Back AT You

by John W. Mefford

  Before I left Vegas, though, I had one more piece of unfinished business. Jerry said he’d tag along and provide moral support. I think it was because he wanted to make sure I didn’t commit another felony.

  Honestly, I wasn’t entirely certain that I wouldn’t.

  38

  Alex

  Jerry and I found the Faulks at poolside. Not surprisingly, Byron wore dark sunglasses and had a Bloody Mary in his hand.

  Irony? I think not.

  The sun reflected off the stone to radiate some serious heat. In the few seconds it took for us to walk about fifty feet, Jerry was wiping sweat from his pink face. I saw Becca and Sonya in the pool, tossing a ball back and forth, dodging a swarm of other swimmers. They didn’t notice us as we pulled up next to Byron’s lounge chair. Jerry’s large body cast a shadow over Byron, who’d moved the straw to the side and was chugging his Blood Mary as if he’d been withheld any liquid substance for a week.

  Jerry cleared his throat. Byron held up a finger, downing the last drop, then let out an “Ah” and wiped his mouth with his bare arm. He had on shorts and a short-sleeve T-shirt that highlighted the much-hyped Mayweather-McGregor fight in Vegas a while back. The fight, from what I recalled, had been mostly a farce. Just like Byron.

  “Byron,” I said.

  He finally looked up. “Alex?” He lowered his sunglasses, shot a glance at Jerry. “What are you doing back in Vegas? And who’s your, uh…friend?”

  “Let’s go inside and talk,” I said, motioning toward the building with my head.

  He splayed his arms. “This weather is beautiful. Why would I want to go inside?”

  “I think we need to have a conversation, preferably away from the girls.” I saw Sonya and Becca diving for the ball, giggling with each other. They seemed so happy. I wondered how many moments during a regular day in the Faulks’ home they were allowed such a luxury. They still hadn’t looked in our direction.

  Byron lowered his glasses again, eyeing Jerry and me. “You never told me what you’re doing back in Vegas, or who this guy is.” He had a bit of a shaky-voice going on. I wasn’t sure if it was because he was plastered…or if he had the sense that his past mistakes would no longer be cloaked in secrecy or brushed off as a typical problem of a suburban dad with a mortgage, and a wife and child, and pressures at work, and all the other responsibilities that came with his life.

  “I’m here to talk to you, Byron. To give you the opportunity to answer a couple of important questions.”

  He grabbed his glass and tipped his head back. Nothing was in the glass except red-colored ice. He held up his empty. “Where’s a damn waiter when you need one?”

  “You don’t need another drink. You’re probably going to need a lawyer,” Jerry said.

  Byron threw off his glasses, giving Jerry the once-over. “And who the hell are you?”

  Jerry pulled out his credentials and extended his arm without saying a word.

  “Of course, I don’t have my FBI credentials,” I said. “They were stolen, along with everything else. Including my daughter.” On the last three words, I could feel my own voice quivering. I took in a slow breath.

  “I know you’re upset, Alex. Sonya and I didn’t sleep a wink until we got Becca back—thanks to you, I might add. But you should be happy now, back at home and enjoying your daughter. What in the world are you doing here with this guy?”

  “He’s my boss. He’s my friend. Are you familiar with the term ‘friend’?”

  He tried to laugh, but he never got there. “Funny, Alex.”

  “I’m not fucking laughing.”

  His jaw clenched. Mine did too. So did my fists and every other muscle in my body.

  Jerry touched my arm. He could see the tension I was carrying. Another deep breath. “I kept asking myself, Byron—why were Becca and Erin chosen out of all the girls in Vegas?”

  He shrugged. “It’s that age, you know. Those perverts go after the girls who are young, cute, and easy to manipulate. I just hope they catch the bastards who did this to the girls. To you, Alex. To Sonya and me. It’s got to stop.”

  I nodded. “Oh yeah, it’s going to stop. Right fucking now.”

  He looked like he’d just had a rotten egg shoved up his nose.

  “You’re right about the perverts, Byron. I’ve seen them, smelled them even. They’re worse than you can possibly imagine. And they drugged your daughter. They beat your daughter. And they raped your daughter.” I could feel tears welling in my eyes—fueled by sadness and rage—for what Becca had experienced, for what Erin had experienced.

  Byron looked at the pool, scratching his chin. His hand had the jitters. A chemical reaction, or were the words finally evoking true emotion?

  “You know Dmitri, don’t you, Byron?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He had no conviction behind his words. It almost sounded robotic. He kept his gaze on the pool.

  “You’re a druggie, Byron. You, like so many others, are addicted to fentanyl, aren’t you?”

  He didn’t move for a second. Then, he pulled his knees up and put his hands over his ears, as if he couldn’t bear to hear any more.

  I gave him a moment.

  “I didn’t want to do it,” he said, his voice cracking. “But that Russian fuck wouldn’t drop it. He wouldn’t cut me a break or give me more time to pay back the debt. He didn’t care about anyone except himself.”

  I held back a nasty retort, miraculously. Instead, I asked, “How did it go down, Byron?”

  He closed his eyes. His skin turned ruddy. “I ran into Dmitri at a party here in Vegas about a year ago. He was suave, European, had women draping all over him. I was a little envious. He said he could hook me up.”

  He swallowed. “From the very first pill he gave me, it took me to a place I’d never felt. All the booze I’d downed over the years never came close to this feeling. I was on top of the world. Nothing could hurt me. After I came down from that high, I knew I had to experience it again. He showed up at my room the next day, almost like he knew I’d be begging him for more. He gave me more, but at a price. I had money, so it didn’t matter much at first. Eventually, I got back home, tried to settle into my normal life…well, my normal life of being a walking, talking drunk. But it just wasn’t enough.”

  He looked up with pleading eyes that were so bloodshot it was hard to see the white. I crossed my arms, didn’t say a word.

  “He supplied me the drugs, and I paid. But after a while, I needed so many just to get through a week, it was more than I made. We couldn’t pay the mortgage or car payments. It got bad. We were saved by Sonya’s parents one month, but I was desperate…for money, for the pills, for the escape of it all. I planned a trip out here for spring break and thought I’d talk to Dmitri in person and get it all worked out. But he didn’t see it the same way. He got pissed and told me there was only one way he’d remove all the debt. I had to find someone competent to carry his drugs from LA back to Vegas. Taking the girls, though, was his idea.”

  “So it was all him, not you? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  He grabbed his head with both hands and shook and cried. After a few seconds, he got it under control. “You’re right, Alex. I chose to ignore the danger the girls would be in. I had a feeling he was into some bad stuff, including using girls as prostitutes. I…I knew it, but I did it anyway.”

  “So,” Jerry said, “you worked with Dmitri to set up those calls to your wife and Alex?”

  He nodded. “I guess I hoped that Alex would come through and that the girls would be released in a few hours, and other than a little bit of a scare, we’d all be fine. No harm, no foul, right?”

  Sonya walked over and grabbed a towel. “Alex…Byron? What’s going on?”

  I spotted Becca, who was smiling in the pool, talking to another girl her age. And then I looked at Sonya. “I’m sorry for you. I’m sorry for your family.”

  Jerry put his hand on my shoulder. “I’ll take it
from here, Alex. You’ve got business to attend to.”

  I patted his arm and walked off with tears raining down my face.

  39

  Ivy

  In my tenure at CPS, and even during my time in running ECHO, I rarely had the chance to reunite a child with her parent when neither was at fault for any wrongdoing.

  But right now was one of those few precious moments. Along with Cristina and the FBI agent in the back seat, I pulled up to the curb in front of the Bailey home. Before the car had rocked to a stop, Angel had thrown open the door and jumped out.

  “Careful now,” the agent said.

  I shifted the gear to park and watched Angel run into her father’s arms. He picked her up, spun her around. A moment later, little Lila poked her head out the front door of the house. With a toothy smile on her face, she barreled into her father and sister.

  We gave them all the time they needed. Eventually, Lila ran back inside. I took that as my cue to walk up the sidewalk and speak to Gerald. With his arm still wrapped around Angel, he reached out and grabbed my hand. Tears of joy rained down his face.

  “Thank you. You have no idea the gift you’ve given me.”

  I smiled. We talked for a couple of minutes. Angel was aware that her mother was in a detox center.

  “I hope she feels better, and we can become a family again,” Angel said.

  “I hope so too, sweetie,” her father said, giving her a kiss on the forehead. “Just know it’s going to be a long road. She’s going to need to see a counselor, and I’ll probably join her.”

  “I’ll go too. Anything for Mom,” she said, wiping a tear from her cheek.

  I was amazed at her ability to not hold a grudge against her mother. I didn’t want to mention that her mother might face criminal charges. Now was a time for healing and forgiveness—two things kids rarely see from their parents, at least in my experience.

  I gave Angel a final hug and said goodbye.

  As I got back into the car, I received a text from Saul. We’d been going back and forth since I’d bought a phone at the airport.

  “Are you and Saul sexting again?” Cristina asked.

  I looked at the agent in the back seat. She half-smiled and went back to reading something on her phone.

  “We’re not sexting.”

  “Okay, doing your xoxo thing. You’re just so giddy these days, like a love-struck teenager or something.”

  “What can I say? We’re—”

  “In love. Right. Got it.” She gave me the thumbs-up. “Did I tell you that Brice asked me out?’

  “Uh, no. What happened to Poppy?”

  “We realized we were just friends. But Brice is…hot.” She smiled.

  I nodded.

  She smacked her hands against her jeans “So, are you ready to dive into teacher background checks?”

  “Almost.”

  “Almost,” she repeated, as if she were in deep thought. “Wait, you said something about meeting your friend, Alex, in Austin. Is that now?” she asked, pointing downward.

  I nodded.

  “Why would you do that when you just got back from almost being killed by those Russian amigos?”

  “It’s something I really need to do.”

  “Can’t Alex do it on her own?”

  “Maybe. But something is pulling me. I can’t explain it. It’s bigger than me, bigger than Alex.”

  She shrugged. “I guess I can knock out a few while you’re gone.”

  After dropping off the agent at the airport and Cristina at her apartment, I jumped on I-35 and drove north to Austin. In a couple of hours, two more lives would forever be changed. And I knew I had to be there for my friends.

  40

  Alex

  Ivy and I stood at the side of my rental car just off the curb of a street in old west Austin. The street was lined with lush trees and homes as unique as the city, long known for embracing its “weirdness.” It had taken longer than expected to hunt down Ozzie. We had first dropped by his apartment. He didn’t answer the door, but a neighbor of his, a nice gentleman named Ervin, had steered us to this home—the old house that he and Nicole had purchased only weeks before he saw the love of his life plunge to her death. Or so he’d thought.

  My eyes glanced at the yellow and brown For Sale sign in the front yard; then I lifted my sights and saw Nicole Novak—a.k.a. Liv Bradshaw—walk the last few steps toward the front door. Her gait was apprehensive, almost like a young flower girl padding up the aisle in a church wedding. But I knew she was bursting with excitement. Of course, this excitement had only come after a period of great mourning and grief.

  I thought back to what had transpired in the last twenty-four hours, starting with the news that would, for the second time in the last few months, alter the paths of more than one life. In the screened-in porch of Bruce Massey’s in-laws’ home, Holt told Nicole that her parents had been murdered in Belgium through some type of nerve agent that had touched their skin in a crowded train station. At first, Nicole was quiet, as if all her emotion had been sucked out of her long ago. But slowly, over a few minutes, she began to cry. Ivy and I did our best to console her.

  “For years, I wasn’t even sure they were alive. And now that they’re actually dead…I don’t know. It’s just so unfair.”

  That night, since I only had minutes before heading off to join the raid on Dmitri’s compound, Ivy and I learned part of the story. Unbeknownst to anyone, including Ozzie, Nicole’s parents had worked as double agents, infiltrating the GRU—Russia’s foreign intelligence agency—while actually working for the CIA. It had taken the couple years to slowly work their way into a position where they would provide useful information back to the CIA. But they were outed by someone who held a grudge against the CIA and narrowly escaped their first encounter with Russian agents who’d hunted them down just outside of Moscow. While they were on the run, the CIA believed that the Russians had learned of the Ramseys’ one and only offspring, and that was when Nicole had also become a potential target. She had to go into hiding to protect anyone who might also be a target because of knowing her—such as Ozzie and his daughter, Mackenzie.

  “Nicole is so nervous,” Ivy said, bringing me back to the present scene. “I know she doesn’t want to give Ozzie a heart attack.”

  “But she wanted to do it in person,” I said. “She thought that if she called him, he wouldn’t believe her—and not just because he can’t hear very well. She was really concerned he would think it was a very cruel joke.”

  Nicole brought her hand up to the door, paused, and then rapped three times. Everyone thought I was this hero for rushing into dangerous situations to help people I cared about. But could I actually walk away from the people I loved most to keep them safe, fake my own death, know that I’d probably never see them again? That was what Nicole had done. It was the ultimate act of love…where the recipient may never know the truth.

  Nicole waited until we met up with Ivy an hour earlier to share the first part of her story. She said she first learned of her parents’ danger when FBI agents snuck a note into her purse while she was attending a marketing conference in New York. She’d met an agent at a bar, and he’d explained everything. At first, she was in shock, simply because she hadn’t heard from her parents in years. She wondered if they’d died while serving the country they loved. After she took in that new information, the agent brought in Holt, and he gave her the options. She only had one day to get back to him, so they could plan her exit strategy. She didn’t sleep a wink and was tormented every minute of those twenty-four hours.

  In the end, she made the call to fake her own death. At first, they weren’t sure how it would go down—until the FBI learned of the obsession of one of her old college friends, Mitch Durant. She had turned down his advances at the conference. At the time, she didn’t think it was more than a guy having too much to drink. Then, the FBI started digging into Mitch’s life. What they found was a very deranged person, and someone who had m
ore than an infatuation with Nicole. As they monitored his communication, they learned he’d hired a known hitman, Bruno Hopper, to kill Nicole. This, Holt had told her, would be the catalyst for making this event so believable that no one would question it. And that would allow them to achieve their goal—protect Ozzie and Mackenzie, while Nicole would start a new life after undergoing some changes to her appearance.

  Holt and a few agents in the FBI Witness Protection Program worked behind the scenes to make it all happen. They found out when Hopper was in Austin. They tracked his whereabouts and his communication to Durant. They had a stuntwoman on the ready. She’d altered her appearance to look similar to Nicole. Nicole knew she could get word from Holt and his team at any moment. It just happened to be when she was leaving work to meet Ozzie to celebrate their anniversary. She was near the bridge that day, but not on it, talking to Ozzie on the phone, pulling off the act like a seasoned actor. The stuntwoman wore a Kevlar vest, took three bullets to her chest, and fell off the bridge. She lived—agents helped her out of the raging river minutes after she’d dropped in.

  I asked Nicole about the ring finger—police had found a severed finger with her rings on it in the river—since I noticed she had all ten of her fingers. She said the finger was from a cadaver. She had to give up her rings anyway, so this was one way she knew Ozzie would be able to keep her rings.

  After hearing the full story, Ivy and I were stunned into silence for more than a few minutes.

  “Ozzie had no idea your parents were in the CIA?” Ivy asked.

  “I couldn’t tell him. When I left school at Cal-Berkley after we met, it was to go see them in Europe. I thought it might be my last time to ever see them.”

  After that, we hugged Nicole with everything we had. And then we began the final leg of her trip.

  Back to the present scene. “Do you think he’s even here?” Ivy asked. “Maybe he ran off to a hardware store, or to pick up Mackenzie from school.”