Chapter 6 #2
“You’re not going anywhere,” Jacko said, deep voice hard. “The running stops now.”
She was twisting her hands in her lap, pulled her fingers apart. She met Jacko’s eyes then John’s. “I can’t lie and say the idea of being protected by Jacko isn’t appealing. But it’s not practical.” She turned to Jacko completely, looked him full in the face. “You can’t stay by my side 24/7. Because that is what it would take. You’ve got a job, a life. You simply can’t do it.”
“I can stay by your side 24/7,” Jacko growled. “No question.” He looked at his boss. “Which is why I quit.”
John was fiddling with a pencil which looked out of place on his super high tech designer desk with the six thin film monitors and the projected keyboard. “No, Jacko,” he said. “You can’t stay by her side day and night.”
Jacko half rose out of his chair. “Goddammit! Sir. Yes I can and yes I will.”
“No. You can’t.” The pencil was suddenly pointed at him. “But we can.”
Jacko’s face turned blank. “Sir?”
John nodded at her. “Is she yours?”
At any other time Lauren would have protested the language, bristled at the tone. Is she yours? No, she wasn’t anyone’s. But this was something between John and Jacko.
“Yeah. She is.” Jacko said immediately. He made a fist, bounced it off his knee.
“Then she’s ours,” John said simply. “And we look after our own. We’ll keep her safe. AIS has manpower. When you’re working we’ll detach someone. We can work out a plan, shift schedules. This is what we do.”
All of a sudden Jacko’s face changed, lightened, and Lauren realized what relief he felt. He didn’t look so impassive—a strong man making a big sacrifice, quitting the job he loved for her. His face was so grim and fixed all the time she hadn’t noticed but now she did. He didn’t look like he was bench pressing 300 lbs. He looked relieved.
“Okay, Lauren.” John turned to her, that handsome CEO look gone, the warrior underneath visible. She’d always seen him with his wife and he curbed his essential nature when he was around her. Right now, he looked like Jacko, he looked like Douglas, whom everyone called the Senior. He looked like all his men. Tough and mean and indestructible. And coldly efficient.
At any other stage of her life, seeing that look on a man’s face would have scared her. Alfonso, her mother’s husband, had looked just like that when he dropped that affable rich-guy affect he’d had. Dark and dangerous, belonging to a world of blood and iron. Only John was dangerous in defense of people, not against people. Like Jacko and Douglas and the rest of the team at ASI.
But still, the instinctive part of her recognized a dangerous animal and she recoiled, then checked herself. These two men were going out of their way to make her safe.
Jacko she could sort of understand. For some reason he had placed himself at her service, like a knight of old. It had to be more than the sex they’d shared. Men didn’t turn their lives inside out for a one night stand. Underneath his impassive exterior, she felt he cared for her.
But John? What did John care?
“Why do you care?” she blurted, then bit her lips. But she needed to understand. Putting herself in Jacko’s hands when he cared for her, that made sense. But John was about to be involved too. Why?
He didn’t take offense. He just sat back in his chair, looking between her and Jacko. Jacko was staring straight ahead, but he reached over and held her hand tightly. “We’re all military men in this company,” John said. He had a deep, mesmerizing voice. Well spoken but with a slight hint of the south. Not as much as Jacko, but definitely there. “We had each other’s backs in the military and we have them now. A threat to Jacko and who he cares for is like a threat to my own family. I’d expect him to defend Suzanne and Isabel with his life, and he would. It’s mutual. We’re all in this together.”
Something deep inside, something that had been frozen for a long time, suddenly thawed in a hot rush of emotion. She’d been alone for so very long. Jorge’s pursuit had cut her off from everyone, leaving her in a cold bubble of fear and dread. Day after day of loneliness, keeping her head down, trying not to be noticed. Not answering the smile of the girl who poured her coffee, not responding to the nice guy who pumped the gas and who wished her a good day. Because any kind of human contact painted a huge bullseye on her and anyone who’d been nice to her.
Like Cheryl. Like Carla.
She clutched Jacko’s hand, warm and hard, with a trembling hand. “Oh God. I—I’m having trouble coming to terms with this.” Not being frightened all the time. Not being so relentlessly alone.
She held her other trembling hand to her mouth to keep in the sobs. But the hydraulic principle of emotion made tears well in her eyes.
John’s eyes widened, almost in fear. She could see the whites all around his gunmetal eyes. Jacko simply held her hand tightly. Both men turned at the sound of the door opening.
“Senior,” John said, relief in his voice. “Come in. We have a situation. Lauren’s in trouble.”
Douglas Kowalski moved quietly and quickly across the room, grabbed a chair and sat down beside John. He looked carefully at Jacko holding her hand and then at her. Unlike John, Douglas didn’t have an avuncular CEO look as a default setting. His setting was tough warrior, always. It ratcheted up even more when he saw her.
“Sitrep,” he said.
John nodded at Jacko, who sat even more stiffly in his chair, as if coming to attention sitting down. Jacko turned to Douglas. “Lauren has someone after her,” he said. “A bad guy. Killed two people trying to get to her.”
“Whoa.” John held up a big hand, palm out. “This is new. We need to talk to the cops. Senior?—”
But Douglas was already tapping on his cell. “Bud,” he said. “Got a minute?” The answer must have been yes because a second later the image of Detective Tyler Morrison, known universally as ‘Bud’, Claire’s husband, showed up on a monitor. Douglas angled it so everyone could see. Bud was in his office, Spartan and efficient.
“’Sup?” he asked genially. “John, you gonna bribe me with some more Trailblazers tickets?” He leaned forward a little. “Hey, Jacko. Hi Lauren.”
“Yeah,” John answered, “but first we’ve got a problem. Lauren here has a bad guy after her. Killed two people to get to her.”
Like with John, the geniality left Bud’s face immediately, his features sharpened and he looked every inch a cop. Lauren remembered that he was ex military, too. Not a SEAL, but a Marine. She’d heard the guys joke about the wusses in other parts of the military but never the Marines.
“Lauren,” he said, curling his fingers up. “Talk.”
“Yes…” Lauren swallowed the instinctive ‘sir’.
She looked at the four men, three in the room, one on a screen, listening to her intently. Jacko looked impassive, as always, though she knew he was paying close attention. She held onto Jacko’s hand tightly.
“My name isn’t Lauren Dare. I’ve only had that name for four months.” No going into close detail on that. Felicity deserved her anonymity. “Basically, I inherited what I believe to be a criminal empire two years ago. My mother married a man called Alfonso Guttierez, who runs—ran—all sorts of nasty things from a hotel and casino empire. Guns, drugs, prostitutes, you name it. Alfonso and my mother died in a car crash. My mother died an hour after my stepfather. She was his universal heir and I was my mother’s, so the whole thing came to me. My step father, who was childless, had imported a nephew of his from Colombia but he turned out to be a fuck-up.” Lauren looked around. “Can I say that? It’s what my stepfather—who might have been a crime boss but never used profanity around women except when talking about his nephew—called him.”
“What was the name of the fuck-up? And where was this?” Bud asked. He was tapping on the keyboard of a monitor to the side.
“Jorge Guttierez, Palm Beach, Florida,” Lauren answered and suddenly had an image of the next to the last time she’d seen him, at the funeral, clearly drugged up and smelling of sweat and alcohol. The last time she’d seen him, he was trying to kill her. “At least Alfonso could control himself but Jorge…Jorge was in thrall to the products he sold.”
“Yeah. Got him. Nasty fucker.” Bud turned another screen to them. “Rap sheet as long as my di—er, arm.” A flush of color appeared on his cheeks.
The three men in the room leaned forward to read off Bud’s monitor. Lauren didn’t bother. She knew what they were seeing.
If Bud’s dick was as long as Jorge’s rap sheet, Claire must be one happy woman. Actually she did look always happy. Despite his roughness, Bud seemed to be a really good husband.
A long list of arrests showed up, with Jorge’s booking photo. He looked more and more disheveled as the photos scrolled down. His hair grew longer, beard going from stubble chic to unshaved mess.
“The arrests never stuck, though.” Bud sounded angry. “What the?—”
“Alfonso had set up a very good team of lawyers. The most expensive in the Florida I heard him say once to my mother. He himself was never booked on anything, he never even got a parking ticket.”
“Jorge’s arrests start two years ago.”
“Right after his uncle’s death. He was scared of Alfonso, kept himself in check. But after Alfonso died there was no one to rein him in. I think he went a little nuts when he realized he hadn’t inherited anything. That I’d inherited everything.”
“A lot nuts.” Jacko sat back after having carefully studied Jorge’s dealings with the law. His lips were pressed tight. “Used to easy money, little work, thinking to inherit an empire. Certain kinda guy—yeah, it’d push him over the edge.”
“So, Lauren—do I call you Lauren?” Bud asked.
“Yes. I like the name, it was my grandmother’s.”
All four men scowled. At her. She scowled back. “What?”
“Not good, honey,” Douglas answered. “If you’re going underground, you should choose names that have nothing to do with you.”
Yes, that was exactly what Felicity had said. She’d taken two seconds to find out that Lauren was her maternal grandmother’s name.
Lauren sighed. “Yes. You are absolutely right. But—I’d had everything taken from me. My past, my present, my future. My job—I was a museum administrator, and a good one. Everything. And my first fake name, I never remembered it. People would call my name and I wouldn’t answer. I loved my grandmother. I guess it was a way to hold on to something of my past.”
Silence.
Maybe they understood.
“So who are the dead bodies?” Bud asked.
Lauren shivered. Two women dead—because of her. Jacko reached over the back of her chair and cupped her shoulder. His touch steadied her, gave her warmth.
“The first is a friend of mine from Palm Beach, Cheryl Goddard.” Sweet, funny, too-rich-for-her-own-good Cheryl, whose parents had given her money instead of love. Cheryl, who’d never had loving grandparents like Lauren had. “I was finishing up graduate school in Chicago when my mother’s lawyer called up with the news of my mother’s death. And that I had inherited the house and a slew of hotels.”
Lauren pinched the bridge of her nose, looked at the three tough men before her, glanced at the monitor to one side. They were all leaning forward, faces tight with attention, including Bud.
“At the time, I didn’t realize what it was I inherited. I knew Alfonso was bad news but I didn’t realize exactly how bad. My mother’s marriage to him had created a rift between us. We rarely saw each other and I’d never seen the house, which my mother had just finished decorating.” She tried a smile on for John. “Suzanne would be appalled. So much money, gilt everything. So I travelled down to Palm Beach for the funeral and hadn’t thought to book a hotel. After the funeral, this lawyer pressed a set of keys and some remote controls in my hand and said that I should stay in the mansion, start taking stock. He’d send someone for me the next day. I was in a daze. I don’t remember much. It was hot, all the colors seemed so outrageously bright, my head hurt.”
Her heart, too, as she realized she’d never be able to reconcile with her mother. It was too late.
“Alfonso’s nephew Jorge was there. I barely noticed him. He was tall, good looking in a sleazy kind of way. Dressed in black Armani. When he gave me the keys to the mansion, the lawyer whispered that I should watch out for Jorge.”
“Jorge had nothing to do with it,” Bud said. “If the estate had been deeded to you, and you hadn’t made out a will naming him as your heir, he couldn’t do anything at all.”
Lauren tried a shaky smile. For a second, she was back there in the suffocating heat of Palm Beach, the smell of a billion flowers overwhelming, almost nauseating, the memorial facility filled to the brim with overdressed darkly-tanned people she’d never met. Complete strangers, men and women drenched in perfume and cologne, embracing her. Murmuring platitudes while eyeing each other. Bling that nearly blinded her. Trying to come to terms with the fact that her mother—her vain and cold mother—was gone . Her entire family, gone. Father, grandparents dead. And now her mother. And she couldn’t even begin to grasp what she was feeling. On top of it all, it turned out that she was rich, unbelievably rich, the money coming from the bowels of hell.
“My friend Cheryl attended the funeral with me and refused to let me sleep alone in the mansion. The place was huge, garish. We found two guest bedrooms that were larger than my apartment in Chicago, I took one, she took the other. I—I couldn’t sleep. Around two in the morning I gave up trying and slipped outside to take a walk in the gardens. I saw two men dressed in black walking toward a third man. Jorge. Something told me to stay quiet.”
She could never forget. The two men dressed for stealth. Jorge still in his black Armani. A full moon that showed his expression of vile malevolence. He was swaying as if in a full wind, stoned out of his mind.
Lauren tightened her hand around Jacko’s hand. “They—they were reporting to Jorge that they’d ‘found the bitch and taken care of her’. Those words exactly. He asked if they’d made it look like an accident and they said yes. He took two packets from inside his jacket. Payment. They took off. I went back in and found?—”
Her teeth began to chatter. Jacko put an arm around her shoulders, pulling her against his chest. She felt his words more than heard them.
“That’s enough for now,” he said. “She needs some rest. We can go over this some other time.”
“No, no!” Lauren pushed against his chest. She could never make him let go if he didn’t want to, but he let her go immediately. She straightened, wiped her eyes. It was the first time she’d told the story to anyone. Even Felicity knew only part of it. She had to get it out now, get the grief and the guilt off her chest. She leaned her forehead briefly against Jacko’s broad shoulder then lifted her head. “I have to do this,” she whispered, meeting his eyes.
He nodded.
Lauren looked at John, at Douglas, glanced over to the monitor, then lastly to Jacko. He was, as usual, impassive. No. Looking more closely, he wasn’t impassive. He was totally focused on her and she could almost feel his attention on her skin.
And she remembered—these men were warriors. They had faced death and dismemberment every day for their country. Most of the incredibly brave things they had done had been classified so no one even knew. She couldn’t be a coward in front of them, she simply couldn’t.
“I found Cheryl at the foot of the stairs. Her neck was broken. They’d thrown her down the stairs, but I couldn’t prove anything. I ran upstairs, packed a quick bag and got out of there. My mother had a dozen cars. I took one of hers because when Jorge realized he had the wrong woman he’d come after me again. I thought it might take him a day or two to figure out I took one of my mother’s cars.”
“Cheryl?” Bud asked over the computer.
“Yes.”
“Spell the name.” She did. He held up a big hand for silence, then started typing furiously. They were all quiet while he checked screens. He nodded abruptly. “Okay. They found it an accidental death.” He looked up. “No one reported you missing.”
Lauren swallowed. No. There wouldn’t be anyone to report her missing. There wouldn’t be anyone who really cared. The people who cared enough for her to take action were all in this room. And in a virtual chatroom.
She shook her head. “Jorge certainly wouldn’t report me missing once he realized he’d had the wrong woman killed. And I think Jorge must have bought someone off. I am absolutely certain he has plenty of cash even if he can’t access his uncle’s accounts.”
“I’ll check into it carefully,” Bud said, and she knew he would.
“You said two.” Jacko said quietly. He was watching her intently, listening so carefully she was sure he could repeat what she was saying verbatim. “Two dead.”
“Yes. And the second dead person is my fault, too.” Lauren felt bitter bile in her throat as she spoke. Two people dead, because of her. “I—I was under shock. And I wasn’t thinking clearly. I called my college roommate who lived in Indiana. Carla Whitman. Asked if I could come and stay with her for a few days. It never occurred to me—” Her voice broke, her throat tightened. Jacko looked as impassive as ever but his hand tightened around hers. Lauren straightened. She had to own this. It was her fault entirely and she had to own it. She met the eyes of the three men in the room, checked the monitor. Bud was watching soberly. “It never occurred to me that I was endangering her. I was driving my mother’s car, I was travelling anonymously. It just—I felt like I was safe. And I wasn’t.”
Jacko stirred. “Nothing in your background led you to believe you could be tracked.”
True, but—”Still, I should have thought it through. But I didn’t. I was shocked, stressed and I just wanted to get away. I thought if I could hole up somewhere, I could figure things out. Regroup. Call the police. Get out a restraining order or something. Then tell them what I’d heard.”
“And instead?” Bud asked.
“Instead, I got Carla killed, too. We met at a cafè in town. She was worried, she heard the panic in my voice over the phone. I explained the situation to her and she was angry. Said that a friend of her father’s knew someone who could help. I started calming down. I’d driven all night and I was exhausted. She said to come home with her and she’d call in a security company she knew through work to protect us.” Lauren stopped, looked around the elegant premises, at the owners of the security business, John and Douglas. “Maybe like this one. It was just what I needed, safety. The time to think. We paid the bill and I needed to go to the bathroom. I left everything on the table, including?—”
“Including your cell,” Jacko said.
Lauren hung her head in shame.
“Yes,” she whispered. That one careless, thoughtless act had snuffed out Carla’s life. “Yes, except my cell. They killed her instead of me. I came back out of the bathroom to see two men walk into the café, right up to her. One took out a gun, put it against her forehead and pulled the trigger. Then they walked right back out again, fast. Everyone in the café was so shocked no one tried to stop them. Carla looked a little like me.”
“Like this?” On the monitor, Bud turned another monitor around. And there it was—Carla’s portrait photo that had been on her Facebook and Linkedin pages. Pretty, blonde, lively.
Now dead.
Lauren nodded, throat tight.
“She’s blonde,” John noted.
“So is Lauren,” Jacko chimed in.
Lauren blushed, a hot rush of blood to her face and chest. Clearly Jacko had a way to know that. An intimate way. But none of the men showed signs of anything but concentration.
“I, ah. I have changed my hair color several times.”
Polite silence.
“I should have gone to the police. But I had zero proof. It would have been my word against Jorge’s and he can hire the best lawyers there are.”
“And he would have gotten to you,” Jacko stated, voice flat. “No question. Throw enough money or men at the problem of getting to you and you’ll be dead. You were right to run. Except…” Jacko gave a long hard stare at John then Douglas. “The running stops. Right here. Right now.”
“Damn straight.” John leaned back in his chair.
“Oh yeah,” Douglas said.
“So now you—” John pointed a finger at Jacko. “You’re taking the week off. You’ve got a lot of accumulated leave you haven’t taken. We’re going to put together a protection roster and protocol to ensure 24/7 protection for Lauren when you come back to work.”
“Thanks.” Jacko bowed his head slightly, then lifted it. “And Bud’s going to look into this Jorge, find out what’s happening. Get some eyes on the fu—creep.”
“You bet.” Bud’s stern face looked out at them from his monitor. The image was so clear he could have been in the room with them. “I’m going to start investigating this guy. From what Lauren says, he’s probably breaking a million laws, not to mention two homicides. I know an LEO in Florida, can’t be bought off. He can do some digging. We’re going to bring down a world of hurt on the guy. I’ll check in with you later.” His image disappeared in a wink.
“Oh.” Lauren’s head whirled. A few hours ago, she’d been packing to go somewhere, anywhere. To leave her friends behind, to leave her whole life here behind. Her new life would have been sere, friendless. Planned to be that way. Her heart had ached at the thought of what was before her. And now this. A reprieve. And maybe, just maybe a normal life at the end of it?
An impossible dream, only a couple of hours ago.
Her gaze shifted from John to Douglas and back to John. “I don’t know how to thank you. But you must promise me that Suzanne stays away from me. And Douglas, Allegra too. And tell Bud that Claire has to stay away from me. They shouldn’t even know I am still in town. I don’t want any of them near me.”
“Why don’t you want us near you?” an indignant female voice inquired from behind her.
Lauren twisted in her seat. There she was. Suzanne. Wearing one of her perfect pastel suits that looked like a million dollars on her. And you couldn’t hate her for it because she was so nice. The thought of anything happening to her?—
Lauren jumped up, put her hands in front of her, palms up, as if staving off danger. And she was. Anything happening to Suzanne would kill her.
“Suzanne!” she called sharply. “You shouldn’t be near me!”
Suzanne walked forward quickly, as if she hadn’t spoken at all, and simply enveloped Lauren in a warm, perfumed embrace. Lauren pulled in a deep breath. Suzanne smelled so good. Not only of an expensive perfume, but of friendship and love. If those were smells, they would be Suzanne’s.
She bent her head to Suzanne’s shoulder to hide the sudden spurt of tears. Two years of not crying and here leaked water everywhere.
“No,” she whispered shakily into Suzanne’s powder pink jacket. But she clung even more tightly.
Suzanne lifted her head and spoke to her husband. “What’s going on, John?”
Before John could answer, Lauren pushed herself away from Suzanne. It was hard to do but she’d gotten used to pushing away good things. “You’ve got to stay away from me, Suzanne. Someone is after me and you could get caught in the crossfire. Jacko and John and Douglas are going to try to fix this, but until it’s fixed, I shouldn’t be anywhere near you. Or anywhere near Allegra and Claire.”
She took a step back, far enough not to feel Suzanne’s body heat, or smell her perfume. It hurt.
To her surprise, Suzanne stepped forward again and put her arm around Lauren’s shoulder. “Nonsense,” she said briskly. She looked at her husband. “John won’t let anything happen to me, will you, John?”
John stood up, walked toward them. He put a big hand on Lauren’s shoulder. Douglas had stood up, too.
John’s face had turned hard. It wasn’t difficult to imagine him as a warrior again, instead of a highly successful businessman. “Nothing is going to happen to Suzanne or Isabel. We keep our women safe. Don’t worry about that.”
“Oh yeah,” Douglas chimed in. His scarred face was hard, too. “Nothing’s going to happen to you or Suzanne or Isabel or Claire. And no one on this earth is going to touch Allegra. You can bank on that.”
Lauren believed them. There was a concentration of male power in the room that was more than testosterone. These were men who had been tested again and had come out victorious.
There was an aura in the room, a feeling of strength and purpose. These were serious men. Even Suzanne was serious. When Suzanne was in business mode and not in friend mode, she was invincible. Firm and smart.
All of a sudden, Lauren had a vision of Jorge. Instead of him looming in her head like a huge monster, a Godzilla capable of swatting away her future, her life, and the people close to her, she saw him as he was. Weak and petulant. All of this heartache was because he thought he could simply step into Alfonso’s shoes. Whatever else Alfonso had been, he had been a hard worker. Jorge was a spoiled child. He’d gotten close to her twice because of luck and her own stupidity. Not through his own intelligence.
The presence of Jacko, John and Douglas—and even Suzanne—made her realize she had better and smarter people on her side.
For the very first time she thought— I’m going to win this . She’d been so grief-stricken at the loss of Cheryl and Carla, so caught up in the idea that Jorge could find her wherever she went to ground, it had distorted her thinking.
She was going to win this. She was going to get her life back.
Another male hand landed heavily on her shoulder. Jacko’s.
“As long as I am alive, you’ll be safe,” he growled.