyone will listen to me, but Copper…I did the absolute bare minimum here to keep it running. I kept all the stupid things from getting done when all the losers on the board wanted to take it in a different direction than what you wanted. But Copper…they don’t really know me.”

“They do, and they’ll need a familiar face when I take the board and dismantle it,” he elaborated.

For some reason, I didn’t feel like the dismantling of the board would be as easy as he thought it was.

I’d kill them all if I thought it would help Keely in the long run, but I had a feeling that anything that happened to those six men would garner quite a bit of media attention.

Copper would likely have to do this all by the book to avoid the cops coming after him.

And he would be the first person that they looked at.

Ex-con coming into a business of his father’s—a father that he killed—and all of the board members get taken out?

I wasn’t even a cop and that would be the first place I’d look, too.

“I’ll do it under one condition,” she finally said.

“Anything.”

“You let me work my own hours,” she said, her eyes coming to me. “If you need me at a certain time, I’ll be here. But I don’t want to be a slave to this place.”

“Done.”

“And you also have to quit my job for me. I don’t like doing that.”

Copper chuckled. “Does it have to be a phone call, or will an email work?”

She shrugged. “Email should be fine.”

“I’ll get it sent to you ASAP, and all you have to do is copy and paste it.”

Copper’s grin was boyish in that moment, as if he loved the idea of working with Keely.

I wondered, idly, what made her hate the nursing job that she’d gone to school for and made a mental note to ask her why when we were at home by ourselves later.

I polished off the bacon and eggs, and then discreetly pushed the rest back into the middle of the table so it didn’t look like I wasn’t eating it.

When the meeting wrapped up, Copper turned to me and said, “What do you think about tightening up the security here?”

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