7

ALLIE NIBBLED HER WAY THROUGH ANOTHER HANDFUL OF WHITE CHEDdar popcorn and washed it down with a sip of Diet Coke. The bowl held only crumbs and a few duds, so she opened another bag (her second) and poured it in. A nearly empty package of Keebler Deluxe Grahams sat on the table between the popcorn and a nearly empty 2-liter Diet Coke bottle.

She ate when she was nervous, and she was always nervous when Connor was trying to negotiate a settlement of one of Devil to Pay’s lawsuits. She understood why she couldn’t be at the negotiating table with him, but that didn’t make it any easier to sit in her apartment and wait for a phone call.

The waiting was particularly hard this time. She needed the money more than she usually did—the last settlement had been a little smaller than she expected and she had been living a little larger than maybe she should have.

Plus, Connor had called late in the afternoon to tell her that he was stuck in a conference room by himself. The mediator had been trying to freeze him out of the negotiations and wanted to settle the case for peanuts. He said he’d call her back if they ever got to the point of negotiating a whistleblower share.

That had been three hours ago, and she had been putting away about 1,000 calories an hour since then. She wondered how long it would take to eat herself to death like a goldfish. Not a bad way to go, actually.

The opening notes of “Sympathy for the Devil” played from her phone and she grabbed it from the table. She bit her lip and looked at Connor’s picture on the phone’s screen. “I hope you’ve got good news for me, bud.” She clicked the answer icon and held the phone to her ear. “So?”

He laughed. “It’s good to talk to you too, Allie. How’s life treating you?”

“You tell me.”

“Life isn’t bad.” He sighed and she could hear him stretch. “In fact, life is pretty good right now.”

“How good?”

“Oh, all right. Ten million dollars good, plus attorney fees. Max is offering twenty percent to Devil to Pay as a qui tam share. We could try to negotiate with him for a bigger cut, but—”

“Woooooo-hooooo!”

“Hey, Max,” she heard him call, “I think she’s okay with twenty.”

She did some quick calculations in her head. Connor got a twenty-percent contingent fee in addition to his hourly rate and then there were taxes to pay. Still, she should net about a million, which was almost double what she had hoped for— enough to pay all her bills, keep living the good life for a couple of months, send a couple hundred thousand back to her mom, and still have some left over to invest. “So, how did you do it?”

“Remember how I told you the mediator was trying to put together a mostly noncash deal? Well, that blew up when the Hamilton team realized that Max would try to debar them from public contracting. So everybody went back and started over and this time the mediator didn’t try to keep Max and me apart. We talked it over and decided that Hamilton didn’t need to be debarred so long as they paid a substantial price for their misconduct and had an independent auditor go through their bills on any future government contracts.”

“Very nice! I knew my lawyer could beat up anyone else’s lawyer.”

Connor laughed. “There’s an old saying at the bar: ‘good facts make great lawyers,’ and you always give me great facts to work with. So, are you up for a victory dinner tonight?”

She bit her lip. These dinners always made her stomach do somersaults even when she hadn’t just filled it with junk food. The thought of an evening alone with Connor at a five-star restaurant filled her with all sorts of conflicting feelings that she wasn’t ready to deal with. “Um, sure. Eight o’clock at the usual place?”

He laughed again. “Perfect. By the way, now that this case is wrapping up, we should start thinking about the next one. Do you have anything in the pipeline?”

“Nothing yet, but I just lined up a new job through my temp agency. I’m starting on Monday. Two-month assignment, so I should have plenty of time to look around.”

“I’ll have my paralegal do some background research on them. Who is it?”

“Hold on a sec.” She dug in her purse and found the notes from her last conversation with Trudi. “Okay, here we go: Blue Sea Technology. They do a lot of maritime salvage and engineering work for both Defense and the State of California. Big-ticket stuff like that turbine project under the Golden Gate Bridge. They’re checking my fingerprints and criminal record right now. By the way, my agency says their books are a mess, which is why they’re bringing in me and a couple other CPA temps.”

Connor whistled. “My, my, my. Classified government contracts, lots of money, and messy books. Sounds like an excellent prospect. Happy hunting.”

“Thanks. I’ve got a good feeling about this one.”