Chapter Forty-One - Nolan
The helicopter jolts me from sleep and I’m up and looking for pants before the sound fades. Mysterious. Fuck, I think, searching the other room for my clothes. I forgot all about him.
I pull the pants up and forget the shirt, just hop down the steps to the back of the house. By the time I get to the family room, Pax is coming through the massive double glass doors.
“Thanks for picking up, you asshole,” Pax says. “I thought you were dead or something. I should’ve figured you were getting your dick sucked.”
“Hey.” I point at him. “Ivy is here, so shut the fuck up. And I left my phone in my pants.” Which I fish out right now to prove my point. Pax has called fifteen times, no voicemail.
“Yeah, well, about Ivy,” Pax says. “This is some fucked-up shit and I’m sorry I have to be the one to break it to you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Everything, man. Your sister—”
“What? What’s Claudette have to do with anything?”
Pax ignores me, just walks over to the bar, reaches under the counter, pulls out a tumbler, then finds the most expensive bottle of Scotch on the top shelf and pours himself at least four fingers. He gulps a healthy dose and then says, “Ahh. I really fucking like working out of this house. You rich assholes have everything here.”
“What? You’ve never even been here before.” But as soon as the words come out of my mouth, I know I’m wrong.
“I do business out of here all the time, dumbass.”
“This is not your house, Mysterious. Where do you get off doing business here?”
“Hey,” Pax says with a shrug. “What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is mine. That goes for all the other Mister Assholes who dragged me down with them ten years ago. Just think of it as my way of getting even.”
“I didn’t drag you into anything.”
“The hell you didn’t. I know that bitch blew you that night. I saw it. I see everything, Nolan,” he says, tapping his head with his glass. “So fuck off. Your family never uses this house anyway.”
“That’s not the fucking point, Pax. You don’t just use other people’s shit.”
“When your name is Paxton Vance you do. Now, do you want to hear the total fucking shitstorm I just dug up about your sister? Or do you want me to slap down a Benjamin to pay for the drink and swim back to the mainland?”
Somehow when Pax says it, swimming from Martha’s Vineyard to the mainland doesn’t sound ridiculous. I have no doubt in my mind that if I told him to leave, he’d jump off the fucking dock and disappear. Not die, mind you. Just disappear. I have a feeling the Atlantic Ocean couldn’t kill Paxton Vance even if it was trying.
“Just get on with it,” I say, waving my hand in a rolling motion.
“Well…” he starts, then gulps the rest of his drink and slams the glass down on the bar as he breathes out the burn. “Your sister is psycho. Your girlfriend is her target. And I hate to be the one to tell you this, even though I think you’re a total dick. But your dad is dying.”
I just stare at him. “What?”
“Your sister—”
“Fuck my sister, Pax! My father?”
“Cancer, dude.” Pax shrugs and it even comes off as genuine. “And I got a hold of his will—”
“How?”
“Would you just shut the fuck up? I’m not telling you how. Trade secrets, asshole.” He scowls at me and then continues. “Anyway. That will you thought you were cut out of?”
“Yeah?” My heart is racing.
“Not so, my soon-to-be billionaire friend. Your sister was the one cut out. Turns out your old man was quite the cheater before you were born. Claudette isn’t your sister. Well, she is, I guess. At least half. She was cut out several years ago. You were added back the day your father was diagnosed. He’s not doing well. They expect him to die any day.”
I just stand there, stunned. Pax grabs another glass and pours me a drink. I take it and gulp. “What the fuck?” I ask him, grimacing from the whiskey.
“Well, I’ll try to piece it together as best I can. But bear with me, I just got all this tonight.”
I am suddenly disgusted at the thought of Paxton digging through my family history.
“Listen, I know you don’t like me, but I’m straight with you, right? I’ve always been straight with you guys. So what I’m gonna say needs to be taken at face value and then we gotta get your girlfriend out of here so—”
He’s interrupted by the doorbell. “Who the fuck is that?” I ask.
Pax has a huge gun out and he’s pointing it in every direction at once, morphing into some Navy SEAL clearing a building on the spot. “Here,” he says, whipping another gun out of his jacket. He tosses it to me. I catch it, because it’s a fucking gun and no sane person throws one at you. “Keep it close. This shit is going down now.” And then he waves the gun at the hallway and says, “Answer the door.”