Liberty...And Justice for All (10 page)

I nodded. I was trying to be a little bit smarter about the
you go, I go
thing.

He slipped back into the limo but the car didn’t pull away until I was safely inside the lobby. I watched from behind the glass doors, my heart heavy as I watched my husband disappear into the night.

I
slept fitfully
without John beside me. And then, at around three a.m., I heard some yelling from the hallway that completely woke me up. I looked through the peephole and caught a glimpse of Catherine running back and forth down the hall, whooping with laughter.

It was a luxury hotel, and the walls were thick. So if I could hear her, she was being nuclear-bomb loud. I threw the door open and stalked outside in my pajamas.

“What. The. Hell,” I hiss-whispered at Corey, who was leaning up against one of the walls, dying from laughter. Catherine was trying to say something but they both kept laughing so hard it wouldn’t come out.

“Corey?” I asked, menacingly. He looked up and tears were pouring down his face.

He looked at me helplessly. “It’s just…she’s just…bahahahaha.” He collapsed against the wall again.

“You are shit-faced.
Perfect
,” I said. “You’re supposed to be the responsible one.”

He looked at Catherine and they both started laughing again, off on a jag, and I just shook my head in disgust. “Go to bed,” I said, “before John gets back.” I watched Catherine as she swayed, trying to get her door open.

“Don’t you dare sleep with her,” I whispered to Corey, my fists clenched. I was seething, and drunk as he was, Corey seemed wounded by my words.

“I wasn’t going to,” he mumbled. “She just kept making me do shots. I was trying to let her have fun.”

I pointed down the hall. “Go. And remember, we’re right next door.”

He kept his eyes on his feet—maybe because he was ashamed, or maybe because he wasn’t sure if they were going to work right—and walked unsteadily to their suite.

I went back into my own room and paced until John got home, two hours later. I had worked myself into quite a state by then, worrying about him, worrying about everything else.

“What were you doing? Why were you gone so long?” I asked as he came through the door.

He unknotted his tie and sighed. He looked exhausted. “My contact kept me waiting for a while. He’s with the cartel. I had to sit tight until he was done with a meeting tonight.”

“And? What did he say about Mia?”

“He said that she’s alive. She’s being held in the desert compound, like I thought. And that they hadn’t done anything to her…yet.”

“Are they going to bring her in the morning?” I asked.

“No,” John said. “My guy said they’re not giving into any demands. He assured me that she was alive. They’ll do the picture like we asked, before we turn over the money.”

“And then what?” I asked.

“Then, they keep her until we come up with the rest of the money,” John said. “Maybe we can get Tony set up to run, and we find a way to get Mia out of there. Or Tony has to play ball with the dealers, go back to what he was doing before. The Freemans want this deal. The club is a cash cow for them. It’s becoming a hedonistic hot spot.”

“Why aren’t the police doing anything about this?” I asked. “The dealers can’t just come in and take over the club. The police should be all over them.”

“There’s something else going on…the Freeman cartel is very sophisticated, Liberty. They have a plan. I’m sure they’ve got a lot of people on their payroll.”

John sighed and rubbed his face. “I would try to break in and get Mia out so that they could run, but it wouldn’t be easy, and it may not even be possible. The dealers have a stronghold out here, in the desert. It makes Angel Morales’s compound seem like a cakewalk.”

I shivered, remembering the setup Angel had…machine gun-clad guards everywhere, a video security camera system.

But still, we’d been able to manage it…

I kept pacing, my hands nervously fiddling
.

John flopped down on the bed and closed his eyes. “Babe. Let’s sleep on it. I’ve had enough angst for one day.” He opened one eye and peered at me. “Did Catherine and Corey make it back okay?”

“They’re back…. They were a little…toasty,” I said, trying to be upbeat about it.

“Corey, too?”

I nodded. “He said Catherine made him do shots. He was just trying to let her have fun.”

John just closed his eyes again. “I’m ready for this day to be over,” he said, “and it’s already tomorrow.”

I climbed next to him and wrapped my arms around him. “I can make it better,” I said, and kissed him. He opened his eyes and smiled at me; I could feel him stirring against me. “I know some tricks.”

“Hell yeah, you do,” he said wickedly, and pulled me on top of him.

“
Y
ou have
a lot to answer for, young lady,” John said to Catherine the next morning as we waited for the elevator. John and Corey were headed to meet Tony. They were all going to the exchange together. Catherine wanted to go shopping, so I was stuck playing babysitter.

She’d snorted when she’d seen me. “
That’s
what you’re wearing?” she’d asked, incredulous. I looked down at myself. I had on leggings, a pair of Ugg boots, and what I thought was a relatively attractive gray sweatshirt.

“We’re going shopping, not to the opera,” I said, stymied.

“I’m going to pretend you’re my inbred second cousin. Or my assistant,” she sniffed. She was wearing a leather miniskirt, black leather booties with a three-inch heel, and what appeared to be some sort of bodysuit. She had a chain-link Dior pocketbook thrown across her chest like armor and makeup that made her look like she came right from shooting a
Purple Rain
video.

“Aren’t you hung over?” I asked. “Doesn’t your head hurt so much that you should be quiet, or something?”

“I feel fine,” she shrugged. “I took four Advil before I went to bed. Hangovers are for the weak.” We both looked at Corey, who was looking a little green.

“Be quiet,” he admonished us. “I have a headache.”

“As for you,” she said, turning back to her father, “I have nothing to apologize for. Corey and I did what you said—we went out for drinks and we had fun. You want apologies? Go look in the mirror and practice. In the meantime, I wouldn’t be holding my breath.”

She tossed her long braid over her shoulder and proceeded to ignore us.

“Do you have any more Advil?” I asked her. “‘Cause I’m pretty sure I’m going to need it.”

I kissed John quickly in the lobby before they left. “Be careful,” I said.

“I will. You too,” he said giving Catherine a quick look. “I hired a car for you. I’ll text you when I can.”

He looked at Catherine. “Try to have a good day. And for what it’s worth, I
am
sorry. For everything.” He squeezed her shoulder and bit his lip while I seethed inwardly.

Always giving her too much. And does she appreciate it?
I looked at her face, impassive beneath the layers of makeup.
No. No she does not.

I decided right then and there that this was going to be a tough-love sort of shopping day.

We headed to our car. The driver nodded to us and held the door open; Catherine completely ignored him and I smiled widely and thanked him profusely, in part to make up for her rudeness.

I closed the divider once we got inside. “Can you stop being so rude?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes. “Would you get off my back? Between you and John, I’m going crazy. Eva didn’t trust me alone, so she had John babysit me. John didn’t trust me alone, so he had you babysit me. You didn’t think you could
leave
me alone, so you had to drag me out here. To babysit me. So now I’m here. Don’t expect me to be excited about it.”

“You don’t need to be so cruel to your father. You are
playing
him. He doesn’t deserve it.”

“How do you know what he deserves?” Catherine asked.

“I had a father who abandoned me,” I said. “John was far from a perfect dad, but what he did does not rise to that level. If I can forgive Eric, why can’t you forgive John? Move past it?”

“Why would I want to do that?” She asked. “What do I owe him?”

“It’s not about owing anybody anything,” I said. “It’s about being a grown up. You have a second chance with John. He’s giving you everything that he has. He’s putting up with every ounce of your shit. Why would any reasonable person do that?” I asked, my eyes flashing at her.

“It’s because he loves you. It’s because he’s trying to do the right thing, to make up for not being there for you growing up. To make up for the fact that you were abducted—which he blames himself for, by the way—and your situation with Angel.”

“Angel wasn’t a situation,” she snarled. “He was my husband. And
you
killed him.”

“Will you get off that?” I asked. “
You
told me to kill him. C’mon. We’d both be dead right now if I hadn’t done it, and you know it.”

She stopped glaring at me and looked out the window.

“I’m not sorry to be free of Angel. Or that life,” she said, a little while later. “I’m just not sure what I’m doing here.”

“You’re going to have to figure it out,” I said. “You’re going to have to figure out what you want to do.”
Besides shopping, drinking your face off and acting like a spoiled brat.
“I
do
know you’re too old to be treated like an adolescent with a piss-poor attitude. So maybe that’s a good place to start.”

That elicited a sigh and an eye roll from her.

“I just feel like a girl, still,” she said. “Being around my parents makes me feel like that. It’s like I’m emotionally frozen at eighteen.”

“You know, that’s actually a real thing,” I said. “I’ve done some reading on what abuse and trauma—also, addiction—does to you. It can stop your emotional maturity. Like, if you start using drugs at eighteen, you don’t emotionally grow past that age. Same thing if you’re abused —or have a major trauma, like an abduction. You shouldn’t be ashamed of that. You should go talk to someone.”

“
You
should go talk to someone,” she said. “If I recall correctly, you’ve had abuse, addiction and major trauma to deal with.”

“You’re the only major trauma I’ve had,” I said, and laughed. “You kidnapped my ass.”

“You totally deserved it,” she said, and now she was laughing, too. “Serves you right, coming to Mexico and asking stupid questions. You’re lucky you didn’t get killed.”

“I am lucky,” I said, “and so are you. So think about what I said. About maybe talking to someone.”

She shrugged but didn’t say anything nasty. For me, that was a small victory.

“What about your family?” She asked. “What are we going to do about the necklace?”

“Matthew suggested that we start threatening them with physical violence. He said they’d crack pretty quick.”

She nodded at me. “Sounds like a plan. When are we doing this?”

“As soon as we go back. And Catherine—”

She looked at me with all the innocence she could muster.

“Don’t sleep with Jacoby again. I’m about as related to you as I can stand to be.”

“I hear that,” she said, and went back to looking out the window.

C
atherine literally shopped
until I dropped. I was her bag lady. I actually had to run back to the car, several times, to put her purchases in to the trunk. The driver was laughing and shaking his head at me by the time I came back with the third load.

“You girls,” he said.

“Oh, this isn’t me,” I said. “None of this is me. It’s Her Highness. She’s too excited to be around all these stores.” For me, the morning was like when I went to a restaurant without Chicken Caesar Salad on the menu: it was over my head. The weird clothes, the snotty sales attendants, and the outrageous price tags were beyond my comprehension.

Was this supposed to be fun?
I wondered. Seriously…five thousand dollars for a pocketbook? Didn’t these people know that there were kids starving all over our country?

If Catherine knew about the starving children, their existence did not impede her. Pocketbooks, shoes, coats, lingerie, perfume…if Dior and Bottega Veneta stocked it, she was buying it.

Lots of it.

After three hours straight, my stomach was snarling. “Catherine,” I said, accosting her as she came out of yet another dressing room. “We’re done. I’m starving.”

“All right, all right,” she said. She looked at my outfit again and sniffed. “I guess we’ll go someplace causal for lunch.”

“Since you probably maxed out all John’s credit cards just now,
yeah
, I’m thinking casual would be the best option.”

She sniffed at me in disapproval.

I sniffed back. And desperately wished I’d taken an Advil.

J
ohn and Corey
met us back at the Byzantine that evening. We were in the lobby; the four of us were having tea. I watched, while pretending to not watch, that Catherine was telling Corey about our shopping trip, and that she was making fun of me, and that Corey was laughing. And that they were being sort of cute together.

Catherine tried to order a Bloody Mary but I gave her a death look. One that actually worked.

“How’d it go?” I asked John. He’d texted me several times over the course of the day, letting me know he was okay, but without providing details.

“Not great,” John said. “Tony gave them the money. They sent the picture, but Tony begged to talk to Mia… she was hysterical. Tony got very upset. He threatened them.

“And then they told him that Mia was as good as dead.”

“And then?” I asked.

“Then Tony offered to do whatever they wanted.”

“So what’s the next move?” I asked.

“The dealers said that at the moment, they are only interested in receiving cash from Tony. They’re cutting him out of the drug action until he can prove that he’s really back in, and that he’s going to be cooperative. We’re going to watch the security tapes tonight to see if we can figure out who they’ve been sending into Fierce. That way we can at least try to keep tabs on what’s happening at the club.”

“If we can find the dealer, maybe we can trace him back to Mia,” I said. “Maybe he could lead us to where they’re keeping her.”

“I already know where she is,” John said, “but it’s not a viable strategy for us to try to break in there. Even if I flew all the guys down, and we staged a full-scale military operation, we’d have a fifty-fifty chance of success. So we need to come up with an alternative plan. At least before we take on odds like that.”