Chapter 42 Poe
POE
The convention center was more packed than it should have been given the fact that we were at a conference for Neanderthals.
I held tightly to Maeve’s hand, leading her through the crowd as Remy looked at the event guide we’d been handed when we’d signed in (under fake names of course).
There were no costumes, but otherwise we might have been at Comic Con or some kind of film festival, a convention for water softeners or time-shares.
That was how normal everyone looked.
The jig was only up when we got closer to the convention stages, the names of upcoming events and presentations displayed on standing signs in front of each hall.
The Myth of the High-Value Woman
How to Work the 80/20 Rule to get B*tches
Telling Them What They Want to Hear: Psychology in a Hostile Dating Landscape
My stomach turned. This was fucked up.
And yeah, I knew it was #notallmen, but the fact that there was enough of these fucking assholes to fill the convention center said there were still way too many of them.
I held tighter to Maeve’s hand, wishing she would have agreed to stay at the hotel. I knew it was pointless to try and protect her from this shit but I still wished I could.
“This way,” Remy shouted over the noise of the crowd.
Bram and I flanked Maeve as we followed Remy toward a sign bearing the words Debate Stage.
Unsurprisingly, the crowd was mostly men, but they looked like a bunch of fucking robots. We were surrounded by a sea of polos and tight T-shirts designed to show off muscles that had been honed in expensive gyms.
I could almost smell the desperation in the room, a bunch of sad little boys who didn’t get enough attention from women in the world and who were too self-absorbed to realize it wasn’t because women were shallow gold diggers but because the men at Apex didn’t deserve it.
I’d heard it all in the months we’d been tracking Ethan Todd: the 80/20 rule (80% of women only wanted to date 20% of men), the 666 rule (six feet tall, six figures, six inches), and on and on it went.
Except everywhere you looked there was evidence that it was bullshit: short men with beautiful women, poor men with beautiful women, scrawny men with beautiful women.
Almost like what a woman really wanted was just a fucking decent guy who treated her like a fucking human being.
Meanwhile these fucking losers worked on their bodies with single-minded devotion and stuffed down every emotional impulse in an effort to attract women who just wanted them to cook dinner now and then and care enough to make sure she got some sleep.
It boggled the mind that they could be so stupid.
And then there were the influencers like Ethan Todd, men — and a handful of women — who capitalized on the collective insecurities and stupidity of other men by convincing them they had the magic bullet, the key to getting bitches when the entirety of the key was to not think of women as bitches.
We joined the line outside the debate stage and inched our way forward.
“I hope we can get in,” Maeve said.
She’d worn her hair pulled back into a ponytail and kept her face free of makeup, and I hadn’t needed her to say it to know she was trying to be under the radar in enemy territory.
The crowd wasn’t entirely men, but the women were a definite minority, and there was a strange kind of energy around them, a kind of revulsion-tinged desperation.
She looked so fucking pretty it almost broke my heart until I remembered the way she’d looked the night before, naked and tangled up in us at the hotel.
We hadn’t been able to get enough of her, and we’d fucked long into the night, experimenting with every possible configuration until there was nothing but bodies and pleasure.
I forced myself not to think about it when my dick got hard.
I squeezed her hand as the line inched forward. “We’ll get in.”
A few minutes later, we did, and we entered a large conference room filled with people. It was standing-room only, just a ring of people crowding in around an elevated stage with two podiums under lights.
I heard snippets of conversation, caught Ethan Todd’s name in more than one of them.
He was the star of the show and everyone was waiting to watch him take down the graduate student from Columbia who’d offered to debate him in place of NYNancy, who was a no-show for reasons that were obvious, at least to us.
A guy about our age in a suit and tie entered from the main doors and made his way to one of the podiums.
“Hello and welcome to the Apex Debate Stage!”
Maeve looked nervously around the room as the crowd cheered.
“Today’s debate will follow the usual format, with each pair of opposing debaters taking the stage for a total of twenty minutes,” the guys said.
“Each debater will have three minutes to make their arguments on a predetermined topic of their choosing, followed by a one-minute rebuttal by their opponent. This will continue until the twenty-minute period is up. We ask that you remain quiet during the debate.” He paused.
“We’ll start with Meredith K. Dunne, professor at NYU Law, and Jake Thurman debating the Nineteenth Amendment. ”
They were going to debate a woman’s right to vote? Really?
Jesus fuck.
I scoped out the room while he read their bios.
Meredith K. Dunne was an accomplished lawyer with two graduate degrees, including a PhD, and over twenty years of experience in constitutional law.
Thurman was a thirty-year-old online influencer with a top-rated podcast and over five million social media followers.
Fucking perfect.
There were no doors other than the ones we’d used to enter the room — the same doors the moderator or MC or whatever the fuck he was had used to enter the room — which meant that the debate participants, including Ethan Todd, would have to use those same doors.
As if to prove my thesis, Professor Dunne and Jake Thurman entered the room to thunderous applause. The crowd parted to allow them room to get to the stage and I caught Bram’s eye and edged toward the doors.
It meant being farther from the debate stage, but our goal was to get close to Todd in the swarm of the crowd, not to get front-row seats to the debates.
Still, I watched with fascination as the debate began, starting with Professor Dunne, who laid out the arguments, legal and constitutional, for the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.
The buzzer dinged and Thurman countered that the amendment had been illegally ratified since it expanded the electorate beyond the intent of the founders that men would represent their households with their vote, and that it violated states’ rights to make their own voting laws.
The buzzer dinged again and Thurman started in on his first argument, which was every bit as dumb as his rebuttal. I tuned him out, looking around and wondering if anyone was really buying his shit, then got depressed when I saw some of the men nodding along in agreement.
By the time the twenty-minute debate was up I’d pretty much lost faith in my gender, to say nothing of humanity as a whole, and I only half listened as the moderator announced the next debate, “Feminism as Misandry.”
Again the debate participants — an undergraduate student from a local community college and a guy in his thirties running for Congress — entered through the doors at the front of the room.
I looked at my phone and wondered where Todd was in the lineup, then realized they were probably saving him for last since he was a headliner.
My thoughts turned to my mom, as they had been more and more often. We were risking everything to get justice for June, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. But who had tried to get justice for my mom? Who — beyond my gramps and gran — had even looked for her?
I’d been stuck in the loss of her. But that had been all about me. Since Maeve’s kidnapping, I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about my mom and what it had been like for her.
I held tightly to Maeve’s hand, like that might keep her from slipping away, because no matter how I looked at it, that had been happening around Blackwell Falls for a long, long time: countless women disappearing into an unreachable void.
I didn’t know how to make it stop, didn’t even know all the players behind the sex trafficking operation.
But I knew about Ethan Todd, knew he was involved somehow, and that was a good fucking place to start.
I was pulled from my thoughts as applause erupted around me. The second debate had ended, and from the look on the Congressional hopeful’s face, I was willing to bet he’d had his ass handed to him by the undergraduate student.
Boo-fucking-hoo.
They exited the stage and the moderator took to one of the podiums.
I experimented getting close to the last two debaters, holding tight to Maeve’s hand and edging closer to their position as they wound their way through the crowd toward the doors. I had my knife — we all did — but we’d need to get close to Todd to make it matter.
Bram and Remy followed, catching my drift, but no one seemed to notice. We were just part of the crowd, a bunch of people with nothing better to do on a Saturday than to pile into the overcrowded convention hall and watch two people engage in a battle that seemed more like showmanship than skill.
“And now, I’m sure the moment you’ve all been waiting for,” the moderator said from the podium.
“To say we were disappointed to hear one of our next debaters wouldn’t be joining us this year would be an understatement.
He’s a man who really needs no introduction, so let’s just bring him in, shall we? ”
The crowd cheered, the applause deafening. I looked around and caught the handful of people who weren’t clapping, their expressions stony. They were people like us, people who saw through Ethan Todd’s bullshit, people who were desperate for everyone else to see through it too.
The doors opened to our left and a beefy guy in a black jacket marked with the words SECURITY entered the room. He was followed by two more guys just like him, and I recognized the jackets as convention security.
Todd had lost his body man in Anton and clearly hadn’t replaced him yet, which meant he was forced to use convention security instead.
That might be good for us. I doubted the guys hired to secure this circle jerk of a convention were skilled. Unfortunately, there were a lot of them: three in front, pushing through the crowd, one on either side of a smaller figure who was obviously Todd, three more at his back.
Fuck.
Rent-a-cops might not be skilled, but the sheer number of them surrounding Todd made it almost impossible to even see him, let alone reach him.
Maeve looked up at me, her expression frantic as the entourage pushed toward us through the crowd.
Bram shoved a couple people aside, trying to get closer to them, but I could already see that it was a lost cause. There was too much security — a crazy amount of security really — for any of us to get close enough to take him out.
Todd’s security was right there, close enough to touch, but Todd was insulated by their bodies.
For a split second, I thought they were going to stop right in front of us. There was a halting of their forward motion, a hitch in their step. I caught a flash of Todd’s face — a flash of his suit jacket and tie— through the bodies of the security guards.
Then he was gone, the backs of the security guards at his flank all that was visible as Todd took the stage to thunderous applause.
Maeve pulled me toward the doors, clearly in a hurry to get out of there, and I wondered if the situation was triggering for her, if she would have nightmares again after seeing Todd, after being so close to him for the first time since Romania.
We spilled out of the room and into the convention hall. There were a few people milling around, in between presentations or events, but it was a hell of a lot quieter and less crowded than the debate room had been.
“He saw me,” Maeve said, her voice shaking. “I’m pretty sure he saw me.”
“Fuck,” Bram said, stalking away before pacing back toward us. “Fuck.”
“I’m sorry,” I told Maeve with a frustrated sigh. “I didn’t see that level of security coming.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Remy said.
“It matters,” Bram snapped. “Who knows when we’ll get another shot at him?”
Remy held up a phone. It took a few seconds for us to realize it wasn’t his phone.
“Wait…” Maeve said. “Is that…?”
Remy nodded. “I got his phone.”
“Holy shit,” I said at the same time Bram said, “How the fuck…?”
I was surprised Remy had managed to stay upright in the crowd, let alone that he’d managed to lift Todd’s phone.
Remy shrugged. “You said improvise. There were so many people, and his jacket pocket was right there. Figured it was worth a shot.”
Maeve’s eyes were wide, her gaze trained on the doors to the debate stage, like she expected Ethan Todd to come roaring through them at any second. I put my arm around her shoulders. “Let’s get out of here.”
We headed for the exit.
“How hard is it to break into a phone?” Maeve asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I know someone who does.”