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  “Ditto.” Jeff pointed his fingers at his eyes and then at Peter’s. “I’m watching you.”

  “Look before you go, I gotta tell you something, and you’re not gonna like it.”

  “What now?” Nancy looked at Jeff and rolled her eyes.

  “Don’t kill the messenger, but, I don’t know—maybe it helps you understand. So, Saunders Construction did the Zenergy site.” Peter waited anxiously to gauge their reaction.

  “What? Saunders? If that motherfucker’s back in town, so help me God,” Jeff said angrily.

  Nancy clutched at Peter’s arm, raking it with her nails. “You’re serious. No bullshit, you wouldn’t.” Her face broke into a grimace as she choked back a sob. “I have to get out of here.”

  CHAPTER 12

  JEFF AND NANCY WALKED OUT OF THE POLICE station together, each reliving their years-long nightmares of Brock Saunders. Nancy had to rest against a wall. Wheezing audibly, she fumbled in her pocketbook. “I need my inhaler.” Two puffs later, she still couldn’t move. “Oh my God, Jeff—what are we gonna do?” She wiped the tears rolling down her face on the back of her trembling hands.

  “Nothing.” Jeff’s voice sounded octaves deeper. “Don’t panic. We rebuilt our lives—no surrender. That piece of shit doesn’t get to win. I gotta find out more. Fucking Pete—now I get it.” He clenched his fists and almost punched the brick wall before stopping himself.

  “I feel like barfing. My blood pressure is through the roof—I’m seeing spots.” Nancy panted as she spoke, her eyes closed.

  “Damn it, Nance. You can’t breathe, your heart’s gonna explode, the diabetes, all the meds, the shots, you name it. Jeff propped her up as best he could. She outweighed him by at least forty pounds. “Don’t pass out.”

  Kenny Johnson climbed the stairs near them after parking his Jeep in the lot.

  “What’s goin’ on?” Approaching quickly, he held Nancy’s wrist in his hand and took her pulse. “That’s not good.”

  “I’m fine.” Nancy shook him off. “Just a big shock.”

  Jeff nodded. “Thanks, Kenny. If she says she’s OK …”

  Kenny assessed Nancy carefully. “Go sit down on that bench. Do you have a baby aspirin, Ms. Yates? We can get the EMTs out here.”

  “No.”

  “Nance, pop an aspirin.” Jeff dug into her purse and opened the small bottle. “Take it.”

  “Kenny, I’m OK now.” Nancy chewed the aspirin and tried to smile.

  Seeing how she rallied, Kenny started to walk inside. “Call 911 if you feel bad again. Don’t wait.”

  Jeff relaxed as the color returned to Nancy’s face. “Alright, I’m driving you home.”

  Nancy’s baggage could break a bull elephant’s spine. Cigarettes, sunbathing, stress, booze, and insomnia had aged her so quickly that she didn’t even recognize herself at thirty. Divorced with two kids and a boring office job wasn’t how she’d pictured her future. Yet she surprised everybody but herself by being a whiz with technology and crawled up the ladder as a tech specialist for an insurance conglomerate. Post-Brock, depression, anxiety and asthma held onto her ankles like dead weights. By forty, a hysterectomy, high cholesterol, dramatic weight gain, and early menopause. Her fifties now featured hypertension, Type-2 diabetes, sleep apnea, and epic hives.

  Back in middle school, Nancy and Peter became tight as they sat week after week in detention, busted for having Bad Attitudes. Nancy smoked like a chimney in the bathrooms, chomped gum in class and showed too much skin. Peter never shut up, dropping one-liners like a stand-up comedian and disrupting every class. They hung out when they could, Nancy, an only child, becoming friendly with Jeff, too.

  Nancy and Peter had slept together once after she got divorced, about six months before Brock violated her. Curiosity and alcohol fueled whatever sparks led them to the bedroom, and although Nancy thought that this could be the start of something, Peter doused the flame without realizing she wouldn’t mind more.

  “Wow, let’s not do that again. I think that was the tequila talking. Sorry it sucked.” Peter, divorced after a brief marriage in his twenties, shook her awake to talk after he got dressed while she was pretend-sleeping. She had been thinking about reaching over to get him hard again when he bolted out of bed.

  “Oh, yeah. Wow, no, it’s OK. We have like zero sexual chemistry.” Nancy played along. “No offense.” She tucked the sheets up over her still-naked body and staged an elaborate yawn.

  “None taken. Already checked off on our bucket lists, right? Hey, don’t tell Jeff or Tomassi.”

  “Tell them what—we had lousy drunken sex? Please.”

  “Sometimes, it’s just an itch, you know? We’re OK, though, right?”

  “Sure. I’m going back to sleep,” Nancy said, turning away from Peter and doing a halfway decent job of acting casual. “Close the door on your way out. Catch you later.”

  CHAPTER 13

  JEFF COULD NEVER SHAKE OFF THE SUCKER PUNCH of being utterly ripped off, the heart-stopping moment when he knew he had lost everything. Artie Russo, Jeff and Peter’s father farmed the fruit and vegetable fields that his father farmed before him. And, unfortunately, he farmed it exactly the way his father did. Innovations were met with suspicion and derision, but fortunately for the balance sheet, so was debt. Artie ran the farm on a shoestring budget; he didn’t trust bankers as far as he could throw them. When Artie anointed Jeff as his successor at age twenty-three, Jeff couldn’t believe the meager cash flow. Neither could the accountant he hired on the sly. In a bad year, plagued by drought or too much rain, the farm fell dangerously into the red. Peter avoided Artie like the plague and made it known that unless Jeff needed help with the crops, Peter wasn’t visiting. Jeff shouldered the burden, staying awake nights trying to think of ways to make more money.

  “The asshole doesn’t get that to make money, you have to spend money.” Peter bought another round of beers at their favorite watering hole, nodding as Jeff complained.

  “I don’t know what to do.” Jeff didn’t even notice the pretty young woman making eyes at him from across the room until Peter pointed her out.

  “She likes your ugly mug. Poor thing needs glasses.”

  “Fuck off.”

  The Russo farm’s acres of proximity to the Connecticut River brought developers out of the woodwork. Where once schooners, sloops and freight steamboats sailed the river, now jet skis and motorboats dominated the waterways. Fertile alluvial soil, almost rockless, graced the Russo homestead. But with Bridgeville now ranking as the hottest town West of the river for residential and commercial real estate, a day didn’t go by without a card in the mail, a phone call, a knock on the door, or an inquiring email.

  “Hell, no. We got river water and dirt in our veins,” Jeff joked, turning down every offer to sell after consulting with Peter. Artie made his wishes known, too.

  “You never sell this farm, you hear me. Never.”

  Traitors to the hold-out farming community practically had to flee town after inking their deals with developers eager to blow up their fields. No one except the greedy and corrupt got rich off of farming.

  “I’m good,” Peter said when Jeff agonized for the millionth time about Artie’s Byzantine manipulation to divide, conquer and rule. Their mother, an alcoholic by then, did nothing to interfere with Artie’s decision. Jeff and Peter hardly expected her to, either. They’d watched her live for as long as they could remember in the shadow of a tyrannical husband who only let her have charge of the kitchen and the washing machine. When she died, they mourned, mostly for what could have been, but she had long ago become a bit player in their lives.

  “I’ve got a great gig at the factory. You keep the headache of dealing with the old man and running the farm. I’ll be your right-hand man when you need me.”

  “Hello, dipshit—I need you. But when he kicks off, you’re getting like 25 percent of the farm. The good and the bad.” Jeff held out his pinky for Peter to grab with his own. They shook
pinkies just like they did when they were boys.

  “So make me a deal, boss. What do you need?”

  “A deal? Like I pay you in cash money? And don’t call me that.”

  “You can pay me in beer.”

  “I can’t pay you, period. Everything is so run down, it’s for shit. But, how ‘bout you take a crop and handle it from planting to harvest?” Jeff scratched his head and thought for a minute. “I’ll keep Dad away from you, but don’t fuck it up. You got the corn.”

  “OK, but we need new equipment to do it right. The old man hasn’t upgraded since the 1950’s.”

  “Yeah, that John Deere is held together by spit and duct tape. Get your ass over to some auctions and get what you need.” Jeff never let on to Artie that to get the equipment, he’d have to borrow from the bank. Set up with a generous line of credit, collateralized by the farm, Jeff made changes to improve everything. Slowly, the modernization paid off until Brock Saunders made his pitch, selling Jeff and Artie on the promise of can’t miss riches.

  “I’ll kill him,” Jeff vowed angrily to Peter after the Ponzi scheme unraveled. “I’m gonna cut off his balls and stuff them in his lying sonovabitch mouth.”

  “Yeah, you gotta get in line.”

  Brock Saunders bolted from his hometown in the dark of night after the implosion of Pioneer Premium Properties’ shell game. When the first few irate investors, choking with rage or tears, called him at the office before it shut down, Brock stonewalled.

  “I’m as surprised as you are. Call Customer Service. Someone will definitely get back to you.” Brock’s stock response didn’t buy him much time. Customer Service didn’t exist now that the shit hit the fan. And just about everybody knew the location of his palatial bachelor pad. He split before Jeff and hundreds of others got to confront him.

  Brock laid low. Although advised by legal counsel to stay in the area, it came out in court documents that Brock took up exile in an oceanside condo overlooking the Atlantic in posh Westerly, RI, some two hours away from Bridgeville. Rented under a fake name, he sat on the terrace, drank heavily, avoided his father and gorged on fried clams. Never appearing anywhere without sunglasses and a baseball cap, he finally agreed to meet his lawyer at a rest stop on I-95. Brock had no idea that the prized attorney was wearing a wire.

  “Brock, I hear that you’re going to be charged with fraud and securities law violations, just like everyone else at PPP. We can probably bargain if you roll over on your bosses. I’m more concerned with the IRS. Did you declare all your income?”

  Brock hemmed and hawed. “By all, do you mean everything?” He guzzled his vodka gimlet and signaled for another one.

  The lawyer had gotten rich off the billable hours he spent defending Brock’s father, always for Saunders Construction’s failure to provide or pay for contracted goods and services. But the lawyer’s hands got dirty. Busted by the feds, he offered them Brock.

  “All, everything—what the hell’s the difference?” The lawyer dismissed the inconvenience of semantics.

  “What I tell you is private, right?” Brock paused, waiting for a yes. “So, not exactly all. You know, I had some shitty accountants who didn’t give me good advice. It’s their goddam fault.”

  “How many?”

  “How many accountants or millions?”

  CHAPTER 14

  NANCY, STILL LABORING TO BREATHE, STRUGGLED to keep from free-falling back to the fateful night that changed her life forever. Fire and Ice, a popular bar in West Hadley, pulsated per usual with loud music and musk that fateful night when Nancy, then thirty-three, decided to go to Brock’s place.

  “We’ll have some fun,” he said, and kissed her willing lips again at the end of the long u-shaped bar. It functioned essentially as his lair when he graced the place, and Nancy was happy to be the chosen one for a change.

  After her divorce at age thirty-one, Nancy became a Saturday night regular. She dressed her curvy figure to attract attention like every other woman out on the town. Cleavage, big hair, tight miniskirt, black opaque tights. She met up with some girlfriends usually, and they eyed the attractive men who eyed them back. People bought each other drinks, and everyone wanted to get lucky with someone.

  Brock Saunders dropped by every now and then. He was making money hand over fist for Pioneer Premium Properties. Their parties were the stuff of legend on huge chartered yachts and in tricked-out mansions. Food, booze, entertainment; costs upwards of six-figures were nothing. But Brock liked to scout for easy prey outside of work.

  “You don’t eat where you shit,” his boss told him after some complaints about Brock’s aggressive trawling of secretaries. “Work the older rich broads whose money we want, otherwise get your pussy elsewhere.”

  At Fire and Ice, Brock favored the grand entrance. Good-looking, with hard brown eyes and brown hair, he accentuated his muscular physique by dressing like a character straight out of Miami Vice. He even had the shades.

  “Drinks for all the ladies.” Brock expensed everything, so it was really no skin off his back.

  Nancy held her booze well, but she never brought men home; her kids were there. In her pocketbook, she always kept condoms hidden inside a small zippered compartment.

  “I don’t want my kids finding them,” she said, showing her friends where she kept them in case they needed one quick.

  Brock’s showy visits pissed off more than a few average guys. He just sucked the air out of the room.

  “Fucking asshole with house money.”

  “Watch out, ladies—here it comes again. Bend over.”

  “I’m gettin’ mine, no matter what. Fuck Brock.”

  Nancy flirted with Brock like she flirted with every guy. Everyone knew Brock prowled with a purpose. He went through women like water, and Nancy didn’t see herself with him. But after Nancy and Peter’s fizzled one-night stand, and a few lousy lays from the bar, Nancy eyed Brock differently. He became a Maybe.

  “What do you think about me going after Brock?” she asked one of her friends.

  “He’s pretty hot. I’d do him.”

  “Yeah, he’s gotta be better than some of the losers around here.” Nancy pointed her index finger and made it droop, prompting giggles from everyone at her table. “What do you hear about him in bed?”

  Her friend signaled the bartended for another drink. “Check out his hands. He’s gotta be hung with a beer bottle.”

  They laughed, and Nancy looked for him, but she only saw his back, broad shoulders, moussed hair, and hands splayed across the ass of the brunette leaning into him.

  “Hey, get a room,” someone yelled. Brock grinned, extracting his tongue from the brunette’s mouth long enough to flash his teeth. They left together around eleven, Brock’s very obvious hard-on tenting his pants. Nancy left alone soon after; none of the available guys still standing at that hour appealed to her, and the sitter needed to get home.

  The following month, Nancy sat alone at the bar on a Friday night, a rare occasion for her. Both kids were sleeping over friends’ houses, so she indulged her need for a martini and repartee. She even played darts with an old geezer who regaled her with tales about building the Alaska pipeline. Laughing and focused on the game, she was startled when the bartender walked over and set another martini down on the counter.

  “From Brock,” he said.

  Nancy looked to where the bartender had nodded. Brock raised his glass to her and smiled. Nancy strolled over to him, making sure to emphasize her sashaying hips and two inches of exposed cleavage.

  “Thanks, Brock.”

  “My pleasure, Nancy. It is Nancy, right?” He took her hand in his and tickled her palm with his index finger.

  “You know my name. Don’t forget I was only two years behind you at school, Brock.” Nancy sipped at her martini, bringing it to her lips with her free hand.

  “Did we ever go out?”

  “No, and that’s your loss.” Nancy took her hand back and reached for a cigarette from her purse
. She waited until Brock lit it for her.

  “I can see what I missed,” he said, getting even closer. “That needs to be fixed. You with someone?”

  “Not at the moment. How about you?” Nancy felt his hot breath close to her ear. The smell of his cologne and his obvious interest made her body tingle with excitement.

  “Tonight, I’m with you,” he said, kissing her on the neck before lightly licking her ear.

  “Oh, really? What—” Her words evaporated into his mouth as he kissed her lips. She kissed him back, their tongues getting to know each other.

  “Come back to my place,” Brock whispered, “You can follow me in your car.”

  Nancy knew all eyes were on them as he draped his arm over her shoulder and steered her out the door. She hesitated in the parking lot, almost too drunk to navigate.

  “Just follow me.” Brock drove his Porsche slowly as he lead the way.

  Feeling her up as they pawed each other in the elevator up to his river-view penthouse, he placed her hand on his cock. “For you.”

  He made them both drinks, put on some light rock and patted the couch next to him. After getting her shirt and bra off, he licked and sucked her nipples until she moaned loudly.

  “You got me so hard I can’t move. Help me, you bad girl,” he said, unzipping his pants and pushing her head down so she could take him in her mouth. Nancy obliged him but gagged as he came, his hands holding her head immobile.

  “Nice, very nice. Finish your drink.” Once she had drained her glass, he offered her the rest of his untouched glass.

  Nancy felt the room start spinning. So dizzy, suddenly, she couldn’t even stand when Brock tried to pull her up. She sagged against him as he dragged her to his king-size bed.

  “I don’t feel good,” she said, as he took off her skirt and tights, her limbs like foreign objects. “Another time, OK?”

  “You let me handle things. You need some Vitamin B, get it? B for Brock.”

  “I’m gonna go. Just go home.” Nancy could hear herself mumbling, her voice going weak as she tasted fear.