Bad Billionaire

by Julie Kriss

  We lay there breathing for a few long moments. There was no other sound. I couldn’t hear anything from the corridor outside or the apartment across the way, and I wondered if the police were gone. With the thought, the world seeped back in to the space between us, with its complications and its disappointments and its impossibilities. I put my hand over his where it rested over my breast, my fingertips brushing the ridges of his tattooed knuckles, as if reminding myself that what had just happened was real.

  “I should go,” he said, reading my mind.

  “I know,” I replied. But neither of us moved.

  I was in danger if he stayed here. I knew that. The cops might come back, might have some way to find him here. They might find out I’d lied. Devon Wilder could escape the consequences of tonight for an hour, maybe two, but he couldn’t escape them forever.

  Still we lay, drifting. If he stayed past midnight, past one o’clock, I reasoned with myself, there was less chance a neighbor would see him leaving. Even less chance if he stayed until two. Until three.

  But he wouldn’t. I already knew that.

  We were quiet for so long, I lost track of time. I wasn’t asleep; neither was he. We just were, the two of us in my bed, in the small world of my bedroom, for just a little longer. We could have talked, I supposed. But what was the point? This was only this, nothing else. It wasn’t anything. There was nothing to say.

  He fucked me again before he left. We went slower this time, his body spooned behind mine, his hand hooked beneath my knee. He pressed me into the bed and said everything filthy in my ear—That’s it, that’s right, take my cock, easy and slow, fuck me nice and hot, sweetheart—and we both came again, our orgasms quiet and intense, rocking through us like earthquake tremors. Then he got out of bed in the dark and I heard him dressing.

  I lay on my back and pulled my knees up, watching his shadow. I could feel him trickling out of me, and I didn’t care.

  “Listen,” he said after a minute as I watched him pull his shirt on over his head. “I have to stay away from you, and you have to stay away from me. There are people who would hurt you in order to hurt me if they knew about you. Do you understand?”

  He wasn’t talking about cops. “Yes,” I said.

  “I mean it,” he said. “Don’t give a fuck about me, Olivia, starting now. Save yourself. No phone numbers, no email addresses, nothing. I’m not going to tell you where I’m going, and you’re not going to ask. If it’s ever safe to contact you, I’ll find you. Not the other way around. Are we clear?”

  I shivered against the fear that was chilling my skin. Who was out to hurt him? What kind of person would hurt me in order to get to him? I didn’t want to know. “We’re clear,” I said, crossing my arms over my breasts.

  He had finished dressing. He watched me for a long moment. I couldn’t see his face in the dark.

  Don’t say goodbye, I thought. Don’t.

  “Lock your door behind me,” he said.

  He turned and left the room. I heard him pick up his jacket from the kitchen floor. Then I heard my front door open and close.

  I waited for a long moment, hugging myself, staring at nothing.

  I’ll find you.

  Then I did as I was told. I got up, walked to my front door, and locked it so the night couldn’t get in.

  Nine

  Devon - Two Years Later

  My lawyer’s name was Ben Hanratty. That was his real name. It might be tempting to make a joke about a lawyer with the word “ratty” in his name, but no one ever made fun of Ben. He looked like an escapee from a biker gang—tatted, bearded, except he showered and wore suits. His hair was dirty blond, and his eyes were dangerously intelligent. His opponents usually underestimated him, and by the time they learned how smart he was, they were already bleeding. I’d known him since I moved to San Francisco ten years ago, when I was an eighteen-year-old with an attitude problem, and he was a twenty-five-year-old working in his father’s law office. He was the first person I called the second I got arrested two years ago.

  “Listen, Wilder,” he said to me now. “Something’s happened.”

  We were sitting in a prison visiting room—a private one, since this was only medium security and Ben had made a case for lawyer-client privacy this time. It still stunk like cigarettes and old piss, and it still made anyone sane want to kill themselves, but at least it was private.

  The first thing I thought of was either Max, my best friend, or Cavan, my brother. I thought about Olivia—I always thought about Olivia—but it couldn’t be her, because no one knew about her. No one except me. “What is it?”

  Ben blew out a breath and stared at the ceiling. “Fuck, I don’t know where to start.”

  I resisted the urge to jump over the table and grab him by the shirt. “Is someone dead?”

  “No, no. Sorry.” Ben blew out another breath, then looked at me again. “You okay in here, by the way?”

  I blinked at him. “Are you kidding me? I’m in fucking prison.”

  He nodded. “Not for long, though. Ten more days, by my count.”

  “Then for ten more days, I am not okay.”

  Two years. I’d been in here for two years, watching my life drain away—though it could have been worse. They’d gotten all of us from the van in the end—Danny, Jam, Westerberg, me. They nailed us on the robbery count, but they didn’t find the TV’s with the Oxy. Danny, it turned out, had done some quick thinking and told Gray where the TV’s were right before the cops picked him up. By the time the cops figured out drugs were involved, the TV’s were long gone from the ditch where we’d dumped them.

  So, only robbery, no drug charges. Thirty months, out in twenty-four for good behavior and because Ben was a very good lawyer.

  They hadn’t nailed Gray Jensen, the dick who’d hired me, or Craig Bastien, the drug lord who’d hired Gray. They’d nailed Chaz, my old boss at the body shop. Chaz had had nothing to do with the robbery, of course. Most likely the cops had sweated Gray about it, and Gray had given up his brother. And his brother, in turn, had given up the rest of us, including me. While Gray skated the whole thing.

  It was tempting to rat out Gray, but that went against my nature. My nature being that I don’t tell cops anything. I don’t tell them my own name unless my lawyer advises me to. Besides, when I got out I was sure Gray would find me. And then we’d have a word. In private.

  “So if no one’s dead, what’s happening?” I asked Ben.

  He opened his briefcase and pulled out some papers. He put them on the table between us, but didn’t turn them around for me to read. Instead he tapped his fingers on the table.

  “First, let me say that I’ve vetted all this,” he said. “I took some time after it first came to me and did my due diligence. There’s no fraud here, Devon. This is fucking real.”

  “I still have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  He nodded. “How much do you know about your father’s family?”

  “Nothing,” I said. My father had left when I was two and my brother Cavan was four.

  “Did you know you had a grandfather?”

  I shrugged. “Since it’s a biological requirement, I suppose I did. But that’s it.”

  “Well, you did. His name was Graham Wilder, and he kicked the bucket six weeks ago.” Ben tapped the papers beneath his fingers again. “He named you the beneficiary in his will.”

  I felt my eyebrows go up. “He knew about me?”

  “He must have, because you’re named, and as I say, the will is legit. It’s all legit. You get everything, Dev.”

  There had to be a catch. “Doesn’t my father have something to say about that?”

  “No, because your father died five years ago.”

  There was a beat of silence.

  “We gonna have an Oprah moment?” Ben asked warily, looking ready to run from the room if I showed emotion.

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t know him. It doesn’t matter.” Fuck, I should find a way t
o tell Cavan. If only I knew where Cavan was. Mom was already dead, so at least I didn’t have to tell her.

  We weren’t big on family, the Wilders. A little more like feral cats.

  “Right,” my lawyer said. “Your father, Pete Wilder, died of prostate cancer. That’s a pile of shit, I can tell you, so if you had any resentment against him, just wipe it away. Whatever he did to you, he paid.”

  “Noted,” I said.

  “Okay. So Pete died, and Graham rewrote his will to leave everything to Pete’s son. That’s you.”

  “Cavan is Pete’s son.”

  “Cavan gets a piece of this only if he un-disappears and shows up within six months. Even then, his piece isn’t as big as yours.” He shifted in his seat. Ben was usually confident, blunt, and a little cocky; I’d never seen him this uncomfortable before. It made me uneasy.

  “Fuck, what did I inherit?” I asked. “Drug money? A porn business? A bunch of third world orphans? Just get out with it, Ben.”

  “I’m getting to that,” Ben said. “Your grandfather made his money in the movie business in the sixties. Some Hollywood stuff—he didn’t make movies, he invested in them. Then, when those movies made money, he turned around and invested that money. The point is that there is money of his that’s been sitting in the stock market since 1965, and over time it’s paid dividends and reinvested. And along with the other money Graham dropped in the market, which in decades he never cashed out and spent, the bottom line is that you, Dev, are getting a fuckton of money when you get out of here in ten days.”

  I stared at him. When he’d first told me I was in my grandfather’s will, I’d imagined inheriting some old guy’s crappy apartment, with his worn-out sweaters and sandal-sock combos that I’d have to throw out. “How much is a fuckton, exactly?”

  “Depends,” Ben said. “Not all of it is liquid cash. There are bonds, and index funds, plus the estimated value of the LA house—”

  “There’s an LA house?”

  “There is, and there’s also a second house here in San Fran that he only used on vacations. LA was his base.”

  I stared at him, taking this in. I was born in LA, and I’d spent my life there until my mother died. Apparently I’d lived in the same city as my grandfather, who knew who I was, but had never introduced himself to me. I pushed the thought away. “What kind of San Fran house?”

  Ben cleared his throat. “The kind of house that’s in Diablo.”

  My stomach dropped. Diablo was one of the richest areas in the state, if not the country. I’d never even been there. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “Yeah, that was my reaction, too. But it’s true. He bought the Diablo house in 1971, and since then its value has quadrupled, by conservative estimates.”

  I closed my eyes and ran a hand over my closed eyelids. None of this could possibly be real. “Ben,” I said. “Just give this to me as clear as you can. I’m a TV thief. There is no way I own a house in Diablo.”

  “I know,” he said. “Dev, I told you. I checked this out. I went at this from every direction, legally, before I came here today. I spent a couple of weeks, actually. I tried to poke holes in it, see if there’s some way you can be screwed over. But there isn’t. Graham’s will is iron fucking clad, and you’re in it clear as day. The government gets their piece, the IRS gets their piece, everyone’s happy. It’s all legal. And when you put together the liquid assets plus the non-liquid ones like the houses, at today’s rates, the entire portfolio is worth just about a billion dollars.”

  I stared at him for a long minute. Somewhere down the hall, someone shouted. Someone else laughed.

  “You’re saying,” I said finally, “that I’m sitting in this piss-stinking prison for stealing some TV’s filled with Oxy, and I’m a billionaire?”

  “Yeah,” Ben Hanratty said. “That’s what I’m saying.”

  We were quiet again. I thought about getting out of here in ten days. I’d been counting the minutes, the hours, like every prisoner does. I’d planned to take a taxi and get a hamburger, a big one with cheese and a side of chili. A beer. I’d been planning to go back to Shady Oaks and find out if Olivia still lived across the way, if she’d agree to fuck me again. That had been the best sex I’d ever had, the best sex I was even capable of imagining. All I wanted, those first few hours out, was a hamburger and Olivia with her legs spread. If I was lucky.

  Now I was going to Diablo.

  Ben slid the papers across the desk to me. “We have some work to do,” he said, “to get this moving.”

  There was one thing I’d always been good at, and that was rolling with changes. I’d dodged the foster system for two years. I’d dodged the cops for even longer than that, until my luck ran out. I didn’t give a fuck about changing my plans, because I never had any plans in the first place.

  But maybe now, I could make some.

  “Okay,” I said to Ben. “Tell me where I sign.”

  Ten

  Devon

  Hanratty picked me up from prison the day I got out. He drove a five-year-old Civic that looked like it had been pounded into the pavement, hard. I had no idea what a lawyer would do every day that would make a car look like that. Then I remembered, with the weird dreamlike feeling I was getting used to, that I now would have no problem paying his bill.

  “I sorted some things,” he said to me as we got on the road to Diablo. “Details and shit. Open that bag there.”

  I saw a plastic shopping bag on the back seat and picked it up. The first thing I pulled out was a cell phone. “I already have one of these,” I said. They’d given it back to me when I was released, along with my watch, my wallet, and seventy bucks. The remnants of my old life.

  “Now you have a new one, with a new number,” he said, not taking his eyes off the road. “It’s set up with a plan and whatever—I don’t know, I had my office assistant do it. You’ll also find some other things in there. A credit card that works, a bank card. All hooked up to your accounts. Some cash to get you going. And the keys to your new house.”

  I swallowed. For a split second, I wanted him to turn the car back around so I could go hide in prison again. Then I said, “Where’s my Chevy?”

  “In Diablo,” Ben said. “I’m sure the neighbors are impressed already. Your grandfather had a few cars too, parked in the garage. I think the keys are in the house.” When I pulled a piece of paper out of the bag, he glanced over and nodded. “Those are the codes for the security system. The name and phone number of the cleaning company. They come every other week, always have, even though your grandfather didn’t live there. I called them and checked them out. They’re legit.”

  Jesus. I had all the makings of someone else’s life, stuffed into a plastic grocery bag. A life that was now, apparently, mine. And the first thing I thought was, If I get my car back, I can go find Olivia.

  “You’re gonna need to talk to your banker,” Ben was saying. “There’s stuff to go over regarding your investments.”

  “My investments?”

  “Sure. You’re going to want to assess them. What to keep and what to cash out. Whether to sell the house in LA, or even this one, if you don’t want it. How many stocks in your portfolio versus how many bonds.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I said. “I don’t know anything about that shit.”

  “Learn,” Ben said. “Buy a book. Take a course. You can fucking afford it, and you don’t have to work anymore, so you got time. I got no sympathy for you, Bucko.”

  I squinted at him. The sun was up, and I had no sunglasses. Maybe I’d buy a pair. “You treat all your rich clients this nice?” I asked him.

  “You betcha,” Ben said. “Just watch who you trust, all right? People are gonna be all over you when this gets out. Financial advisors, real estate agents, bankers, lawyers. Don’t trust any of them.”

  “You’re a lawyer,” I pointed out.

  “Obviously, I’m a very different breed,” Hanratty said without missing a beat. “I got street
smarts, and I’ve known you a long time. I don’t like to see my clients get screwed. You’re lucky you have me. And by the way”—he jabbed a finger at the shiny new credit card I was holding—“I accept credit cards when it comes time to settle my bill.”

  He dropped me off at my new house, giving me a little wave, like this was an everyday thing. As if I wasn’t standing in front of the most expensive house I’d ever seen.

  It wasn’t a mega mansion. Ben had said my grandfather bought it in 1971, and it was made of a combination of brown brick and cream accents—dated, sort of unattractive, but imposing in its way. Well maintained. The lawn and gardens were immaculate, obviously kept up by a gardening company, and the property was surrounded by a high wrought iron gate. On the front of the gate was a security keypad. I hefted my duffel bag on my shoulder, rummaged through the grocery bag, and keyed in the code Ben had scribbled on the piece of paper.

  As the gates clicked and swung open, a voice came behind my left shoulder. “Thank God you’re here.”

  I turned to see a man of about sixty, his face square as a brick, his hair pure white and combed back from his head in waves that were truly amazing. I’d never seen hair like that on an old guy. He had a sun-browned tan and flawless white teeth. He was wearing a blue jogging suit and had a little dog on a leash, which he had obviously been walking when he spotted me.

  “Excuse me?” I said. I had never seen him before in my life.

  The oldster pointed past me to the open gate and the grounds beyond. “The koi pond in back has scum on it,” he said, his tone thick with offense. “And the rose bushes are positively ratty. There’s a view of it from the golf course, and every time I go golfing I can see it.”

  I blinked at him. That was what it was, then. He thought I was the handyman. The help.