Chapter One

 

The rain started to let up again. Sarah gripped the steering wheel of her car and fidgeted. It looked like she might be able to get out and make a dash across the city street to the entrance of that tavern without getting soaked through now, but every time the rain had let up before it was as if it was just catching its breath before coming down in another heavy downpour. It gave her an excuse to stay where she was. She scarcely needed any such excuse. It had taken the last fractured bits of resolve that she had just to drive here and park. She had to get across the street. She had to go into that tavern. She had to see Mack and beg for his help, and right now she couldn't even bring herself to get out of her car. She had a powerful urge to just drive away, but she couldn't bring herself to do that either. It all seemed so hopeless, so useless, and so damned inevitable. If she just drove away, whether she went back home or anywhere else it was only a matter of days before the sky fell on her and her life would be over. If she went in that tavern, what if Mack wasn't there? The PI she'd hired to find him had told her that it was his usual hangout in the evenings, but her luck had been so very, very bad of late that this might just be the night he'd decided to go somewhere else. If she went in there and asked for him and they told her he wasn't there, she just knew that she'd lose it right then in front of everybody. And if she went in there and he was there, what then? What if he didn't want to see her? What if he didn't want to hear her out? And what if he did hear her out and then told her to go to Hell? She couldn't really hold it against him if he did that, not after what she'd done to him. But all of her choices, all of the possibilities, had fallen away until there was just this one, wild, desperate chance left. She had to go in there. She had to. She'd already come all this way. Why was it so hard for her now to just cross the street?

The rain suddenly slackened to a light drizzle. Before she knew what she was doing, she was out of her car and shutting the door. It was easier now, once she'd started. She quickly glanced up and down the narrow city street before quickly crossing over to the other side. There was a dark red awning with the name of the tavern printed on it in big white letters. She had just reached the shelter of it when the rain began pouring down heavily again, beating against the fabric of the awning and cascading off of it onto the sidewalk.

The front of the tavern had two big picture windows flanking the double doors of the entrance. Dark blue curtains were hung from brass bars halfway up each window. Now that she was this close to the building, Sarah could just see over the curtains. Inside it was full of people. Some sat at small round tables, others were perched on stools at the bar. Waiters and bartenders in dark red vests and long-sleeved white shirts bustled about, bringing food and drink to the customers. It all looked warm and welcoming. It was chilly and lonely out here in the street. Sarah took a deep breath and went to the entrance. She reached it just as a happy, laughing young couple came out, the eager, dark-haired young man holding the door for his lovely blonde companion. The sight wrenched at Sarah's heart. She and Mack had been like that once, and she'd thrown it away because she hadn't wanted to wait to live the good life. The good life! She'd be lucky now if she had any kind of life left ahead of her that wasn't spent behind bars and fending off the advances of women who were bigger, stronger and meaner than she was. She went in as the door swung shut, stepped off to one side and scanned the crowd, searching for Mack. She didn't see him, and her heart began to sink. He couldn't have changed enough in five years for her not to recognize him, though he might not recognize her.

The interior was laid out in an 'L' shape, with the long part of the L running away from the entrance. Down that way there were a number of high-backed booths. She wouldn't be able to see anyone sitting in one of them, but she couldn't just walk along peering into each booth as she went by. Instead, she went to the bar.

"What can I get for you, ma'am?" the bartender smiled as she perched anxiously on one of the stools. He was a handsome older man with gray hair and a dark gray goatee, tall, broad-shouldered and stocky.

"I..." Sarah hesitated. "I'm looking for someone," she replied. "Is Mack here?"

"'Mack'?" the man frowned.

"Cass MacKenzie?" Sarah suggested. "I'm told he's here a lot."

"Oh, you mean the boss!" The bartender's smile returned. "Yes, ma'am, he's got his own regular booth right back there at the end. He expecting you?"

"No," Sarah answered. "We're...old college friends. I thought it would be nice if I just stopped by and said 'hi' to him."

"He's a busy man, ma'am," the bartender warned.

"I won't be long," Sarah flashed him a smile as she slid off of the stool. "Thanks."

Her legs felt leaden as she made her way to the last booth, and it wasn't just due to all the weight she'd put on recently. Neither her clothes nor her shoes fit well any more, but she couldn't afford to buy new ones. Her thin raincoat was the only thing that fit, and she'd picked that up at a thrift store. As she neared the booth she saw a broad-shouldered, dark-haired man in it, sitting back near the wall, bent over some papers. She stood at the end of the table and cleared her throat. He didn't seem to hear her over the buzz of conversation, so she tried again, a bit louder. This time, he looked up, and Sarah's heart skipped a beat. It was Mack, a little older...no, more mature...than she remembered him. His dark blue eyes were just as she remembered, as was the stubborn set of his jaw. But while she recognized him instantly, he didn't seem to recognize her at all. She smiled at him, but couldn't bring herself to say anything. For a long moment, she just stood there, smiling down at him, and he just sat there, looking up at her quizzically, in silence.

"Hi," Sarah said, her voice hoarse because her mouth was so dry.

"Do I know you?" Mack asked her, frowning.

"You did," Sarah nodded. She saw recognition dawn in his eyes.

"Sarah?" he said as if he wasn't sure it was truly her.

"Yes," she nodded. Her heart sank again as she saw the anger start to smolder in those eyes.

"What do you want?" he asked brusquely. He didn't offer her a seat. Well, she hadn't been expecting a warm greeting, not after all those years, not after what she'd done to him. Sarah's smile faded away as her face crumpled.

"I need help," she said. "Please. I'm desperate."

"And you thought I'd be the one to give it to you?"

"I couldn't think of anyone else."

"More likely you ran out of other people to ask," Mack snorted. "Why do you need help?"

"It's...it's a long story," Sarah told him. She was trembling now, and she felt herself on the verge of tears.

"I'm sure it is," Mack said. He gestured for her to sit down opposite him, and she did.

"Tell me about it," he said. "What happened to all the glitz and glamour and money?"

"It's gone," Sarah replied. "All of it. I was an idiot, Mack."

"I recall telling you the same thing a while back, but you didn't listen. What happened to your rich boyfriend, the one who was going to give you everything you ever wanted? And, by the way, what happened to you?" His gesture took in her puffy face, her too-tight clothes, her haggard appearance. Sarah choked back a sob.

"It's all gone," she repeated.

"Why? What happened? I thought...what was his name, Harlan Holmes the Third? I thought old Harlan had a trust fund that would take care of him and you for life."

"He did," Sarah nodded as she fought back tears. He hadn't said he'd help her, and he hadn't said that he wouldn't, but he seemed to be taking some pleasure in making her tell him all about her plight. He probably was. Well, she deserved this. And she still needed his help. She reached out her hand towards his, and he pulled his hand away.

"It all started when his father died," Sarah went on as she slowly pulled her own hand back. "Harlan got control of his trust fund, and his share of the family business, and he started spending it all. We bought a beachfront house and a vacation home up in the mountains, and cars, and...everything. We took trips all over the world. I thought he knew what he was doing until I found out he'd sold his share of the family business to his brothers when his own funds started to run low. And then he ran through that. He took out second mortgages on the houses, forging my signature on the paperwork."

"So you lost everything?" Mack leaned back, away from her. "Didn't you keep anything aside for yourself? Squirrel away some cash or jewelry?"

Now she couldn't suppress the sob. "It's all gone too," she sniffled. "Little by little, bit by bit, just so I could keep up the payments on my car. And then it was gone too."

"That's a sad story," Mack commented. "But I don't see what any of it has to do with me."

"It got worse," Sarah leaned back herself. "He started to deal drugs."

"Leave him," Mack shrugged. "Start over somewhere."

"It's too late!" Sarah wailed. "He started doing them himself, and he got me to do them too. By then it was drugs or alcohol for me, because I could feel everything falling down around me and I didn't want to feel it any more."

"You can still leave him," Mack suggested.

"I don't have anywhere to go!"

"What about your family? Wouldn't they take you in? You were their golden girl."

"Not any more," Sarah shook her head. "Harlan talked my parents into making a bad investment, and kept most of the money for himself. They don't even talk to me any more. And even if they did, I couldn't put them in that kind of danger."

"Danger?" Mack sat up straighter and leaned forward. He looked intensely serious now.

"What the fuck are you taking about?"

"It's...it's...the drug dealers," Sarah stammered. "Harlan was dealing and distributing for them. He had a pilot's license, and a plane until the bank took it away. Well, he started shorting some of their shipments to make some extra money for himself. It was only a few at first, but then it was every damned time, and a lot of what he held out went up his own nose. He gets nosebleeds all the time now, and he's not...stable. He's not even sane some times. They found out. He talked them into giving him some time to make it all good. He can talk anybody into anything when he wants to. The time's all gone, the bank is foreclosing on the properties, and they repossessed the cars. We have nothing left, and he keeps saying it will all be okay. The dealers are going to kill him."

"Go to the police," Mack suggested. "Ask for immunity. Ask for witness protection."

"He won't, Mack," Sarah looked at him with tears trickling down her cheeks. "He won't, and I don't really know anything to tell them. I didn't want to know. I wouldn't let him tell me. But the dealers..." she shuddered. "They won't believe me if I tell them that. Do you know what they do to people who cross them, Mack?"

"Let me get this straight," he said, leaning towards her across the table. "You've got some vicious thugs looking for you and your husband, and you ran straight here to ask for my help? You led them straight to me?" He sounded angry: not the raving, fist pounding the table rages that Harlan was flying into more and more often, but rather a slow, smoldering, quiet kind of anger that frightened her.

"I'm sorry, Mack," Sarah sobbed. "I wasn't thinking. Everything's been so hard! Please. I need your help."

"I don't owe you a fucking thing," he growled. "You ripped my heart out, shredded it and pissed on the shreds. And after you did that, you got me thrown out of college with those fucking allegations of stalking and sexual harassment. I don't owe you shit, lady."

"I didn't want to do those things!" Sarah protested. "Harlan made me do them!"

"No, he told you to do them, and you went ahead and did them," Mack snapped. "I'd noticed that you were weak sometimes, but I thought it was only because you were young. I never saw how weak you really were, because I loved you."

"And I loved you, Mack," Sara reached out again. Mack ignored the gesture.

"Not as much as you loved all the things your new boyfriend's money could buy you," he said coldly. "You sold me out for those things. Do you know, I never got my degree? Your boyfriend had connections through his family. Every college I applied to turned me down. After six months, I quit trying and went to work."

"He wanted me to file rape charges against you too," Sarah sobbed. "But I wouldn't do it. I couldn't do it!"

"Well, I guess I do owe you a little something for that, at least," he said quietly. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. "And maybe for one other thing too. I'll never know what kind of history professor I might have made, but I did find out I'm good at business." He pulled out some bills and pushed them across the table to her.

"Take it," he said. "Take it and go somewhere, as long as it's anywhere but here. Go and get drunk so you don't have to think about how hard everything is for you. Just don't do it here. This is a respectable place. We don't like sloppy, whiny drunks here."

"Mack..." Sarah reached out with both hands, but he was already gathering up his papers and visibly getting ready to leave. "Mack, please..."

"We're done," he said to her as he slid out of the booth. "Go away. Don't come back. There are a lot of bars down near the riverfront where the drinks are cheap. And if you want, you can probably score some drugs there. Good-bye, Sarah."

And then he was gone, and with him the last frail hope she'd had to cling to. She looked down at the table, at the bills he'd pushed at her. Her hand reached out slowly, as if it had a mind of its own. She wanted to stand up and scream at Mack as he walked away from her. She wanted to stuff the money down his throat and tell him to go to Hell. She wanted to make a scene. But in the end, she picked up the money and took it with her as she left the tavern, so sunk in her own hopeless misery that she barely noticed the other people there, and didn't see the gray-haired bartender watching her as she stumbled out of the warm, welcoming place and back out into the chilly, lonely world outside. The drizzling rain mixed with her tears as she crossed the narrow street to her rental car. She barely noticed. It had been bad enough that Mack had turned down her plea for help. That had been a desperate hope at best, but the look of anger and contempt in his eyes had been enough to break her. What made it all worse was that he was right, and now her life was over. All she had to look forward to now was death or prison, and right now she didn't care which doom fell upon her.

Once inside her car, she counted the money. It was more than enough for her to get blind drunk or obliviously high on, but not enough to do much else. It certainly wasn't enough for her to get back home, but she had no desire to do that anyway. She hadn't even left Harlan a note when she'd left. He might be wondering where she was and what had happened to her, but it was more likely that he was snorting coke, probably off of the belly of a cheap hooker. He hadn't been able to afford the expensive ones for some time now. Well, fuck him! And fuck Mack! And fuck the whole fucking world! She started the car and pulled out without even thinking to check the traffic. A horn blared as an SUV veered around her, another horn blared as an oncoming car veered to avoid the SUV. Sarah ignored them and drove off. Mack had told her that there were cheap bars down near the riverfront. Which way was the riverfront? She'd go there, and she'd do her damndest to drink herself to death. And when they found her body some time next morning, they'd come to Mack and tell him what had happened to her and maybe then he'd be a little bit sorry that he'd treated her so badly. She found the riverfront, parked the car and went into the first bar she saw. It was small and dim and reeked of old sweat, stale liquor and despair. She parked herself on the nearest stool and ordered a drink.

She could never remember the next hours clearly. She vaguely recalled a bartender cutting her off because he said she was plastered, so she went from bar to bar until she found one that would serve her no matter what state she was in as long as she had the money to pay for it. Then she felt violently sick, and they threw her out so that she wouldn't puke her guts up all over the dirty floor. She staggered into an alley and vomited over and over again until her belly hurt and her mind cleared a little. She checked how much money she had left and realized that it wasn't enough to buy her more than a couple of shots of cheap booze, but she didn't feel much like drinking any more anyway.

She heard the sounds of a scuffle at the mouth of the alley and looked back. Now that she was able to think a little, she realized that she was in a very, very bad part of town where she could wind up dead simply because she'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time. She saw two men struggling. One was small and ratline, the other taller. She couldn't make out much more than that because the lighting was so poor. As she gaped, the taste of vomit still in her mouth, she saw the taller one twist the smaller one's arm up behind his back and slam him against the crumbling brick wall. There was a sickening sound as the bigger man then shoved the smaller one's head into that same wall. The smaller man collapsed without a sound and the taller man began walking towards her.

She couldn't think very clearly even before panic hit her. Once it had, all Sarah could do was cling to the rim of a trashcan for support.

"No," she managed to croak as the man, dark and indistinct in the shadowy alleyway came closer and closer, all the more terrifying because of that. "No!" she wailed. "Leave me alone! Leave me alone!"

"Shut up, you drunk bitch," the man growled. "You want everyone to hear? Mack sent me. He said to tell you he can give you what you need, but you gotta come with me, and you gotta do it now." He had a deep, rumbling voice, harsh and threatening.

Sarah winced and bent over as another wave of nausea hit her, followed by dry heaves.

"How..." she managed to gasp after the fit had passed. "How do I know he sent you?"

"Fine." The man shrugged. "You wanna play games, I'll just leave you here and tell Mack you wouldn't come."

"No! No..." Sarah reached out a hand towards him, but he didn't take it. "Please. Tell me what to do."

"Just come along and keep your mouth shut," he replied.

"Where are we going?"

"Can't even keep your mouth shut for a second, can you?" He took her by her arm and started leading her further down the alleyway. Sarah stumbled along beside him. She wouldn't have been able to resist even if she hadn't been incapacitated by liquor. She was a short woman, and up close he was an even bigger man than he'd seemed to be at a distance, more than a head taller than she was and muscled like a gorilla.

There was a beat-up old gray van parked at the far end of the alley. As they approached it, the side door slid open. Inside was an inky darkness that suddenly struck Sara with fear. She tried to hang back, but the man bundled her into the van as easily as if she'd been helping. She collapsed onto what felt like an old scrap of carpet, tried to get up, and realized that it would be too much trouble. Then another wave of nausea hit her.

"Get this bitch to where she needs to go," the big man rumbled. "I'm done." He slid the door shut, leaving Sarah in utter darkness. There were no windows in the back part of the van, and something solid between her and the driver's compartment. She heard the van start up, she felt it lurch into movement, and then she melted into the blackness herself, and became a part of it.