Page 2 of The Lonely Road

As a fixer, when someone powerful (read: wealthy) has a problem they want dealt with discreetly and well, they call me.

A month ago, Senator Otis Jessup called me to a corner office of a corporate client of mine in D.C. My client, the CEO of a DOD-friendly arms company, did the basic introductions and left.

Plausible deniability is a mantra in government circles.

The office was on the fourteenth floor of a building in D.C., designed to make one feel small. Big desk, American flag, framed photographs of the CEO with men like the Senator arranged in ascending order of importance—Jessup was number two. Number one was the President.

I’ve sat across from men like Jessup my entire career. I know the type. I don’t like the type, but they spend their money the same as anyone else’s, and I stopped judging clients when I went independent. That’s the difference between a government payroll and your own: you can say no. I exercise that right occasionally, usually when the fee doesn’t match the work I see coming. Also, I don’t do wet work. Not anymore. Within those two limits, my moral flexibility is considerable.

Jessup slid a file across the desk without touching it himself, like he didn’t want his fingerprints on the act. Men like him never do.

I flipped open the file and gave it a cursory skim.

“The lawyer. She’s the problem,” he commented.

Taya Morningstar, I read.

I saw her photograph, a professional headshot (one that did not do justice to the reality). The camera lens reflected back her sharp eyes and attractive face, but it didn’t translate her personality.

“She’s representing a rancher named Clara Whitman in a water rights dispute. If their lawsuit succeeds, it kills an acquisition. Two years of groundwork, three hundred million in investor commitments, down the fuckin’ toilet.”

Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Money.

I closed the file. “What do you need?”

He smiled the smile of a man who never had to do his own dirty work. “For her case to fall apart.”

Across the bar, Taya tips her head back and laughs at something the blonde says, and the sound cuts clean through the noise of The Rusty Spur and the steel guitar and the thirty years of acquired professional distance I keep between myself and anything that may matter.

She seems happy. I didn’t expect that either.

From the profile put together by an investigator I trust, another military man who went mercenary, life hasn’t been easy for Taya Morningstar lately.

She left the law practice at Aspen rather abruptly—right before what seemed to be an offer of a partnership. I dug into that gap, as I do with every gap, and found a senior partner named Griffin Cole. My investigator dug some more and found receipts: security camera footage, emails, and so on.

She doesn’t come across as the type to fall for the oldest line in the book—“Honey, I’ll leave my wife for you”—but I’ve heard that love makes fools of the smartest people.

To give Cole credit, he had been separated when Taya got involved with him. That part was clean. What wasn’t clean was the exit. When he went back to his wife, he didn’t just end things with Taya—he took her career with him. His wife made it a condition of reconciliation. No custody fight over their two kids meant no Taya. And just like that, Taya’s years of work became a liability he needed to shed. She left before they could push her out.

Barely.

I glance back at her. She’s listening now, head tilted, attention locked on whoever’s speaking.

I’ve read about that quality—interviews, colleagues’ quotes. She makes you feel like you’re the only one in the room.

I’d filed it under “useful trait” and “potential vulnerability”.

Experiencing it in person is different.

I drain the rest of my bourbon.

I wish I could see her eyes better. Is she guarded with these women or open?

People who’ve been burned by someone they trusted tend to armor up. That’s usually useful information. You find the seam. You press.

But Goddamn it, the kind of pressing I want to do has nothing to do with Otis Jessup’s job.

Her file said she was smart. It didn’t say she was the kind of person you orient toward without meaning to. It didn’t say her laugh sounds like it costs her nothing and means everything.