Private Paris (Private 10)

“They come up,” I admitted, and yawned. “Why?”

“The prince is happy Maya’s safe, and grateful to you and Langlois,” Peaks said. “I don’t think the same can be said about me.”

“Looking for a job?” I asked.

“If it comes to that,” Peaks said.

“If it comes to that, I’d love to talk,” I said.

Louis, to my surprise, was already snoring in the seat in front of me. I put in earbuds and called up a white noise app for the sounds of waves softly crashing on a beach. It was as if I were home, and that noise was coming in my window. I fell hard and deep.

When I felt someone shaking my shoulder what seemed like a few minutes later, I jerked awake in a foul mood, pulled out the earbuds, and stared angrily at the doctor.

“I didn’t want to disturb you, but you’ve been sleeping an hour,” she said. “And Kim keeps asking for you.”

“Okay,” I said, forcing open my eyes. “I’ll be right there. How is she?”

“Considering what she’s been through, the heroin and all, she’s good,” the doctor said. “We gave her a slight dose of morphine to stay her withdrawal for a more suitable time and place, and a smaller dose of amphetamine salts to keep her heart rate up in the meantime.”

“She stable enough to make the trip to L.A.?” I asked.

“I think so.”

I thanked her and went aft, knocked, and went through the divider. Kim lay under blankets, propped up against pillows. She had an IV in her arm and looked wrung out and pale.

The nurse left and shut the divider behind her.

“You don’t give up, do you, Jack Morgan?” she asked in a hoarse whisper.

“Not as a rule,” I said. “The doc said you wanted to talk to me.”

Kim looked at her lap, bit the corner of her lip, and nodded weakly.

“I owe you an explanation,” she said. “After what you’ve done, you deserve it. But please, I’d appreciate it if my grandfather hears none of this. He’s…he’s one of the few people in my life who always believed the best of me.”

I leaned up against the cabin wall and said, “You don’t owe me an explanatio

n. But whatever you feel comfortable telling me stays with me.”

Chapter 76

OVER THE COURSE of the next forty minutes, Kim gave me the CliffsNotes version of her story. After her parents died in the boating accident, she felt compelled to return to France, where she ended up working in Cannes as part of the film festival staff. She ran with a young, wild Euro crowd. There were drugs, and she got a taste for them, heroin in particular.

Kim met Phillipe Rivier the night of her twenty-fifth birthday at a nightclub in Cannes. He was fifteen years her senior, but he was handsome, sophisticated, mysterious, and by all appearances fabulously wealthy.

“There was also this…” Kim started playing with the blanket. “He was very, very sexy. And it was like in that book, you know?”

“Book?”

“Fifty Shades of you know?” she said. “Except it all took place on the boat.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, and fell silent for several beats. “It was good for a while, an escape from everything, I guess. And then it wasn’t. I realized he was keeping me isolated on the yacht, and when I complained, he either punished me or gave me a little heroin, which kept me in line.”

Kim said she lived aboard Rivier’s yacht for more than two years. During that time, she became a junkie, using the heroin to deaden herself to her predicament.

Then one night, four months before Louis and I got the call from her grandfather, Kim said she overheard Rivier tell Whitey and the Nose that it was time to get rid of her, that the drugs had made her a liability. They were moored in the harbor at Marseille, one of the few times the yacht was so close to land.