2. Payback

by Fern Michaels

  Two hours later, the Monarch mansion was swept clean. Kathryn took a crowbar from the back of her truck and proceeded to smash every machine in the Monarchs’ office. The women clapped with enthusiasm. Then they high-fived each other.

  Nikki looked around the office. “Charles would be so pleased.”

  “Did we get everything?” Kathryn asked.

  “I went over it twice,” Nikki said. “I cleaned out all the other safes on Charles’s map and just threw everything in those garbage bags.” She held out her hands encased in surgical gloves.

  “I’ll carry Julia. She’s still sleeping. I’ll put her in the backseat of the car they arrived in. You’re driving her, Nikki. Isabelle will be with Alexis, Yoko and myself. Can you handle it?” Kathryn said.

  “Not a problem” Nikki replied. “Be careful, Kathryn, you’re carrying some strange cargo this trip. You’re going to Baltimore Washington Airport where Charles’s people will take over. I’ll see you back in McLean.”

  “See ya!” Kathryn said as she picked up Julia and cradled her to her chest. Her eyes sparkled with unshed tears as she carried her friend out of the house to the car for her ride back to McLean.

  “Kathryn, be careful, OK?”

  “You know it.”

  Fourteen

  Jack Emery looked down at the bottom of his computer monitor to see the date and the time. Then he fingered his battered face. It was healing much too slowly to suit him. He still wasn’t comfortable with the temporary caps on his front teeth. He felt like he had a mouth full of mush that made him lisp when he spoke.

  He felt beaten, worn down. Ten long days since he’d been beaten to a pulp. He probably would have starved to death if it hadn’t been for Mark and take-out restaurants that delivered. The outside world no longer beckoned. He liked sitting on his chocolate colored sofa watching stupid shows on television and swigging beer from long-neck bottles until he fell asleep. He’d only been out twice, to go to the dentist and to pick up prescriptions.

  Jack had no idea what was going on in the outside world. Ten days’ worth of newspapers was piled high on his kitchen counter along with ten days’ worth of mail. He hadn’t turned on a newscast in the same length of time. He knew his old-fashioned answering machine either wasn’t working or the little tape was full. He knew this because two red lights glowed on the square black box. One red blinking light meant there were messages, two blinking lights meant the tape was full. It simply did not matter in the scheme of things.

  Jack clicked off the computer before he shuffled out to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. He was stunned to see an array of food filling the shelves. Fresh orange juice, a new container of milk, a new twelve-pack of Bud, apples, cheese, a loaf of bread, lean-looking bacon, a dozen eggs. Cold cuts from a deli in individual plastic bags, hot dogs, some ground beef, cottage cheese, yogurt and salad greens. Mark must have been here during the night. Obviously, he’d tidied up while he was here, too.

  Good old Mark. He felt bad that he’d sucked his friend into the mess he’d gotten himself into. He didn’t deserve a friend like Mark. Mark agreed. Jack found himself grinning at the thought.

  He knew he had to get off his ass and join the world again. Some world where the bad guys got away with what they were doing and the good guys got the living shit beat out of them. There was something wrong with this picture. Something really wrong.

  Jack headed back toward the chocolate colored sofa. Nikki had helped him pick it out, and the day it was delivered, they’d christened it by making love all night long. He looked over at the matching recliner where he liked to tilt back to read the paper. He eyed the sofa but opted for the recliner. His biggest problem right now was what to have for dinner. Maybe chips and salsa or maybe some of the pre-cooked pudding he’d seen in the refrigerator. Both would require little chewing.

  Jack propped up his feet and swigged from the Bud. He should go back to work. Back to the grind where he tried to put away the bad guys so some smart-ass defense attorney could lie through his teeth to get his client off so he could do the same damn thing all over again. Where the hell was the justice he’d believed in all his life? Where? He felt like crying but big guys didn’t cry. That was a crock. Everything was a crock of crap.

  Jack adjusted the volume on the TV set. He watched ten minutes of Montel Williams interviewing defiant, pregnant teenagers before he switched channels. Judge Sophie was railing against some guy who had stiffed his landlord. He switched channels again to a rerun of Law and Order where the good guys made things right in sixty minutes. Another crock. He finally pressed the mute button and reached down into the magazine basket to pull out last month’s issue of Field and Stream. Maybe he needed to go fishing so he could commune with nature and think about his life. He didn’t even know where his fishing pole was. He dropped the magazine back into the basket.

  He thought about Nikki because when he came to this point in his daily thinking, memories of her surfaced no matter how hard he tried to block them out. Where was she? What was she doing? The image of her stunned expression when she saw him outside the armory would stay with him to his dying day. He knew then she hadn’t known about the beating he suffered. She might not have been privy to the actual details but his gut told him she knew something bad was going to happen. Otherwise…why did a doctor and nurse show up so conveniently?

  He went back to thinking about what he was going to have for dinner when he heard noise coming from his small foyer. He moved fast, quicker than he’d moved in the last ten days, to the sofa and his gun that was between the cushions. It was in his hand in the blink of an eye, the hammer pulled back. He waited, his heart pounding in his chest.

  “It’s me, Jack!” Mark called. “Man, it’s pouring cats and dogs out there. It took me an hour to get here but I did stop at Mozellie’s for some spaghetti and meatballs.”

  Jack clicked the hammer back into position before he pushed the gun down between the cushions.

  “You gotta stop doing this, Mark. I’m not some charity case on your conscience. Tell me how much I owe you so I can square off with you.”

  “What’s a little food between friends? Sorry I haven’t been able to get over here more during your waking hours. You were out like a light when I stopped by last night. You look a little better today.” All this was said as the FBI agent took out cartons and plastic silverware from the shopping bag that oozed the scent of garlic and parmesan cheese and set everything up on the oversized coffee table. Napkins, little packets of salt, pepper, and a plastic container of grated cheese followed. Mark trotted off to get two fresh bottles of beer. He uncapped both of them. “Dig in, buddy, because this is the best spaghetti and meatballs in the state of Virginia.”

  As they gobbled their food, they talked baseball and fly fishing. When they were done, Mark tossed everything into the shopping bag along with the empty beer bottles and carried them out to the trash chute in the hallway. The apartment still smelled like garlic and cheese.

  The FBI agent and the ADA eyeballed each other from their respective positions. Mark took the initiative and spoke first. “Are you ready to hear about what’s going on in the outside world?”

  Jack swigged from his bottle. He shrugged. “Not unless it directly affects me. I’m about ready to go back to work. I have a meeting with my boss in two days. Figure if I wear dark glasses, don’t smile and try to walk normally, I can pull it off. The truth is, Mark, the job has lost its luster. If it doesn’t go well then I’ll start looking for a job in the private sector where the pay is a hell of a lot better plus you get a sign-on bonus. How’re you doing, buddy?”

  “I gave my notice last week. I told you but I guess you don’t remember. You were pretty high on pain pills that night. After that visit from those…those shields, I started looking at things a lot differently. I just couldn’t get back into the swing of it. Then they farmed me out to the DOJ and somehow, I screwed up the program. They chewed my ass out and it was the last straw. These last fe
w days I’ve been busy correcting some of the programs I wrote and installed for the Bureau.”

  “What’s that mean?” Jack asked.

  “What that means, buddy, is I can access all those programs and no one would ever be the wiser. Same goes for Department of Justice. My codes, my own private back doors, my own fire walls, that kind of thing.”

  “You sly devil!” Jack said in awe. “Does that mean you’re going private?”

  “What it really means is, we’re going private. Wait till you hear this. I put up a quickie Web site about ten days ago. I called it the Justice Agency and added a little blurb about righting wrongs, etcetera, etcetera. I applied for grants all over the place under that name and within two days I got a hundred-thousand-dollar-grant from some spinoff of that Monarch HMO setup. Of course you haven’t been reading the papers or listening to the news so you might not know about that. I got the check today. Just like that — a hundred grand. Say something, Jack.”

  Jack hoisted himself up to a better sitting position. He winced, pain flashing across his face. “Are you telling me Monarch went belly up? If that’s the case, how’d you get money out of them?”

  “No, no, they didn’t go belly up. If you’d read the papers you’d know all about this. It happened a day or so after that armory shindig, after those shields paid us a visit. It was on the front page, above the fold, for about four days. Monarch was private so they could do whatever they wanted. They returned premiums, paid off people whose claims were originally denied. They even printed a list in the paper of the recipients along with apologies. A legal firm in D.C. handled the payouts.”

  “Which firm?” Jack asked, although he already knew the answer. His hands started to shake.

  “Nikki’s firm, Jack. Man, think of all those billable hours. Damn, that was a plum for her. There’s more. The Monarchs dropped off the face of the earth. No one is looking for them, if that’s your next question. And, why should they? They disbanded, got religion, whatever, and decided to right the wrongs the company was responsible for. I have to file reports but that’s no big deal. We can keep tabs on Nikki and her firm as well as the others and no one will be the wiser. With my expertise I can hack into her computers anytime I want. Win win, Jack. End of story.”

  “Why do I feel there’s more?” Jack asked uneasily. Dropped off the face of the earth. Just the way Marie Llewellyn dropped off the face of the earth.

  “Because there is more. Senator Webster and his wife disappeared at the same time. Somehow or other, according to the press, the doctor and the senator got into the wrong limousine and no one has seen them since that night at the armory. The weather was a bitch that night and the senator’s detail ended up guarding some elderly Republican couple instead of the Websters. There were some pretty red faces come Sunday morning. The Bureau is on it. Mrs. Webster is gone, too. Seems she had earlier resigned her position at the hospital citing family obligations. As far as I know, no one, and that includes the Bureau, is linking the two together. All five of them literally dropped off the face of the earth. Doesn’t say much for the Secret Service, now does it?”

  Jack rubbed at the stubble on his bruised and battered face. “I’ll be damned.”

  “So are you in with me or not?”

  “That hundred grand isn’t going to last very long, Mark.”

  “Oh, did I forget to tell you, the grant runs for ten years? Ten years, Jack. It will pay us a modest salary, pay the rent on an office plus utilities. We can share an apartment in the beginning to cut down on our personal rent. We’re bound to get some clients if we advertise. We can do this, Jack. I can freelance on the side. You gotta resign, though. Can you do that?”

  Could he? ‘Yeah, I can do that. That means we…”

  “Yeah, that’s what it means, Jack. If we go private we don’t have to answer to our bosses and we can play detective all day and all night, twenty-four-seven. And remember this, the mightiest weapon of all is the written word. All we have to do is find some gung ho seasoned reporter who will listen to us, and wait to print the story we give him. When we have a story to give him, that is. I even think I know the right guy, Bob Lyon. They call him The Lion.”

  “I’m going home now. I suggest your start reading those newspapers on your kitchen counter and then prepare your resignation letter. You OK?”

  “I think I just crossed the threshold to well-ness. I expect my recovery to be short of immediate. Should I thank you, kiss your feet, what?”

  Mark laughed. “Buy dinner tomorrow night. That means you go out and pick it up. We’re gonna get them, Jack.”

  “Yeah, Mark, we’re gonna get them.” If they don’t get us first.

  Less than twenty-five miles away, Myra and Charles walked out into the velvet darkness, crystal goblets of wine in hand. They sat down next to one another. Myra reached for his hand and squeezed it before she placed her head on his shoulder.

  “It’s a beautiful night, isn’t it, Charles? It’s so quiet. Even the Dobermans are quiet.”

  “That’s because it’s midnight,” Charles said.

  “So it is. We should make a toast, Charles.”

  “Not yet, dear.”

  Myra sat up and placed her wine on a rattan table next to the swing she and Charles were sitting in. “Charles, we never speak about…about your grief where Barbara is concerned. It’s always me wailing. Do you…?”

  “No, Myra, I don’t. I know you aren’t going to understand this and sometimes I don’t understand it myself but I just can’t…I don’t know how…it’s all locked up deep inside me.”

  Myra patted Charles’s hand. “I understand. I didn’t think it would ever be possible to love another human being the way I loved Barbara. It’s not the same yet it is the same. I think I would lie down and die if anything happened to our girls. I pray every night for Julia. I pray for all of them. I hope at some point they can all find happiness. I want so much for all of them. I want Alexis to be able to take her birth name back at some point. I want them all to be whole.

  “I wish, Charles, that we could find a way to bring Nikki and Jack together. They were meant for each other. Oh, look, Charles, a shooting star! Quick, make a wish!”

  Charles squeezed his eyes shut as did Myra.

  “That was me, Mom. How’d you like that?”

  Myra’s eyes flew open.

  Charles bolted off his chair, his eyes wild.

  “Whatcha think, Charles? Was that nifty or what?”

  “Darling, time to go in, it’s getting late.”

  Myra laughed, the sound ringing across the lawn. “That was the most spectacular shooting star I’ve ever seen.”

  “Beyond spectacular,” Charles said.

  Fifteen

  The gorgeous, orange ball in the sky slowly dipped beyond the horizon as the sisters leaned on the railing to watch it disappear.

  They were dining by candlelight on the terrace this evening. Even though the table, the retractable, bright colored awning, and the crocks of brilliant flowers were cheerful, the mood was somber. There was no sparkling repartee, no poking one another in fun, no jostling. Even Murphy was subdued, lying on the top step of the stairs that led to the lawn that was greener than any golf course.

  The table was set for six instead of the usual eight place settings. The French doors opened as Charles pushed a heavily laden serving cart onto the terrace. He tried to be cheerful when he rattled off the food he would be serving he knew no one was going to eat. He could have served dry shoe leather with ketchup and no one would have noticed or complained. He felt sick to his stomach and there was a knot in his throat as he ladled out food onto the fine china.

  Charles watched as the women stirred and mashed and then stirred some more. He was right, no one was eating. Murphy looked up and then ignored what was going on.

  “It was a beautiful day today, wasn’t it, girls?” Myra said. The others nodded.

  Myra tried again. “You all look so beautiful in your summer finery. I do lo
ve flower patterned dresses. I think they just make a person feel good.” The others nodded.

  Myra tried one more time. “Let’s all have some cigarettes and beer.”

  “Now you’re talking, Myra,” Kathryn said as she got up and beelined for the kitchen. When she came back with a twelve-pack of Corona beer she said, “With a few of these under our belts we’ll be able to handle…maybe we’ll be able…shit, never mind.”

  “I hate beer,” Yoko said, as she squeezed lime on the rim of the bottle then upended it. “Where are the cigarettes? I never smoked before.”

  “And you won’t be smoking after tonight either. This is a special occasion. Actually, it’s beyond special,” Kathryn said fiercely. “Just puff and blow the smoke.”

  A lot of coughing and sputtering went on to Charles’s amusement as he fired up his pipe and leaned back in the springy chair he was sitting on. He didn’t know when he’d ever felt this sad, this melancholy. The truth was, he wanted to cry for what was about to happen.

  The cicadas sang their song and the night birds chimed in. The old oaks overhead whispered their own song. A faint quarter moon could be seen riding high in a sky sprinkled with millions of stars. The night was deliciously warm but no one seemed to notice.

  “I’ll have another one of these,” Yoko said. “Beer is nothing like tea. I think I like it. Is it mandatory to smoke cigarettes when you drink beer?”

  “Yeah, it is,” Kathryn said, clapping her on the back. “Drink up. We have another hour to wait.”

  Twenty-four bottles of beer and two packs of cigarettes later, the women jumped as one when they saw headlights at the security gates. Murphy reared up and then leaped down the steps, raced across the lawn and howled a greeting to Alexis and Julia. Alexis stopped long enough to open the door for Murphy to climb in before she barreled up the drive to come to a screeching halt.