by Mia Caldwell
~~*~~
Merrick practically ran out of the room. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t anticipated those types of questions. He was a man of planning and detail. He was a designer of buildings and builder of empires, for Christ’s sake. How could he fall down on the job so hard when it came to that girl?
After taking the stairs to the floor below, he made a call for real.
“Tony, do you have the identification yet?” Merrick said to his brother as soon he answered the phone.
“I told you I had it.”
“Well, bring it to the lobby. I need to talk to you.”
When Merrick spotted Tony, he kept his mouth shut and motioned him outside. Walking out of sight of the bell captain and other guests, Merrick led Tony to the front of an idling but empty casino bus.
“Why all the James Bond shit?” Tony said.
“I want to see the paperwork, her ID.”
Tony handed him the envelope. Merrick examined everything without pulling each card out of the envelope. As ordered, he had a driver’s license, a hotel and casino ID, and a health insurance card for one Mona Lisa Van Dyke. Merrick marveled at how authentic the driver’s license looked. Then he noticed the address.
“That’s the wrong address. What the fuck?” The license listed his Atlantic City beach house address, the place he shared with Tony. They’d put down the bachelor pad, not some address in Florida, as he’d originally asked for.
“I’m sorry—I didn’t have time to come up with another, so I told my connect to make one up. I didn’t expect him to use ours.”
“Too late now,” Merrick said, trying to not get upset. “But how am I supposed to explain that to Bombshell? I told her she’s never even been to New Jersey before. I told her that I met her in Florida.”
Tony and Merrick stood silent for a moment, pondering. Tony snapped his fingers. “Tell her that, since you didn’t know her old address, and she was going to be living with you from now on anyway, you had them use your future address as her actual address.”
“Okay. That works, but also reminds me of the other thing I wanted your help with.”
“Will this ever end, big bro? I have a life too, you know.”
“Shut up, or I’ll fire your ass and you can go start a limo company, or maybe that gigolo service you’d always wanted. Ouch,” Merrick yelled, pulling himself away as Tony tried to give him another charley horse. “Sorry, bro—I know I’m asking a lot of you. I really appreciate your help.”
“Sure, Merrick—so what else do you need?”
“Two things, actually,” Merrick said. “One—I need help coming up with a story. She keeps asking me questions I can’t answer. Like, where we met, and where I proposed, you know—questions like that.”
“Well, yeah—she’s a chick. That stuff’s important to them. What’s the second thing?”
“I need you to take her to the doctor while I come up with a believable backstory.”
A long stretch limo pulled up.
“I get to take the limo?” Tony asked, his eyes lighting up.
“Absolutely,” Merrick said.
“Okay—hey, wait a minute. What do I do if she asks me the kinds of questions your still dreaming up the answers for?”
“Tell her you don’t know,” Merrick said.
~~*~~
Bombshell lay in the machine, trying to be as still as possible.
On an overhead speaker, a technician sitting behind a glass window in the other room told her, “This will take about fifteen minutes. I need you to be as still as possible.”
She’d removed all her jewelry before lying on the cold table.
The machine lit up and hummed with power. She tried to still her breathing. Lights flashed overhead and the scanning commenced. A searing pain ripped through the back of the skull causing her to jerk her body and scream in agony. Unable to tolerate such pain, her mind shut down, and took her to another place.
She lay on her back, strapped and bound to a bed. Outside she heard a car on the gravel. Heart thudding, she tried in vain to pull free. The front door opened, and water ran in the kitchen. Blindfolded and gagged for so long, all she could do was feel, hear and smell. Hope faded as she recognized the rhythm of his steps. No one had found her. No one could save her. Bile rose in her as she caught a whiff of his stench as he entered the room. He hummed a two note tune. She could tell where he was as he moved about the room, setting up his equipment, turning everything on. When the studio lights came on, she was blinded beneath her blindfold. Instinct fought against futility and she tried to shrink away --but there was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Any minute he’d be touching her, the way he’d touched the other girl. Bile rose in her throat, when the bed moved, and the bed springs creaked under his weight. God, please help me. She screamed through her gag, when she felt his skin graze against hers. His hands were groping at the back of her head, taking off her gag. Panic flooded her. The gag was off. She tried to scream, but no sound came out. She couldn’t get enough air. He was saying something to her. Asking her a question. She tried to listen. “Are you ready to be a star?”
Jana Peters came out of her nightmare, screaming and panting, and gasping for breath. Only the vaguest memory of what had happened lay at the tip of her thoughts, but when she tried to recall it, her mind refused to cooperate, and for her own good, she slid back into unconsciousness.
Chapter Nineteen
After another sleepless night worrying about her friend, Holly showed up to work at the diner ten minutes late. She almost called in sick, but changed her mind. The diner was the hub of all news and gossip in town. If anyone knew about Jana, that was the place to hear it.
The front door bell chimed and Sam walked in. For a moment her hopes soared. Maybe Sam’s wife had come home. Maybe he remembered something about the night Jana disappeared. But as soon as she saw the slump of his shoulders and the defeated expression on his face, she knew he hadn’t received any good news.
Holly poured him a coffee, and tried to sound up beat. “Hey ya, Sam, how are you? Any news?”
Sam squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head.
Holly said nothing. Silently honoring his pain.
“What’ll it be, Sam?”
Sam pushed the menu towards her. “You decide…”
Holly put in an order for the meatloaf. A middle aged couple had taken the two seats at the counter between Sam and the cash register, when she returned with his dinner. They were busy still studying the menus, so Holly went back to talk to Sam.
She wanted to ask him, if she could make him a flyer for his missing wife, but hesitated as she watched him toy with his meatloaf. The front door bell chimed and Holly looked up, as someone left. As the door swung closed, Holly suddenly realized that there was something wrong. She stared at the door for a long moment before she understood what was wrong. The flyer wasn’t on the door any more. Someone had removed Jana’s missing person flyer.
Out of the corner of her eye, Holly saw the couple motioning her, signaling that they were ready to order. She didn’t make eye contact and hurried to the back room.
She found the box of flyers and brought it back out front. She put it on the counter, still avoiding eye contact with the couple, as she rummaged under the cash register until she found some clear tape.
“We’re ready to order, young lady,” the women of the couple said.
“I’ll be with you in a minute,” Holly snapped. She pulled two flyers out of the box and went out front. By the time she’d put them up she’d used all of the tape.
“There,” she said to herself, satisfied with her work.
She went back inside, prepared to apologize to the couple for being just a little bit rude. She’d explain about her friend and give them a flyer. They’d understand.
But, when Holly spotted the couple, she could see that they’d already helped themselves. The woman was folding the canary yellow page and stuffing it in her purse.
“So, what will it
be?” Holly said as she regained her spot behind the counter.
“Can’t stay,” he said nervously and tugged at the women’s arm. “Come on, Joann, let’s go.”
Holly caught a glimpse of the women’s eyes. She knew something about Jana.
“Hey, don’t go. Come back.”
But they were already out the door hurrying to their car.
Jana ripped off her apron and tore around the corner.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
By the time she got outside, the couple was in their car, on their way out of the parking lot. With a gasp, she recognized the car. Her eyes locked in on the license plate. She pulled out a memo pad and a pen and wrote it down, then walked over to the flyers on the door and updated the partial plates.
When she walked back into the diner, she was fired on the spot. She didn’t care. She took her box of flyers and drove home. Then she called Jimmy, who called his cousin who worked for the DMV in Litton and owed him a favor.
Holly was closing in on Jana’s kidnappers.
~~*~~
Joann grabbed the flat of petunias and yanked it out of the back of the utility vehicle. She walked up the road to the edge of Merrick Flynn’s house, where her husband sat as if nothing had happened. She pursed her lips as he calmly troweled holes for the flower bed. She dropped the petunias from a foot in the air, almost hitting his boots as potting soil spilled from the tray.
“Damn it, woman, what’s wrong with you?”
“You know what wrong. What’s wrong is letting people like that poor girl in the restaurant continue to be worried sick, thinking the worst about a missing friend, and you and that boss of yours not giving two shakes about other people’s feelings.”
“He’s your boss too,” Charlie retorted.
“Well, not if I can help it. I’m calling him—I’m telling him that people think she’s been kidnapped. And if he doesn’t do the right thing and call that girl on the flyer, than I swear to you, Charlie, I will.”
Joann yanked off her garden gloves and threw them at her husband, hitting him on the back.
“Joann!”
But she didn’t listen to him. She got in her car and drove back to their house. He needed to know about that flyer.
Chapter Twenty
“Where’s surgery?” Merrick asked as he raced into the hospital.
“What’s the patient’s name?”
“Bombshell, I mean, Mona Lisa Flynn, I mean, Mona Lisa Van Dyke.”
“Just a moment, please.” The receptionist typed the name into her computer. “Sixth floor. Doctor Armavir.”
She handed Merrick his visitor’s badge. He thanked her, the hurried to the elevators, his heart pounding. All he knew from Tony was that Bombshell had some kind of reaction in the middle of the MRI, and has been in surgery ever since.
Stepping out of the elevator he spotted Tony right away.
Tony came over to Merrick and gave him a comforting embrace.
Merrick’s voice cracked, “How is she?” He dreaded the answer.
“I don’t know anything, yet. She still in surgery is all they’ll tell me.”
The surgeon appeared, looking tired. “Are you Mr. Flynn?”
“How is she?”
“She’s out of surgery and stable.”
Merrick let out a breath. He’d feared the worse.
“What happened to her?” Tony asked.
“There was a foreign object in her brain. The MRI made it move, and so we had to take it out.
He pulled a small plastic bag out of his pocket. Merrick stared at the tiny sliver of glass. Guilt twisted in his stomach.
“What is that?” Tony asked.
“It’s actually a sliver of glass with traces of a metallic film, which was a good thing or we would have never seen in during the MRI. You’re girl is actually very lucky. Any farther into the brain, and it could have been fatal.”
“Did you get it all out?”
“Yes, we did,” the doctor said with utmost confidence.
A nurse stepped into the doorway. “Doctor Armavir? Can I talk to you a moment, please?”
“Excuse me,” he said. “Don’t go anywhere, I’ll be right back.”
“It’s all my fault,” Merrick said to Tony as soon as they left the doctor’s office.
“You can’t blame yourself, dude,” Tony said.
Merrick shook his head. “Yes, I can. I should have taken her straight to a hospital after the window was shot out. I never should have let some hick country doctor who was so blind he couldn’t even drive do the job. I never should have pretended to be her fiancé or made her come here in a vibrating helicopter, while a piece of goddamn glass was stuck in her brain trying to kill her.”
The doctor returned and continued, “Unfortunately, in order to get to the errant splinter of glass, we were force to cut through some healthy brain matter. It’s vital that her brain has a chance to heal, so we’ve induced a coma and we won’t release her from it until tomorrow at some point.”
“Then she’ll be alright?”
“Difficult to say. According to the information we had from her initial visit, she’s been experiencing severe amnesia, as a result of a car accident—is that correct?”
“Yes, actually—she’s forgotten everything about herself that happened prior to a few days ago.”
“Everything?”
“Yes, even her name.”
The doctor made some notes in his file.
“Can you tell me if she’s had any incidents where she’s shown signs of remembering something frightening from her past?”
“Yes,” Merrick said. “Yesterday, she freaked out. Got all scared.”
“So, she’s had some trauma recently. Do you think it was from the accident? What happened in the accident? You say this accident occurred a few days ago—I didn’t see any bruises or lacerations. Can you tell me more about how she got her head injury?”
“Actually,” Merrick said—bowing his head a little, “it wasn’t a car accident—someone shot the window while she was in the car. The window shattered, but she said she was fine. It wasn’t until a few hours later that I realized there was a large piece of glass in her skull.”
“Oh, I see, so, a few hours after the accident you went to the hospital to have the glass removed. Is that correct?”
“Not exactly,” Merrick said, his head drooping a little more.
“You did it yourself?” the doctor said.
“No, I had a doctor do it,” Merrick said. “But we weren’t near a hospital, so he didn’t have any decent equipment.”
“I see,” the doctor said, his face twisting in disapproval. “Could I get the name of that doctor, please?”
“Uh, I’m sorry—I don’t remember his name.”
“Where was his office, then?”
“Uh, he came to us, I don’t know.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but I have other patients to take care of. Just one more thing.”
Merrick and Tony waited uncomfortably, wondering how this doctor would judge them next. He went to his desk and flipped a Rolodex, then pulled out his prescription pad and wrote down a number.
“I’m not too worried about the brain injury, but I’m very concerned about her state of mind and her amnesia. I don’t believe it was caused by the accident or the glass in her skull. But I’m not an expert in this field—this woman is. I suggest you contact her so she can be around when our young lady comes out of her coma.”
Merrick took the name and put it in his pocket.
“Thank you, Doctor,” they said, then left his office.
Since Bombshell would remain in a coma and in the hospital overnight, the two men went back to the beach house.
It was getting dark when Merrick parked in the driveway. They were halfway up the driveway when their front door flew open and Mama G came running out the front door. “Why didn’t you call me?” she said. “I’m so sorry about your fiancée, Merrick. Have you heard anything?
Is she going to be alright?”
“What are you doing here, Mama G?” Tony asked.
Mama G shifted her shoulder and put her nose in the air. “Why shouldn’t I be here? You’re my boys, aren’t you? I heard about Bombshell being in the hospital, and I thought you boys might be hungry when you got back. I put a lasagna and salad in the fridge. I wasn’t going to stay and cramp your style, Romeo.”
“It’s okay, Mama G,” Merrick said. “I’m glad you’re here. We need to talk.”
Tony shot Merrick an look which said, Are you sure you want to tell her?
Merrick nodded. “Yeah, Mom, please stay and eat with us. There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you about Bombshell. I’m afraid I haven’t been entirely honest with you.”
Mama G’s face lit up at the dinner invitation, then got a little pinched at the news she’d been lied to. Then she shrugged her shoulders and pulled both of her boys into a big hug. “You two wash up. I’ll get dinner on the table. Give me fifteen minutes to reheat the lasagna.”
Merrick went to his room to change into shorts and a t-shirt, then called the referral doctor, a Doctor Suzanna Garcia. He got her answering service and left a message, stressing that his call was urgent and she’d be extremely well compensated if she could come to Atlantic City tomorrow. To his surprise, he received a call back less than five minutes later.
“Hello, is this Merrick Flynn?” said a sultry voice.
“Doctor Garcia?”
“What’s so important that you’d bribe me to come to Atlantic City, and how much are we talking about? Because I do have some free time, and I adore gambling.”
“Then you’re in luck, doctor,” Merrick said, “because I own a casino. How about your usual hourly rate—plus I’ll put you up in a suite and give you two thousand dollars in play money?”
“How about you put me up in a penthouse and make it ten thousand?”
“Done,” Merrick said. Never before had he appreciated the power of his wealth. “Great, then I’ll send a helicopter for you first thing in the morning?”
“I don’t do helicopters, but you can make travel arrangements with my assistant. Is this a cell? I’ll text you her number.”