Hollywood's Baddest (11 page)

Anger and pain boiled up in her and she swore under her breath, cussing him out; if only in her mind. When she got back to work, she decided that she definitely needed absolute confirmation of her pregnancy and she made an appointment with her doctor to do a blood draw. He was able to see her that afternoon, and that was a huge relief to her. She sat in the waiting room, anxious and fidgeting, and after what felt like a double eternity, she was called back and put into an examination room. The nurse came in and drew her blood, and then a few minutes later the doctor came in to discuss her results with her.

“Well, my dear, you are definitely pregnant. Do you know about how far along you might be?” he asked, jotting down notes.

She knew exactly to the day how far along she was and she told him the date of conception. He wrote that down and gave her a due date eight months off from then. He checked her for general health and told her that she needed more rest and to eat a more healthful diet, and then he let her go.

Alexis left the doctor’s office in a terrible state. Raw emotion was ripping through her and she volleyed between being devastated and crying, and being furious with Lucas for getting her into such a mess to begin with. She should never have gotten stuck with his case, and she certainly never should have wound up carrying his baby. She thought back bitterly to the night of the Oscars s and wondered how different her life would be if he hadn’t won the Oscar that night.

She climbed out of her car and stomped into the house, slamming the door behind her, and slamming her purse and keys down on the table. She glared hotly at the spot where her purse had landed, and as she looked at it, she noticed that there was something different about her table.

There was a piece of paper on it that hadn’t been there before, and she furrowed her brow curiously and reached for it, picking it up with a ginger touch. It was folded in half. She opened it and as she read it, her eyes grew wide and her mouth fell open.

It said simply, “
Tell Lucas to pay for the drugs he got, or there will be dire consequences.”

Not quite able to believe what it was that she was looking at, she stared at it for a long moment before she looked up slowly and realized that not only was there a threatening letter left on her table, but there had been someone in her house. Someone had left the note on her table. She turned around in a circle, looking all around her as if she might still see the person in her home.

Panic and adrenaline filled her veins and burned at her muscles, and fear clutched its icy fingers around her heart. She had no idea how anyone had gotten in or why they were leaving a message for Lucas with her, but she wasn’t about to take any chances with her safety.

She slid her hand into the inside pocket of her jacket and pulled her phone out, holding it close enough that she could dial the police with the touch of a button if she needed to. She walked through her home room by room until she had been through all of it, and she knew that she was in fact alone.

Then she went to all of the doors and windows and locked every one of them and turned her home alarm on, wishing that she had been more careful about regularly setting it before. She finally took a breath and sank down into the cushions on her sofa, trying to figure out what she was going to do, and looking at the note in her hand again. She read it over and over, trying to make some sense of it, but the only thing that was abundantly clear to her was that Lucas had been involved with a drug dealer, and her suspicion of his guilt was proven.

She pulled her phone out and dialed Lucas’ number, though she hated doing it, and got no answer. Her call went to his voice mail. She left him an urgent and emotional message and told him to call her as soon as he could. She ended the call and then looked up Warren’s number and called him. That call also went to voice mail and she left an urgent message for Warren to call her back as well.

Alexis sat on the sofa a while, reading the note, checking her phone, and listening carefully for any sound or misstep in the house, and after a long while, she felt sure that there wasn’t going to be anyone coming back for her. The message had been delivered, and she was merely the messenger. She called the police and an hour later a detective showed up on her doorstep. She let him in and explained to him how she found the note and told him about the case and that she had called Warren and Lucas.

The officer told her that there wasn’t much that could be done because there wasn’t any sign of forced entry, and anyone could have left the note, but he filed a report and left, and she sat back on her sofa in the living room again, hoping that either Warren or Lucas would call her, though she was betting on not hearing from Lucas at all.

Late into the night, she finally felt safe enough that she went to her bedroom and fell asleep; though her sleep was light and not restful, and she had locked her bedroom door and kept the phone right beside her.

It was the phone that woke her from her light sleep in the morning, ringing as a call came through. She grabbed for it and saw that it was Lucas. She was astounded that he was calling her back, and she tried not to sound too surprised when she heard his voice coming through the phone to her.

“Alexis? It’s Lucas. I got your message, are you alright?” he asked, his voice filled with concern.

She lowered her eyelids and scowled that he would call her back for this, but not because he wanted anything else to do with her, but the scowl faded and the seriousness of the situation came to the front of her mind. “Lucas, I was out of the house yesterday, and when I came back there was a note on my kitchen table. I don’t know who was in my house, or why they left it, but it was really scary. I even called the police, though they didn’t do anything to help me.” Her mind ran through the entire scenario from the night before.

She heard panic in his voice then. “Someone was in your house? What happened?”

“Well, it looks like there was no forced entry, so whoever it was knew how to get in without making it obvious to the police; nothing was broken or stolen. Nothing was out of place, except for the note that was left on my table. The thing about the note is that it was a message to you.” She said, her tone getting edgy. She was angry that anyone had bothered her about him, though she did understand how it could have happened; her being his attorney.

Confusion colored his reply. “The note was… a message for me? Why would anyone leave a note in your home for me?”

“Oh, maybe because I’m your attorney, and judging from what was in the note, they were certain that I would see you and be able to get this message to you sometime soon.” She was growing more irritated, the more she thought about it.

“What does the note say?” he asked worriedly.

She opened it up and read it to him, and heard him gasp quietly on the other end of the line. “But that doesn’t make any sense at all!” he proclaimed adamantly.

“Oh, it makes perfect sense to me. I’m your attorney, they knew you’d be talking to me. They know I’m defending you for charges of possession, and that’s because they know you had the drugs in your possession, and now they want their money from you! They want to be paid for their drugs! I knew you were guilty in this. I knew it!

All this while proclaiming your innocence, and all along the drug dealers have been waiting for you to pay them for what the cops took. Is that who you met in your office the night it all happened? Was it the drug dealers? Did they bail out before you paid them because the cops showed up?” She was growing more and angrier as she went on, and she knew that part of it must be the hormones from the pregnancy, but she wasn’t about to stop. She didn’t care what it was that was making her angry; she only knew that her house had been broken into and a threatening letter had been left for her, and it was because of him, and his lies.

His confusion quickly became frustration. “I’m not guilty! I told you that! I don’t do drugs, and I didn’t have any drugs at my house; at least, as far as I knew there were none there! I don’t know who those guys were in my office. I was just told that they were waiting to meet me and that was it.

I don’t know who left you that note, but even if I was going to pay off these people, I don’t know who they are or even how to get any money to them, so it makes no sense at all for someone to leave you that note and demand money! I don’t know any drug dealers! I have no idea what any of that note is about or who gave it to you! You’re supposed to be defending me, Alexis, how can you defend me if you don’t believe anything that I’ve told you?”

“You’re so full of it! Use your head and think about this a little bit! Someone is going to get hurt because of this, and you don’t care about that at all! You need to turn those drug dealers in and stop them before someone gets hurt or killed! Stop trying to protect your ego and your image, and do the right thing for once!” she snapped at him angrily.

“I am doing the right thing! I’m defending myself and standing up for the truth!” he shot back at her, his temper flaring.

“I can’t believe you’re still spouting off about your supposed innocence when I have proof of your guilt right here in my hands in the form of this note! The police have overwhelming evidence, and there’s just no way or no reason for you to deny it!

Do what you should have done when the prosecution offered you the plea bargain, and turn the drug dealers in! You have an obligation to do the right thing!” she raised her voice and the forcefulness of it surprised her.

He was just as loud as she was, and all it did was make her angrier. “I am not calling the police to turn anyone in because I don’t know who I could turn in, Alexis! I don’t have any drug dealers, and I am doing everything right, including defending myself, which is why I didn’t take the plea bargain! I can’t believe you still think I’m guilty in all of this!

"My trial is coming up and you think you’re going to defend me and convince a whole jury and a judge that I’m innocent when you don’t even believe it yourself! Look, I don’t know who left that note for you, but it wasn’t anyone I know, and I don’t know what else you can do with it except turn it over to the police!”

She felt rage boiling in her and she couldn’t take it any longer. “No, this isn’t for me to handle. It’s your crime, it’s your problem, it’s something that you have to handle! Damn you! My life was perfect before this! My life was exactly what it should be before you committed your drug crimes and wrecked my entire life! I have far too much going on myself to try to figure this out, this one is your problem to fix, so take that responsibility and fix it! Now!” she yelled at him

He began to protest again, but she was so furious with him by that point that she hung up on him and tossed the phone aside on her bed. Tears burned at her eyes and she covered her face with her hands and cried, letting out all of the frustration and anger in her, exhaling it bit by bit with each sob, until she fell back asleep.

Chapter7

Alexis readied herself for work the next morning, showering and dressing in one of her pants suits with a powder blue blouse and the matching suit jacket. She pinned her hair up to the back of her head in a bun and skipped wearing eyeliner in case she wound up crying again.

It was awful to her that she was feeling so much emotion so strongly, but there was no way out of it. She had woken up thinking of the baby growing in her belly, and she had examined her belly in the mirror carefully before she showered, and again after she showered. She stared at it like there was some strange alien life form hidden in the depths of it, and she couldn’t quite make herself believe it.

There was no outward sign of any change to her body. She peered at the scale and saw no change in her weight, and that coupled with no obvious change in her form had made her wish that there was no positive result on the pregnancy tests and that it had all been just a strange misunderstanding. She knew it wasn’t, though. Sighing, she slid her phone into the inside pocket of her jacket and walked through the kitchen, picking up her car keys. Her mind was on the decision she had made regarding the baby and Lucas. After her phone call with him, she had decided that she wouldn’t tell him about the pregnancy.

If he was found guilty of his charges, and there was an excellent chance that he would be, he was going to go to prison for a long while. As long as the prosecuting attorney could possibly get him behind bars for, because Harvey was hell bent on making a public example out of Lucas, and he would do everything in his power to make that happen. The judge had a reputation for being harsh on violent offenders and drug dealers and users. She knew that it would not go well at all for Lucas if he was found guilty, and she knew that he’d be put away for years before he ever saw the outside world again.

She didn’t want a druggie father for her child. She didn’t want a prison inmate for the father of her child. She had worked hard all of her life to make herself successful and to become all that she could. He had put her at probable risk of losing much of what she had worked so hard for, and she knew that she wanted to give her child every possible benefit and chance at a happy and secure life.

It was obvious that having him involved in it in any way would only bring on more trouble and heartache for the child. She wasn’t about to impose a life like that on any little one. She felt that it was her responsibility to keep the fatherhood of the child she carried a secret. No one but her sister would ever know who the father was, and Abby would never betray her by telling anyone. She just had to look forward to a life of raising the baby on her own, with some help from her sister.

Alexis was angry at herself for the pregnancy even happening. It had always been a constant priority of hers to be as responsible as she could, and the fact that she had gotten pregnant from a one-night  stand with a client she was actively defending was a glaring example of her substantial failure at being the responsible person she prided herself on being. All of those thoughts and many more simmered in her mind as she walked out to the garage to leave for work. She opened the back door of the car and set her briefcase in it, and then reached for the driver’s side door handle, but she was stopped suddenly by something that had closed tightly around her neck from behind.

She gasped and blinked in shock, and it took her a moment to realize that there was a hand squeezing her throat. Panic and adrenaline shot through her and she cried out loudly and reached for the hand to try to pull it from her neck. Something cold and hard pushed against the back of her head and her whole body stiffened.

“Do you feel that?” a cold gravelly voice asked near her ear. Shivers ripped through her body and she shuddered involuntarily. “That’s my gun,” the voice continued. It was male, and difficult to discern anything else about because he was speaking just under his breath and she couldn’t tell much from that. “You try to run, or move, or escape, or scream, and I will put a bullet through the back of your head and end you. I want you to know right now, there’s no real compelling reason for me to keep you alive, so don’t do anything stupid.”

Her heart pounded wildly in her and she looked around the garage with wide eyes, trying to see if there was anyone else around or if it was just him, and she hoped to see something that she could use for a weapon of some kind to get away from him and his gun, though the gun made things much more difficult. “What do you want?” she gasped as his hand squeezed harder around her throat.

He chuckled a little. “Money. There was a note on your table, and there was a request on it for money, and that money hasn’t been paid. You were warned that things would be bad, and no one heeded that warning, so here we are at the next step.”

Her breath was raspy and shallow as she tried to pull away from the man behind her as much as she could. He only pressed the gun harder into the back of her head. “I said don’t move!” he demanded, and she relented, stopping her subtle struggle.

“What is the next step?” she breathed thickly, her eyes still scanning everything around her as adrenaline burned through every part of her, making her muscles ache and making her want more than anything to run.

“The next step is that you are taken.” There was a strange ripping sound then, and she whimpered softly in fear as the man let go of her throat and kept his gun held to her head. “Don’t… move….” he instructed firmly.

The next moment he pulled something tight across her mouth and she knew he’d duct-taped her mouth closed. She breathed in and out slowly through her nose, trying to get enough oxygen. She was still looking around the room when something covered her head and everything went dark around her. She tried to twist and turn, but the man grabbed her arm and held it hard behind her body.

“You stubborn bitch! You just don’t listen, do you! I bet you make me wind up having to shoot you before I even get you back to the boss. Knock it off!” he ordered, and she stilled. As she stopped moving around he slowly let her arm go, and the painful ache in it that he had caused began to subside.

She could not see anything, and she could not say anything, but she could hear, and it was incredible to her just how acute her other senses became when her eyesight was no longer available to her. Alexis felt strong hands close on her upper arms and she was pulled and pushed out of her garage. The sounds around her changed, and she knew she was outside. Someone dragged her into a vehicle, and from the feel of it and the space around her, she could only guess that it was a van of some kind.

Her heart raced and her blood pounded through her veins, rushing through her body and deafening her ears. She tried to hold in the tears that threatened to spill down her face; knowing it wouldn’t matter if she did cry, because no one could see it with a cover over her head, but she didn’t want her captors to hear her crying, or see it when they unveiled her head again, whenever that might be.

She tried to determine from the sound and movement of the vehicle where they were going and how fast they were moving, to at least give herself an estimate at a radius from her house. They drove for a long while, and she knew that they were taking her somewhere far from where they had kidnapped her. She cursed Lucas in her mind, wishing that anything had been different with him; that he hadn’t won the Oscar, that he hadn’t had his own party, that Warren had chosen any other attorney and that Anderson hadn’t demanded that she be the one to defend him. If he had pled  guilty instead of maintaining his innocence, or if any of so many other things hadn’t happened, or had happened, she would not be in the back of a van, terrified out of her mind and being taken by criminals to god knows where over the drug money they were so determined to get.

The van finally slowed and came to a stop, and she heard two sets of footsteps on either side of it. The door slid open and the rough hands which had grabbed her before, grabbed her again. She was pulled from the van and she did her best to try to figure out as much as she could about her surroundings. The ground was hard when she stood on it; concrete or asphalt. She was forcefully walked into a building and the sound around her changed. Everything sounded as if it was far away, like there was an echo that reverberated off distant walls; almost cavernous. She smelled what little air she could get through the cover on her head and noticed that it was dank and dirty smelling.

They walked along a hard surface that sounded gritty with each step, until they came to an elevator. She didn’t know it was an elevator until she stepped into it and it began to move. She tried to count the floors and she wasn’t sure, but she thought she’d heard three of them pass before they stopped on the fourth. The doors opened and the two people with her pushed her out of the elevator and walked with her a short way through a room that echoed a great deal, and then she was stopped where she stood, and was pushed roughly down onto a seat. She listened closely still, and suddenly out of nowhere, the cover over her head was lifted and light almost blinded her, it was so bright. She closed her eyes until her vision adjusted and then she was finally able to open them and look around.

Alexis was in a warehouse of some kind. The walls were made of thick old red bricks, and the room she was in was wide open. From what she could see, it was the most of the entire fourth floor, with no walls separating any of the space, only support beams set at intermittent intervals throughout all of it. There were windows set in the wall all around the room, but most of them were boarded up; only a few were left to bring in the light from the world outside, like random eyes watching the room silently, seeing everything in it and saying nothing.

There was a table about five feet in front of her, and leaning on the table was a tall thin man with a tuft of dark messy hair at the top of his head, the patch at the forefront of it seeming to be resisting his receding hairline. He stared at Alexis with dark beady eyes that glinted dangerously. His face was lined with time and the trials of life, and his mouth was set in a thin strip.

Another man, a shorter, rounder, hairier man, was standing just off to the side of Alexis, between her and the table. He seemed to be smiling at her, just a little; his chubby cheeks spread back by his wide mouth. His eyes were dark and deep-set, and there was something about his nature that made Alexis uncertain if the man was in a pleasant mood or if he was just crazy enough to be completely unpredictable and dangerous. Alexis looked from one to the other of them and tried with everything in her to calm herself and do her best to think clearly. She had to find a way out of where she was, and somehow her sense of self preservation and survival had kicked in and was trying to overcome the fear and panic in her.

She took in her breaths as slowly and steadily as she could, hoping that she looked less terrified than she felt. She wondered if the two men before her were drug dealers or if they were going to do anything to her or perhaps just hold her for ransom for the drug money. She knew as she sat there that her best chance of being freed was to try to get herself out of the situation she was in, rather than waiting on anyone else to get her out of it.

“How you doin’….” the short round man said with his half smile and his slightly wild eyes, “You comfortable?”

She only stared at him in response. She wasn’t going to interact with her captors until she knew more about who they were and why she was there. He watched her quietly for a moment and when he knew that she wasn’t going to respond, he glanced at the tall thin man and gave a little chuckle.

“I guess maybe I ought a give the lady a hand so she can talk to us,” he quipped sarcastically. He walked over to Alexis then and leaned over so that his face was inches from hers. A rotten smell assaulted her nose as he drew near. He reeked of sweat and what might have been old deli food, covered over with cheap dime store cologne.

He reached his hand up to her face and tugged the corner of the duct tape that was still covering her mouth. She felt tears spring to her eyes and tried not to wince as he pulled it slowly from her cheek. He paused at about half an inch into it and looked at her with mock sympathy; his eyes wide and his mouth forming a slight pout.

“Aw, does that hurt?” he tugged slowly and pulled a little bit more of it off. She closed her eyes and willed herself to just get through it. He laughed then, loud, and his breath clouded in her face and nearly made her vomit from the rotting stench of it. “Maybe I’ll be nice to you and just… rip it all off at once. How about that, pretty lady?” he asked, and she kept her eyes closed.

He waited, and she did not respond. Growing frustrated with her in almost no time at all, he made a grumbling noise deep in his chest and ripped the tape off in one swift motion, making her feel as if part of her face had gone with it. She gasped and opened her eyes, unable to stop the tears that flowed freely from them.

Drawing in big breaths, she coughed a few times and then closed her mouth and looked up at him as he stood over her, staring down at her. “See? I can be a nice guy, when I want to be.” He gave her a nod. “Now then, how about you be a nice broad and tell us why we don’t have our money yet. I know you got that note we left on your kitchen table. Did you get that? You can tell me. I already know. You got it… didn’t you?” He wasn’t asking her; he was confirming something she realized that he already knew.

She nodded subtly and watched him like a hawk.

He rubbed his chin and stared at her some more. “So… you got it… but, I don’t have any money.” He frowned in frustration and then looked over at the tall thin man still leaning on the table staring at her icily.