They Sawed Me Open, So I Stocked the End of the World novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: Eight Million
She sells gold, hires her father's old friend to move the rest, and learns the lab has already come asking for her.
Jessa did not touch him.
She sat with her thumb pressed into the glass until the nail went white.
She let the man in the gray jacket finish counting his money.
He tipped the bartender, said good night to nobody, and walked out whistling.
Her hand had started to hum with lightning, a weak blue crackle that only she could see.
She shut her fist around it.
Killing him tonight would feel wonderful for a minute.
Then the people who ran him would know someone was hunting them, two months before she was ready.
She needed the man at the top of that lanyard, not the man holding the saw.
She paid, walked out into the amber lights and wrote his face in her head.
She did not sleep much.
At nine the next morning she was in a plain brick building downtown with a small plaque that said EXCHANGE.
She had carried twenty-five gold bars in two of Rhys's duffel bags.
The woman at the desk did not blink at the bags.
She lifted a bar, turned it under a bright lamp, and checked the stamp against her tablet.
"Where's it from?"
"My father's storage unit," Jessa said. "He died a long time ago. I only found the key in his papers."
"People don't tell their kids anything," the woman said, without looking up.
Thirty-five minutes later she slid over a printout.
"Eight million, net. The wire goes out the moment you say yes."
Jessa kept her face still. "Yes."
She walked out onto the street eight million dollars richer and shaking all the way down to her knees.
That left four hundred and seventy-five bars, and no honest buyer on earth could take them without someone asking questions.
For that she needed a lawyer, and she knew the only one she trusted.
His office was downtown in a building with dark wood and old carpet.
She had last sat in these chairs at fourteen, in a dress that itched, while he explained guardianship to Rhys.
Her father's old friend had gone gray since then.
He came around the desk to shake her hand instead of pointing at a chair.
"Jessa Hartwell. It's been too long, kid. Is Rhys still giving them hell overseas?"
"He lands in a couple of days. The whole squad is coming with him."
"Good." He waved her into a seat. "You called this morning sounding as if the building was on fire."
"Not on fire." She set a duffel bag on his desk and unzipped it.
He looked inside and his hand stopped.
"Where did this come from?"
She gave him the same story, smoothed down.
A storage unit her father had kept before she was born.
A small fortune he had never told anyone about, found last week in his papers.
"I don't know why he hid it," she said. "Maybe he meant to tell us."
It was not true, but it was the kind of lie that fit him.
The lawyer had known her father for twenty years, and she watched it land softly.
"How much?" he asked.
"Five hundred bars. I'll sell a few myself. Four hundred and twenty-five need to go through you."
"A hundred ounces each?"
"Yes."
He sat back, and she saw him go through the sum and not like it.
Then she saw something else, a glint of interest.
"A sale this size draws attention," he said. "So we make it boring."
"A family trust, a formal appraisal, and I sell in pieces to the refiners and a private bank."
"It will take two or three weeks. When it settles, you'll have a hundred and seventy million, maybe more."
"I don't care what the fee is."
"You will, once you see it." He smiled for the first time. "But it will be a fraction of a percent."
"I need the first wire fast. I'm buying a house."
"Then it will be fast." He reached for a legal pad. "What's the rush?"
"A feeling."
He didn't ask what kind.
He wrote for a minute and then stopped with the pen over the page.
"Jessa, there's something I ought to tell you, and I'm not sure what to make of it."
She looked up.
"A courier came here yesterday afternoon, in a gray van. He had a letter from a medical research foundation, Halcyon Institute."
The room seemed very small.
"They asked whether the late Mr. Hartwell's daughter would be reachable at this address," the lawyer said. "They wanted to arrange a family screening."
Jessa's voice came out level, which surprised her. "Did you give them anything?"
"I told them I'd pass on the message."
"Please don't pass on any more."
"I wasn't planning to." He tore the page off the pad and folded it.
"They asked for your brothers by name, Jessa. Both of them. Why would a medical foundation do that?"
She stood up so fast the chair scraped the floor.
She had left no trace yesterday, and the lab had still reached her door first.
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