My Darling Husband

by Kimberly Belle

  “I heard you. I won’t call them. You have my word.”

  The man rolls his eyes. Across the hall, the television fades into a commercial break and the house falls quiet, only a soft hiss coming from the phone. I stare at it, stomach acid burning up my throat as my mind bubbles with terrible thoughts. He doesn’t believe Cam. He doesn’t think he’ll bring the money.

  Icy fingers clamp down on my heart and squeeze. “How long will it take you to get here? Do you remember the amount?”

  “Seven-three-four-two-nine-six. I remember. It’s a strange amount.”

  I said the same thing, too, and pretty much word for word. The man refused to tell me anything other than I better hope Cam will be able to scrounge up the cash.

  But in the minutes ever since, in between his careful explanation of what I am to say and him punching the call into my phone, I’ve quietly come up with an answer: the number is not random. It’s the bottom line on a bank statement he fished out of our mailbox, maybe, or the purchase price for a building Cam is bidding on for one of his restaurants. Otherwise why not demand an even $800,000? Why not shoot for a million or more?

  Another realization is that as strange as the number is, it also could present a problem—it’s too big to just walk into a bank and withdraw. Aren’t there waiting periods for that kind of cash? Precious minutes to wait out the red tape.

  And his investment strategy these past few years has been aggressive. Expanding his business, turning every bit of profit into capital for the next location. What if he doesn’t have enough money liquid? Cam might have to gather up cash from different accounts, liquidate some of his assets. He might not have enough time.

  Or maybe that’s the whole purpose.

  Terror churns in my stomach because maybe this is no typical ransom plot. Maybe this man’s promises of a happy reunion is a lie. Maybe no matter what kind of miracle Cam works, the day culminates with a bullet in each of our heads.

  If that’s true, if this whole exercise was intended to fail, then that means nothing I do, nothing Cam does, will change how this day ends. As much as I want him to hurry, every minute he’s not here means another minute the kids and I are still breathing.

  Another minute I have to figure out how to get us out of this alive.

  “Where are you?” I say. “How long before you can get here?”

  “I don’t... I don’t know. It’s going to take me some time to pull that kind of cash together. I’m going to have to empty the safes, move some things around between accounts, and the banks close in what—an hour? It would be a lot quicker to just transfer the money, all I need is a—”

  “No.” Another one of the scenarios the man and I discussed, and he was crystal clear. “No bank transfers. It has to be cash, and you have to bring it by seven. He says one second later than that and we’re dead.”

  “Seven o’clock tonight?” Cam’s voice cracks through the speaker, incredulous. “I don’t... That doesn’t give me anywhere near enough time.”

  “Yes. He was very specific about the time.” I don’t mention that the man smiled when he said it: Tell your darling husband seven o’clock or else. Almost like a dare.

  In the background, squealing wheels pierce through the roar of an engine. “Look, sir, whoever you are, listen to me. I will get you this money, but you have to understand there are forces out of my control. It’s rush hour. Traffic is a nightmare, and the banks are going to take forever. I can probably stitch together a couple hundred thousand today, and then tomorrow morning first thing I’ll get you the rest. I swear to you I’ll pull through, but I just don’t—”

  “Cam.” The gun’s barrel is flush to my forehead, jabbing it into the bone, pressing hard enough to leave a bruise. Icy metal against scalding skin.

  I think about my children in the next room, my husband on the phone, how if this man pulls the trigger now, they will hear everything. The gunshot, my insides splattering onto the wall. This will be their last memory of me, the exact moment they heard me die.

  He pushes harder.

  “He wants the money today, Cam. All of it. By seven.”

  A long pause filled with exhaled air, hard and sharp like Cam had been gut punched.

  “Okay. Okay. I’ll figure something out. I don’t know what, but I’ll do it. Hold on, babe, I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  “Please hurry.” A shuddery spasm traps in my throat, a sob struggling to escape.

  “Jade, just...hold tight, okay? Take care of the Bees, tell them I love them. I will be there as soon as humanly possible. I love y—”

  Click. With a rubber-tipped finger, the man pushes End.

  C A M

  4:19 p.m.

  The air in the truck’s cab reeks of sweat and terror. The light up ahead flips to yellow, and the sea of traffic in front of me glows eerie red, brake lights as far as I can see. I screech to a stop behind a white SUV, slam the steering wheel with the heel of my hand, my whole world turning crimson.

  A masked man. A gun. My wife tied to a fucking chair.

  The call was coming from inside the house.

  And the kids are, what—splayed on the carpet on the playroom floor? Strapped to one of the recliners, a sock stuffed into their mouths? The horrible, awful vision slips like black smoke across my mind, and I pound the wheel and howl into my car because I don’t know. I don’t know if they’re bound and gagged, if they’re conscious, if they’re even really alive. For now, Jade said when I asked if they were okay, and as much as I believe my wife, I know one thing with one hundred thousand percent certainty: never believe the asshole with the gun.

  Calm down, Cam. You can’t save any of them if you drop dead of a heart attack. Calm down and breathe.

  But it’s hard getting any air with this Mack truck sitting on my chest. My heart is a clenched fist, punching a fast, erratic beat against my ribs. I’m on the verge of blacking out—an all too familiar sensation these days, like floating out of my body and watching myself die from three feet above.

  Only you don’t die from panic attacks or atrial fibrillation or whatever the hell else the ER doc told me these episodes could be. You only feel like it.

  The light turns green, but traffic doesn’t move, and I lay on the horn. The woman in the SUV takes her sweet time, pausing to wag a bird over her shoulder before she shifts her foot to the gas. The car eases forward, and I ride the brake and her bumper. I glance over both shoulders, edging closer to the lanes on either side, but I’m closed in by wall-to-wall traffic, and it’s not going to loosen anytime soon. Atlanta’s notorious rush hour is just getting started.

  Calm down.

  Think things through.

  Don’t come to me with a list of problems, I’m always preaching to my staff. Bring me the solutions. Identify the issues, evaluate your options, tackle the items one by one. This is what I am constantly telling them.

  Now it’s my turn.

  Problem number one: I don’t have $734,296 in cash. I don’t have that anywhere in a nearby universe. Cash flow may be the lifeblood of the restaurant business, but that doesn’t mean I have piles of it lying around. Whatever cash I have on paper, none of it is liquid.

  And contrary to popular belief, the restaurant business doesn’t run on cash, not since an Atlanta bartender was killed in a late-night burglary a few years back. Overnight, every sit-down restaurant in town instituted a no-cash policy—Apple Pay or cards only. Even with the tip jars at the bars, even if I raided the valet stands, there’s no way I can come up with that kind of money, not before the 7 p.m. deadline.

  Which brings me to problem number two: just under three hours for this mission impossible, and that includes driving time in bumper-to-bumper traffic. I’m still a good four minutes away from the office, and the banks close in—I glance at the clock on the dash—forty-eight minutes.

  The vise around my c
hest twists tighter, sending a surge of adrenaline to my heart. It bangs against my ribs in an almost painful pulse, brisk and erratic. The last time I felt this way, an ER doc whipped out the heart paddles.

  The lane to my left opens up, and I swerve into it and gun the gas, blowing past the SUV.

  Problem number three: no police.

  Honestly, this is the only one of his demands I can get behind. The idea of a bunch of armed cops swarming up the lawn, busting through doors and crawling through windows... I’ve seen enough movies to know how that scenario ends, and the thought of something happening to Jade and the kids makes my double-beating heart explode into quadruple time. Whatever made this guy decide today was the day to force his way into my house and hold my family at gunpoint, it’s not because he has any other options. His back is against a wall, and he’s obviously desperate. I don’t want to think about what will happen to Jade and the Bees if I fail.

  So, on to solutions, then.

  1. Gather up the money. Get as much as you can from the bank before it closes, and then whatever it takes. Loan shark, armed robbery, murder for hire. Whatever I have to do to scrounge up the cash, and do it fast.

  2. Deliver it at the house before seven tonight.

  3. Alone.

  Oh, and 4. Don’t drop dead of a heart attack before you get Jade and the kids out alive.

  I take a right at the light, tires squealing as I veer onto a two-lane road that runs along the rail yard, empty train tracks stretching out to my left. A shortcut from the southern tip of Buckhead to my office on Atlanta’s west side. If it weren’t for the blue-haired lady in front of me, a two-minute trip. I gun it around her ancient sedan, and the road opens up.

  I pull up the number for my banker’s cell and hit Call.

  “Cam, hey,” Ed says, picking up on the second ring. “I was just about to call you. I heard something about a fire?”

  An instant reminder of the day’s first disaster. Now it barely makes a blip.

  “Wow. Word travels fast, huh?”

  Ed makes a sound that’s not quite a laugh. “Big city, small town. And you know how people here love to talk. I heard it from my wife, who heard it from the manager of the Restoration Hardware across the road. Was it bad?”

  “Catastrophe territory, which is why I’m calling. I need to know how much is left on that line of credit and how quickly I can get to it.”

  I know how much is left on the line of credit: a couple thousand and some change. Peanuts compared to what I need, but I also know how Ed ticks. He hates being confronted with a big ask. He likes to be buttered up, warmed up, massaged, and he gets a kick out of solving money problems. It’s basic psychology, really. People are more open to a proposition if they’re part of the solution.

  There’s a rapid clicking through the phone, Ed’s fingers flying across the keyboard. “As I recall, it was somewhere around a couple thousand. A little more, maybe, but not much. If you give me a second, I can pull up the numbers.”

  “What’s the chance of you guys increasing it?”

  The clicking stops. “By how much?”

  “By another half million, maybe more.” I wince. So much for buttering him up.

  Ed blows out a long, slow breath. Silence on the line.

  A couple of years ago, Ed would have signed off on the loan without question. Lasky runs tens of millions of dollars annually through his bank, and for what’s coming up on a decade. A consistent flow every year like clockwork—only now most of it goes to my investors. As my banker, Ed knows they’re the ones with the money, not me.

  “Come on, Ed. You know I’m good for it.”

  “I know you’re a fantastic chef and a hardworking businessman, yes, and that you’ve been an ideal client for the past seven-plus years. But I also know you’ve taken on investors and are probably already overextended as it is. And you read the papers. The market is volatile, and every banker I know is treading water, praying the economy doesn’t tank like the Titanic. I’ve been ordered to sit tight until further notice.”

  “Sit tight on what—me?”

  “Not you. Lasky Steak.”

  “That’s the same damn thing!”

  Ed doesn’t respond, mostly because he can’t dispute it. I am Lasky Steak and Lasky Steak is me.

  I swallow, trying not to throw up. “So no more loans.”

  “None. Like, zero. Not unless something’s changed since the last time we talked and you can put up some serious collateral. And so we’re clear, it’s not only you. Nobody is handing out free money right now, Cam. We’re all in a waiting pattern.”

  I swerve into the office lot, a long strip of asphalt that runs alongside the squat redbrick building where Lasky Steak, Ltd. is pressed between a furniture distributor and a chocolate shop. I sling the truck into a spot by the door, grab my cell from the cupholder and flip the audio onto my phone’s speaker.

  “Okay, then. What about my IRA?” I slide out of the truck and race up the alleyway with my phone and keys. I don’t expect to find anybody inside. This place is mostly for me, more living room and test kitchen than office space, an escape I picked up for a steal soon after Beatrix was born, because I couldn’t get a lick of work done at home. I fumble with the keys in the lock, but it’s cranky and refuses to cooperate.

  “What about it?” Ed says.

  “What’s it worth and how fast can you cash it out?” The dead bolt gives, and I trample inside, tapping in the code for the alarm. I don’t bother with the lights, or even closing the door behind me. I’m not going to be here for long.

  “Besides the fact that you’d have to pay a penalty fee plus taxes on the entire amount, did you hear what I just said about the stock market? Don’t touch your IRA, Cam. You’d take a huge hit.”

  “I need to know what it’s worth.”

  “God, I don’t know. Half a million if you’re lucky.”

  The number sticks to my stomach like an ulcer. I haven’t logged in to the account since the last time the stock market took a nosedive. Too painful, especially since my strategy was to wait it out. I’m young, not quite forty. I figured I wouldn’t have to touch it for a while.

  But a half million? Shit. It should be at least double that.

  “Do it,” I say, my shoes squeaking on the polished concrete floor. “But there’s one caveat. I need the money today.”

  I’m moving fast through the dim space, past the factory-style windows high on the exposed brick walls, hung with the twinkle lights I inherited from the caterer I bought the place from. Jade didn’t do much other than throw some vintage rugs over the polished concrete floor, add some couches and chairs—“conversation corners,” she calls them. And in the middle of the room, a glass chandelier over a giant oak table she designed herself, littered with cookbooks and papers. I can’t walk by the thing without thinking back to the night we broke it in; Baxter was born ten months later.

  On the other end of the phone, Ed chokes on a laugh, a loud phlegmy bark. “You can’t... That’s... Look, I want to work with you, I really do, but that’s impossible. Your IRA isn’t liquid. We’re going to have to sell off the stocks first, and there are transfer times—”

  “I need the money, Ed. Like yesterday.” I settle my cell on a shelf in the storage room, giving him time for the realization to sink.

  A long, painful silence.

  I plug the code into the safe, and the lock slides open with a metallic thwunk.

  “Is this about the fire?” Ed says finally. “Because if it is, I can maybe help get the ball rolling with the insurance company. You’re with Hartford, right?”

  “This isn’t about the fire.” I turn around, scanning the shelves for a box, a bag. Something small and inconspicuous. I spot a shoebox on the top shelf filled with old receipts and dump them onto the floor.

  “Then what?”

  What wou
ld happen if I told him the truth? Would he tell his boss, call the cops? I’m pretty sure bankers have an ethical obligation to report suspected crimes, so better to keep Ed in the dark.

  “I don’t have time to explain. You’re going to have to trust me on this.”

  “And you’re going to have to give me some kind of indication of what’s going on before I can agree to do this. I can’t help you without an answer.”

  Normally I could volley like this for days. Winning Ed over with words, cooking up steaks and uncorking a bottle of my best red, plying him gently to my side, but every second I spend arguing is another second I don’t have the money. The clock is ticking. My heart feels like it’s about to explode. I don’t have time for this shit.

  I grab my phone from the shelf and hold it an inch from my face. “What’s going on is that I need you to give me my money. Give me my damn money, Ed. It’s mine. Give it to me!”

  There’s a long patch of empty air, and I force myself to pause. To take a deep breath and blow it out. Get my temper under control just enough to sound remorseful as I start again. “Come on, Ed. You know me. You know I wouldn’t ask unless this was life or death. The truth is I’m desperate, man.”

  The silence stretches again while in my head, I’m doing the math. The rest of the line of credit, the few piles of cash in the safe, cash advances on my three credit cards. If I’m lucky, $100K, which means without that IRA, I’m screwed. Jade and the kids are screwed. I don’t have anywhere near enough.

  I slide the money into the shoebox, along with what I really came for: my gun, a tidy black Smith & Wesson. The three magazines, eight 9mm rounds apiece, I drop into my jacket pocket. That’s twenty-four bullets I can sink into the asshole in the mask. I grab the box and head for the door.

  Ed blows out a breath heavy enough to rattle the line. “Fine. But you’ll have to give me a minute to run things by my boss. Maybe we can work something out where we extend the line of credit if you sign over your IRA. Just to bridge the time it takes to sell the stocks.”