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It didn’t even surprise me, either.
We dealt with a lot of shady people who did a lot of shady things. While Quin would never sign on to do a job like someone had signed up to do for Blairtown Chem–the bodily harm of an innocent woman–we did, on occasion, help fix situations for equally sketchy corporations. Mistresses who were threatening to go public, love children who would seriously fuck with the morality clauses signed at the time of employment, even angry children out to destroy their parents’ reputation. It was all harmless. We never physically hurt anyone. But we did enough business with those kinds of people to know that they would do anything–anything at all–to protect their reputations and their money. No matter the cost.
We had to take them down if we wanted Gemma to be able to get back to her life.
Now, in what way we took them down, well, that depended on a lot of factors.
Like if Nia could get remote access to Phillip’s computer, could dig through things more thoroughly than Gemma had been able to do, could find absolute proof of wrongdoing. And, the clincher, that they knew and disregarded the threat to the public health.
That would be the easiest path for us.
With that information, we could gather a packet, go to the police, claim someone from the company slipped us the information, but ran off before we could get more out of them. Or, well, we could also go to the good, old-fashioned blackmailing route.
We show them the evidence we have. We tell them that if they don’t back off, we go public.
It was non-traditional, though, in that we needed two things from them.
One, we needed to make sure they had no threats on Gemma’s life, that they would let her live until old age claimed her.
But, two, we needed them to scrap that new product.
It was nonnegotiable.
Not just for Gemma’s conscience.
But for all of ours.
Now that we knew what was at stake, everyone was on-board about making sure that weed killer and the bug repellant never saw the light of day, never fell into innocent, unsuspecting hands, never ripped families apart.
I had been in this business long enough to know that getting a company like Blairtown Chem to agree to those blackmail terms would be hard. Maybe even impossible.
Which was why I had a third plan, one I was keeping from Gemma despite telling her that we needed to come from a place of honesty if we wanted things to work out. I had mentioned it to Quin. I had talked about it at length with Bellamy when Gemma was showering or sleeping.
If nothing else worked, there was always our last-resort method of fixing a problem.
Bellamy.
And his particular brand of services.
With maybe a little bit of help from Finn to make sure nothing could ever be traced back.
See, sometimes, people who got involved in big, ugly, deadly cover-ups, well, they had a crisis of conscience. They couldn’t go on. They couldn’t live with it.
So they took their own lives.
Sometimes they even left a note explaining why so the problem could be dealt with after they were gone.
If we had to handle it that way, it could be arranged. A suicide note confession and a noose around the neck or fatal dose of something in the medicine cabinet or even a shot to the head.
If all else failed, we had that option.
The problem was, I knew it had to be avoided at all costs.
Gemma, well, I wasn’t sure she could ever handle that knowledge. I wasn’t sure she would ever be able to look at me in the eye again after knowing it had been my idea, that I had been the one to okay it happening.
Keeping it from her indefinitely was an equally unpleasant prospect.
I hadn’t been putting on a show for her when I talked about honesty. I believed that. Sure, it was okay to have private thoughts, things you didn’t tell your partner. But the big shit, that needed to be shared.
This would be big shit.
Not sharing it would be a crack in the foundations that never got repaired. We could keep building, but I would always know it was there; I would always be worrying that someday, it might split open wide and take down everything we had created.
I didn’t want to live that way.
I would if I had to.
But I wanted things to work out some other way.
“Of fucking course,” I grumbled as I pulled up in front of the address Gemma had–a bit grudgingly–given me.
There was a reason clichés existed.
Because there were dozens and dozens of people who reinforced them. With their thoughts. With their actions.
Rylan was a prime example of a cliché in real life.
The paranoid investigative filmmaker who found himself in the middle of a corporate conspiracy.
