Chapter 6 - The Freeze and the Audit
The holding cell at the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center smelled of industrial pine cleaner, cold floor wax, and human defeat.
Derek sat on a stainless-steel bench, his designer linen trousers now stained with gray grime from the patrol wagon floor. His phone had been confiscated; his platinum watch was sealed in a plastic evidence bag; his shoelaces were gone.
Across the partition of the non-contact visitation booth, his mother, Brenda Vance, was pressing both palms against the reinforced glass.
"It’s that bitch," Brenda wept, her mascara running in greasy black rivers down her powdered cheeks. "I told you, Derek. I told you three years ago when you brought her to Thanksgiving. She had that cold, northern look in her eyes. People with that kind of money don't know how to be family. They don't have warmth. They don't understand that a wife’s job is to support her husband's people!"
"Mom," Derek groaned, pressing his forehead against the cold metal shelf. His head was pounding with a migraine that felt like a hot spike behind his eyes. "Shut up about Thanksgiving. Did you get the bail money?"
Brenda’s weeping stopped abruptly.
Her hands slipped an inch down the glass. "Well... that's why I'm here, sweetie. Peter went to the bond office. The judge set it at one hundred and fifty thousand dollars."
Derek’s head snapped up. "One hundred and fifty? For a domestic dispute? That’s insane! Peter should have argued it down to ten! I have no priors!"
"The judge saw the hospital pictures, Derek," Brenda whispered, looking around nervously as if the corrections officers were listening—which they were. "Peter said the prosecutor brought in full-color eight-by-tens of her throat. They’re treating the coffee as a caustic weapon under the enhanced domestic violence statutes. To get you out, we need fifteen thousand cash for the bondsman."
"So pay it!" Derek yelled, his voice cracking against the glass. "Go to my home office in the condo—"
"The condo is locked, Derek!" Brenda wailed. "Suzanne tried to go back with a locksmith! There’s an armed private security guard stationed outside the elevator door! They threatened to arrest her for trespassing! And your corporate account..."
Derek felt a cold, oily dread slide into his gut. "What about my corporate account?"
"The bank cards aren't working. Suzanne went to the ATM to pull the five thousand for Peter's retainer, and the machine swallowed the card. It said 'Account Frozen by Order of Corporate Trustee.'"
"No," Derek whispered. "No, no, no. That's my agency. Vance-Creative is *my* firm."
"Peter called your partner, Greg," Brenda said, her voice shaking so badly she could barely pronounce the syllables. "Greg said Skylar's family trust withdrew their operational credit line at noon. He said the trust owned seventy percent of the non-voting preferred shares. He said without the King logistics account, the firm has six thousand dollars in liquid cash and eighty thousand dollars in rent due on the Brickell office on Monday."
Brenda leaned closer, her breath fogging the partition.
"Greg resigned, Derek. He packed his monitors and walked out at two o'clock. He told Peter to tell you that if you call his cell phone again, he’s giving the forensic files to the IRS."
Derek’s hands began to shake.
Truly shake, not with the performative anger he used to intimidate me at the breakfast table, but with the cold, animal realization that the scaffolding holding up his entire existence had been kicked away.
He had spent four years playing the high-rolling South Beach executive. He had leased the Maserati under the corporate account; he had charged his bespoke suits to the trust's promotional expense line; he had taken Suzanne on five-star trips to Aspen and St. Barts, writing them off as "client hospitality" because I had never bothered to audit the secondary cards.
I had been too busy running an actual freight company.
I had been managing twelve container vessels, four hundred dockworkers, and twenty-eight million dollars in intermodal contracts while Derek played business in a glass office, pretending that his little boutique marketing agency was an equal partner in our life.
"Where is she?" Derek asked, his voice barely a rasp. "Where is Skylar?"
"Nobody knows," Brenda sniveled. "She checked out of the hospital. She's not at the penthouse. Her assistant told Peter that all communications must go through Arthur Campbell's office, and Arthur told Peter that if he sends another email, he’s filing a motion for sanctions."
Brenda pressed her handkerchief against her nose.
"Derek... Suzanne had to put her car in the impound lot because the lease was sixty days past due. We don't have fifteen thousand dollars. We have eleven hundred dollars in the credit union."
Derek sat back on the steel bench.
The light in the visitation booth hummed—a low, rhythmic 60-hertz buzz that sounded like an execution timer.
He looked down at his bare feet, at the gray calluses on his heels, at the cheap canvas slip-ons the county had given him.
For the first time in his life, Derek Vance realized that the world did not belong to him.
He was not the prince of Biscayne Bay.
May you like
He was just a man in a jumpsuit who had thrown a twenty-dollar ceramic mug at a woman who could buy his entire family five times over without checking her balance.
***
