Gavin is good with this kind of stuff, the plotting and planning. He organizes his thoughts well. I’m a pretty damn good player, but he’s a better coach.
“Option two, you do what you do best and try to get between Simon and Lauren,” he says. “You use that pretty face of yours and play that role of the multi-multimillionaire superstar investor, and you sweep Lauren off her feet and away from Simon. She dumps Simon, he crawls back to Vicky. And that might be doable,” he adds, “but there’s no time. This all has to happen in a week.”
“Very doable,” I say. “But yeah, no time.”
“Third option,” says Gavin. “You threaten Lauren. You scare her off. But that’s dicey. I’m not even sure how you’d do it. Put a gun to her head and tell her to break up with Simon? Then what? I’m not at all sure how that would play out.”
“Right, it doesn’t work.” I sit down next to him on the couch. “He’d assume Vicky sent me. Who else would’ve sent me? And then he’d file for divorceimmediately.”
“So that only leaves one option, my friend.” Gavin pats my back. “And the question is: How bad do you want that twenty-one million dollars?”
57
Vicky
“So that leaves only one option,” says Christian, standing in the living room of his condo.
“What’s that?” I say, seated on the couch, having listened to him discount other options that were never really options at all.
It’s half past six. I’m back at Christian’s for the second time today, after going back to Grace Park, returning Simon’s laptop and green journal to their spots on the desk in his home office, then doing some work on the shelter’s website from home, or at least trying to do some work, wondering what Christian will come up with.
“And I’m not saying we’d do it,” says Christian. “But I can’t think of any other way—”
“Spit it out,” I say.
“Okay.” He puts out a hand, as if to calm me. “I took all afternoon going through every possible plan, and this is the only one, in my opinion, that could accomplish our objective.”
“Speak,” I say.
“Well, we... y’know.” He makes a gun with his hand, points it at his head. “Y’know.”
I stare at him.
“We... make her go away,” he whispers.
“You meankillLauren?”
“I... yes. Yes,” he says.
It took him all afternoon to come up with that?
It took me ten seconds.
“I was afraid you might say that,” I say.
Actually, I was afraid he mightnotsay that and I’d have to raise the idea. But it’s much better that it came from him.
“I know it’s extreme.” He opens his hands. “I don’t think there’s any way of just scaring her off. The only viable option is to take her out of the equation entirely. I’m not saying we’d do it, just that...”
“It would be the only way to stop this.”
“Yeah,” he says.
“Uh-huh.” I nod. “And... hypothetically—”
“Right, just hypothetically.”
“—how would that happen?” I peek up at him. “If Simon’s been having an affair with her, he’s probably left a trail all over the place. If she dies, if she gets shot or stabbed or strangled or whatever—the first person they look at is the man who was having an affair with her. The second person they look at is that man’swife.”