by Britney King
“The whole thing,” Tiffany said. She expected me to say yes, I could see it in her eyes. That was the thing about my sister. She had a way of making you do things.
It would make mommy happy if I wasn’t all sugared up. “Okay,” I relented. She smiled like she was in on a secret I wasn’t privy to. And then she jumped. I waited for her to come up. I watched the water. I stood on the side looking in. It took a long time. And then she was asleep forever.
“Get up, sleeping beauty,” the male voice orders. I wasn’t sleeping which is how I see it’s Mark standing over the trunk. I’m exactly what you’d call surprised. I curl into myself. “She’s naked,” he says. “Why is she naked?”
“I didn’t do it,” Adam confesses, holding his palms up. “She’s pretty hammered. Just started dropping her clothes all over the place.”
“You.” I blink rapidly peering at Adam. “You did this?”
“Wonderful,” Mark says. “Now Beth really is going to kill me.”
Adam shrugs. Mark sighs. They both stare at me in my birthday suit. “You know she hates it when I bring work home.”
“Tom should be on his way.”
“Where are we?” I ask. Make a note of your surroundings. My eyes feel like they’re matted shut. It’s dark out. My mouth is dry. I feel like I’ve bathed in my own saliva. My head feels like someone has it in their fist and they’re squeezing and releasing, squeezing and releasing. It doesn’t hurt. But there’s pressure. So much pressure. “I need water.”
“Shut up,” they say in unison.
The two of them chat amongst themselves. I’m not the praying kind, exactly, but I say a silent wish that the video uploaded to Instalook. With my luck, it’ll probably get flagged on account of me being topless.
“Come on,” Mark says. “Let’s get you covered, before my wife kills me.”
Adam lifts me from the trunk.
“Am I going to die?” Obviously. The trunk is about as far from first class as it gets. They don’t put you there without reason. You have to earn it.
“If you don’t shut up,” they say, again in unison. Mark finishes. “You might.”
Fuck. I reach for the phone. My fingers brush it, but as I’m lifted, they’re forced to let go. It’s like one of those claw games where you try to win stuffed animals. It just slipped right through my fingertips.
I try to make a break and turn back for it. It’s no use. Adam’s grip tightens around my forearm. They’ve closed the trunk.
“I need to get back in there,” I tell them. “I forgot something.”
“Your shoelaces?” Mark laughs.
I’m not wearing shoes.
It’s a humid, cloudy, moonless night. Which is better than the alternative, on account of my nakedness. The further we get up the walk, the more I recognize where we are. Beth’s lake house. I’ve seen the photos on Instalook.
Inside, Mark tosses a robe in my direction. “Beth will be down soon.”
I’m sober now. But I could use some alcohol to numb me up, if only to touch the outer edges of my consciousness. I have a bad feeling about being here. I have a feeling I know what this is. They’re going to human sacrifice me.
“Sit,” Mark orders, once I’ve dressed in the robe. It’s not so hard to get people to do what you want when you’re holding a gun. “I hear you’ve been snooping around…”
“Me?” I motion toward my chest and then shake my head. “No.”
“Here,” he says, handing Adam the gun. “Just in case she tries to run.”
“There’s something I need to know,” Mark informs me. “Is it you who is the liar, or is that husband of yours in on this too?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He makes a clucking sound with his tongue meant to convey his disappointment. “And to think we’ve given you so much. Look at you, looking like a Barbie doll. And this is how you show your appreciation?”
“I’m flattered at the comparison,” I say. “But I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Beth comes down the stairs. “Finally.” I straighten the robe. “Now things should start making sense.”
But then nothing makes sense because Beth crosses the room and backhands me. “After all I did for you.” She hits me again. And again. She has a way of making her resentments felt. When my tongue touches my lip, I taste blood.
She’s been crying. I can tell by the way her chin quivers.
“Maybe we should talk about this,” Adam suggests.
“What’s there to talk about?” Beth sniffles. She can’t decide whether to be sad or angry. The struggle between her lack of control and her attempt to suppress it is disappointing. I’m embarrassed for her.
“She’s a liar,” Mark says. “She put the whole project at risk.”
“What project? Can someone tell me what’s going on?” I pull my lip between my teeth and suck the blood away. It can be dangerous to ask a question when you already know the answer.
“What the fuck?” Beth inhales deeply. She’s staring at her phone. Her eyes meet mine for a second, and then she looks over at her husband before finally settling on Adam. “You didn’t bother to take her phone?”
Recognition registers on his face.
“She Instalook Live’d from the trunk.”
“Fuck.” Mark runs his hands through his hair. “Where’s the phone?”
“Don’t worry,” Beth says to him. She exhales loudly. “Her location settings appear to be off and thank God I’m an admin on her account. I deleted it.” I watch as she holds up her screen, on it a vague outline of my face. My lips are moving, but nothing is happening. Beth laughs and shakes her head slowly from side to side. “It wouldn’t have mattered anyway,” Beth laughs. “She had the sound off.”
Adam paces. “So what does this mean?”
“It means nothing,” Beth assures him.
“Hey,” I say. “Twenty-thousand people were in queue to watch that.”
“It’s basically just her face in the dark,” Mark says as he glares at Beth’s phone. He shakes his head and then crosses the room. “Twenty-thousand. Unbelievable.” I watch as he fishes a magazine from the coffee table. He holds it up to my face. “Recognize this guy?”
I do recognize that guy. “No,” I say.
“His name is Richard Fisher. Richard is the head pastor of Divine Life.”
“So?”
“So, you slept with him.”
I should say nothing. Silence is rarely misunderstood. Instead, I cock my head. “And?”
“And—Richard Fisher just so happens to be one of our biggest competitors.”
“You’re a church. How can you have competitors?”
This time it’s Mark who hits me.
“And this guy, Elliot Walls…” He holds up another photo. “You slept with him too.”
“Jesus.” Adam rubs his jaw.
“Do you know who Elliot is?”
I shake my head.
“He’s the finance manager at All Saints.”
I roll my shoulders. It was cramped in that trunk. “Okay?”
“What I think Mark is trying to say,” Adam tells me. “Is that you’ve fucked all the competition.”
Beth stands over me. I brace myself for what I know is coming. Out of everyone, girls always fight the dirtiest. “And what I want to know is…why?”
“It’s not personal.” I wait for her to hit me again. It’s coming. I can see it on her face. Now doesn’t seem like the time to bring up the fact I can’t feel any pain. “They’re philanthropists. They donate to my parents charity.”
“How convenient,” Mark says.
“Really, more of a coincidence,” I say.
“I have to run,” Adam says. This gets everyone’s attention. Especially mine. He nods at his phone. “The wife is expecting me home for dinner.”
“That’s fine,” Beth replies, dismissing him. Then to everyone but me she says, “Tom will be here soon. We’ll let him handle
the traitor.”
“I’m not a traitor,” I say. “I just really like sex.”
“Shut up,” they all say.
I watch Adam leave. He doesn’t even say goodbye. Fair weather friends. They’ll get you every time. I should have known better. I thought he might help me. I thought my charm would work on him. Clearly, it didn’t. I feel like something very bad is going to happen.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Tom
To go or not to go, that is the question. I could just as easily skip town. Take the money and run. Keep it simple. I’m on the fence about it, to be sure. What would it take to drive in the other direction and not look back? What does it take for a person to betray those they’re supposed to love most? Do I have it in me?
People like to think it’s the spilt-second decisions that make the difference, do or don’t, walk away or stay, and sometimes it is. More often than not, it isn’t. Usually, there’s momentum behind that decision, a whole set of forces, seen or unseen, leading up to the act. It’s important to understand those forces. It’s important to understand what momentum can do. You let things build, brush aside your feelings, delay the conversation, ignore the slight gnaw in your gut. Until one day, it happens. You’re sucker-punched. Jab. Uppercut. Right hook.
How could I have missed the signs, you’ll ask yourself.
You didn’t miss them. You just weren’t looking hard enough.
June insisted we take the family to Cabo San Lucas one summer. It was against my better judgment to travel to a country where the odds of kidnapping are quite high. But June insisted, so I took a class on counterterrorism and negotiation tactics. Just in case. I’d hoped not to have to put them to good use, but as they say, every dog has his day.
First, I can tell you this. In any negotiation, there’s always leverage. Negotiation is never a linear formula: add A to B to get C. Everyone has blind spots. Mark is no different. He’s irrational, yes, but like anyone, he has hidden needs, a universe of variables that can be leveraged to change his ideas and expectations.
Now that he has something of mine in his possession, the goal is to shape his reality so it conforms to what I ultimately want to give him, not what he initially thinks he deserves.
And if this doesn’t work, I can always throw a bit of jujitsu in the mix.
“I told you,” Mark warned. “I gave you time. I was patient. You should have moved on your first target by this point.”
“How?”
“I don’t know—you’re a smart man. Figure it out.”
“But how could I do that? I’ve been dealing with the quarterly reports… I’ve been up to my eyeballs in work.” Already, I feel my training kicking in. It’s like a bicycle. Once you learn, you can’t forget.
As I expected, his tone grew more agitated during our second phone call. “I told you to handle it or I’d handle her.”
I want to ask why he’s doing this. Why now, when I was so close to getting away from here. But that’s not the question to ask. “How am I supposed to do that?” I demand with a loud exhale. Never ask questions that start with “why.” “Why” is always an accusation, in any language.
“Like I said. You’re a smart guy. I trust that you’ll figure it out.” Mark excels at speaking vaguely. Best not to incriminate himself. But the manipulation, the incessant persuasion, the indirect bullying it’s all there just underneath the surface waiting to be unearthed, begging to be misunderstood.
“You had choices,” he cautions. Nails on a chalkboard to my ears. When people issue threats, directly or indirectly, they create ambiguities they fully intend to exploit. In this case, it’s me. A loss, even a perceived one, is far worse than a gain. He knows this. It could be conscious. It could be subconscious. But he knows. This is why he has my wife.
“I’m sure we’ll figure something out.”
“Do you want to make this right, Tom? That’s what I need to know.”
“Yes, but how?” Yes is nothing without how. I listen to Mark breathe into the receiver. I let the silence between us linger. The less one says in any negotiation, the better. Listening is one of the most powerful tools a person can have in their arsenal—one which few people utilize for all it’s worth.
“You tell me.”
The secret to gaining the upper hand in negotiation is giving the other side the illusion of control.
“How about this…how about I come to you and we come up with a plan? You know better than anyone that acting in haste is senseless.”
“Okay,” he says, as though this was what he’d wanted all along. “That sounds good. We’re at the lake house.”
“The lake house.” It’s not meant to be a question. I turn the car around and I drive in the direction of my wife’s captors. I’ve already lost enough. I won’t let them make me a coward, too.
“Oh, and Tom…”
“Yes?”
“Don’t fuck this up.”
I veer left in the direction I’ve been instructed to take. Not to my house. For this to go as planned, I knew I had to negotiate away from there. I had to come at Mark with a surprise. I call him back.
“This is good,” I say. “About the lake house.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“She can’t swim.”
“Beth is here.”
“Mark,” I remind him. “We have to do what we have to do.” He doesn’t know that I know why he wants those men killed. They’re not just men my wife slept with. They’re competition. Competition that will be as quick to put the move on his devotees as he would be on theirs. Austin isn’t big enough yet for multiple gurus. Mark wants to be the only one. I take a deep breath in. “We can’t have people thinking deception among us is okay. No one respects weakness.”
“No one,” he agrees.
“That’s why we have to be smart about this. We must send a message without outing ourselves. We have to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
“Maybe I should just kill her now.” He’s testing me. Melanie is Mark’s leverage. Without her, there’s only me. If he’d wanted to start there, he would have. Mark does not do busy work.
“Whatever you want,” I tell him. “I just want what’s best for the church. We need strong leadership. We need someone in control. You’re always saying that…”
“Excellence, yes.” He doesn’t think I’m the guy for the job. He wants to—but he’s not sure.
Now that I’d anchored his emotions in a minefield of low expectations, I play on his loss aversion. “She’s my wife. Wait and let me handle this like I said I would.”
Mark wants me to level with him. He seeks control. He wants me to compromise my own. I refuse. People don’t compromise because it’s right; they compromise because it is easy. It’s safe. I refuse to show some pretend moral good that in essence only exists as weakness. Unlike me, most people in a negotiation are driven by fear or by the desire to avoid pain. Too few are driven by their actual goals.
I can hear Mark breathing. I can hear the wheels turning. “Yeah, you’re right. Sometimes it’s good to make an example out of a person.” He cackles like the unstable person he is. “Don’t you think?”
“Yes,” I say. “I do.”
“At least this way my wife won’t get any ideas.” He exhales. “Beth never cared for her anyway.”
“Beth was right about her all along,” I offer as a concession. It’s not a lie. That’s why it works.
Mark hangs up. I step on the gas. Sure, I could leave her. I could let her answer for her mistakes. The only problem with that is eventually, everyone has to. And as the saying goes, the best way to ride a horse is in the direction in which it is going.
It’s pitch black out when I arrive, save for the lights that line the drive. I doubt Mark knows about the missing funds yet. Chances are, with my wife around, he has his hands full. That’s my play, if things get too bad. I have something he wants—his money—he has something I want—my wife.
“Speak of the devil,�
� he says, opening the door to greet me. I don’t even have to knock. I take in what I’ve walked into: the shiny metal glint of a gun tucked in his waistband.
I follow him into the great room. I’ve always liked the windows in this place. It helps that at night they look like mirrors. In the reflection, I can see my wife is seated in an armchair, one wrist cuffed to it.
“You realize she could just drag the chair,” I say to Mark. Clearly, he doesn’t know Melanie when she’s determined about something.
He shrugs. “It’s a heavy son of a bitch.”
Beth is seated on the couch opposite my wife. She doesn’t acknowledge me. She’s staring at her phone.
“Glad you could finally join us,” Melanie says to me, one eyebrow cocked. She doesn’t like how much I’ve been working recently. “If you’d come home sooner, you could have saved us both a trip out here. Although I’m sure yours was more comfortable.”
I glance at Mark. I should have assumed. “You put her in the trunk?”
“She was naked,” Beth answers.
This makes sense. I do not recognize her clothes.
Mark pulls me aside. “You say Melanie can’t swim…”
“That’s right.” When Mark wants to make a point, he enjoys taking the scenic route.
“In that case, I thought the lake would be an appropriate place to do the job. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Four friends go out on a boat. They take a moonlight swim. Only three come home…”
“There’s no moon,” I say.
“Details, my friend.”
I glance over my shoulder at my wife. “Devil’s always in the detail.”
She’s dressed in jeans that are too big for her, a navy striped boatneck tee and Sperrys. She has a red bandana tied around waterfall curls. “You look like Boating Barbie,” I say to her when we walk back into the great room. I hope she takes the hint.