Body Movers

by Stephanie Bond

  His buddy Chance had given him the idea by asking if Wesley could expunge a couple of DUI arrests from Chance’s record. He was willing to pay Wesley five hundred bucks per delete stroke.

  Oh, sure, the extra cash had come in handy, but cleaning up Chance’s traffic violations hadn’t been the primary incentive. For months now he’d been covertly accumulating details about his father’s indictment and subsequent disappearance—covertly because Carlotta would murder him if she ever caught wind of it. He’d made copies of every public document he could find online and in crammed file cabinets around Atlanta, but the information was incomplete and dated. When he’d tapped into the courthouse records two days ago, he’d found a wealth of information on his father’s last court appearance, and on sightings of his parents over the past ten years—Michigan, Kentucky, California, Texas. The thought of his polished, executive father wearing a ten-gallon hat made him smile, but he was sure that Randolph Wren could carry it off. His father was smart, savvy, and knew how to blend in to his environment—how else had he been able to elude the authorities for over a decade?

  His chest swelled with pride when he thought of his father donning a disguise and slipping out of town under the nose of some cop out to make a career for himself by capturing Randolph Wren, The Bird. When Wesley was in grade school, he’d entertained his friends with daring stories that he’d imagined to be true. Having a notorious father had given him status in school. He was no longer the bespectacled runt who blew the curve in math class. He was the son of The Bird. He had told his classmates how he’d helped his father escape the feds by coming up with a fantastic math equation regarding engine speed and the timing of traffic lights, and how he continued to help his father from afar via secret code. As soon as his father had gathered enough evidence to prove that he had been set up, he would return to Atlanta and clear his name. They would be a family again, vindicated, and stronger for their trials.

  It was true…sort of. He hadn’t helped his father escape, of course, but he would have if his father had only asked. And there was no secret code within the abbreviated messages on the postcards they had received sporadically over the years—at least not one that he’d been able to crack. He’d spent hours poring over those postcards, eight of them in all, studying them under a magnifying glass, infrared light, black light, and had even managed to have a couple of them X-rayed on an eighth-grade field trip to a vet clinic. In hindsight, he realized there were no secret messages between the lines of “We’re fine and we love you” or “You’re always in our hearts,” yet he remained hopeful that his father would someday contact him and ask for his help now that Wesley was an adult.

  Unless his parents had forgotten how old he was.

  He banished the thought as soon as it entered his mind. Of course his parents knew he was an adult now. Just because they’d never called or sent a special message on his birthday didn’t mean that they’d forgotten that he was no longer a kid. Ditto for Christmas. They had sacrificed too much to risk being caught over something stupid and sentimental.

  Yet every Christmas, in the back of his mind, he dared to hope that they might simply show up at his bedroom window, or maybe ring the doorbell. “We couldn’t stay away any longer,” they would say, then gather him and his sister in their arms.

  But it never happened. Last Christmas he’d spent the day being a jerk to Carlotta when she’d only tried to make him happy by attempting to bake a chocolate cake with peanut butter chips in the middle. It had been his favorite since he was a kid, a special cake that his mother had always made during the holidays. But Carlotta was hopeless in the kitchen. In fact, self-preservation had forced him to take over the cooking duties when he’d turned twelve. Carlotta’s cake had been undercooked in the middle and burnt around the edges. He had snapped at her and at the time, had been unfazed by her wounded expression, just happy to lash out at someone.

  But now he felt the sting of remorse over the mean things he’d said—that she’d never find a husband if she didn’t learn to cook and that he hated the clothes she’d bought and wrapped up for him and that he didn’t want to watch the dumb Christmas movie that she’d rented. The movie, he knew, had been her attempt to tether him, to keep him off the streets and away from the card tables. She meant well, but she smothered him.

  Then he sighed. Damn, no matter what he did, he seemed to disappoint Carlotta. She’d be furious with him when she found out about the hacking. Although, if he was careful, he could at least keep her from finding out why he’d done it.

  A buzzing noise sounded and the door to the holding cell slid open, revealing a uniformed officer. All the inmates who weren’t sleeping or passed out perked up.

  “On your feet, Wren. You have a visitor.”

  Wesley winced. Time to face the executioner. He pushed to his feet and waded through the jumble of funky-smelling bodies, enduring wolf whistles from his bigger, brawnier cellmates while the officer handcuffed him. Then he followed the officer to a room where his sister waited. Her anxious gaze darted from his face to his handcuffs, and she looked as if she was going to cry. God, he hoped not. Seeing her in tears tore him up, always had. When the officer left and closed the door, she gripped his shoulders hard, but instead of hugging him, she shook him with more strength than he’d known she had. “What the hell did you do, Wesley?”

  When his eyes stopped spinning in his head, he said, “Relax, sis, no one was murdered.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “Yet. That Chance Hollander has something to do with this, doesn’t he?”

  “No,” Wesley said because Carlotta already didn’t like his best friend. And even though Chance had given him the idea to break into the courthouse records, he was the one who had actually done it.

  “Tell me what you did. Now, Wesley.”

  He swallowed. He hadn’t seen her this worked up since he’d broken the news that he wasn’t going to apply for college. “I, um, sort of stumbled into a computer database that I wasn’t supposed to.”

  One dark eyebrow arched. “Stumbled into, or hacked into?”

  “Uh, hacked.”

  She crossed her arms. “Detective Terry told me that you broke into the courthouse computer and changed some records?”

  He frowned. “That guy’s a jerk.”

  His sister looked alarmed. “Did he hurt you?”

  “Nah, but he gets off on that bad-cop routine.”

  She frowned. “I noticed. Now, why were you messing around in the courthouse records?”

  He tried to look sheepish. “Just trying to get rid of all those traffic tickets I accumulated so I could get my driver’s license reinstated and I wouldn’t be such a pain to you.” He could lie with assurance because when he suspected his access was being tracked, he’d unleashed a virus in the database that would be undetectable to the hillbilly programmers in the police department. No way they’d be able to tell what had been changed.

  “Is that all?” she asked, her brown eyes hopeful.

  Guilt stabbed at him, but he told himself that she wanted to believe him, and he’d only hurt her more with the truth. “Yeah, that’s all.”

  She sighed in relief, then ran her hand over his cheek as she used to when he was little. “What am I going to do with you?”

  His heart swelled with affection, but he tamped down his sissy emotions. “You have to keep me around, or you’d starve to death.”

  She smiled briefly, then sobered. “We need to get you a lawyer.”

  He shifted his feet. “I already called Liz Fischer.”

  Carlotta looked horrified. “Dad’s attorney? Why?”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, for one reason, she’ll probably charge an arm and a leg to represent you.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe not. She always told us to call her if we needed anything, and she sounded nice on the phone.”

  “I don’t like the fact that everyone will connect her to Dad, and then him to you.”

  “Since we have the sam
e last name, I think that’s unavoidable, don’t you?”

  Carlotta frowned, her expression suspicious. “What did Liz say?”

  “She’ll be here. My bail hearing is at four this afternoon.” He shuffled his feet again. “Can we make bail? I have six hundred dollars in a tennis-ball can in the garage.”

  Her eyebrows shot up. “You have six hundred dollars?”

  More disapproval. He owed a lot of money to a lot of people, but he kept a secret stash in case a big card game materialized—something tempting enough to go back on his word to Carlotta that he wouldn’t gamble. “My emergency fund,” he mumbled. And now he’d have to find a new hiding place.

  Her gapped front teeth worried her lower lip, then she sighed. “If the bail is set too high for us to pay cash, then I’ll call a bail bondsman, assuming we can cough up ten percent.”

  “And if we can’t come up with ten percent?”

  “I’ll have to put up the house.”

  Wesley’s intestines cramped. For the first time, he doubted his plan. He hadn’t counted on the trouble it would cause his sister.

  Then she gave him a shaky smile. “Don’t worry, we’ll figure it out.” She looked down and gasped. “Where did you get those revolting shoes?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said, waving off her concern. “If I have to spend the night here, will you feed Einstein?”

  She winced. “For that reason alone, I’ll make sure you get out of here.”

  He grinned, glad to see she was back in good humor. His sister was a pretty woman, especially when she smiled. She was self-conscious about the gap between her two front teeth, but he thought it gave her character, made her look like a dark-haired Lauren Hutton…and his mother.

  He worried about Carlotta. He’d seen men’s eyes light up when she walked into a room, but she hadn’t had a serious relationship since their parents had left, since that bastard Peter Ashford had dumped her. She’d never said so, but Wesley knew that he himself was much of the reason that his sister hadn’t settled down. Not too many guys were keen on a kid brother as a package deal. Just one more thing for him to feel guilty over. “Thanks for coming, sis. I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”

  Her expression was part dubious, part hopeful. “I’ll hold you to that.”

  Wesley went back to the holding cell with mixed feelings pulling at him. For the next few hours he sat with his back in a corner trying not to attract attention from his cellmates, many of whom were finally rousing from hangovers and were spoiling for trouble…or romance. A muscle-bound guy wearing a headband and leg warmers kept looking his way and licking his lips. In desperation, Wesley pulled out a deck of cards he’d been allowed to keep and announced he was giving a clinic on how to play the ultimate game of skill and luck, Texas Hold ’Em Poker. His audience seemed suspicious at first, then crowded around. He sat cross-legged and dealt the four men closest to him two cards each facedown on the gritty concrete floor. Just the feel of the waxy cards in his hands sent a flutter of excitement to his chest.

  “Those cards are your pocket cards,” he explained. “I’m going to deal five community cards faceup—three, then one, then one more—and the object is to create the best hand possible from your two cards and the five community cards. Bets are made between rounds of revealing the community cards.”

  “We need chips,” one guy said, then started ripping the buttons off his shirt. Everyone followed suit and within five minutes, a pile of mismatched buttons lay in the middle. Impressed with their resourcefulness, Wesley divided the buttons among the four players and gave them tips on betting. “If you have strong pocket cards, you’ll want to bet. If not, you’ll want to fold.” Then he grinned. “Unless you want to bluff, and then you’ll want to bet.”

  “What’s a strong card?” a man asked.

  “Any face card, or an ace,” Wesley said. “Two of a kind is great, two cards of the same suit can put you on your way to a flush, and two neighboring cards, like a nine and a ten can put you on your way to a straight.” He went around, taking button bets on the pocket cards. “Now I’ll deal what’s called the flop cards.” He tossed a discard card to the side, then dealt three cards faceup—a three of spades, a five of hearts and a queen of hearts. “We got a possible straight going with the three and the five, and a possible heart flush with the five and the queen.”

  Excitement built among the players and spectators as they studied the cards, creating possible hands. Wesley smiled to himself. There was something so sweet about evangelizing the game of games…and training potential players that he might someday face across the table and rob of every penny they had.

  He tossed the top card onto the discard pile, then dealt another card faceup. “This is called the ‘turn’card.”

  An ace of hearts. A murmur went up among the men. Wesley studied the players’ “tells,” the body language and betting techniques that told a more experienced player what the person was holding as surely as if the cards were transparent. The big guy on the far left was holding crap—probably a ten and a deuce, but he wasn’t going to fold and look bad to the other guys. The guy next to him was grinning like a fool after the turn card, so he probably had a pocket ace to make it two of a kind. Beginners thought that aces beat everything else, no matter what.

  The third guy also had nothing, else he wouldn’t be gnawing on his nails and staring at the community cards as if he could will them to change. The fourth guy, though—he had something because he was holding his cards close to his chest as if they were winning lottery tickets. Wesley guessed he had pocket queens and was looking at three of a kind, which so far was “the nuts”—the best hand in the game.

  “Here comes the river card,” he said, and dealt a nine of clubs—not much good to anyone, he guessed, although the bidding was brisk. The aces guy was all in with his six wooden buttons and a jeans rivet. Pretty soon, everyone was all in, and Wesley asked, “Whad’ya have?”

  The first guy turned over his ten of spades and four of clubs and took some ribbing from the other guys. The grinning aces guy turned over his ace of diamonds and seven of spades, giving him the expected pair of aces. The third guy cursed his mother and tossed in his jack of diamonds and six of spades, then stomped away as if they had been playing for real money instead of sewing notions. The last guy turned over his pocket queens to the cheers of the men behind him, and raked all the raggedy buttons toward him triumphantly.

  While Wesley was shuffling for another hand, the cell door buzzed and slid open and he was being summoned again. “Your lawyer’s here,” the guard informed him.

  Wesley handed off the deck of cards, stood and allowed himself to be handcuffed again, then followed the man to a room where Liz Fischer waited, tapping the toe of her pointy high-heeled shoe. She was a tall, athletic blonde in her mid-forties, a real looker who seemed to be in perpetual motion. Wesley recognized her from newspaper photos of his father’s case, although her hair was shorter and she looked a little leaner.

  “Hello, Wesley.”

  Her voice, for sure, was familiar—throaty and abrupt. He’d had more than one wet dream lately with that voice looping in his head. “Hello, Mrs. Fischer.”

  She smiled at his politeness. “I’m not married, so it’s Ms.—in fact, call me Liz. How nice to finally put a face to the voice. I just wish it were under different circumstances.”

  When she sat down at the table, the scent of her cologne reached him—not a feminine, floral scent, but something earthy and strong that she might have gotten out of her lover’s medicine cabinet this morning. Which could also explain the oversize white dress shirt she wore with her prim suit.

  She clicked open her briefcase. “So, you got caught. I told you to be careful.”

  He splayed his hands. “I slipped up, but everything’s fine.”

  She frowned. “The optimism of youth. Do you realize that you’re facing jail time and a hefty fine?”

  A vision of Leg Warmers licking his lips flashed throug
h Wesley’s mind. “How much jail time?”

  “Probably less than six months, but it won’t look good on your permanent record. Now, tell me what happened.”

  Wesley repeated the lie, that he had hacked into the courthouse records to clear his own traffic violations. “I’m really sorry,” he added.

  The woman’s expression was bland. “You’re going to have to do a better acting job than that for the district attorney. And you’re telling me that this records break-in has nothing to do with your sudden interest in your father’s cold case?”

  “That’s right.”

  She studied him suspiciously. Wesley imagined himself through her experienced eyes: a skinny, know-it-all kid who’d grown up without parents and likely wouldn’t amount to much.

  “You look like Randolph,” she said, surprising him with intense eye contact.

  His cock jumped—damn, he was going to embarrass himself. He shifted in his chair. “That’s what my sister says when she talks about my father, which isn’t often.”

  “Carlotta was bitter when your parents…left. Rightfully so. How is she?”

  “Fine. A little upset with me at the moment.”

  “I called her occasionally after…. afterward, and she always assured me everything was okay.” The woman looked remorseful. “I should have looked in on both of you more often.”

  “We did okay,” Wesley said, trying not to sound too reassuring in case she was inclined to reduce her fee out of some sense of obligation. “But Carlotta doesn’t know that I’ve talked to you about my father’s case. It would only upset her.”