by Shari King
This felt good. Nineteen thousand people in the stadium and he was courtside, one of the chosen few. Across from him, he could see Jack Nicholson deep in conversation with a stunning blonde. A few seats along, Mila Kunis was resting her head on Ashton Kutcher’s shoulder. Just half a dozen seats to his left, David Beckham’s brow was frowning with concentration as he explained something on court to one of his kids, breaking off to shake Jay-Z’s hand as the team owner passed him on the way to his own seat. The seats on either side of him belonged to the boss of a record company and tonight they were occupied by a couple of rap kings Davie recognized from MTV, wearing more bling than the window at Harry Winston.
A beer appeared in front of him, served as a matter of course by a hostess who knew his preferences. The tip-off went the Lakers’ way, and Kobe Bryant scored a lay-up off the first drive.
The game was fast, aggressive and fairly evenly matched, but most of all, it was a distraction. This wasn’t about him. Or about the fact that his life had gone to shit. Here, he was anonymous. Just a guy watching a game.
A slow roar of disapproval started in the crowd and his attention snapped back to the court. Hang on, what had he missed? The teams were on a timeout and yet the crowd’s disapproval was ascending like a furious ringtone, thundering now, with thousands of feet stomping the floor to add to the sheer ferocity of the noise.
What was this? What the hell was going on? Had he missed a foul? Or an injury? Or . . .
His eyes flicked to the big screen up to his left and a wave of ice sliced through his body.
There he was. On the big screen. Caught on the stadium camera. And the boos of the crowd, the disgust on their faces – that was all for him.
This was the modern-day Colosseum of Rome. And the crowd had just made it clear that he was going to have to fight or die.
17.
‘Bang Bang’ – will.i.am
Three a.m. was no stranger to her. Mirren couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone a full night without a visit from her frenemy Insomnia. There were advantages to surviving on a couple of hours’ sleep. When work pressure was on, she could achieve the impossible: rewrite a scene, work on her next novel, clear her inbox, plan her month, tackle the stack of outstanding tasks that came with running a home, a company, a family and a production.
But on nights like tonight, when even the distraction of work couldn’t rouse her from a deep trough of melancholy, insomnia became a slow torture. Every minute lasted an hour. Every hour lasted a week.
Throwing back the duvet, she padded over to the seating area of her bedroom and flicked a switch to spark up the flames that rose from crystals behind the glass of the fire built into the wall. The Venetian mirrored door to the side of the fire concealed a wine rack holding ten bottles of their favourite Pinot Noir. The mini fridge below it had soft drinks, smoothies and a couple of bottles of Jack’s favourite Krug, Clos d’Ambonnay 1998. Until last week the champagne was only liberated in times of celebration or passion. Tonight was neither, but somehow the fact that she’d just popped open a bottle of his $3,000 liquor and poured it into a coffee mug made her feel like she was achieving a small dig at the faithless dickhead. Petty, of course. Even more so when the first sip evoked so many memories that it made her want to retch.
Shivering, despite the heat from the fire, she swapped it for a bottle of water and folded her legs beneath her on the sofa, pulling a cashmere rug over her in the hope of getting some heat into her bones.
Beside her, her phone bleeped and she picked it up to check it, already smiling. It would be Logan. He had absolutely no concept of time difference and he texted her every night before he went to bed and every morning. Not very rock and roll, but it was one of the conditions of him going on the road. Not that she could have stopped him, but he was sweet enough to humour her and play by her rules. Two daily texts and a phone call every other day. Logan never stuck to that one: there was so much hanging around at airports and soundchecks that he rarely went a day without a chat.
A quick mental run-through of his itinerary reminded her that they were playing in Brazil last night. Six hours ahead. So 9 a.m. there. His breakfast text.
‘Morning, Mom. Love ya! Hug Chlo for me. Xx’
If there had been any point, she would have wept. Not for that asshole Jack – she’d parked her grief over that one until she could think straight on how to move forward.
Right now, her sadness was all for Chloe. But what would regret achieve? It wasn’t going to bring Chloe back or straighten her out. This was her doing. Her fault. She’d handled Chloe’s life badly, pushed her away. Yet at the time, she honestly thought she was doing the right thing. Maybe still did. How many times was she going to go over that morning in her head and change her actions? Sliding doors. If she’d made a different decision anywhere along that fateful day, would the outcome have been any different?
Mirren closed her eyes. Pressed rewind.
A year ago. Almost to the day.
The sound of an incoming text on Chloe’s phone.
Mirren was no longer sitting on her bedroom sofa. Her mind was back there, back in Chloe’s bedroom twelve months ago, on the morning that changed everything.
Chloe was in the shower and Mirren had used the time to search her room. There was no doubt she was using again. They’d done rehab twice, they’d done four separate overnight stints in the cells, but nothing had shocked her straight.
Mirren was beginning to wonder if anything would.
They had a drugs specialist in the spare room, a lock on the door, and they were on the third sober companion this month. Two had quit for fear of their own sobriety, and the other one was back in rehab. Chloe’s influence was nothing if not persuasive.
Beep. Beep.
Mirren’s head jerked to the left, to the slight illumination that was radiating from a Louboutin sneaker on the floor. Chloe was obsessive about her phone. Kept it hidden. Never left it anywhere that it could be hijacked by a parent or a cop. It was probably a sign of how spaced out she was that she hadn’t taken it into the bathroom with her.
Looking at it would be an invasion of her daughter’s privacy. It would be crossing a line. But at that moment, Mirren didn’t care. She was in the market for answers. Where was Chloe getting her drugs? Who was dealing? Where was the money coming from? How was it happening? And how could she make it stop?
Putting her hand into the shoe, the first thing she touched was hard, the second soft. Sighing, Mirren put the phone on the bed and put the bag of white powder next to it.
Evidence for the prosecution? Shit Mother, guilty as charged. How had she let her baby get to the state that she was hiding drugs in her shoes?
The phone demanded a password. Mirren paused, then typed in a word, one of the only two things in life that mattered to Chloe. Logan. Ping. Correct answer. The second guess had been coke.
The text was now on the home screen. A movie clip. And a message.
Mirren pressed play.
The image wasn’t the best quality, but good enough to make it quite clear what was happening. A bedroom. High class. Expensive. A hotel. Brochures sitting on the black slate coffee table, in front of an angular black leather sofa. Behind it, a bed, glossy ebony frame, silver bedding. Rich. Opulent. Chris Brown’s ‘Don’t Wake Me Up’ playing in the background.
On the bed, Chloe, just a tiny vest and panties, her red curls matted and wild, her eyes alive, wide, giggling as she snorted a line off a ten-inch-square mirror that she held up to her nose.
The camera jerked as it scanned the room, then went still, as a guy came round in front of it.
‘OK, baby, it’s on,’ he told her.
Back to the bed, to Chloe, beckoning him towards her. The guy – Mirren could only see him from the neck down – came into shot as he stepped towards the bed, the muscles on his naked torso rippling as he moved.
The voices in Mirren’s head screamed, Don’t touch my baby. Don’t you fucking dare touch my baby. He
wasn’t listening.
Chloe pushed herself downwards until she was lying flat, then sprinkled a line of white powder in a straight line from the middle of her breasts down to where her G-string began.
‘Come down here, baby,’ the girl on the bed begged, her voice whiny and insistent. It wasn’t Chloe anymore. It was someone else, someone who looked like her. It had to be. The same face, the same body, the same birthmark, a little brown circle at the top of her right thigh. But that couldn’t be her baby. It couldn’t be.
Only the back of the guy’s head was in view as he leaned down, produced a rolled-up note from the palm of his hand and snorted all the way from the top to the bottom.
Chloe grabbed his hair and pulled him back up towards her, kissing him, laughing.
Then she pushed him back, flicked open the front of her bra, took another pile of powder from the bedside table and rubbed it round her nipples. He paid attention to each one in turn, Chloe moaning with pleasure as he licked them clean.
His hand was on Chloe’s belly now, then moving downwards until he slid it inside her knickers.
No. Oh God, no. Mirren was whimpering now, rocking back and forwards, desperate to turn it off, yet absolutely unable to.
Chloe’s moans became even more insistent, demanding, ordering him to never stop. Oh no, never stop. He retracted his hand now, ignoring her wails of protest, then moved to the bottom of the bed, his back to the camera, but sadly not blocking out the sight of Chloe’s salacious grin as he pulled off her panties.
It didn’t matter. Mirren knew exactly who it was. She recognized the hair, the broad shoulders, the laugh, the voice, and most of all she recognized the expression on her daughter’s face, the one that she saved just for him. She recognized the voice her daughter was using, the same one she used when she was calling him for the tenth time in a day. The one that she was using now to call the shots.
‘Fuck me now,’ Chloe ordered, spreading her legs wide, as he . . .
Cut to black.
At exactly the same moment as Mirren died inside. The message that accompanied the clip was almost irrelevant:
$100k.
That was all it said.
It didn’t matter. No amount of money was going to make that go away. No amount of money was going to save her girl.
Only she could do that. Or die trying.
Trembling, she slipped the phone into her pocket. She’d worry about Chloe’s reaction later.
As she passed the rehab specialist in the other room, she popped her head in. Long grey hair, tied back, a shirt and tie under his medical jacket, he was a survivor of the 1970s rock scene, reinvented as a substance-abuse expert and had come highly recommended as one of the best in town. Mirren couldn’t help thinking he wasn’t that good if he hadn’t discovered Chloe’s stash. She tossed the bag of powder to him, saying nothing.
He nodded as if it was exactly what he’d expected.
‘They’re addicts, Mrs Gore. They find ways.’
‘And I’m paying you ten thousand dollars a day to make sure you’re better at finding them than she is at concealing them.’
He had the temerity to look offended. Mirren had never cared less.
‘I’m putting some more security downstairs. I’ve taken her phone and she’s going to kick off . . .’
‘Mrs Gore, I’d strongly recommend against that. It demonstrates a lack of trust and could be detrimental to—’
‘I don’t give a damn. I’ll be back in an hour. Call me if you can’t cope.’
In the kitchen, she grabbed her phone and pressed number one on the speed dial.
‘Hey, my doll face, what’s going on?’
‘I need help, Lou.’
Her friend didn’t even pause to ask why. ‘Shoot.’
‘Jordan Lang.’
‘Son of a bitch. Is Chloe still hanging out with that vile piece of crap? I was hoping he’d disappear after his daddy cut off the cash supply.’
‘When did that happen?’
Lou immediately switched into information mode.
‘Last weekend. Word is, he emptied his trust fund of half a mill and sold one of Granny’s rocks. Kent Lang went nuts, threw him out, told him to fuck off, disinherited him.’
The demand for cash suddenly made sense.
‘I know it’s a long shot, but any idea where he is today?’
‘Give me five minutes.’
The phone clicked and Mirren used the wait to get prepared. In her study, she flipped open the panel behind the portrait of the kids, taken at the beach when they were about five and six. It was her favourite image of them, excitement and love radiating from them as they ran back to her, the surf in the background.
They’d thrown themselves upon her, sand kicking up everywhere, and they’d all shrieked with glee as she’d tickled them until they couldn’t breathe.
It took less than a second to punch in the code; then the steel door opened and she extracted what she needed.
She was already in the car, completely confident in Lou’s ability to deliver, when her phone rang.
‘He’s at the Combrian, room 456.’
The Combrian. Made sense. Five star, but famous for its long history of rock stars ejecting the contents of their room via the windows, including, last year, a high-class escort who died on impact when she landed on the roof of a Rolls-Royce Phantom down below.
The lead singer of the band was out on bail before her mother in Nebraska knew she was dead.
The door was answered on the second knock, right after she shouted, ‘Room service.’ Idiots didn’t even have the sense to check the peephole.
A guy she didn’t recognize eyed her quizzically, but she burst past him, giving no time for his wasted brain to catch up. As soon as she was inside, she recognized it as the room from the video. If she had any doubt about what she was about to do, she had none now.
Jordan Lang lay on the bed, his tanned, athletic body adorned with nothing more than a pair of tight white boxers, his thumbs flicking the buttons on the Xbox controller he held with two hands. To his left, a square mirror on the bedside table sat next to a bag and a tiny silver spoon.
Two cronies she didn’t recognize lounged on the sofa, eyes fixed on the screen, watching two cars race while gunshots crackled from the sidelines.
Lang didn’t even flinch or take his eyes from the TV screen when she entered. Hard to say if that was because he was high or an arrogant prick. Actually, there was no debate. He was both.
No reaction from the sidekicks either. The one that had answered the door just ambled over and joined his two buddies on the couch. It struck Mirren that they looked like clones: all early twenties, all in jeans that dipped beneath their asses, vests, chains round their necks, baseball caps. What the fuck were grown adults doing wearing baseball caps backwards and trousers that showed their underwear? Pathetic, yet something in their screwed-up DNA made them think it was cool.
Time to take their dangling crotches somewhere else. Mirren calmly crossed to the TV and flicked the off switch.
‘Hey . . .’
‘Glad I’ve got your attention.’
For a second there was a glimmer of confusion on Lang’s face, before it switched straight to anger.
‘What the fuck . . . ?’
‘You three, time to go.’
‘Fuck off.’ Ah, the power of educated speech.
She held up her phone, demonstrating that it was on a video call . . . ‘Right now I’m connected to a very nice friend of mine at LAPD.’
She scanned the room with the phone, ensuring it captured each of their faces, before saying, ‘Combrian, room 456,’ into the speaker.
One of the three looked at Lang for guidance.
‘Don’t look at him, look at me,’ Mirren told him, with absolutely no emotion in her voice. ‘And I’m the one saying that it’ll probably be best for your future criminal record if you didn’t say a word on your way out the door.’
Over on the bed, Jord
an Lang nodded slightly and the three were through the door before being told for a third time. Mirren disconnected her phone and put it in her back pocket.
‘I’m Chloe Gore’s mother.’
‘I know who you are.’
The bravado and arrogance made her teeth grind. Oh, Chloe, how could you choose this one? For a second she wavered, desperate to go, to get his face out of her brain and make it stop polluting her thoughts. But an image of him with his hands on her daughter’s stomach, touching her . . .
She opened her purse, took out the clear bag of wrapped notes and threw it on the bed.
‘A hundred grand,’ she told him. ‘Just in case you can’t count that high.’
No fear, no concern on his face, just a smile of satisfaction there now.
‘Good to know that Chloe’s got a mother who’s onside.’
‘Where’s the original?’
‘On my phone.’
‘Give it to me.’
He grinned as he leaned forward, picked up the cash and whistled.
‘That’s not the deal. The deal is that you give me this, I make sure it never hits the tabloids. They’d pay a hundred grand for it, but this way no one finds out what your girl likes to do when she’s having fun.’
‘The deal is that you give me the original. Right now. End of story.’
His hands pushed back through his shoulder-length black hair as he made his amusement clear.
‘Like I said, that’s not how it works.’
Only once before in her life, a long, long time ago, had she been this desperate to remove a smug smile from someone’s face.
But this time she knew how.
Her actions were almost matter of fact as she opened her Chanel tote, extracted her fully licensed handgun and pointed it at his face.
That got his attention.
‘You wouldn’t,’ he said. Almost dared her.
‘Oh, I so would,’ she answered, voice absolutely calm and absolutely deadly.
