by Celia Mulder
“Twenty-four and we won’t question Jacobs.”
“Forty-eight. Besides, tomorrow’s Sunday. Do you really want to work on a Sunday?”
Matt growled. “Fine. Forty-eight. We will be back on Monday afternoon for Mr. Polce, whether it’s his wish or not, and we will be coming with a warrant to search this house.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
Matt turned to go. Lucille felt her body relax once he was no longer staring at her. Then he paused and looked back at her.
“I have one final condition.”
Lucille’s insides clenched again. Just like Matt to let her think she was home free and then lay in with a catch.
“You have dinner with me. Tonight. At my apartment.”
It was Lucille’s turn to growl. “You think I’ll trade favors for sex?”
“Not sex, just dinner. I want to...talk to you.” His voice was soft, and he wasn’t looking at her.
The tone caught her more off guard than the suggestion. He sounded, she didn’t know, broken, or something. Her heart beat a little faster, and not from nerves. “Okay.”
“I’ll text you the address. Eight p.m., okay?”
“Fine,” she said one last time.
He kept his word and left, taking his policemen with him.
Lucille wandered back into the living room, feeling dazed and off balance. Brett was still perched on the edge of the leather couch like a scruffy but loyal guard dog, watching Michel as he rocked and moaned. For an artistic genius, Michel Polce was remarkably unhinged.
She walked to Michel’s side of the couch and laid a hand on his shoulder. He looked up at her with those sad blue eyes. “The police are gone, Michel,” she said in her most soothing voice. “They won’t be bothering you.” For a while, anyway.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
“What’d you do? Give the detective a blow job?” Brett asked.
Lucille ignored him. “It’s only temporary. Stanton pulled strings to get the investigation fast-tracked, and they can only hold him off for so long. If she doesn’t turn up in the next forty-eight hours, I’m afraid they’ll be back to question you.”
Michel nodded. “Of course.”
“You’re both out of your fucking minds,” Brett muttered.
Lucille’s mouth twitched. “Do you have something to add, Mr. Jacobs? Or are you going to continue to be an ass?”
Brett stood. “Yeah, I do have something to add. I don’t get how any of this concerns you. Why are you even here?”
“I am here because my client needs me.”
“Uh huh. But why did you send the police away? It seems to me that with the attempted murdering and kidnapping, they are the very people who we actually need here, not you.” Brett’s face was red and angry.
Lucille’s pulse raced again, and her lady business perked up and took notice. Matt had always told her it was weird how she got off on conflict. “If the police get involved,” she said, talking down to him on purpose, “then Michel will be taken in for questioning. The media will get ahold of that, and the next thing you know, Michel’s being framed as a kidnapper. Someone does a little digging and the murder attempts come up. It is my job, Brett, to see that none of that happens.”
“Don’t you think that Michel’s life is a little more important than his reputation?” Brett spluttered back.
She watched his mouth, unable to stop thinking about kissing him. “It’s not my place to judge. I leave that up to the client.”
Brett was speechless for about ten seconds. “You leave it up to the client. You leave it up to the client?”
“As I said.” How can someone so naturally attractive be such a pig-headed mess?
Brett just nodded like a bobblehead doll. “Even if the client is completely insane?”
Lucille shrugged. Naturally attractive? “Again, not my place to judge.”
“Will the two of you shut up?” Michel bellowed from the couch.
Lucille turned to look at him in surprise, immediately turned off and back in her senses.
Michel was lying down, but he seemed more lucid than he had a minute before. “There’s only one thing to be done.”
They waited. Brett crossed his arms and looked skeptical. Lucille tapped her manicured nails against her skirt.
“We have to go after Sylvia.” Michel said the words with such authority, such firmness, it was difficult to reconcile him with the broken shell that had inhabited the space not ten minutes ago.
“Oh? Do you know where the kidnappers might have taken her?” Lucille was being sarcastic but Michel didn’t pick up on it.
“Perhaps. I have some ideas.”
“Lord help us,” Brett muttered and fell back on the couch.
Michel wasn’t finished. “We just need to make a list of possible places and then, taking my jet of course, search them. We’ll be gone in a few hours and back before Monday, my beloved Sylvia safe in my arms.”
Lucille knew this was her stop. After fighting for Michel all day, she’d have to walk away at the eleventh hour. She didn’t do the action; only dealt with the aftermath. She didn’t go racing around looking for errant heiresses. But then she’d also never had a client of Michel’s caliber. Seeing this job through to the end would mean she’d have enough business to last her the rest of her career, however short that may be.
She stared at the wall behind Michel’s head, trying to formulate a response. The wall was a pale blue that stood at odds with the rest of the Spanish decor. Walk away or stay.
“Michel...we’re not police,” Brett said. “Or spies, bounty hunters, or cartels. We’re artists. We don’t go on the adventure, we make adventure films.”
Michel wouldn’t be dissuaded. “What if Sylvia isn’t back in forty-eight hours? What if they hurt her? What if they...kill her?”
“Can I remind you that we’re talking about the woman who has tried, not once, but six times to kill you?”
“I don’t care. I love her. Please come with me. I have no one else to ask, and you are my oldest friend.”
Lucille heard Brett’s groan of defeat. “Only because I have nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, to lose.”
“Thank you.” Michel leapt up and kissed Brett on both cheeks.
“Ugh, get off. Now you really owe me. Well, Lucy? How about it?”
Lucille looked at the two men staring at her, one with earnest pleading, the other wary mistrust. She swallowed. “I can’t.” It was a poor start. She went on. “I mean, this is way outside of my role as your spin doctor, Michel. I can cover up your absence and hold off the police, but I don’t get personally involved.”
Why did she sound apologetic? She never apologized to anyone for anything.
“I understand.” Michel’s face fell again.
Brett frowned at her. The muscles of his jaw worked, no doubt holding back the scathing accusations he longed to lay at her feet.
Lucille couldn’t stay there anymore. She had work to do and the stupid dinner date with Matt. She couldn’t stand to look at her heartbroken, desperate client or his angry, attractive friend any longer. “I have to go. Text me when you have a plan so I can cover for you.”
“Of course.” The words came from Michel. Brett still hadn’t said a thing.
She picked up the purse she’d discarded on the chair and started out of the room. She stopped, met Brett’s gaze, and said, “For God’s sake, don’t get yourselves killed.”
She walked out of the mansion, her heels echoing too loudly on the stone floor.
Chapter Eight
Brett waited for the front door to close before turning to Michel. “And why do we need her?”
Michel shot him a look. Brett waited.
Michel sighed. “Remember that rapper we were into like ten years ago? The one who turned out to be in all those cults?”
Brett nodded. “HiFli.”
“Yeah. And you kept saying it was weird that he was so famous but no one knew abou
t the cult thing? Everyone thought he was doing charity work instead?”
“That was Lucille?”
“That was her uncle. Simon Anton.”
Brett whistled. “Impressive. So why didn’t you contact him?”
Michel rubbed his hand over his face. His whole body was tense and on edge, his expression a dark shadow of frowns. “No one has seen Anton for eight years. Now, can we please focus on how we’re going to find Sylvia?”
Brett opened his mouth to ask something else, but Michel glared at him and he closed it again. He still had so many questions. Why has nobody seen this guy in eight years? Does that include Lucille? Is she her own uncle in disguise? The last thought is preposterous. Maybe. Good idea for a plot, though... “I wonder what Lucille said to make Detective Adams go away,” he said aloud.
“For fuck’s sake, Brett! My fiancée is missing, probably being tortured, possibly dead.” Michel choked on the last words.
A punch of guilt stopped Brett’s thought train. He stood, shifting from foot to foot, while Michel sank into another wave of sobs. Then he did the only thing he could think of—he went to the summer kitchen and fixed them both a generous pour of whiskey.
“Here,” he said, shoving the whiskey in Michel’s face. “Drink this.”
Michel took the glass without a fight and downed it in a few gulps. He gazed up at Brett through watery, angsty eyes. “Brett, you are such a good friend to me. After all I did to you. I know this is a rough time for you too, and I just...thank you for being here. I’m sorry—”
Brett slapped Michel across the face.
Michel blinked, his cheek turning red beneath his brown skin. “What was that for?” he asked, rubbing his jaw.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re a fucking mess,” Brett said, sitting in Lucille’s vacated chair beside the couch. He took a long drink of his own whiskey. Why hadn’t he thought to bring the bottle over? He remedied the situation and refilled Michel’s glass, splashing more into his own for good measure. The day was shaping up to be a real fucking shit show.
Michel gulped his whiskey. “I know. I mean, I can see it, I can see myself, but I just can’t do anything to stop it.”
Brett nodded. He could see himself drinking too much, sleeping with strangers he cared nothing for, wasting his life on a profession his family wanted, and failing spectacularly at it. No, there was nothing spectacular about his failing. It was a flailing, desperate failing that not even his dearest friends, of which he had none save the man next to him, wanted to hear about.
“What we need to do is find Sylvia, find out why she’s been trying to kill you, and get this whole crazy situation cleared up.”
Michel was silent for a few minutes. “I’ve been thinking. What if she actually does want me dead? What if it isn’t a big misunderstanding after all?”
“Come on, Michel.” Brett leaned over and slapped him on the back. “This is Sylvia we’re talking about. My hot-headed cousin who loves you more than anything in the world. She probably got in with the wrong people, owes them money, and they put out a hit on your life. When they couldn’t get you, they kidnapped her.”
And, under the current circumstances, that theory sounded far more pleasant than the probable reality.
Michel took a deep breath. “You’re right. Of course you’re right. Sylvia loves me and I love her. We just need to talk it through and get things squared away with the kidnappers. Then everything can go back to normal.”
“Yep, and whatever happens, Lucille will cover it all up so no one knows,” Brett said. He meant it to be sarcastic. He still didn’t get the point of Lucille, particularly now she’d run out on them when the going had got tough.
“I know.”
Brett frowned. “Aren’t you annoyed she ditched us?”
Michel shook his head. “No, she was right. This is way beyond her professional boundaries. Besides, she got the police off the case, which is already more than I thought possible.”
They were quiet for a while, drinking. Brett’s thoughts meandered back to how exactly Lucille had gotten the policemen to leave them alone. She had a history with the detective, that was obvious. She might have traded sexual favors. They’d certainly been gone for long enough. He didn’t see Lucille Anton as the type of woman to get down on her knees, though. Especially on the stone floor in that short skirt of hers. No, she was the type of woman whose bribe would be allowing a guy to get her off, and that guy would be grateful for the opportunity. Brett knew he would be. The woman was sexy, particularly when she was angry. He would like to see her fall apart as she came, releasing all that pent-up tension in a moment of bliss that he’d administered.
He pushed away these fantasies. They’d only lead to heartbreak—his—and tears—again, his. “So,” he said, breaking the silence, “you have some ideas about where Sylvia is? And how we’re going to rescue her from the kidnappers?”
“The first part, yes. It’s likely she’s been taken by one of the Stanton’s enemies.” Michel blinked a few times. “As for the second, I was hoping you would know.”
“Why would I know? If anything you’d know after all that covert ops training you did for Man Undercover.”
Michel shook his head. “Stunt double.”
“All of it?”
Michel nodded glumly. “My face is worth too much to risk doing my own action scenes.”
“So we’re fucked.” Brett drained his glass. “More whiskey?”
“Not much else we can do,” Michel agreed.
Over the next hour and another bottle, they made a list of all of Sylvia’s possible enemies. It was long and included everyone from the personal stylists she’d fired to her sworn enemy, Reina Winter, to her best friend, Ani Bennet, who she publicly bullied. A few people they could cross off the list. Lucille had had lunch with Reina that day, Brett had seen her. Ani Bennet had been interviewed in the media reports of the kidnapping. Everyone else, though, was a strong possibility. They drank another bottle.
Next, they made a list of locations Sylvia might have been taken to. Turned out Michel did have ideas, lots of them. Over half the world was on their list.
Michel got antsier and drunker as the day went on. He was counting down the hours until Detective Adams returned to haul him off to jail, and counting up the hours since Sylvia had disappeared. It was obnoxious.
Brett excused himself to the bathroom. Michel’s mansion had a his-and-hers bathroom set on the first floor. He’d always considered this weird. Weren’t these supposed to be near the master bedroom so the couple didn’t have to share? It had to cause confusion during parties. Not that Brett was ever invited to Michel’s parties anymore. He wondered if Michel even had parties. Somehow he didn’t think so.
He picked the “hers” side and headed straight for the medicine cabinet. Just as he’d suspected, it was jammed full of pill bottles, the prescriptions made out to Sylvia Stanton, the contents mostly intact. He grabbed one that seemed most similar to Valium and, when he went to refill the whiskey glasses, crushed it up and sprinkled it in Michel’s drink. A few minutes later, Michel was passed out on the leather sofa, snoring.
“Awesome,” Brett said to himself, and he went upstairs to look for clues. He rummaged through Sylvia’s walk-in closet, checking for who knew what. A gun? A letter that said she wanted Michel dead? A picture of her new lover? A death threat from possible kidnappers?
Though knowing his cousin, there was a definite possibility that there weren’t any kidnappers and she was playing them all. He could almost guarantee that, despite having a rich fiancé, Sylvia was in need of funds. Her dad had cut her off after all and there was some question of her being written out of his will.
Thunk.
He froze, listening over the sound of his pounding heart. All he could hear was Michel’s snoring echoing off the cathedral ceiling. The house was still. But he’d definitely heard a sound—a thunk. It wasn’t the house settling; new houses were made primarily out of concr
ete, and stone didn’t settle.
Brett removed his shoes and snuck, barefoot, out of the bedroom, his breathing thundering in his ears. Had Lucille come back? Or one of the servants? Or the kidnappers?
Michel was helpless on the couch downstairs, knocked out with drugs and copious amounts of liquor. If the kidnappers did come back, they’d have an easy job of it. Michel would go without a struggle, and his blood would be on Brett’s hands.
Brett ran then, straining to hear Michel’s snoring over his adrenaline rush. At the marble staircase he didn’t pause but catapulted down the steps. Only something had changed since he’d climbed those same stairs not half an hour prior. One of the stones was askew, but he didn’t notice until his foot landed on it, his full body weight engaged in the forward velocity.
In a feat of desperate refusal to die at this precise moment in time, he grabbed the bannister as his feet slid out from under him. He flailed through the air and landed with a thud on his back as his right arm wrenched behind him, ripping his shoulder from its socket. The pain knocked the consciousness from him, and he missed the would-be murderer’s exit.
Chapter Nine
Forty missed calls. In the short time she’d been at the mansion, her phone, still on vibrate, had gone off forty times. Under other circumstances, she’d have berated herself for missing so many urgent messages. Under the current circumstances, she felt annoyed. As she pulled out of the tree-lined driveway, she also felt distinctly shitty.
Walking away was the only option, she told herself again. Going off on a hostage retrieval mission meant risking everything: her secrecy, her other clients, all that she worked to achieve.
What sort of precedent would it set if I was willing to go to those lengths for a client? Next thing I know I’d be personally involved in all my cases. Lucille shuddered.
It wasn’t like she was breaking any agreement. In the mess of Sylvia’s presumed kidnapping and her ex-boyfriend’s ill-timed arrival, she hadn’t given Michel the contract. She worked for him in word only, and that she had no trouble breaking. She shouldn’t even be writing him a press release without upfront payment and a nondisclosure agreement, but after seeing that hurt look on his face, not to mention the stunned betrayal from Brett, covering their tracks felt like the bare minimum of guilt appeasement.
