Secret Hearts

by Radclyffe

  “I know everything I need to know.” Julie resumed stalking, making Kip feel like the weakest, slowest antelope in the herd being tracked by a lioness, with nowhere to hide.

  “I guess I’m not being clear.” Kip smiled, hoping she could get out of this without causing a major incident with one of Savannah’s friends. “I’m not—”

  Kip’s cell simultaneously chimed and vibrated on the coffee table. She almost cried hallelujah. “Sorry, I better get that.”

  With a barely muffled snarl, Julie snatched her shirt off a chair and pulled it on, leaving it unbuttoned as she lounged on the sofa, her hungry gaze fixed on Kip.

  “Yeah?” Kip sent Julie an apologetic grimace.

  “Hey, Kip, it’s Phil.”

  “Hi, Phil.” Kip frowned. Why was her cousin, one of the company’s managers, calling her at close to midnight on a weeknight? She was labor, not management, and way down the list of family chain of command. “What can I do for you?”

  “I might be out of line, but I thought you ought to know Randy is here at the Oasis with a girl. Girlfriend, I guess. It, uh, looks like he’s had a fair amount to drink. Her too.”

  Kip’s jaw clenched. “I’ll be there in ten minutes. And, Phil, thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it. I don’t think he knows I’m here, but if they look like they’re leaving, I’ll see if I can talk them up and keep them around long enough for you to collect them. From what I can make out, neither one of them should be driving.”

  “I owe you one.” Kip ended the call and shoved the phone into her pocket. Pushing her shirttail back into her trousers with one hand, she scooped her keys off the table with the other. “I’m really sorry, but I need to go. An emergency. You can let yourself out.”

  “Why don’t I just curl up in bed and wait for you.” Julie traced one lacquered fingertip along the inside of her thigh and tapped delicately in the area of her clit. “I can finish taking care of this for the moment, and I’ll be ready again by the time you get back.”

  Kip paused at the door. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. I’m not sure I’ll be back tonight. The door will lock after you when you leave. I’m sorry.”

  Julie shot to her feet, fire in her eyes. “Sorry? You should be sorry. You have no idea what you’re missing.” She shook her head and muttered under her breath, “Really, no wonder you need your cousin to set you up on a date. Asshole.”

  “Right,” Kip muttered and let herself out. Idiot for trying to keep the family peace when she knew a blind date wasn’t headed anywhere but trouble. Ruthlessly putting Julie’s furious face and undeniably sexy everything else out of mind, she tapped the Uber app on her phone as she took the stairs down two at a time, and luckily, a driver was nearby. She was in the vehicle and on her way to the club in under a minute.

  For the millionth time she wondered what Randy was trying to accomplish by breaking every rule and daring anyone to stop him. If he got picked up again, drinking and drugging with his seriously underage girlfriend in a club, he could be looking at real jail time, no matter what strings her father could pull. She checked her watch as the driver cut to the curb in front of the glittering sign for the trendy club on Lexington. Nine minutes. She tipped him a twenty and jumped out. “Thanks.”

  The club was in full swing with wall-to-wall hipsters drinking, dancing, jostling, and flying high. She picked Phil out of the crowd at the end of the bar almost at once. Tall and lanky in an open-collared shirt and slim dark pants, with blond hair just brushing his collar and high cheekbones in a narrow face, he was runway handsome and hard to miss. She arrowed through the crowd to his side. “Phil. Thanks for the call. Are they still here?”

  “I lost sight of Randy a minute or two ago, but the girl he’s with is still over there.”

  Kip followed the direction of his head tilt and sighed. Lindsay Montgomery, another spoiled rich girl looking for trouble out of boredom or rebellion, she wasn’t sure which. Lindsay probably didn’t know either. She and Randy were an on-again off-again couple, mostly off again, but apparently tonight was an exception. “Okay, I’ll take it from here.”

  “You want some help?”

  “No, Randy will probably be easier to handle if there’s just me.” She didn’t bother to add he’d resent her trying to interfere with his good time, and witnesses to his perceived victimhood would only make him more resistant. She remembered when he’d been small and she’d been his hero. That seemed like another lifetime now.

  Lindsay was willowy and blond, her lacy see-through top so low the pale shadows of her nipples were clearly on display. The bottom of her flimsy top rode half an inch or so above the waistband of her skinny jeans. Her heavy dark eye makeup was smeared, her mouth a crimson slash. Bangles, dozens of them, adorned both arms. She looked more like a hooker than an heiress, which Kip figured was exactly her intention. When Lindsay saw her, she cocked a hip and raised an eyebrow.

  “My night just got better,” Lindsay said.

  “Hey, Lindsay, is Randy here somewhere?”

  “Is that any kind of hello?” Lindsay feigned a pout and tapped Kip’s chest, letting her fingers drop along the curve of her breast.

  Kip pulled back and reined in her temper. She was a little tired of being played with. “Randy?”

  “He went to the little boys’ room. I don’t know what he’s doing in there unless it’s another one of the little boys.”

  Kip sighed. Randy was as popular with men as women and didn’t appear to have any preference for either. If it was fun, especially if it was dangerous, he was there. “Stay here, all right? I’ll go get him.”

  Lindsay hooked a finger over the top of Kip’s waistband and tugged, trying to pull her closer. “He’ll be back. Why don’t you keep me company. I could use a date who knows what to do with a woman.”

  Kip held back from mentioning at barely eighteen, Lindsay hardly qualified as woman. She’d likely get slugged, start a scene, and never get either of them out of the place. She had nothing against Lindsay, but she wasn’t her responsibility. Randy was.

  “Just do me a favor and stay right here, okay?”

  “Hey, sis, making time with my girl now?” Randy appeared out of the crowd beside them, his dark hair disheveled, his blue eyes hazy and bloodshot even in the yellowish light of the bar. “Can’t get your own pussy?”

  “Come on, Randy,” Kip said. “Have a little respect for your girlfriend.”

  He snorted and gave a pointed look to Lindsay’s hand, which still rested on Kip’s hip. “Yeah, like you?”

  “Come on, I’ll get you guys a ride home.” Randy’s pinpoint pupils signaled he’d been using, and Kip hoped it wasn’t anything more than a line or two of coke. His grungy T-shirt and threadbare jeans looked like he’d been living in them for a week. He’d managed to talk his way out of rehab after his last arrest by swearing he’d stop using, and she’d thought he was cleaning up his game. She’d been another kind of idiot for believing him.

  “We got our own ride.” Randy looked at Lindsay. “So what’s it gonna be? Cock or cunt for you tonight?”

  Heat surging up her spine, Kip grabbed his arm. “Listen to me, you little moron. You took her out, and you’re responsible for her. You don’t talk to her like that.”

  He laughed, a dismissive, scornful sound. “Yeah, like you know so much about women. I don’t see you doing so well.”

  “Let’s go.” She couldn’t help trying to reason with him, but any attempt to appeal to the heart she had to believe was hidden beneath anger and contempt was wasted tonight. “We’re leaving.”

  Randy yanked his arm away and pulled a set of keys out of his pocket, dangling them in the air. “I told you, we got a ride.”

  Kip snatched them from his grasp. “And now so do I. You’re not driving anywhere.” She glanced at the keys to a Hummer. Must be Lindsay’s vehicle. “Where’s it parked?”

  “A couple blocks away.”

  “Good, maybe the walk will sober you up.”<
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  “We’re not going anywhere.”

  “Yeah, we are.” Kip pocketed the keys, grabbed Lindsay’s hand, and gripped the back of Randy’s shirt. “You either come with me, or I call David.”

  She had no intention of calling her father’s security chief, but the threat was enough to get Randy moving. He cursed and muttered under his breath the entire way, but five minutes later she poured them both into a black Hummer they’d left parked on the street in a not-very-good neighborhood. “You’re lucky this thing hasn’t been stripped.”

  “Yeah,” Randy said expansively, sprawling in the front seat with Lindsay on his lap. “That’s me, lucky.” He slid his hand under the lower edge of Lindsay’s skimpy top and cupped her breast. She wiggled her ass in his crotch and kissed him.

  Gritting her teeth, Kip started the engine, pulled out, and headed north toward the Upper East Side, where Lindsay lived with her parents. Or where she would have if they were home, which was rare. As near as Kip could tell, Lindsay’s mother’s personal assistant did most of the parenting. They were three blocks away when a patrol car pulled up behind them and lit them up with the light bar. Kip glanced down at the speedometer. Thirty-five miles an hour in a twenty-five mile an hour zone. “Fuck. Really?”

  She pulled over and rolled down the window. Before she could even reach for her wallet, a voice came through the loudspeaker of the cruiser behind them. “Exit the vehicle with your hands in the air.”

  “What?” Kip muttered. She glanced into the side mirror and could make out two officers, one on each side of the car, approaching slowly, weapons drawn. “Cripes. Randy, Lindsay, get out of the car, nice and slow.”

  “Offer them a hundred bucks,” Randy muttered, his hand still under Lindsay’s shirt. “You weren’t going that fast.”

  “Exit the vehicle,” a voice shouted. Two more patrol cars screeched to a halt, fencing in the Hummer, and officers jumped out, weapons trained on them.

  “Randy,” Kip said urgently. “This is serious. Get out, both of you, and do exactly as you’re told.”

  Something in her voice must have gotten through to him, because Randy shifted Lindsay off his lap and took a look around.

  “Guess a hundred bucks won’t be enough.”

  “Just do what they say.” Kip opened the door, extended both arms into the air with her hands visible, and stepped down. A female officer a few inches taller than her, making her just shy of six feet but seeming a whole lot bigger at the moment, pushed her against the vehicle with one hand in the center of her back, grabbed her hands roughly, and cuffed them behind her back.

  “What is this—?” A hand pushed Kip’s head against the side of the Hummer, hard.

  “You’re under arrest for possession of a stolen vehicle. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will…”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Kip exclaimed, “there’s been a—”

  “You have the right to an attorney, if…”

  The rest of the Miranda warning went by in a haze. She was pushed into the back of the nearest cruiser, Randy and Lindsay into one of the others. She tried to crane her neck around to check on Randy, but she couldn’t turn enough to see. Two officers piled into the front, slammed the doors, and pulled away, leaving the Hummer at the curb. Kip leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

  Stolen. Of course. Another perfect ending to a perfect night.

  Chapter Two

  Kip tried watching street signs as the cruiser sped north past Central Park, but she had trouble seeing much from her cramped position in the back of the patrol car. After a short ride, the officers pulled in behind a squat brick building and the female officer who’d cuffed her initially opened her door, freed the cuffs from the restraining ring, reached in, and grasped her arm.

  “Slide on out,” the officer said.

  Kip complied. “Where are we?”

  “Twenty-fifth Precinct—8th and 119th.”

  Kip didn’t see the other cruiser with Randy and Lindsay. That might be a good thing. Or not. She couldn’t be sure of anything right then, other than she didn’t want to ask too many questions—or answer any. Inside, the halls were brightly lit but relatively empty. They delivered her into a large room with a high counter partitioned into several windows like at a bank or the racetrack. Only one space was occupied.

  “Name,” the thin, bored-looking officer with a pencil mustache and pronounced widow’s peak asked.

  “Catherine Wells Kensington,” Kip said.

  He paused and looked up from his keyboard. “Like the apartments or the appliances?”

  Both, somewhere in the family. Kip shook her head. “Rotary engines.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m a mechanic.”

  He grinned. “You like cars, I guess.”

  Kip unclenched her jaw and waited.

  “Date of birth?”

  She answered his questions, handed over her wallet and ID, the gold ring her grandmother had given her when she’d graduated from high school, and her watch. He tossed everything into a manila envelope with a printed label bearing her name and gave her a voucher.

  “Sign here.”

  Her next stop was another beige room with a few desks, another officer at a computer, and a camera on a tripod. A few minutes later, the female officer—Winobe, according to the black plastic name tag under her badge—escorted her to a cell in a row of them. Only the front wall was barred, the other walls solid, and she couldn’t see who else occupied the neighboring cells. She did catch bits of muffled conversation and the sound of someone vomiting. No one sounded like Randy or Lindsay. Before Winobe locked the cell, she removed her handcuffs.

  “I’d like to make a phone call,” Kip said, rubbing her wrists.

  “As soon as the paperwork gets into the system, you’ll be able to do that.”

  “How long will that take?”

  The officer shrugged. “Hard to say—could be a few hours.”

  She disappeared and the hall fell silent.

  Kip slumped onto the narrow bunk and checked her watch. The watch that wasn’t there. She’d never been arrested before, but she’d thought she knew what to expect. She’d been wrong. She hadn’t figured on the incredible depersonalization of the whole process. The feeling that her identity was being stripped away, one layer at a time. First her belongings were confiscated—not just her identification, her license and credit cards, but the personal items she counted as part of who she was. She’d been herded from one spot to another, told where to stand as cameras flashed, told to hold out her hand as strangers impassively pressed her digits to a screen and printed her, all the while never really looking at her. The common expression seemed to be bored, as if she were already just a number like the one on the card they handed her to put in front of her chest for the photographs.

  By the time the process was over, she was numb, struggling to hold on to reality in an unreal situation, fighting to remember who she was outside these walls. If this was how she felt after a few hours, what must it be like to be cast into the system for weeks, months, years? What became of a person who was no longer a person, but simply a number, a body in a long line of bodies moving along on the tide of someone else’s will? She shivered although the building wasn’t really cold.

  The cell held a stainless steel toilet, a narrow bunk with a gray sheet that had once been white, a thin wool blanket, and a miniscule sink bolted to the concrete floor in the corner. The wall across from the barred opening was beige and blank. Kip had to struggle to keep from feeling claustrophobic, despite the openings between the bars. She was locked in and no one knew where she was—her life outside this cell had stopped like the hands on a broken watch. Needing to move, to feel her body obey her will just to know there was one last thing she could still control, she splashed cold water on her face at the tiny sink in the corner, pulled the blanket off the bed, and wrapped it around her shoulders. Leaning back against the wall, she stared at the bars and remi
nded herself she was in New York City and she had rights. She would not just disappear. Her racing heart hadn’t yet gotten the message.

  She might’ve drifted, but it didn’t feel like very long when approaching footsteps brought her out of her unexpected half sleep. It had to be close to four in the morning and her body had decided she wasn’t in charge after all. The numbness had reached her brain, apparently. She threw off the blanket and stood, shaking her hands to get some feeling back in her tingling fingertips.

  A different officer, this one young, husky, and sporting a friendly smile, unlocked the door again. “You can make three free calls. Come with me.”

  He led her back down the hall in the opposite direction from where she’d been before. Kip hurried along beside him, seeing figures in the semidark cells, some sitting as she had been, most curled on the bunks with their faces to the walls. He directed her into a long, narrow room with a row of booths holding landlines perched on narrow oak shelves. He closed the door and stood with his back to it.

  “Thanks,” Kip said. He said nothing, so she straddled the backless stool in the farthest cubicle and looked over her shoulder, judging how much of her conversation he could hear. She guessed probably all of it. She picked up the phone and carefully entered her father’s private number.

  He answered immediately, sounding surprisingly alert, although he ought to still have been sleeping. She resisted clearing her throat, needing to sound steady and sure, more for herself than for him. “I’m sorry to wake you, Dad. I’m at the police station, and I need an attorney.”

  “I’ve been expecting your call. Where are you?”

  “The Twenty-fifth Precinct—how did…” She halted when her brain finally started working. Right. “You’ve heard from Randy?”

  “Yes. Several hours ago.”

  “He’s…doing all right?”

  “Your brother,” her father’s cool voice intoned, “is currently packing his bags and will be checking in to a private facility in the morning for some long-overdue medical attention.”