Sadie
“Okay,” I said to Chris, stopping in my back-and-forth pacing to look at him. “I want you to tell me everything—every last detail of how you ended up in this situation.” Chris looked up at me, more than a little humiliated I could tell.
“C’mon, Say,” Chris said, sighing. “I told you the important parts.”
“How the hell do you expect me to help you with this if you don’t give me all the details?” I crossed my arms over my chest. “This isn’t the sort of thing you can lay low on for a while. As far as Micah’s concerned you stole from him. He’s not going to cut his losses.” I sat down on my couch and scrubbed at my face with my fingertips. I’d never even tried to run in the same circles as my brother, but even I—goody two-shoes that I was—knew about Micah Rintley. I’d seen him in clubs from time to time when my friends and I went out; I’d thought he was a pretty good-looking guy: tall, broad shoulders, always in a suit, with short dark hair and cold, steel-blue eyes, a little stubble on his cheeks.
But my friend Sarah had set me straight on him the first time we’d seen him at one of the clubs. “Oh man—if that guy comes up to us, you have to be polite... but don’t let him get you alone.” I’d asked her why not, and she’d said, “Micah Rintley? Drugs, prostitution, racketeering... Probably murder too, but they’ve never made it stick.” Sarah worked in an attorney’s office as an assistant while she worked her way up.
“I don’t expect you to help me,” Chris said, bringing me back to the present. “Seriously—I want you to stay as far out of this as possible.”
“Well just by staying at my place you’re getting me involved,” I pointed out. “You don’t think anyone is going to do some digging, find out you’ve got a sister and come asking me questions?” I crossed my arms over my chest and looked at him.
Chris sighed. “Okay, fine,” he said, shaking his head. “I already gave you most of the details. Two guys came up to the car while I was waiting for the call to visit one of the girls. I recognized them from the week before—dudes who’d used the service. I don’t know how they figured out my car, but whatever; they did.” Chris sounded bitter and whiny and I tried not to roll my eyes at him.
“How much did they take from you?” Chris was obviously agitated; I’d need to keep him on task as much as possible.
“About five thousand, including both the drugs and the money,” Chris said sheepishly.
I just stared at him. “Five thousand in drugs and money,” I said, making it not quite a question. “Okay.” I pressed my lips together and considered for a minute. I’d thought from what Chris had said originally that it would be a pretty good sum—but I was thinking maybe half of the total he’d told me, maybe even less. “There is no freaking way that you can get that much money in time before Micah figures out where you’re hiding.”
“You don’t know that,” Chris said, crossing his arms and almost—I swear—pouting at me.
“I do know that,” I countered, holding his gaze. “I know it because if you were the kind of person who could come up with five thousand dollars on a whim—in a few days—you wouldn’t be working for Micah in the first place.” I raised an eyebrow.
“I could figure out a way,” Chris told me, grumbling.
I lost any ability to be patient with him, to coddle him, and just straight up rolled my eyes. “Any way you could figure out would just get you in more trouble, which is the opposite of what we want,” I pointed out. I started thinking. Obviously Chris couldn’t leave the apartment— I had to assume that Micah was working on finding where my brother was, and he’d figure it out pretty quickly. A man like that, head of a major criminal organization, ruthless and well-connected, wouldn’t have a whole lot of trouble in finding out that my brother had a sister, and where I lived.
He’s probably got at least a couple of cops on his payroll, and even if he doesn’t I’m sure he’s got personal detectives on retainer. Micah Rintley wouldn’t have gotten as far as he had without that level of organization and ability.
“So what do you propose?” Chris had an almost mocking gleam in his eyes, in spite of the fear I could still see there. “I didn’t know you were such a criminal mastermind.”
“I’m not,” I said tartly. “But as far as I’m concerned this doesn’t require a criminal mastermind. Micah’s a businessman at the end of the day, right?” Chris stared. “So I’ll go to him, talk to him like a businessman.”
“No—Sadie, no.” Chris shook his head. “Are you insane?” He stood and started pacing. “You can’t talk to someone like Micah. He’s—He’s brutal. He doesn’t give a fuck who he kills.”
I shrugged. “I somehow doubt he’s that impulsive,” I pointed out. “He’d have gotten caught if he was. And he hasn’t gotten caught yet.”
“He’d use you to get to me,” Chris insisted. “If you walk in there, Micah’s going to—I dunno—take you hostage, torture you or something, and use that to like... make me come out of hiding.” I pressed my lips together to keep from laughing at my brother. I knew that a guy like Micah Rintley was bound to be ruthless, but I didn’t figure he spent a lot of time personally torturing people or holding them hostage. He probably has someone to do those things for him. The thought gave me a chill, but I was already determined. I couldn’t just let Chris have his own way in this. He obviously had no real, thought-out idea of what to do.
“I’m doing it,” I said, standing up. “You’d better stay here—in fact, you should hang out in the guest room. Don’t answer the door if there’s a knock.” I sighed. The adrenaline surging through me was just enough for me to not quite feel the full force of how risky it was. I could feel my arms and legs tingling, my heart pounding in my chest. I have to do this before I get too scared to go through with it, I thought to myself. I checked the time; it was still pretty early. I couldn’t imagine that things were so busy at the clubs that Micah owned that he’d be unavailable. But which of his clubs should I go to? He couldn’t be at all of them at one time, and I couldn’t spend the whole evening going from one to the other in the hopes of finding him.
I left the living room and freshened up a bit in my bedroom, while Chris tried to keep coming up with excuses for me not to go. “You have no idea what he’s going to do,” he said, calling into my room from the hallway.
“Neither do you,” I countered. I put on a little lipstick and powder—nothing over-the-top. I just wanted to look confident, put-together. I pulled on one of my blazers and a skirt; I dressed basically the way I did for work, not so much sexy as clearly feminine and sharp. I slid a pair of heels onto my feet and checked myself in the mirror. I didn’t think anyone at the club I would go to would mistake me for a customer. Hopefully I looked businesslike enough to get admitted to the big man himself. Worry about that when you get there, I told myself. If I thought too hard about it, I was going to chicken out.
I pulled my hair back and out of my face and twisted it into a loose bun at the base of my skull, using a couple of bobby pins to secure it. It’d probably come undone by the time I was on my way home—but I didn’t want to take too long to get there.
“Sis, you can’t do this. I can’t be responsible for my little sister getting tortured or killed or kidnapped—or all of those things.”
I rolled my eyes and kissed my brother on his cheek. He was a scaredy-cat, and he’d screwed up, but I loved him.
I got into my car and thought about the practical approach to getting access to the guy I needed to talk to. According to Chris, Micah had an office in the back of all of his clubs. But he owned four or five of them, scattered around town. Okay, think strategically. He can’t go to all of his clubs every night. I turned the key in the ignition and hoped that Micah hadn’t already figured out that I was Chris’ sister, and that there wasn’t someone coming for my brother already. I left the parking lot at my building and turned toward downtown. If I were Micah, where would I be? What would I spend most of my time doing? I thought about it as traffic slowed down a bit around me.
I knew very little about Micah Rintley’s business, other than that he apparently had something to do with prostitution and drugs, and that he owned multiple clubs. I could guess that he probably had even more going on in his organization; I couldn’t imagine that just drugs and prostitution and the clubs were enough to make him as wealthy as he seemed to be. Of course, That would depend on how much of those things he does.
I decided that I was going to at least start from the most logical place: the biggest of Micah’s clubs, Vagabond. It was the first club that Micah had started up, and I’d been there a few times with friends. There’s got to be security of some kind, right? It was impossible for me to think that Micah would just be sitting in an office somewhere around the club, doing paperwork of some kind—and what kind of paperwork did a mob boss have?—without some kind of guard.
I made it across town in decent time, and accepted the $5 parking fee for the lot next to the club. The fact that the wasn’t full yet told me it was probably a slightly slow night inside; there were enough cars for the bar to be doing steady business, though. With any luck—apart from my brother’s stupid transgression—Micah would be in a decent mood, a mood to negotiate. I took a deep breath and looked around me as I walked around to the entrance of the club. There was a sparse line leading to the front door, and a big bouncer—dressed all in black, with medium-brown skin and a shaved head. He was checking IDs, collecting the $10 cover charge. I thought about waiting in line—but I didn’t want to spend any more time than I had to.
I ignored the nasty looks in my direction as I walked past the people in line. “I need to talk to Micah Rintley,” I told the bouncer. I crossed my arms over my chest and looked up at him, trying not to feel the flutter of my heart in my chest. The bouncer raised an almost-nonexistent eyebrow and looked down at me like I had a second head.
“You need to get to the back of the line if you want in this club, girl,” the bouncer said.
“I don’t care about the club,” I insisted. “I’m here to meet with Micah Rintley, in his office.”
The bouncer laughed and shook his head. “There ain’t nothing that you have to talk to Micah about,” the bouncer said, pointing again to the end of the line. “Either get in line or get the hell out of here.”
I glanced at the line. I couldn’t wait around all night—or risk the possibility that Micah might move onto another of his clubs while I was waiting. Obviously I’d need to play my cards as well as possible.
“I’ll give you one last chance to do something that could make or break you,” I said, meeting the bouncer’s gaze. “How the hell do you think Micah is going to take it if he finds out that you had someone who could tell him about Chris Bamber at the door and you left me cooling my heels?” I shifted, cocking my hip. “I’m here for business—and something tells me that Micah would reward someone who gets in the way of his business.” The bouncer’s expression changed; he almost looked respectful. He pulled a radio out of his back pocket and reluctantly tapped the ‘call’ button.
“Hey, boss,” the bouncer muttered into the radio. “I’ve got a lady here who says she knows something about Chris Bamber. She wants to—”
“Send her up.”
I smiled, unable to help myself. The bouncer looked at me again, still a little doubtful, and then confirmed that he would do as he was told. He gave me a wristband from the sheaf in his hand.
“The door to the stairs leading up to his office is at the back, in the hall behind the bar,” the bouncer said. “You’re going to need an escort.” I glanced at the people waiting to go in; none of them were my fan, clearly. The bouncer pressed a button on his radio and about a minute later a man appeared. He was slim, dressed in a crisp, tailored suit, hair combed back from his face.
“This the girl?”
The bouncer nodded. “Micah wants to see her.”
The man in the suit shrugged and opened the door wider to allow me to go past him into the club.
He grabbed my arm at the elbow almost as soon as the door closed behind us, and I resisted the urge to try and push him away. The dance floor was mostly-full but not super packed as I let my eyes adjust to the gloom on the other side of the door. The bar was doing good business as people worked themselves up to greater and greater bravery.
We strode right through. Even if I had wanted to be distracted by the moving bodies, my escort wasn’t about to let me take the opportunity. We walked past the bar, found the hallway that the bouncer had told me about, and followed it through to the door. As I should have suspected, there was another guy there; not quite as big as the bouncer, and lighter-skinned, but pretty obviously—to my eyes, at least—the more dangerous of the two. It was hard to say whether he or my escort was more dangerous.
Probably carrying two or three different guns concealed. A knife, too. You don’t let someone cover the door leading to your office without them being tough as steel. I took a quick, deep breath. I would have to keep up at least the facade of being a competent, confident woman.
“She’s here to see Micah,” my escort said, looking up at the man’s face. “Norm confirmed her.” The guard at the door gave me a raking look, and then glanced at my escort as if to silently ask him if he was sure. “Look—Norm tells me he confirmed someone, he confirmed someone,” the escort said with a shrug.
“Fine,” the man said. The pulsing, pounding noise of the music out in the club proper was almost completely suppressed in the back area; I could feel my ears un-cringing, a faint subliminal thump-thump-thump in my ear bones lingering. But that could be my blood as much as it was the bass.
The man opened the door and I saw the staircase leading up to the office. It was at the back end of the club as well, from what I could see. My escort guided me through the door and propelled me carefully toward the stairs so I’d be in front of him. I began climbing the stairs, feeling the pressure in my toes, grateful that there only seemed to be about fifteen steps. There was a landing—I paused for just a moment to confirm my escort was still right behind me—and then I took the last eight or nine steps leading to an open doorway.
My heart pounded in my chest, and as I looked into the open doorway on my way toward it, I spotted the man himself: Micah Rintley, seated at his desk. He rose to his feet, and I gave myself just a moment to appreciate the look of him; he was beautiful, and deadly—like a panther, or a black widow spider. Keep both of those things in mind, I told myself.
I stepped into the office and Micah made some kind of gesture to the man who’d escorted me. The man nodded and the door closed behind him, leaving Micah Rintley and me all alone. “Sit down,” Micah said, gesturing to the only other chair in the room besides the one he’d stood from.
I sat down, reasoning that there was not really anything else I could do. But the fact that it had actually been relatively easy—easier than I’d thought—to get to the big man began to filter through my stressed, worried thoughts. It gave me an idea; but it was going to take a lot of guts—guts I wasn’t sure I had.