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  “TV adds ten pounds.”

  The man laughed. “To say nothing of shoulder pads.” He extended his right hand. “Foster Speakman. Thank you for coming.” They shook hands. Not surprisingly, his hand was smaller than Griff’s by far, but his palm was dry and his handshake firm. He pushed a button on his fancy wheelchair and backed away. “Come in and have a seat.”

  He motioned Griff toward a grouping of comfortably arranged pieces with appropriate tables and lamps. Griff chose one of the chairs. As he sank into it, he experienced a pang of homesickness for the furnishings of similar quality he used to own. Now he had to keep his bread in a fridge with an irritating hum.

  Taking another glance around the room and the acreage beyond the windows, he questioned again just what the hell he was doing here, in an ivy-covered mansion, with a crippled man.

  Foster Speakman probably had five years on him, which put him around forty. He was nice looking. Hard to tell how tall he would be standing, but Griff guessed just shy of six feet. He was wearing preppy clothes—navy blue golf shirt and khaki slacks, brown leather belt, matching loafers, tan socks.

  The legs of his trousers looked like deflated balloons, not much flesh to fill them out.

  “Something to drink?” Speakman asked pleasantly.

  Caught staring and speculating, Griff shifted his attention back to his host’s face. “A Coke?”

  Speakman looked over at the man who’d answered the door. “Manuelo, two Cokes, por favor.”

  Manuelo was as square and solid as a sack of cement but moved soundlessly. Speakman noticed Griff watching the servant as he went to the bar and began pouring their drinks. “He’s from El Salvador.”

  “Huh.”

  “He literally walked to the United States.”

  “Huh.”

  “He tends to me.”

  Griff could think of nothing to say to that, although he wanted to ask if Manuelo, despite his smile, kept a collection of shrunken heads under his bed.

  “Did you drive from Big Spring today?” Speakman asked.

  “My lawyer picked me up this morning.”

  “Long drive.”

  “I didn’t mind it.”

  Speakman grinned. “I guess not. After being cooped up for so long.” He waited until Griff had taken his drink from the small tray Manuelo extended to him, then took his own cut-crystal glass and raised it. “To your release.”

  “I’ll drink to that.”

  Manuelo left through the double doors, pulling them closed behind him. Griff took another sip of Coke, becoming uncomfortable under Speakman’s blatantly curious stare.

  What was this? Invite a con for drinks week?

  The whole scene was beginning to make him uneasy. Deciding to cut to the chase, he set his drink on the end table at his elbow. “Did you ask me here to get an up close and personal look at a has-been football player? Or a convicted felon?”

  Speakman seemed unfazed by his rudeness. “I thought you might be in the market for a job.”

  Not wanting to look desperate or needy, Griff gave a noncommittal shrug.

  “Any offers yet?” Speakman asked.

  “None that have interested me.”

  “The Cowboys aren’t—”

  “No. Nor is any other team. I’ve been banned from the league. I doubt I could buy a ticket to an NFL game.”

  Speakman nodded as though he had already determined that was the way things were with Griff Burkett. “If you can’t do something related to football, what did you plan to do?”

  “I planned to serve my sentence and get out.”

  “Nothing beyond that?”

  Griff sat back, again shrugged as though he didn’t give a shit, reached for his Coke, and took another sip. “I’ve toyed with some ideas but haven’t settled on anything yet.”

  “I own an airline. SunSouth.”

  Griff kept his features schooled, trying not to show that he was either surprised or impressed, when actually he was both. “I fly it. Or rather, I used to fly SunSouth often.”

  Speakman flashed an unself-conscious smile. “So do a lot of people, I’m pleased to say.”

  Griff looked around the beautiful room, his gaze stopping on some of its treasures, then came back to Speakman. “I bet you are.”

  Despite his drollness, Speakman’s smile remained in place. “I invited you here to offer you a job.”

  Griff’s heart did a little jig of gladness. A man like Foster Speakman could do him a lot of good. Now he remembered why the name had sounded familiar. Speakman was an influential force in Dallas, owning and operating one of the region’s most successful enterprises. An endorsement from him, even a minor nod of pardon, would go a long way toward winning back some of the favor Griff had lost five years ago.

  But he tamped down his bubbling optimism. For all he knew, the guy wanted him to strain the shit out of the sewage tanks on his airplanes. “I’m listening.”

  “The job I’m offering would give you immediate financial relief. I understand that your assets were liquidated to pay the fine the court imposed on you.”

  Hedging the truth, Griff said, “Most of them, yeah.”

  “Those proceeds were also used to cover substantial debts. Is that correct?”

  “Look, Speakman, since you seem to know anyway, stop fishing. I lost everything and then some. Is that what you wanted to hear? I don’t have a pot to piss in.”

  “Then I suppose a hundred thousand would come in handy.”

  Taken aback by the amount, Griff felt his irritation turn to suspicion. He’d learned the hard way to be wary of anything that seemed too easily come by. If it seemed too good to be true, it probably was. “A hundred thousand a year?”

  “No, Mr. Burkett,” Speakman said, smiling, enjoying himself. “A hundred thousand to seal our deal. Using a term you’re familiar with, it would be like a signing bonus.”

  Griff stared at him for a count of ten. “A hundred grand. U.S. dollars.”

  “Legal tender. It’s yours if you say yes to what I propose.”

  Griff carefully removed his ankle from his opposite knee and set both feet on the floor, buying time while his mind spun around the amount of money and how badly he needed it. “Are you thinking about using me to advertise your airline? Billboards, commercials, ads? That kind of thing? I wouldn’t cotton to posing naked, but it could be negotiated.”

  Speakman smiled and shook his head. “I realize that endorsements were a significant part of your income when you were the starting quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys. That Number Ten jersey sold a lot of whatever it was advertising. But now I’m afraid an endorsement from you would repel customers, not attract them.”

  Even knowing that was true, Griff was pissed off to hear it. “Then what did you have in mind? Who do I have to kill?”

  Speakman actually laughed out loud. “It’s nothing that drastic.”

  “I don’t know anything about airplanes.”

  “This isn’t airline related.”

  “You need a new yardman?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’m fresh out of guesses. What do I do to earn my hundred thousand dollars?”

  “Make my wife pregnant.”

  CHAPTER

  2

  EXCUSE ME?”

  “You heard correctly, Mr. Burkett. Another Coke?”

  Griff continued to stare at his host until his question sank in. At least the crazy bastard was a courteous host. “No thanks.”

  Speakman rolled his chair over to the end table and picked up Griff’s empty glass, carried it along with his to the wet bar, and placed both in a rack beneath the sink. He used a bar towel to wipe the granite countertop, although from where Griff sat, he could see that it was highly polished, not a single drop of liquid or streak of moisture on its glassy surface. Speakman folded the towel, lining up the hem evenly, and threaded it through a ring attached to the counter.

  He rolled back to the table at Griff’s elbow and replaced the coaster
he’d used in its brass holder, gave it three taps, then put his chair in reverse and resumed his original place a few feet from where Griff sat.

  Griff, watching these maneuvers, thought, Courteous and neat.

  “Let me know if you change your mind about another drink,” Speakman said.

  Griff stood up, rounded his chair, looked back at Speakman to see if his lunacy could be detected at this distance, then walked over to the windows and looked outside. He needed to ground himself, make sure he hadn’t fallen into a rabbit hole or something.

  He felt as he had those first few weeks at Big Spring, when he would wake up disoriented and it would take several seconds for him to remember where he was and why. This was like that. He felt detached. He needed to get his bearings.

  Beyond the windows, not a Mad Hatter in sight. Everything was still there and looking perfectly normal—the emerald grass, stone pathways winding through the flower beds, trees with sprawling branches shading it all. A pond in the distance. Blue sky. Overhead a jet was making its final approach into Dallas.

  “One of ours.”

  Griff hadn’t heard the approach of Speakman’s chair and was startled to find him so close. Prison would do that to you, too. Make you jumpy. Linemen topping three hundred pounds used to charge at him bent on inflicting injury and pain, teeth bared behind their face guards, eyes slitted with malice. He’d been prepared for them and was conditioned to take their abuse.

  But even in the minimum-security area of the prison, where the inmates were white-collar criminals, you stayed nervous twenty-four/seven. You kept your guard up and other people at arm’s length.

  Of course, he’d been that way before prison.

  Speakman was watching the jet. “From Nashville. Due to touch down at seven oh seven.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “Right on time.”

  Griff studied him for several seconds, then said, “The hell of it is, you seem perfectly sane.”

  “You doubt my sanity?”

  “And then some.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, for starters, I’m not wearing a sign that says sperm bank.”

  Speakman smiled. “Not the kind of job you thought I’d be offering, huh?”

  “Not by a long shot.” Griff glanced at his own wristwatch. “Look, I’ve got plans tonight. A get-together with some friends.” There was no get-together. No friends, either. But it sounded plausible. “I need to get going to make it on time.”

  Speakman seemed to see through the lie. “Before declining my offer,” he said, “at least hear me out.”

  He extended his hand as though to touch Griff’s arm. Griff’s flinch was involuntary, no way to prevent Speakman from noticing it. He looked up at Griff with puzzlement but pulled his hand back before making actual contact. “Sorry,” Griff muttered.

  “It’s the wheelchair,” Speakman said blandly. “It puts some people off. Like a disease or a bad-luck charm.”

  “It’s not that. Not at all. It’s, uh…Look, I think we’re finished here. I gotta go.”

  “Please don’t leave yet, Griff. Do you mind if I call you Griff? I think this is a good point at which to shift to first names, don’t you?”

  Speakman’s eyes reflected the bright light from the windows. They were clear, intelligent eyes. Not a trace of madness or the kind of wild glee that signaled insanity. Griff wondered if Mrs. Speakman was aware of it. Hell, he wondered if there was a Mrs. Speakman. The millionaire might have been completely delusional as well as compulsively tidy.

  When Griff failed to reply to the question about his name, Speakman’s smile relaxed into an expression of disappointment. “At least stay long enough for me to finish making my pitch. I would hate for all my rehearsing to be for naught.” He gave a quick smile. “Please.”

  Fighting a strong urge to get the hell out of there, but also feeling guilty for the physical rebuff he’d given the man, Griff returned to his chair and sat down. As he settled against the cushions, he noticed that the back of his shirt was damp with nervous perspiration. As soon as he could gracefully make an exit, he would adiós.

  Speakman reopened the dialogue by saying, “I can’t father a child. By any method.” He paused as though to emphasize that. “If I had sperm,” he added quietly, “you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  Griff would just as soon not be having it. It wasn’t easy to look a man in the eye while he was talking to you about losing his manhood. “Okay. So you need a donor.”

  “You mentioned a sperm bank.”

  Griff nodded curtly.

  “Laura—that’s my wife. She and I didn’t want to go that route.”

  “Why not? For the most part, they’re reputable, aren’t they? Reliable? They do testing on the donors. All that.”

  Griff knew little about sperm banks and wasn’t really interested in how they operated. He was thinking more about what had happened to Speakman to put him in that chair. Had he always been paraplegic, or was it a recent thing? Had he contracted a debilitating and degenerative disease? Been thrown by a horse? What?

  “When the male partner is incapable of fathering children, as I am,” Speakman said, “couples do use donor sperm. Most of the time, successfully.”

  Well, apparently he wasn’t embarrassed by or self-conscious about his condition, and Griff had to give him credit for that. If he was in a situation like Speakman’s, needing somebody like Manuelo to “tend” to him, he doubted he could be as accepting of it as Speakman appeared to be. He knew he wouldn’t be able to talk about it so freely, especially with another man. Maybe Speakman was simply resigned.

  He was saying, “Laura and I desperately want a child, Griff.”

  “Uh-huh,” Griff said, not knowing what else to say.

  “And we want our child to have physical characteristics similar to mine.”

  “Okay.”

  Speakman shook his head as though Griff still wasn’t quite getting it. And he realized he wasn’t when Speakman said, “We want everyone to believe that the child was fathered by me.”

  “Right,” Griff said, but there was a hint of a question mark at the end of the word.

  “This is extremely important to us. Vital. Mandatory, in fact.” Speakman raised his index finger like a politician about to make the most important statement of his campaign. “No one must doubt that I’m the child’s father.”

  Griff shrugged indifferently. “I’m not going to tell anybody.”

  Speakman relaxed, smiling. “Excellent. We’re paying for your discretion as well as your…assistance.”

  Griff laughed lightly and raised both hands, palms out. “Wait a minute. When I said I wouldn’t tell anybody, I meant I wouldn’t tell anybody about this conversation. In fact, I’m not really interested in hearing any more. Let’s consider this…uh…interview over, okay? You keep your hundred grand, and I’ll keep my sperm, and this meeting will be our little secret.”

  He was almost out of his chair when Speakman said, “Half a million. Half a million dollars when Laura conceives.”

  Arrested in motion, Griff found it easier to sit back down than to stand up. He landed rather hard and sat staring at Speakman, aghast. “You’re shittin’ me.”

  “I assure you I’m not.”

  “Half a million?”

  “You have blue eyes, light hair. Like mine. It’s hard to tell now, but I’m taller than the average five feet eleven. We have similar genetic makeups, you and I. Similar enough anyway for a child you sire to be passed off as mine.”

  Griff’s mind was spinning so fast it was hard to hang on to a thought. He was thinking dollar signs, Speakman was talking genes. “Those sperm banks have books.” He pantomimed leafing through pages. “You go through them and find what you want for your kid. You pick out eye color, hair color, height. All that.”

  “I never buy anything sight unseen, Griff. I don’t shop from catalogs. Certainly not for my child and heir. And there’s still the risk of disclosure.”

  “
Those records are kept confidential,” Griff argued.

  “Supposedly.”

  Griff thought of the gate with the disembodied voice, the high wall surrounding the property. Apparently privacy was a real issue with this guy. Like neatness. The psychologist at Big Spring would have had a field day over the obsessive way Speakman had removed the drinking glasses from view, folded the towel, and replaced the coaster.

  Intrigued in spite of himself, Griff studied the millionaire for a long moment, then said, “So how would it work? I’d go to a doctor’s office and jerk off into a jar and—”

  “No office. If Laura was inseminated in a doctor’s office, there would be talk.”

  “Who would talk?”

  “The people who staff the office. Other patients who might see her there. People love to talk. Especially about celebrities.”

  “I’m a fallen star.”

  Laughing softly, Speakman said, “I was referring to Laura and me. But your involvement would certainly add another element to a delicious piece of gossip. It would be too tempting even for people bound by professional privilege.”

  “Okay, so I don’t go to the doctor’s office with you. You could take my semen in and claim it as yours. Who’s to know?”

  “You don’t understand, Griff. That still leaves room for speculation. My condition is obvious. A specimen I claimed as mine could have come from the pool boy. A skycap. Anybody.” He shook his head. “We’re emphatic about this. No nurses, no chatty receptionists, no office open to the public. At all.”

  “So where? Here?” Griff envisioned taking a dirty magazine and a Dixie cup into one of the mansion’s bathrooms, the mute manservant standing outside the door, waiting for him to finish and deliver the specimen.

  No way, José. Or rather, No way, Manuelo.

  But for half a million bucks?

  Everyone had their price. He’d proved he did. Five years had decreased it considerably, but if Speakman was willing to pay him five hundred grand for doing what he’d been doing for free for the past five years, he wasn’t going to let modesty stand in the way.

  He’d walk away with six hundred thousand, counting the “signing bonus.” The Speakmans would get the kid they desperately wanted. It was win-win, and it wasn’t even against the law.