The bastard.
And her coach wasn’t much better. The two of them, those two impossible-to-please men, had put all their hopes and dreams on her. She’d been a fool to ever think she was doing it for herself. Turned out she was doing it for them. She just might have been proud of herself for winning silver, but not them.
“Look at the endorsement deals you’ve lost,” they told her. “Millions of dollars, thrown away. The life you could have had.”
Her father didn’t talk to her all the way home. Pretty long flight, Sydney to L.A., then the connecting trip to New York, the limo ride back to Montclair.
She started doing poorly in school. Went from being an A student to getting Cs, and worse. Her father wanted to know what the hell was wrong with her. Did she take a stupid pill in Australia? Was it something in the water?
Nicole—of course, that wasn’t her name then—knew what the problem was. She could never make the man happy, so why bother? Maybe, if her mother hadn’t died from cancer when Nicole was twelve, things might have been different. That woman, she had a life as a successful real estate agent. She didn’t have to live through her daughter, unlike her dad, whose greatest achievement in life was being assistant manager at a Payless Shoes outlet.
She didn’t just let her grades slip. She partied. She slept around. She did drugs. Let her once perfectly toned body get out of shape. When she was eighteen, she met up with a man thirty years older than her who didn’t actually run a meth lab, but worked for someone who did.
His name was Chester—honest to God, like from an old Western—and he had one of those RV things, a Winnebago, and he used to load that thing up with product. Maybe Chester was the perfect name for him, given that the RV was like a modern covered wagon. Meth was stuffed everywhere. In the fridge, under the beds, in the actual walls of the RV. Because you couldn’t send meth by FedEx or Purolator and you couldn’t take it on a plane, if you wanted to get it from one part of the country to the other you had to damn well take it there yourself. And because Chester’s boss was linked into a major distributor based in Las Vegas, it meant making plenty of trips to Nevada.
But driving an RV cross-country all by yourself, that could look kind of suspicious, so Chester hired Nicole to tag along with him. If he ever got pulled over by police, and if they asked, he’d tell them she was his daughter, and he was taking her out west to be with her mother. Plus, Chester got her to help out. She made meals in the RV kitchen while they made good time on the interstates. She’d take the wheel while he had a nap. Only time they ever had to stop was to fill the tank.
Sometimes, Chester would have Nicole meet his needs in ways that didn’t involve getting him a drink or making him a sandwich or cutting him up an apple. She didn’t like it, but he always threw an extra hundred her way when she helped him ease his “interstate tensions.”
This business of making men happy, it never ended.
They made the trip from New Jersey to Vegas a dozen times. Always pulling the RV into the same warehouse on the outskirts of Vegas, making the exchange with the same people. Looked like they were all trying out as extras in a Scarface sequel, but nice enough. They’d all have a drink when the exchange was made. They liked Nicole, and loved to tease Chester about how he passed the time driving all those thousands of miles, back and forth across the country, with that hot young thing riding along with him. Chester would give them a nod and a wink, doing nothing to make them think otherwise.
She kind of hated him for that.
It was the thirteenth trip where things went off the rails.
Nicole knew something was up the moment the warehouse door began retracting. Usually, first thing they’d see would be the Scarface guys’ Escalade sitting in there, back hatch open, the boys leaning up against the grill. But instead of the Escalade, there was a Ford Explorer. No one outside the car, but two inside.
“I don’t like this,” Nicole said, standing behind Chester, looking through the massive front window like it was a movie screen.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I got a call couple hours back, while you were sleeping. They said they’d have someone else receiving today.”
“They say why?”
“They’re gonna tell me their troubles? Don’t worry about it.”
Nicole took a few steps back into the kitchen, slipped open a drawer, grabbed something. Chester pulled the RV up alongside the Explorer, killed the engine, got out of his oversized captain’s chair, and opened up the side door.