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devandahlcourte-work-in-progress · 2 years

Text

Section 18. 2 chapters, ending with chapter 71

I am reposting these first eighty-two chapters (in 22 sections) plus the prologue and the preface.

These posts will be the updated versions from my DeviantArt account, and since Tumblr may not display all the text correctly (it destroys anything I had in italics or underlined) I would still recommend reading everything there, on DeviantArt. They will also include internal links that navigate between the chapters on DeviantArt and will take the reader off Tumblr if clicked.

This came about because I noticed search engines were finding random sections of my book and displaying them along with some other people’s blog posts.

Okay, so that’s why I installed those internal links in each one… so that if anyone gets to a random section by way of a search engine and would like to read the story from the beginning, they can.

Only then did I realize that it wasn’t getting it’s search results from DeviantArt, but from old Tumblr.

There’s another problem at work here besides unrefined searches…

There is a new species of virus on the internet that likes to eat ancient Tumblr posts and barf them back up infested with adware - spyware - malware etc. The virus goes by names like TumGIR, TumBIG, TumPIK, or Tum(anything else but ‘blr’). The caps were added by me for emphasis so that maybe you can double check in case you’re not looking at an actual Tumblr post right now but one of these so-called “mirror” sites.

If you’re looking at this text through one of the counterfeit Tumblrs that I mentioned, then no link you click (assuming it even copies it with my links intact) will take you out; it will redirect you and show you all of the spam ads it wants to. So read carefully what url is showing on your browser right now.

If it is one of the untrustworthy ones I would suggest closing your browser window and doing whatever else you normally would in order to reset settings.

As far as my science fiction novel entitled “If And Only If,” the safest way to find it is by going to my Instagram:

@michelle.de.vandahlcourte

From there you can click on the link in my bio. It will take you to the beginning of the story on DeviantArt… the safe one! No malware.

P.S. None of this is Tumblr’s fault! It’s the malware/adware/spyware developers who are stealing people’s tumblr posts.

The actual content of this page appears below here👇

Section 18. 2 chapters, ending with chapter 71

↩️return to previous section, section 17

↩️↩️…and if you arrived here because of a search engine and you would like to read this story from the beginning, click here.

Swifty

He would’ve liked to think that all his cowboy nonsense made some kind of difference. For just a split-second he dared. There were no new loud crash-landing noises behind him. A smaller scale kind of ruckus was taking place along with a new shadow dance, which suggested a new source of fire. He couldn’t look. Focus... he screamed to himself, on emptying both of these clips into them.

And what the hell are they? “Them” as he’d just tagged them in his thoughts right now, didn’t seem like any aliens from any science-fiction work he’d ever read. Flatland? Those were cute fluffy bunnies compared to these things! The so-called armor piercing rounds seemed to just vanish into an abyss inside each one, as if they were disappearing into another dimension somewhere. Was that what these things were? Creatures from some other dimension?

Common sense and arithmetic told him he’d be out of ammo soon. Butthead didn’t appear to have any extra magazines on him. Although both of these extended a bit below the butt of each pistol, that would mean what? Maybe fifteen to twenty, each? He tried desperately to search his memory and recall if the rounds looked staggered. Was it that kind of weapon? He’d only reloaded the previously chambered rounds back in each one. If staggered, could it be up to thirty or so each… maybe a bit more?

Not by much. Before he ran out, the window creatures moved a little. As he stepped around to try and keep everyone in his field of fire he could see the third attack helicopter after all. And it wasn’t good. The shadow-beast wannabe had made contact, by way of its beam and the helicopter was now burning.

If it had been allowed to go on its way for just a couple of seconds longer it might’ve made a normal landing. It was on a “good approach” if that’s the right term. As it was not permitted to continue with its descent, the aircraft’s fall was from roughly twenty feet. Possibly survivable for anyone properly strapped in, but not if they were on fire!

When it did smash down, the uneven surface caused it to tip about 45 degrees to the side, with the doors wide open. The result was like something that toy-hating kid might’ve put together. It abruptly dumped a pile of bodies out, with roughly half of them on fire. The reality that these were not toys was becoming nauseatingly and horrifyingly clear to the aging desk jockey who had never been in any sort of combat in his life. Though still on the other side of Sawyer Street, he could feel a noticeable surge of heat as something on the back end of the chopper exploded, then a smell at once penetrating his nostrils that reminded him of times when his father had decided to refill all of his old fashioned cigarette lighters at once with lighter fluid. Maybe. Not quite gasoline, not quite kerosene. It didn’t engulf the crew with any more flames but mostly spewed out the back and upwards with a roiling smoke cloud.

The ones who were burning were motionless. So maybe they were dead already before being dumped out and hadn’t suffered much, Swifty thought, instead of being burned to death right now in front of him. Some who weren’t on fire were also motionless. Of the few who might have still had life in them, one in particular seemed to be fighting to free himself from the wreckage. It was more like some kind of overhead strap he’d been trying to grab onto had inadvertently become wrapped around his wrist, which he was now hanging from with boots about a foot off the ground; thankfully no bent and burning metal wreckage was restraining him.

Something finally gave. The guy was free and dropped the short distance to the ground. Wounded, Swifty could tell, but not nearly as bad as the others. His weapon (the outline resembled an HK 90-something maybe but Swifty had only made a cursory study of these things) was securely slung around him. From the bulges in his web gear he could see that the man had brought enough clips to decimate a couple of platoons of the other idiots who had him tied to the chair – the ones he’d given a description of in his coded phone call. But against these bastards? Would it matter? They were up against something clearly not from this world. And how would he communicate that fact to this guy?

Anyway, with at least this one heavily armed gentleman here, at least he could take up a position behind some kind of cover, and at least someone could keep the fight going. The man didn’t run for cover though. Instead he evidently noted enough signs of life in one of his fellow crew members on the ground and proceeded to rapidly pick the guy up in a perfect fireman‘s carry.

If Swifty had time to gawk and hands to applaud with he would have. After 9/11 there had been a number of special courses which he’d been required to take. These included “emergency medic training,” although the military medics from all branches of the service had nonverbally indicated that they didn’t think it was nearly as tough or as thorough as the real thing.

One of the things they’d learned were carries. This man had pulled it off flawlessly – as well as his Navy Corpsman instructor ever had. “Whoa,” he thought, “what a damned good guy to have on your side in a disaster like this.”

All this pondering and observing had only taken a few more seconds. None of which had interrupted his hammering away at the things with his pistols. Right about when the ops guy had picked up the other wounded man, Swifty finally ran out. The second pistol predictably went for a few more rounds since he started using it slightly later. The pain he felt next was wholy unexpected though: Immediately he ruled out overheating. He was using these weapons in precisely the way they’d been designed to operate.

Nevertheless there was heat. But if it was due to overheating, that problem would affect the barrels first and not the pistol grips, which were now hot enough to make him involuntarily drop both handguns to the ground. It wasn’t enough to cause burn injuries to his hands. Just exactly as if someone had grabbed something from a stove top that they didn’t know was hot and suddenly let go of it. He shook and flapped his hands a bit at the pain but it was over in microseconds.

Simultaneously he noticed the heat waves, fading away now, connecting directly between himself and the left window but more diffuse and not a totally focused beam as had been used against the helicopters.

This was potentially fantastic news! He specialized in reading information from things that people did which they didn’t know were revealing any information. They had just told him: Hey! Stop it! Those bullets are annoying us. The fact that they had been willing to expend the energy – any energy – to direct any kind of heat ray at him at all meant that all his machine pistol antics were bothering them. At least a little.

So if 9 mm parabellum irritated them, would 7.62 mm NATO irritate them more? He pondered this as the guy approached and he got a better view of the weapon and could now estimate its caliber.

Approached!? Yes, the man carrying his wounded friend was making a direct line for him. “The mission! He recognizes me!” Swifty reasoned that there had probably been some hastily prepared in-flight briefing, including Swifty‘s picture on an overhead monitor that all the guys were watching.

It’s possible that he doesn’t know these things are the enemy and that they were what shot down the attack helicopters. That would make sense; they were dark, small in size, and had attacked with nearly invisible beams.

Castadiva

“…need something? Or did you want to visit the little girls room? If you do I’ll head over there with you. We can go to the VIP one, you know… no lines or waiting for a stall” Maura said looking at me a bit quizzically.

“Huh?”

Not my most articulate moment of the night, I realized as I replayed what Maura had just been trying to say to me. Then immediately I added “Oh, no I didn’t need anything. But I was going to get up to do something. Now I can’t for the life of me remember what it was that I was getting up for…”

Maura smiled and shook her head “Senior moment! Don’t feel bad dear, I get ‘em all the time and ever since I was a kid. Guess I was just mature for my age.”

“But now that you mention it,” I quickly volunteered, “this would be an excellent time for the restroom. If they could excuse me for a few minutes?”

“Oh they will. I’m sure there’s more of us that need to make the trip, what with all this wine we’ve been guzzling!” Maura was a master of girl-facial-expression-code and without a word got the attention of two of the other women by eye contact only. With some expressions and head motioning, our squad was assembled and on its way.

As we stood up I steadied myself for balance. Wine!!! Fuck! I wondered briefly again what in the world I had been wanting to get up and walk towards, over near the kitchen doors. Then Maura tugged at my sleeve as she staggered upon standing after just killing the $6K bottle with only a tiny bit of help from me.

And so the four of us – with a combined net worth of a bit over two billion dollars, Maura informed me after donning my AR glasses for fun – headed to the nearby VIP bathroom at La M.M. as I hummed softly to myself.

Or so I thought. I guess not that softly then.

“Oh my god, what is that tune? It sounds sooo familiar!” Strawberry Blonde Centimillionaire beseeched me before I finished one whole chorus of the tune.

“You know, I’m really not sure. I’ve just suddenly got it stuck in my head,” I honestly and immediately quipped back.

“Dah-dah dah-dah-dah” she sang, then maybe less than an octave lower nearly but not quite the same sequence, “Dah-dah dah-dah-dah,” and back to more-or-less the original pitch once again “Dah-dah dah-dah-dah,” punctuated with one final note, “dum.”

“Yes, that’s it exactly,” I agreed with her.

“Great Blondie,” Maura smiled thinly this time, “now you two’ve got it stuck in my head also!”

Mr. $729 Million from earlier – the glasses had updated his net worth, Maura noticed and informed me, when she’d put them on at the table for some odd reason – looked amused and couldn’t seem to help asking as we passed his end of the table: “why on earth are you ladies singing that?”

“What is it?” The one I’d mentally nicknamed Betty Boop Centimillionaire paused to ask him and clarified: “we’ve got it stuck in our heads all of a sudden.”

“Well I don’t really know if it was ever a song per se,” he ventured rapidly since he knew we were restroom-bound and in a hurry, “but it’s an old ringtone or maybe text tone from around fifteen or twenty years ago. It was called Minuet.”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

If you have a nightmare where you are crying, can you wake up actually crying tears?

Yes. Google thinks you can. I checked as soon as I woke up.

I wasn’t the one doing the crying; it was a “character” I suppose, in my dream. I was having a nightmare. My first nightmare that I can recall in forever. It was a girl. Kinda familiar. But damned if I could remember where I saw her.

A dream about someone else sleeping? That’s also unusual I guess. She was tossing in her sleep, groaning, crying out. Her scream upon awakening was blood-curdling like from some classic old horror flick; the neighbors in her building were pounding on her door, worried out of their own sleep. They shouted. A name? And a word.

As I woke up I already began to forget. I tried. But it frustrated me as usual. I couldn’t remember. Fifteen more minutes before my alarm was to go off. I would have had just a little more time. Crap.

I got up anyway. Might as well get an early start since today’s the big studio tour – both the movie studio and my design studio there, built to my specifications – along with many of my regular crew who were meeting me. I wouldn’t have been able to get back to sleep in a beneficial way with only fifteen minutes in any case.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

It was one of those moments… random stuff throughout the day. A dream that you forgot you had in the early morning. Then the trigger. A tv on the wall of a celeb’s dressing room while one of my seamstresses did some measurements. I chatted with the starlet about some of her fave fashions, trying also to bullshit my way through talk of her movies; some of them I might have seen bits of while walking through a room where someone had a tv on once in a while. Basically I’d seen weather forecasters on the news who were more entertaining. But naturally I had to be polite. And just as a person, she was pleasant enough to speak with. I simply couldn’t do a convincing job at coming off as an adoring fan of her work.

I disguised this by repeatedly steering the talk back around to fashion; not too surprising and hopefully not too out of place since that’s what I’m famous for and she does know that’s what I’m doing here at the studio. The tv image jarred me though. I lost track of what she was saying about herself when I saw the missing-person alert on the news. She was aware that my attention had drifted and turned to see what had distracted me.

“Oh my God, that’s awful,” she unconvincingly tried to sound concerned but then cut herself off with “hey… La Movida?! Weren’t y’all just there recently?” Her southern accent was something that I hadn’t had much experience with lately. Even in Austin it wasn’t typical; being an island of blue in a red state plus spending the bulk of my time there either on or around campus.

“Yes, two nights ago,” I trailed off realizing before she did, that this woman was abducted or somehow otherwise disappeared at exactly the time that we were there. Candy. The word from my dream that the screaming-upon-waking-up-from-her-nightmare woman’s neighbors were hollering through the door. But it was a name in this case. The “name” they’d been shouting in my dream – at least I assumed it was a name – was Chirene. But Candy was the missing woman’s name; the picture looked nothing like the character from my dream either. If anything, my dream character kinda resembled me when I was twenty. So I could have written it off as coincidence. Still, it seemed weird.

“…try to interview any of you?” what’s-her-names voice came back in and finally registered over the loudness of my thoughts. I brilliantly parried with my typical “huh?” The old standby from school up through the seventh grade before I got serious about academics. I pieced together what she was trying to ask me easy enough.

“No. I suppose they knew we hadn’t seen anything since we were at a banquet table in a large privacy nook, behind a partition. Maybe she disappeared from some other part of La Movida Madrileña? But now that you mention it I am surprised we didn’t see any cops at all – just business-as-usual.”

“Oh that could easily be,” she nodded knowingly, “since they do have three separate floors there.”

That actually made sense, I thought. She’s probably right. The unfortunate woman was involved in something in an altogether different place within the establishment and whatever happened had been completely out of our view.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Later a guy who looked like one of the football player characters from that old Dazed And Confused movie startled me when he yelled out loud in pain; he was steadying himself on a snack table that had a coffee machine and had apparently burned his hand. How? I wondered. On the hotplate portion where the carafe sat? Who knows. I really empathized with his pain apparently. It was as if his scream made my nipples just sort of barely start to get hard.

What was weird about it was, even though I had no clue who he was, the night before last his picture appeared in the history file of my AR glasses as if I had looked him up before. The last time I’d even taken the case out of my bag was that night at La Movida Madrileña.

It was about five minutes later when I saw Maura and asked if she recalled anyone else using my glasses that night – admitting that I was a bit tipsy from all the excellent wine.

“Uh-oh, why?” she asked sheepishly. “If I broke them I’ll have my assistant Jacques bring you around a new pair, darling. And your people hopefully had all your data backed up?”

I reassured her that she hadn’t broken them, then almost forgot about burned-hand guy. Like that feeling when you walk into a room to get something but then can’t remember what it was you got up for. Then, the light flickering back on, I snapped: “Dazed and Confused guy over there. The one talking to Shallow Hal, who just burned his hand a few minutes ago. He’s in the history file of my glasses, but I don’t remember ever examining him with augmented reality. Did you – –”

“Girl! You were more wasted than I thought,” she said after briefly laughing in a way that sounded like they could have used her on a laugh track for part of a fake studio audience. Had I noticed that about her laugh before? It seemed almost familiar but in a fuzzy kinda way. Fuzzy familiar. Just like burned-hand dude.

“You really don’t recall? It was at that club-slash-restaurant night before last,” she went on incredulously, “I had you look up his name with your trusty Cyb-AR-sleek twenty-sevens because I couldn’t remember it even though he kinda works for me, indirectly. Then I wanted you to let me know what they showed for my net worth; they also told us that he was in debt. I said something about us both having ‘senior-moments’ but I’m not sure what it was about. Then we all went to pee together. Well, not everybody…”

Maura rambled on but I did try to pay attention because she was a treasure trove of information right now about a piece of my life which I’d evidently blocked, but I was suddenly gripped by a chilling notion “…and speaking of which,” she babbled on, “senior-moment alert again, I can’t think of Shallow Hal’s real name either; I know he’s some kind of famous actor but I don’t think you can get your little helpers out without making it obvious that we’re trying to check him out, even with oblique periscope mode.”

When she finally paused for a breath I interjected – having thoroughly forgotten what I’d wanted to ask her again: “maybe you could pull a Miranda Priestly and have Jacques tell you?”

Laugh-track laugh again. “It’s tempting, right. But I’ve got Jacques, Stella, and Candelario all running different errands for me right now… Oh! But maybe Angela would know,” she said, flagging down Betty Boop Centimillionaire.

“Hey girlfriend, hold still, I just thought of something. Castadiva needs an excuse to get her data glasses on without being obvious with those guys over there, and while we’re at it I’m curious to see if it updated your net worth projection yet.”

Angela. Yes. Remember Angela, I chided myself. I needed to stop internally referring to all these new people by the silly nicknames I’d been giving them. And yes, her net worth was up from the upper 890 millions to 1.03 billion. “Hey! Congrats Angela! This thing has you as a billionaire now,” I sincerely said, hoping she didn’t mind the intrusion. She didn’t. Smiling and kind of bragging, she detailed some of the highlights of her last very successful two quarters.

Good. Now that I’ve used Angela in conversation I can hopefully remember. Because thinking of her as Betty Boop Billionaire-But-Barely was just getting way too cumbersome. Not to mention that I needed Bald Billionaire’s and Bearded Billionaire’s real names as well. The bearded guy might not mind; guys grow beards ‘cause they want to, and if they keep them it’s ‘cause they like the results. But the bald one might be sensitive about it. Then it hit me again… before Maura went rambling off about something else I squeezed in: “hey by the way, do either of you remember anything to do with cops at Movida the other night?”

“Hey Scandalario!” Angela smiled as one of Maura’s people came scurrying in to bring her a folder with who knows what in it. It wasn’t just her pet name for Candelario, but a nickname he liked using and was popularly known by in the QUILTBAG+ community and Anita had called him that also in our previous meetups.

“Oh yeah, definitely. They were interviewing some stressed-out woman who sort of looked like you over by the kitchen door for a long time. I just assumed it was a dine and dash date,”

…then Maura interrupted Angela: “or some guy groping her on a dance floor. Why’d you ask, chica?”

Holy shit! Could I have been that trashed from the Carménère!?

“Oh it’s just that, earlier, a tv in some actress’s dressing room during a fitting ran a news story about a missing person case and it ended up being from La Movida Madrileña at the exact time we were all there,” I replied, not exactly sure where I was going with this. But I had to say something and it couldn’t be my real thoughts at the moment.

“Super Creepy! I know,” Candelario jumped in and then elaborated with much more info than I’d been able to get off the muted tv on that starlet’s wall. He was mainly addressing Maura to fill her in but glanced at each of us intermittently.

She nodded: “yes, I was vaguely aware that someone by that name had been abducted. Candy. But I hadn’t connected the dots yet and realized it was right under our noses and that’s probably what the cops were doing there.”

“Our backs were mostly turned,” Angela volunteered, “so Blondie and I likely wouldn’t have seen any cops at all if we hadn’t gotten up to go pee.”

Strawberry Blonde Centimillionaire’s actual real name was Blondie! So that’s gonna be an easy one I thought. But now more importantly: had I actually witnessed something and had my memory erased? Considering that, in my lifetime, I’ve interacted with a supernatural taco that may have mind-erasing powers based on some of our observations? That’s not as absurd a question as it might seem. I urgently needed to talk with Amber or Keith. Or both. But for sure Amber. But in person. I needed to fly to San Francisco ASAP.

“…girls might have seen anything, or were you both too tipsy from guzzling ten thousand dollars worth of wine between the two of you?” Angela smiled as I realized she was speaking to both of us.

“Guilty as charged,” Maura laugh-tracked, “and this one,”

“I didn’t even notice there’d been cops there; I only thought to ask because of that tv news piece,” I cut in not realizing Maura was still not finished.

“yeah, this one was having her Anton Ego moments with some of that vino we were knocking back, trying to pick up stuff my klutzy-drunk ass kept dropping on the floor, and chilling out to the video-art-light-show exhibit when our people got into all the boring legalese crap…

…And, not that I’m insensitive about what happened to that poor Candy woman – and her wife Chirene must be going through absolute hell right now – thanks by the way for airdropping me the story Scandalario… but seeing as how we didn’t actually witness anything that could be of help, I just wanted to let you ladies know you’re invited to my building in Manhattan this weekend where multiple bottles of both our new liquid-friends will be waiting! I scored big time deals in the online wine auction circles,” she ended with a brief laugh-track as some lawyer-ish types came over to ask us about the “alleged burn victim,” as they referred to him.

“Aww, Mr. Cheapsuit got hurt?” Maura sounded genuinely sympathetic. But no, although I’d heard him cry out in pain, I told them I hadn’t actually seen the accident. My attention had been on a large safety pin which I’d somehow dropped on the floor out of my “shelter kit” that I always carried. Since no one else had seen anything either, they thanked and left us.

I was almost frozen. A feeling like ice water in my veins allowed me to control myself and my facial expressions.

“Well,” Maura went on, “if cheap-suit-guy was getting coffee for one of the assistant directors as I suspect he was, and since that is part of his job description, and it’s a piece of company equipment – –

I need a dick in me!!!” She bellowed, waving at my old friend and continued: “he just might have a juicy little workman’s comp settlement in his future. So maybe he can pay off his debt. Oh! Angela, did you know that the net-worth-feature on Castadiva’s AR glasses will also give you how much debt people have?”

Blondie had just joined the group with her steaming coffee cup and sunglasses on, looking like she might well have preferred an intravenous caffeine drip instead. She nevertheless smiled at Maura’s antics.

Angela finished rolling her eyes at Maura:

“First of all honey, you completely destroy the double entendre humor when you pronounce it that way. It’s much more cute if you just say Anita De Kennmey and let people think they might have heard the other thing about the dick. And no, I wasn’t aware of the debt feature. Poor guy, how bad off is he?”

Anita had shuffled over to join our little group with arms outstretched to embrace Maura. My only-San-Francisco-friend-in-LA was well-versed enough in all my emotional states to know something was a bit off with me, but I couldn’t talk about it.

“Oh, not bad at all. It was a trivial amount. I expect to serve each of my guests an amount of wine that exceeds it,” then motioning to me: “And Fashion-Goddess’s sleek glasses themselves probably cost quintuple what he owes…”

As their conversation meandered on I got my head around the meaning of what she’d said: Mr. Cheapsuit. And Chirene. I had scribbled that most enigmatic note down with old fashioned paper and ink in my day-planner thingy and until just this moment I had no inkling of what the Mr. Cheapsuit reference was. But now I understood that it was him. And Chirene? The name of my crying-out-in-agony character from my dream. Whose neighbors were also yelling Candy. They were yelling the names of the two women who lived there. The married couple. Because they heard screams and obviously thought something was terribly wrong.

Had that scene really happened? Or was my mind merely imagining how awful it would be for her to have to go home and sleep alone knowing that her wife had just been abducted? And I didn’t simply write down the name “Mr. Cheapsuit.” My coded symbols around the name which would’ve resembled innocent doodles to anyone else? They meant DANGER. Most extreme danger. For about forty hours since Anita drove me home that night, I mulled over why I would have written a warning for myself about somebody in a cheap suit.

Now it all added up. The cops I couldn’t recall seeing, even though I was seated and facing in the direction Angela described so that I should have seen them. Cheapsuit himself, whom I couldn’t recall but had regarded as important enough to warrant putting on AR glasses – something I abhorred doing – or else Maura had goaded me into putting them on for some silly reason. The fact that my memories had been utterly annihilated. The fact that it happened on a night when some supernatural force was seemingly trying to get me drunk off my ass. And finally, that nightmare!

And was that weirdness with Eileen being around the same kind of art a third of a century later, standing in the same position, somehow connected to all this? Never mind that for now.

What it all added up to was that I had witnessed this woman, Candy, get abducted somehow. And Cheapsuit was most likely involved and quite possibly the one who did it. Then someone had gone to great lengths to erase my memory of it all.

“I’m going to San Francisco on some important business first, Maura,” I told her in what I estimated to be a fairly pleasant tone, “but I can be in New York mid-evening Friday. Was this to be a formal dinner party? Because I probably wouldn’t be able to make it early enough for that and be dressed appropriately for – –”

“Oh no, dear. It’s just a ‘come as you are.’ And so you’ll be taking your Lear then? I’ll have a car waiting where the private plane hangers are, just give my people your pilot’s contact info,” she said head-motioning to Candelario as Anita was still busy giving her a big squeezy hug and making her arms temporarily unavailable, “and they’ll take you to my helicopter which will set you down right on top of my building. No traffic whatsoever.”

Blondie smiled and told her patiently that what I had was a Global now, not a Lear. Their conversation digressed into vintage private jets that their dads had traveled in back when these women were all kids.

As Anita gave me my huggy greeting, she whispered “what’s wrong?” I whispered back “when we’re alone. Later,” eye-motioning to the others and Anita nodded slightly and winked. I could confide in Anita that I was under a lot of stress and I thought it might be affecting my memory, but Amber was the only one who could even remotely have a chance to sort this out, I now realized. Keith and the others would no doubt find it interesting; but yes, Amber would have advice that I’d trust.

Continue on to next section…

If And Only If

by Michelle Viviénne de Vandahlcourte

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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