Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 131387 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 526(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 131387 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 526(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
“People do this shit legally now, Lee.”
“Not with dicey street LSD, Hutch. She accidentally killed one of her clients. She went down for negligent homicide.”
“Good fucking Christ,” Hutch bit off.
“By this point, Mabel, an A student, mind you, got hooked up with some Hollywood hotshot’s son. The entire family loved her. She was seventeen, the dad helped her get emancipated, and she lived with them until she got a full ride to study business at USC.”
“Academic full ride?” Hutch asked.
“Yes. Her transcripts are impressive. During college, she interned for a tour company, and they hired her on after she got her degree. She’d broken up with her high school boyfriend by then, but we’ll just say, that family still considers her one of their own. Though, they don’t see her very often. Mabel has never gone back to LA, which is not a shock. The company sent her to their Florida office. She began her adult life in Orlando.”
Hutch chanced sitting down again as he said, “Right.”
“All’s good. She’s moving up in the company. She gets poached by a competitor company, makes more money. She’s got a side business she runs, refurbishing furniture. A hobby she’s making money from. She meets the man of her dreams, he gives her a ring, she says yes.”
It felt like Hutch’s chest hollowed out.
Never in his life had he had that feeling, and he hoped he never would again, because it felt shit.
Lee kept talking.
“They’re out at a romantic dinner, something he won from some business card drop or something, but the man had no idea it was a setup.”
Hutch tensed again. “What kind of setup?”
“You ever heard those ‘to catch a cheater’ things radio shows do?”
Tensing had been good.
“Jesus Christ, seriously?”
“It wasn’t one of those. This was set up by the wife and her friends. But they showed at dinner, phones up, filming. He was engaged to Mabel, but he had a wife and two kids. It’s all over social media. The only good part about it is, those women saw immediately that she had no idea. She was just as shattered as the wife, maybe more so at that moment, because the wife already knew, and Mabel had no clue. When they let it loose on TikTok, they fuzzed out her face. But Brody got hold of the raw footage. I’ve seen it, and brother, seriously, it was gutting.”
“Enter Mabel Adams,” Hutch said tonelessly.
“Yeah. One thing you can say, when she’s ready to cut the weight that’s holding her down, she’s all in. New name. Left Orlando for Misted Pines. Trucked her ass all the way across the country. If she wants someone to know where she is, or what she’s called now, she has to tell them. Her mom, her uncle, or that fuck who made her the other woman, they’d have to find someone like me to find her. And just to say, that fuck is now divorced, predictably, so he might come looking. Not exactly hard, but as I’m sure you’ve discovered, you can’t do a couple of Google searches and find anything about her. Even the house she rents and the shop she runs in town is buried under an LLC that has three directors, and it’s in her new name.”
“So at least, for that, she’s safe. But she went through all that shit, and now she’s living next to a cult.”
“There’s something else.”
Hutch blew out a sigh and decided it was a bourbon night.
“What?” he asked.
“Turns out, she was Frank Groove’s biological kid. Man was loaded, all this went down, he let her swing. Until he died recently, with a lot of his fortune used up in legal fees and just from blowing it by partying, still, he had some money, and that mansion. Mabel only learned he was her father after he died, because she inherited it all.”
Hutch steadfastly ignored the chill that swept over his skin at the familiar feeling of this story and instead focused on the fact this was good for Mabel.
But bad if Lars Enstrom ever heard of it.
Lee kept going.
“She instructed the executors to liquidate everything, and after his debts were paid, death duties, attorneys’ fees, she walked away with a little over a million dollars.”
“That guy was known as a hitmaker,” Hutch noted. “And that was all he died with?”
“That’s it. He owed everybody, including a bank who held his hefty home equity loan. But at least she’s got a healthy safety net, not to mention, his royalties and residuals.”
“Or a huge chunk of money some fucked-in-the-head asshole who trusses his women up in Little House on the Prairie dresses, without the flower prints, and puts them to work making pies can get his hands on through brainwashing.” He couldn’t imagine Mabel would ever fall to that. “Or intimidation.”
“Maybe you need to sit on her,” Lee suggested.