“What… what did he do?”
Lorelei stepped out of the closet. He felt her hand on his shoulder and her voice at his ear. “This is Raymond Cordingly. His fortune is built directly out of the life’s savings of others. He promised to shepherd them into a secure retirement and old age. The web of lies that he created left honest grandparents homeless and destitute. By the time it all came to light, he had withdrawn from his company and arrayed such formidable legal defenses to his freedom and his fortune that your courts focused instead on his corporate dupes. Their involvement was comparatively minor and largely unwitting. Other accomplices escaped notice.”
She didn’t seem emotionally invested in her story. “Innocent workers lost their jobs to cover the cost of the company’s legal concerns. I could tell you of three people who lost their lives and many others who linger on in pain and misery because of the disruption to their medical treatment caused by this man’s greed.”
With that, she was gone. Alex didn’t hear or feel her step away, but he knew he stood alone staring at Raymond’s wasting face.
It was the sort of story that enraged him. He figured it would enrage any feeling person. But when Lorelei spoke of her purpose and her victims, he imagined worse things: murderers, mobsters, tyrants. Child molesters. Rapists. Not something like this.
Alex looked at the drawn, still face, and finally asked himself how stealing with lies and a smile and a contract was any better than doing it with a gun in an alleyway. A mugger might kill, but he might not…and either way, he wasn’t likely to get away with the family home or anyone’s college tuition.
“It would be a simple thing to claim the bulk of his liquid assets. He entrusted me with limited access, but I am certain that I could get the rest. Concealing it would not be too difficult,” Lorelei added from within the closet.
Alex blanched. Did she seriously want him to take this dead guy’s dirty money? Was that what they came for?
Then the dead man coughed.
Alex jumped back in shock. “Lori?” Raymond rasped. His eyes fluttered open, tracking little but clearly showing signs of life.
“Holy shit!”
Raymond gasped, winced, and looked around weakly. “Who…who are you? Oh, God, you have to help me. I can’t get up. That bitch…”
Alex just looked at him in amazement. “You’ve been lying here like this since Monday?”
“What?” the other man croaked. “Look…I can’t walk. You gotta call an ambulance for me.”
Again, Lorelei stepped out of the walk-in closet. She was now dressed in designer jeans that looked painted onto her and a shimmering silver top under a matching blazer. Alex would have stared under almost any other circumstance. At the moment, though, he was simply too stunned.
Raymond’s face twisted in an immediate rush of conflicting emotions. “Oh, God, Lori,” he babbled. “Why did you…what…?” Raymond babbled, then winced in pain. “Fuck, it hurts so bad. You hurt me so bad.”
“I apologize, master,” Lorelei said coolly to Alex. “I had thought this would be done by now.”
“Master? What?” Raymond blinked. “Who the hell is this kid, Lori?”
“He is more of a man than you have ever been at any point in your misspent life.”
“Have you been lying here since Monday night?” Alex repeated firmly.
“Yes! Yeah, God,” Raymond spat. “Something’s wrong with my hips. Stuff feels broken. Grinding. All I could reach was this water. Can’t get to my phone. I called off the maid so Lori and I could… oh God. You gotta call me an ambulance.” His voice rose barely over a whisper. Desperation was the only thing giving him lucidity. “I thought I was going to die.”
Lorelei turned to Alex and put a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Master, this is something I should finish,” she told him gently. Alex and Raymond both realized that she already had a pillow in her other hand. Neither of them had any illusions about what she meant to do with it.
“No,” Raymond pleaded.
“Wait, wait,” Alex said.
“It was his fate.”
“Stop. Stop for just a minute.” The shock of Raymond’s sudden awakening and the seriousness in Lorelei’s eyes had Alex unsettled, to say the least.
“Man, don’t let her-”
“Shut up!” Alex snapped. He ran his hands through his hair, turning away with his eyes wide. Then he turned around to face them both. “Lorelei, what happens when he dies?”
She just shrugged. “His soul descends into Hell.”
“No, I mean the money. All that money.”
“As I said, we can claim it if you wish. I was uncertain how you would feel about it, given your personal standards.”
“Huh, you’re damn right I’ve got standards,” Alex huffed. “No, I don’t want it. That’s fucked up. It’s not mine. But what’s gonna happen to it when he’s found dead?” Alex shifted his attention to Raymond. “How much do you have in the bank?”
“I can get twenty million easily,” Raymond said. “You can have all of it, just call an ambulance and don’t-”
“Shut the fuck up! Just answer the questions, alright?” Alex was agitated, more afraid than intimidating, but Raymond wasn’t in any condition to sort that out. “You’re a finance guy. You’ve got a will, right? Something? What happens to your money when you die?”
Raymond’s lower lip quivered. He looked between the shaking youth and the deadly, cold seductress standing over him. “I don’t…I never gave a shit,” he explained. “I’ve got a sister. My mom. I guess they’ll get some after the state sorts it out.”
Alex’s jaw dropped. “You guess? You do finance for a living and you don’t make out a will?! Jesus,” he fumed. He looked at Lorelei, whose face was set in stone cold resolve. “And all your investors?” Alex pressed, fighting to calm down. He was not far from screaming, both from rage and from feeling the enormous pressure of the moment. “You live it up ‘til you die and they just stay fucked?”
For a moment, it looked as if Raymond might try to talk his way through this. His lips twisted, eyes glancing around frantically as he tried to come up with something clever to say.
“That’s it, right?” Alex asked Lorelei. “He just dies and nothing gets fixed?”
“My purpose here was punishment for his crimes, not restitution. That is not in my-”
“Nature, right,” Alex said, cutting her off. He tugged nervously at his hair, looking back down at Raymond. “How many investors did you have in your scam?”
“It wasn’t a scam, the market just-”
Lorelei’s hand shot out at Raymond’s throat. She pulled him up just far enough to demonstrate that she could do much worse. Even this was agonizingly painful on his hips. “Do not lie to him, worm,” she hissed fiercely. Then she let him go. Raymond collapsed back into the bed, overcome with fear of the raven-haired demon.
Alex took a deep breath. He had to think. “How many investors? You were smart enough to pull this shit off. You had to have kept track of the details. How many accounts were there? You’ve got files, right?”
Raymond looked only at the intimidating woman towering over him. “I–I didn’t…I was worried about being subpoenaed. Search warrants.”
“So you didn’t keep anything at all? Not even just in case you had to cut a deal to save your ass later down the line?”
“Answer him,” Lorelei ordered.
“It’s in a safety deposit box under a false name,” Raymond conceded. “The media played it up to sound worse than it was, but I did…I bilked about fourteen thousand investors out of everything.”
“How much are you worth?”
Raymond blinked. “That’s not an exact thing.”
“I know. You’re a rich fucker, I’m sure most of it’s in stocks and stuff. Give me a conservative ballpark figure, and don’t bullshit me. How much are you worth if it means buying your life? Selling everything off, whether it came from this scam or legit stuff.” Alex had learned just enough in a couple of economics classes to know that it was all very complicated, and that the rich didn’t operate like ordinary people.