The Fury

"There. Seven hundred fifty thousand dollars, paid as a consulting fee from Mr. Daniels personal investment accounts." He sighed as he closed down the laptop. Laura looked at something on her phone and nodded to her grim-faced lawyer. Her lawyer pushed a memory stick over to one of the Qantic lawyers.

"Miss Roberts will vacate her apartment tomorrow and leave the state of Texas for at least five years. The stick has a video statement by her to that effect. She also declares that she has had no interest in Alan Daniels except from a financial perspective."

Aside from Laura and the Qantic accountant, only three lawyers and I witnessed the transaction. It'd all taken place in her lawyer's office in an oddly sterile conference room. Laura pointedly ignored me. Daniels had insisted I be there as an implied threat, a reminder that he could do more than offer money. He, on the other hand, had distanced himself from the proceedings. Alan, of course, was unaware of the coldly financial sacrifice of his dreams of happiness.

What I couldn't understand was the sheer glee in her eyes as she walked past me to leave. From what Jessie and I had seen, the money just wasn't high enough to really buy her out.

*****

Consequences to the innocent are, of course, inevitable. It was almost 2 AM when I got the phone call to come down to the police station. He was uncooperative, and the cops found my Security Manager card in his wallet.

"No bail, just get him the hell out of here." The cop at the desk just wanted Alan gone. Alan Daniels in the drunk tank would be way too much trouble, and she didn't want it. She led me to the holding cell of the substation.

"Where'd you find him?"

"Lobby of the Mandalay. They really didn't want to call us, but he was getting pretty unruly."

He was half-crouched, half-sitting on the end of the single bed in the cell, but he opened his eyes as soon as we entered. "Fucking Judas." He tried to lunge off the bed at me, but just flopped onto the filthy floor, out cold.

The cop helped me get him up on my shoulder, then pushed an envelope at me with his belongings. "Cell phone, belt, wallet, thirty dollars and thirty cents in cash. You gonna be able to handle him?"

"I'll probably be wearing whatever he drank for supper, but I'll make it."

I dragged him out to my car and strapped him in the seat. I tried to think of who to call. No way I was handing him off to his asshole father, and I couldn't think of anyone else who cared enough about him to watch over him.

Except, maybe, there was that one person who might. I pulled his phone out and checked it. Poor naïve Alan didn't even keep a screen lock on it. I stared at the picture he had set on his phone as wall paper and felt nausea. I flicked through the contacts and made the call. She didn't sound thrilled, but she'd answered, and I told her I'd just dump him on her doorstep if she didn't let me bring him in.

I dragged him up the steps then into the high-end townhouse while she held the door.

"What am I supposed to do with him, Cal?"

"Keep him away from sharp objects for a couple days. Treat him like shit for a while, then maybe forgive him. He didn't have a chance against her. You know he didn't."

Karen pointed down a hallway. "I do know. That's what hurts. I didn't even see the bitch coming."

"He doesn't love her or anything like that, it was just infatuation."

"Alan should have been smarter than that. Pisses me off."

"You've always been the sharper half, Karen, remember that." I tossed Alan up on the bed and pulled his phone out, flicking it on and holding it up for her to see. "Somebody sent this to his private number from a burn phone. If his father had it, he'd have thrown it in his face. If you wanted revenge, you'd have sent it from your phone so he'd feel worse. You're the only one who stands to gain from sending this anonymously. That's why I'm here."

She stared at the picture of Laura and I tangled up naked on the carpet. "I had her place wired. I knew if I waited and kept the surveillance on, she'd fuck up sooner or later. I just didn't expect it to be you. You're the only real friend Alan had. The only one who didn't want something from him or his father." She hissed the last.

I sighed. "There's history between me and her. It goes back a long way. Long before any of us met."

"So I heard in the tapes, her real name is Laura, right? Now I get her leftovers?"

"No, Alan almost got carried away by a wolf. We got lucky and drove the wolf away. He's not leftovers; he's a victim. If you want him to be, he can be a survivor."

She grimaced at him. "He's a cheating asshole."

"Maybe, but if you hadn't wanted him back, you wouldn't have sent the picture that way and then let me through the door with him. He's inoculated now, he'll never do it again. You made sure of that."

Karen's expression softened, just a bit. "There probably isn't another one like her, is there?"

"I don't know. Maybe there is, but now you know what to watch for."

"He'll be making up for this for the rest of his life."

I rolled Alan on to his side and braced him with a pillow. "And he'll thank you every day for letting him. Just keep him on his side or the rest of his life could be ten minutes. I don't expect Alan will want anything to do with me anymore, so I wish you two the best."

Karen saw me out. As I headed home, I reflected that with all Karen's manipulation and deception, maybe the only real difference between her and Laura was that she actually loved Alan.

At least a little. Maybe it was enough.

*****

I dragged into the work the next morning, exhausted. I opened the door to my office to find Jessie already sitting on my desk next to a pile of manila envelopes. She looked somber; of course her hair, lips and nails were all dead black, so that may have made it a bit more obvious.

"It's as bad as you suspected. Daniels and Philips are setting you up to take the fall for covering up that industrial spill on the Ubangi. Evidence tampering, witness tampering, obstruction, corruption, extortion. Everything. Daniels took it on as a favor to be paid back later for one of the French-aligned CAR factions. He didn't realize how bad it was going to get and he decided he needed a fall guy. Philips is doing most of the work."

I sat heavily next to her. "Shit."

"Cal, their plan only works if you can't testify. It'll only work if you're dead."

I sighed. "What have you got?"

"Some emails, but mostly texts. Everybody forgets the company backs up the texts from company phones for five years." She pointed to the stack of envelopes. "I've got it ready to mail out. FBI, Department of Justice, IRS, and every other agency I can think of." She shrugged. "I even have the Department of Agriculture in there somewhere."

"I could just take it over to the FBI office."

"They'd take one look and drop you in jail until they can sort it out. Philips was DEA and Daniels has reach. You wouldn't make it alive until morning." She reached up and touched my lip with one fingertip. "I may not love you, but I'll miss you Cal. I really will."

I grabbed the stack of envelopes and headed out to the post office.

It was less than half an hour later when Daniels called me. "Calvin. I need you to get over to Trina Roberts' place and stop her from leaving if she's still there."

I almost told him to fuck off, but held my tongue. "Why? You wanted her to leave, she's leaving."

"Not with seventy-five million dollars of my money."

"It was seven hundred fifty thousand. I was there, I watched it happen."

"I had a bad feeling about it and had it checked. Somebody hacked the link, caught the computer between the display and the security system. The geeks say it's a variant of something called 'data scraping' whatever the hell that means. You guys saw what they wanted you to see. They got seventy-five million dollars of my money. You stop her from leaving. Philips and I will get there as fast as we can."

I stomped on the gas.

***

"Cal." Laura was dressed down in jeans and a blouse, but what really caught my attention and staggered me for a second, was the smile on her face, a real, honest smile that went to her eyes. She was genuinely happy to see me.

"Daniels is on his way here with his enforcer. They caught your little game with the money and he wants blood."

"Shit. I thought we had another ten hours before they'd notice. Even had some of the money routed to Philips's bank account to confuse things."

I could hear footsteps coming down the hall. "Hide."

She nodded, then slid into the closet as they began pounding on the door.

Daniels and Philips shoved into the room.

"She's gone."

"Why did you let her leave?" Daniels glared at me.

I pretended to look out the window. "She was gone when I got here."

"Goddammit. It'll take weeks to hunt her down and deal with her."

I didn't say anything. I just needed to get them out of the apartment. Philips seemed to be drifting aimlessly, not really searching.

Daniels rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Might as well do it here anyway." Philips pulled out a small revolver, a short barrel .38, and leveled it at me. He stepped over behind me and put one hand on my shoulder.

Daniels walked over to the bar and examined the bottles slowly pouring himself a drink. "It's just business, Cal." He pulled a case out of his jacket pocket and pulled out a syringe. "Philips tells me it doesn't hurt."

"Murdering me to cover up your mistake? Seems pretty personal to me. Not everything is business."

The closet door opened, and Laura stepped out behind us, a small automatic in her hand. "No, not everything is business." Philips started to turn but she stopped him. "Put the gun down." Something in her voice made it clear she'd shoot. He tossed the revolver onto the sofa.

Daniels had the sheer gall to look betrayed. "So I guess she didn't leave."

"I guess not."

Laura gave a shark-like smile. "No she didn't." Her voice dripped sarcasm as she waved Philips away from me.

Philips let go and started to back away. I spun and punched as hard as I could, staggering him back into the wall. He tried to fight back, but it was too late. I hammered him until he slumped to the floor.

Daniels stood rigid, looking at me in shock.

"What was the plan? Unsolved murder in the missing woman's apartment, maybe get law enforcement to do your dirty work?"

Laura cut in. "Cal, do you remember when I told you about my father?"

I nodded. Daniels looked lost.

"Robert Pike, that was his name, though I don't expect you would remember that." She looked at Daniels with a curious tilt of her head.

He shook his head slowly.

"You 'downsized' his department one year so you could pay yourself a bigger dividend. I looked into it, the division was doing well, but you reported that you wanted a bit more cash flow for the investors, so you chopped it."

"That was business." His voice was slow and uncertain.

Her eyes narrowed to slits. "That's your answer for everything, isn't it? But it wasn't. It took me years to find out, but I did. You did it to cover up a mistake, a drug experiment that caused birth defects in testing. You eliminated the division that was supposed to do the long-term follow-up for the testing, to shift the responsibility for that to someone you could control. Thirty positions, including my father's. It killed him. It took a year, but it killed him."

Daniels's face went blank. "So you decided to take my money. It's all about the money..."

Laura cut him off, eyes blazing like an angry cat. "I didn't do this for the money, I did it to hurt you. I thought of going after you, I could have done it... 'Sugar Daddy.' But you know that old joke about the difference between politicians and whores? There are some things a whore won't do for money. I couldn't bring myself to even think of touching you."

"So you went after Alan." Daniels voice was dead calm.

"Not really. I knew you didn't care about Alan, the only thing you care about is money. So instead of taking Alan, I took the money. I just used Alan to do it." She shot a glance at me.

Her face was drawn, and I could see her finger start to whiten on the trigger. "Laura, he's already screwed. I just sent evidence of the cover-up he was running in Africa over to the Feds, he'll spend the rest of his life in prison."

Daniels looked at me, trying to calculate how serious I was. A sound drew my attention as Philips uncoiled from the floor to rush me. I could tell he was still bleary from the beating, but he was still too damn fast. He cannonballed into me, managing to get one arm around my throat. Both of us slammed first into Laura then caromed into Daniels.

As we crashed into the bar, I twisted, trying to break Philips's grip and felt another pair of hands gripping my arms. As we tumbled, I saw Laura's gun skitter across the floor and disappear under the sofa.

I was fighting, but losing, starting to black out, until Daniels suddenly let go, freeing my arms.

I pulled Philips's arm loose, just enough to choke in air. With that I was able to get my legs under me, shoved and catapulted us backward. I felt the air go out of him as we smashed into the wall and I pulled free, diving for the sofa where he'd dropped his gun.

I probably wouldn't have made it, but Philips tripped over Daniels, giving me time to scoop his revolver out of the sofa.

From the rage on his face, I didn't have a choice. I fired the snub nose .38 twice and Philips crumpled lifeless to the floor.

I finally looked at Daniels. He was drawing ragged breaths, only the whites of his wide-open eyes showing. It didn't make any sense at first; then I saw the hypodermic sticking out of the side of his neck. I pulled it out; only about half the serum had been injected.

"It was all I could do." Laura was half crouched by the remains of the bar, rubbing her rib cage. "What do you think it was?"

"I don't know but it wasn't good."

For the first time since we'd met, all those years ago, Laura suddenly seemed uncertain. "What do we do now?"

"We leave." I picked a towel from the wreckage of the bar and wiped down the revolver, put it in Daniels hand for a few seconds, making sure to press his forefinger on the trigger. "We clean up a bit, make it look like it was between them."

I took the syringe from Daniels neck, wiped it and put it in Philips' hand. "Cops like simple answers. We'll just give them one. Your little trick with the money going into Philips account makes it a pretty neat little package."

We left Daniels with Philips's body, but I dialed 911 on his cell phone and dropped in on the floor on the way out.

Laura, it turned out, had a red 1966 GTO convertible stashed in a nearby parking garage. There was an atlas in the glove box with the route to Mexico already marked.

*****

I was sitting in my beach chair, drying off from my last run, the surfboard leaning lazily against another chair off to my side. The cool ocean breeze was a welcome contrast to the hot dry air.

On my tablet, I looked over the Wall Street Journal headlines. Daniels was under so many federal indictments that just reading them off would take a week. Even with his pull, the combined weight of so many agencies and governments baying for his blood would have brought him down. That didn't matter now, though, he'd never be prosecuted. The picture of him showed a bent old man in a wheelchair, the poison-induced stroke hadn't killed him, but it'd imprisoned him in his own body forever, unable to even speak.

A lone female figure delicately picked her way down the stairs towards us, coming from the massive hacienda to our blinding white perfect beach.

I glanced over at Laura, laying nude, half asleep, on a sun shade-covered platform. A true redhead, there was no way she could tan, just "fry and freckle," but that didn't mean she didn't relish laying out naked in the open air, and I certainly wasn't complaining about being on sunblock application duty.

The woman walking towards us came into focus. She was petite, with a pixie cut and dark brown hair, in a blue wrap dress and sandals.

Laura turned her head and smiled. "Hey, Babe, how'd it go?"

"It was perfect, just like we planned; the records are all gone." I watched in shock as Jessie dropped her wrap dress to the ground and stepped out of her sandals. She wasn't wearing another stitch. "Move your butt." She slid onto the platform and settled in next to Laura. "I had all the servers way overclocked, and the whole server farm fried. Fire broke out and the sprinklers finished it off. The half dozen memos I sent up over the last two years about how badly the server farm was set up and how we needed to shift to cloud storage back up paid off."

Laura chuckled. "Did you get to lose your temper at the board meeting?"

"I even threw a binder at the head of IT. Pompous asshole. Alan and Karen backed me up and asked me to stay, but I refused to stay employed where I wasn't being taken seriously. They insisted I take a really nice severance package. Of course, the FBI thinks Daddy Daniels set the fire up on purpose. They even added an obstruction charge." Jessie grinned.

Laura shook her head. "They never had a clue."

"I think Karen suspects, but she doesn't care. She got what she wanted. She's pretty much running the company. Because of all the secrecy and precautions Daniels set up, she managed to separate the company from Daniels' dealings in Africa. Karen and Alan are getting hitched in June at the Omni Mandalay. I hear the pre-nup is Armageddon-level Mutually Assured Destruction." Jessie rolled up on one elbow and grinned wickedly at Laura. "She quietly asked me to pass an invite to the wedding to Cal, but I don't think she wants to see you there."

Laura laughed softly. "I bet not."

They quieted for a moment.

I broke into their reverie. "So how long have you two been working on this?"

Laura focused her shining eyes on me. "Two years."

"Met her at a club in Austin and she seduced me. She's really, really good at that, you know." Jessie smiled and sent me a quick raise of her eyebrows. "She told me about Daniels, asked if I was interested in some real money."

Laura closed her eyes. "You almost screwed it all up, Cal."

Jessie nodded. "Once Laura realized who they hired and that they planned on making you the fall guy for the whole Ubangi River cover-up, she was determined to rescue you."

The full scope of their plan hit me. "So now what?"

Jessie flopped back onto the platform. "I just dropped by to let you guys know that it's all clear. The FBI has even lost interest in you. I met a really cute girl in Cabo that I have to get back to tonight. I'm thinking of taking her to Paris to go shoe shopping."

Laura turned up on her side and eyed me cautiously. "I don't have any plans to go shoe shopping or anything else. So I guess the rest is up to you."

A real hero would have been offended and angry at being manipulated like I so obviously had been. A real hero would have left, stuck to his principles and stormed off.

But as I said, I'm no hero.

Post Production Notes:

I once heard the "noir" genre described as "A woman with a past meets a man with no future." This story touches on that, and it is a nod to "Gilda," "The Lady From Shanghai," and "Double Indemnity."

Special Thanks

Thanks to blackrandi for top-of-the-mark line and content editing on this story; to sbrooks103x for amazing line editing and beta reading and Crkppr for beta reading. They all did this on extremely short notice, with just a couple days to the deadline. There are others who contributed ideas and discussion: Thanks to all of you, I appreciate it and continue to learn from you input. Any errors are entirely mine - probably added after their assistance.