“Mr. Roman? Mr. Lanier would like to speak with you in his office.”
Mark felt sick. Kind of like he’d felt right before he’d called Katie the day of the wedding. This is it. I’m about to get fired. He turned around and walked down the hall to his father-in-law’s office and went in.
An hour later, he walked out with his ears still ringing and a neat little settlement package buying him out of his contract, knowing full well the old bastard expected Megan to get it back in alimony. And with best wishes in his new life.
As soon as he got in the car, Mark called his lawyer and told him what had happened and was reassured again that without a prenuptial agreement and with less than six months of marriage to a wealthy woman, it did not constitute alimony of any kind. And then, while he was riding a wave of relief, he impulsively called Katie.
He didn’t know why, other than he wanted to hear her voice.
It did not surprise him that she wouldn’t answer, so he drove to her apartment complex, but then when he parked, he didn’t see her car. Still intent on making contact, he went up to her apartment to leave her a note, and walked up on a couple moving in.
Holy shit! She moved out?
Suddenly, he realized he’d just lost his last connection to her. If she wasn’t answering calls, and he didn’t know where she lived now, he’d actually really “lost” her. He turned around and went back to his car and headed home, but the closer he got, the deeper the pain in his chest became.
It hurt to breathe. He thought he might be having a heart attack. What if he died? He didn’t want to die. Then he wondered if this was how Katie had felt when he’d betrayed her. What the hell had he been thinking?
He sighed. He knew what he’d been thinking about.
Money.
Power.
Prestige.
That’s what he’d been thinking.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
“I am a worthless son of a bitch,” Mark said.
By the time he pulled into the garage, he was crying.
Then he remembered Lila. She’d know where Katie was! He scanned through his contacts and found her number. When he called, Lila answered so fast it startled him to the point of being speechless.
“What?” she said.
“Uh, this is—”
“I know who it is. Caller ID, dumbass. What do you want?”
“Uh, Katie moved and—”
“She didn’t just move. She’s gone. Between you and the nut who shot her, she never wants to see Albuquerque again. I’m not about to tell you where she is, and if you go looking for her, I will find you and remove your balls with a garlic press. Do you understand me?”
Horror rolled through Mark in waves. He knew Lila well enough to believe she meant every word of what she’d said. He’d lost a good woman to a bad one, and he’d betrayed her to do it. He couldn’t take that back. He was as sorry as he could be, but not sorry enough to part with his balls. He hung up without saying another word and went into the house.
He hadn’t just lost a wife; the job she’d come with was gone, too.
House of cards.
All fall down.
Chapter Eight
Mark moped through the evening and ordered in his dinner. As he was waiting for it to arrive, he remembered Megan’s claim she’d left something behind, so he got up and went upstairs to their bedroom to see if he could find it.
Her clothes were gone, of course. He’d watched her packing them. And she’d taken all of her jewelry with her as well. He checked her side of the vanity in the bathroom, then the little end table on her side of the bed. Nothing was there but an old charger cord to a phone she no longer owned.
The drawers in her dresser were empty, too, but he looked anyway, and then, as he went to push a bottom drawer shut, it stuck. So he pulled it out, straightened it, and went to push it shut again, and again it stuck about halfway in.
Frowning, he pulled the drawer out again, but this time lifted it off the track and pulled it all the way out to see if a piece of her lingerie might have fallen out and was keeping the drawer from shutting. But when he stood the drawer up against the wall with the bottom facing forward, he froze, unable to believe what he was seeing.
A pouch full of tiny little bags of white powder barely larger than postage stamps was taped to the bottom of the drawer. His skin crawled. That couldn’t be… She would never…
He yanked out another drawer and turned it over and found another pouch. Then he pulled out the other four drawers and turned them over and nearly lost his mind.
Hundred-dollar bills sealed up within resealable bags.
He peeled the money off the drawers and counted over thirty thousand dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills. He had no idea what was in the bags, but he knew it had to be some kind of drugs. His big decision now was what the hell to do with it.
When his doorbell rang, his heart nearly stopped. He grabbed his phone to check the camera on his Ring doorbell and saw the delivery guy from DoorDash.
Dinner was served.
He flew down the stairs to retrieve the delivery and hurried back up, frantically locking the door behind him before carrying the food into the kitchen. He was so rattled that he couldn’t even remember what he’d ordered and felt the pressure of what was upstairs weighing heavier and heavier on his conscience.
Then, in one of his rare moments of doing the right thing, Mark Roman called the cops on his wife. He didn’t care what kind of trouble she was in. All he knew was that he wanted no part of it.
Thirty minutes later, his house was crawling with cops. They were taking the house apart, looking to see if there was more than what he’d found, while a detective from Narcotics was taking his statement.
Mark couldn’t quit shaking.
The only positive thing about the whole fiasco was that the cops actually believed him innocent of abetting. It was obvious from the level of shock he was in that he had not been involved, and the text on his phone from his wife, wanting back in the house after she had filed for divorce and moved out, only bolstered his alibi of how he’d found what she’d hidden and his innocence in what she’d been doing.
They didn’t find any other drugs, but they did find another stash of money totaling a little over twenty thousand dollars in a Walmart sack hidden in the deep freeze in the garage beneath a ham and a box of steaks.
Megan Roman was going down. She just didn’t know it yet.
As the police were leaving, the detective from Narcotics paused, then turned around and gave Mark a stern look.
“Don’t call and tell her we’re coming, or we’ll be coming back for you.”