Exit Strategy (34 page)

“Good plan, I guess. But just know the offer from Nate and me still stands.”

“Okay, but I don’t think I want you guys to beat him up, either. The other part of my epiphany is I decided I’m going to talk to him about my father and my triggers.”

“Well, it’s about goddamned time. You’re both going to be so much better for it.”

“He’s done so much to help me in the time we’ve known each other. It’s about time I trusted him with everything.”

Jada takes another gander at the television. “Oh, the Buffaloes are up by twenty. They’ve got this one in the bag.” She begins to flip the channels. “You and Tristan might get to aim for TPE if you were to say, move in with him.”

“Yeah, like that’s ever going to happen.”

“You never know.”

I grin and pick my pad and pencil back up. “In Tristan’s dreams.”

“Not yours?”

“My dreams involve more than just cohabitation.”

“Well according to his brother, your boy just might be softening up to other options.”

“In my dreams.” I don’t get to write another note before Jada’s exclamation startles me out of my thought process.

“Well, I’ll be goddamned!”

When I hear Jada’s exclamation, I look back up at the television, and she turns the volume up. She’s landed on one of the gossip shows where they are showing video of Tristan out on the town with a tall blond woman.

A mere twenty-four hours after girlfriend Keisha Beale’s ex was found not guilty of drugging her, Tristan White is out on the town with former flame, Leilani Doyle. Ms. Doyle was the financial mogul’s arm candy a couple of years after the tragic accident of Aimee Gabriel, the woman many believed he would someday marry.

Having dated a bevy of beauties since that time, White appeared smitten for ten months by the three-year post-college Keisha Beale, who met him while seeking venture capital for her successful music studio, Kente Studio Records. There were had been rumblings of wedding bells for the striking couple prior to the high-profile trial, but tonight’s activities call those rumblings into question.

Had the videos just shown him out having dinner and then dancing with the woman, I might have believed it was just Tristan hanging out with an old friend. But they are actually having a romantic dinner, cuddling and kissing, then dancing like they were filming a remake of
Dirty Dancing
. The sad thing is, I don’t even think about myself and how devastating this turn of events is for me. I think first about my mother. Mama watches these shows religiously since Jada and I have been regularly featured in them, and she will see this. It will break her heart to see that Tristan isn’t the man she thinks he is.

On cue, my cell phone rings. As the loop begins again, I glance at Jada, who switches the television off and spikes the remote on the floor like a football.

“That fucker’s just earned his appointment with me and a pair of pliers.”

“Jada, you won’t be able to get close enough to him to do anything. His security team will be all over you.” My cell phone continues to ring, and I ignore it. I can’t talk to Mama yet. I need to think about what I’m going to say to her. In my present frame of mind, I don’t want to talk to anyone right now, but Jada’s a given. She’ll rally behind me no matter what.

“Not before I get a nice handful of man meat. He’ll be known as Tristan White, the eunuch, when I’m done with him.”

“I’m sure that might satisfy your sadistic nature, but don’t do it on my account. I knew telling him how I felt might make him run in the other direction. I gambled and loss.” I’m so empty inside, so. So betrayed... but I don’t want to incite Jada to attempt murder.

I leave the living room and head for the kitchen. I need to be mollified, and I know just the thing. Tristan gave me a supply of wine from his cellar so he wouldn’t have to drink the lesser brands Jada and I keep around. A bottle of 2001 Ch
â
teau d’Yqem will certainly do the trick. My palette has become accustomed to the more expensive vintages, and perhaps I won’t be quite as hung over if I self-medicate with the good stuff.

I grab the popular sauvignon blanc which happens to from Sauternes to the tune of $350 a bottle. Tristan loves this wine, and I should’ve taken more instead of just knocking his number down by two bottles.

I carry the bottle and corkscrew in one hand and the stemware woven through the fingers of the other. Jada doesn’t speak when I reenter the room; she just takes the glasses from my hand and sets them on the table as I do the same with the wine bottle and prep it for opening.

We clink our glasses together, and she proposes a toast. “To men who don’t know the difference between a goddamned good thing and their assholes.”

“Hear, hear,” I say and take the first of what I know will be many swallows.

The last thing I remember before Jada and I pass out is her texting Jorge to open up for us in the morning and then drunk-dialing Tristan several times, cursing him for all she’s worth and me refusing to cry, instead laughing like a goddamned hyena.

~*~

“What did you do, Keisha Anarosa?” Mama asks me before I enter her living room the next day.

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Girl, you’re just as prickly as I am. Did you push him away because of the outcome of the trial?”

“Mama, Tristan isn’t ready for the kind of commitment I need. I tried to tell you this, but you were so hell-bent on this being the real thing, you didn’t want to hear it.”

“Someone who looks at you the way that man did doesn’t go off with a blond bimbo for no reason. Did you reject him?”

“No, I didn’t. All I did was tell him that I love him, okay? I don’t think he could handle it.”

“Oh.” Mama sinks into her favorite stuffed chair. “Does he have some kind of commitment phobia or something?”

“A grand case of it, I’d say. He’s been that way since he lost his mother.”

“He can get help for that; he’s a wealthy man. Did he even try to get help?”

“He sees a therapist regularly, but I don’t think he wants to change that about himself.”

“Then maybe it’s time to say good riddance. I don’t care how rich he is; you can’t keep letting him string you on with no promise of commitment ever.”

“So, are we good?”

Mama comes over to me and envelops me in her arms. “Baby girl, we will always be good.”

Tears prick my eye, because I can never handle Mama being mushy with me.

“He’s going to figure out you’re better than a bushel full of that riff-raff he’s carrying on with now.”

Leave it to Mama to summarize it so succinctly.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

TRISTAN

Surveillance is not as exciting as they portray it on television. Tristan becomes more anxious by the day, and it's been three weeks since the trial. He wants his lifestyle back, and, more importantly, he wants Keisha back in his life. He isn’t surprised she doesn’t remember everything he said the day of the trial.

While listening to the conversation Keisha had with Jada after the story broke about him and Lani, he’d been tempted to call everything off, but that would’ve left them in the same position they were in before. They would always be looking over their shoulders, wondering if the person or persons threatening them would make good on those threats.

Carlos Velasquez has moved into his guest room for the duration, and they're debriefing for the day.

“Rojas reported in. He’s been partying like a rock star with McCaskill. Says he’s been going straight consensual with a kinky bent. There was a cute little Latina in a club McCaskill eyed one night, but she was willing,” Velasquez says. He ticks off items on his pad as he speaks. “He’s pissed with The Coyote, so he’s been shopping for another dealer. Sent one of his people out to get weed and uppers once. No GHB.”

Tristan rears back in his desk chair, stretching muscles that feel atrophied given how much he’s been in front of the damn monitors for three weeks. If he isn’t there, then Velasquez’s men are.

“What about Paulson and Fielding?”

“Still doing their booty calls, but nothing diabolical. A brunette showed up at Fielding’s place one day, and a slight-looking red-haired dude came out. I went over the video personally, and either the woman who went in left through another door and the guy was already there and we missed him on a shift change or something, or a switcheroo went down inside. Neither Paulson nor Fielding have been in touch with McCaskill.”

“Sara is a makeup artist. Pull that video and tag it for me, will you? I’d like to see if I recognize either person.” At night when he can't sleep, Tristan fast-forwards through the footage just to make sure they haven’t missed anything.

“Sure thing.”

“I think it’s time we sent Heather Davies into McCaskill’s inner circle. Rojas should be able to get us some good intel as to where they'll be at all times so we can protect her.”

“You want to use the cop? What if someone links her to you?”

“Heather was just a brief stopgap between Lani and Sara. We never went out publicly because she didn’t want the guys on the force giving her shit about me.”

“So there’s no photographic history the feds could use to link you two?”

“None.”

“I say we go for it and see if we can pin McCaskill with something he can’t shake loose this time.”

“Have your guys been able to search the homes for evidence that either of them have been cutting out words from magazines?”

“Someone’s always at McCaskill’s place, so we haven’t been able to get into it since the trial. We’ve been in both Paulson’s and Fielding’s places. She’s got a ton of magazines, but we found no pages cut out. He had a few business mags—same deal.”

“Any luck getting the camera footage from the courtroom? Keisha said the Aimee lookalike was there around the time the judge excused her mother and the church folks. She slipped out again when they returned from recess.”

“Prosecutor Todd is hoping to get us a copy before Judge Summers has the portion with the pictures of Ms. Beale redacted, since that was the timeframe the person of interest was in the courtroom.”

“And that reminds me. I want every copy of those damned pictures destroyed when this is over. I don’t care whose property has to be breached or who you have to bribe. Get it done.”

“Yes, sir.”

~*~

“Fuck me!” Tristan exclaims as he eyes the pictures he requested from Carlos several days ago. Now that he finally got around to viewing them, an interesting similarity jumped out at him. He grabs the photos in question and runs from his library, which is now his makeshift office, to the guest room Velasquez has occupied since just after the trial. Not bothering to knock, Tristan spills into the room talking.

“Carlos! Wake up. I—”

Velasquez vaults up off the bed, gun in hand.

Tristan throws on the light and raises his hands. “It’s just me.” He remembers
after the fact
that Velasquez has been in some horrible war situations and might be a little trigger happy. If he were a lesser man, Tristan might have wet his pants, finding himself staring down the barrel of a gun. He isn’t skittish, but he also won’t make any false moves until he’s sure Velasquez is coherent.

“Sorry, sir.” Velasquez lowers the gun and stows it back under his pillow. He swings his legs off the side of the bed and stands. Thankfully, he's wearing boxers and a wifebeater, so he isn’t indecent as Tristan approaches him with the photos.

“This is the picture we pulled from the courtroom video. This one's from the video at Sara Fielding’s place. Wouldn’t you say that’s the same person? In one photo she’s in women’s clothes, and the other, she’s in men’s clothes.”

“Yes, absolutely.”

“And she bears an uncanny resemblance to Aimee Gabriel. Her face is a bit rounder, but they could be sisters.”