Chapter 4: Nine Calls

"That's not my signature," I said.

"I know." Lawton tapped the missing letter. "I've seen you sign a hundred bar tabs. You loop the y."

"Who's the lawyer?"

"A firm in Columbia. Nobody there has ever met you."

He turned a page.

"The paralegal said the papers came in by courier with a cover letter on our family office stationery."

He said it flat.

Like a man reading a weather report about his own house.

"Libba was here an hour ago," I said.

His head came up.

"Here?"

"Two million dollars to sign that and leave town. She knew about the baby."

"I didn't tell her."

"I know. Everybody in the bar knows. The nurses at table four know."

Sallie came by and set a coffee in front of him without asking.

"Drink that. You look like a drowned cat."

"Thank you, ma'am."

"Don't thank me. Your company just bought the lien on my roof."

She slid the folded county notice across the bar.

He opened it and read it.

The color left his face for the second time in two days.

"I didn't approve this."

"Somebody did," Sallie said.

"There's a creekside hotel in the plans. Libba's been running the land side. I signed the concept in the spring. I never saw an address."

"Well, now you've seen one."

"I'll kill it. Today."

"You can kill your hotel," Sallie said. "I still owe the county thirty-eight thousand dollars."

She tapped the notice.

"That debt was mine before your company bought it, and it's mine after."

"Then let me pay it."

"No," Sallie and I said at the same time.

He looked from her to me.

"We'll pay it ourselves," I said. "I didn't walk out on your money to have you buy me a bar."

"You didn't walk out on my money. You never got any of it."

"Exactly."

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