The Distraction Read online

  “Bitch at me all you want to,” I said. “But never, ever accuse me of taking his life for granted.”

  She stared back her challenge, not even a flicker of fear in her green eyes.

  “Let go,” Alec prompted, easing my knuckles open. “Anna, let her go.”

  “Or don’t,” offered Tenner.

  “You should listen to Alec,” said Janelle. “For once.”

  I backed off and leaned against the counter, still fuming that she’d gotten under my skin, but now more fearful than ever for what this trial had done, and would do, to Alec. I pictured him bleeding out on the floor in prison, as she’d said. Pictured how it had nearly happened again at the hotel after Reznik’s man had shown up. How could I not have known how bad it had been for him? Why hadn’t he told me?

  The thought of him dying scared me more than Reznik or Stein ever could.

  As I looked at Janelle I felt nothing but contempt. But I needed to keep my mouth closed if I wanted to stay here, and more importantly, if I wanted Alec protected. I would do whatever she said to keep him safe.

  “How about some coffee?” asked Matt.

  I didn’t answer. I gripped the countertop behind me so hard my fingernails began to throb.

  Alec stayed a foot away, arms crossed. Was he doing that for her sake, or mine? Either way, I wasn’t a fan of the distance.

  “You need to meet with your lawyer,” said Janelle, squatting to pick up her folders off the floor. “Jack Reznik’s still missing, and Maxim Stein’s claiming he has no idea what provoked him to use his name.”

  The information seemed to make the air even thinner and more fragile, and through it cut a memory, spurred by her reminder.

  “Do you know a woman named Jacqueline Frieda?” I asked Alec, still unable to look straight at Janelle. “She’s a lawyer, I think.”

  “How do you know her?” asked Janelle pointedly. She placed the folders back on the table.

  From Alec’s confused frown, I guessed he hadn’t heard of her.

  “She’s been looking for Alec. I’ve run into her twice now, but she won’t tell me what she wants. Marcos—the police officer on my protective detail—he looked up her plates for me.” I pictured my serious guard. Even if he wasn’t technically tailing me anymore, I wondered if he had noticed I’d disappeared.

  “She’s on Stein’s legal team,” said Janelle. “What does she want with you? She shouldn’t be talking to you without going through your lawyer. That’s a serious breach of ethics.”

  “I don’t know,” said Alec. “I’ve never met her.”

  Janelle considered this a moment, staring behind us, into the kitchen.

  “I’ll arrange a meeting,” she said. “Something secure. See what she wants.” She looked back between us, her face showing a hint of color for the first time. “Until then, try not to distract my agents.”

  With that, she stalked out the door without looking back.

  Thirty-seven

  The meeting was arranged for eight o’clock that night, at a McDonald’s in a town thirty minutes away. These were her conditions when Janelle insisted we discuss whatever had originally brought her to Alec’s door.

  Thirty minutes after the scheduled time, I moved onto the third fingernail I’d chewed down to the nub. Matt had stayed behind at the safe house, but Tenner was smoking outside the entrance, and Janelle was sitting in the booth behind ours, pretending to read the paper. To my left was a play place, shiny with spilled orange drink and littered with wrappers and discarded Happy Meal toys, and I couldn’t help but stare at it.

  I hadn’t been to a place like this, more or less waited at a place like this, since my birth mother had died.

  Alec had been sitting across from me, but as I moved onto the fourth fingernail, he slid into the booth beside me. Taking my hands, he clasped them both within his and kissed my knuckles.

  “It wasn’t my first choice for location,” he said.

  It was an open invitation, and I didn’t want to talk about it.

  “She chose these clothes on purpose.” I smoothed down the large long-sleeved T-shirt and cargo pants Janelle had picked up at a secondhand store for me to wear until it was deemed safe enough that someone could make a supply run to my apartment. They were all the wrong sizes. I looked like a child playing dress up.

  “Maybe you should take them off.”

  I elbowed him halfheartedly, my gaze fixed on a twisting ladder and climbing wall beyond the glass partition.

  “Why didn’t you tell me how bad it was in prison?” I asked.

  He shifted.

  “Same reason you didn’t tell me how hard Bobby hit you.”

  I looked at him, then down at our clasped hands. Okay. I got that.

  “I broke my arm in a place like this once,” he said. “I thought it’d be a good idea to jump from the top of the slide. Turns out it wasn’t.”

  “Oops.”

  “Yeah. One of the rare times my dad took me somewhere.” He looked wistful, lost in the memory.

  “What’d he do about it?”

  Alec’s mouth tilted up at the corner. “He said it didn’t look broken.”

  Oh, Thomas. Some people thought they were so funny.

  I pictured Alec’s father, sitting at the restaurant on the water with Mac. How long had he waited before realizing I wasn’t coming? Did the other agents contact him, like they said they would? They never had when Alec had been taken to the safe house. I’d had to tell him myself.

  And then there was Amy, and Mike, and Derrick at work. What would they think when I simply disappeared? I wished I had a way to contact them, but my new best friend Janelle was holding my cell phone hostage in her black leather purse.

  I did have the burner phone Marcos had given me though. I’d tucked it into one of the lower pockets of the cargo pants. It was on silent; I didn’t want it somehow ringing and alerting Janelle that I was holding on to safe house contraband. But holding on to it made me feel safer.

  “What if Jacqueline’s working for Reznik?” I asked. “Or if Maxim’s got her doing something less-than-legal on the side?” I couldn’t shake the feeling that this could be the worst kind of setup. That we’d agreed to a private meet with some kind of femme fatale.

  “Then she won’t get far,” said Alec. Janelle was armed, though the weapon was concealed. If this lawyer threatened to harm us, she would jump in.

  That didn’t make me feel better.

  My gaze turned to the door as a woman in workout clothes entered. Her blond hair was back in a ponytail, tucked beneath a ball cap pulled low over her eyes. Even though this was the first time I hadn’t seen her in business attire, I recognized her immediately.

  “There,” I said to Alec. He started to stand, but she was already hurrying toward our table.

  “Jacqueline.” Alec’s expression was flat and impossible to read. “We weren’t sure you were going to make it.”

  “How did you know where to find me?” she demanded, keeping her voice low. “And who was that woman that called my office? Do you have any idea the trouble I could be in for talking to you?”

  Her concern seemed genuine, and any speculation that she was working for Reznik vanished. “I got your license plate number the last time we met. A friend of mine helped me locate you.”

  “The woman who called you is part of my security team.” Alec had been directed by Janelle to say this. “You can trust her.”

  Jacqueline laughed cynically. Her eyes darted around the room.

  “You’re one of Maxim Stein’s lawyers,” I prompted.

  “I’m involved in his bankruptcy case,” she said.

  “Bankruptcy?” I’d thought the man was made of solid gold bullion.

  Her scowl etched deeper. She began to twist a paper napkin left on the table.

  “All reve
nue effectively stopped once the charges were raised against him. He’s filing personal bankruptcy to pay for his legal fees. Another firm is starting to look at what they can pull from his company’s assets. It’ll all be public tomorrow morning anyway.” She waved her hand, little bits of napkin floating through the air.

  Alec had told me before that legal fees were killing his savings—he was a couple months away from living in a cardboard box. It seemed this trial was sucking both sides dry.

  “Why did you want to see me?” asked Alec.

  At his pointed question, she stiffened. She looked at his face for the first time, her eyes rounding just slightly.

  “You’re getting screwed,” she said.

  “How’s that?” he asked.

  She sighed.

  “You really need to look back over the Articles of Incorporation in Force’s founding documents. Point your lawyer in that direction. And if you’re feeling really generous, leave my name out of it.”

  Her vagueness was beginning to rub me the wrong way.

  “What are the Articles of Incorporation?” I asked.

  “They’re the legal papers that define the rules of the company.” Alec was scowling. “They were put into place before I worked for Max. Why would I need to look at them?”

  Jacqueline hesitated.

  “I could be disbarred for this,” she said. “Sued. If this gets out . . .” Her face was getting paler by the moment.

  I tried a gentler approach. “You already did the hard part. Just tell us why.”

  She glanced at Tenner outside, who was probably on his fifteenth cigarette by now.

  “We’ve been reviewing the Articles as part of the bankruptcy assessment,” she said. “In them is an addendum that says that if any shareholder is convicted of fraud, those shares are forfeited to the company. Do you understand what that means?”

  I glanced at Alec, who seemed to absorb this information slowly. He suddenly leaned forward.

  “Max was the primary shareholder,” he said. “He opened some of them up to Bobby when he announced that his nephew was next in line to take over the company. That’s when he let me buy in.”

  I even bought shares in it knowing full well Max would never give me any voting power.

  “Wait,” I said, piecing this all together. “Max and Bobby are about to be convicted of fraud. Holy shit.”

  “Yes,” said Jacqueline. “Holy shit.”

  Alec stared at her. “My shares don’t even make up 2 percent of the company.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “If their shares cease to exist, your 2 percent becomes 100 percent.”

  Alec shoved back in his seat. “How is that possible? I would have known about this. He would have known about this.”

  “I would bet Stein does know,” she muttered. “But like you said, that document was written before you came on. No one references it on a day-to-day basis. It’s not crucial to the corporate espionage charges the prosecution is raising against him.”

  I wasn’t much for blind trust, but the doubt was already bubbling into something far lighter in my chest.

  “You’re saying Alec has the potential to own Force,” I said. “The whole worldwide, elite aviation company.”

  She gave a jerky shrug. “Not that it’ll be worth much when this is over anyway, but yes. Stein and Calloway have to be convicted of fraud of course, which will be harder with the secretary still missing. Her testimony, considering it matched yours, would have sealed the deal.”

  “Ms. Rowe,” I said, feeling that well of dread inside me every time I thought of her. For all we knew she was trapped in a car at the bottom of the Bay.

  Jacqueline nodded. “Since Calloway pled guilty to running that woman off the road—what was her name?”

  “Charlotte MacAfee,” said Alec stoically.

  “Right. Since Calloway’s saying he acted alone, the brother’s accusations that Stein masterminded the whole thing is at a standstill. Now, Stein’s just preparing to fight you, Mr. Flynn. And he’s spending a pretty penny to do it.”

  Which meant that he was scared as hell.

  Which is why he’d hired Reznik to eliminate the opposition.

  I thought back to the newspaper articles I’d read about Charlotte MacAfee’s brother. He’d wanted justice for his sister’s murder. Maybe Alec’s testimony would give him some of it.

  Or maybe I could give it to him. Because despite Alec’s efforts to keep me clear of all this, Bobby had told me that Max had ordered my death. Maybe that was enough to lock him away forever.

  “Why tell me all this?” asked Alec. “Why go to all this risk?”

  “It’s going to be public at some point,” Jacqueline said. “You’ll want your lawyer to be prepared for that. They’ll try to say you fabricated your testimony just so you could get Stein out of the way.”

  I put my hand on Alec’s thigh, steadying the bounce of his heel. The thought of him being accused of lying had been a reality before, but now it seemed a hundred times more real. This trial had the potential to push him to the very edge.

  “And,” said Jacqueline, looking down into her lap. “And I have a cousin who’s very close. We were raised as sisters. A few years ago she met Bobby Calloway at a bar. I don’t know much of what happened, but I can tell you it didn’t end well.”

  Alec’s jaw had begun working back and forth.

  “You found her, Mr. Flynn. She’d been severely beaten. I don’t expect you to remember.” Her voice had gone tight.

  “I remember,” said Alec. “I took her to the hospital. She accused me of doing it.”

  “After Calloway’s lawyer threatened her,” she said emphatically. “She dropped those charges after she told me what really happened. She . . .” Jacqueline cleared her throat. “She owes you a great debt of gratitude. As do I.”

  Alec had told me about this once, shortly before Bobby had shown me just what kind of violence he was capable of. I didn’t know what to say. It appeared Alec didn’t, either.

  Jacqueline rose. “I appreciate what you did. We both do.” She squeezed her keys, looking from Alec to me. “Good luck.”

  A minute later, she was gone.

  Thirty-eight

  “Did she just say you’re a billionaire, or did I misunderstand?” I finally asked.

  Alec was still staring at the door where she’d left. I waved a hand in front of his face, but he didn’t even blink. In the next booth, Janelle rose.

  “She said you have to win, that’s what she said. And even then there might be nothing left.” With that, Miss Mary Sunshine hurried outside to talk to Tenner.

  Alec was still silently staring off into space.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.” He scowled. “It can’t be true. Maybe Max paid her to come here.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “I don’t know.” Alec scratched a hand over his skull. “It can’t be true.”

  The way he said it, all wary and undeserving made me want to crawl up into his lap and hold him. Because we were still in public, I settled on pulling his hand onto my thigh and resting my chin on his shoulder.

  “Why not?”

  “Because miracles don’t fucking happen to people like me.”

  He might as well have kicked me in the stomach.

  I pulled away.

  “Hold on,” he said. “I didn’t mean . . .”

  “That I wasn’t your miracle?” I crossed my arms and raised the wall. “Don’t worry, I didn’t think I was.”

  But he was mine. He’d saved me, changed me, made me want to take on the world rather than run from it. It was a shame something as simple as love didn’t stack up against the almighty dollar bill.

  He stared at me, brows knitting together.

  I wanted him to take it back, say this
great prospect was nothing without me by his side, but even if he wanted to, he couldn’t, because right then Janelle returned to the table. She was holding her cell phone, a scowl tightening her features. At the sight of it, I gripped the side of my leg, making sure the burner phone was still there.

  “Matt says someone’s been trying to reach you on your cell. They’ve called four times in a row.” She scrolled down the text message and rattled off a familiar number.

  “It’s my friend, Amy Elgin,” I said. “Did you tell her I was with you?”

  Janelle’s raised brow told me they hadn’t.

  I shook my head, hating that Amy was worrying about me. She’d likely already called my dad. The cops. The National Guard.

  “Then she’s going to keep calling until the phone’s dead,” I told her. “And then she’ll start hanging my picture on street corners and doing interviews with the local news.”

  “Good God,” said Janelle. “I don’t have time for this shit.”

  She pressed a few buttons, and held the phone up to her ear.

  “Hello? Who’s this?” Her frown deepened. “I need to speak with your mother, please.”

  It took a moment for my brain to switch gears to the six-year-old daughter of my best friend. Without thinking, I stood, leaning close to listen in.

  “What do you mean . . . Sure,” Janelle said tightly. She handed me the phone. “You’ve got two minutes.”

  I lifted the phone to my ear, listening as a small voice said my name. “Anna?”

  “Paisley? What’s going on?”

  She had my number—it was taped to the wall over their house phone for emergency purposes. She’d never called me before without Amy speaking first.

  I checked the time on the clock behind the registers—it was late for her. She usually went to bed around eight, but it was already nine thirty.

  “Mommy left and didn’t come back.”

  A cold chill crept up my spine. It wasn’t Miss Iris’s night to babysit; Amy should have been there. She never left Paisley alone.