“Johnny Duprey is in jail.”
“But his lieutenants aren’t. We’ve been over this before.”
We had…the first time he approached my grandmother and me about WITSEC…when he told us we’d have to leave California and move to Arizona and when we left Arizona for here. He reminded me of that every time.
And it still had the power to shoot cold blades of fear through my heart.
My hands started to shake. I had to put my coffee cup down before the contents found their way to the front of my sweatshirt.
“Memaw’s not fit to travel.”
“I know.” Richard sat back and glanced out the window, watching the cars go by for a moment. “We talked to her doctor, and he thinks she would benefit from moving into an assisted care facility.”
“No.” I sat up a little straighter, leaning forward so he couldn’t miss a word I said. “I will not place my grandmother into one of those places.”
“You might not have a choice.”
He wouldn’t look at me when he said it. Even so, his meaning made its way through my fear and my anger to settle with the power of a bucket filled with ice water poured over my head.
“You want to move me without her. You want to stick her into some home here in Portland.”
“They don’t want her, Mellissa. They want you.”
I shook my head even though I knew what he was saying was true. “My uncle made you promise—”
“And we’ve done the best we could to keep that promise. But everyone knew from the beginning that this day might come.”
The idea of being separated from the only person left in my life who knew me before—who loved me before—broke my heart. And he knew it. I could see the understanding in his eyes and that made it so much worse. If he didn’t care, if this was nothing but another job to him, maybe it would have been easier to defy him. To spit on everything he had done for me over the past six years. But he did care.
“I won’t go. I’ll leave the program before I let you separate us.”
“Don’t do that.” He reached across the table and grabbed my arm, pulling it until I was leaning toward him and we were only inches apart. “These people have been looking for you for years, Mellissa. Do you really think they will stop just because you’ve decided you’ve had enough? The moment you leave the program, they’ll be on you like flies on shit. And you will be dead by the end of the month.” He squeezed my arm a little harder. “Do you think that will help your uncle? Do you think that will do your grandmother any good?”
A squeal of tires and a prolonged blare of someone’s car horn broke the tension. I glanced out the window and wanted to disappear.
Conrad’s car was stopped in the middle of the lane right outside the diner.
***
“It’s not what you think.”
“So you said.”
I tried to grab his arm again, but he pulled away. Again. We’d been going back and forth like this since I jumped into his car, riding unwittingly with him to his downtown office. He wouldn’t even look at me at first, driving much too fast and much too recklessly through the morning traffic for me to even catch my breath, let alone explain anything. When he slammed the car into a parking space in the underground garage beside his building, he got out of the car like he didn’t even know I was there.
“This is really mature,” I said. “You’re acting like a three-year-old who didn’t get his way.”
“I’m the immature one?” he asked, jabbing a finger into his own chest. “You’re the one that had sex with me in my car yesterday and then this morning you’re having some sort of lover’s tiff with some guy.”
“It wasn’t a lover’s tiff.”
“Then what the hell was it?”
But that was it. I couldn’t tell him.
WITSEC makes you sign a contract that is hundreds of pages long. And one of the first stipulations in that contract is that you can’t tell anyone that you’re in the program. No one. Not even a lover.
There was nothing I wanted more, but I couldn’t.
When I didn’t answer, Conrad turned away.
“Please,” I said. “I never meant for you to see that.”
“I’m sure you didn’t.” He dropped into his office chair and opened his laptop computer. “I’m sure it was your intention for neither of us to know about the other. But, again, this isn’t a relationship, right?”
“He’s not my lover.”
“Then who is he?”
I shook my head, drawing a blank. I could have said he was a friend, but he wasn’t. Not really. He was so much more than that. The truth was the only thing that could really explain what my relationship was with Richard, but that was the last thing I could tell him.
Conrad stared at me for a long minute then shook his head, turning his attention to his computer. “Why don’t you just go? I can’t even stand to look at you.”
“You told me the truth is full of grays.” I went to his desk and slammed my hands against the top. “If that’s good enough for you, why isn’t it good enough for me?”
“Because this requires black and white.”
“Why? Why is this different from everything else?”
“Because.”
“Because why?”
He looked at me, and then he shoved his computer, knocking it over onto its side. It would have gone off the desk if it hadn’t slammed into my arm.
“Because I care about you,” he said, as he stood and shoved his chair back against the wall. “Because I thought you were different, that I could be enough for you.”
“We barely know each other.”
“We know each other well enough for yesterday to be…” He hesitated, but the look in his eyes told me what he couldn’t put into words.
I wasn’t the only one who was in trouble here.
And that realization made my eyes burn with tears that begged to be shed.
This was all so unfair!
“I have to make a phone call.”
His eyes narrowed. “You need to call your boyfriend and ask permission to tell me what I already know?” He gestured toward the phone sitting on his desk. “Go for it.”
I turned away from him, walked to the windows that overlooked downtown Portland, and pulled my cellphone from my pocket. Richard answered on the first ring, as I had known he would.
“I’ll do what you asked,” I said quietly, my heart breaking with each word. “But you have to give me something first.”
“Anything.”
“You have to let me choose the home for Memaw.”
“Of course.”
“And…” I bit my lip, trying to stem the flow of tears that I was afraid would never stop if I let that first drop fall. “There’s someone I need to tell. I need you to be okay with that.”
“The guy in the fancy sports car?”
“He already knows some of it. He recognized me.”
There was a long silence on the other end of the line. “This is really risky, Mellissa,” he finally said. “Are you sure you can trust this guy?”
“Yeah. I can trust him.”
Another silence. Then he said, “Be ready to go in a week.”
I turned off the phone and slipped it into my back pocket. I stayed by the window, afraid that I would lose my determination if I turned and looked at Conrad. The fight against the tears was a losing battle. Everything was so out of control. I wanted things to be different; I wanted to be able to choose my own destiny for once in my life. But decisions had been made that would forever cast a shadow over my life. And there was no escaping the reality of that.
“It started with Hurricane Katrina,” I said, my voice stronger than I had expected. “Or maybe it really started long before that, when my parents died in a plane crash when I was two…I don’t know, really.”
“What did?” Conrad asked in a weary tone.
“This disaster that is my life.” I reached up and brushed away a few tears, but they were quick
ly replaced by more. “My uncle inherited me along with my father’s insurance policy and his 1964 Ford Mustang. Memaw came along later, after Pops died.”
“Mellissa. I don’t really want to hear the history of your family.”
“But you want to know who that man was. And that comes with my family history.”
Silence fell heavy between us. And then I heard the squeak of his office chair’s wheels as he pulled it back to the desk and took a seat.
“Fine.”
I cleared my throat, the memory of the storm rushing back to me, so vivid even after all this time. We were expecting it, but not to the degree with which it hit. I was sleeping on the couch, exhausted after staying up half the night watching The Weather Channel with Memaw and Uncle Mike. When it hit, the winds were the first thing. It was like a million angry cats were crying outside our doors. And the walls vibrated like the strings of a guitar. By the time the water came, I had already worked myself into a fit of panic. I was thirteen and everything that was supposed to be safe and secure about my life was coming apart at the seams. And that was just the beginning.
“The storm destroyed our house and my uncle’s bar. The insurance didn’t cover floods, so it took nearly everything he had to rebuild the house. The bar—it was a complete loss. He never would have been able to reopen. All he had ever done was tend bar. But working in someone else’s place didn’t offer even half the money he’d been making before. Within just a few months of the storm we were hurting bad enough that even I was aware of how bad it was.”
I took another swipe at the tears on my cheeks. “That’s when Johnny Duprey approached him. Said he’d give him the money he needed to rebuild his bar. And all he had to do in return was take a few bets. It seemed fairly simple. It wasn’t like my uncle was the only one who turned to the dark side to survive in the aftermath of Katrina.”
“Yeah, but your uncle did a little bit more than take a few bets.”
I nodded. “I was a kid. I had no idea what was going on. But at trial, my uncle said—”
“At trial?”
I glanced over at him. “You knew he went to jail, right?”
Conrad shook his head. “No, I didn’t. When Aurora and I left New Orleans, I never looked back.”
I turned, leaned back against the window, the cool refreshing against my burning skin, and crossed my arms. “My uncle came under the suspicion of the FBI after only about a year, I guess. They started watching his bar, keeping track of who came and went, taking note when one of Johnny’s lieutenants showed up. After a while, they had enough to approach my uncle and ask him to help them get Johnny.”
“Your uncle turned on Johnny Duprey?” Conrad whistled under his breath. “That takes balls.”
“Yeah.” I ran my hands over my face, wiping away the last of my tears, and smoothed my moist palms over my still drying hair. “He tried to get out a few times and Johnny wouldn’t let him. He thought that his next best option was to turn on him. He’d have to go to jail, but the FBI promised him they would make sure he got leniency for his cooperation. And that Memaw and I would be protected.”
“Let me get this straight,” Conrad said, leaning back in his chair. “Your uncle was working with the Feds in ’07?”
“Yeah.”
“Hell, that’s why he…” Conrad shook his head, a bewildered look on his face. “Shit,” he whispered.
“What?”
“All these years I thought your uncle screwed me over. But he was really just keeping me from making the biggest mistake of my life.”
I didn’t understand. I pushed away from the window and moved closer to his desk, watching him struggle with something. He ran his fingers through his hair and then buried his face in his hands.
“Shit!” He looked up at me, his eyes rimmed in red. “All these years I was so angry at him. But now…he called Aurora.”
“What?”
“I went to make a bet one day, after he warned me to stop. And Aurora shows up, screaming at me about how I promised to stop and how I was going to mess up both our futures. It got so bad that that goon your uncle kept in drinks at the end of the bar came over and escorted us out of the building. The next time I went back, the goon wouldn’t even let me in the door. I thought…” he shook his head, a soft, humorless chuckle slipping from between his lips. “I was so stupid.”
“If you made a bet with him, the FBI would have had your name—”
“And I would have been rounded up when they started arresting people.”
“But my uncle wouldn’t let you. He kept your name off the list.”
Conrad nodded. “If he hadn’t done that, I never would have married Aurora. I never would have built this business.” He stared at me for a second. “I would have fulfilled the other side of my mother’s prediction.”
“My uncle was a good man.”
The irony wasn’t lost. Even on me.
I sank into a chair that was positioned strategically in front of Conrad’s desk.
“You really didn’t know?”
“No.”
“But when you said my uncle screwed you over and you should call Johnny Duprey—”
“It was an empty threat. I just meant that I should tell Johnny how your uncle refused to take bets from paying customers. It’s the same threat I made to your uncle all those years ago.”
It would have been funny if it wasn’t so frustratingly stupid.
“I’m in the Witness Security Program. Johnny got a life sentence, but there are a dozen of his lieutenants who got shorter sentences or managed to stay out of jail altogether, and they’re pretty eager to hurt my uncle any way they can.”
The color drained from Conrad’s face.
“The man you saw me with this morning? He’s my WITSEC contact. He found out about Madison’s kidnapping, that I was the original target, and he wants to move me out of Portland. That’s what we were arguing about.”
Conrad came around the desk and leaned against it just a few feet in front of me. “That’s what you meant, when you said you didn’t know what might happen in the future.”
“Yeah.”
He shook his head, a soft chuckle again slipping from between his lips. “I’m such a fucking idiot. I should have known there was more to it than what I knew. I just…I assumed you left New Orleans to escape your uncle. All this...” He waved his hand. “It never crossed my mind.”
“I’m sorry.”
He grunted, as he grabbed my arms and pulled me up into him. “You have nothing to be sorry for,” he said, running his hand over my back. “None of this is your doing. You’re just an innocent bystander.”
I moved closer into his arms and buried my face in his chest. For a long second, I took pleasure in feeling his body wrapped around mine. I tried to imagine what it would be like to know that this would always be here, that I would always have the right to take comfort from his touch. To fall in love and trust that we would never be separated.
It was a dream meant for someone else.
“They want to put Memaw into a home and move me next week.”
“Next week?”
“It’s usually a lot sooner than that. I think the only reason they’re waiting is because of Memaw.”
“And then what?”
“And then I start over again, for the fourth time. This’ll be the first time I’ll be on my own. I won’t be able to take anything personal with me. I won’t be able to call you or any of the other friends I’ve made. And I won’t be able to see any of you again. Including Memaw.”
That thought—saying it out loud—took the steel out of my knees. I slipped forward, and Conrad caught me. He lifted me into his arms and carried me to the small couch against the back wall of his office. But he didn’t just lay me down. He sat and pulled me into his arms, cradling me like a child. And I fell apart like a child.
“I don’t want this,” I whispered when I had some control. “I don’t want to run for the rest of my life.”
&
nbsp; “What happens if you elect to leave the WITSEC program?”
“They stop protecting me.” I rubbed my cheek a little roughly. “They leave me to my own devices. Chances are good Johnny’s people will find me fairly quickly after that.”
“They would just dump you?”
“They would take away everything they’ve been doing to keep me hidden. No more monitoring the local press, no more keeping tabs with the local police. No more paying for my rent, no more dealing with the landlord so he won’t get curious about my grandmother and me. No more meetings with Richard to make sure nothing unusual has been happening in the neighborhood.” I snuggled closer against him. “I don’t know what else. I’m sure they do things that I don’t even know about.”
“But you would keep your name.”
“I guess. I don’t know.”
Conrad kissed the top of my head. “Well,” he said quietly, “we have a week to spend together and to figure out what’s next.”
“We know what’s next. I have to leave.”
“Maybe.”
I sat up to look him in the eye, hope planting a seed deep in my heart. But before I could form the words to ask him what he was thinking, the door to his office burst open.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Goldstein,” his secretary said as two plainclothes detectives—the same two who had interviewed Madison at the hospital—charged into the office behind her.
“Conrad Goldstein?” the taller one asked.
Conrad gently moved around me, standing so that he blocked my view of the room.
“Yes?”
“You’re under arrest,” the younger man said, grabbing Conrad’s arm, pulling him into the center of the room, and turning him to face me. “You have the right to remain silent,” he began, making me feel as though I had suddenly fallen into a bad rerun of Law and Order.
“What’s this about?” Conrad asked, as the detective snapped handcuffs around his wrists.
The detective ignored him, preferring to finish reading him his rights.
I jumped to my feet, beginning to wonder how much more of this day I could take.
“You have to tell him what the charges are,” I announced, not even sure I was right, but pretending I was.
The TROUBLE with BILLIONAIRES: Book 2 Page 8