The Set Piece Read Free

English professors into a masters in modern British literature. She had been the darling of the department. Her parents’ death and the debt they left as a parting gift had almost pulled her under. When she surfaced in LA, three thousand miles from the problem, she had jumped on the treadmill of just getting by.
    She rolled into the Starbucks parking lot, depressed and preoccupied, and was startled when Paul Knight bounded out of his late-model Jaguar toward her.
    “Amy Kimball, you’re a hard woman to find,” he called out to her.
    Amy recognized him from the pub. “What the hell?” She raised the bike lock menacingly in her hand.
    “No. No. It’s all good.” Knight stopped in his tracks. “I just got a proposition for you.”
    “Get away from me, you perv.” She swung the bike lock in his direction.
    “Not that kind of proposition. Just hear me out.” He took a quick step back.
    “No thanks.”
    “Look, I’m Paul Knight. I’m Diego Torres’s manager. Get out your phone. Look me up.”
    Amy didn’t move.
    He reached into his back pocket for his billfold and pulled out a crisp one-hundred dollar bill. “I’ll give you a hundred bucks if you Google me.”
    “So it is that kind of proposition.”
    Knight chuckled, but it wasn’t a happy laugh. “The money’s easier earned out here than it is in there.” He tipped his head to the busy Starbucks and the line that went out the door. “You want it or not?”
    He had her there. “All I gotta do is look you up?”
    “Yep,” he said, popping the “p” at the end of the word.
    She’d be foolish not to take the money. He was buying her on some level, but what was the real difference between this and discovering a hundred bucks on the sidewalk? It was still found money. And besides, this could be the tip he hadn’t given her last week. Amy slipped the bike lock between her legs, ready for a quick grab if she needed it, and pulled out her phone from her purse slung across her back.
    “That’s K-n-i-g-h-t,” he said.
    She typed his name into Safari, and up popped his picture. He and Diego Torres, standing with their arms around each other, with shit-eating grins all over their faces. She looked from her phone to the man in front of her. They were one and the same. She stepped just close enough to snatch the bill from his outstretched hand and then backed up.
    “Okay, you got my attention,” she said.
    “Good. Because this is where it gets a little crazy.”
    Amy leveled a look at him. “We passed crazy five minutes ago.”
    “No, seriously. I do have a proposition for you. But you need to hear it at our lawyers’ office, and you need to sign a confidential non-disclosure agreement before we go any further.”
    “This is getting too weird for me. I’m not interested.” She locked the bike and moved toward the coffee house.
    “Look. I’ll give you five hundred bucks more. A hundred now in good faith and four hundred just for hearing me out tomorrow.”
    Amy skittered to a halt. Her mind vaulted over, Careful, once he’s bought you, you’re done, to six hundred dollars! I could get new running shoes and dinner at that new up-scale Mexican restaurant, or be responsible and put gas in my tank and plunk down a couple of Benjamins on my student loans. She turned back and looked him straight in the eye.
    “How’d you find me?” she asked.
    “The Internet and a good private investigator.”
    “That’s not creepy at all.”
    “You’re just what we’re looking for.” He dug another crisp bill out of his billfold and held it out for her.
    “You’re only proving my point here.”
    “Just take this now, and decide later if you want to come.”
    “I guess it couldn’t hurt.” But the alarm bells in her head rang loudly. Even though Amy didn’t like the look of him or the deals he offered so slickly, she walked over and snatched the second bill out of his hand.
    He grabbed a folder from his car. It had the names Horowitz and Kane in gold