No one ever looked at drivers. Particularly at this one who, at that moment, happened to be folded down neatly into the space in front of the passenger’s seat.
Plenty of legroom, these custom Phantom limos.
Along with an extensive driver-engaged security system and a wood-lacquered chauffeur’s panel featured in a variety of YouTube tutorials, it was one of the vehicle’s most celebrated features.
Starting the timer on my phone, I levered the car into gear and carefully pulled away from the curb.
Math had never excited me much, but I’d done a lot of it while folded over the blue light of my laptop at my apartment.
In downtown Denver, I could probably get away with about two miles before Valentine figured out that I had no intention of driving him toward the dinner his assistant had informed me he had scheduled that evening. A total of four minutes, if evening traffic followed its regular patterns.
With the aid of Google Maps, I’d determined that four minutes would get me to three different places where I could comfortably park the limo without drawing immediate attention. I’d settled on the Colorado Convention Center, as its proximity bought me two minutes and the chance to admire the auspicious omen of a forty-foot blue grizzly bear forever peering into the east-facing bank of windows.
Once I had us parked, I figured I had about five minutes before Valentine tuned in to the fact that I wasn’t carrying a real firearm and decided to go ahead and summon his minions. Motivated by the fear of lost jobs and the fact they were not driving a stolen limo, they’d make better time to the Colorado Convention Center than we had.
This gave me a total of seven minutes to question Valentine about my mother’s whereabouts, and I had every intention of making them count.
What I hadn’t counted on was the alarming sounds the real Louis had begun to make behind his panty hose gag. I thumbed on the satellite radio and quickly located the opera station, where the odd soaring vocalization of male discontent wouldn’t be out of place.
When the intercom buzzed I jumped enough to catch Louis’s hat on the Roll’s roof.
Valentine’s voice filled the cabin, bare of the melodious smoothness he’d employed for the delivery of his commencement speech earlier that day. He sounded tired, annoyed, and infinitely more human.
“Louis, turn that shit off. You know the soundproofing in this thing isn’t worth half of the extra ten grand I paid for it.”
Rather than attempting to force a male voice, I poked Louis in the butt and hoped the resulting grunt would resemble approval.
Close enough.
I enjoyed another thirty seconds of silence before the intercom’s little red eye winked at me again.
“You missed the turn. The Palace Arms is on Seventeenth, not on Curtis.”
This time, I didn’t bother prompting a response from Louis, whose eyelids had begun to flutter. We were two blocks from the parking garage, and my hands were beginning to sweat within their leather gloves. I relinquished my grip on ten and two and fingered the business card in the pocket of my skirt.
Valentine’s business card. Had I not been wearing the gloves, I could have traced my mother’s blue-ink pen scrawl, proof that she had spoken to the man growing suspicious in the back seat. Motivation to continue with my plan.
Courage, Janey.
“Louis, did you hear me?”
Louis heard him all right. The wiry driver had wormed his way off of the floorboards and flopped his torso onto the passenger’s seat.
“Easy, Louis,” I said. “You’ll want to keep your head above your heart so you don’t pass out. The panty hose tied around your wrists restrict the blood flow more than you know.”
How I knew, I chose not to think about at that particular second, focusing instead on angling the Rolls into the parking garage and retrieving the ticket spit out by the automatic gate.
“Louis, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” It wasn’t the intercom this time. Valentine’s voice bled directly through the window separating the driver’s compartment from the leather-and-wood-bedecked limousine cabin.
I steered the long black car into the first available slot and checked the timer on my phone. Five minutes and thirty seconds. Given the physical impediments I’d acquired in the course of this day, I’d allowed myself an extra half minute to account for limping in the getaway.
“I’m going to ask you not to move, Valentine.” My pellet gun was the first thing through the window, followed by my shoulders and my head, then the rest of my body in a rapid, graceless lurch.
I managed to keep the gun trained on him as I righted myself, stripping off the hat, wig, and mustache. I wiggled my nose and mouth against the sudden, burning pain, vowing never to wax this part of my body even if it meant cultivating a full goatee postmenopause.
Valentine took his time looking me over. I found enduring his thorough gaze far more unnerving than tasing his driver or stealing his car.
Comparatively speaking.
“What did you do with Louis?” he asked.
“He’s having himself a little rest in the front seat. He wanted to give us time to talk.”
About what? would have been the predictable response to this statement. Valentine was not a predictable man. Neither was he a kempt one, upon closer inspection. Without the benefit of artistic overhead lighting, shadows bred in the hollows below his cheekbones and under his eyes. His dark hair had appeared carelessly entrepreneurial during his address but now bordered on homeless chic. His eyes, a color that evoked romance-novel descriptions of stormy seas or polished jade, were red rimmed and bloodshot. He looked less like a wildly successful architect and more like a playboy coming off a three-day bender—just as the papers had reported.
“I’ve seen you,” he said, settling back into the leather seat. Valentine was one of those men who sat with his knees open wide, the gesture a brazen declaration of his dire need to make room for ponderously large testicles.
A declaration he supported by reaching for the crystal decanter full of amber liquid on the lacquered tray at his side without so much as a glance at the weapon pointed at his forehead. He poured three fingers into a Baccarat tumbler and held it out to me in wordless invitation.
I shook my head no, though my mouth watered in traitorous longing. Dutch courage and all that.
He shrugged in a lazy “suit yourself” fashion and swallowed a healthy slug of the drink. “I never forget a face.” Half smiling, he tapped the glass with the silver ring on his finger. His wedding finger. Odd for a man whose estranged wife was doing her level best to crucify him via every available media outlet. “You were at the graduation today. Was my address really that bad?”
“I’m not here to talk about the graduation. I’m here to talk about what you did before the graduation.” This felt like the place where I ought to cock my weapon for emphasis, but lacking this capability, I cocked my head instead. Shrewd, I coached myself. Be shrewd and edgy.
“You mean have lunch with one of your classmates?” He paused as if searching the memory’s details. “Come to think of it, you were sitting next to her on the stage. Perhaps you know her. Melanie Beidermeyer?”
Oh, now I really wanted to pull the trigger.
But pulling the trigger was a monumentally bad idea for a multitude of reasons. As satisfying as pinging Valentine between the eyes might be, he would realize I was holding him hostage with a pellet gun, and I’d be facedown on the concrete before I could say common law felony.
Also, my mother had trained me better.
She’d trained all of Brownie Troop 621 from Plattsburgh, New York, better, to tell the truth of it. At the annual Spring Sunshine Jamboree, she’d squired the entire pack of giggling, brown-beanie-clad eight-year-olds out behind the canoe shed and pressed paintball guns into our sweaty hands.
“Balls and eyes, ladies,” my pretty mother had said, demonstrating a quick double tap on the menacing male silhouette pinned to a nearby tree. “Balls and eyes.”
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We’d each splatter-painted the shadowy nards of about a dozen paper perverts when Mrs. Hooper came barreling over the hill, troop-leader neckerchief flapping below her pink face, creased corduroy shorts whistling their disapproval.
“Mrs. Avery,” she scolded from thin lips the color of boiled liver. “What in heaven’s name do you think you’re doing?”
“Alex,” Mom corrected. “And I’m teaching these girls a valuable skill.” Violet Dupree—the smallest and meekest of our number—squeezed off a tidy nut shot, pausing to blow on the barrel of her gun before beaming a grin of unmatched brightness up at my mother.
“This is not part of the approved curriculum. These girls will follow me to their leatherworking class this very minute.”
“Oh, great,” Mom said, folding tanned arms below her breasts. “And when some letch tries to drag them into a van, they’ll have a nice leather coin purse to whap him with.”
Mrs. Hooper’s close-set eyes went sly with dislike. “Not all mothers choose careers that would expose their daughters to that element of society.”
And that’s when Mom snatched the gun from Violet and popped Mrs. Hooper twice in the sternum.
“Would you look at that?” Mom held the pistol up and fingered a little switch on the side. “I must have left the safety off. See why I said it’s always important to check?”
“Yes, Miss Alex,” a singsongy chorus of girls answered.
Mrs. Hooper only blinked, her eyes watering, mouth opening and closing like an apoplectic fish before skulking off to the nurse’s cabin.
So maybe Mom would have understood my itchy trigger finger after all.
A quick glance at my phone informed me I had only three minutes and twenty-three seconds left. Swampy with rage, I shucked off Louis’s coat and fanned my face with his hat. “After lunch, but before the graduation. Say, at about one thirty?”
Valentine’s eyes flicked over the thin cotton blouse clinging to my damp skin before finding their way to my face. I, of course, was already watching his. Waiting for the spark of recognition.
Valentine smothered it with another sip of whiskey. “Are you here to blackmail me too, then?” he asked, voice smoky from the alcohol. “There are better ways to pay off your student loans, believe me.”
“Blackmail?” I parroted the word without thinking. Of the hundreds of responses and dozens of scenarios I had prepared for, this one hadn’t even entered the realm of possibility.
“That’s not what your mother called it, of course.”
Your mother. He knew.
Valentine leaned forward, his elbows coming to rest on his knees. “Don’t look so surprised, Miss Avery. I’m an architect. Good buildings begin as beautiful bones. Your mother has them. So do you.”
“My mother would never blackmail anyone,” I insisted.
“I’m relieved to hear that.” Valentine shot the remainder of his drink and reached for the decanter. “Maybe you can tell me what she meant when she said she had information about me that someone was willing to pay big money for. Unless I paid her bigger money, of course.”
I fought back more denials, all too conscious of the precious seconds each one would cost me. I hadn’t come to haggle over my mother’s relative guilt or innocence. I’d come to find out where the hell she was, and so far, I’d allowed Valentine to all but hijack the conversation. Time to steal it back. “Is that why you kidnapped her?”
“Kidnapped?” All traces of levity abandoned Valentine’s face. His eyes went as blank and empty as a shark’s. “Your mother is missing?”
“She disappeared during the graduation. She isn’t answering her phone.” I swallowed against the ever-present panic threatening to crawl up my throat.
Valentine set his drink aside and ducked across the limo’s cab, sliding into the seat beside me. Awareness of his thigh alongside mine registered as prickling heat. I could smell him on the air between us. An intoxicating cocktail of whiskey and warm skin.
“Miss Avery, if I expended the effort to kidnap every person who claimed to have damaging information about me, I’d have to double my staff.” The green eyes staring frankly into mine were fringed with those sable paintbrush lashes the average female would gut a supermodel for. “You, on the other hand, have kidnapped me and assaulted my driver. Fresh-faced law school grad that you are, I don’t have to explain this to you. I could eat you for breakfast.”
“But you won’t.” I resisted the urge to scoot away, knowing on some elemental level that yielding ground to a man like Valentine was tantamount to defeat. All future interactions would be governed by what I said in the next few seconds. No pressure. “If what you say is true, it sounds like we both need my mother found as soon as possible. And I’m your best chance at making that happen.”
“Are you? I get the feeling you don’t know your mother half as well as you think you do.”
“That’s still twice as much as you know.”
Valentine was a man of many smiles. If I’d had to name the one he leveled at me just then, it would have been something like “cat contemplates sparing three-legged mouse for future fun and games.”
“Perhaps,” he said.
Someone tapped on the window nearest Valentine. Maybe a security guard. Maybe a police officer.
My time was up.
“I trust you’ll keep in touch,” he said. “It’s better if I don’t have to come looking for you.”
Better for whom, he didn’t say. He didn’t need to.
“If you’ll pardon me for a moment.” I leaned back through the window to the front seat, trying not to think about which smile Valentine might be wearing as I reclaimed the panty hose that had served as both gag and handcuffs. Along with Louis’s coat, hat, and gloves, I deposited two packs of Turkish cigarettes and a fifty in the driver’s seat. “I’m really sorry about the tasing,” I said, offering him my hand. “I just needed to borrow your boss. No hard feelings?”
Louis eyed the cash and smokes. “Keep your money,” he said, voice raspy from lack of saliva and L’eggs control top in Misty Taupe. “I’m getting too old for this shit.”
“I’ll see that you’re compensated for this evening’s adventures, Louis.” Valentine’s voice was even and unperturbed.
Back in the rear of the car, I hiked up my skirt, slid my pellet gun into the holster strapped to my thigh, popped open the top three buttons on my blouse, and ran a hand through my hair to leave it appropriately tousled.
“Clever girl.” Valentine gestured toward the door but made no attempt to move. I had half crawled over him on my way out when he caught me by the hem of my skirt and pulled me back. “Wait,” he said, examining my face as he might a building schematic, eyes taking in several details at once.
Valentine dragged his thumb across my lower lip. That strange, sensitive flesh packed with blood and nerves, more than capable of feeling each and every ridge of his thumbprint sliding across what remained of my lipstick. Smearing it as if I’d been thoroughly, fiercely kissed.
And in a way, I had. The gesture had been just as deliberate. As possessive. Curiously intimate.
He sat back, admiring his handiwork. “Better,” he said. “We’ll talk soon.”
I nodded, wondering why I hadn’t made at least a passing attempt to bite the shit out of his thumb.
The door opened onto a fleet of black-suited men, all of whom cast each other knowing looks once they got an eyeful of my dishabille.
“He’s all yours, boys,” I said, adjusting my skirt. “I’ve had my way with him.”
By the time I returned to my apartment overlooking the outskirts of campus, the sun had slipped behind the sawtooth ridge of the Rocky Mountains. My apartment looked its best in this light, with the last smudges of sunset gilding the walls and stretching interesting shadows across the floor.
Tonight I didn’t wait for the light to fail before switching on my small army of lamps, which tended to soften the minimalist sensibility where exposed HVAC ductwork masq
ueraded as “industrial aesthetic” as opposed to “no room for drywall.”
But it was cheap enough that I could afford to live there alone even though there were two bedrooms and two baths crammed into the seven hundred square feet I paid just under a grand a month for.
Priorities. I have them.
Unfortunately learning how to cook had never been one of them, so I was standing in sock-clad feet before the stove, supervising while a grilled cheese sandwich tried to brown itself, when my landline rang.
I stood there staring at it like I’d seen a ghost.
In the three years since my mother had insisted I get a landline—it’s quicker if emergency services ever need to find your physical address, Janey—it had never rung. I wasn’t even sure what the phone sounded like until that very second.
As far as I knew, only one person had the number.
Mom.
I floated over to it on watery legs and picked up the receiver.
“Hello?”
“This is Shepard. I work with Paul Gladstone. Listen carefully and don’t interrupt. You need to get out of your apartment. Take the south stairs down to the laundry room and exit the building through the basement. I’ll be parked out in the alley in a gray Hyundai Genesis, license plate 621 LAO. Go now, Jane.”
My face felt like it had been swarmed by ants, alternately plagued by surging numbness and stinging needles. Why would Shepard—not Paul—call me? And how the hell did Shepard know the schematics of my apartment building?
Speaking of my building, why would I leave the safety of an apartment with a state-of-the-art security system—birthday present from Mom—to run out and hop in a car with a man I had never met? And all on the assumption that Paul, a man I hadn’t even known existed until four hours ago, could be trusted implicitly, and by extension, Shepard too.
No matter what angle I examined the prospect from, it looked like a monumentally bad idea.
“Sorry, wrong number,” I said, and hung up.
The phone shrilled again within seconds. When I didn’t answer, my cell phone began playing the graduation processional—my mother’s idea when I’d joked about forgetting to silence it for the graduation ceremony earlier that morning. A third and far less melodious sound joined the fray—the smoke detector howling its protest to the smoke billowing up from the grilled cheese pan.
Private Lies (Jane Avery Mysteries Book 1) Page 5