The one-word name should have been the first indicator I couldn’t trust Fika.
His name reminded me of Emery Winthrop and her penchant for obscure words, which should have been the second indicator.
Fika is Swedish for a moment to slow down and appreciate the good things in life, and that should have been the third sign.
For starters, there were no good things in life.
And Fika wasn’t even Swedish.
He was a Wonder Bread white, North Carolinian, Keith Mars wannabe, a disgraced Eastridge sheriff ousted almost two decades ago, around the time I’d touched my first boob.
“I think you should stop this crusade of yours.” A curtain of bangs swept hair over one eye until he brushed them to the side. He resembled the Jonas Brothers before they’d realized straightening hair was for pussies. The leather chair squished under his weight as he leaned forward and placed two elbows on my office desk, close enough I could see my reflection in his eyes. “It’s destroying you. There’s no light in your eyes. I didn’t think it’s possible, but each time I see you, it’s worse, Nash.”
Fika patted his pockets as if searching for the cancer sticks that had fucked up his lungs in the first place. When he didn’t find them, he snapped at the litany of rubber bands that formed a colony up and down the length of his forearms.
“I didn’t invite you inside my home at four in the morning for your opinion of me. I hired you for a job.” Tracing my fingers along the stack of hundreds in front of me, I watched Fika’s eyes follow their path across Benjamin Franklin’s pasty, sunken-eyed face. “I tell you what to do. You get paid. That’s how this works.”
Thumbing the currency strap, I lifted the bills and fanned them, my fingers brushing against each hundred (and there were many). I should have shown mercy, but all I could feel at the mention of a Winthrop was rage.
The medical examiner had ruled my dad’s death a heart attack, but he’d left out the three jobs he’d taken that led to it. If he and Ma hadn’t lost their home, jobs, and savings, Dad would be alive and I wouldn’t catch Ma staring at an empty dinner setting with misty eyes every time I visited.
As far as I was concerned, the Winthrops killed Hank Prescott.
Case closed.
Vengeance pending.
Fika’s jaw ticked when I pulled out my desk’s drawer, dropped the bills inside, and slammed it shut with an audible thud.
I believed in power over mercy. People possessed needs, and when you determined someone’s needs, you ruled him.
Fika’s need was money. His second cancer diagnosis arrived eighteen months ago. It sucked away the fat on his cheeks until he resembled something more like a ghoul than a man. Since his remission, he’d gained back some of his weight, along with medical debt that could fund a third-world coup d’état.
To be fair, I’d never had to pull the money card in the past. I’d done some less-than-legal things to become the C.E.O. and founder of a company Forbes valued at over a billion dollars last year, and Fika had done a stellar job of covering my tracks for me.
I’d stayed out of jail this long, a phenomenon in itself.
I asked him to do something. He did it. That was how transactions worked.
Until now.
“Did you swallow a bad batch of chemo?” I lifted a second stack of hundreds and tore at the edges of one bill because I could—and it left Fika on edge, a near miracle with the hippy bullshit he’d turned to after he’d beaten cancer the first time. “Have you forgotten the English dictionary? Transactions require an exchange, and for you to get this”—I rattled the stack of bills—“you have to give me what I asked for.”
“Look, man…” He eyed the money before shaking his head. “I get it. You’ve got a thing against the Winthrops, for good reason, but nothin’ good will come out of finding Gideon Winthrop. Trust me.”
I trusted no one, another reason Gideon needed to go. I didn’t mean die. Death was an easy route; long, drawn-out suffering pleased me more.
Movies like Taken and John Wick skewed the general public’s conceptions of revenge. It didn’t happen in a day. Like all things worth doing, revenge—true revenge, the type meant to annihilate its target—took time.
The Space Race, for instance, began in 1955. The Apollo 11 didn’t reach the moon until 1969. It took over fourteen years to land on the moon. Fourteen years. More than the average lifespan of a dog.
My revenge, on the other hand, had been in the making for a mere four years.
“I’m not looking for an ethics lecture, Fika.” His hands shook as I spoke, but I spared him no mercy. “You found Gideon.”
“I did.” He worried his bottom lip and swiped at the Jonas Brothers wig again until it sat slightly crooked on his head. “Sometimes people do bad things for good reasons.”
The argument of someone who’d taken bribes during his tenure as sheriff to pay for his cancer treatments.
How much evidence had he stolen? How many wealthy Eastridgers had he given a free pass? If Gideon had approached him, would he have brushed those crimes under a rug, too?
Unbuttoning my cuff plackets, I rolled up my sleeves on both sides until the tattoo on my left forearm peeked out.
penance
My bold, unapologetic truth.
Fika had misconstrued its meaning in the past, and I allowed him to do so again as his eyes dipped to the word then back to my face.
“I won’t bullshit you,” he began, his hands clasped together in the shape of a church steeple.
“Then don’t.”
“I found Gideon Winthrop.” Fika dropped a hand to his distressed jeans—a fucking fifty-something-year-old in distressed jeans—and toyed with the frayed strands at the knees. “He seems happy and thriving. He sends his daughter postcards through email often. He has new friends, new neighbors, and even a new Golden Retriever. They know of his past, yet they still befriended him. In return, he treats them well. I’ve never seen a man smile more. He’s discovered his own paradise, Nash.”
I wanted to raze it all to the ground.
Destroy his daughter.
Steal his money.
Break his friends.
Tear down his neighbors.
Kidnap the damned Golden Retriever.
If he owned it, I wanted to watch him suffer as I took it from him.
“That’s all good and dandy, but I didn’t pay you to give me the Hallmark summary of Gideon’s life.” I poured each of us a glass of Bowmore 1957 and slid one Fika’s way, knowing he craved it but couldn’t accept it thanks to the diet his doctor had him on. “I asked you to find him for me. Where. Is. He?”
He eyed the liquor, his hand twitching before he dug it into his Slim-Jim-thin thigh. “I can’t tell you that, kid.”
I’d turn thirty-three years old this year, and he still saw me as the twenty-five-year-old who had come to him sprouting wild accusations about the Winthrops.
Unbelievable.
“Why.”
A demand, not a question.
It slid past clenched teeth into stale air. I tapped the table, drawing his attention to a pack of cigarettes I’d left there for the sole purpose of keeping Fika off balance. I’d never smoked a day in my life, but they tempted me as I pictured the way they’d rile him up.
Seething didn’t begin to describe me. If I were a volcano, I’d be spewing lava, an ash cloud the size of the moon hovering above us as I burnt Fika to a crisp. I settled for pulling the ten-thousand dollars from my desk and tossing the money into my fireplace with the precision of someone who’d spent his teenage years throwing shit out of windows and running for it when husbands came home too early.
I had a hotel being built in Haling Cove, a contract to negotiate in Singapore, and four suppliers to fire by sunrise. Stopping by my house in Eastridge for a meeting with Fika sat low on my to-do list, and my time was too damned valuable to be jerked around by a corrupt ex-cop in a Jonas Brothers wig who had forgotten his place.
Fika leapt for the money, but the flames swallowed it, bright sparks shooting past the mantel at us. He whimpered as it burned, withering away to nothing but smoke and ashes.
Meaningless.
“I feel sad for you, kid.” When the last bill metamorphosed to dust, Fika turned to me and sat on the leather ottoman beside the fire, shaking his head like I was his son and my existence disappointed him. “Do you know what Fika means? It means to have a coffee, but it’s more than that. It’s a way of life. Stop. Have coffee. Enjoy your own company. Enjoy the company of others. You can’t appreciate what you have now if you’re fixated on what was taken from you in the past.”
I stood, pushing my chair with the backs of my thighs as I remembered the fourth sign I shouldn’t have trusted Fika. He answered to a moral compass skewed by his idiotic perspectives. He was, after all, the type of madman who played Christmas music year-round and, worse, sang out loud with the songs.
“Before you quote another CBD-laced fortune cookie, Hank Prescott isn’t the kind of man who can be forgotten.” I opened my office door and stared Fika down until he got the hint and left, sans the fifty-thousand dollars he would have received had he delivered Gideon Winthrop’s location as promised. “Learn your place.”
Slamming the door just as he exited so he felt the bite of the wood, I gathered documents into a briefcase for my trip to Haling Cove and considered the obvious. Emery knew where Gideon lived. Gideon and Virginia had separated soon after news of the scandal broke, but Gideon still sent messages to his daughter.
Stripping a man of his wealth, dignity, and happiness was an art form, and like all art forms, it required a great deal of patience and suffering. I had the patience, but I refused to suffer any more.
Emery Winthrop, on the other hand, made perfect collateral damage.
I could break her spirit in half and not feel a lick of guilt.
Sin number one.
She’d known about her dad’s extracurricular activities. I’d overheard her parents discussing it the night Reed almost went to jail.
Reed had run to the cottage, and Emery had hidden in her room, but I’d found myself against the tiger sculpture’s ass again, leaning behind Dionysus, listening in on Virginia, Gideon, and Able Small Dick Cartwright’s dad argue.
“If Emery finds out, I will cut you off, Virginia, and I will sue you for everything you own, Cartwright,” Gideon had warned, his voice steady and threat real.
“Please,” Virginia scoffed, unladylike without an audience, “she already knows. Why do you think I sent her to that shrink to set her straight?”
The ledger had only left my suit’s breast pocket once since I’d stolen it, and I felt the heat of it burn my chest. Emery Winthrop knew about her parents’ scam, and I… I’d made two mistakes tonight that I couldn’t take back.
Sin number two.
The day the F.B.I. and S.E.C. had raided Emery’s McMansion, she’d led an agent to my parents’ cottage, covering for her dad as she listed our names—Betty. Hank. Reed. Nash. They stood in front of the mailbox, staring at the door, but I’d heard enough.
I dipped into the maze and retrieved the ledger I’d hidden before some government smuck found it.
I had a plan to atone for my sins.
I had a plan to fix my parents, Eastridge, everything.
I had a plan.
Then, Dad died.
And I was just as guilty as the Winthrops.
