Still, at least the drive gave her a distraction. To keep herself on track, Harlow had to concentrate, which meant there hadn’t been time for her to stress about what the hell she was going to say if she did actually get close to her target.
By the time she pulled into the rear service alley of the upmarket building, Harlow had just figured out how to shift the manual and corner without the ass drifting. That was one achievement to tick from her list.
Locking up the car, she tried to be discreet about leaving the alley and slipping into the flow of people on the sidewalk. It wasn’t that busy, or that late, but there were couples probably on their way to dinner, and singles most likely on a journey to meet others.
In her cocktail dress with her hair loose and her silk purse hanging on a delicate strap that lay across her body, she fit in with the other pedestrians who didn’t notice she’d just walked out of an alley. Service alleyways weren’t the sort of place classy people in this neighborhood hung out. They didn’t even have hobos around here. God forbid.
Rounding the corner to head for the building entrance, no one was paying her any heed. The doorman even opened the door to allow her inside. Security were conversing, so with all the confidence in the world, she strode on past and went to the elevator.
The whole time she was waiting for the doors to open, her stress level was rising. Her palms were beginning to sweat and her heart was pounding. It wasn’t that she was doing anything wrong per se. But if she didn’t get to her destination, she’d have to come up with a different plan. Harlow would rather just get this over with than have to connive new ways to achieve her goal.
The doors opened and she slipped inside to select her floor.
Closing her eyes, she sent silent thanks to Ryske for watching over her. Security could have flat missed her. Though it was more likely that a single woman of her stature was such an unlikely crime suspect that they simply didn’t care about where she was going.
Still, security could notice the lone figure and rush to intercept her at any moment. Getting to the right floor was a boost; she wasted no time in going to the target’s apartment and knocking. While waiting for a response, all she could do was hope this wouldn’t be a replay of what had happened at Bale’s place.
Despite her research, this could blow up in her face. Plans often changed at the last minute and Harlow was out of the loop. Even if the setup was exactly right, a fight could be inevitable.
The apartment door opened. Harlow held her breath, amazed by the occupant’s beauty, which hadn’t lessened over time.
“Ophelia,” Harlow whispered.
Forgiving Ophelia for her moment of pure shock, Harlow clasped her hands in front of her, bracing for any kind of response to her presence.
Still in shock, Ophelia’s hand rose. It seemed to want to touch her hair but fell back down before it could.
“Harlow,” she murmured.
At least Ophelia remembered her; that was a good start.
Harlow was trying to figure out how to broach what she wanted to say, and hadn’t realized that they weren’t finished with their greeting. Ophelia lunged forward and pulled her into a tight hug.
Rigid and stunned, the display of overt emotion was unexpected. “I…”
Leaning back, Ophelia clutched her upper arms, so Harlow mirrored the move. “It’s awful. Awful,” Ophelia said. “I don’t even know what to…”
Whether she’d felt it or sensed it, Ophelia’s gaze shifted from Harlow’s face to her wrist. Her breathing slowed when Ophelia took hold of her wrist to examine the bracelet and the tattooed star beneath it.
There was a new sense of determination on Ophelia’s face when she looked up again. Whether or not it was set in Harlow’s favor was a mystery.
“Ophelia, I—”
“We should get to work,” Ophelia said, pulling her into the apartment.
Harlow hadn’t expected it would be so easy to convince the woman to join her cause. She’d underestimated Ophelia’s feelings. That had been a stupid miscalculation. Harlow had called it the night they’d met when both of them had accused the other of being in love with Ryske.
Traversing a wide entry hallway, they rounded a central floral display and went into a living room at the head of the apartment. The large space had a focal fireplace with tall windows flanking it.
Ophelia took her to a pinstriped couch and sat her down before going to a decanter in the corner. “Sherry?”
Harlow nodded, pulling her purse closer to her stomach. Scanning the room, she learned that Ophelia had sophisticated taste in décor, preferring muted shades. The air was perfumed by the fresh flowers that were dotted throughout the room.
When Harlow’s gaze settled on the mantelpiece an involuntary impulse made her rise to her feet. “Oh my God,” she said, moving toward the central glass box that displayed a diamond ring, one she knew well, because it was the one Rupert had given her.
“It’s my monument to the dead,” Ophelia said, joining Harlow and handing over a glass of sherry. After a sip, Ophelia nodded to an urn at the far end of the fireplace. “That’s my mother. Jarvis has our father.” Stepping backward, she revealed an urn at the other end of the mantel. “And, that is half of the remains of my best friend.”
“Anwen,” Harlow said without really thinking about using the name.
Hearing it startled Ophelia, but she recovered quickly and moved closer, blocking Harlow’s view of Anwen’s urn and raising her glass to the display case in the center. “Ryske gave me that the night he died.”
Harlow knew that. Well, she didn’t know that he’d used her ring to propose, though it made sense. Where else would he get such an expensive jewel at such short notice? Harlow had said the Floyd’s crew could keep it, so she couldn’t be offended, even if the notion was a little disconcerting.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, sipping the alcohol.
Not telling Ophelia the truth of the ring’s provenance was more an act of mercy than one of deception. Putting it in that case and in such a prominent position was proof positive that Ophelia had been enraptured by Ryske.
“I’m not naïve,” Ophelia said, touching the edge of the case. “I know the proposal was a move on his part… I don’t know if he wanted to convince Jarvis that we were going to be together or if he wanted me to think you were no longer a factor… maybe that was for Jarvis’ benefit too.”
Putting her sherry glass on the mantel, Ophelia turned and lifted Harlow’s wrist to touch the engraved metal strip. “You were there… at the end?”
Nodding, Harlow put her glass next to Ophelia’s. “Yes.”
“Was it… quick?”
From the moment of the shot until his final words to her in the ambulance, it felt like a thousand years, and yet it was over in the blink of an eye. “He wasn’t in pain,” Harlow said, in another act of mercy.
The vision of Ryske’s panic was imprinted on Harlow’s brain and she’d never forget the sound of him trying to pull breath into his failing lungs.
With a quiet nod, Ophelia seemed to accept the untruth. All of a sudden, she balled her fist and hit it against the front of the mantel. “God, I hate him,” she hissed. “This is all his fault.”
“Jarvis’?” Harlow asked, stroking Ophelia’s arm, hoping to soothe her.
She wanted to rip Hagan’s head off as much as Ophelia did. Somehow both of them had refrained. That was a miracle in itself.
Cooler heads would prevail. They had to keep calm. Plotting Hagan’s downfall would have a higher chance of success if they were deliberate rather than impulsive.
Turning away, Ophelia went to the couch and sank down to perch on the edge, worrying her hands on her knees. “Although, I have to admit… some of the blame is mine.”
Guilt had been Harlow’s companion too. “We could all point fingers at ourselves,” she said, going over to join Ophelia. “What’s important is what comes next.”
They made eye contact. Harlow nodded while picking
up Ophelia’s hand. “You want payback,” the beauty said.
“I want payback.”
Admitting that truth to Ophelia was a massive exercise in trust. If she ran off to tell her brother, then Harlow’s plan, and her life, could be over before they began.
Instead, Ophelia straightened, taking on a serious air. “What do you need from me?”
“The deal,” she said. “I want in.”
“Oh, well, that all fell apart,” Ophelia said. After a beat, she gasped, pulling Harlow’s hand over to her own lap. “Of course, you won’t know! You disappeared as quickly as he did… I admit I thought maybe…”
That Harlow had decided to join Ryske? Ophelia didn’t finish the sentence, maybe because of Anwen, or perhaps because she didn’t want to be accused of planting the idea.
“I thought about taking my own life,” Harlow confessed, in a truth she’d never uttered to anyone. “I did.”
“Why didn’t you?”
There was genuine curiosity in the question; Harlow wondered if that went back to Anwen too. What had caused Harlow not to follow through when Anwen had? If Anwen and Ophelia had been such close friends, the former’s suicide must have raised all kinds of questions for the latter. Should Ophelia have noticed something about Anwen’s behavior? Was there something she might have done to stop her friend from committing such a final act?
“I don’t know,” she said, dropping her focus to their joined hands. “Ryske’s voice in my head telling me I was stronger than that… No, that wasn’t it…” If she was going to be honest then she had to go all the way. “Ever since it happened I’ve wanted to crawl inside myself… I was lost. Didn’t know who I was or what to do without him… But something…” Narrowing her eyes, she tried to make sense of the senseless. “Something in me told me I wasn’t done. That there was something left for me to do…” Lifting her gaze, she found Ophelia’s. “It was this.”
“You know that if my brother finds out that we even thought about this that he’ll kill us both.”
Harlow nodded. “I’m willing… for Ryske.”
It took just a moment, but a smile crept to Ophelia’s lips. Leaving the couch, she went to retrieve their sherry and waited by the mantel for Harlow to join her. “For Ryske.”
Both of them raised their glasses to the box on the mantel and then drank. Harlow put her glass down by the display case again. “I need you to tell me everything about why the deal fell through.”
“It was Ryske,” Ophelia said, guiding them back to the couch. “As much as my brother wanted to cut him out, he was crucial to the operation. Without him there was just no way to follow through. Getting the drugs into the country was Yarker’s responsibility; he has the connections to make that happen. Parratt was supposed to provide logistics for transport. Those two are thicker than thieves. I’ve never trusted either of them all the way, but with Ryske on top of them, I didn’t have to worry.”
Drugs. This was about drugs? The consortium had talked about a million apiece, that meant a four million dollar investment. In one shipment? Surely not, Harlow couldn’t believe that men like Parratt and Yarker were willing to take such a risk.
“Ryske was distribution,” she murmured.
It made sense. His connections had been referenced. The starched businessmen of the consortium probably didn’t have a lot of call to associate with drug dealers beyond their own weekend dabbling.
“It was Ryske’s job to bring in clients. More important was his duty to provide vendors…” Ophelia smiled. “He called them Hawking Hookers, I always thought that was funny.”
Hawking Hookers, what did that imply…
Harlow was still trying to figure it out when Ophelia’s smile cracked. “You do understand that this is not just some common street drug. One hit costs upward of ten thousand dollars. This wasn’t some flash in the pan operation; it was a pilot. If it had been successful, we had satellite schemes ready to go across the country… We’d have made millions.”
In illegal money, dealing in a dangerous and exclusive drug. “Millions,” Harlow muttered.
“Ryske had his own ideas for the future…”
Was Ophelia referencing his unexpected death or did Ryske have a scheme of his own outside the operation? Maybe it was both. “Is it addictive?”
Ophelia went to the decanter to refill her drink. “I asked him that once,” she said, watching the liquid stream into the petite glass. Replacing the stopper, she swung the sherry to her amused lips. “He said it depended on the woman.” Ophelia laughed, just a short, private sound. “I suppose he was addicted with Anwen.” Breathing out, Ophelia sounded both wistful and resigned. “The drug itself was developed by a European pharmaceutical company. Except they couldn’t get approval. Something to do with funding and public perception… and the Europeans are supposed to be sexually liberated, right?”
“Seems their failure is our gain,” Harlow said.
Another laugh joined Ophelia on her journey back to Harlow’s side. “That was the idea,” she said, sipping her drink. “Some contact or other got hold of the formula, I don’t know how. They synthesized this initial batch and apparently the results have been impressive.”
“Where are they testing it?”
“The Netherlands, of course, in their red light district,” Ophelia said. “They are looking for global distributors. It hasn’t been scaled yet and because of whatever’s in it, it’s expensive to produce. I wasn’t involved in the consortium at first, though I suppose I became the glue. I found out what was going on when I overheard Jarvis talking about providing locations and geographical support. I asked him what was going on. I suppose I got him in a good mood, or maybe a desperate one, because he told me about the consortium… They didn’t have anyone who could provide entertainment… It had been a while since I’d spoken to Ryske…”
“Jarvis couldn’t have supported Ryske’s involvement.”
“No, he didn’t. Parratt got Ryske involved. Jarvis would never have accepted it if he’d been aware in advance,” she said. “Parratt has always had a soft spot for me and I may have whispered in his ear. I knew that he and Ryske had history… that there was an outstanding debt between them. A while before all of this, Parratt had given Ryske a shot to clear it by recruiting him to help Yarker out with his divorce.”
By sleeping with Yarker’s wife…. Harlow had heard the men discussing that the night she’d met them. Yarker needed evidence of infidelity and Ryske provided it.
The first time Ryske had told her about Anwen, in the bathroom at Floyd’s, he’d mentioned having a chance to square things with Parratt about six months after Anwen’s death. He said he’d screwed it up. Could providing Yarker’s evidence be the chance he’d been talking about? According to what she’d heard, he’d done that and hadn’t screwed it up in any way.
“If Ryske cleared his debt to Parratt by giving Yarker evidence of his wife’s infidelity… Why did you think the debt was still outstanding?”
Breathing in, Ophelia slid deeper into the couch. “Unfortunately, during the affair, Ryske made the mistake of having a threesome with Parratt’s mistress… his favorite mistress, Lydia. Apparently, it had always been a fantasy of Yarker’s wife. Parratt wasn’t happy… to say the least. So, I suppose that negated the repayment of the debt.”
8
Wow, Ryske had screwed it up. Big time. Her Crash didn’t do anything by half. Sleeping with Yarker’s wife wasn’t a difficult instruction. Bringing a second woman into it, Parratt’s woman, would’ve been a quick way to get back on his creditor’s bad side.
“Did Ryske know the other woman, this Lydia, was Parratt’s mistress?” Harlow asked.
Circling her wrist in a flippant wave, Ophelia smiled. “This is Ryske we’re talking about,” she said. “Do we think for a moment that it would’ve mattered if he did?”
No. When it came to sex, little mattered to Ryske… except avoiding doing it with her. Harlow was beginning to think that maybe it wasn’t h
er place to get involved with this. Ophelia knew the details and the players, and she had known Ryske for years before Harlow came on the scene. The beauty had more reason to want to hurt her brother; she’d lost her best friend, Anwen, by his actions too.
Yet, in the time since Ryske’s death, Ophelia hadn’t taken any action or made a plan to take her brother down.
Working things through, Harlow spelled each stage out. “Parratt was transporting the drug. Yarker was going to get it through customs. Your brother was providing premises where it could be peddled and used. Ryske was supposed to bring in clients… and Hawking Hookers.”
“They’d have to be the high class sort,” Ophelia said, resting an elbow on the low back of the couch. “Ryske knew all kinds of people… The idea was to use my brother’s club, Windsor’s, to host exclusive parties. That was the whole reason for him buying the place. His task was to begin building up a customer base of people who may be interested in the drug, Pothos. The other entertainment, the gambling and such, that was secondary, or it would be once we had Pothos. At the casino nights, they intended to make Pothos available… And because the drug’s purpose is to enhance sexual experience, they needed to have women available who would let the customers test the product.”
Ryske had avoided giving Harlow any details about the consortium’s operation. There was no time to ponder anything during this crash course. Harlow had to get as much information as she could. Guessing that Pothos was the name of the drug, as Ophelia had tagged the operation with that moniker too, Harlow needed to eke out more details.
“It’s like Viagra?”
“Oh, no,” Ophelia said, screwing up her face. “Pothos is far more sophisticated than that. I don’t understand the specifics of how it works. Somehow it provides an endorphin boost. All those hormones and chemicals and whatever zaps around the body when people are having sex, they’d be increased like a hundredfold… It wouldn’t just be orgasms that would be stronger and longer, it increases the sensitivity of every nerve. Just a kiss or a touch can be as debilitating as a regular orgasm… Ryske did say it would increase blood flow, stamina, and prowess, so I guess it does the same thing as Viagra too. But that’s more of a side effect than the purpose of it… It’s the sex god drug. It basically makes everyone into a sex god or goddess. That’s why they called it Pothos; he’s some sort of Greek god or something.”
Go It Alone (A Go Novel Book 2) Page 7
