‘There’s my girl.’ Kip Kilpatrick was standing at the top of the floating glass staircase. As usual, he had a basketball in his hands. The guy couldn’t go anywhere without the damn thing. He said, ‘I need you after this. My office.’
‘We’ll see.’ Angie brushed past him. She checked the room, looking for a familiar face. None of the big names had arrived yet. It was mostly twenty-somethings in skinny suits drinking Cristal like it was water.
She saw a large-scale architectural model underneath the LED sign. This was what the party was all about. The last pieces of the All-Star deal had finally come together. They were going to break ground in exactly two weeks. Angie looked down at the glass-enclosed model. Converted warehouses. Open-air shopping. Grocery store. Movie theater. Farmers’ market. Chic restaurants. Marcus Rippy’s abandoned nightclub.
Abandoned no more. The team would go in a week from now to spiff the place up. The club anchored the All-Star Complex, an almost-three-billion-dollar venture that all the agency’s big stars had invested in. And some of the little stars, too. Kilpatrick was in for ten million. Two other agents had invested half that. Then there was the team of lawyers, an international cavalcade of leeches who, as far as Angie could see, were worth every freaking dime.
Will had tried to crack the lawyers a month ago and come out the loser. Angie had been rooting for him. She really had been. He had faced them all across the weirdly large conference table, doing his best to get any kind of answer. Marcus and LaDonna Rippy were almost secondary. Every time Will opened his mouth, Marcus looked at the lawyers and the lawyers spun the answer into a kind of beautiful gibberish that only a Martian or a politician could understand.
Angie had watched the entire thing from her office one floor down. Will had no idea that everything in the conference room was recorded. He sure as shit didn’t know she was close by. On her screen she could see him looking more and more frustrated as the lawyers threw out more and more obstacles. All Angie could do was shake her head. Poor thing. He was asking Marcus questions when he should’ve been talking to LaDonna.
‘Hey, doll.’ Laslo was leaning against a desk. A flute of champagne was in his hand. He was wearing his usual tight black pants and shirt. The look wasn’t bad. He had a fantastic body. And a bitchy nose for fashion. He glanced down at her shoes. ‘How much?’
‘Fifty,’ she said, annoyed that he had noticed they were knockoffs. Thanks to her job, she finally had enough cash in the bank to buy the real thing, but they weren’t as comfortable as the fakes and her back could only take so much standing around before it started to spasm.
He said, ‘We gotta thing later.’
‘Kip already flagged me.’
Laslo sipped his champagne. They both watched Kip tossing the basketball in the air. His eyes were on the door to the lobby. He was like a lovelorn schoolgirl. Like Sara Linton waiting for Will to come home.
My heart jumps in my chest every time I hear his key in the door.
‘Yo.’ Laslo snapped his fingers. ‘You in there?’
She took his glass and downed the champagne. ‘What does Kip want?’
Laslo shushed his finger to his lips and walked away.
‘Ma’am?’ A good-looking waiter offered her a tray of champagne glasses.
Angie wasn’t old enough to be a God damm ma’am. She snatched a glass off the tray. She walked across the room, picking her way past the Snotleighs and Bratleighs who made up the 110 Sports Management team.
Five months ago, she had tapped Dale Harding for a job. He’d been his usual asshole self about it, but Angie knew how to be an asshole, too. She’d told him that she needed money to pay off her dealer. He’d believed her, because Dale’s life was filled with dealers and bookies who took out interest with their fists. Angie had never had a dealer problem. What she had was a Kip Kilpatrick problem. She needed a way into the agent’s inner circle, and Dale was ideally equipped to understand the expertise that Angie could bring to the table.
Many of Kip’s clients were from the street. They missed the girls they used to have fun with. Angie knew these girls. She understood how their habits were grinding them into the ground. Backing off the pipe or needle a little, cleaning up a little, and letting a rich basketball player show them a good time was a hell of a lot easier on their bodies than throwing down in the back seat of twenty different cars every single day. And if it put a little money in Angie’s pocket, all the better.
That had turned out to be the easy part. Kip’s inner circle was a harder nut to crack. The agent had kept Angie at arm’s length. He had Laslo. He had Harding. He didn’t need some broad busting heads for him. All of that had changed the day Angie ran into the bad end of LaDonna Rippy.
The meeting was a fortuitous accident. Angie was sitting across from Kip at the glass table he used as a desk. They were discussing compensation for a girl who’d had it a little rough from one of Kip’s players. The negotiation was winding down when LaDonna had slammed open the door. Rippy’s wife was an Amazon, the kind of woman who wasn’t afraid to pull the loaded gun she kept in her purse. She was mad about something Angie could no longer remember. LaDonna got mad about a lot of things. Angie had suggested a solution, LaDonna had gone away less pissed off, and Kip had asked Angie on the spot if she wanted a more permanent job.
Angie didn’t want a permanent anything, but she knew that Marcus Rippy had been charged with rape and she knew that Will was working the other side of the case.
Talk about romantic. Sara could praise him for lifting a stupid bag of dirt but she couldn’t hand him evidence on a silver platter that broke open his case.
That had been Angie’s initial plan, at least. She had honestly meant to help Will. Then she had seen how much more lucrative it would be to help the case go away. Looking after Will didn’t put food on the table. Bribing a few witnesses was nothing she hadn’t done before. If Angie hadn’t been willing to do it, Harding would have, and if Harding hadn’t, then Laslo would’ve stepped in. When you looked at it that way, it was Angie’s patriotic duty to make sure the job went to a woman.
The room started to hush. Marcus Rippy was here. LaDonna was at his side. Her long blonde hair was curled tight, draping over her shoulders. She must have gotten Botoxed this morning. Tiny red dots showed through the almost white powder she used to cover acne scars. She looked pissed, but that could be from a recent plastic surgery. Or it could just be her general disposition. She had a lot to be angry about. Marcus had been her high-school sweetheart. They were married at eighteen. She was pregnant at nineteen. By that time, he was already stepping out on her, drawn to the women who were drawn to his fame.
Of course, LaDonna had been clueless about the other women. At least at that point. She started working as a hotel maid when Marcus attended Duke on a full scholarship. Because of strict NCAA eligibility rules, her paycheck was the only thing that had kept the family afloat. There were a lot of ups and downs in those early years, including an almost-career-ending injury that had cost him his scholarship and kept him out of his first draft.
LaDonna had stood by her man. She had taken on a second job, then a third. Marcus had trained his ass off and come back to what was considered one of the shittiest sophomore seasons in history. He almost got cut from the team, but then something happened. He found his groove. He grew up a little. He’d had another kid by then, and an ailing mother who needed hospice, and a father who wanted to make amends. Marcus Rippy had turned into a superstar and finally LaDonna’s hard work had paid off.