A Nuclear Family

Chapter 1

Angie woke up to a kiss from her husband, their bedroom aglow with the light of the rising sun though the curtains. He was dressed in a dark suit with a white shirt and deep red tie, holding his briefcase in the hand that was not pulling her face to his. When he pulled away, she smiled. It was such a nice way to wake up. For so much of her life, reality had felt no different than the nightmares she woke from, but ever since she had married John, things were different. They had met while she was in college, and he had graduated a few years prior. He had built his company from the ground up, successful enough to support them both alone within only a few years. They married immediately after she graduated, and she never did anything with her Art History degree, not that there was really much she could've done with it anyways.
The house they lived in now had been built for them, and it was everything she could've dreamed of. It was 2 stories, plus an attic and a basement. There was a swimming pool out back, a racquetball court and a gun room in the basement, which was always locked, for safety purposes, and John carried the only key.
"I'm heading to the office, babydoll. I'll see you at 7." He spoke softly, in a familiar, deep voice that Angie found so reassuring. It was the voice that had gotten her through her darkest times, comforted her, inspired her, given her confidence.
She smiled sleepily. "I love you," she murmured, kissing him again.
"I love you, my darling," he said, kissing her once more, this time on the forehead. She laid her head back down and he pulled the covers up over her snugly before leaving the room. Angie drifted back to sleep for a little while before she had to wake up and make the kids breakfast, while John climbed into the drivers seat of his black '77 Cadillac convertible and backed out of the driveway, heading towards his office.
His 'office' was his center of operations, and it was, in actuality, an entire 5 story office building that looked perfectly normal from the outside, but had been gutted on the inside to suit his purposes. All the right people had been paid off, and no one ever came to inspect anything, and no one, no one got past the security system without permission.
He had hidden his opperation in plain sight, appearing even under the closest bureaucratic microscope to be a legitimate insurance company and nothing more.
'Insurance' was only one of his avenues of revenue, however. The building produced meth and coke in the basement, contained by thick fire walls to contain any damage in case of an accident, and to be barricaded off and concealed like a large panic room in the event of police involvement. The door down to it was in the back of a closet, just like every staircase in the house, designed to be covered by a door that looked like a wall at the press of a button on John's cell phone. They would be impossible to find if John did not want it to be found. The first floor was a maze of hallways, various rooms, and dead ends. Grunt level employees dressed as business men were required to memorize the paths to the place they needed to go, and nowhere else, so that they could not take advantage of the information. The second floor was  where important business deals took place in the front, and where his well-armed 'travelling salesmen' received their assignments in the back.
The third floor was drug packaging and processing, brought up from the basement on dumbwaiters. The fourth floor was the armory, and the fifth floor was split half and half, a shooting range on one side, and John's personal office on the other.
That day, he walked through the front doors, made like most of the building exterior from bulletproof, one way glass. With a nod to the security guard standing behind it, he was admitted through a second set of doors, and into the maze of corridors. He made his way through the familiar path to the elevators, entering his personal ID code that allowed him access to the entire building and going up to the second floor. The elevator let him off in the back half of the floor, where there were a few of his minor executives giving field agents their assignments.
He smiled to himself as he noticed them trying not to stare at him walking by, the sudden nervous tension in the room. These men all knew who he was. They respected his authority, and we're afraid of it. Several of them had seen first hand exactly what he was capable of.
He walked through a door into the front half of the floor, and towards a man flanked by 2 of John's security guard. He was a Mexican with a scar on his face, a little shorter than John. The representative he had arranged to meet with from a large Mexican marijuana cartel.
John smiled charismatically, reaching out to shake the man's hand. The man obliged, clearly nervous, his hands shaky and sweaty. He didn't blame him, his security was rough around the edges, and his reputation even rougher.
"Mr. Hernandez, I presume."
"Er, yes," the man replied in a Mexican accent.
"I recently received a proposal from your organization, and I'd like to present your boss with a counter offer."
"He is staying in a nearby hotel" the man said through his accent. "But refuses to leave his suite. He insists that you must meet with him there, where he will not be seen by any cameras. He is a very paranoid man," the Mexican spoke apologetically, and he looked very unhappy to be the bearer of this news.
John considered for a moment.
"Very well. You two," he looked at the guards, "come with us."
The guards blindfolded the man, and then John led all three down to the ground level, instructing one guard to sit in the back with the Mexican and the other in the passenger seat.
The guard getting into the seat next to him picked a cell phone up off the seat, holding it out to him.
It was Angie's cell phone. He put it in his coat pocket, hoping that she would he alright without it until the end of the day, and drove off, following the Mexican's directions to the Imperial Plaza Hotel.
-
While this was happening, Angie had just finished sending the kids off to school. She went upstairs to the bedroom to grab her phone off the nightstand, but it wasn't there.
"Fuck," she swore to herself, allowing herself the luxury when the kids were away. She couldn't remember where she had put it last night.
Pulling out her laptop, she looked up the gps tracker on her phone, and was relieved to see that it was at her husband's office. She must have left it in his car.
But then, she was just about to close her laptop, when the signal on the screen started moving. It was 9 o'clock in the morning, he couldn't be taking his lunch yet. Could he?
She watched the dot that was her husband move slowly across the map, waiting anxiously to see where it went. After about 10 minutes it stopped, and Angie zoomed in on the location. When she saw where it was, her blood started to boil. The Imperial Plaza Hotel? What was the bastard doing at a hotel at 9 o'clock in the morning? She was in shock, she couldn't believe that her husband would cheat on her, but there seemed to be no other explanation. Determined to get to the bottom of it, she grabbed her keys angrily and drove off in a cherry red Corvette, one of her husband's, breaking every traffic law to get there as fast as possible. She squealed into the hotel parking lot, pulling in fast to an empty spot. Getting out of the car, she was horrified to see her husband's Cadillac parked an aisle over.