Now there was Carl Yates.

How had that gone so terribly wrong?

Coy sighed. The financial world was like those stores in old western movies: a nice impressively respectable false front hiding the small squalid building behind it. He glanced over at Maggie, on the phone with a client who was obviously underwater and obviously pleading for leniency in making some sort of payment. Maggie, as usual, was bending over backwards to be accommodating, but rules were rules and there was only so much she could do. Just from hearing her side of the conversation, he could tell that this story would not end well.

Rumor had it that the bank was in trouble. Too many bad investments. He wasn’t privy to the details—none of them were—but they’d all been exposed to a little piece of the puzzle, and when they got together at break or lunch to compare notes, all of the arrows seemed to point in one direction.

For the past year, Coy had been dating Florine Jacobs from Evergreen Title, and it was Florine who’d first hinted to him that everything at the bank might not be hunky dory. She told him that word had come down from the corporate office that an auditor was looking into Escrow accounts associated with Montgomery Community. The expression on his face must have given away the shock he felt because she immediately said, “Don’t tell anyone I told you!” Her voice was panicked. “You can’t say a word about this to anyone!”

“I won’t,” he promised. And he hadn’t. But he had kept his ears and eyes open, had expressed his doubts about the future to coworkers who expressed their own doubts, and he worried that the day might come when he was forced to look for a new job.

The very thought of changing employers depressed him. He’d spent his entire working life at Montgomery Community. He liked it here. He liked the work, liked most of the people. He even liked the building. The only other bank in town, aside from the small Federal Employees’ Credit Union next to Wal-Mart, was a Bank of America, and the B of A was not only fully staffed, but the last time a position opened up, they transferred someone from the Prescott branch instead of hiring locally. It was going to be next to impossible for him to find a banking job here in town. He’d either have to apply somewhere besides a bank or move to another, bigger city.

It was a slow afternoon, not only for the loan officers but for the tellers as well. Between one and three, a few calls came in, a couple of old ladies stopped by to make withdrawals, but that was it, and Coy saw Maggie and Cal exchange worried looks. It was not unusual for there to be slow periods in banking, but those slow periods were not only becoming more frequent, they were lasting much longer. It was part of a pattern, a pattern that did not bode well for the future.