Go-Between

by Lisa Brackmann

  Whatever. She’d expected he was watching her. She hadn’t been trying to hide.

  She’d been so stupid about it before, in Mexico. But she’d never thought of her phone that way until Mexico. Never realized that it could track her, that every app she used to reach out pulled her in, held her close and followed her home.

  The restaurant was loud, colorful and crowded. Mariachis. Birthday parties. Twentysomethings out for drinks. Gary had secured a table at the back of the big patio, away from some of the noise. A soft mist cooled the area, glass bricks with colored bulbs inside helping to light it.

  “So, what d’you think of Houston?” he asked, after she sat.

  “It’s hot.”

  “That it is.” He signaled the waiter. “I ordered us a couple skinny margaritas.” He laughed. “Skinny margaritas. You ever heard of such a thing? But it’s about half the calories of a regular one, and you don’t get all that sugar. I’ve taken a liking to them.”

  Of course he hadn’t asked her if she’d wanted one, and as much as she’d wanted a drink before, drinking with Gary was another thing entirely. But it wasn’t worth arguing about.

  She waited for the drinks and to order—“I’d recommend the small portion of the grilled shrimp—plenty of food for a light eater like you”—before she said, “I have some conditions.”

  Gary snickered. “Do you, now?”

  It was a good thing she’d left her gun in Arcata, she thought. Though if she did shoot him, given this was Texas, maybe she’d get off easy.

  “You really want me to do this? Because I don’t care anymore. I’ll just start telling people what I know about you and your friends.”

  “You’ve got no evidence,” he said. “And no credibility either.”

  “Maybe not. But maybe Danny does. Maybe we’ve made some arrangements.”

  Gary stared at her for a long moment. His predator look. The one that said, you are nothing to me. I will kill you if you get in my way.

  Then he grinned. “I knew I had you pegged right, Michelle. You’re a born operator.” He sipped his margarita. “Not that I’m really all that worried about anything you and Danny might have to say. Danny knows better than to do something like that. Especially where he is right now. Things can happen to a guy in jail, you know.”

  Hearing that, she shivered, the cooling mist chilling her skin.

  She couldn’t back down. Even though she knew Gary was right, and that he still had the upper hand.

  She shrugged. “Are you okay with being embarrassed? I’m thinking your bosses might not like it very much.”

  “Well, you might be right about that.” He settled back in his chair. “So tell me what you have in mind.”

  “I want Danny out of jail. I want the charges dropped.”

  “That’s up to a federal judge and a US attorney, not me.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Don’t lose it, she told herself. She drew in a deep breath. “I know you set him up. I know you used your influence to get his bail denied.”

  “Say that I did. Say that I can get Danny out. What’s to stop the two of you from doing another runner?”

  “We won’t.”

  He shook his head. “You can’t expect me to take that on faith, now. Can you? I’m going to have to see some effort on your part first. What else?”

  “Money.”

  “How much?”

  “How long is the job?”

  “Say, two months.” He grinned. “Though who knows, you might end up liking it.”

  “Five hundred thousand.”

  “What? For two months’ work?” From the expression on his face, this might have been the funniest thing she’d said yet. “I’ll tell you what, sweetie, you’ve got some balls, asking me for that kind of money.”

  “I’ve got obligations, Gary,” she said, voice tight. “A federal drug trafficking defense to pay for. A restaurant manager to hire. And probably an airplane to replace.”

  “Two hundred K, and don’t ask for any more. You work past the two months, we can renegotiate.”

  “What about Danny?”

  “You work the first month, I’ll see what I can do.”

  It was his best offer, and she knew it.

  Better than she’d expected, actually.

  Their dinners came. The shrimp was pretty good, Michelle had to admit.

  “Her name’s Caitlin O’Connor,” Gary said. “You heard of her?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Think about it, I bet you have. Rich lady. She and her husband and their little boy got carjacked. Kidnapped. A couple of crazy crackheads. They didn’t think the whole thing through. Drove them around to a few ATMs to withdraw money. Shot the husband, threw the kid out of the car. Raped her a couple times. Kid died in the hospital.”

  He tore the tail off a shrimp and sucked out the little bit of flesh from it. “Anyway, she made it through, more or less. Became real active in promoting victims’ rights and public safety. Started a foundation, Safer America. Ringing any bells yet?”

  It sounded familiar, one of those stories running 24/7 on cable news networks, along with missing blonde women, kidnapped girls forced into sexual slavery, and the mom who drowned her kids and pretended that the black guy did it.

  Background noise.

  “Right,” she said. “I think I know who you mean.”

  “I’ll email you some articles tonight. Read them over, and we can probably set up an interview for tomorrow or the day after.”

  “Tomorrow? Where is she?”

  “Here in Houston.” Gary ripped off the shell and legs of his next shrimp and popped the meat into his mouth. “I try and make things convenient.”

  “Call me after you’ve looked this over,” he’d written. “I imagine you’ll have a few questions.”

  Sitting in her hotel bed, reading the news articles on her iPad, she remembered the story. The rich, perfect couple and their five-year-old son, coming home from a Pixar movie in their Range Rover. The carjackers, two black men, who’d held them up at a gas station, not even caring that their faces were caught on a surveillance camera. The son, tossed out along the side of the road like garbage, though the killers had claimed they’d only wanted him out of the way. The husband, shot in the head while kneeling among the weeds and the scrap and the trash of a vacant lot down by one of the bayous.

  The wife, raped. Shot. She should have died, but she didn’t. The two men had been out of their heads, drunk and lit up, so high that they couldn’t think straight, and they’d left her bleeding in the backseat of the Range Rover while they argued about what to do, and somehow, she’d managed to open the door and stumble away, into the night, while they continued to fight outside the liquor store where they’d stopped to buy more beer.

  Michelle studied a photo of the family. One of those corny studio portraits against a backdrop of hand-painted blue-gray muslin. You’d think with their money they could have done something more interesting, she thought, and then she pushed that thought away. I’m a horrible person, she told herself. This was a tragedy, after all.

  She made herself look at them. At Paul O’Connor, brown hair, square jaw, broad smile, in his suit and tie, staring up and to the right, per the photographer’s direction, no doubt. At then toddler Alex, blond, burbling on his father’s knee.

  At Caitlin.

  Blonde, like her son. Big hair, but not ridiculously so. Small frame, cheerleader pretty. Smiling, like her husband, at some beautiful and amusing vision to the upper right.

  “The only thing you can do when you have something like this happen to you is to try and keep moving.”

  Her voice was soft, well modulated. Quiet enough that you found yourself leaning forward to listen. Or in Michelle’s case, holding the iPad closer to her face.

  “So, you founded Safer America,” the interviewer prompted. Some cable news channel flack. Along with the articles, Gary had sent a collection of video links in the body of his email.
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br />   On screen, Caitlin nodded. It had been four years since the attack. Seven since the family studio portrait. Her blonde hair was now cropped closer to her head. She’d lost that cheerleader prettiness. It had turned into something else, something more fragile, almost ethereal.

  That can work for you, Michelle thought. Lots of people found vulnerable-looking women attractive. They weren’t threatening. They needed protection.

  “Yes. I felt that not enough attention was given to the victims of violent crimes. So we try to act as advocates for them.”

  “But you push for stronger public safety measures as well.”

  “Well, that goes hand in hand with supporting victims.” Caitlin sat on a couch in what might have been her own home. An expensive cream-colored sofa in a large living room. Michelle couldn’t make out many details the way the shot was framed, but she thought that the sofa might be a Barbara Barry.

  “When people have been victimized, they are desperate to have their sense of safety restored. And by knowing that violent offenders will be locked up where they can’t hurt anybody else, they get just a little bit of their own security back.”

  She smiled. A sad, tentative smile.

  It wasn’t just that she looked vulnerable, Michelle realized. If anything Caitlin was beautiful now, instead of merely pretty.

  “Drugs have taken over our cities.” A deep, bourbon-voiced narrator, who Michelle was pretty sure also did trailers for Hollywood movies.

  Grainy black and white shots of addicts drawing on crack pipes, white smoke swirling around their pockmarked, skeletal faces. Graffiti-bombed street corners, with furtive dealers exchanging brown paper bags of contraband.

  “Yet Felix Gallardo insists that drugs aren’t a problem.”

  A shot of a politician at an impromptu gathering—outside a courthouse? City Hall? Surrounded by news mikes. “Drugs aren’t the problem,” he said in quick staccato rhythms. Michelle wondered if the bite had been edited. “We’re spending too much money on law enforcement solutions—”

  A freeze-frame on his face, his expression caught so that he appeared to be half-drunk. A crawl of text with statistics, with the narrator reading highlights: the percentages of violent felons with illegal drugs in their systems, drug-related traffic accidents, the crimes committed by addicts, the number of kids who’d smoked pot last year, rolling by so quickly they were hard to read.

  Then, a smash cut to a young black man wearing prison scrubs, sitting at an institutional aluminum table, clasped hands resting in front of him. “I was so high I was crazy,” he said, staring at his awkward, knobby hands. “So, yeah, I shot them. I killed them.”

  Back to the freeze-frame of the politician and the voice-over artist.

  “Drugs aren’t a problem. Really, Felix?” The shot fading to a black screen. “Paid for by Safer America.”

  Michelle picked up her Emily iPhone and called Gary.

  “I do have a few questions. Are you free tomorrow, for breakfast?”

  Chapter Six

  “So, if it doesn’t say ‘organic,’ and it uses canola oil, doesn’t that mean it’s genetically modified?”

  “Probably.”

  “And same thing with soy?”

  Michelle gritted her teeth and nodded.

  “What’s the world coming to, when you can’t even trust tofu?” Gary said with a sigh.

  “Just coffee,” Michelle told the hotel waitress.

  “Yeah, me too.” Gary settled back in his bucket chair. “I’ve been doing intermittent fasting anyway.”

  They sat in a corner of her hotel’s coffee shop, underneath a painting of an offshore oil rig done in Day-Glo colors, which looked to be part of a series also decorating the adjoining bar and lobby.

  “So, I want to make sure that I understand the situation,” Michelle said. “Caitlin’s actively involved with fundraising for this foundation of hers. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “And the foundation contributes to political campaigns.”

  Gary nodded.

  “And there’s a national election coming up in November.”

  The waitress arrived with their coffee and a white ceramic pitcher and a matching container of sugar and sweetener. Gary took a sip of his coffee and made a face. “Is that half-and-half?” he asked. He winked at Michelle. “I’ll risk the bovine growth hormone.”

  “So Caitlin’s going to be in the public eye a lot,” she continued, after the waitress left.

  “Yeah. That’s one of the reasons we need you for this job. She can go a little overboard on the cocktails, and we can’t afford to have that happen on the national stage.”

  “And I’m her babysitter.” Michelle had a sip of her coffee. He was right; it was pretty bad. She poured a little half-and-half from the pitcher into the cup. “How does that make sense?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have a boyfriend in jail on pot charges,” she said in a low voice. “Odds are I’m going to get questioned by, by the FBI, or whoever’s investigating this at some point. Even if I’m just standing in the background, things like that get found out. So if you really want this to work—”

  He snorted. “Oh, I see where you’re going on this—I should get Danny’s case dismissed. Actually, I have a better idea. Emily might have a pot-smuggling boyfriend. Michelle doesn’t.”

  It took her a moment to get what he meant.

  “Wait … you want me … you want Michelle—?”

  “Sure! We can work that tragic widow angle. Maybe you and Caitlin can do some bonding over it.”

  Sucker punched again.

  Stupid, she told herself. You’re so stupid. He’s already thought two steps ahead of you.

  She sipped her coffee, which tasted even worse as it cooled off. Thought about Gary’s move. And realized, it still didn’t quite make sense, not on the surface, anyway.

  “I guess I don’t get why that’s better,” she said. “So Danny’s a pot smuggler. My husband cheated investors. If he hadn’t died, he’d be in jail.”

  “Well, we’ve been doing a little cleanup on your late husband’s business. He still doesn’t come off great, but more like, incompetent and in over his head, rather than an outright crook.” He pointed at her, grinning. “You, on the other hand, were safely out of the loop. Which is the truth.” He leaned closer. “Right?”

  She felt her cheeks flush. She knew what he was implying. He’d accused her of being Tom’s accomplice before.

  She hadn’t known. But she’d suspected. And she hadn’t done a thing about it.

  “Right,” she said, keeping her voice steady.

  “And your motivation is, you’re trying to move beyond the pain of the loss by helping others. Plus, you need the money.”

  “Where have I supposedly been for the last two years?”

  “Mexico, and then you traveled. You know, looking for meaning, or romance, or what have you. Like in all those books you women love. Not staying in any one spot for too long. India, China, Vietnam, Bali … all places you’ve been, don’t worry about that.”

  “Places I’ve been a long time ago. Gary, this, this is …”

  Crazy.

  She stopped herself from saying it. “Crazy” was how Gary operated.

  “Yeah, maybe skip China,” he muttered. “Too many changes.”

  “Problematic,” she said.

  “It’ll work. Everything will check out.”

  “I left some loose ends. The lawsuits—”

  “Fixed. Turns out a little hedge-fund group came in and bought up the remaining assets of your husband’s business. As a part of the deal, they settled with the original investors.”

  She hadn’t thought there were any remaining assets. Just the shell of Tom’s company and ownership on paper of a project he hadn’t been able to develop, the one that had taken their house, taken their savings, that had bankrupted his business. As far as she’d known, anything left had been hopelessly encumbered when she’d gone to Mexic
o over two years ago, for her five-day vacation.

  Given the people Gary knew, given whom he worked for …

  “And I guess I signed off on this deal?” she asked. The question tasted bitter.

  “I guess you did. And you were real happy to, apparently. Cause you know, you hated the idea of leaving people out all that money because of your husband’s poor business decisions.”

  The truth was, she hadn’t even thought about those people, not since she’d become someone else and they were no longer her problem.

  “And now you’re ready to start over fresh. With a clean slate.”

  Which in a way, she’d already done. Only it hadn’t lasted.

  She could call her old attorney to confirm some of this. He had to have helped draw up the hedge-fund deal. He must have thought she’d agreed to it.

  “So, how did you do it? Faked some emails from me? Forged my signature?”

  “Something like that.” Gary studied her face, without his usual leer or threat. “Don’t you want to be Michelle again?” he asked. For once, he seemed genuinely curious. “Have your old life back?”

  She hesitated. Actually thought about it. How she’d lived, back in Los Angeles. How she’d lived the last two years.

  “Not really.”

  “The interview’s just a formality. You’ll be meeting with Porter Ackermann, the executive director of Safer America. He’s already heard all about you.”

  “All about me?”

  “Well, what he needs to know. That you’re the right person for the job. That you know how to handle the kinds of situations you’ll find yourself in.”

  She hoped he meant fundraisers and cocktail parties.

  “After that, you’ll see Caitlin. That won’t be a problem. She’ll go along with whatever Porter tells her to do.”

  She knew there was a big piece of the puzzle missing, and that Gary wouldn’t tell her what it was if she asked him. But she decided that she might as well ask. Maybe something in his reaction would give her a clue.

  “There’s another thing I don’t get, Gary. Why do you care about this?”