“Who is he?”
“Friend of mine, and we’ll keep it at that.” I could hear his shifty smile as he said it and knew that’s all I’d be getting from him. “You tell him everything you know.”
“What will he do?”
“Whatever you ask, most likely. I can’t say any more, darlin’, not on an open line. You go talk to the man and I’ll check back in a day or two.”
“Okay.” I found that my hands had steadied themselves a little.
“You stay safe now, you hear?”
“I will, Walter, and thank you.”
We said our goodbyes. I had eighteen minutes to get to the library.
***
The traffic was heavier than I expected, due to the weather, and it seemed like every road, bypass, and shortcut that I knew had traffic backed up for what seemed like forever due to minor fender benders and other annoying accidents. I pounded on the steering wheel with my fist. I yelled. I screamed for people to get out of the way.
I cursed, worse than my father on a drunken night, and said some things I shouldn’t have at a little old lady going ten miles an hour under the speed limit. I tried to force myself not to get worked up. I hoped that if I missed Harris, I could simply call Dubya Three back and beg for another chance or to set up a meeting with someone else. Anytime, day or night. That’s what he said, right? Yet, I didn’t know how many times I could play that card, and I definitely didn’t want to rely on him for help.
I was better than that. I was stronger than that.
I would not play the role of damsel in distress with him whenever I needed something, but right now, making the meeting with Harris was my only viable option.
The engine screamed as I pressed harder on the gas pedal and shot down a side street, almost catching air off of speed bumps, feeling the rear of the car shimmy just a little when I hit a deep puddle.
I shouted, “Come on, come on!” and tightened my grip until my knuckles were white. Squealing into the parking lot, two minutes late, I erupted from the car and ran into the library. The permeating smells of old books and that pine-scented liquid they use to clean the floors washed over me. My shoes screeched too loudly on the tile as I skidded to a halt, quickly scanning the lobby and rows of books for a man in a leather jacket and a baseball cap.
A front desk clerk glanced up at me with a wary look, then returned her attention to a computer screen.
My eyes darted from person to person. Not him. No. Not him. Is that him? No, that’s not leather. An older gentleman in a Mariners baseball cap passed me without a second glance. I doubted his wheelchair left much room for dirty work. I began to lose hope. That desperate sensation that starts with a warm tingle at the base of your neck slithered up and into my head, crawling across my skin as it approached panic.
I must have looked quite the sight as I stood there in the lobby, almost vibrating, hoping I hadn’t missed him. Would he really blow off our meeting because I was two minutes late?
I heard a man’s voice behind me. “Sharon, hi!” it said, followed by a hand on my arm. I whipped around, expecting a stranger that had mistaken me for someone he knew. My eyes were level with a chest, covered by a brown leather jacket.
Glancing up, up, and up into the face of an impossibly massive, impossibly tall male in his early fifties, baseball cap pulled low over his forehead, I saw the calm expression of the man who had to be Harris.
“It’s been so long, Sharon,” he said with a fake smile, gently nudging me past the front desk and up the stairs.
Cresting into the second floor, I whispered over my shoulder, “I’m not Sharon.”
“I’m aware of that,” he said flatly, “but do you want them to know that if someone places us together?” His eyes darted around the upper level to all the people on computers, browsing for books, and flipping through the audio collection.
“How did you know it was me?”
He scoffed. “Please. You were practically screaming for me to find you. And besides, if you’ve been in this business as long as I have, you can tell.”
“So your name’s not really Harris?”
Harris smirked. “I like working with the smart ones. Over here.” He pulled me toward an empty table in the northeastern corner of the floor, back where the study rooms took up the far wall.
Once he was satisfied that we were alone and out of earshot from anyone else, he pulled a notepad from his inside breast pocket with the slow, deliberate precision of a surgeon removing a heart. He had a pen in his hand before I could notice where it came from. These may have been subtle motions, but not a bit of movement was wasted, every action calculated.
With his pen poised over the paper, he cleared his throat and said, “Now, young lady, how does the first chess piece move?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I suppose stranger things have happened. How does a Stanford MBA graduate, valedictorian of her class, who now runs an escort service and had broken dreams of Wall Street glory, wind up in the far corner of a library with a hired “professional,” as he liked to be called?
What they don’t tell you in grad school is how the real strings are pulled behind the scenes in the corporate world. I can’t say this with one hundred percent accuracy, but guys like Harris probably drive more of the world’s economy than the cotton-headed geriatrics sitting in the top floor suite, where their office overlooks Central Park, sipping fifty-year-old scotch.
No, the real chess pieces are shuffled around in dark alleys. Pawn takes Queen with a syringe to the neck, and a company’s stock price takes a nosedive by fifty points the next day when the female CEO with a golden smile is found dead of something innocuous like natural causes.
Who profits? The company that hired the pawn.
How do I know this? Deductive reasoning. I’d suspected it long ago, after conversations with some of my professors who’d been with those powerful companies.
Harris helped confirm it. I could tell by the way in which he interacted with me, initially, that my needs and Dubya Three’s request to help were beneath him. The not-so-subtle eye rolls. The huffing. The sighing. The telltale annoyance that practically shouted, “Goddamn amateur!” without a word spoken.
I don’t react well to men like this. It pisses me off.
My emotions were across the board. One minute, I was a panicky, shaky mess, ready to cry like a little girl who’d dropped her ice cream, and the next, I was a ball-busting bitch.
Push the right buttons. See what happens.
I seethed, feeling my skin prickle, trying to contain myself. Harris was there to help, against his better judgment I assumed, and I didn’t want to snap, say the wrong thing, and have him walk away.
“So,” he said quietly, flipping a sheet of notepad paper over, “you’re telling me that all I have to go on is a bodybuilder with a prison tat, brown hair, brown eyes, who likes to beat up hookers?”
That did it. Over the edge. And before I spoke, I made a mental note to call Dubya Three and ask him why in the hell he connected me with this jackass.
I took a deep breath, leaned forward and pointed at his face. “Listen to me, asshole, my girls are not some cheap whores working a street corner for their next meth fix. They are gorgeous, intelligent women that have more class and respect for other people in their pinkies than you do in that giant, over-sized body of yours.
“These women can hold their own in any conversation with governors and congressmen, billionaire CEOs, Hollywood producers…anybody. They were doctors and lawyers and professors who probably got sick of trying to defend or teach humongous dickheads like you, and if you think for one second I’m going to sit here and let you demean them, especially while three of them are in the hospital, you can think again. Walter sent me to you because I asked him for help. Get up and walk if you want to, but don’t you dare disrespect them again. Do you hear me?”
Harris tilted the baseball cap back on his head and propped himself up on his elbows, giving me a half-grin and a muttered, “Hu
h.” The only way I can describe it is that on the inside, he’d had a revelation, something along the lines of, “Well how ‘bout that?”
“You finished?” he asked.
I practically growled a frustrated, “Are we finished?”
“We’re just getting started.” Grinning. “You’ve got some fire in that belly, huh?”
“You could call it that.”
“I like that fire. Keeps the smart people savvy.”
“That’s debatable, but whatever you say.” I could feel that metaphorical dropping of my blood pressure as I eased out of pure rage and back into something resembling a subdued agitation. I was calm-ish, but ready to strike again if need be. Had he been testing me? Had I impressed him? Either way, his softened features indicated I’d passed. Not that I needed his approval; it was nice to be done with whatever games he was playing.
“It’s not much to go on,” he admitted, glancing down at his notes. “But, I’ve taken care of business with less. I found a guy one time just by a receipt he’d left in a hotel room. He spent thirty-seven dollars on a tank of gas.”
“What happened to him?”
“He wasted his money.”
A shiver raced down my spine. I didn’t need any more particulars than that. Didn’t want to know. “Can I give you anything else? Like details about the business or some of our clients that might help? My partner, she’s meeting with everyone in an hour to talk about old clients or anybody that they might’ve pissed off recently. I could call you once they’re done if they come up with anything.”
Nodding, rubbing a hand across stubbly cheeks, he said, “Possibly.” What he said next took me by surprise. “Tell me about yourself.”
“Me? What do you want to know?”
“Any enemies? Anybody you might’ve pissed off lately? Everything relevant. Background stuff. How a smart young lady like you—what are you twenty-one, twenty two?”
“Twenty-two.”
“Mr. Wickam gave me a brief rundown—no offense, but you’ll take it anyway. How’s some Stanford smarty-pants end up running an escort service? Shouldn’t you be on the cover of business magazines with your hot new startup instead of peddling blowjobs?”
“You’re right, that is offensive.”
“Come on, work with me here. All I’m trying to do is lay it out there like it really is. Things are what they are and it doesn’t make a bit of difference what kind of label you want to put on it. I work in absolutes,” he said, then leaned over to whisper, “which is exactly how I’ve stayed alive as long as I have. Got me?”
I could do nothing but hold my tongue and look away. Harris was a Class-A jerk, but I’d begun to realize that it was simply his nature. Rough, gruff, and tough. He was used to dealing with the shadier side of humanity, the kind that required the personality of a bulldozer. Talking with someone like me, a young, intelligent woman that was easily half his age, probably pushed him further out of his comfort zone than I was out of mine.
Harris tapped his pen on the table. “Well?”
“Tell me why you want to know.”
“Because something’s off about this whole thing.”
“How?”
“You said that you’d checked with the other services in town, yeah? No harm done to any of them. No recent reports of battered women that made the news. At least nothing out of the ordinary. You think it might be someone that’s familiar with your business because you’re still—what was the word you used? Underground?”
“Yeah.”
“This whole thing, it’s not a coincidence. If it were some serial thug who got his jollies by beating up women, there’d be more randomness to the pattern, if he had a pattern at all. What that says to me is, you’re partially right about the fact that he’s targeting your business, but the way I see it, he’s not just coming after the business itself, he’s coming after you. Maybe your partner, too, though I doubt it. He’s trying to cripple the business to hurt you in particular, and I want to know why.”
Even though it poured outside with the strength of a monsoon, rain spattering the windows beside us so rapidly that it sounded like automatic gunfire, the clouds inside my mind parted and bright sunrays of revelation poured through.
I could’ve smacked my own face for not seeing it sooner. Why in God’s name had the fact escaped me? Was it because I was so certain that we’d pulled off the coup without a hitch that I’d gotten too confident?
It had to be him. There were other options, sure, like disgruntled clients or random chance, but when given the choice between accidental universal alignment, and the option of a simple, logical answer, I’ll take the latter any day.
“Oh my God,” I said, falling back against my chair, rubbing my face. “I think I know who it is.”
“The prison tat guy?”
“No, who’s behind it.”
“And who would that be? Because if you’ve got a solid possibility, that’d make my job a helluva lot easier.”
“I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.”
“Forest for the trees, Miss Kim. Happens all the time. Tell me who.”
“Roman. He’s the owner of Midnight Fantasy, where I used to work.”
“Why him?”
“Because I stole half of his staff.” Saying the words out loud, admitting it like that, gave the situation more gravity than I had realized. Of course it was Roman. Of course he’d found out somehow. I knew he would eventually. I expected him to be pissed off. I expected some form of retaliation. I didn’t know when, but I knew it would happen one day. It was unavoidable.
I knew it was coming, but I never expected him to resort to physical violence.
I thought maybe a lawsuit, something along those lines. He was too clean, exacting, precise, calculating, and uptight to dirty his hands with the blood of innocents, especially if the man he’d hired could be traced back to him somehow.
But it had to be Roman, all right. It was the only thing that made sense.
Harris pinched his eyebrows together, tucked the notepad back into his leather jacket, and asked, “Care to tell me what you mean by that?”
I crossed my arms and tapped a foot. No, I didn’t want to tell him—I was embarrassed, but not quite ashamed, because that was the price of business survival. Like I said, worse things than secretly recruiting employees from a competitor happen around the world every minute of the day, but that didn’t mean that my conscience wouldn’t waffle at underhanded tactics.
It’s an unspoken rule that you learn to exist in a cutthroat state of mind, or you watch those red numbers on the bottom of your spreadsheet grow higher and become unmanageable until the inevitable happens. You go under.
I looked Harris in the eyes, watching him as he waited for me to continue.
I was out of options. I told him almost everything.
Not necessarily my life story, but a big part of it. The highest marks in grad school, the failed recruitment from major companies, Joey, taking whatever job I could find, then getting laid off.
Desperation. Survival instinct.
Then the promise of more money than I knew how to spend, catering to the illicit whims of rich elite like Dubya Three, which resulted in temporary relief but rapidly devolved into greed and lust for more. Always more.
I explained my on-again, off-again trysts with Roman, leaving out the explicit details, letting Harris know that, at the time, it was more than just sex for me, but not for the asshole that I thought I could love. The rejection that followed. The immature need for vengeance, which resulted in starting Secret Desires to get back at Roman, with the earnings as a side bonus.
Roman had found out what I’d done, and he wanted his own retribution.
How did I miss it? Harris was right. Forest for the trees.
And how did Roman find out? Did it matter? It could’ve been an infinite number of possibilities. Maybe he put a tail on me. Maybe he threatened one of the escorts and she caved. Maybe he bribed a client to find out where h
e was getting his rocks off. I could speculate until I was blue in the face and it wouldn’t make a difference.
Harris plucked a toothpick from a breast pocket and tucked it in the corner of his mouth, working it around, chewing on it while I finished telling my story. He waited until I was done before he asked, “You ever heard the phrase, ‘don’t start a war you might not win’?”
“Yeah. You think that’s what I did?”
Harris pulled the toothpick from his mouth, smiled, and then winked. “I’m not talking about you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
When I parted ways with Harris, I took with me an insane plan and a nervous stomach. What he’d proposed might have been the smartest way to get what we needed, but it was also the most dangerous. It took him a while to convince me, and I can’t say that I left with absolute certainty that it’d work.
I paused under an overhang outside the library. The rain fell in sheets so thick, it looked like walls of white blowing through the trees and across the cars parked there. A gust of wind kicked up and tore an umbrella from a woman’s grasp. She chased it and gave up when it lifted from the ground and blew high into a tree.
I called Michelle at the office and she informed me that she was in the conference room with all of the ladies. They were worried, confused, and demanding that we hire security to accompany them on their client meetings. I had her put me on speaker. I assured them that security was our highest priority for the future, but until I gave the all clear, they were absolutely not supposed to entertain anyone, not even the men and women they’d known for years.
“It’s for the best until we get this straightened out. Go home,” I said. “Take a vacation. Rest. Relax. Catch up on some reading, whatever you need to do for a couple of days.” I chuckled when I heard the grumblings in the background. “No whining, and don’t give me any crap about lost earnings. I’ve seen your numbers. You can afford it and I promise, the money will be there when I’m ready for you to come back, okay?”
I heard a collective mumble of agreement around the room and the muffled sounds of everyone leaving. Michelle picked up and asked, “Where’ve you been?”
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