5.
Nadine Griffin
The Queen of Wall Street was feeling the loss of her crown more acutely now that she’d had a loaded gun to her head for the last two hours. She was watching the television in the corner of her office with one eye and the pistol that was squeezed against her temple with the other, her hands shaking and not from the coffee or the whiskey.
“We are dealing with this situation like we would deal with any others,” Lieutenant Welch of the NYPD said on the screen, smug and tight, glorying in her fall. “Ms. Griffin’s legal status has no bearing on our handling of this matter. Our goal is to resolve this peacefully—”
Yeah, right, Nadine thought, the metal barrel of the gun being squeezed tight against her temple giving her a headache. It wasn’t the whiskey, no, nor the coffee; it was definitely the gun. Not her fault but his, this intruder, this vulture after another piece of her flesh. As though there weren’t enough of those already. You’re definitely handling this like you would if it was a sweet, innocent twelve-year-old with a gun to his head. Oh, no, wait. You would have already paid this maniac if that were the case.
“I don’t think they’re gonna come through for you,” Joseph Tannen said, almost crowing. Something Nadine had figured out in the last two hours was that Joseph Tannen was crazy as hell and that he had the worst breath she’d ever smelled, pouring through her hair like stink released from a bottle, stirring the strands against her shoulder and caressing the back of her neck roughly, like that ex she hated.
“Idiot,” she said. Her patience and niceties had been exhausted about fifteen minutes into this—and she’d never had much to begin with. “That means you’re going to die, too.”
“I dun care,” Tannen said, and he sounded like he truly didn’t. That caused Nadine a worried roll of her eyes, almost as much for the pathetically stupid way he spoke as for the suggestion that she was going to die and leave an ugly corpse behind. She almost gagged on the injustice of it, because this wasn’t how her story was supposed to end. She had deals. Plans. She had a sales success system that was going to help bridge the money gap for her until this legal battle cleared up and blew over. It was just waiting for approval, and it was the most deliciously ironic thing, her nastiest slam against the Old Boys.
She called it the Balls Out™! Success System. It fit.
“What’s this?” Tannen asked as the reporters on the screen went breathless again. “Oh, looky. Heroes.”
“It’s one hero, moron,” she said, sagging. She’d figured out early on that Tannen didn’t give a damn if she called him names. That gun in his hand seemed to give him a feeling of boundless security she couldn’t even dent. Either that or he viewed her as subhuman scum. She didn’t really care which, because she certainly viewed him through that microscope, like any other fungus or intestinal parasite. “It’s … Captain Frost.” She rolled her eyes again, involuntarily.
And it indeed was. “Captain Frost!” a reporter shouted at the square-jawed, overmuscled loser on the screen. “Captain! Are you planning to intervene?”
Of all the dumbass things that had happened since the day President Harmon had gone on TV to announce that superpeople were real, the arrival of not one but two of them as New York’s very own meta superheroes over the last few months ranked right at the top. Nadine could get behind government task forces with metas on them, but the idea of these do-gooders flying around New York with nothing but heroics on their mind …
It was just stupid. But at least this Captain Frost had figured out how to monetize it.
“I’ve done a little informal survey,” Captain Frost announced, his voice loud and confident, “on Twitter and Facebook, and it looks to me like the people of New York are pretty content to watch Nadine Griffin—just another Wall Street fat cat with her hand caught in the cookie jar, twist in the wind.” Frost grinned broadly, with rows perfect white teeth like he had just had them bleached. “I think this is just justice being done.” There were some hoots in the background, and someone started chanting, “Frost! Frost! Frost!” as Frost stopped to smile at the onlookers.
“Idiot,” Nadine muttered.
“They aren’t fans of you,” Tannen opined.
“Thanks, ass,” Nadine replied as Frost motioned for the crowd to quiet down. “Lacking any self-awareness at all, I guess I didn’t know that.”
“Maybe if you hadn’t tried to be the female Madoff,” Tannen said.
“I’m not—” Nadine flushed. “Madoff stole from his own clients in Ponzi scheme, okay? I didn’t do that. I made my clients money.”
“And also stole from them,” Tannen said flatly.
“Allegedly,” Nadine said. “What do you even care? Were you a client?”
“Nope,” Tannen said. “Just an average Joe sick of seeing you assholes get away with murder.”
Nadine’s eyes narrowed before she could control her reaction, a sudden burst of chill rolling down her. “I haven’t committed murder.” Yet.
“Nah, your crimes are just daggers to the heart of people who saved their money and trusted you,” Tannen said, pushing the barrel deeper into her temple.
“And your crime is to try and extort the people of New York by putting a gun to my head and hoping they’ll see enough value in keeping me alive to pay you for it.” Nadine held her head surprisingly high considering she was in danger of losing it. “At least I—allegedly—stole from rich people. You’re stealing from everybody, including the middle class and the poor.”
“You could just pay me and I’d leave,” Tannen said coolly, rolling the barrel around the side of her head painfully. “Then only the rich would take the hit, see.”
“They impounded my money, moron,” Nadine said irritably. “Locked down all my accounts. Seized my homes, my cars, my yacht—” She cut herself off, furious. “And besides, you have no way out of here even if I had millions to give you. You’d walk right out into the loving arms of the NYPD, and they’d arrest you even if you don’t kill me—though it’s kind of a toss up whether they’d be madder if you did or didn’t do it. I couldn’t say which would get you better treatment—”
Tannen guffawed. “Yeah. We’re in a pickle here.”
Nadine lowered her head, and Tannen followed, keeping the barrel pressed to her skull like a too-tight diamond-studded tiara she’d tried on once, but without any of the glamor. She looked straight ahead; she could see the NYPD snipers moving on the next rooftop, and she’d just given them a clear shot before Tannen pulled her head back up in front of him.
They hadn’t taken it.
“Uh uh,” Tannen said, sounding a little more pleased than he had a second ago. “No help there.”
“Of course not,” Nadine said, and now her voice sounded dead to her own ears.
And why wouldn’t it? The police weren’t going to help.
The hero—Captain Frost—wasn’t going to help.
Her old press contacts that used to answer her calls immediately—they hadn’t rung her back in weeks. They were watching, circling her carcass, and they wouldn’t help one bit. Though if she miraculously survived, they’d want interviews, of course, the scum.
The people of New York wanted her dead.
No one was coming to help.
So Nadine just sat there, a gun to her head, a little tear of impotent rage threatening to well up in her eye as she waited for the crazy man to kill her, and she felt nothing—no regret, no humility, no sadness. Nothing but rage.