Chapter 6 - The Fall of Marcus Vance
Marcus was hyperventilating against the garden wall.
The sirens were so close now that the blue and red strobe lights were reflecting off the tops of the cypress trees along the driveway.
"You set me up," Marcus choked out, pointing a trembling hand toward Jack.
"You knew! You let me file the Delaware documents!"
"You set yourself up, Marcus," Maya said, stepping toward him with cold, measured purpose.
"Nobody forced your hand to type Jack's name on a county deed."
"Nobody forced you to run an unlicensed money-laundering conduit through your commercial brokerage," she added.
"It was her idea!" Marcus screamed, his voice breaking into a terrified shriek as he pointed straight at Vanessa, who was still kneeling in the puddle of cake.
"She came to my office! She told me Jack was an abusive drunk who wouldn't let her leave!"
"She told me he threatened to burn the house down if she asked for a divorce!"
Vanessa’s head snapped up.
Through the smeared white frosting and matted hair, her eyes flared with shock and betrayal.
"Marcus!" she shrieked. "You swore to me! You told me you loved me!"
"I don't love you, you crazy bitch!" Marcus yelled back, completely dropping any shred of dignity.
"You're a sociopath! You threw his leg in the pool! You dragged me into a federal wire fraud case!"
Marcus looked at the two towering veterans blocking the gate.
"Let me through, please," Marcus begged, tears forming in the corners of his eyes.
"I have two hundred thousand dollars in cash in my trunk. It's yours. Take it. Just let me walk out to my car before the cruisers hit the gate."
Staff Sergeant Dawson didn't even blink.
He stood six-foot-two, with arms like telephone poles and a flat, impassive expression that had stared down Taliban commanders in the Chora Valley.
"Sir," Dawson said in a flat, polite voice, "if you touch that latch, I'm going to dislocate your shoulder."
Marcus shrank back, his knees shaking so violently that his designer linen pants were trembling.
The high-society guests were now scrambling toward the opposite side of the terrace, trying to find an alternate exit through the service kitchen.
Nobody wanted their face on the bodycam footage of a federal fraud arrest.
"Ladies and gentlemen," Jack said, his voice echoing across the courtyard, arresting their panic for a brief moment.
"Please don't use the service exit."
"The officers will need witness statements regarding the battery that occurred against Maya Collins ten minutes ago," Jack announced.
"Nobody is leaving this property until the paperwork is signed."
A collective groan of despair rippled through the gathered elite.
Vanessa looked up at Jack from the floor, her hands clasped together in front of her chest like a medieval penitent.
"Jack, please," she sobbed, the tears carving clean, dark tracks through the thick white icing on her cheeks.
"I made a mistake! I was confused! Marcus manipulated me! He told me you didn't love me anymore!"
"He told me you only kept me around to be your nurse!"
Jack looked down at her.
There was no hatred in his face.
There was only an infinite, barren emptiness.
"I never asked you to be my nurse, Vanessa," Jack said.
"I had nurses at Walter Reed who cleaned my wounds with disinfectant when I was screaming from the pain."
"I had physical therapists who held me by the harness while I threw up from exhaustion trying to stand."
Jack leaned his weight onto his left foot, looking down at the broken woman.
May you like
"All I ever asked you to be was my wife."
"And you couldn't even manage that."
