by Kane, Janine
“I like this little town,” Vincent was saying. “I’m thinking of perhaps settling down here. I know you have family in this area, any suggestions?” he said.
He wanted him to bite; Hank knew that. He had come a ways since he’d been the guy who’d ran out here to hide behind his sister’s skirts. Not far, but a ways. He wasn’t going to grovel to this bastard, that was for sure. At least, that’s what he thought, until the next words came out of Heston’s mouth.
“I found the nicest little bakery here in town. I originally went there for the bear claws, but the service turned out to be so nice that I just had to keep going back. It’s surprising how you’re just going about your business one day, and then… wham! Out of the blue, the one you’ve been waiting for walks into your life.”
Hank’s already torn up stomach began to churn violently as he thought about Heston being that close to Eva.
“What do you want from me, Vincent? I don’t have any money,” Hank finally said. He knew he was defeated. If they killed him, at least maybe they would leave Eva alone to get on with her life.
Vincent smiled again. “I thought that I wanted to kill you. I already have the box I was going to put your head in,” he said. Hank could feel his insides convulse. Then Vincent went on. “Then I met your sweet sister. She was the one that I had planned on sending the box too. But after meeting her, I decided that I just couldn’t do that to her. She seems so delicate…”
“Vincent, please…”
“Please what, Hank? I’ve already disclosed to you that my intentions are not to kill you, and I can swear to you on my own mother’s sacred grave that I have only the most honorable of intentions towards your sister.”
Armando looked confused when Vincent said “my mother’s sacred grave.” Hank knew Vincent’s mother was probably as healthy and spry as ever. His intentions were never honorable.
“Eva has a boyfriend. She’s in love with him. She’s started a new life here, Vincent. I’m the one that screwed up… badly. Please don’t make her suffer for it.”
“Oh, but I have no intentions of making her suffer,” Vincent told him. “Quite the contrary. You see, that house that she lives in with that military man is… unsuitable for a woman of your sister’s caliber. I can offer her a palace, make her my queen. She would never have to dirty her hands in that bakery again. She would have anything her heart desired. How would that be making her suffer?” he said, giving Hank a look that said he better give the right answer. “Are you insinuating that I’m so repulsive, your sister wouldn’t want to be with me?”
Hank was sweating again. He could feel it rolling down into his eyes. His hands were behind his back, fastened with Flexi Cuffs, so he couldn’t wipe it away. He tried to keep his voice steady as he said, “That is not what I am suggesting at all… sir. I just wasn’t aware that you knew she was already involved with someone.”
“See, now there’s the key,” Vincent said. “A smart guy doesn’t try and come between them. If she chose me over him, well then, she would be a cheating slut and not worthy of wearing my crown. But… if the one she was involved with were to somehow be taken out of the equation... well then, the road to destiny is paved.”
Chapter Twelve
Broken Dreams
Sutherland Springs, Texas
Monday Evening
Danielle was finally home. It had been an extraordinarily long day to start out her week. She walked in the door and kicked off her shoes, and then she headed straight for the kitchen and the bottle of chardonnay that she knew was waiting for her in the refrigerator. She wasn’t much of a drinker, but her old neighbors had given it to her as a goodbye gift when she moved. Tonight, she was really glad she had it.
As she pulled open the bottle, she remembered that she hadn’t unpacked her wine glasses yet. She looked around the kitchen; it was full of cardboard boxes. She had no idea which one they were in. Sighing, she pulled a paper cup out of the cupboard and poured herself a drink. As she took the first sip, she willed the warmth of the golden liquid to course quickly through her body and rinse away the stress.
She had been at the courthouse for exactly three hours before Special Agent Gomez had approached her. She had already been given two new cases and had been heard on one parole violation and on two other bail hearings. When she had finally gotten a break, she was going to run out and grab a much needed latte, until Gomez caught her.
“Good morning, Miss Thurston,” he’d said.
Danielle thought he looked familiar, but she couldn’t quite place where she knew him from. “Good morning,” she replied with a smile, hoping to continue her rush to the Starbucks across the street.
“Could I speak with you for a moment?”
Danielle looked longingly at the front door of the courthouse. She had been so close…
“What is this about?” she asked, trying to keep the impatience out of her voice.
“I’m not sure if you remember me?” he queried. When she didn’t respond right away, he explained, “I’m Special Agent Antonio Gomez with the DEA. We met on a few court cases over the last year or so.”
“Yes, of course, Agent Gomez. What can I do for you?” she asked reluctantly.
“I have a… prospective client for you in conference room number two. I was wondering if you had just a few minutes to meet with us.”
“This is a bit unusual,” she said. She should have just said, “No,” and walked away.
“Ayden Styles referred him,” he added.
Shit! That name haunted her wherever she went these days. She looked at her watch. “I have a few minutes.”
And then he had led her to him! That arrogant, self-worshipping, mass of muscle with very little brain, Grayson Alexander. She wished she could get just one do-over, and never get out of bed that morning.
She carried her wine glass into the living room. Searching amongst the boxes, she found the remote control and turned on Nancy Grace. As Nancy’s self-assured voice droned on in the background, Danielle cleared a spot on the couch and sat down. Taking another sip of her wine, she thought about Ayden.
She had lied to Gray. Ayden was more than just another client. She often wished that wasn’t the case, and she prayed for the strength to cut ties and walk away someday. Grayson Alexander, however, would probably be the last person on Earth who would understand her motivations for not doing so.
Danielle, Dani, as her friends called her, had been raised in Texas. She had a fairly normal childhood with a daddy who first worked in and then owned a motorcycle shop and a mama who stayed home and baked cookies. She was an only child for the first six years of her life, and then her brother had come along, uninvited as far as six-year-old Dani had been concerned. Dani had been sullen throughout her mother’s pregnancy. Suddenly, all conversations and activities any adults in the house undertook seemed to be about the new baby. He wasn’t even here yet, she had thought, and already he was stealing all the attention. She was sure she wasn’t going to like him at all.
Danielle reached for the scrapbook on the table in front of her. It had been the first thing she’d unpacked when she moved into the house. She opened it to a picture of Justin. He was only eight or nine months-old in the picture, but he already had that disarming smile that sucked her right in.
Despite her reservations at first, Dani had quickly fallen in love with her little brother, and he with her. Dani’s mom had given birth to her at the age of thirty-five. She and Dani’s father had tried to get pregnant for years before, and about the time they gave up, Dani had come along. She was their first miracle; Justin was their second. But by the time Justin was born, her mother was forty-two, and the pregnancy had been high risk. He was born premature and had a lot of health problems as a kid. Because of that, he was abnormally small for his age and wore thick, coke-bottle type glasses. He was shy and withdrawn with people other than Dani, and he didn’t have many friends. Dani found out later in life that he had been bullied… a lot. He hadn’t ever told
her, and her parents had only found out by accident. Then he wouldn’t talk about it; he had just internalized it.
Dani loved her family, but her dream throughout high school had been to go to college in Boston, at Harvard. She wanted to major in political science and, with hope, be a U.S. Senator someday. She had worked hard and found out towards the end of her senior year that she had gotten a full academic scholarship. Justin had freaked out when she’d first told him. He had cried and begged her not to leave, telling her that she was the only one who loved him, the only friend he had.
Dani wished now that she’d had a crystal ball. She would have never left him, and he would have never fallen in with the people that he had. But she hadn’t been able to see the future, so she told him, “I’ll come back often. I promise. And you can come visit me too.” She had really meant it then, but life had a knack for getting in the way of good intentions.
Danielle flipped the scrapbook forward to a picture of Justin when he was about thirteen. The bright smile from his earlier pictures had faded to one that was forced for the school photographer. She should have noticed it then. She thought now, as she had a thousand times before, If I had been there… If I had been paying more attention… But she hadn’t been, and when she came home for Christmas that year, she could already see the changes taking place.
Justin was sulky and quiet, even around the family. He seemed almost disinterested in her, although she knew now that it had been his way of punishing her for leaving. She asked her mother about his moods. That was when her mother had told her that Justin was being bullied at school. He had come home a few weeks earlier with a black eye and busted lip. Her mother and father had called the school about it, but Justin refused to give them the names of the boys who had attacked him.
Dani had gotten an internship in Boston over the summer the following year, so she didn’t go home. She kept in touch with her mother, and Justin when he cared to return her calls. He had told her he was doing fine, but her mother sounded anxious every time she called. She never gave Dani any details; she just said she was worried about Justin.
Her father had taken on a business partner, who her mother also said “worried her.” She never told Dani why, other than to say the man “attracted the wrong kind of customers.” Her father, on the other hand, didn’t care what kind of customers they were, as long as they were, in fact, customers. He told Dani that his motorcycle shop was more profitable than ever. He had hired ten new employees, and they were doing so many repairs and restorations, they actually had to turn people away for lack of time. Dani’s mother was a worrier; she had always been. Dani wrote it off to that, and moved on.
The following winter, Dani’s mother died. She had a heart attack at the age of fifty-four. Dani came home for the funeral. Justin was angry. Dani thought it was a normal part of grieving for a then almost fourteen-year-old boy who had lost his mother. She asked her dad to call her if Justin needed her, and she would come home right away, and then she went back to Boston.
Her dad didn’t call. He had thrown himself into work to assuage his own grief, unfortunately leaving Justin to deal with his on his own. That spring, when Dani came home over break, Justin barely came out of his room. When he did, his dull emptiness scared her. She thought that he almost seemed suicidal. He still wouldn’t talk to her about how he was feeling, so Dani did something that seemed like such a good idea at the time. She told her dad they were losing Justin. She told him he needed to snap out of his own grief and take care of his son.
It made her feel bad to talk to her father that way, but he had wallowed in his own grief for too long, as far as she was concerned. There was a point when a father had to kick himself in the ass and move on. She’d told him that he needed to spend more time with his son—quality time. At the very least, he should be taking Justin to the shop with him, teaching him to work on and restore the bikes. It would give the boy an outlet for his grief and anger. Her father took her words to heart and gave Justin a job at the shop.
Justin seemed to blossom after that… for a while. When Dani talked to him on the phone, he was happy and would talk to her for hours about the bikes he was working on, or send her pictures of the ones he had helped their dad restore. He was making friends too. He told Dani the guys at the shop, Dad’s partner’s friends, were “really cool.” She was happy for him, and happy that her dad had taken her advice.
She stayed loosely in touch with her father and brother over the next two years. She had gotten a job in Boston working with the campaign manager of a congressman who had White House aspirations. At the same time, she was working on her master’s degree. She had been so caught up in her own life that when she’d call and Justin told her he was doing well and that Dad’s partner, Christopher, was “teaching him so much,” she hadn’t asked enough questions.
She didn’t go home again until her dad died. Justin was seventeen and Dani twenty-three. He was too young to be alone, and she too young and naïve to understand that an offer she’d thought was heaven sent would turn out to be akin to a deal with the devil.
A knock on Danielle’s front door pulled her up out of her memories. She was happy for the distraction. She put down her wine and the scrapbook and went over to the door. Without asking who it was, she pulled it open and, seeing who stood there, exclaimed, “Oh my God! What do you want?”
“I just need five more minutes… please.”
It was Grayson Alexander. The man was beginning to feel like a stalker.
******
Stockdale, Texas
Tuesday Morning
Hank woke up, sore and disoriented. It was still dark, and he couldn’t remember where he was at first. He started to sit up, and that was when he realized he couldn’t move. He was tied to a bed. Reality was like a slap in the face when he suddenly recalled where he was. He was in a small hotel room, probably six miles from where his sister worked and maybe twelve miles from where she lived. She would never know that, however. Last night, after Vincent told Hank that he was going to make Eva his “queen,” he had his goon Armando hold a gun to Hank’s head while he wrote her a letter.
Vincent told him what to write, and as Hank penned it, he had hopes that it would be what Zack and Evie needed to put them back on high alert. The day he had left their house and got on that bus to Chicago, no one knew where he was going. However, Vincent didn’t know that. When he asked Hank if his sister knew he had left town, and where he was headed, he had told him, “Yes.” He told him that Evie had helped him make the arrangements for the bus and the motel he’d been headed to. As he wrote the letter, exactly as Vincent told him to, he said a silent prayer that the words would sound an alert in Evie and Zack’s minds. The letter said:
Evie,
I got off the bus in Chicago. I was headed to the motel that you and I had talked about, but I think someone was following me. I took a cab all over town, trying to lose them. I finally got back out at the bus station and realized that two of the men who had been looking for me were there. I got back on the first bus I came to. It took me back to Texas—Brownsville, to be exact. That was when I had an idea. Who would look for this white boy in Mexico? I don’t want to walk around looking over my shoulder all the time. I crossed the border into Matamoros, and I plan to make my new life here. I hope you understand.
I love you, Evie.
Hank
Vincent read it, and then as if talking about an animal, he handed the letter to Armando and said, “Feed and water him, and tie him up next door. Then mail this from Matamoros.”
Armando had given Hank a bottle of water and bought him a Happy Meal, which barely scratched the surface of his hunger. Then he had told him to pee because it would be a while before he came back. Hank lay there now, his body a mixture of pain and numbness, and he wondered how long it would take them to find his body if he died here.
***
Vincent made a phone call to Marcella, who he had sent home for a few days to visit her mother. “Tell yo
ur mother I’ll be sending another her way in a day or two,” he said.
“Is it another woman?” Marcella asked.
“No, this one’s a man,” he told her.
“Should mother put him to work as well?” She sounded relieved.
“Yes, my mother’s lawn needs to be taken care of, doesn’t it? Tell your mother to fire the lawn boy; this one will do it for free… for now, anyways. Make sure the same security measures are followed.”
“Si, Señor Heston,” Marcella said. “Do I get to come back to you soon?”
“Not yet. When I get settled into a place of my own, I’ll send for you.”
“Si, Señor.” She was clearly disappointed. Vincent had noticed how tense she became every time she saw him look at the redhead at the bakery. She probably thought he was fucking her right now. But Marcella wouldn’t pout. He had trained her well. And he knew that it wasn’t that she minded him fucking other women; it was that she liked to be there with him while he did.
******
San Antonio, Texas
Tuesday Afternoon
Gray put on his jeans and boots and leather gear. As he waited for his coffee to brew, he thought about his visit to Danielle the night before. As usual, she hadn’t been happy to see him. He didn’t understand it. He was such a nice guy.
Reluctantly, she had let him in the house and said, “I got you out on bail today, wasn’t that enough?”
“No,” he said. “I still need to know what your connection is to Ayden Styles.”
He had seen her eyes flick towards a book on her coffee table and land there for a few moments before she answered him. It just looked like an old scrapbook, but it was the eye motion that convinced him she was lying.
“I told you. He’s a client. Any further discussion would be in violation of his attorney-client privileges.”
