by J. D. Mason
“Langston Riley was a distributor of your father’s legitimate medication. That’s all he was.”
She wouldn’t look at him. Robin gripped the arms of the chair so tight her knuckles turned white. “We did the best we could,” she weakly protested. “We tried to save him. But the evidence…”
“Circumstantial at best,” he murmured.
“They found crates of that shit in his warehouse,” she snapped angrily, making eye contact again, defying him to argue the obvious.
“Who put it there?”
Unexpectedly, tears streamed down her cheeks. “How the hell should I know? There was an investigation. They had a search warrant, and they found five hundred kilos of heroin hidden in a secured room in the back of one of his warehouses, Jordan! There was nothing we could do. The evidence spoke for itself.”
She was right. Detectives searched all Riley’s warehouses and found heroin hidden in a secret and secured room in the back of one of them.
“Clark Rollins, Riley’s business partner, swears to this day that your father paid him to put that shit in that warehouse.”
Robin wiped the tears from her cheeks and laughed. “Clark Rollins was a fucking junkie,” she retorted. “If he’s all you’ve got, then I feel sorry for you, Jordan. There’s not a cop in Jersey who’ll take his word over my father’s.”
He nodded. “The same probably goes for Blaine Stevens, I’m assuming,” he said casually. “They won’t believe her either?”
Robin angry stare bored a hole in him. “She’d be incriminating herself.” Robin paused, waiting for Jordan to offer another alternative. “So, is this how this is going to go? Tit for tat? I dig up something on you, and you, in turn, dig up something on me? Is this what you want? A wife for a sparring partner?”
“I don’t want you for my wife,” he said maliciously.
“You’re a fucking bastard,” she snarled angrily at him.
Robin glared at him with such hatred, Jordan could almost feel it. Before he realized what was happening, Robin was on top of him, pounding on him with her fists. Jordan grabbed her by her wrists and pushed her down onto the sofa next to him.
“This would be us, Robin,” he blurted out bitingly. “You want a lifetime with me? Then this is what you’d get.”
“Mother fucker!” She sobbed, struggling against his grasp.
“That’s exactly what I am,” he declared, relishing in that fact. “Your father, Montgomery Sinclair, has a bull’s-eye on his back. And for now, no one knows his involvement.”
“Let me go!” she demanded, still squirming, sliding off the sofa onto her knees on the floor in front of him. But Jordan wasn’t finished.
“Langston Riley was not a drug trafficker, but he was no saint. He trafficked guns, Robin. He had ties to organized crime, who lost access to millions of dollars when he went out of business. Shipments went missing, and they waited for Riley’s trial to end before going to him to find out where their shit was.”
She stared wide eyed at him. “H-how do you know this? How the hell could you possibly know?”
Adrenaline rushed through his veins. “You’ve got skeletons, Robin. Some of them talk. For the right price, they did.”
All color washed from her face.
“No one will believe it,” she retorted. “Especially after I turn you in to the police, Jordan. Your fucking name will be smeared like mud by the media.”
“One phone call,” he said, holding up a finger. “One. And Montgomery Sinclair will become a person of interest, Robin,” he threatened. “But not to the police.”
She stared at him in disbelief. “It’s been a decade. Nobody will give a shit about guns after ten years.”
“Guns? No. Millions of dollars to be made from the sale of those guns, money that was lost because of those guns, yes. Somebody gives a shit. Trust me.”
Greed made monsters of men.
“Only Langston knew where the guns were hidden,” Langston’s ex-business partner Rollins had told him. “He thought that he’d get off. That he’d be found not guilty, so he never told where they were. He thought the fact that he was the only one who knew where they were would keep him safe. Alive. He was murdered in prison almost as soon as he got there. Took the secret of where he’d hidden them, with him.”
“Your father cost the wrong people too much money, Robin. One call from you and, yes, you can ruin my life. One call from me, and your father won’t have one.”
Robin didn’t move. “My father has nothing to do with you and me, Jordan.”
“This is who I am, Robin. I am the man that you want to spend a lifetime with. You play dirty. I play dirtier.”
“I could still send you to prison,” she said, lacking the same conviction she’d once had in the threat.
“And I could send your father to hell. You choose.”
* * *
He left without waiting for her to answer. Montgomery Sinclair was sixty-three years old, living happily ever after since retiring early, ten years ago. Jordan had no idea if that old man had any knowledge of any guns. But to be sure that Robin didn’t call his bluff, he made sure to tie up any lasting loose ends.
* * *
Lab assistant Lois Anderson needed the money. She needed a lot of money. A single mom raising three kids on her own, trying to stay one step ahead of an abusive ex-husband, yes. She needed the money. She tore open the package of the dry DNA sample from case number LA-5438654 and burned it in a glass jar and shoved the ashes down into the bottom of the trash can right before she left the office. Evidence got lost sometimes. This was just one of those times.
I’m Drowning
TWO BELLY DANCING CLASSES and a protein shake later, Abby was at the house packing up the last of her belongings.
Skye had called to say that one of her kids was sick, so she wouldn’t be able to help pack.
“All this rain is probably what’s got him sick, Skye,” Abby said, wrapping some glass figurines in newspaper before stuffing them into boxes. “Poor baby. Give him a kiss for me and make sure he keeps hydrated.”
“Hey, did you ever find out how that vase got broken?” Skye asked.
Abby had come into the house a few days ago, and glass was shattered all over the living room floor. Her guess was that one of the ghosts had done it, but because she really wasn’t in the mood to explain this whole haunting thing to Skye from the beginning, she decided to play it off.
“No. I probably left it sitting too close to the edge of the table. That’s all.”
After hanging up with Skye, Abby walked over to the large window in her office, which used to be the second bedroom in this house, and stared out at the yard on the side of the house. It had been raining nonstop in northeast Texas for over a week now. Streets and homes were flooding like crazy, the ground was turning into swamps, and everything was just a mess. Fortunately, this place had been spared any major damage from water. Abby had just gotten an offer on it and was eager to get it sold. It was a lot easier to sell a house that wasn’t underwater than one that was.
She’d recently closed on the apartment complex in Clark City. For now, Abby would be living back at the hotel until she finally got one of the apartments livable enough for her to move into it. The place needed so much work, but when it was all said and done, it was going to be a great investment. All that work would keep her good and busy for at least six months to a year. Being busy was therapy for Abby.
She hadn’t called Jordan, and he hadn’t called her. Both of them were smart enough to realize that moving on was for the best. Abby worked hard not to judge him. He’d done some monstrous things in his life, but did those things make him a monster? She kept telling herself that what he was or wasn’t had nothing to do with her. The only version of Jordan that she knew was the one she’d fallen in love with. Still, sometimes love wasn’t enough. Sometimes you couldn’t outrun your demons. Sometimes the only thing you could do was to move on. And that’s what she was doing. As hard as it was most
days to act like she wasn’t hurting as much as she really was, Abby had no choice but to pack up and move on.
Abby turned around to go back to packing when she caught movement in her peripheral vision. She looked up into the hallway, and nothing was there. Intuition told her, though, that either Ida or Julian was probably trying to get her attention, which she didn’t want to give them, so Abby decided to leave everything and come back to packing another day. She walked out of her office and turned right toward the living room when she suddenly stopped. She stepped into the living room and felt as if she’d stepped into the frozen tundra.
Buried! Buried deep.
The whisper came from behind her.
“No,” she murmured to herself, more determined than ever to get out of that house. “Not today.”
Abby started walking again, when suddenly, she heard what sounded like a gunshot, followed by a loud, shrieking scream. She covered her ears with her hands and was suddenly struck by a wave of nausea and vertigo. Abby stumbled over to the sofa and sat down before she fell. Shadowed figures materialized in front of her, vague and blurred. Abby watched in disbelief like she was watching a movie play out.
A woman, no. Two. Two women yelling at each other. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw another woman. A girl? Crying? Abby felt like she’d been pulled out of her own body. This wasn’t real. She had to keep telling herself that this wasn’t real. Her breath caught in her chest. A man, tall, with light skin and light hair. She squinted to try to see his face, but she couldn’t see it. She couldn’t make out any of their faces clearly. Without understanding why, Abby raised her arm and swiped her hand through the air to clear the shadows from view. But she couldn’t touch them. She jumped at the abrupt and piercing sound filling the air. The man clutched his chest and dropped to his knees.
Hurry up.
That chilling whisper filled the room again and drew Abby’s attention to it. She saw a woman in the hallway, vague and shadowed like the others. But she was separate from them.
Buried.
The place where her mouth should’ve been was a dark and hollow space. She raised her arm and motioned toward Abby’s office. Abby struggled to get to her feet, glancing back as she moved through the living room to the place where she’d seen those people, but they were gone. She looked back for the woman in the hallway, and she was gone, too. Abby continued to her office and found that torn picture of Ida Green on the floor. She bent to pick it up and held it. Without thinking, she walked back over to the window, looked up, and saw that woman that she’d seen in the hallway, the one in the picture that she held in her hand, standing outside in the rain underneath the huge tree in the backyard.
* * *
Buried deep. Without recalling leaving the house, Abby suddenly found herself outside in the rain. Panic filled Abby’s chest as she crouched in the mud underneath the tree, tearing up the soggy ground with her hands. The urgency was real, and it was hers. She had no idea what she was looking for or why. But the burning need to find this … whatever it was … was all consuming. Abby cried desperately as she dug, moving from one spot to another when she couldn’t find what she was searching for.
“Oh, God!” she cried, her hands and clothes covered in mud. “It’s here! I know it is!”
Abby was overcome with so much emotion, sadness and pain, desperation. She dug as if her very life depended on it. It was as if she were watching herself from a distance, consumed by the madness of finding what was buried deep here in this ground. Abby wanted to stop and to run to her truck and drive off. She wanted to get as far away from this house as possible and never look back, never come back.
“Hurry!” she heard herself say. “Before it’s too late!” She was losing him. Abby stopped immediately at the thought. Losing him, she mouthed to herself. Losing … losing … her heart filled with grief and despair. She’d lost him once. She’d been fighting for him ever since. She’d lost him once. “Hurry,” she said helplessly, continuing to dig. And just when she thought she’d never find it, just when she’d given up hope that it was no longer here, Abby’s fingernails scraped against the top of what felt like metal.
Her heart raced even faster as she pulled handfuls of mud from the hole. Abby’s eyes widened at the sight of the dark box she’d finally found.
“Yes,” she said breathlessly as she dug faster, scraping her fingertips around the edges and corner of the box to gouge deeper into the dirt around it enough to finally pull it up from the ground. “Yes!” she said, falling back exhausted and clutching the precious box to her chest. Abby sobbed in the rain like a baby, filled with joy and sorrow that she’d finally found what had been buried deep for all these years.
You Get What You Give
HER FATHER WASN’T A DRUG dealer. He was a businessman. Langston Riley wasn’t an innocent man. He just wasn’t guilty of the crime he was convicted of.
“We’re really going to miss you around here,” Dave Morris, her boss, said somberly, standing in the doorway of her office.
Robin continued packing her things. “Well, my job is done, Dave,” she said, smiling. “Time to move on to bigger and better things.”
He smiled in return. “If you ever need recommendations or a reference, I’ll do a singing telegram on your behalf if you think it’d help.”
“Thanks,” she said sincerely. “I appreciate that.”
“So, what are you plans?”
She shrugged. “Immediate plans include Saint Croix. After that?” She shrugged. “I’m thinking about teaching or maybe starting my own practice or both.”
“You’ll be great no matter what you decide,” he said before hugging her and finally leaving.
* * *
Robin stared out of the window of her high-rise apartment, watching the rain fall. Gradually, the numbness she’d felt was starting to dissipate. A slow, boiling rage still burned within her. This whole ordeal with Jordan had awakened demons inside her that she never knew were there. Whether she’d ever be able to lay them to rest again, was a question she couldn’t answer. Would she get over him? Was she over him? And what was wrong with her that she’d let her desire for him push her to crazed levels like that?
She hadn’t seen or spoken to Jordan since he’d dropped the bombshell about Langston Riley nearly a week ago. After getting over the initial shock of what he had told her, Robin couldn’t help accepting the fact that karma didn’t give a damn who you were. If you owed, then it came for you. Until the other night, she thought she’d managed to escape it. He knew how to get down and dirty, though. Of course, she wasn’t surprised. Any man who could cover up murder had to be diabolical, and Jordan certainly was.
What she had on him could destroy him, his empire, his life. Robin could call his bluff and snatch his freedom from him and all his luxuries with a simple phone call, and the thought had crossed her mind several times to do just that. But then Jordan could break her heart more than he already had. She adored her parents and had always been Daddy’s little girl.
She’d found out about the drug trafficking by accident. Robin had a reporter friend who’d gotten wind of the feds closing in on a massive drug ring that led back to Newark. She’d mentioned that they were looking at some pharmaceutical company that they suspected might be involved somehow. Her father had tried to keep his financial woes from her, but Robin wasn’t stupid. MonClair Pharmaceuticals had been floundering under the weight of lawsuits for years. She put two and two together, then confronted her father on the golf course of his country club of all places.
“I need to know the truth, Daddy,” she demanded from him. “I need to know what you’re involved in.”
“No,” he said sternly. “You need to stay out of it. My business is not your business, Robin. I’ve told you that before.”
“It is my business when the feds are sniffing around, trying to build a case around you. This is serious, Daddy. If they find out that you’re connected to this drug ring in any way, you could go to prison, and Mom
would lose everything. Do you want that?”
Of course he didn’t. It took some prodding and honest and open talk between them for Robin to understand just how deeply he was involved. He’d stopped selling the heart drug he’d become known for.
“You know people, who know people, who know those people,” he explained gravely over drinks after they cut their golf game short. “I needed to settle those lawsuits, baby girl. The business was dying a long, slow, painful death, and I needed to get out from under it. This was the quickest, easiest way to do it. And no one’s batted an eye. The suits have been settled, and I’ve kept the business running as usual. I’ve even got detailed records of acquisitions and sales.”
“Fabricated,” she muttered, emotionless.
“But you’d never know it from looking at them.”
For the first time in her life, she saw shame in her father’s eyes.
“We have to do something if we want to divert the interest from MonClair, Daddy,” she explained. “And we have to do it quick.”
Langston Riley was just a middleman. He had been distributing empty boxes to fake addresses for MonClair for well over a year. It was Robin’s idea to plant the drugs in his warehouse. And it was Robin who’d made the call, anonymously, to the police. Blaine Stevens, her friend and cocounsel, was paid enough money to live on for the rest of her life to keep her mouth shut. Two months after Langston began serving his sentence, he was murdered by another inmate. Shortly after that, Robin’s father retired.
* * *
Jordan Gatewood had proven one hell of a point. That he was absolutely not capable of loving Robin and that he was determined, at all costs, not to marry her. It was difficult to ignore the pain of that realization. Robin’s ego, of course, had gotten the best of her, and she’d made a complete and utter fool of herself over that man. She’d dirtied herself with him and diminished herself over him. She was almost another Claire. Robin couldn’t help wondering if she might’ve found herself with a gun to her head in a few years of being Mrs. Jordan Gatewood. Or his.