I rolled my eyes, and we waited for our client to wake up.
8
Megan snored for an hour straight. While we waited, Cristina called for the tow truck. When Megan finally sat up, she had a huge red mark on her forehead. Cristina stared directly at it, while I averted my eyes. “I won’t bother getting out my mirror,” Megan said, running her fingers through her hair. “I probably look like I should be in a Halloween haunted house.”
She wasn’t far from the truth, but as she hopelessly wiped dried makeup from under her eyes, some changes had already taken place. She was calm, composed, and speaking without slurring her speech. Now, I figured, we could make some headway into this trauma.
“Not to be redundant—I’m not sure what you recall—but I’m Ivy, and this is Cristina. We are ECHO.”
She sighed while trying to smile. “I’m quite embarrassed about my behavior. I do recall most everything, at least I think I do,” she said, placing her palms on the table. She looked toward Cristina. “Thank God you’re okay. I’m truly sorry if I hurt you or scared you into crashing your skateboard.”
“No probs.”
“Your daughter, Annie. She’s okay?” I asked.
A deep nod. “Thankfully. I’d never experienced anything like this before, and even after I found out it was a hoax, I completely broke down and went straight to the bottle.”
“Are you…?” Cristina asked hesitantly.
“I’m what you call a corporate drinker. I go to all the happy hours—mandated, voluntary, with the executives, my colleagues, or the lower-level employees. I do it all. I fool myself into thinking that I’m playing the game, moving up the corporate ladder. But I’m really just giving myself an excuse to drink. And after Annie’s life flashed before my eyes, I just…couldn’t deal with it.”
Her voice ended in a whisper, her eyes focused on the glass table. Cristina coughed, and she came back to life. She then described the kidnapping hoax. Even though I’d asked her to try to stay with the facts, she veered into her emotional reaction at least a dozen times. It was completely understandable.
“When I finally heard Annie’s voice on the phone, it was surreal. I wanted to believe it was her. But part of me thought my mind was playing games—that I’d just made it all up as some type of coping mechanism so I wouldn’t have a breakdown.”
She thumbed a tear in the corner of her eye. “Damn, I never knew how much I loved her until I thought she’d been taken from me.”
I nodded as the wheels turned in my head. I was stunned. Stunned to hear that instead of racing to the park to go hug her daughter, be with her husband, spend time with them, Megan had instead turned to booze. “You reported this to the police?”
“Of course. I spent two hours there before I went to the liquor store. Detective Stan Radowski was assigned to my case.”
I could feel Cristina’s eyes on me.
“What?” Megan asked. “You know him?”
I nodded. “Stan and I worked together when I was at Child Protective Services. To be honest, he’s a great detective, and a better friend.”
I thought about how far he’d come since having his arm amputated a couple of months earlier. After feeling like his life was over—who wouldn’t?—Stan had pushed himself through rehab and gained decent control of his right-arm prosthesis. He’d been learning to do everything, not only with just one good arm, but with his left arm. He had been right-handed. He even dedicated himself to becoming certified with his pistol while using his left hand. On top of that, he’d recently started working out. His cousin Nick, an FBI agent up in Boston, had challenged him to train for the Boston Marathon.
“Did you know he uses a prosthesis? Well, of course you do. I’m sorry,” Megan said. “He’s a little slow.”
Cristina arched her back. “Do you have a problem with that?”
“Cristina.” I shook my head at her defensiveness, then turned to Megan. “We’re all rather protective of Stan, after everything he’s been through.”
“I understand. It’s great that you have so many close friends. I’m not sure what those really are. All of my relationships are fake, outside of what I have with my kids, especially my little girl.”
“You’re married?” Cristina asked.
“Yes.”
I waited for more, but she didn’t offer anything. I didn’t ask a follow-up question. For now, I only needed to understand what she wanted from me.
I set my forearms on the table. “I know this might have been the worst day in your life.”
“And then some.”
“It sounds like you’ve come to realize that you have a drinking problem, and I’m guessing you’re going to try to deal with it.”
She clasped her hands on the table, then pressed her fingers together, as if summoning the fortitude to declare war on her issue. “Yes, I have that as a goal. But…” She seemed to be considering her choice of words. I stayed silent, and thankfully, Cristina followed my lead.
“The people who did this…they need to be punished. I want you to find them, and then give me five minutes in a room with them. That’s all I’m asking.”
My first thought was that she had no idea what she was asking. She was still fuming. She was essentially asking me to be her vigilante hunter. I couldn’t agree to that, no matter how much I hated those same people for even thinking they could harm her daughter.
“I’m sorry, Megan, but that would be against the law. And even worse, you don’t want to be in a room with the folks who did this.”
“Believe me, yes I do.”
She held my gaze, and then her jaw flinched slightly. I said, “I don’t want to belabor this point, but even if I was inclined to hand these people over to you, it’s against the law. So, if that’s why you came to see me, then I think our meeting is over. I can call you a cab.” I began to rise out of my chair.
“Please don’t.” She held up a hand. “I’m sorry. I’m just upset. I’m letting my anger take over all of my thoughts. These monsters are worse than terrorists. They destroyed me, all because of greed.”
I remained standing. “It’s horrible. I hope the police catch them and they spend a lot of time in jail,” I said, walking toward the breakroom. “Do you want a bottled water?”
“Sure. That would be nice. My mouth is a bit dry.”
“Hey, while you’re in there, I’ll take a Coke,” Cristina said.
I returned with two bottled waters and Cristina’s Coke. We spent about thirty seconds chugging our drinks.
“I get the feeling you don’t have a lot of confidence in Stan and the police. He might only have one arm, but his mind is still intact. He’s a bulldog of a detective, and he knows when and how to use the resources around him.”
“He might be the greatest American hero, but you should have heard what he and some other detective told me after two hours. A guy named Moreno.”
“Omar Moreno. I know him.” I didn’t like him, and he felt the same about me. For Stan’s benefit, we’d learned to coexist.
She went on to say that she had learned this same hoax had been played out at least a dozen times in Texas, mostly in San Antonio or Austin. She was told that their best hope was getting the FBI to add technical resources into some type of joint task force, which had yet to be formed.
“Interesting,” I said, twisting the bottle on the table.
“I know Detective Radowski was trying to give me hope, but it smells of bureaucracy. And I don’t want to wait three years for them to come back and say they ran out of money, or the leads dried up. The time to catch these piranhas is now.”
“Agreed.”
“Then will you do this for me?”
“I’m not a vigilante hunter.”
She waved a hand in front of her face. “I wasn’t being serious. I only want justice served. And to keep them from ripping another family to shreds.”
I locked eyes with Cristina. She took in a breath, then nodded. We had the same thought—Megan was fight
ing through a lot of issues, the kind that end relationships, ruin lives. But at least this episode was brought on by something so sinister and mean that it was hard not to feel sorry for her. And to turn down her request to go after the people who would undoubtedly strike again would be tantamount to personally witnessing a crime and not doing a damn thing about it. I couldn’t live with myself, and it appeared Cristina couldn’t either. I turned back to Megan. “Realize that I consider Stan part of my extended team. He might help quite a bit. Hell, the cops could still find these people before we get close.”
“I’ll cheer if they do. I just can’t sit around and do nothing. I’m sure you’ll share more than the police, and my guess is that you won’t have all the restrictions and procedures to slow you down.”
She wasn’t wrong on that thought. I leaned forward in my seat, pausing an extra second to see if I might have an epiphany telling me to decline the case. It never came.
“You’ll take the case?” For the first time her voice carried hope.
It would be our second case that seemed to fall outside of our niche. But I figured we had to adjust to the market.
“We’ll take the case.”
“Perfect. Thank you.”
I offered to call her husband or a cab, but she refused. She said she wanted to walk home to give herself a chance to gain perspective on what was important in her life. It sounded noble. I shut the front door and turned around to see Cristina at my computer.
“Are you about to do what I think you’re about to do?” Her big, brown eyes had doubled in size.
She’d seen the online form. I rested both hands at my waist and considered my options. Get into an endless debate with Queen Rebel herself—which would assuredly do nothing to enlighten me any further—or I could simply make the decision for myself, and own it. I walked behind my desk, where she grudgingly gave up her position, and I grabbed the mouse and clicked submit.
“You really want to test those waters? Look at the train wreck that was just in here. Look at my mom. You can’t pick your family, Ivy. There’s probably a damn good reason why you’ve never seen them.”
I knew the response she was expecting me to provide. It was embedded in the corner of my mind. But after twenty-eight years, I’d finally been able to look beyond the spontaneous reaction of resenting someone I didn’t know. If anything, seeing these parents in pain over their kids, even their grown-up kids, made me want to reach out even more. I couldn’t keep it buried any longer. For a while now, I’d felt this seed of hope sprouting. Hope to find one or both parents still alive. And even greater hope that they cared to know that I existed at all. I was taking a risk, opening myself up to being hurt by someone who may not give two shits about me. But there was that little seed of hope.
I knew that while I waited for an official response from the Texas Central Adoption Agency, I’d probably regret clicking the submit button a dozen times. That was why I didn’t debate the action a few moments ago. I could talk myself out of anything.
“I’m not going to get my hopes up,” I said, organizing my desk just to keep myself occupied. “But there comes a time in your life, when you just have to know. Even if I get hurt in the process.”
“Damn, you’re stubborn.”
“Are you serious? Just wait until you’re out of college and you work with a teenager.” I closed up my laptop and shoved it into my backpack. “By the way, how’s school going?”
“Eh. Boring and a waste of time. But I’m pushing through it.”
“Good to hear. Still on pace to graduate at the end of this semester?”
“As long as I pass geometry. It’s kicking my ass.”
I threw my backpack over my shoulder. “I know you can win any ass-kicking battle.”
“You know it.”
I certainly did.
9
The fluttering of the cash-sorting machine. The slurping of liquid circulating through a maze of tubes. The whir of the occasional helicopter landing and taking off in the middle of the forest. The growling generators that kept the entire operation moving forward, twenty-four hours a day.
The sounds of money.
Standing just outside his personal tent in the shade of the tall pines, Petro Udovenko took it all in. If anything could warm his sixty-year-old heart, this had to be it. He puffed twice on his cigar—a Cuban Partagas Serie D with a blended woody finish—and let his thoughts wander, searching for a time in his life when he’d felt more accomplished. He recalled the day he walked through the doors of the local recruiter and volunteered for the Red Army as a pimple-faced eighteen-year-old. Not two months later, he was trudging through the rocky terrain in the hills of Afghanistan, fighting a war that no one in his homeland thought they could win. But defeat wasn’t a term that the military leaders would ever utter. Not publicly.
His first lesson in survival came on his third night. He’d fallen asleep while leaning against a large boulder when the first enemy bullet cut through the flesh on his thigh. A moment later, dozens of mujahideen forces descended upon their camp. With pain rippling through his body, he froze for a moment. He didn’t want to die, not at such a young age, before he’d achieved anything in his life. He wondered if he’d be forced to kill to stay alive, and if he had that kind of rage inside of him. Maybe they would take him hostage, trade him for one of their own.
The decision was made for him. A bearded man jumped him from behind, nearly slitting his throat. He didn’t think; he just reacted. And at six-five, two hundred twenty pounds, his response was immediate and thunderous. He flipped the man over his head, punched him in the throat, and then used his own knife to stab him in the gut. With the knife still inserted, he looked the man in the eye—the full moon illuminated their space as if someone had snapped their fingers. Then he used the knife to shred the man’s insides, pretending he was shaving the skin of an apple, just like he’d done as a little kid in his hometown of Pripyat. The man gurgled blood and died in seconds.
That night had confirmed two things for Petro. First, he would do anything to survive in this harsh world. And second, he’d enjoyed it. Ecstasy. Petro’s comrades later celebrated his first kill, saying he’d finally popped his cherry. Deep down, he knew he was a natural-born killer.
That was the beginning of what could only be called an extraordinary career, one that had involved its fair share of killing, but also so much more. He could envision some deep-pocket producer making one of those Hollywood movies about his life. But who would believe it? He’d fought in wars both warm and cold, developing skills that would not only save his life but also reap major rewards for the cause he’d pledged to support.
The cause of Communism. What a joke. It was nothing more than a failed attempt to brainwash the masses into believing everyone should sacrifice for the good of society. The messages always implied that material goods were wasteful, when money and effort should be focused on supporting the cause. If nothing more, the Communist regime was a propaganda machine. That was evident in how the people rarely rebelled, helping the message spread like wildfire.
Meanwhile, the upper echelon would snub their noses at the very message they propagated. He’d seen generals and party leadership say one thing to the public, or the rank-and-file of the military, and then turn around and travel in a private jet to a lavish vacation home on the French Riviera, where gluttony was the norm. He’d seen it with his own eyes, having accompanied one such general as part of his logistical support and security team. He could still recall standing guard next to the infinity pool where the general, whose enormous belly hung over his thong bathing suit, lounged on a cabana mattress while six women pawed at him like he was Adonis. The pungent mixture of sweat and tanning lotion had soured his stomach. A waterfall of perspiration poured off the general, but that hadn’t stopped the scantily clad woman from rubbing up against him, feeding him fruit and drinking bottles of champagne that cost upward of a thousand euros.
It was at that moment when Petro Udovenko ma
de a life-altering observation: he would no longer surrender his thoughts and aspirations to the bullshit messages from the elite who ran the party. He would learn the necessary skills, soft and otherwise, to enable him to succeed. Not success the way an average person would judge it. But success in terms of how these self-righteous bastards lived their lives—he would be one of them and, at the same time, not. He vowed to attain influence, power, and money to give him anything he wanted.
After several formal military roles, at about the same time as the fall of the mighty Soviet Union, he’d moved on to more engaging careers, ones that put him first, not last. And he flourished. Since then, he’d outsmarted greedy leaders and even greedier criminals, survived coups, and chased more than a few women.
Ah, the women. He could write a novel about all of his conquests. The great beauties of Europe, some of whom were runway models, girlfriends of prime ministers, and even one who was connected to what had been called the Russian mafia.
Fucking amateurs.
He took another long puff of his cigar and watched his team of scientists and production assistants carry out their roles. They were like ants. They did what they were told. They didn’t question authority, and they were reliable. It had taken a while to find the right mix of contractors. Some had perished in the vetting process. But that was the way of business.
Other people outside of his immediate team had tried to suck up to him, to manipulate him into making certain decisions—changing distributors to one of their cousins, suggesting price breaks as a way to expand their drug network’s footprint. He prided himself on never falling prey to even the most seductive manipulation. He made decisions based upon the possible return on investment. That was it. He could recall only a couple of instances where emotion came into play. But those situations were personal. No one would ever influence the direction he chose in those cases.
He knew that it took a rare person to think in those terms. He was one of those rare people.
A blur of movement captured his attention, and he stopped breathing.
The Ivy Nash Thrillers: Books 4-6: Redemption Thriller Series 10-12 (Redemption Thriller Series Box Set) Page 29