Full Black - Brad Thor [67]
Her jewelry went first. Then she traded in her leased Mercedes for a much cheaper hybrid vehicle. She could claim all she wanted that she was trying to “give the earth a hug,” but Ralston knew why she’d made the switch.
Ava’s father called him a week later and told him that Ava had reached out for a sizable loan. He wanted to confirm what it was for and Ralston told him the truth. Ava’s drug problem was completely out of hand. The soap opera had placed her on a leave of absence. Even their makeup artists couldn’t hide what Ava was doing to herself.
Though Ralston probably should have left her for real and allowed her to hit bottom, he couldn’t. He stayed with her, but to his credit, he never gave her a single cent. Neither would her father, as it turned out, but Ralston didn’t learn that until later.
Ava’s family—her mother, father, and Alisa—had joined in a united front. They would pay for rehab, if she would fully commit to it, but other than that, she was on her own.
Alisa kept in contact with Ralston from that point forward. Ava was so angry with her family for not “helping her out” that she stopped speaking to them.
When Ava finally lost her apartment, Ralston knew that if he didn’t let her move in with him, some opportunist would take her in and get her to do God only knew what. As screwed up as she was, he loved her. He wasn’t a complete idiot, though. He still had to work during the day and so cleared all of the booze out of his house, along with anything of value she might be tempted to steal and pawn for drugs. He also quit drinking, hoping that by setting a good example, he could help her get clean. It didn’t work.
Ava used the brains her family was renowned for, and what little of her looks she had left, to get what her addiction-riddled body needed. Bad people reentered her life from an earlier time, before Ralston. Alisa, though, did know them, and she warned him to keep them away from her. Ava was circling the drain. There was little Ralston could do, short of kidnapping her and taking her deep into the mountains somewhere to go completely cold turkey.
He decided that there was no other option. If she kept going like this, she was going to kill herself. He began looking for a cabin to rent and started studying the phases of detoxification and what to expect.
Alisa bought a stack of nutritional books aimed at rebalancing the body and had them sent over to his apartment. She also offered to pay for half of the expenses for renting the cabin. Ralston appreciated her offer. He wasn’t exactly rolling in money.
He was wrapping up a project with a studio and figured he could be on the road to the cabin with Ava in two weeks. Ava had even mentioned that if they could “just get away,” she thought she could hit the reset button on her life. It made him feel better about his plan. Maybe there was hope after all.
That hope faded after about two days. Ava’s hybrid was repossessed, and at first Ralston thought that might be a good thing. It was better that she wasn’t driving. Then she took another turn for the worse.
She disappeared for three days and came back with needle marks in her arms. When Ralston asked her where she had been, she told him she didn’t want to talk about it. She pushed past him and went into the bathroom to take a shower. She was in there for hours, and Ralston could hear her crying the entire time. He needed to get her the hell out of L.A.
He called the producer he was working for at the time and asked to be let go early. The producer said that they couldn’t afford to replace him at the moment and said that he was sorry, but Ralston would have to stay.
Ralston went in to work the next day and when he came home, Ava was gone again.
At two in the morning, she called him crying. She was incoherent, but he managed to get her to tell him where she was.
The abandoned house was near Crenshaw Boulevard in L.A.’s dangerous Hyde Park area. Ralston kicked in the door. There were empty liquor bottles, beer cans, and cigarette butts, but no Ava.
In the back portion of the house, he found