Page 42 of Tango

“You still have a Yuri problem. There has to be a Plan B. We can’t stop until you’re safe.” She turned to her brother. “Get out of here, Benny.”

Ben slowly got up from the floor, went over to the cardboard box with his papers, and dug out the fake ID. He retrieved his ice pack and headed back out the door.

“So what do we do now?” Wade asked.

Vivian turned her face to Jay so he could see her simmering rage.

“I know. I’m sorry, I guess. I don’t feel like the bad guy here.”

“Well, you are,” she grumbled.

“I’m not. The damned billionaires are making it impossible to make ends meet. They take everything and leave us crumbs. They make us beggars. We’re just taking a small glass from their revenue stream.”

“River, you mean,” Wade countered.

“Ocean,” Vivian said.

“Whatever,” Wade said. “It’s gonna trickle down for once. I’m tired of living hand to mouth. I’m tired of saying no to my kid. I’m tired of not having any padding in my checking account. A single shitty day, and me and mine are out on the streets. Or worse, sleeping on the floor in your living room next to Ben’s snoring.”

“One bathroom,” Jay said. “You can always stay in my uncle’s hunting cabin as long as it’s not hunting season.”

“With no running water and a latrine?” Wade asked. “That’ll go over well with my wife.”

“Especially if she’s already fighting a UTI,” Vivian said.

“I met your boss, Piper, at Alabaster today. When she walked in, I thought she was Amanda and almost had an aneurysm. I thought Amanda had changed her mind and decided not to go to the party. That would have blown up our whole plan. When you showed me her picture on your phone, they looked similar. In real life in dim light? Spooky.”

“Hard to believe that’s a coincidence,” Wade said.

“My thoughts, too.” Jay shuffled around in his seat, grabbing at his uniform pants, and pulling them at the knees.

“I knew this was going to be a shit show. I told you it was holey as Swiss cheese. I think we need to go the other way. I think we need to get hold of a vial of the formula Piper’s been working on. That’s not a hundred grand in a bank. That could be a million.

Jay caught her gaze. “Million?”

“Talk to me about a million,” Wade said, sliding closer.

“How much were you going to move from Amanda’s bank into crypto?”

“Two hundred thousand,” Jay said. “It’s twice what we owe Yuri plus other bills—the cars.”

“My idea only works because of Jay.” Vivian rubbed her nose. “The formula that my lab is working on … I didn’t put two and two together. Listen. I’m going to tell you what I overheard Piper tell her friend on the phone. And then I’m going to tell you my idea.”

The men were silent and focused as Vivian repeated the highlights of the conversation. She explained what Piper saw in the physical changes in Lionel and Amanda, and how they were building a spa that could end up using the formula off-label, as the fountain of youth.

What she didn’t tell them was about the data she’d documented in the healthy mouse population when the formula was administered. Her target was money from someone with stupid money. The kind of money that wouldn’t mind spending a half million dollars on their appearance. With that kind of money, they could afford a doctor’s consultation. And the decision was their own: what they did with their own bodies was on them. They owned their own consequences.

“It turns back the hands of time?” Jay asked.

“Not necessarily safely. It’s honestly a bad deal. But Piper thinks that Lionel and Amanda Harcourt injected it and grew years younger,” Vivian said.

“We get a vial. We sell it on the black market. Boom! There’s a million in crypto,” Wade’s grin was ear to ear. “And who’s going to get butt-hurt over some missing experimental drug that cures Runker-Bailey Syndrome? No one as long as we keep everything quiet.”

Jay’s face was painted with skepticism.

“Look, all we need is Piper’s badge to get into the Alabaster lab. Is that right, Jay? If you had that, you could get into the lab?”

“I write her name in the book, use the credentials to go down, and it would look like it was her going in, yes.”