by Lucas, Helen
“Yeah, of course. He’s always out of the office by seven o’clock.”
“Perfect.”
It was 7:45 now.
Teddy climbed out of the car and I watched him stride confidently—or so it seemed to me, at least—up the steps, into the office. He lifted his hand to greet one of the police officers at the door and I saw the cop smile at him.
So far, so good. I was proud of the kid.
I glanced down at my phone to see a text from Sarah. Her FBI contact—some big wig from down in Florida she had met while at a law school conference—was at Riley’s now. Everything was going according to plan.
And, of course, I knew from my experience overseas that this meant it was the perfect time for the shit to hit the fan.
So, I guess you could say I was half-expecting it when I saw a police car pull up and Oliver Richards himself climb out and start into the building.
I texted Teddy quick, telling him to get ready, and I dove into the glove compartment of my car, finding my gun. I slapped five rounds into the chamber just in time to look up and see Teddy putting those quarterback’s legs to good use, racing out of the department with his father in tow, roaring something incomprehensible.
Teddy crashed through the doors, hurtled down the steps, and all but flung himself into my car.
“I got the USB drive,” he gasped, as his father drew his gun, joined by two officers behind him reaching for their guns.
Shots rang out: one cracked my windshield as I reversed hard out of the parking lot, turning onto the road. More shots rang out, and they were greeted by return fire from Lance and his buddies in the truck. I could see in my rear view mirror as the truck reversed, following me, with a gunner aiming an AR-15 out the passenger window, forcing the three cops to run for cover.
I drove like the devil, slamming the pedal to the floor and leaning my head out the side of my window, since I couldn’t see shit out my windshield anymore. The truck was behind us and, then, two police cars. Then three. Sirens and everything.
“Shit, shit, shit, shit…” Teddy murmured, panting. I thought the kid was going to pass out and so I jabbed him in the gut. He gasped but that calmed him down.
“We’re almost to Riley’s,” I growled. “We can make our stand at Riley’s.”
“I don’t want to shoot my dad,” Teddy sobbed, his young face breaking out into tears.
“Well, your dad was just shooting at you right now, so I think the Richards family has just about burned all its bridges, kid,” I grunted. “But he won’t dare keep this shit up if there’s a federal agent involved…”
“Do you really believe that?” Teddy whimpered, his face pale and splotchy.
“I’m trying to,” I hissed as I turned into the parking lot next to Riley’s. We tumbled out of the car and dashed inside. I saw the truck follow us into the parking lot and park sideways in front of the door, barring entrance—a common tactical maneuver. War-fighting 101.
Inside, the bar was empty, except for Riley, Christina, and a man I had never seen before. Asian, in his forties or early fifties, and smoking a cigarette, he wore a wrinkled grey suit.
“You two boys look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
Gun shots rang out in the parking lot. Christina’s eyes widened and she looked at the agent.
“I’ll take care of this,” he said with a sigh, as if this were something he dealt with every day. He rose, reached into his jacket pocket, and retrieved his badge. We followed him outside as he held it up, almost nonchalantly.
Gunfire from both sides ceased.
“My name is Douglas Wong, and I’m the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Organized Crime Office Chief for Southern Florida. This is an official FBI investigation, and I’m going to interpret any further hostile action on anyone’s part today as tampering with that investigation—that’s a felony, boys.”
Oliver Richards stormed out of his car.
“This ain’t no FBI investigation,” he roared. “These sons of bitches are tampering with my personal files!”
“As a matter of fact, I’ve got a judge in Florida who, if I call him now, will issue a subpoena for your personal files at eight AM tomorrow morning. So, I think you’d better go on home, Chief Richards.”
“What the hell is going on here?”
Douglas looked from me, to the truck, to Christina and Teddy.
“Well, if I had to place money on it, I’d say a whole hell of a lot. For me, this is revenge, but I don’t think I’m the main character in this little mystery.”
He held up the flash drive that Teddy had given him.
“Fact is, I’ve had a bit of a grudge against Harry Logan for a few decades now.”
Oliver’s face paled.
“No, no, no…” he murmured.
“And if what I think is on here is, in fact, on here, well, then…” he smiled, taking a long drag on his cigarette. “You and he are going to be going to jail for a very, very long time.”
“You song of a bitch!” Oliver screamed, drawing his gun. Before anyone could react, Teddy, who stood next to me, grabbed the pistol from the waistband of my pants, leveled it on his father, and fired.
The big man dropped like a pile of bricks and so did the gun, sliding out of Teddy’s hands.
“You boys stand down,” Douglas growled at the other cops. Christina was already on the phone, calling for an ambulance. Teddy sank to his knees, and began to weep. Not having anything else to do, I joined him, putting my arms around him, and holding his sobbing head against my chest.
But then, my instincts kicked in. I tore off my shirt, ran to Oliver, pressed it into the wound. This was a battlefield, like any other, and I cradled his head in my lap, staunching the flow of blood as best I could while Christina took over the job of holding his son.
“You son of a bitch…” Oliver mouthed at me.
“You should have been nicer to your son,” I replied. “You reap what you sow.”
He coughed, and a trail of blood erupted from his lips.
An ambulance arrived within minutes and Oliver’s gasping, bloodied body was loaded in.
I stood, realized suddenly that I was shirtless and covered in another man’s blood.
“You’ll want to go to a hospital and get cleaned up there, kid,” Douglas said to me, after exchanging a few words with the paramedics. “I know you’re fine, but it’s standard procedure when dealing with bodily fluids.”
“Right.”
“You’re a cold-hearted son of a bitch, you know that?” he said with a smile, handing me a cigarette and lighting it. I don’t usually smoke, but the rush from the nicotine was well-appreciated right now. “Marine Corps, right?”
“That’s right.”
“I was in Vietnam. Last days of the war. Not pretty. Semper fi, mack.”
He started to turn away but then stopped.
“You know, you pulled off this operation basically flawlessly—are you in college?”
I shrugged.
“I’m finishing up my GED. Then, I was thinking I would go back to the service…”
“Well, you could do that, or… You could get a college degree, and then come work for me. I could use someone like you. Someone with balls of steel who gets the job done.”
I found myself speechless. I mouthed a few things, unable to say anything.
“I’ll keep that in mind, sir,” I murmured finally.
“You do, kiddo. I’d hate to see a smart operator like you rot in the infantry the rest of his life.”
SARAH
The next few weeks stretched into months, and then everything moved faster and faster and faster.
I was applying to college and I had to write a long addendum about what all had happened—to explain my incomplete grades, to explain why I had missed about six weeks of school, and also why I would be needing all the financial aid they could possibly offer because my family was damn near bankrupt.
Douglas Wong, the FBI agent that Christina had m
et, managed to find enough incriminating evidence on the USB drive to get both Harry and Oliver arrested and charged with murder, not to mention embezzlement. The case went to trial and it was over practically before it began: they both pleaded guilty, no contest. Harry was given fifteen years for the murder, and another ten for the embezzlement. Oliver got off fairly light—only fifteen years for the same.
I was released from the hospital a week after my suicide attempt. It was tricky, though, because Christina and Maria were in the process of selling the estate to pay down our bills. Harry, to his credit, defended himself in court, and so we didn’t have any legal bills to pay. But, on the flipside, that meant that there would be no money for college.
Dakota, meanwhile, had totally re-invented herself through all of this. Suddenly, she was getting good grades, had stopped hanging out with bad influences, was even working an evening shift at Maria’s restaurant, which was good, since that was about the only income we had.
The day I was released, Damien came to pick me up.
“And what’s your relation to Sarah?” the nurse asked Damien as he filled out the paperwork to get me released. She was fairly young and I could tell she was eyeing his build, his tattoos, the haunted look on his beautiful face and in his dark eyes. “Are you here husband—boyfriend—“
“Brother. Stepbrother. That’s why we have different last names.”
“Oh, of course,” she said, relaxing noticeably. “Well, in that case, would you be interested in…”
But Damien brushed past her, collected me out of bed, and loaded me into a wheel chair.
“I can probably walk…” I scowled as he wheeled me through the parking lot.
“You probably can. But this is your punishment—you have to be babied and pampered for a while.”
“Fine.”
We climbed into his car—he let me do that by myself, though he did shut the door for me—and then, we were off.
“I’m sorry,” I said, finding it hard to look at him, though I forced myself to. “About everything.”
“It’s fine,” he said, his voice quiet, emotionless. “I’m glad you’re not dead.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
We rode in silence most of the way back to the house. A big “FOR SALE” sign now graced the front entrance.
“Man, I can’t believe it,” I sighed. “I guess it’s for the best.”
“I guess,” he replied, voice still quiet, still betraying no emotion.
He helped me inside and upstairs. Back in my room, the house somehow felt lighter, like the chains weighing it down had been lifted.
“It’s weird that this won’t be my room much longer,” I commented. “But then again, I would have been going to college at the end of the year anyway, and so it wouldn’t really have been my room after that anyway.”
“Oh, speaking of that,” Damien said suddenly. “I’m going to need you to help me with my college applications. You can consider it pay back.”
My eyes widened.
“What? You’re applying to college? That’s great!”
“Sure, I guess,” he said stiffly.
“Where are you applying?”
“I have no idea.” He paused. “Where are you applying?”
“I’ll show you my list.”
I bit my lip.
“Why? Do you want to go to the same school as me?”
“Maybe. That depends.”
“On what?” I asked.
“On you.”
I pulled him close and kissed him. He kissed me back and we tumbled into my bed.
Later, as we lay, naked, the sun going down over head, my fingers playing and dancing over his chest, I heard him saying the words that I would have thought, a week ago, he’d never say: “I love you.”
“I love you too,” I replied, as I pressed my lips into his. Our hands locked, fingers intertwined, and we fell asleep there—there, on the precipice of a new and uncertain future together…
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If you enjoyed Risk you’ll love Billion Dollar Bastard, a steamy alpha male billionaire romance guaranteed to press all the right buttons!
Excerpt from Billion Dollar Bastard:
KAREN
This was where I really belonged. This was better than sex.
“Harriet Jacobs escaped her life of slavery by using the only resources she had as a woman of color in pre-Civil War America…”
My voice rang out over the lecture hall. The students were quiet, for once, their phones down, practically no eyes focused on their computer screens. For once—for one, brief, shining moment, I couldn’t see the pale blue glow of facebook in the reflections on their glasses, couldn’t see their young, otherwise life-filled eyes glaze over.
It was these moments that I live for. It was these moments that made me glad I had become a professor, made all the years of studying, research, and writing worth it.
Yes, this was my career, my calling. It was worth it.
“So, she slept with not one, but two white men? She manipulated them sexually. And she wrote about it. The significant thing about Jacobs is not that she slept with white men to save her children, to save her own life, but that she wrote about it, in her own voice. In her own words.”
The lecture was almost over but no one was moving to leave. And it was one of the last lectures of the semester before Thanksgiving break. All across the university, students were getting antsy, antsy to be leaving, to be going home and seeing high school friends, to be trading stories and gossip, to kiss the boys they had always wanted to kiss in high school, to see favorite dogs and cats back in their childhood bedrooms.
But still, they stayed with me, through to the end.
“White people tried to stop her, tried to silence her. ‘We’ll write the story for you, Harriet,’ they said. Harriet Beecher Stowe—if you remember, she was the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which we will not be reading for this course—“ I hated Uncle Tom’s Cabin and I had already written far too many papers about it. It’s an important book that people should still read, but I wanted my students to like me, not hate me after slogging through six hundred pages of overwritten 19th century prose. “—even told Harriet Jacobs, a black woman of her own name, that she wouldn’t help her get published—but she would take Jacobs’s story and incorporate it into her own work.”
Grim chuckles danced through the lecture hall as I reached for a sip of water.
“But Jacobs persevered. She was a survivor, and she was published. So, as you read her book, her ‘Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,’ remember her story and her background—how difficult is was for her to get this story into your hands, now, today, over a hundred and fifty years after it was originally written.”
I paused, allowing those final words to sink in.
“See you all on Monday,” I said with a smile, allowing myself a deep breath as the class collectively exhaled and began to rustle around, began to collect their things and trickle out. I took a seat, sighing. Lecturing always took it out of me.
You see, I’m honestly pretty introverted. That’s what you get, I guess, growing up the daughter of a fierce lawyer. My mother is far more the gung-ho, take charge type. She demanded that I be allowed to skip a grade in grammar school when my standardized tests showed that I was reading at more than three grade levels above where I should have been at. She demanded that I be allowed to take seven AP classes at a time in high school, and that I be allowed to take time off to travel to Europe to compete in violin competitions. She’s always been my biggest booste
r and maybe, as a result, I haven’t had to advocate much for myself.
But no. I’m a woman in academia. Virtually every one of my colleagues is a man, or a woman nearly fifteen years older than me. I have to advocate for myself, for the very worthiness of my existence, every single day.
“That was incredible,” Masha, one of my graduate students and teaching assistants, murmured to me, leaning over from her desk at the head of the class. “You managed to keep them in their seats for five minutes after the end of class—I didn’t see a single lacrosse players sneak out.”