Runner by Thomas Perry Read Free Book Online Page A

the president was doing something just as illegal as what my father did, just because he trusted my father and wanted to save him. He also thought he would be saving the company from a scandal, but there wasn't much in it for him personally."
    "Since you said there was a trial, I assume the plan didn't work."
    "My father collected everything he could and tried to sell it or get his money back. He took pictures of the cars, the boat, the house, and put them on the Internet. He tried to take back a lot of the things he or Delia had just bought. He cashed in his insurance and his retirement and went to the banks for loans. For the first time in years I was proud of him, because he was doing something to pull himself together. What he hadn't planned on was the Delightful Delia."
    "What did she do?"
    "Nothing. She wouldn't sign off on anything. The house was in both their names, and she wouldn't sell it. One of the cars was in her name and another in both their names, and she wouldn't sign the pink slips. She got a safe-deposit box by herself and put all the jewelry in it, and probably all the cash she had been skimming off and hiding from him. She wouldn't cosign a loan, get a job, or even stop charging things."
    "How well did he do without her?"
    "At the end of the month he had sold one of the cars—his car, with her name forged on the pink slip—for about twenty thousand, which was half what he had paid for it a year earlier. He sold his watch, a TAG Heuer my mother had bought him as a present about
fifteen years earlier. He sold my laptop and my iPod and my DVD player for about six hundred. There were a lot of other odds and ends, mostly things he'd had before the marriage. The final count of what he had taken from the company was about a hundred and twenty thousand, and he came up with about seventy."
    "Not enough."
    "No," said Christine. "It was a horrible thing to watch. He was defeated from the moment he told Delia and saw the cold, ugly look on her face. He knew it, but he kept trying. He was wounded, bleeding inside, but he kept scrambling as hard as he could to get himself and us out of this mess. He had to keep working full-time, of course, or people would notice and start wondering what was up. He would sleep a couple of hours a night, then go to his computer again to check on the bids and put up more stuff for sale. It was all impossible, one of those situations where you know you can't get there from here. At the end of the month he brought the seventy thousand he had raised and begged for more time. But the president didn't have any more to give him."
    "He couldn't do anything?"
    "It was a public company—you know, with stockholders and directors and everything—and there were federal rules about how often they had to have the outside auditors in. He couldn't hold up any longer, or he might be fired, too. Or worse. The president was a friend, as I said. He took the other fifty thousand out of his own pocket—cashed in some of his retirement money—and added it to my father's seventy."
    "That's a real friend."
    "It didn't work. The money was paid back, but it was too late. The bookkeepers had ratted him out to the auditors, or thought putting the money back was dishonest, or something. It came out, and my father was arrested."
    "I'm sorry."
    "Well, it wasn't as though he didn't take the money. And the reason he did it was that he didn't want his wife to realize he was running out of money before the end of every month. I mean, I'm sure she knew what his salary was. So what was he protecting her from? Arithmetic? God. But in the process, he got his giant flash of clarity. The Delectable Delia wouldn't help him save himself, even by signing a paper to give him back a little of the money he'd spent on her."
    "She never relented?"
    "Even I was surprised, and I didn't expect much from her. She said, 'I just can't throw away everything I've built and leave my children destitute'—meaning the