35. Jake
Chapter 35
Jake
I t’s hard to tell anything about the person on the screen. Dark, baggy clothes conceal their height, build, and gender. They even thought to wear gloves so I can’t tell anything by their hands either. Smart enough to not look up, they make quick work of soaking the office.
They light a group of matches and toss them onto the gasoline, igniting dangerous flames right away. Only when the figure turns toward the front door to make a hasty exit do I see it. A pendant on a necklace catches the light. If she’d turned the other way, I’d have never guessed it in a million years.
“Cora? ” It comes out more as a harsh, disbelieving breath than her actual name.
My head spins and bile rises up my throat. No way this can be right. Cora is…well, Cora. Plus, she’s supposed to be in London.
“Jake, are you okay?” Dylan’s voice filters to my brain through the ringing in my ears.
“That’s Cora’s necklace. Can you zoom in?” Sure enough… “Martin bought that necklace for her on her eighteenth birthday. It’s the only one like it in the world. She never takes it off.”
“Why would Cora do this? She’s been so supportive.”
I’m trying to figure out the same thing when something occurs to me. “She wouldn’t. I’ll bet her dad put her up to this as some way to get his hands on more property. Maybe he’s blackmailed her into the vandalism because no one would ever suspect her?” It seems so far-fetched, but it’s the best I’ve got right now.
“Cassie, have you seen my phone?” I ask, ignoring the shards of glass tearing at my vocal chords.
“Yeah, I think it’s over here under the T.V. guide.” She retrieves it for me and hands it over.
Unlocking it, I immediately call Phoenix.
“Jakey! How’re you feeling? The guys and I were gonna swing by after—”
“Phoe, I need the name of the officer you trust the most. If you had an emergency, who would you want to show up?” Because he’s full-time with the fire department, Phoenix knows those guys way better than I do.
“Jake? Is that you?”
“Yeah. My throat’s fucked up from the smoke, but it’s me,” I confirm.
“What’s going on?” he asks, starting to sound panicked.
“I just need a name and number. I’ll fill you in later.” There’s an extreme urgency because regardless of where she was two nights ago, Cora could be anywhere now. She has both the money and the means to get the fuck out of Dodge before anyone can catch her.
Phoenix rattles off a name. “I’ll send you his contact info. Call me when you can, okay?”
I place the call to Lieutenant Stewart telling him everything I know as quickly as I can. I feel slightly guilty for ratting Cora out, knowing she’s been a pawn her whole life for insufferable parents, but Dylan almost died.
And that is unforgivable.
“You have to hurry. If she hasn’t left already, she’s planning a trip overseas soon.” Although the U.K and the U.S. have an extradition treaty, who’s to say that’s really where she’s going? Perhaps Martin has set her up in the islands somewhere, or maybe this was her plan all along and she told me about the symposium in the U.K. to cover her tracks.
“We’ll send someone to pick her up for questioning right away. If you think of anything else, please give me a call.”
“Her father has been buying property for several months along the street where the hit and run took place. I can’t help but feel he’s involved in the vandalism that’s been going on.”
“Christ,” the voice mutters through the phone. “Greedy fucking bastards. All of them. I’ll need a little more time or evidence before involving the Governor, but maybe his daughter will give us something to go on.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant.” My throat still hurts, but there’s enough adrenaline flowing through my veins to keep the pain at bay.
When the call ends, I ring the nurse’s bell.
“I’m walking out of this room in five minutes. Please have my discharge papers ready to go.”
I have a visit of my own I need to make while the cops are tracking Cora down.
“Sir, I can’t—”
“You can. Either give me the papers or mail them to me, I don’t care which.”
When I look back at Dylan, he’s scribbling furiously on the whiteboard. He suffered worse damage to his throat because his exposure to the smoke was much longer.
Where are you going?
“I need to pay a visit to Martin. I’ll be damned if I let him get away with allowing Cora to take the entire fall for this mess.
I’ll come with you.
“Dyl, I need you to stay here. I need to know you’re safe.”
What about what I need?
I slide my hand along his cheek and he places his over top of mine and nuzzles into my touch.
“You need to stay and heal. You need to let me fight this battle because it’s my fault you’re in this hospital bed in the first place.”
It takes him longer to write his next message, but when he flips the board over, I have a hard time arguing.
You once told me “I know it feels like we’re getting hit from all sides, but from here on out, I’m on your side. Always.”
Please don’t ask me to stay here and leave you to handle this on your own. I want to help.
I blow out a breath, run a hand through my hair, sitting back down next to him, my own words glaring at me from the white board.
“Dylan, I love you so fucking much and you were targeted because of that. I can’t watch you walk into the lion’s den again because of me.”
“Just stay with me. Let the cops handle it,” he rasps, making me wince. “ Please.”
I brush his hair back. “I need to find out what Martin knows and record him if I can. They might not be able to use it in court, but it might give them enough to be able to detain him. I have to try. I’ll call you when I get back in the car, okay?” He closes his eyes and I fucking hate letting him down. I hate worrying him. But more than either of those things, I hate that because of me, the corruption of my world has bled into his.
I kiss him slowly, wondering if he can taste the desperation on my tongue.
“I love you, Dylan. When this is all over, I hope you can forgive me. I hope you still want to be with me.”
He holds up the whiteboard and circles the word always from the last sentence he wrote and then adds,
I love you too.
I pull up outside Martin Cosey’s house, shoot Dylan a quick text to let him know I’m going in, then I put my phone on video and hit record. I recognize this is the part of the movie where everyone yells at the character for being stupid and walking into the enemy’s hands with no backup and hardly any plan at all. But unless everything you love has been threatened to the point of extinction and you’re restless, with no faith left in the “system”, I don’t expect people to understand.
I ring Martin’s doorbell and hear footsteps inside. Considering he had a hand in attempting to kill Dylan, and he used his own daughter to do it, I’m assuming he’s probably packing his bags right about now.
He rips the door open and glares at me.
“I have nothing to say to you.” He attempts to slam the door in my face, but I catch it with my foot.
“Well, I have something to say to you.” God, I wish I had a voice for this.
He furrows his brows and jerks his head back. “Jacob, what’s wrong with your voice?” He sounds annoyed that he can’t hear me more than concerned for my condition.
“Cut the shit. Don’t act like you don’t know about the fire. You really expect me to believe Cora did that on her own?”
Martin opens the door wider, bracing himself on it.
“Jacob, what are you talking about? What about Cora? She left for the airport two days ago, trying to put the pieces of her life back together.”
“She wasn’t on a plane two days ago. The day before yesterday, she was committing arson and attempting murder.”
Martin studies my face. “Jacob, are you on something?”
“Where is Cora?” In my head it’s a bellow. In reality, it’s a whimper.
“I already told you, she’s gone.”
“ Fuck.” I call Lieutenant Stewart right there in front of Martin. “She’s gone. Her father said she left for the U.K two days ago. She must’ve taken a flight right after the fire.”
“Jacob, what are you doing with the governor?”
“Please, just check the passenger manifests or something. Find her. ” I beg. Forcing my voice causes me to taste the tang of blood.
Even if she was coerced, she can’t just get away. Yes, I fucked up. I messed around with Dylan while she and I were “together”, but that doesn’t excuse her attempt to burn him alive.
Lieutenant Stewart tells me to be careful and that he’s sending an officer to Governor Cosey’s before ending the call.
Martin reaches out and grasps the lapel of my jacket, hauling me over the threshold into his house.
“Jacob, what the hell is going on? Who were you just talking to and why are you sending them after Cora?”
“I have to hand it to you, Governor, this is quite the convincing display of ignorance.”
“ What are you talking about?!” he roars, shaking me violently by my shoulders.
I decide to play along and gauge his reactions. “Someone torched Dylan’s shop two nights ago.” My throat is screaming at me. Begging me to shut the hell up before I cause permanent damage, but even if I’m never able to speak again, by God, I’ll make it through this.
“And you think it was Cora?”
I reach in my coat pocket for my phone and pull up the images from the camera feed Dylan sent me, less concerned about recording him and more concerned about gauging his reaction to the evidence.
“Tell me, Martin, what do you see?”
I pause and zoom in on the frame with Cora’s necklace. My heart hammers in my chest as I watch the color drain from his face. He takes one step backward and falls to the couch.
“Cora did this? I don’t understand.” His eyes stay glued to my screen as they alternate between narrowing and widening in disbelief.
I don’t think Martin is this good of an actor, especially when he leans forward and vomits on the Persian rug beneath his feet.
“Tell me about your properties.” I refuse to believe he isn’t involved somehow , even if he didn’t know about the fire. He can’t even raise his head, but doesn’t argue when I bring him a glass of water from the kitchen. Staring at his mess on the floor, he begins talking.
“What do you want to know, Jacob? You’ve seen everything. The closing documents were all included in the paperwork I gave you.”
“What about the property with my dad?” I’m too keyed up to sit so I pace, trying to get my mind to stay focused.
“We bought it back in the early spring. He had ideas to gentrify the area. Of course, you can’t tell people that’s what you’re doing, it just has to happen over a period of time. When he went for the second property, he told me…”
“He told you what? ”
“He told me Cora had managed to make some connections and could probably get us a deal.”
“Did he say who her connections were?”
Martin shakes his head. “No. And I never asked. With everything in full swing for campaigning season, I just told him to handle it. We were going to alternate who bought which properties after buying the first one together. I went first and just signed on the dotted line.”
My father.
“Martin, do you think Cora would have done my father’s bidding?”
This question finally gets Martin’s head to rise.
“Quite possibly. They went to the symphony together last weekend. I didn’t think much about it at the time. I wasn’t surprised your father had reached out to her. Ever since he had suspicions of you and that boy, he grew more possessive of Cora like he was afraid our friendship would change simply because you two had broken up.”
“Wait, they went to the symphony together ? On purpose ? They didn’t just run into each other?”
“No, I believe he invited her a while ago. Said it was business.”
I’ll be fucking damned. They played me . Cora turned down the concert with me and Dylan so she could go to the symphony with my father. Knowing my father has been on to me since before the gala, my mind races to put the pieces of this fucked-up puzzle together.
“Martin, are you up for a visit with my father?”
When he looks at me, there’s steel in his eyes and a new resolve forming behind them as well. He wipes his mouth, squares his shoulders, and nods. “Give me a second and I’ll be right down.”
He moves to the staircase and I assume he’s going to change considering the front of his shirt is stained with his last meal.
I shoot a text to Dylan, Charlie, and Cassie, letting them know I think Martin is innocent and that we’re going to confront my father. Then I call Lieutenant Stewart and leave a voicemail asking him to reroute his officer to my parent’s house.
While I’m waiting on Martin to come back down, my phone rings and Whitney’s name flashes on my screen.
“Whitney?” I rasp.
“Jacob, oh thank God. I’ve left you like a hundred voicemails.”
“I’ve been a little busy.”
“Yeah, the fire’s been all over the news. Jacob, I think it was Cora.”
“I know it was, but how do you know?”
Whitney launches into a story about being picked up by Officer Dowdy for driving while impaired a couple years back.
“I’m not proud of it, but I was blitzed, Jacob. No way I should have been behind the wheel of a car. Officer Dowdy said if I’d let him fuck me in the backseat of his cruiser then he’d drive me home without so much as a warning. I figured what the hell , I was already known as a whore because of that innocent fling with Teddy — I’m sure you remember the pool boy? I figured if I was going to be accused of it, I might as well be guilty…especially if it could prevent DUI charges. Anyway, Cora knew the story, so my guess is she enlisted the help of a dirty cop who could help her get away with this.”
“But why did she want to do this in the first place?” I ask Cora’s best friend.
“Look, Cora is…complicated, but she’s not stupid. She was on to you and Dylan way before the gala. The double date she planned for us? She asked me to come on to Dylan to see if he’d bite. When you lost your shit over my hand on his leg, something snapped inside her, but I swear I didn’t think it was ever going to go this far. I thought if you were cheating on her, she’d get a huge payout and it would be swept under the rug like every other affair, but then she confided in me that she was working with your dad to come up with some plan to win you back . After that, she started acting weird and I haven’t really talked to her much since then.”
“Thank you, Whitney. That’s actually really helpful. And I’m really sorry that sleazy asshole took advantage of you like that.”
I hear her false bravado through the phone. “It’s in the past, but I thought you should know there was a connection there.”
“Thanks. I’ll pass it along to the officer on the case.”
Martin comes down the stairs a minute later. He calls my father on the way to the house to ensure he’s home. Of course, Steve doesn’t answer either, but we decide to try anyway. Both of us are so fired up, we’ll drive around this entire goddamn planet until we find him.
But neither of us are prepared to see Cora’s Audi in my dad’s driveway.
“What the hell?” Martin says beside me.
I glance over to see him pull a pistol out of a holster clipped to the inside of his pants.
“Whoa, Martin, let’s not do anything crazy. There’s already been enough attempts to take a life.”
“Jacob, if your father has laid a single hand on my daughter, today is the last day he’ll draw a breath.”
I believe every word he just said.
Martin is out of my car before it’s even in park. He’s halfway to the front door before I smack the hood of my Range Rover to get his attention and point to the basement. My parents have a keypad down there that raises the garage door and unless anyone’s in the basement, they most likely won’t hear the door open, potentially giving us an opportunity to gain more information.
We make our way into the bowels of my parent’s house and quickly hear my father’s shouts.
“I never told you to kill him for Christ’s sake! ”
“What? You thought just torching his shop was enough repayment for ruining our lives?” Cora shouts back.
Martin and I pause on the steps and flash a look of surprise at each other. It certainly doesn’t sound like Cora is being held against her will…nor does it sound like my father is in charge of this interaction.
I slip my phone out of my pocket, put it back on video, flashing a quick view of Martin and myself in the lens just so we’re accounted for before we climb a few steps higher so we can hear better as the argument continues.
“Cora, all I wanted was to ruin Jacob financially. To prove that if he wasn’t worth a dime, that mechanic wouldn’t want anything to do with him and Jacob would come to his senses and crawl back to the life I had planned for him, finally forgetting about his queer lifestyle.”
“Yeah, and how’d firing him and threatening his inheritance work out for you?” she sneers. “I told you he was no longer interested in the money! And you promised me that money!”
I can tell my father has his jaw clenched based on how clipped his words are. “That’s what the lawsuit was for. Jacob would’ve come around. He would’ve had to because he would have had nothing, nor would his boy-toy after the shop was turned to ashes.”
“You obviously weren’t paying close enough attention to the two of them. They would have lived out of one of their cars in order to be together,” Cora fires back. At least she’s smart enough to have seen how deep my love for Dylan runs.
“Arson? Sure. Murder? No, Cora. I may be an asshole, but I’m not a killer for fuck’s sake. You’re on your own. And I think it’s best if we steer clear of each other from now on.”
“Excuse me? I did all of this for you…for us. First, you force Jacob into a relationship with me so you can use my father. Then when Jacob defies you, you reach out to me, making promises you never intended to keep. And now you’re just going to pretend you’ve played no part in this?”
“ Cora ,” my father growls, the sound of his footsteps moving to the right of the door. “You were the one who went on the air and basically told the whole fucking world he was gay and that you supported him. How is that me not keeping my promises?”
“That was never supposed to air!” she shouts. A few seconds later, something shatters against the wall. “I offered Jacob the arrangement you suggested. He and I get married publicly while living separate lives privately. You and I could continue our affair while he and Dylan kept their trysts behind closed doors. Everyone would win, but Jacob has his own mind and refused to consider that plan, and now you want to throw me to the wolves? Once again, leaving me with nothing ?”
Martin and I stare at each other with wide eyes. My father is having an affair with Cora?
There’s a pause and then we hear my father ask, “What are you doing?”
Fuck, I wish I could see what’s happening right now.
I move up another step and try to peer under the door but all I see are Cora’s heels in front of my dad’s loafers.
“I was promised an Ellington, Steve. My whole life I’ve been reassured that my future will be set with your fortune. You and I have both known for a while that Jacob’s gay. Hell, I’ve gotten more action from you than him over the last few months and trust me, it wasn’t for lack of trying.”
“Yes, but our affair was only ever going to be just that. You were feeling neglected and I was pissed at my son. We could offer each other something in the moment.”
I have to grab Martin’s arm to keep him from catapulting through the door. Hell, I’m about ready to knock my dad’s fucking head off, myself.
“Tell me you don’t still think about it,” she purrs. The next sound is an obscene groan from my father and I can only guess where Cora’s hand has landed. I silently turn the door handle and ever-so-slowly work the door open a crack.
“Of course I do. I thought asking you to help made sense because we shared a common enemy, but I was wrong. I should never have dragged you into this and I’m not who you want. Money isn’t an issue, Cora. I can give you a whole new start, anywhere you want to go, but you and I are through. Locking that boy inside the burning building was crossing a line even I’m not willing to toe.”
How fucking heroic of you, father.
They’ve rotated slightly and I see Cora run a hand up my father’s chest. “I took initiative and took matters into my own hands. You wanted new properties? I ensured you got them for pennies on the dollar. You wanted Dylan out of Jacob’s life? Done. Do you even know how many times I had to let that disgusting cop put his hands on me in order to get him to do all of that shit? Then, when he accidentally hit that old guy, he refused to be a part of this anymore. But I’m no quitter. And we were so close to achieving our goal. I waited until Dylan was alone. I knew there were no internal cameras because Officer Dowdy had confirmed that earlier and I did what everyone else was too chickenshit to do. You need a warrior by your side, Steve. Someone who knows how to play this game. Haven’t I proven I can be that for you?”
The sound of a wet kiss fills the air around us. I look over to see Martin slumped against the wall of the staircase, pale and dazed. Admittedly, it’s a lot to digest.
Before they can continue their conversation, there’s a knock at the front door.
I sigh in relief, thinking the officer has finally arrived, but then I hear my father shout, “What the fuck are you doing here and why is Jacob’s Range Rover in my driveway?”
The unmistakable sound of Dylan’s rasp reaches my ears next.
“Where the fuck is he?”