Alibi Island

by SLMN

  “My dad wouldn’t believe me, Jake.”

  “There’s one thing a daddy will always believe about his daughter, Lainey.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “That every man who is alive and breathing wants to fuck her. It’s like baseline dad.”

  So six weeks ago on a Saturday night, when her parents were out of town, Lainey played the ultimate move in this game of household chess with Sven.

  She’d just made the full conversion to Hot Goth Chic. Her blond hair was cut back to a severe bob and dyed crow black. Her lipstick was black, and she’d stuck two black diamante diamonds to look like tears in the corner of each eye. Both eyes were almonds of Khol, and her eyelids were pure smudged charcoal smoke.

  Her dress was more fishnet than actual dress, and her bra was working it for her until it sweated blood. The skirt was a piece of material that had been introduced once long ago to the concept of skirts existing as a thing, but that was about as far as it went. Her knee boots had tractor tire treads and silver buckles all the way to her knees.

  Lainey marched down the stairs into the wine cellar, where she knew Sven would be making his usual Saturday night inventory.

  Sven stopped what he was doing, put the bottle of something very red and expensive on the table, and looked at Lainey. He hadn’t seen her dressed in this way, and as it had taken her breath away when she’d looked in her bedroom mirror herself, she could only imagine the effect it might have on members of the opposite sex.

  “Ms. Lainey. Is that you?”

  “You know perfectly well it is. I’m going out.”

  Sven was on more familiar territory now that he’d gotten over the breathtaking transformation in Lainey’s appearance.

  “I’m afraid your Mother made it very clear to me that you were not to leave the compound, Ms. Lainey. I’m sorry to have to inform you…”

  Sven’s English was heavily accented, and a little slow, as if he had to think about every word before he said it. Lainey didn’t have time for this. The taxi would be here in five minutes.

  Jake had prepared her well, as if it were a script he had used himself many times in the past to get out of his house and away from his father. Although Lainey had never told Jake who she really was—she wasn’t stupid, as her fake profile in the name of “Pippa Graves” had just enough real information about her to feel authentic. It would in no way let on to anyone that she was Lainey Ralston. Her close friends new about the change and the deception, but no one else. She shied away from telling Jake the truth, not because she was worried what he’d do with the information, but because she was worried that it would put him off.

  They’d first gotten in touch through Pippa Graves’ Instagram account. She’d published a few selfies of trying on some Goth Gear, and he’d commented favorably. They had been the kind of comments that signaled the dead sure I’m interested in you giveaway vibe. The going back on her timeline deep-liking scads of posts from the last two years, was the clincher. After that, they’d got chatting. She’d looked at his Facebook profile with her eyes out on stalks because he was so damn pretty, and so the pretense stuck. She’d felt herself falling for Jake long before she’d felt compelled to tell him the truth of her identity.

  “Sven, do you like your job?”

  Sven narrowed his eyes. This obviously was not the question he was expecting. Jake had been right about that too.

  “Put him on the back foot, make him unsure. He’s the kind of guy who expects everything to be just so, and you asking him that will throw him. Once he’s off balance then you can put him down and you’ll never have to worry about him again.”

  “I do not understand, Ms. Lainey. Of course I like my job.”

  “Then you’ll be wanting to keep it.”

  “Ms. Lainey, if there is some complaint you would like to make, or some issue you would like to discuss then I’m sure we can hold a meeting with your father when he returns from the fundraising event in Corpus Christi.”

  Jake had been right again. Sven would try to deflect and would subtly bring up the issue with her father. She still hadn’t told Jake who her father was, just that he was in the oil business, that he was a very rich man and that he was a controlling asshole.

  Lainey could argue until the cows came home with her mother. Brenda was weak and somewhat of a lush. The majority of the drinks that disappeared from Ralston’s cabinet were taken by Brenda, and that’s why Huey—knowing her mom’s problems—hadn’t made such a fuss. He liked her quiet and drunk. It kept her out of his hair. If he’d known how much booze his daughter had been misappropriating in the last year, then the situation would be very different.

  But Lainey never won an argument with her father. He was a bully and as stubborn as three mules with their heads up each other’s asses. If she pushed him too far, he wasn’t beyond putting her over his knee and teaching her a lesson with the flat of his palm. That was a humiliation she had managed to avoid since she was twelve. She’d managed to avoid it by not getting into fights with her dad. She knew her mom resented it because she got the brunt of Lainey’s rebellion. However Lainey could cope so much better with her mom’s half-cut screaming matches than she could with Huey Ralston and his old fashioned take on home discipline.

  “There will be no discussions, Sven,” back on script. “I’m going out now, and you’re going to wipe the section of hard drive in the security system that records me leaving. And when I get back in the morning, you’ll do the same. Am I being clear enough for you, or would you like me to repeat it for you more slowly?”

  God, Jake was good. He knew exactly what to say because Sven’s eyes blazed, but he kept his cool.

  “Ms. Lainey I’m afraid…”

  “And that’s when you scream,” Jake said. “Top of your lungs. He’ll drop his lunch. No man wants to be trapped down the cellar with the boss’ daughter screaming rape.”

  And Jake had been right. The scream made Lainey feel infinitely powerful. Sven…mile wide, mile high Sven had held up his hands, his Swedish Special Forces Super Cool shattered.

  “D…don’t touch me! D….don’t touch me! Daddy! Daddy! Oh, Daddy! Thank God you’re home! Sven tried to touch me. He made me meet him in the cellar and he tried to touch me!”

  Lainey leaned forward and added a wrinkle of her own so confident that she felt it was working out for her now and nudged the very expensive bottle of wine by the neck. It teetered, turned, and fell, smashing against the tiled floor—sending a bloody spray of wine up Sven’s trousers. “I threw a bottle at him, Daddy! It was the only way I could stop him. He’s a monster! Call the police! Please, Daddy, call the police.”

  Lainey was breathing hard, Sven’s mouth was gold fishing.

  “Just wait thirty seconds. Say nothing. Let it all sink in. He will comply. He has no choice,” Jake said, and so she waited every single one of those 30 seconds as the gravity of the situation sank into Sven.

  He paused, and then he nodded, “I will do what you ask.”

  And from then on, Lainey had zero trouble from Sven. He got her a new key to the drinks cabinet, and the entry coding system on the front gate worked every single time it was needed.

  Which is why, when Lainey Ralston disappeared for real, there was no CCTV of her leaving the house. Sven didn’t raise the alarm for nearly 20 hours because he never knew when to expect her back. He just waited to clean up the digital files when she did.

  Just before Huey Ralston fired Sven he told the Swede that he’d rather have heard the butler-cum-bodyguard tried to fuck his daughter, rather than just let her walk out of the building.

  The irony was not lost on Sven as he walked out of the compound for the last time.

  3

  Huey Ralston loved being Huey Ralston.

  There was no doubt about it. He loved Huey Ralston to the absolute max. 6’2”, a tightly packed 210 lbs.—with the ability to fit into the same tux now that he could have slipped right into when he was 20—he often couldn’t pass
by a mirror without straightening his tie. He used a licked finger to push back a stray hair or feel that warm glow of loving himself so hard, he honestly couldn’t understand why the rest of the world didn’t find him so damn agreeable.

  Ralston liked to tell the story of how he’d worked his ass off to get where he was, but like most apocryphal stories, there were only a couple of diamonds of truth buried in the bullshit of misdirection.

  Ralston Oil was his Daddy’s company, and Old Man Ralston—as even Huey’s mom had called her husband—had done all the hard work. He’d been the one that had built the business up from the dirt: doing the surveys, digging the wells, losing two fingers on his right hand when a chain hauling a new drill bit into place had snapped and crushed them like jelly. Legend had it that Old Man Ralston had carried on working, leaking blood and gooey bits of flesh until the new bit was in place and the machinery could be started up again at the drill head.

  Huey—breaking a nail when he’d flubbed picking up a hammer to pass to a drill head rigger when he’d been at the Santa Clara Well—didn’t really have the authenticity or veracity of the Old Man Ralston tale. But over the years and true to form, Huey had augmented and embellished the story somewhat. Now the scar he had on his arm—from a drunken tumble down some stairs onto a smashed vodka bottle at a Frat party—became the story of how he’d saved the drill head rigger from certain death by shielding him with his own body, as the rig had been ripped apart by a whipping back drill string in a heinous well accident.

  The fact that the particular drill head rigger had been sought out by Stephen Crane, given $50,000, and made to sign a handcuff-tight NDA to never talk about any incident, was beside the point.

  Truth should never get in the way of good mythology.

  Ralston had scraped through college with the barest grade averages and had fallen straight into the family business.

  The myth stated that Old Man Ralston had made his son start at the bottom as the lowest of the low mail boy in the Houston office of Ralston Oil. A quick conversation from anyone back then (NDAs notwithstanding) would tell you that Huey spent much of his days not delivering mail to the girls in the typing pool, but instead just delivering MALE.

  By the end of the first year, Daddy had paid for three terminations and paid off another girl who was threatening to go to the police for harassment. Huey had been kicked upstairs—kept to the executive level, away from the typing pool, to sit in an office twiddling his thumbs. He’d mainly play Solitaire on his computer while Old Man Ralston boiled about this “wastrel son” and got on with the serious business of becoming a multibillionaire.

  By the time Old Man Ralston had died of a coronary so suddenly that he’d fallen face first into his soup at dinner and had been dead before could close his eyes, he’d surrounded himself with people who could run Ralston Oil in his absence like clockwork. No “wastrel son” who would inherit and become the putative head of the company would be able to “fuck it up,” however dead Old Man Ralston was.

  And so Huey had become the Chief Executive Officer of Ralston Oil at 40. Like any automatic system, he only had to be there on site occasionally to nod through what his advisors advised about the business. They would suggest which acquisitions and mergers were best placed to make more money for the company, which renewable technologies were best to move into, and when to couple that buy out with the increase in fracking businesses. He’d been told it was a good idea to have feet in both sides of the green divide. And who was Huey to argue? He knew fuck about fuck…all except for fucking.

  Fucking he knew all about. Fucking and…other pleasures.

  Even getting married to Brenda hadn’t stopped the fucking and attendant activities. Huey had realized early on that money was the greatest aphrodisiac known to man, and the succession of cheerleaders, models, and starlets who had punctuated his marriage had been testament to that. Huey loved the power that kind of money gave him. Exposure to that many beautiful women ready to respond favorably to his advances made him feel like a god.

  When Huey fucked them, he tended to do it from behind’ He’d seen too many fleeting looks of disgust flicker across the faces of the women who’d temporarily rented space to him in their bodies, but never in their heads. Huey didn’t care. To him a fuck was a fuck, and where Old Man Ralston had made his first billion in the Texas Oil Business, Huey was well on his way to making his billionth mark on the bedsheets of the Texas Fucking Business.

  Even when he’d grown jaded with the fucking and had moved on to different avenues of sexual gratification, he found more than enough women who would meet his particular needs for money.

  Capitalism was a wonderful tool.

  So with the business in the hands of people who could run it well, Huey was at a loose end. There were only so many parties he could go to, there were only so many secret and brutal liaisons to have, and there were only so many presents he could buy his wife to shut her the fuck up when his latest blond-haired bimbo had been found in their house by a maid.

  What would he do with his days?

  Huey had found politics as easy as he had fucking. In many ways, they were the same thing and came from the same place. The only difference being, that instead of fucking one airhead at a time, politics allowed you to fuck thousands—and both fuckees fell for the same shtick.

  Money was the aphrodisiac that oiled progression in both spheres as far as Huey was concerned, and he was mightily successful at both. It was all about how you picked your bedmate in either circle. Huey would default to crazily beautiful, easily influenced, and available women. He did the same with the electorate—crazily populist platforms in the Lone Star State—tough on illegals, tough on crime, support for the NRA, reductions in welfare to boost the public purse. It’s not that Huey had a political idea before he entered politics—it was fair to say the only ideas he had before politics were about promoting his brand and fucking and beating his way around Texas—but when smart political operators saw someone they could mold into a Titan of conservative populism, they would gravitate towards Ralston. Soon he had an automatic team around him who would do all the donkey work for him in campaigning: write his speeches, set him up with the best meetings to take, decide which special interests to listen to, and whose palms to grease.

  Very much in the same way Ralston Oil had been run since his daddy had taken a dive into the pea and ham soup, Ralston For Senator pretty much ran itself. All Ralston had to do was turn up, miss the furniture, and sign the checks. It wasn’t exactly taxing—but the hard-on it gave him for power was matched only by his hard-on for the next delivery of blonde submission.

  Everything was on automatic until Alaina had decided to run away.

  Huey was not a natural father. He’d realized early on in his marriage that having a child would look good on his public face. That was the face of a socially conservative family man with a great head for business, who believed raising a family was not only what the nation expected of its great and good, but also was God’s work too.

  Huey had been advised that appealing to Evangelists was precisely the constituency he should aim to have high approval ratings with. And so he went to church, he listened to sermons, and he spoke at gatherings of evangelical lobbyists. It occurred to him, as he watched the pastors struttin’ and frettin’ across their altars in their Mega-Churches—soaking up all that adulation and all that money—that perhaps he’d chosen the wrong pastime by entering politics. Maybe setting up his own Church in the future might be a nice side-line and a fine income diversification project…

  You could find gullible people almost everywhere you looked—and the ones that voted for him would be the same ones who fetched up in their thousands to pay for their pastor’s new Gulfstream. If Huey could find the right fire and brimstone speechwriter to work him up some sermons, there could be an even brighter future for him.

  But of course Alaina was trying, in her typical way, to pour fresh Novocain into his Vaseline.

  He’d le
ft bringing up the child to Brenda. It seemed to be her forte—well perhaps back before she’d started the drunken screaming matches with Alaina. They were those “difficult teenage years” that Huey had heard about on daytime talk shows. Huey didn’t know anything about difficult teenage years; he’d had everything he ever wanted and had pretty much coasted until puberty. That’s when he learned what girls were for.

  But as Alaina had grown from the family asset into a dyed-haired, torn-clothed punk, Ralston had ordered Brenda to get the little bitch in line because it was now impossible to have her at campaign meetings or rallies dressed like the Princess of Darkness.

  Nothing happened, of course; Brenda was too busy crawling in and out of the next bottle, and it was as much as she could do to plastic herself up enough to not look like an embarrassment in front of the cameras or at charity functions.

  Ralston didn’t want to have to speak to the girl about her behavior; that wasn’t his job, it was Brenda’s job. But if things didn’t change soon, he was going to have to intervene. They were hitting the campaign trail for the Fall elections soon. If Ralston was going to make it to the Senate in Washington—he’d already won the nomination at a personal cost of 13 million of his favorite dollars—then that girl was going to be blonde again, dressed for church, going to do what the fuck her mom told her.

  Then of course the ungrateful little shit—who had an allowance most kids would die for, a bedroom suite as large as some of her friends’ houses, every single piece of computer equipment, and audio visual tech to make her bedroom look like freakin’ Mission Control—had gone missing.

  When they’d returned the next morning—and Sven had been in the kind of panic that was usually reserved for Brenda when she’d run out of bourbon—Ralston had immediately realized the gravity and danger of the situation…especially to his political ambitions.

  His first thought had been how this would look: Prospective Senator’s daughter, so unhappy with her parents she’s run away. Not the perfect family. Press digging—oh how those fuckers loved to dig—and knowing that if they dug deep and hard enough they’d find something. The lid had to be kept on this, especially when Sven confessed that Lainey had been blackmailing him to cover her tracks leaving the house for the last six weeks. How would that look on the cover of the Houston Times?