“Uh-huh,” he says, still frowning into the phone.
I take in the squint of his eyes, the thinning of his lips. Whatever the person on the other end of the line is saying, it’s not good news.
“All we have to do is keep her steady until tomorrow morning,” he says, aiming his frown at me. He gives me his back, turning to the window. “Tomorrow morning we’ll get everybody on board, and then we can finally move forward. Until then, all you’ve got to do is keep her stable.”
Whoever’s on the other end of that call cranks up the volume, yelling loud enough that he peels the phone from his ear. I can’t make out the words, but the voice is female, and her anger, her indignation comes across loud and clear.
“Okay, okay...calm down, will you? You know I didn’t mean it like that. I get that you’re worried, but so am I. I’m just as worried as you are.”
Worry—that is the emotion I spotted on his face, a worry I’m all too familiar with. The kind only another parent can have for his child.
That’s when all the pieces fall together in a perfectly clear line: I was right before; this man is a father. This person he keeps referring to is his daughter. His sick daughter.
I think back to the half of the conversation I overheard in the kitchen downstairs, and it all makes sense. Levels, numbers, all of them worrisome. Cancer? Something deadly, certainly.
So the money is for what—an operation? A life-saving treatment? It’s possible he doesn’t have insurance, or maybe it’s just that his insurance won’t pay because it’s a last-ditch effort, an expensive Hail Mary pass her doctors won’t sign off on.
But still.
What kind of parent would value his sick daughter’s life over the lives of my two healthy children? Who would hold a family hostage, threatening them with words and blows and a waved-around gun, in order to pry money out of their father? He thrust a loaded gun in our faces. He used it to pistol-whip me hard enough to crack a bone. Yes, I realize this man is desperate, but desperate enough to trade three, maybe four lives to save his ailing daughter’s? What kind of monster would do that?
He turns away from the window, his gaze landing on mine. “I’ve got to go. Cam’s on his way, and I need to get everyone ready.”
C A M
6:30 p.m.
I’m doing seventy up a residential street when it comes to me in a flash: the playroom.
Twice now I’ve talked to Jade, and twice she tried to trip my memory. She worked it into every conversation, multiple times. Playroom playroom playroom. But I was too busy spiraling in my own panic, my brain too distracted to catch her meaning.
I slam the brakes and yank on the wheel, careening the truck over some poor sucker’s freshly mowed lawn. The tires skid sideways across the soft ground, grass and gravel pinging against the side of the cab.
A hank of grease-slick hair escapes from Nick’s man bun, and he yelps, grabbing on to the roof handle. His shoulder slams into the window. “What happened? Did you hit a dog or something?”
“No, but—” I scramble for my cell, charging in the cup holder. “We have eyes in the room. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this earlier, but we can watch on the nanny cams. They’re sitting in front of the cameras right now.”
“So pull them up, then.”
I give him a look—duh—then turn my attention to the phone.
The nanny cams are on the last page, helpfully labeled “iSpy.” Jade installed the app the day the cameras were screwed into the wall, and I haven’t looked at it since. Too creepy, and unnecessary since we can’t afford a nanny. The only person who ever stays with the kids overnight is my mother, and no way in hell am I going to spy on my mom. Ever.
I tap the app, and it opens onto a log-in screen. Two blank boxes for username and password, neither of which I remember. At the bottom of the screen is a key, and I hit it to search my saved passwords, but it’s not there. When Jade logged in that first time, for some reason my phone didn’t save it.
“Shit.”
Nick flips down the visor to check his hair in the mirror. He shoves the strands back in place, poking the ends under the elastic with a finger. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t remember my log-in.” I try my email and the password Jade uses for everything, BeaBax321#, but it doesn’t work. I try the same password with her email, but I get the same result: a shivering screen, a rejection message. I’m locked out. “Dammit.”
“Let’s just go. We’ll see what’s going on when we get there.” Nick pops the visor closed, then gestures to the two-lane road we were just flying down. A long line of traffic snakes in both directions, headlights blinking in a soft drizzle. The clock on the dash turns my body cold: 6:34.
I plug my email in the screen and tap Forgot Password, then toss my cell to Nick. “Watch my inbox, will you? I should be getting a new password any second.” I steer the truck off the grass and poke the bumper back into traffic.
Nick here is a gift from Maxim, as are the two bouncers in the black SUV that had been following us until I hit the brakes, former military trained in all sorts of scary ops who rarely leave his side. Maxim loaned them to me with a toothy grin.
And then he shoved the biggest gift, the best one, into my hands. A moving box crammed to the top with crumpled bills. You wouldn’t believe the amount of counterfeit bills that pass through a strip club. Twenties and hundreds, mostly, most of them passable as real. Go get ’em, kid.
Not the $734,296 this guy demanded, not even close. But along with my $49,000 hopefully enough bills to provide a distraction. It’s now stuffed in the nylon Nike bag under Nick’s feet.
He points me down a mostly empty side street. “Take a right.”
“I know the way. You just watch for the email.”
A minute passes, then another, while I weave my way through the streets as fast as I dare. On a normal day, at a normal hour, it’s a twenty-minute trek from here to my driveway, but this is rush hour, and it’s raining again—two sure-fire ways to make Atlanta traffic grind to a stop.
My phone pings with an incoming email, but with the acoustics of the truck and the tension in the air, it hits me like an explosion. “Is it—”
“Yep.”
I snatch my phone from his fingers, prop it against the top of the steering wheel, and do my best to drive without crashing into the car in front of me. My hands are shaking so hard they’re vibrating, and it takes me a couple of tries to hit the link, but then my phone shoots me to a web page where I type in the new password, then back to the app and I’m in.
The first camera is from the smoke alarm, a bird’s-eye view of the room. Between glances at the road, I spot Beatrix’s mess of white-blond hair, and the sight of her is a gut punch. Jade is seated on the recliner next to her, alert but calm, her spine straight on the chair. I think of Bax, gorging on pizza at Tanya’s across the street—safe, thank God—and for once I don’t want to punch her.
I search the edges of the screen, but all I see are shadows.
I swipe to the next camera and get a head-on visual from the speaker on the wall. A full view of the recliners, Beatrix and Jade, a male-sized body cloaked in black by the windows. Relief starts with a tingle at the top of my head, then courses through me in a warm and glorious rush because they’re okay. They’re still alive.
And Jade...
Even with that bruised and swollen cheek, Jade is glorious. Hair wild, eyes wilder, her back straight with righteous purpose. Her hands are solid fists on her lap, and her chest is heaving. This is warrior Jade, protective and mama lioness Jade, this is Jade at her most fierce and feral. I’ve only ever seen her like this once, after Baxter’s kindergarten teacher teasingly suggested we find him a talent so he wouldn’t always live in his big sister’s shadow. I stare at the screen, and in all the eleven-plus years I’ve known her, never have I loved her more.
Her mouth is moving, flinging angry words. I keep the car on the road and fumble for the volume button.
“...because that is not okay. I get that your daughter’s sick, but in what universe does that make any of this okay? You are trading the lives of three strangers for hers, and that’s not right.” Jade’s seething voice shatters the silence in the cab.
“Shut up.” The voice comes from somewhere off camera, low and male and gruff. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. This is none of your business.”
“It is my business. The second you came into my garage and held me and my children at gunpoint, you made it my business. And you’ve already admitted Cam somehow owes you this money. It doesn’t get any more my business than that. This is my family. You’re holding our lives ransom for your daughter’s.”
The same male voice answers, and it pings something deep in my brain. “You have no idea what I’m going through. None.”
“Tell me, then. Tell me what I’m missing. Because whatever Cam took from you, it can’t be worth a human life.”
On the passenger’s seat, Nick gives an impressed grunt. “Your wife’s a little pistol.”
A deep voice booms from the tiny speaker. “I said, shut up. Shut up before I shove a gun in your mouth and make you.”
Jesus, Jade. Stand down for Christ’s sake.
I swipe to the third camera and there he is. Black mask. Black shirt and pants. Black gloves.
Black gun, and he’s aiming it at Jade.
“Beretta,” Nick says with a derisive snort. “Figures.”
I don’t know what he means, but I also don’t care. My wife is standing up to a masked man with a gun, staring him down. Like the pistol he’s waving around has somehow lost its menace, like it’s a plastic prop. He thrusts it at her, and Jade doesn’t even flinch.
I, however, am losing my shit. The sight of the gun explodes in my chest. I settle the phone on a thigh and slam the gas pedal to the floor, lurching us forward as far as we can go. On the other side of the windshield, traffic reaches into the semidarkness.
“How ’bout I hold the phone while you drive?” Nick says, stretching a hand. “Might be safer that way.”
The asshole’s voice fills the cab. “All you gotta do is sit there and shut up. Why can’t you just do that? Less than thirty minutes until Cam gets here, and then I’ll be out of your hair. This will all be over. I’ll leave and you’ll never hear from me again.”
“This won’t be over, are you kidding me?” Jade says, and she’s shouting. “My children are going to have nightmares for years. You get that, right? They are going to need therapy. I’m going to need therapy. You terrorized and threatened us for hours. You broke my cheek!”
“I’m going to kill him,” I mutter, white-knuckling the wheel. Up ahead, where the road ends in a T intersection, the light flips to yellow. “When we get there, I’m going to freaking murder this guy.”
Nick shifts nervously on the passenger’s seat, jutting his chin to the light. “You’re, uh, not gonna make that.”
I floor the gas, watching the masked man step forward on the screen. “Have you seen my back? You’re lucky this wasn’t any worse.”
A hundred feet, maybe less, and only one car in front of me. So far neither of us has hit the brakes. “Come on, come on.”
Nick grabs on to the handle above his window. “Seriously, man. You’re cutting it too close. The light’s about to—”
“Shut up.”
On my iPhone screen, the man is still talking, his voice loud in the car: “...didn’t mean to hit you that hard, but may I remind you that you started it by coming at me with a screwdriver. I was just defending myself. You don’t know me, Jade, but I don’t put up with that kind of aggression. I fight back.”
“Yeah, well, ditto,” Jade says, and I feel equal parts fear and pride.
The light changes to red, and the driver in front of me hits his brakes. I jerk the wheel to the left and swerve around the slowing car into the oncoming lane, right as another car, a red Mini, turns right into my lane.
Our eyes meet. His are big and round, a terrified teenager going up against a jacked-up truck in a doomed game of chicken. He lays on the horn, then ducks out first. He yanks the wheel and barrels into a ditch.
The lane clears. Nick curses. I blow through the light and take a hard left, a ninety-degree turn that lifts two tires from the pavement.
“Holy shit,” Nick mumbles as I work to straighten out the wheel. “You really do have a death wish, don’t you?”
What I have is exactly twenty-four minutes to get home.
I fumble for my phone, but it’s gone, flung from my lap into that dead space between the seat and the center console, the black hole where crumbs and crumpled receipts go to die. I keep my eyes on the road and dig my hand in, but I don’t get very far. My hand is too big, the slot too tight.
Nick bats my hand away. “You drive. I’ll dig out the phone.”
Meanwhile, Jade and the guy are still talking.
“If Cam were here, he’d tell you this day was coming. I swore I would take back what he took from me, plus attorney fees and interest. I told him I’m not some wimpy asshole he can push around. That money is rightfully mine.”
I freeze, my fists clenching the wheel because a memory is taking shape in my head. Last year, January, in the courthouse parking deck. I was headed to my truck when he stepped out from behind a stairwell, thirty minutes after the gavel had come down on my side. I won. He lost. A Fulton County Superior Court judge agreed I didn’t owe him a penny.
Is that what this is about? The Oakhurst shop that fell through?
“Motherfucker.” I bounce on the leather bucket seat, my muscles jolting with pent-up energy. “That motherfucking fucker.”
Nick drags the phone onto the middle console, and I grab it and hang a sharp right onto a side street, skidding to a stop. I squint at the image of this asshole’s covered face, zooming in until it fills my screen.
Nick leans over the console, craning his neck. “What? Do you know this guy or something?”
“Oh yeah.” I stare at the masked man and the fuzzy edges of his face, and suddenly all the puzzle pieces fall into place. Storming my house, holding my family hostage, clocking my wife in the face. “You better believe I know who this asshole is.”
I also know what today is about—and it’s not money.
This isn’t about money at all.
T H E I N T E R V I E W
Juanita: What is your relationship with Maxim Petrakis?
Cam: Who?
Juanita: Maxim Petrakis. He’s the owner of a number of strip clubs in town, a man who moonlights as a loan shark and criminal matchmaker. The Greek mob version of Match.com, though you won’t find that job description on his website, by the way. That’s just the word on the street. According to the police, his only transgression is speeding.
Cam: Never heard of him.
Juanita: There’s a picture of the two of you looking pretty chummy on the celebrity wall at Club at Chops. Slicked-back silver hair, impeccable dresser, big smoker.
Cam: Now that you mention it, I think I may have cooked for him a couple of times.
Juanita: But you’ve never borrowed money from him.
Cam: I’m pretty sure loan-sharking is illegal, Juanita.
Juanita: So that’s a no?
Cam: [smiles]
Juanita: Two people said they saw you jogging across the parking lot of his Cheshire Bridge club on August 6. One claims it was late afternoon, the other says it was more like dinnertime. That puts you there an hour, maybe more before you were supposed to deliver three-quarters of a million dollars to your Buckhead home.
Cam: We’ve already established I was desperate.
Juanita: Desperate enough to borrow three quarters of a million from a known loan shark?
Cam: Sure. I would have robbed a bank if I’d thought about it while they were still open.
Juanita: So you were there.
Cam: I was a lot of places. The whole afternoon is a blur.
Juanita: [sighing] Did you or did you not go to Maxim Petrakis’s strip club on the afternoon of August 6 and ask him for a loan?
Cam: I can promise you this, I don’t owe Maxim Petrakis a penny.
J A D E
6:36 p.m.
The Android chirps from somewhere deep in the man’s pocket, and my frustration feels limitless. An interruption, and right when we were getting somewhere. I bear down on the ground below my feet and concentrate on the two words he just used: attorney fees. I latch on to them like a pit bull.
“So you and Cam were litigating something—what?”
My voice wobbles with a hammer throbbing in my cheek, with fear of the force of his backhand. I glance at Beatrix, watching silently from her recliner next to mine, her hands sticking out from the duct-tape bonds in tight, hard fists.
The man watches me from the other side of the coffee table.
“You’d think I would have learned. After everything that I’d heard from his former chefs and partners, I should have known Cam would pull some kind of dirty tricks. I should have known he’d find the biggest shark in town and sic him on my lawyer. He crushed us, found somebody who could win on might rather than merit.” The stupid phone chirps again, and he reaches down to unbutton the flap on his cargo pants, his eyes flashing. “And it wasn’t just me he took down. He took down my whole family.”
My mind flips through what I can remember of Cam’s legal issues. The problem is there have been so many. Beyond the basic hazards in serving the public—falls, broken glass, burns and cuts and food poisoning—there are a million things that can go wrong. Labor laws, noncompetes, immigration issues, liquor licensing, noise and traffic. Most of them frivolous enough he doesn’t bother to share, or if he does, it’s only to vent and complain. I hear him out, but I rarely remember the specifics.
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