They gave me five minutes.
I had to hand over my phone and my wallet and everything but the clothes on my back to a guard just inside the door of a blank grey building. After checking my I.D. and ignoring my questions, two silent men in anonymous black suits walked me deep into a warren of hallways and corridors, and through way more security checkpoints than seemed necessary to see anybody short of Jack the Ripper. I was searched twice. I told the two non-talkers it was in no way right that my taxes were paying for all this crap, but they seemed unimpressed.
Then I was turned over to another suit and he led me to an unmarked door. An armed guard opened it from the other side, I walked in and blinked in the sudden glaring light of the tiny room, and I saw Dave.
He sat at a bare metal table that was bolted to the floor. His legs were shackled together and the shackles were chained to the floor. His hands were cuffed together in front of him, and another chain connected the cuffs to the leg shackles.
His orange jumpsuit was big even on him, his hair hung lank and tangled around his face as he stared down at the table, and when the door clicked open and he looked up and saw me?
My Dave grinned that crooked grin of his, a mile wide and brighter than the sun, and I knew it was all going to be okay somehow. I just knew it.
***
The nightmare was over when I saw her. I knew I’d done the right thing, I knew she was somehow still mine despite everything, and I knew I was hers, always.
No matter what happened next, I knew it was all going to be okay.
***
I sat down across the table. I reached out to him because he couldn’t reach out to me – but when we laced our fingers together, the armed guard waiting by the door said, “No touching.”
I spun around in my metal chair. “Really? Fuck off, Sparky, or my fist will show your punk-ass nose some touching! Do you have any idea what –”
Dave was no help at all, because he was busy laughing himself sick.
“Baby, I love you, but you would suck at being arrested – and also, that was sort of verbal assault on a federal officer and they’re super touchy about stuff like that around here, so maybe just think about touching me?”
He didn’t move his hands from mine, though – and behind us, the guard coughed.
“Sorry, ma’am, just doing my job.” The guy glanced at the door behind him, and then added in a lower voice, “My wife really liked what he did on TV the other day.”
“Ah, then I’m sorry I kind of verbally assaulted you – so can we please hold hands?”
A slight nod. “Okay, I won’t see it.” He glanced at the digital clock mounted high on the wall behind Dave. “But you only have about four minutes left.”
“Gotcha.” I turned around and Dave was smiling and his handcuffed hands held mine, and that would have to be enough for now.
“Dave?”
It was so hard to concentrate when he smiled like that. “Yeah, boss?”
“I swear to you, Dave, I am never again hiring a naked homeless guy that I find in the back of my truck.”
It was even harder to not grab him and kiss the hell out of him when he laughed like that.
“I mean, I go and give this smoking hot naked homeless guy one little chance – and the next thing I know, he gets my bar blown up and I’m homeless. Oh, and when I tell him to do the right thing and then make the mistake of turning my back on him? Out of nowhere, he becomes a hero and a celebrity and also gets himself thrown into the federal slammer – I don’t dare leave you alone for two minutes, huh?”
“Cassie, I’m not a hero. I’m just your Dave, and that’s all I want or need to be.”
“Well, then you’re damn lucky that I’m your Cassie and that I love your sorry ass.”
I sniffed and coughed and ordered myself not to waste any of our precious few minutes crying. I took a tighter grip on Dave’s hands, because I had no idea when I’d be able to touch or even see him again.
“Dave, look – nobody knows exactly how all this will play out, but there’s a huge amount of public sympathy for you and maybe that will count for something. Also, I’ve got legal representation for you and they’re the best, so –”
“Lawyers? I don’t need lawyers, I’m just going to plead guilty because I am, right?”
“I love you, Dave, but you’re a moron and of course you need lawyers –”
“Besides, the Justice Department or whoever will almost certainly freeze the company’s assets if they haven’t already, and there’s no way I want you spending your own money on lawyers for –”
“They’re the best criminal defense lawyers in the country, you need them, and it’s not my money or the company’s – Devon Killane is paying for them, and trust me, he can afford it.”
“Wait a minute – the crazy guy from the sushi restaurant? From right after I got my black eye and before you and I had mad bunny sex all night long? That guy, why? I remember him from before all this, and he never could stand to be in the same room with Dad –”
“Of course he couldn’t, because he’s smart as anything and knows a skunk when he smells one. Anyway, I got in to see him and his wife Ashley right before I left Chicago, I pleaded your case to his wife – you know, as one righteously round girl in love with a crazy billionaire pervert to another – and she talked him into ponying up for your lawyers in about two seconds. I think he would have done it anyway, though – I’m not sure what he meant, I don’t know that much about the guy, but he said he knew what it was like to have a father who came straight out of a nightmare, something like that?”
The guard by the door stirred. “Time’s almost up. I’d let this go longer, but the agent outside wouldn’t. Sorry, folks.”
I held Dave’s hands tight. I memorized what they felt like, I memorized his scent and his smile and everything about him. “Dave, I love you, please, I love you so much.”
“Cassie, I love you and I promise you this will turn out all right – I don’t know when or how, but I promise you we will be okay. I love you, boss.”
“And I love you, cook – so hang in there and we’ll see what Killane’s lawyers can do, okay?”
Two years.
Killane’s lawyers were good, but the best they could do was two years. They got the treason charge reduced to something I’d never even heard of, called ‘misprision of treason’ – I swear it’s a real thing, look it up. Basically it’s knowing somebody else was committing treason and keeping your mouth shut about it, and it carries a maximum penalty of seven years. Dave pled guilty, the lawyers argued their hearts out for leniency, and the public was squarely in Dave’s corner – but the real guilty party was dead and buried in Graceland Cemetery, and I guess the judge figured somebody had to pay for the terrible things Einar Dallstrom had done.
So Dave was sentenced to serve two years in a minimum security federal prison in Duluth, Minnesota.
They call those places country clubs, but they’re not. Sure, there’s no razor wire or guard towers. The inmates live in dorms instead of cells. The one in Duluth looks a lot more like a college campus than a correctional facility.
It’s still prison.
You’re locked up. You are not allowed to leave. You have few rights and no privacy. Your communications with the outside are strictly limited and monitored. Visitors are considered a privilege, and you can lose that privilege if you violate the slightest rule – and there are a lot of rules. It is prison, after all.
Oh, and did you know that federal prisoners, even in minimum security, do not get conjugal visits? Yeah, I won’t even get into how much that sucks.
I had to see him. I had to touch him, even if it was just to hold hands. I had to help him get through it.
So I dipped into the money I had left from my one-time job as personal assistant to a billionaire, and I moved to Duluth. I found a studio apartment that was barely big enough to turn around in but cheap, I got a job bartending at a sports bar on East Superior Street, and I vis
ited Dave every weekend.
I screwed up the rules on my first weekend. You’re only allowed one non-sexy hug and a G-rated kiss at the start and the end of your visit, with no other contact in between – unless they decide to let you slide and hold hands. But the first time I saw Dave in that prison visiting room, it had been so long and I ached for him and I loved him … and yes, I kind of lost it and practically tackled the guy. I hugged him like a hungry sex fiend, I kissed him until he couldn’t breathe, a guard pulled me off him while hoots and whistles filled the room, and he lost his visiting privileges for a month.
I was kind of a moron that day, but Dave didn’t mind. He said that molten hot hug and desperate wet kiss were enough to hold him for a month, and after that I behaved myself.
More or less. When they were looking.
The hardest things had nothing to do with touching him.
More than anything, it was hard to see him locked up. Dave was a gentle guy, sweet and funny and a free spirit, and being shut up in a cage was against everything in his nature. Not that anybody likes being locked away and having their life put on hold, but it took a lot out of Dave and I worried about him, every day.
He lost weight. He swore he was eating, but the pounds dropped away. He said it was hard to sleep. He did exercise a lot, and between endless pushups and ab crunches and weight-lifting, he stayed ripped and muscular despite the weight loss. The weight stayed off, though, and I got the feeling he didn’t talk much to anyone in there. He just waited for his life to come back, minute by lonely minute.
But my Dave did his best to adapt. He told me he spent a lot of his free time on recreating the destroyed blueprints of his dream building, the hyperstructure that would hold an entire city’s worth of people – he said it might take him the entire two years to bring that dream back to life a page at a time, on writing pads that cost him a dollar apiece from the prison commissary, but he was working on it.
I saw his smile, that crooked Dave grin I loved so much, when I told him I was working on my dream too. On my days off from the bar, I took the two hour drive down to St. Paul to study for those last few credits of my undergraduate degree at the University of Minnesota – and once that was squared away, I told him, I was taking a shot at getting into their veterinary school. Admissions were beyond competitive and tuition was sky high, but we’d done the impossible before, right?
Another thing that kept his spirits up was hearing about life on the outside.
I told him about how the President was screamingly unpopular for refusing to pardon him, and how everyone knew that refusal must have more than a little to do with Einar Dallstrom having dumped truckloads of unofficial and illegal cash into the President’s re-election campaign.
The Democrats and Republicans both wanted Senator Clifton to run for President on their ticket in the next election, but the man from Nebraska kept saying no – or as he put it, “I have a farm to get back to at home, and a wife who certainly deserves my time more than you people.”
And you know how the government seizes the assets of drug dealers and auctions them off? Turns out that’s also a service they provide for imprisoned billionaires – there are just a lot more zeroes involved. It took over a year, but Dallstrom Defense Systems was split up and sold off in dozens of chunks, until every one of those forty billion dollars had a new owner.
I held Dave’s hand and asked him what it felt like to see the money and security he’d known all his life vanish into the hands of strangers.
Dave smiled as he looked down at our joined hands. “It feels like freedom.”
I told him that the monsters were going down one by one. Arrests took place in this country and in dozens of nations around the world, arrests for dealing in illegal weapons and drugs, for war crimes and human trafficking and just about everything else except jaywalking – all of Einar Dallstrom’s old partners in crime were being locked away, most of them in places a lot worse than a minimum security prison in Duluth.
All except Gregor Szörnyeteg – his assets in the United States were frozen and his family’s bank in Hungary was investigated for money laundering, but he never saw the inside of a jail cell. Instead, eight months after Dave entered prison, a brief story on CNN’s website reported “Gregor Szörnyeteg, a prominent Hungarian banker implicated in the Dallstrom scandal, died Thursday when his car crashed on an icy mountain road one hundred miles northeast of Budapest.”
Don’t believe everything you read.
Two days before the story appeared, I got an email. The address it came from was wonky and strange, and didn’t look like any email address I’d ever seen. When I tried to send an answer, Gmail bounced my reply back and said I had tried to reach an address that didn’t exist.
The message was short.
The matter we discussed on the phone has been resolved. Tell our David that when he is free, you are both welcome to come and stay with us at any time. I am thinking you would find such a visit interesting. – S.
I opened the attached video file, just like you’re not supposed to do when you get an attachment from an unknown address. I curled up alone on my couch in my small Duluth apartment and I watched ten minutes of footage from someone’s cell phone.
Snow swirled down in buckets on a mountain road. Thick forests filled the view to either side. Wind hissed through the trees, driving the snow past the lens in torrents. A limousine sat in the middle of the road, its way blocked by a fallen tree.
Anton swept into view on the right. Looking like a supercharged version of Neo in his ankle-length black overcoat and wraparound dark glasses, he held up the biggest damn handgun in all of God’s creation and blasted a hole through the limousine’s windshield. The driver’s blood and brains splattered against the broken glass, the limo’s doors swung open and get out of there, Anton –
Snipers opened up from the woods. The men scrambling out of the limousine to protect their boss died in a few shattering seconds, dropping into the snow like gut-shot deer.
The snipers came in from the woods and surrounded the vehicle. Anton leveled his giant hand cannon of a murder gun at the man cowering in the back seat and snarled something that I assumed would translate as “Get out, asshole.”
Gregor Szörnyeteg looked a whole lot less scornful and confident than when I’d last seen him by the fountains of the Burj Khalifa. He held up his leather-gloved hands, he stared around at the dead men lying at his feet, and he looked up again to see Anton’s gun two inches from the end of his nose.
Sergei walked into view on the left, wearing the same short leather jacket as always. He ignored Szörnyeteg. Instead, he poked through the bodies, found the one he was looking for, and grabbed the dead man by his collar. Nodding for whoever was holding the phone to bring it closer, he hauled the body to its knees and spoke in his usual calm Eastern European accent as he looked into the phone’s camera lens.
“This man is András Gyilkos. We believe it was he who fired the bullets that killed Kristen Dallstrom. He is Szörnyeteg’s chief of security, but it seems he is not doing his job so well today, yes?”
Sergei dropped the body as if it was a forgotten bag of trash and turned to Szörnyeteg. He smiled his dead-thing smile, he spoke to the doomed asshole in his own language, and then he turned back to face the camera.
“I am telling him that in Dubai he said I was an old and toothless wolf, and yet it seems I can still bite.”
Sergei and Anton took turns shooting Gregor Szörnyeteg. They were careful to avoid hitting anything vital for at least five minutes. In between shots and screams, they chatted in English about the weather.
Once it was over and Szörnyeteg was another sack of bloody meat in the road, Sergei and his people climbed into two four-wheel-drive vehicles and drove away. From a safe distance, someone hurled a grenade to get rid of the evidence. The video ended with a distant view of the limousine and the bodies disappearing in an earth-shaking explosion that sent fire and smoke billowing through the trees.
> Yeah, CNN, those icy Hungarian roads are treacherous.
30
The world turned for two years without us.
Two years of weekends together and long lonely weeks apart.
Two years of me serving overpriced draft beer and stale pretzels to drunks and then going home to my hamster cage of an apartment.
Two years of Dave working in the prison kitchen preparing food he barely had the heart to eat.
Two years of both of us refusing requests for interviews until the reporters and writers and commentators got bored and moved on to new media sensations.
Two years of cold Duluth winters and springs that were somehow worse for seeing other people getting on with their lives in the warmth and sun.
Two years of loving someone right down to their bones but not being able to touch them beyond family-friendly kisses and strictly monitored hugs, and only in a room full of chattering strangers.
Two years of talking about the future and the endless wait for it to arrive.
Two years that ended this morning.
I went to bed early last night and couldn’t sleep until dawn. I got to the prison’s parking lot early and sat there waiting in my elderly Honda Accord, waiting and burning with nerves and excitement and the desperate need to see Dave – to see him, to really touch him, to hold him and smell him and wrap myself up in him, and to never let him go.
I mailed him a package a week ago, when this day was so close we could smell it and yet still couldn’t quite dare to believe it was coming – a package with real human non-prison clothes, clothes that he could wear when he walked out that front door a free man.
They came from his old place in Chicago, when I’d raided it right before making that wild drive to D.C. over two years ago; and yes, while I was there I also scooped up every one of his beloved Star Wars figures and threw them in with his clothes before the Imperial stormtroopers – aka federal agents – could show up and confiscate them along with the rest of his stuff. Hey, the Force told me to do it.
No Dreams Allowed: A Billionaire Romance Page 32