In the Company of Liars

FOUR DAYS EARLIER
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 18

Allison leaves Paul Riley’s office downtown and takes the elevator to the lobby, then transfers over to the parking elevator and takes it down to the bottom level. When the doors open, she sees Mat Pagone’s Mercedes double-parked nearby.

“How are you, Ally?” Mat asks, as Allison jumps into the passenger seat.

She opens her mouth, allowing for the possibility of about three hundred different answers to that question. “Well,” she says, “looks likeyou’re in the clear.”

Mat nods slowly. “I’m not sure how I feel about this.”

“Oh.” She laughs quietly. “Well, it doesn’t really matter how you feel about it. Maybe you should have thought about how you ‘felt about it’ before you paid off those senators. And made Sam an unwilling participant.”

Mat blinks his eyes in surprise, wets his lips. Never, she assumes, has he had the facts put to him so harshly.

“It’s done,” she says. “No one can lay a finger on you now.”

“I-” Mat touches his forehead. “Thank you doesn’t seem enough.”

She is being hard on him, she can see. This is how you hurt a man like Mateo Pagone. He is, in many ways, utterly broken now. But that seems to drive Allison away from sympathy. Because Mat Pagone is the luckiest man in the world right now.

“I’ll need your help, of course,” she says. “You think you can handle that?”

Mat turns to her. “Allison,” he says softly, “you really think so little of me?”

She pauses a moment, looks at him, then leaves the car.