Delta_Ricochet

by Cristin Harber

  “I have a private bathroom entrance—”

  “No way would I go anywhere with you.”

  “I’ll pull off my team if you tell me how you got my number,” Gloria offered. “Simple trade. Your life for another.”

  “Screw you.”

  Gloria’s exasperation rolled off as she tossed her hair. “You don’t want to kill me. You want to talk, tonight of all nights. What is it that you want?”

  Adelia couldn’t believe the superior swagger this lady had. “I want to understand.”

  “You’re risking prison time so you can understand something? You’re stupider than you look.”

  “Consider it my dying wish.”

  “At least you’ll be out of my hair.” Gloria touched the corner of her fake eyelashes and blinked as though the conversation was as simple as her makeup. “When did you put two and two together? Honestly, I looked at how your organization managed money and couldn’t make heads or tails of it myself. That you could even connect one dot to the next dot to another is…” She lifted sequin-covered shoulders. “I should actually be impressed.”

  “What are you talking about?” The bank transfers? How would Gloria know what Adelia was doing?

  A jeweled hand waved her question off. “Impressed. It means, never mind.”

  Focus. Adelia couldn’t slap her for being a condescending bitch. Or she could. But the plan would derail. “I don’t even have to understand how. Just why?”

  “Because I am helping.” She gestured to the room. “Can’t you see that?”

  Adelia’s stomach bottomed. “What?”

  “It’s above your schooling, I’m afraid.”

  “Try me.”

  “Sure, but you won’t understand. Most people don’t have the intellectual or emotional abilities to comprehend concepts on this macro of a level.” Gloria waved to a woman as she walked by. “Demand dictates there will always be supply. Buyers are not hard to find, but when the global political and socioeconomic climates shifted over the last two decades, it became the right thing to do.”

  “Traffic people?”

  “Children wash up on shores and babies float onto beaches because their families are fleeing war-torn countries. Cities are being decimated by bombings. Every day this happens, and unless a famous reporter catches a heartbreaking picture that goes viral, it’s not discusses. There are relief camps that don’t have enough food and water to feed the people they’re trying to save. There are political leaders have given their military forces permission to rape their own people in order to establish compliance. I am bringing these women to a civilized country with first-world amenities.” Gloria’s lips flattened together. “You may not agree with how I make money, but they are safer than they were.”

  Tears streamed down Adelia’s face. “You can’t do that.”

  “Yes, I can. People treat their property better than governments help their people. I would rather sell a thousand woman as a sex slave, knowing they will be kept fed and alive, than know they will watch their babies suffocate during chemical warfare, their children die from preventable diseases, their mothers bleed out from gang rapes as they starve to death praying for relief.” She jabbed her finger. “I am the relief.”

  This woman, the humanitarian of the decade, believed herself to be an untouchable Robin Hood. “Maybe what you say is true. I was trafficked to a better life, and I’m standing with Gloria Astor, the humanitarian of the decade.”

  “A title I have rightly earned,” Gloria said, all but signing her name onto Adelia’s recording. “Now, please excuse me. I’d like to get back to my dinner.”

  The salad plates were being cleared, and Gloria turned back toward the raised head table, summiting the three steps. Adelia couldn’t tear her eyes away from the monster. She didn’t know what to do with what she’d heard, but her heart ached on another level now.

  Gloria lifted her arm slightly, and a large man rose from a round table directly in front of Gloria’s seat.

  “Oh, shit.” That looked an awful lot like a private bodyguard.

  He moved quickly across the front of the room, though not fast enough to alarm anyone. Adelia spun for the door Gloria had first mentioned. It opened easily into a dimly lit hallway, and she looked both ways.

  Shit, again. This was a fake hall, made by dividers, between ballrooms. She bolted left, falling back on another life lesson from Tex: when in doubt, go left because everyone goes right.

  Another hallway made of fake walls… Where the hell was the exit to the bathrooms? The labyrinth of walls finally spit her out to a private sitting area with sofas and a row of doors. One was marked restrooms and another for the staircase.

  She took the stairs and flew down them, taking as many at a time as she could. Three floors down and she stopped on the landing, listening.

  Nothing.

  She spun around and checked for security cameras. She saw none. Carefully, Adelia pulled the voice recorder from between her breasts and held it to her lips. “If I can’t share this with you, Colin, I love you. Thanks for teaching me to go after what I want—after I figure out what it really is.”

  She pressed her hand to her forehead.

  “And, Javier, I never thought I’d have my brother back. The best advice you ever gave me was run, and I hope you know how much you’ve always meant to me. Love you.”

  She clicked off the recorder and opened the glass casing for a fire hose, praying it wouldn’t set off an alarm. None sounded. She slipped her evidence against Gloria Astor inconspicuously behind the thick rope, shut the door, and wiped away where she could have left a fingerprint.

  Slowly, she continued down the steps as she unbuttoned the oversized server’s top and pants, undressing as she went and folding her clothes into her arms. At the lobby level, with her hair and makeup disguise still in place, Adelia nervously opened the door to the fancy hotel and slipped through, certain Delta would be on the other side, but no one was there.

  The scene was like a normal hotel. There was a mix of people who stayed on site and onlookers milling for the for the event. It was a combination of reporters and celebrity hounds.

  More than once, Mayhem had been present at a hoity-toity wedding simply because they were at the right place at the right time. She, Seven, and Victoria had watched beautiful dresses and fancy extravaganzas from afar. Tonight wasn’t any different. All she needed to remember was what she learned earlier this evening and that she hadn’t done anything wrong, or at least not enough to have security called to the lobby to find her. Right? Either way, she had to do two more things.

  Faking confidence, she walked to the concierge desk. A well-dressed man had enough manners not to eyeball her well-worn clothes and odd hair-and-makeup combo as he greeted her with a professional smile.

  “Good evening, ma’am. How may I help you?”

  “I need to leave a note for my—” What should she call Colin—friend, boyfriend, person she recorded a dying message to in case they were her last words? That seemed a little dramatic. “Boyfriend.” Safest option of her possibilities. “His company has a table at the event tonight, but his cell phone died.”

  She wanted to tack on an excuse for why she looked like she had been on the lam for days, maybe something about her car breaking down. Adelia decided that owning horses would be relatable to the rich and famous, and she could say she had been working with a pony. But that sounded ridiculous in her head and decided that less talking was better in this situation.

  As she fumbled to bite her own tongue and keep from making absurd stories to explain her appearance, the man said, “Certainly.”

  She blinked, dumbfounded. That was easy. He handed her thick cardstock paper and an envelope that was just as nice, along with a heavy metal pen.

  “Would you like to have a seat?” He extended his hand to a small side table and the couch near his desk with the coverage of a plant and desk lamp.

  She hadn’t expected the conversation to be easy, and his manne
rs were throwing her for a loop. “Thanks. This is one of those notes where I feel like every word might be my last.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Under the cover of a plant that had likely had a nicer upbringing than Adelia had, she hid and watched the lobby, rolling the heavy weight of the pen between her palms. What would she say to Colin? Why would it even matter at this point?

  “You know what matters?” Her fingers wrapped around the pen. “We mattered.”

  “Pardon?” The concierge leaned from his desk, pulling back the protective barrier of thick, green leaves.

  “Oh.” She hadn’t realized that thought had been out loud, much less loud enough to pull a man from his desk. “Nothing.”

  But her thoughts hadn’t been nothing. She had no idea if she’d given Colin anything, but since the moment their puzzle pieces connected, he’d done nothing but made her question every decision she’s already made and certainty she already understood. Some hadn’t changed while others shifted, and if it hadn’t been for his light shining in her shadows, she might never have given herself permission to sparkle.

  The plant leaves still swayed as Adelia uncapped the black pen and stared at its white cap, and then she scrawled Colin’s name, wondering if she’d ever written with a pen that flowed like a river waiting to be used.

  Other things mattered too. Adelia hadn’t attacked Gloria, instead searching for a reason. It terrified her to understand she wasn’t driven by just greed or power but so corrupted by her presumed godliness that she didn’t see she’d become the devil.

  That story mattered, and it needed to be told.

  Adelia made the comma after Colin’s name and decided that even if she could scale the amount of pleasure she found in the simple act of writing on this thick paper with luxurious ink to exponentials heights, that she wouldn’t find it in her to sacrifice another person.

  There’s a recording in the stairwell, and you’ll hear everything you need from the monster. I’m sorry I put you in a position where you felt you had to choose between me and your team, and I see that I did the same thing with Mayhem. I’m going to find Hawke now. I’m not giving up on a future like I had before, but this may be the last thing I say to you.

  Her hand pulled back as she readied to sign off, and her eyes filled with tears.

  Love, Adelia

  Two words, none were more truthful but apparently, none were more heart wrenching to write. A heavy tear slid down her cheek, and she swatted it away.

  P.S. I love you. I’m glad I took off my armor for you.

  The tears streamed, and Adelia didn’t bother to wipe them away as she folded the thick card into the envelope. Finally, she wiped her eyes and took a deep breath, then sealed it.

  With dried eyes, she brought the card back to the concierge, who took it without the smile she’d just seen minutes ago. Worry creased the corners of his eyes, and distraction marred his smile that he pushed into place.

  “Thank you.” He cleared his throat. “Will he be expecting this?”

  She hadn’t thought that far. How would he even know to ask for it?

  The concierge flicked a quick glance to his computer screen, and the professional caretaker who had doted on her minutes ago seemed distressed. “Is everything okay?”

  His professional bluster faltered. “I just listened to something I shouldn’t have?”

  Panic jumped in her throat, but there was no way he meant her audio recording. She pressed her lips together and tried to come up with a reasonable response that wouldn’t make her seem sleep deprived and running from groups who wanted her dead. “Happens to me all the time.”

  “Do you ever listen to podcasts?”

  She hadn’t seen a cell phone with a live battery that she could call her own in days. “Not recently.”

  “News from Around the World,” he said like an announcer. “Mostly it’s the normal stuff that will get you in the gut. War, famine, genocide.”

  She rounded her lips. “Oh, the usual death and destruction.”

  “This last one was about cargo liners the locals call the ghost fleet.”

  Her skin crawled as she went cold. “Why?”

  “No one sees it. Everyone hears about it.”

  “What does it do?”

  “Kids tell the reporter it eats people.” He shuddered in his chair. “Locals say when they loom off shore, people go missing. But the reporter could never find any shipping vessels that shouldn’t be where they were.”

  “Missing, how?” she whispered.

  He lifted a suit-covered shoulder. “My family is from a place where folklore is important, and as crazy as it sounds, it always was founded on a grain of truth.”

  “Where’s your family from?”

  “Syria.” He shook his head. “The news is ugly. I don’t know why I even turn it on.” He forced the professional smile back into place. “You can tell. I let it affect me more than I should.”

  Adelia placed the letter in between them and stared at it. “Why does a reporter think it’s news now, if it’s been folklore?”

  “A few weeks ago, a few women and children came home.”

  Her eyebrows arched. “That’s good though.”

  “They talked about mysterious men who saved them in the middle of the night, who brought them back and left like a whisper, firing the folklore to greater heights.”

  “Why?”

  “No one saw them come or go. The missing came home again.” His eyes dulled. “Or, some. Not all.”

  “Oh.” She bit her lip.

  “Podcasts aren’t a reliable source of news to some.”

  “To you?”

  “I listen to it.”

  “Why were you listening tonight?”

  He shrugged. “It was on my mind.” He nodded toward the escalators in the main lobby. “The event your boyfriend’s attending, perhaps.”

  “Yeah, it’s been on my mind too.” Adelia bit the side of her thumb. The mainstream press needed to hear what Gloria had to say more than Colin needed to hear her profess her love to him. “I have to go talk to someone, but will you make sure this goes to a man named Colin Cole?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He blinked and had once again become the concierge who intimidated her, but this time, Adelia knew he was a normal person like her too.

  “Are there always reporters here?”

  He nodded. “The Stanley sees a great deal of events and celebrity.”

  “Do you know the reporters who come and go?”

  The corners of his eyes flickered. “For the most part, I recognize people I see on a regular basis.”

  “Do you know…” She bit her lip. What did she want to know? Who she could trust? Who would be truthful? Were those the same thing?

  “There’s a guy that, if I had something I wanted to talk about, I’d talk to him,” the concierge volunteered. “If my podcaster wasn’t available.”

  They laughed uneasily, both knowing that she had kept something wasn’t shared.

  Three broad men in dark jeans and leather motorcycle cuts with Mayhem emblems on the back strode into the hotel lobby and stood out like hulking thugs in a sea of elegance. Adelia’s thoughts stopped, and if she’d been saying anything, she’d forgotten.

  They’d found her. She wanted to blame Gloria, or maybe that stunt she’d pulled upstairs was enough to alert all the chapters on the east coast of her location, but either way, they’d arrived, and she didn’t recognize them.

  “Everything okay, ma’am?” the concierge asked.

  She stole her attention back to him. “Yes, absolutely.”

  His disbelief didn’t waver. “I can arrange for security to escort you—”

  “No.” She wouldn’t endanger their security’s either. “Can you point me toward the news person you trust?”

  “Trust…? I don’t know if that’s the perfect word, but push came to shove, I’d talk to Jimmy Clave. Channel One News, and he’s always out for a smoke in front. Go to the left of the valet
stand.”

  “Jimmy, Channel One.” Adelia stood, sucking her bottom lip in. “Sometimes, people cross paths with those they’re meant to meet.”

  He extended his hand. “It was a pleasure to meet you.”

  They shook hands, remaining nameless, but she knew that his story was a treasure shared. “Likewise.”

  He took Colin’s note and set it aside as she eased away, checking for other Mayhem by the front entrance before slipping out the side bellboy door.

  Sure enough, a man in a suit, smoking a cigarette, laughed and bantered with two valets. She approached until a few feet away, she suddenly found herself unsure what to say or how to make her boots scoot another step.

  The night was cold, and with the overhead lighting, it was bright as day, but the safety of the sunlight was gone. Jimmy caught sight of her, letting the cigarette hang on his lips before taking a long drag, letting it out, and beckoning her closer in a way that screamed New York mobster.

  Her nameless concierge semi-trusted him, and why that was who she had placed her trust in, she had no idea, but her feet un-Velcroed, and Adelia stepped closer.

  The valets smiled hello and goodbye at once, abandoning her to the reporter. He took another drag and dropped the butt, stomping it out. “Can I help you?”

  “You’re here to cover the event?”

  His gaze rolled. “With every other bozo and clown in the city. Can’t miss this, huh?” His sarcasm rolled. “What about you?”

  “I was inside already.” Adelia swallowed her nerves. Some conversations had the potential to alter the course of her life. Jimmy Clave, if he took her seriously, could do that.

  “Oh yeah?” He eyed her clothes. “How was it?”

  She bit the corners of her lips and remembered the haunting smell of hell. Silvio’s shipping container would torture her mind any time she remembered.

  “Gloria Astor isn’t a humanitarian,” Adelia said. “She’s a human trafficker on one of the largest scales that I’ve ever heard of, and she uses her shipping carriers to do it.”