Bad Company Read Online Free Page A

up, gather ourselves. Make plans. But I mean it: I need to know you, Denny McGowan. You need to convince me I’m doing the right thing here.”
3
    “M y turn,” she said, as they resumed their drive.
    After loading up the Lexus, they’d found restrooms and changed into new clothes. Fresh underwear felt so damned good! After what seemed like the longest time, she was starting to feel human again. Jeans, a tee and another over-sized sweater, nothing to draw attention.
    Denny looked different in sneakers, jeans and a check shirt. He’d worn that black tie and tux well, but now he looked more relaxed, as if he’d finally peeled away the layers of who he was trying to be.
    This time they headed back the way they’d came and took the I-95 west. “First: are we safe in this car? The cops must have got to Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee back there, by now. What if they reported it stolen?”
    Denny grinned at that. “It’s not stolen,” he said. “It’s mine.”
    “ Yours ?”
    “Al and Luis – the gentlemen you met back at your lobster bar – they took it from me last night. They were, shall we say, escorting me back to Boston in it when I took them by surprise and gave them the slip. I hid out in the trees until I saw them heading slowly south, looking for me, and so I headed north. I must have walked for miles in that storm, jumping into the trees every time I saw headlights just in case it was them coming back to search in the other direction.”
    Outside, Bangor was mostly hidden from view by embankments and trees. They could have been almost anywhere. Cassie closed her eyes and took a long breath. So much had happened! Her quiet life at Pappy’s seemed so far away, all of a sudden.
    “So why were they ‘escorting’ you back to Boston? A gambling debt, you said last night?”
    He was doing that thing again: the slight delay while his brain worked, always calculating, planning what to say. She hated that she felt so suspicious of him, hated that her instinct always started off on a negative track.
    “Tell me the truth, okay?”
    He nodded, glanced at her with those steel-gray eyes, then said, “A bad business deal. A string of them... Business, gambling... it’s all just different forms of gambling at the end of the day. I didn’t really do all that. Looking after the money was Brady’s side of things.”
    “‘Brady’?”
    “Brady Lowe. Old buddy of mine. The oldest. We went through MIT together. He was an economics major; I was software engineering. Did you have me down as a geek? No? I’ll take that as a compliment. We roomed together through college, me and Brady. We set up a software company while we were still at Harvard Business School. We shared everything.”
    “Including a girl...”
    She remembered what Denny had said the previous evening: She was beautiful, she was fun, she had an IQ of 160 and she was screwing my best friend. I’ll give you a hint: one of those was a lie.
    “Yeah, that was kind of a breaking point, you know?”
    “And your buddy... Brady Lowe: he cheated you out of everything?”
    “Did I say that?”
    She nodded.
    Silence, for a time, then: “Maybe I was a bit harsh. Brady made some bad decisions. There were repercussions. You know what we did? We wrote dating software. Or at least, that’s what I did, while Brady was out making connections to turn my doodling into money. All I did was a wee bit of data-mining and pattern-matching. That and working out the algorithms that hooked people in so they just had to keep coming back for more.”
    Again, Denny made her think of a salmon fisherman playing his fish, cutting it some slack and then drawing it back in. She could believe that Denny had spent a large part of his life working out just how to keep people hooked.
    “Phone apps, add-ons that integrated with Facebook and Tumblr and just about anything else you’ve ever used online. You never saw our name, but I guarantee you’ve seen our work. We were part of the