Whatever. She’d expected he was watching her. She hadn’t been trying to hide.
She’d been so stupid about it before, in Mexico. But she’d never thought of her phone that way until Mexico. Never realized that it could track her, that every app she used to reach out pulled her in, held her close and followed her home.
The restaurant was loud, colorful and crowded. Mariachis. Birthday parties. Twentysomethings out for drinks. Gary had secured a table at the back of the big patio, away from some of the noise. A soft mist cooled the area, glass bricks with colored bulbs inside helping to light it.
“So, what d’you think of Houston?” he asked, after she sat.
“It’s hot.”
“That it is.” He signaled the waiter. “I ordered us a couple skinny margaritas.” He laughed. “Skinny margaritas. You ever heard of such a thing? But it’s about half the calories of a regular one, and you don’t get all that sugar. I’ve taken a liking to them.”
Of course he hadn’t asked her if she’d wanted one, and as much as she’d wanted a drink before, drinking with Gary was another thing entirely. But it wasn’t worth arguing about.
She waited for the drinks and to order-“I’d recommend the small portion of the grilled shrimp-plenty of food for a light eater like you”-before she said, “I have some conditions.”
Gary snickered. “Do you, now?”
It was a good thing she’d left her gun in Arcata, she thought. Though if she did shoot him, given this was Texas, maybe she’d get off easy.
“You really want me to do this? Because I don’t care anymore. I’ll just start telling people what I know about you and your friends.”
“You’ve got no evidence,” he said. “And no credibility either.”
“Maybe not. But maybe Danny does. Maybe we’ve made some arrangements.”
Gary stared at her for a long moment. His predator look. The one that said, you are nothing to me. I will kill you if you get in my way.
Then he grinned. “I knew I had you pegged right, Michelle. You’re a born operator.” He sipped his margarita. “Not that I’m really all that worried about anything you and Danny might have to say. Danny knows better than to do something like that. Especially where he is right now. Things can happen to a guy in jail, you know.”
Hearing that, she shivered, the cooling mist chilling her skin.
She couldn’t back down. Even though she knew Gary was right, and that he still had the upper hand.
She shrugged. “Are you okay with being embarrassed? I’m thinking your bosses might not like it very much.”
“Well, you might be right about that.” He settled back in his chair. “So tell me what you have in mind.”
“I want Danny out of jail. I want the charges dropped.”
“That’s up to a federal judge and a US attorney, not me.”
“Bullshit.”
Don’t lose it, she told herself. She drew in a deep breath. “I know you set him up. I know you used your influence to get his bail denied.”
“Say that I did. Say that I can get Danny out. What’s to stop the two of you from doing another runner?”
“We won’t.”
He shook his head. “You can’t expect me to take that on faith, now. Can you? I’m going to have to see some effort on your part first. What else?”
“Money.”
“How much?”
“How long is the job?”
“Say, two months.” He grinned. “Though who knows, you might end up liking it.”
“Five hundred thousand.”
“What? For two months' work?” From the expression on his face, this might have been the funniest thing she’d said yet. “I’ll tell you what, sweetie, you’ve got some balls, asking me for that kind of money.”
“I’ve got obligations, Gary,” she said, voice tight. “A federal drug trafficking defense to pay for. A restaurant manager to hire. And probably an airplane to replace.”
“Two hundred K, and don’t ask for any more. You work past the two months, we can renegotiate.”
“What about Danny?”
“You work the first month, I’ll see what I can do.”
It was his best offer, and she knew it.
Better than she’d expected, actually.
Their dinners came. The shrimp was pretty good, Michelle had to admit.
“Her name’s Caitlin O’Connor,” Gary said. “You heard of her?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Think about it, I bet you have. Rich lady. She and her husband and their little boy got carjacked. Kidnapped. A couple of crazy crackheads. They didn’t think the whole thing through. Drove them around to a few ATMs to withdraw money. Shot the husband, threw the kid out of the car. Raped her a couple times. Kid died in the hospital.”
He tore the tail off a shrimp and sucked out the little bit of flesh from it. “Anyway, she made it through, more or less. Became real active in promoting victims' rights and public safety. Started a foundation, Safer America. Ringing any bells yet?”
It sounded familiar, one of those stories running 24/7 on cable news networks, along with missing blonde women, kidnapped girls forced into sexual slavery, and the mom who drowned her kids and pretended that the black guy did it.
Background noise.
“Right,” she said. “I think I know who you mean.”
“I’ll email you some articles tonight. Read them over, and we can probably set up an interview for tomorrow or the day after.”
“Tomorrow? Where is she?”
“Here in Houston.” Gary ripped off the shell and legs of his next shrimp and popped the meat into his mouth. “I try and make things convenient.”
“Call me after you’ve looked this over,” he’d written. “I imagine you’ll have a few questions.”
Sitting in her hotel bed, reading the news articles on her iPad, she remembered the story. The rich, perfect couple and their five-year-old son, coming home from a Pixar movie in their Range Rover. The carjackers, two black men, who’d held them up at a gas station, not even caring that their faces were caught on a surveillance camera. The son, tossed out along the side of the road like garbage, though the killers had claimed they’d only wanted him out of the way. The husband, shot in the head while kneeling among the weeds and the scrap and the trash of a vacant lot down by one of the bayous.
The wife, raped. Shot. She should have died, but she didn’t. The two men had been out of their heads, drunk and lit up, so high that they couldn’t think straight, and they’d left her bleeding in the backseat of the Range Rover while they argued about what to do, and somehow, she’d managed to open the door and stumble away, into the night, while they continued to fight outside the liquor store where they’d stopped to buy more beer.
Michelle studied a photo of the family. One of those corny studio portraits against a backdrop of hand-painted blue-gray muslin. You’d think with their money they could have done something more interesting, she thought, and then she pushed that thought away. I’m a horrible person, she told herself. This was a tragedy, after all.
She made herself look at them. At Paul O’Connor, brown hair, square jaw, broad smile, in his suit and tie, staring up and to the right, per the photographer’s direction, no doubt. At then toddler Alex, blond, burbling on his father’s knee.
At Caitlin.
Blonde, like her son. Big hair, but not ridiculously so. Small frame, cheerleader pretty. Smiling, like her husband, at some beautiful and amusing vision to the upper right.
“The only thing you can do when you have something like this happen to you is to try and keep moving.”
Her voice was soft, well modulated. Quiet enough that you found yourself leaning forward to listen. Or in Michelle’s case, holding the iPad closer to her face.
“So, you founded Safer America,” the interviewer prompted. Some cable news channel flack. Along with the articles, Gary had sent a collection of video links in the body of his email.