Utopian Day (23 page)

“
If you touch Valerie or her
daughter again, it will be the last thing you ever do,” said the
creepy-sounding automated voice.

She quickly crossed the street into the alleyway
where her bicycle was hidden, and turned around to make certain she
wasn’t followed. The whole episode had taken about thirty seconds.
As she turned around, she just saw the door begin to open on the
bottom apartment as someone came out to see what all the noise was
about.

A few days later, she read about the attack in the
local paper. The man had apparently sustained a concussion, broken
a leg, dislocated his shoulder, and required ten stitches to close
a gash in his cheek caused by an exposed nail on the wooden
staircase.

“
Those darned nails,” Laura
thought to herself as she smiled.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Silas looked down at the document that had just
arrived in the mail. He knew what it was, but forced himself to
open it anyway. He had to read it for himself. There was something
about reading it in print that seemed to hit him like a ton of
bricks. Maggie and Silas were now officially divorced.

Resigning from the force had been a hard blow to
Silas. He started drinking heavily. He told Maggie why he had quit
– the truth, and she was mad as hell. He swore to get help. He even
attended Gambler’s Anonymous for a while, but the itch just
wouldn’t go away. He kept thinking that all he needed was one big
score to set things right.

He was making ends meet with private detective and
security work, but kept skimming money off of his paycheck to
gamble with on the side so that Maggie wouldn’t know. They began to
have more and more fights over money. There were many times that
Maggie would borrow money from her sister to cover the mortgage
payment when they couldn’t come up with the funds because of his
gambling losses. Their marriage continued to disintegrate. Finally,
Maggie gave him an ultimatum. Either stop gambling for good, or
their marriage was over.

One weekend, Maggie and their son Tommy had gone to
visit her sister. An old friend invited Silas over to watch the
football game. Once the game was over, the guys wanted to play some
cards. Silas knew he should say no, but he stayed. He told himself
he would just spend twenty dollars on the game and then bow out for
the night if he lost it. He ended up losing one hundred and fifty
dollars before the night was over. It was money they had needed for
groceries.

Maggie and Tommy returned from their trip and Maggie
eventually asked Silas for some money to go to the store and buy
the groceries. When he confessed that he had lost the money, she
went ballistic. It had been the last straw for Maggie. She took
Tommy with her and moved in with her sister that same day.

Silas put the divorce papers down on the kitchen
table and poured himself a tall glass of scotch. All of this could
have been fixed with money, he told himself. He thought back to
when it had all really started to go downhill several years ago,
and fixated on the Bartonovich affair as the starting point. The
online gambling site must have been rigged, he told himself. How
else could the site have won so much money back from him in so
little time? That led to the debt that caused him to decide to take
the job from Bartonovich in the first place. Since it was
Bartonovich’s site, Silas reasoned in his inebriated stupor, it was
his fault that Silas’ marriage had fallen apart. That was the last
coherent thought he had before he passed out on the couch.

While he was asleep, he had a dream about the bank
in the Caymans where Nick Bartonovich had taken J.T. Thornbacker.
In the dream, he saw large bundles of cash fall out of the duffle
bag that Nick was carrying out of the bank. He simply walked away
without picking the bundles up. Silas ran up and began picking up
the cash, stuffing it into his pockets and into his shirt until he
couldn’t carry anymore.

He had the hangover from hell when he woke up the
next morning. He drank two glasses of water, showered, and made
himself some strong coffee with two slices of toast on the side. He
sat at the breakfast table eating the toast, drinking coffee, and
staring at the divorce papers. By the time he had finished his
toast and coffee, he had convinced himself of two things. Firstly,
if he had enough money, Maggie would take him back and he would
have his family again. Secondly, if his money problems had gotten
drastically worse because of Nick Bartonovich, then Nick
Bartonovich could make those same financial difficulties go away
for good.

Silas started spending every spare moment he could
researching Nick’s businesses and watching his house. He determined
he would learn everything he could about the man, find his
weakness, and exploit that weakness to score a big pile of cash for
himself.

One afternoon as he was watching Nick’s house, he
saw the girl leave with Mia in a car. He had determined her name
was Sasha some weeks before by going through the Bartonovich’s
discarded trash. He followed the car as inconspicuously as he was
able. They left the city and made their way over to Newark, New
Jersey. Their first stop was at a florist, where they came out with
a bouquet of flowers. From here, they proceeded to Fairmount
Cemetery.

Silas pulled into the cemetery behind them, far
enough back so as not to be noticed. He followed them until he was
forced to turn down one of the side roads to prevent being
discovered tailing them. He quickly exited his vehicle, grabbing
his binoculars and finding a spot where he could see their car
fairly well.

The car stopped. Mia and the girl got out of the car
with the flowers and went over to a grave stone. He couldn’t make
out the name on the grave stone, but the girl appeared to be
crying. They stayed a few minutes, the girl put flowers on the
grave, and then they got back in the car. Silas pretended to be
visiting a nearby grave when they drove by the road where he was
positioned. Once they had left the cemetery, Silas got back in his
car and drove down to where the girl had put flowers on the grave.
It didn’t take him long to locate the grave with the particular
bouquet he had seen them place. He took out his phone and took a
picture of the grave stone before getting back in his car and
heading home.

This was something significant. Sasha was the key to
Nick Bartonovich’s money – he was sure of that. This graveside
visit just might be the leverage he needed to turn the key. He
didn’t know who Katrina Byers was or how she was related to Sasha,
but he would find out soon enough. And once he knew, he would be
able to exploit that information to achieve his goal. He slept well
that night and had the same recurring dream. In the dream, Nick
Bartonovich was dropping bundles of cash for him to collect.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

It was a beautiful day for sailing. J.T., Laura, and
James had taken the sailboat out in the morning. They had been out
for around two hours and were about to stop and drop anchor for
lunch.

Since starting their new lives in the Cayman
Islands, J.T. had developed a passion for sailing. About a year
before, he had purchased this thirty-two foot Hunter 326 sailboat.
It had one mast with two sails in the classic Bermuda rig style.
There were two couches in the main cabin, with a table in the
middle, two sleeping areas which were each behind their own
bulkhead, a lavatory, and an open galley.

James went below and was beginning to get the meal
ready. He had developed into quite an amateur chef and had prepared
one of his latest dishes for them to try. Today it was going to be
jalapeño Tilapia served over angel-hair pasta with grated Parmesan
cheese, accompanied by a white wine.

J.T. was at the wheel and was about to lower the
sails and come to a stop. Laura had just come up from the hold
after retrieving some sunscreen. She put her sunglasses down on a
small seat located at the stern of the boat just behind the
wheelhouse. The seat was built into the railing, with the second
rail curved out and around the seat to provide back support.

She was just about to put sunscreen on her face when
the movement of the boat caused her glasses to slide off of the
seat and onto the ledge below, just past the railing at the back of
the boat. She put the sunscreen in the cup holder next to the seat
and grabbed the railing, stepping over the side of the boat and
onto the ledge. As she was reaching for her glasses the boat hit a
wave and lurched to the side, causing Laura to lose her balance.
She fell forward, hitting her head on the side of the boat before
falling into the water.

“
Wow, did you see that wave we
just hit?” J.T. said as he turned around to where he thought Laura
was sitting. He saw her orange PFD in the water about twenty yards
behind the boat, where she was floating face down. He immediately
began turning the boat around, heading back in her
direction.

“
James! Get up here! Laura fell
off the boat!” J.T. yelled.

James came rushing up from the galley. “Where is
she?!”

By this time, J.T. had succeeded in turning the boat
around and was headed straight towards where Laura was floating,
still face down in the water.

“
Right there!” J.T. exclaimed as
he pointed to where she was. “I think she hit her head and got
knocked out. I’ll pull up alongside and you jump in to get
her.”

When the boat was close enough, James jumped in and
swam over to Laura, immediately flipping her over so that her head
was no longer face-down in the water. He began swimming with Laura
in tow back to the boat.

“
Hang on, Laura! Hang on!” he
exclaimed.

J.T. turned the boat back around once more after
passing by Laura, dropped the sails, and engaged the motor so that
he could come up slowly on his friends. When he got close enough,
he tossed out a life preserver. James grabbed on with one arm and
held Laura with the other as J.T. hauled them in.

Once they had Laura on the deck, J.T. could see that
Laura’s lips were blue, indicating she wasn’t breathing. He
immediately removed her life vest and began performing CPR. After
about thirty seconds of CPR, Laura vomited. J.T. rolled her onto
her side so that the vomit wouldn’t go down her windpipe. Laura
began coughing and spitting, gasping for air.

“
James, go get a blanket,” J.T.
ordered.

James came back with a blanket and wrapped it around
Laura. After a few minutes, Laura’s lips started turning pink
again.

“
Are you o.k.?” James
asked.

“
Give her a minute, James,” J.T.
said. “Don’t you worry about talking right now, Laura, just focus
on breathing.” Turning to James, he continued, “It takes some time
to get your breath back after something like that. I know, I almost
drowned as a kid. Took me about an hour before I could
speak.”

After they took Laura below, J.T. told James to
watch her and make sure she didn’t go to sleep. He was concerned
that she might have a concussion, and felt that they needed to have
her checked out at the hospital to make certain it wasn’t too
serious.

J.T. turned the boat around and set sail back to the
marina. He called ahead so that an ambulance was there waiting on
them by the time they returned. The doctor in the ER gave Laura
some oxygen and checked her over. Eventually, he diagnosed her with
a concussion and sent her home with James and J.T., giving them a
print-out on what symptoms to look for at home. He told Laura that
she needed to gets lots of rest and take it easy over the next few
days. She was to let him know if any of the symptoms listed on the
sheet he gave her persisted or got worse.

J.T. suggested that they all stay at his house for
the next day or so. That way, he said, he and James could take
turns keeping an eye on Laura’s condition. Laura protested a bit,
but in the end, she was too exhausted to give them much resistance
and she capitulated.

A few weeks after the boating incident, they were
all eating over at J.T.’s house, and Laura brought in two presents
from the car. She gave one to J.T. and one to James. They looked at
her with questioning looks until she said, “Well, go on. Open them
up.”

J.T. unwrapped his first. It was a beautiful stained
glass piece of a sailboat on the water. Laura had included a note
inside the box. J.T. opened the note and read it to himself.
“Thanks for saving my life,” it read. James opened his and found a
similar note. His stained glass scene depicted a boy riding a bike
down the beach.

J.T. went over to Laura and gave her a big hug.

“
I’m just glad you are o.k. Thanks
for the gift.”

“
Yeah,” James added, “thanks. That
was pretty scary. Next time, you stay inside the railing, young
lady,” he said in mock sternness, wagging his finger at Laura as he
spoke.

“
Yes, sir!” Laura said with a mock
salute.

Laura’s near-drowning had been concerning on more
than one level. The x-ray that had been performed on Laura in the
ER had revealed the implant which had been installed for monitoring
the prisoners while they were at Utopia. The doctor started asking
questions about it. Laura had told him that it was a private
medical issue, and that she didn’t want to discuss it. After a few
more prodding questions, the doctor finally let it drop.

They were all concerned that if they didn’t get the
devices removed, it might lead to their true identities being
revealed and land them back in prison. They began discreetly
searching for a good hospital somewhere other than the Cayman
Islands where they could have the devices removed. The Caymans were
too close to home and too many questions would be asked. It had to
be somewhere else.