Up in Smoke

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Frankie looksup at me with tear-stained cheeks.

  “Don’t cry. That bastard doesn’t deserve your tears,” I say.

  “I’m not crying for him,” she sniffles. I see my reflection in her glassy eyes. “I’m crying for you.”

  I’m done. Dead. I’m been dealt a death blow. Something I can never recover from. My stomach lurches, and my breath leaves my body.

  I’m crying for you.

  I don’t remember the last time someone has cried for me instead of because of me. I don’t like the way it feels in my chest. Tight. Uncomfortable.

  I’m suddenly feeling very claustrophobic in my own damn skin.

  I don’t give a second thought to wiping away Frankie’s tears with my thumbs, resting my hands on either side of her face. I pause for a moment, enjoying the way my tattooed hands look against her creamy clear skin. The slope of her long slender neck. The feel of her quickening pulse against my palm.

  “Ask me again,” she says, drying her tears with her hand.

  “Ask you what?”

  “Ask me to tell you where my father is.”

  I’m frozen in shock, but she’s serious.

  “Frankie, where’s your father?” I ask, cautiously.

  Frankie is silent while my heart hammers in my chest. She looks to her hands then up to me. “Okay,” she whispers.

  “Okay what?”

  She straightens her shoulders and looks me in the eyes. “Okay, I’ll take you to him, I’ll take you to my father.”

  Chapter Forty

  Silence.

  It used to be something I enjoyed. Something I craved. I’d sit alone in a room somewhere hours after the world had gone asleep and just breathe. For hours, I’d just be. It had always been enough for me.

  Until now.

  Until I find myself in the van with Frankie in the passenger seat. She’s staring out the window. There hasn’t been a word spoken between us in over two hours. Her plump lips are turned down in a frown. Her eyes shine with unshed tears.

  I want to be mad at her for keeping this from me until now, but I’m struggling with staying angry at her when I’ve kept my fair share of shit to myself this past week.

  I’m still processing it all. Her. Frank. Morgan. It all seems so different now and it’s suddenly as if I’m looking at it all with a fresh pair of eyes.

  I don’t know what the fuck Frankie has to tell me, or why she’s decided now to take me to her old man, but I know she’s wrestling with something big. I’ve waited this long to get to Frank Helburn. I can wait a few minutes longer.

  Even so, the trip is taking forever. Every bump under the tires is jarring. Every beeping horn in the distance sounds like a freight train descending upon us.

  We arrive at the townhouse under the cloak of night. The same house I watched Frankie go in and out of from afar for weeks.

  I get out and slam the door. I stand in front of the van and wait. Frankie doesn’t follow.

  “You coming?” I ask, knocking on the passenger door. After a few seconds, it opens and Frankie slides down from the seat.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me why we’re here?” she asks, straightening her shirt. She looks up at the dark townhouse. Her eyebrows crinkle like she’s looking it over for the first time.

  “No,” I answer. “Because I know you’re going to tell me. That’s why we are here, right? It’s truth time.” I hold my hand out to her. Frankie pauses, looking between my face and my hand.

  “Come on, hellion,” I say, wiggling my fingers.

  She puts her hand in mine.

  It’s truth time.

  Chapter Forty-One

  “Why now?”Smoke asks. I open the front door and flick on the light, but nothing happens. Probably because I didn’t pay the power bill last month. “Why do you suddenly trust me to tell me whatever it is you’ve been hiding, now?”

  “You’ll see soon enough,” I say.

  Smoke darts back to the van and grabs a flashlight. He runs back, powering it on. He follows me into the dark house, lighting the way over to the door leading to the basement.

  I reach around and feel the wall under the sloped ceiling until I find the dial for the generator. I turn it, and after a few seconds, a rumble sounds. The lights in the basement flicker and blink until they’re fully on. The microwave button beeps with the reminder to set the clock and for once I don’t jump out of my own skin.

  Seems a little superfluous at this point.

  We get to the bottom of the stairs. Smoke sets down the flashlight and takes in the sight before him.

  The computers in the center of the room come alive. Several small fans underneath spin to keep it all from overheating in what sounds like a collective roar.

  “I call it the monster,” I explain as Smoke steps into the room. He stops to stare at the eight large monitors. Four on the long desk and four mounted above on pipes hanging from the ceiling.

  “You mean your old man called it the monster,” Smoke says, examining my life’s work. He turns to me. “I thought you said you were taking me to him.”

  I take a deep breath and stand between him and my life’s work. “I did take you to him.”

  “Explain,” Smoke says, crossing his arms over his chest. His vein is pulsing again and I know it’s a sign of his temper growing and his patience shortening. “Cause I don’t see anyone here but us and a bunch of computers your old man used to steal money from Griff.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong.” I sit down at my desk like a pianist at his instrument. I run my fingertips lovingly over the keys. I close my eyes and take a deep breath. My fingers play the keyboard will practiced efficiency. The monitors flash screen after screen.

  Smoke stands behind me and watches. “Holy shit,” he whispers.

  “You already know my father was a hacker. Funny thing is he always told me he worked for the government. Later on, I found out it was all a lie. He was laundering money, but he wasn’t JUST laundering money, he was transferring funds for human traffickers. Taking the money from the people buying sex slaves and sending it to the people selling sex slaves.”

  I find my rhythm and glance up at the screens at the visual music I’m creating.

  “He spent his whole useless life helping those who buy and sell people. Hiding their monetary transactions so they wouldn’t get caught. HE was the real monster. THIS,” I wave my hands at the computer system I spent years perfecting. “is my monster.”

  “What the fuck,” Smoke says. I spin around in my chair and he looks from me to the screens, still flashing.

  “Frankie, you said you were taking me to your old man,” he growls.

  “And I said I did,” I argue.

  Smoke looks around. “Then where the fuck is he?” He asks between gritted teeth. “Don’t fucking toy with me.”

  “He’s over there,” I point to the darkened corner of the basement where only the bottom of a large blue rectangular freezer can be seen peeking out from under a blue roof tarp.

  Smoke rips the tarp away.

  He turns and storms over to me. His heavy feet thudding against the cement floor. He’s furious and aggressive and fucking beautiful all at the same time. My heart and head are pounding. I’m afraid for both myself and for Smoke. He grabs my chair, hands on both of the arm rests and leans in, his face in mine. I see the anger burning in his dark eyes, but I also see hurt, so much hurt my chest pangs despite the position I’m in with my feet dangling above the floor. He thinks I’ve betrayed him.

  “Where—” he snarls.

  I don’t take my eyes off his. “My father. Frank Helburn is there. He’s IN the cooler.”

  Smoke pushes off the chair and stands. “What?”

  I meet his eyes. “He’s in the cooler. He’s dead. My father’s dead. He’s beendead.”

  Smoke

  My ears are fucking ringing. Dead. The motherfucker I’d been looking for all this time is DEAD.

  I cross t
he room to the corner where the dusty blue cooler sits caddy corner underneath a section of dropped ceiling.

  I pull on the padlock, but it doesn’t budge. I look around and spot a pair of bolt cutters hanging from the wall. I grab them, snapping the lock off after several blood-vessel-bursting tries.

  I need to see for myself that the bastard is dead. I can’t decide if I’m happy or pissed off I didn’t get a chance to do it myself, but I’ll work that out later.

  The lid of the cooler doesn’t move when I try to raise it. I bend at the knees and use my back strength. It finally it gives. The ice lining the lid breaks off and shatters around the floor, bouncing around like tiny diamonds as they catch the light from Frankie’s monitors.

  Inside is yet another blue tarp which I hastily rip to the side revealing the frozen open-mouthed corpse of Frank Helburn.

  Fuck.

  Frankie stands beside me, looking down at her dead old man. I think she’s emotionless when it comes to seeing his dead body but then I see it out of the corner of my eye. She’s shaking. And not with despair either. I raise my eyes to hers and sure enough she’s staring down at him with so much hatred burning in her eyes I’m surprised the ice doesn’t melt. “For how long?” I ask.

  She meets my eyes.

  “Five years.”

  Chapter Forty-Two

  “Five years. That’s not possible,”I say. “Morgan died a year ago and your old man killed her. So, you’re wrong, or you’re lying.”

  “Please sit,” Frankie pleads, with a hurt on her face that makes me pause to take a breath.

  I shake my head. “Truth first. What the fuck is going on here?” She’s just told me that the man I want to take out my revenge on is fucking dead. There’s no way I could be calm. Not now.

  Maybe, not fucking ever.

  “Okay.” She sits back down on the chair, and her fingers move so fast over the keyboard they blur together. “I’ll start at the beginning, if that’s okay?” she asks without looking back at me.

  It’s so unlike her to ask me before she does something. I’m not sure if I love it or hate it.

  She sees me nod in the reflection of one of the screens. She inhales a shaky breath. "I never saw my father much,” she starts. “But you know that already.”

  “Keep going,” I urge her on.

  She’s pulling up security feed for Aestro, and I recognize it as a company that does high-end systems for…well, people like me.

  “I spent my time in the house, and my father spent his down here. He ate down here. He had a cot down here that he slept on most nights. I always thought he was just a really hard worker. He told me he designed websites for the government.” She chuckles and looks up at the elaborate computer system. “I used to show my friends at school the White House website and brag that my father was the one who built it.” She glances at me. “The only meaningful time we ever spent together was when he was showing me how to use computers. I could type before I could write with a pencil. I could write in code better than I could write my ABC’s. Occasionally, he showed me a few tricks. I think he was showing off. It was the only thing he was ever really proud of. And it was all fucking bullshit.”

  “Like what kind of tricks?” I ask.

  “Like how to hack into the school mainframe and set off the fire sprinklers on prank day,” she says with a laugh. “Other tricks I picked up by watching him. I’d sneak down here and sit on the step that was covered the most by the shadows. He never heard me, but I watched him working. I can tell you I never saw a single picture of the White House on any of his screens.”

  Frankie was downright graceful. She barely blinked as she moved from one screen to the next, and the fact that she could talk to me while doing it made me realize she was on an entirely different level of smart then the rest of the population.

  “And then one day,” she continued. “I’d learned enough from watching him and doing my own research that I realized what he was really doing.”

  “Hacking?”

  “Not just hacking. Trafficking. People. Women,” she grates, the anger in her words floods into me, and I can feel my blood boiling for her, which makes sense, because she’s a part of me.

  The sounds of the keyboard clicks grow louder as she pounds on them with a lot more pressure than needed.

  Frankie shakes her head. “He was a facilitator, a closer. He was responsible for the deaths of thousands of women around the world. I was so disgusted when I first found out that I didn’t eat for weeks.”

  Frankie’s fingers slow. “I was going to call the cops, but I wanted to confront him about it. So one day, I gathered all my courage and all my evidence against him. I stormed down here ready to be jury and judge only to find him slumped over his keyboard, dead.”

  “How did he die?” I ask, curious as to all the details surrounding the death of the man I missed the opportunity to kill.

  Frankie shook her head. “He was always really unhealthy. Never slept. Ate all the wrong things. Chain smoked sixteen hours a day. I think his heart just finally gave out.”

  “And you didn’t call anyone?” I ask, wondering why a girl her age wouldn’t reach out and call for help.

  “There was no one to call. I don’t have any other family, and I would’ve called the police or coroner or whoever, but then I wouldn’t have been able to stay here on my own and do all this.” She waved her hand at the monitors. Her eyes glassy. She sniffled. “So, I made a pulley with some chains, hung it from the ceiling, and shoved him in the freezer so that no one would know of his death, and I could live here and pretend to be him. Online anyway. That’s when I started my work.”

  “Which is what exactly?” I ask hesitantly.

  She smiles, beaming with pride. “When I realized I could hack my way into the dark web and continue his work, but in a different kind of way…I did. I knew the drop off points. The method of transport. It was all at my fingertips. I saved them, Smoke. I stole money from the assholes trading people like stocks on the Nasdaq, and I hired mercenaries to rescue them. Hundreds of them.