Chapter 2 - The Ten-Thousand-Dollar Tip
Scarlett stared at the green stack of bills. Ten thousand dollars. That was sixteen months of her mother’s heart medication. That was the security deposit on a clean two-bedroom apartment near the clinic in West Orange. That was a life without cutting her own hair in the mirror on Sunday nights while her eyes watered from the fumes of cheap dye.
She turned around slowly. "I don't accept charity."
"It's not charity," Victor said, his tone dry, almost clinical. "It's a consultation fee. You made a diagnostic assessment of my character in six words. In my line of work, people charge fifty times that amount to give me bad advice."
He gestured to the vinyl seat across from him.
Scarlett looked at Patty. Patty was shaking her head furiously, her eyes wide with terror, silently mouthing the word NO. The two guards at the counter were watching Victor's hands, their expressions completely unreadable.
Scarlett walked over, slid into the booth across from him, and kept her hands flat on the table where he could see them. Up close, Victor looked older than forty-five. There were dark circles beneath his eyes, fine lines carved around his mouth that suggested he hadn't smiled in a decade, and a faint smell of gunpowder lingering underneath his expensive cologne.
"My mother has congestive heart failure," Scarlett said, her voice quiet. "She needs an experimental beta-blocker that isn't covered by state insurance. It costs six hundred and forty dollars every four weeks. I work thirty-eight hours here, twelve hours at a laundromat on weekends, and I do inventory for a hardware store on Tuesdays. I know what people look like when they're running out of time, sir. You look like my mother when she stops taking her pills because she thinks it's easier for me if she just sleeps."
Victor sat very still. The noise of the diner—the hum of the refrigerator, the distant rumble of a truck on the highway outside—seemed to fade into the background.
"What is your name?" he asked.
"Scarlett."
"Scarlett Monroe," Victor said, reading the faded plastic tag pinned to her uniform. He pronounced it carefully, as if testing the weight of the syllables. "Do you know who I am, Scarlett?"
"No," she said honestly. "And I don't care. You're a man who thinks five dollars gives him the right to make a sixty-year-old woman behind the counter shake like a leaf."
For the first time since he had walked through the door, the corner of Victor's mouth twitched upward. It wasn't a smile—it was too sharp, too rusty for that—but it was something close.
"Her name is Patty," Victor said softly. "Her husband, Arthur, owed sixty thousand dollars to a crew out of South Philadelphia twelve years ago. I bought the paper on the debt. I tore it up. She keeps this table clean because she thinks I came here tonight to remind her of that."
Scarlett blinked, caught off guard. She looked back at Patty, who was still hovering near the register, clutching her dishcloth like a lifeline.
"Did you?" Scarlett asked. "Come to remind her?"
"No," Victor said, leaning back against the high vinyl seat. "I came here because it's the only place within fifty miles where nobody asks me to sign a contract, nobody tries to shoot me through the windshield, and the coffee tastes like rust."
He pushed the stack of bills across the Formica until it touched her order pad.
"Take it," Victor said.
"I told you—"
"It's not a gift, Miss Monroe," Victor interrupted, his dark eyes locking onto hers with a sudden, suffocating intensity. "It's an advance. Starting tomorrow, you don't work here. You don't work at the laundromat. And you don't count boxes at the hardware store."
Scarlett’s pulse spiked. "I didn't apply for a job."
"You just passed the interview," Victor said. He stood up, buttoning his charcoal jacket with a smooth, fluid motion. "My house in the hills needs an executive manager. The last three were federal informants or idiots who couldn't keep my schedule organized. You have a brain, you don't scare easily, and you know what it means to be desperate."
He looked down at her, his expression turning cold again, professional.
"Eight thousand a month. Full medical coverage for your mother through my private corporate plan. My car will pick you up at six tomorrow morning."
He turned and walked toward the exit. The two heavy men at the counter instantly fell into step behind him, their dark coats swinging as they moved.
Before he hit the double doors, Victor paused, looking back over his shoulder at table six.
"And Scarlett?"
May you like
She sat frozen in the booth, her hand hovering over the ten thousand dollars. "What?"
"The coffee really was lukewarm," he said.
