Real Love Ch. 07

Brad pauses for a breath.

"And last but not least, that fucking strip club in Myrtle Beach."

He stubs out his cigarette.

"That was pretty impressive, you know," he hears from behind him, recognizing Kelly's voice.

Brad shrugs as he lights another cigarette.

"I deal with a lot of information at work, so I'm pretty good at taking stuff in. Plus, we spent hours on this today."

"You missed one," she says gently, taking a seat beside him.

To his surprise she leaned over and picked up his cigarettes and lights one for herself, then grins.

"I've had a couple of drinks."

"What did I miss?" Brad asks.

He doesn't really care if she smokes or not. Who's he to say anything, given he's chain-smoking like an addict on death row.

"The Business Consultants you worked for?" she says, making it a question.

"Of course. With offices in the US, UK, Canada and Australia," he finishes.

"Seriously, that's really impressive, remembering all that."

Brad exhales a long, smooth breath.

"I spoke to Peggy. Told her I was at the club in Myrtle Beach. Now she thinks I'm a low-life pervert weirdo and that I shouldn't have brought it up. And she didn't remember me anyway, so it was all for nothing."

"Everything's been a huge shock to her recently, Brad. To all of you."

"Why don't we have any property for commercial letting in Tokyo?" he asks. "I mean, Tokyo is one of the most expensive places to rent in the world, right?"

Kelly chuckles.

"Plus we have no presence in Japan at all... Tell me again what he did to set up this fake persona for Peggy?"

"The cover story, if anyone looks her up?" Kelly asks.

"Yeah."

"Okay. For four years someone named Peggy Gray has been writing trashy romance novels and scraping a living from it. The novels are all ghost-written, and the photo on the jacket could be her, deliberately shot to be ambiguous."

"Right. What else?"

"Several blogs that were started for a month or two, but fell by the wayside. The usual twitter, facebook, myspace, all that stuff."

Brad nods for her to continue as he sits there in the dark.

"Basically, if anyone who went to school with her looks her up, they'll have her down as someone who moved to an undisclosed town in Illinois, took up writing and didn't really socialize much."

"And if they recognize her as a dancer?"

"Mr Packard found out she was there a few years ago, and I don't know how he did it, but he bought the club purely so he could make sure any CCTV tapes were in his control. He even paid to have the previous owners house turned over and any tapes or photos that were there were stolen."

"Were there tapes of her?"

"Her and every other dancer who had ever worked there," Kelly says quietly. "We got this from Mr Packard only a month ago. He had evidence of some of the girls offering extras, snorting lines of coke, doing meth, all sorts of stuff like that. The owner was just as bad, apparently. Nearly half the girls who ever worked there used to do... favors for him, or he'd fire them. The rest refused, but made too much money dancing for the club to fire them."

Brad moves the ashtray onto the table in front of them both. It was a little weird seeing Kelly smoking, but much weirder things have happened in the last thirty six hours.

"The security staff who worked there were checked out too," she adds.

"And she left nine months ago, right?" Brad asks.

"Yeah. Lived off her savings for a bit."

"So what did Danny do to get all her colleagues to keep quiet?"

"The dancers she worked with who took cash for extras or took drugs were shown tapes of themselves, then offered clean-up programs and jobs. The previous owner was found by the police with half a kilo of cocaine and is doing a stretch in prison. Five of the security guys who worked there are now working as freelance security contractors in Zambia. One of them is in Afghanistan. The other guy who worked there but didn't want to go abroad got a nice big business grant to start a building business with his brother and they're about to get a lucrative maintenance contract to keep them going for a few years."

"What about the dancers who weren't into anything dodgy?"

"A few scholarships and expense packages, helping out with a few medical bills for relatives, a few jobs here and there. One of them demanded a Porsche to keep quiet, so she was shown the stick instead of the carrot."

"What the hell does that mean?"

"You go for the carrot, you get a nice reward for positive behavior. You go for the stick, you get thumped for negative behavior. The carrot and the stick. There's also blackmail, if we need to go that far, but we have never had to do that yet."

"I know what the carrot and stick shit means," Brad mutters, rolling his eyes. "I mean what metaphorical stick was she shown?"

"I believe she was awakened one night surrounded by half a ton of flour in clear bags, in her own bedroom. The bags looked like drugs, you know?"

Brad nods for her to continue.

"On her bed were photos of her showing she'd been slipped a roofie, had been taken out her own apartment, photographed at a local landmark, then put back into bed, all without her knowing anything about it. Next to the photos on the bed was a list of every address she's ever had, the addresses of all her family, her passwords for her email accounts, bank account numbers, a frightening amount of personal information."

"So she was threatened and her family was threatened?" Brad asks, scowling. "Is this what I'm inheriting?"

Kelly sighs, but presses on.

"When she woke up, a disguised man pointed out to her that this could have been the police raiding her and finding all these drugs. It could have been a rapist or serial killer who slipped her a roofie. It could be someone trying to find her in any of the places on those lists, who can find out anything about her at any time. Then the guy pointed out to her that if she wanted a disproportional carrot, she would see a disproportional stick. I believe she settled for twelve grand."

"That's a nasty way of doing business and I don't like it," he says firmly.

"Time to grow up, Brad," Kelly says bluntly, startling him. "You're playing with the big boys now, and information is power. You know that. Do you think every single one of your competitors isn't going to investigate each of you and leak whatever they want to the press? Or try to use it to discredit you and cause a drop in share price? Do you think, if they have something they can blackmail you with, then they'll decide that he's a nice guy and just leave him alone? That's not how it works and deep down you know it, but if you don't know it, you do now. Besides that, what if we didn't do that to her? What do you think she would do?"

Brad shakes his head in frustration.

"So what if I decide I'm above all these power games and I'm not going to play?"

"Then you'll be killed with a thousand paper cuts and the Packard Empire will die a slow death," Kelly replies. "Fortunately for you, we've got people who are really good at this stuff, so it's not something that's going to cross your desk very often."

"What a fucking day," he mutters.

"You get them like that sometimes. Then other days are awesome."

She pauses to put her cigarette out.

"Danny used to say you need a few shit days so you can appreciate the good ones."

"Bring on the good ones," Brad replies.

"You should get some sleep, Brad," Kelly reminds him, standing up and heading toward her en-suite.

Kelly is emotionally affected by Brad. She begins getting interested in him as a person, not the dilemma he finds himself in resulting from the death of his father. He's handling himself fairly well, considering the pressure he's under. She doesn't know what to expect from him yet, but it seems like he's learning about his future and appears to be taking on the challenge. But she feels something for him and doesn't know what it is for sure, maybe sorrow. She smiles to herself as she gets in bed and drifts off to sleep.

Brad sits in the dark for a few more minutes and then stubs out his cigarette and heads inside. He turns off the lights in his bedroom, plunging the place into near-total darkness, strips off and gets into bed. He made every humanly possible attempt at sleep, but it's not in the cards. Sleep eludes him again.

To be continued. Stay tuned for Real Love Ch. 08