by Dale Mayer
*
Fallon and Wagner only heard the last part, as they came out the front door, just in time to realize who Linny and Quinn were talking to, with the barbs slinging back and forth.
“Interesting that he came by,” Fallon muttered.
“And who’s that one?” Wagner asked.
“Somebody you need to talk to.”
“And speaking of talking to you,” Linny said, looking at Wagner. “When did you guys let that guy Keith go from the police station?”
“We only kept him for a few hours of questioning. He was supposed to come back today.”
“Well, I guess he didn’t make his appointment then, did he?”
He glared at her. “Not my fault,” he said. “We didn’t have any reason to keep him.”
“Well, how about for a mental exam?” she muttered.
“Just because he was unstable doesn’t mean that we can just hold him. He must be a danger to himself or others.”
“Well, whatever he was doing,” she said, “it’s got nothing to do with Bullard at least.”
“Says you,” Wagner replied.
“Why would you say that?” she asked, slowly turning to look at him.
“Because we did find something on this Keith person.”
She looked at Fallon, surprised. “What did you find?” she asked Wagner.
His tone was grim, as he said, “A message.” He looked at Quinn. “You wouldn’t have seen it if you just checked his pockets. But a message was written on his arm, in permanent ink.”
“I’m scared to ask,” Quinn said, wincing. “What’s the message?”
“Just because he’s gone, doesn’t mean you’re safe. Besides those words was the Kingdom Securities logo.”
They stared at each other.
She asked Fallon, “Is that a message about Bullard?”
“You can’t assume that,” Wagner said.
“Like hell we can’t,” Fallon said. “So who the hell in our circles would have any clue about these guys? Are they just getting us all stirred up as part of their fun?”
“It’s possible,” Wagner said. “We don’t have any answers yet.”
“We never have any answers.” She turned and stormed back toward the vehicle.
Quinn looked at Fallon. “No other IDs, no tattoos?” he asked.
Fallon shook his head. “Just the logo, from Kingdom Securities.”
“Shit,” Quinn said. “So we’re back to that again?”
“Looks like it,” Fallon replied. “Deedee’s rogue guys are still out there, and, now that she’s dead, nobody’s got a handle on them at all.”
“So why did we come over to Africa? Maybe we should have stayed over there in Paris.”
“We’re over here because obviously they’re here too,” he reminded Quinn.
Quinn shook his head. Just then a vehicle caught his attention. A black truck.
Fallon followed his gaze as it approached and said, “Have you seen that truck before?”
Quinn said, “Yeah. It came by a few minutes ago, driving slow.”
When it got up beside them, weapons were suddenly shoved out the windows, and gunshots ripped through the air.
Chapter 13
Linny screamed as gunfire filled the air. But she was tackled from the side, as Fallon threw her to the ground behind their vehicle. Fallon held her close.
As soon as the gunfire ended, the vehicle ripped away and took off.
“What a little bastard,” she said, trying to sit up. But Fallon wouldn’t let her go. “Are you hurt?” she asked, turning around to look at him.
He sat up grimly. “It’s just a graze.” Sure enough, he’d taken a bullet across his arm, enough to split the skin and to burn the flesh underneath.
She gasped, as she immediately looked for something to staunch the bleeding.
“It’s fine,” he said, as he called out, “Quinn?”
“Yeah, I’m okay,” he said. “I took a little nick, but that’s all.”
“Me too,” Fallon replied. “Wagner, what about you?”
Silence.
Fallon bolted to his feet, and she came flying after him, racing toward the fallen man. As they approached, she gasped and fell to her knees, “Oh! Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”
Wagner was on the ground, bleeding from an ugly shoulder wound. They kept pressure on it to slow the bleeding.
“Oh, my God,” she kept saying. Then she gave herself a hard shake. “Was this meant for Wagner?”
“I don’t think so,” Quinn said. “I was standing right beside him. Something caught my eye on the ground, and I’d bent down, thinking it might be a key when the shooting started. So I’ve got a graze on my arm, but I missed getting hit.”
They stared at each other, as they all realized just how close a call that had been.
“Okay, things are getting seriously ugly here,” she muttered, as she looked down at Wagner. “I feel really sad for him.”
“I’ll be fine,” Wagner snapped. “Just resting, with my eyes closed. Don’t count me out yet.”
“It’s also the work he does,” Fallon said. “Normally we would say this investigation would be pretty easy, but obviously it’s gotten a whole lot worse right now.”
She looked up at him. “Do you think it has something to do with the message?”
“I would think so,” Fallon said. “We didn’t look to see if the door was triggered.”
“No, because it looked like the police had already been and gone,” Quinn muttered. They bent down, studying Wagner.
“We’ll have to call this in,” Quinn said, standing up and stepping away from them. “Give me a minute to make the calls.”
As Fallon tried to pull her back to the safety of the vehicle, she said, “No, I’m not leaving him here like this.”
“That’s fine. We can stay here as long as that vehicle doesn’t come back,” he said. “We’re sitting ducks out here.”
“I hear you,” she said, “but Wagner’s here because of us.”
Fallon hugged her tight against him, as he whispered, “I know. I know that. But we can’t be blamed for all this. I’m sorry you had to see that, but this kind of stuff is what makes our world so ugly.”
“It sucks,” she muttered. She gave him a hard hug and then turned to look at him and said, “So how do we make this a whole lot less dangerous for everybody around us?”
“Take it away from the public,” he said immediately. “Imagine if somebody had come out of that apartment building?” Even now, people were peering through windows and doors, just to see if it was safe. Some ventured out the front door. Fallon smiled and said, “Look at them. They’re all coming out to see if it’s okay.”
“Curiosity?”
“To a certain extent, but also just the fact that an awful lot of noise was out here. They want to know what was happening.”
“Understood,” she muttered.
Quinn came back moments later. “Cops are on the way,” he said.
“Is that a good thing?” she asked.
“It’s not a bad thing,” he said. “Also called Wagner’s office, and they’re leading this attack now.”
“And the message on Keith’s arm?”
“I’m not certain about the meaning of that. However, you can get ready for some pretty intensive questioning,” Quinn said quietly. “It’s one thing for them to have Wagner handling all this. It’s another thing completely when somebody went after Wagner himself.”
“Is that what we think happened?” she said.
“I don’t know, but what I can tell you,” he said, “is that the next couple hours will be intense.”
*
To say it was intense was to put it mildly. Once Wagner’s team arrived, things were taken completely out of their control. Fallon saw a certain amount of calming on Linny’s part, once the professionals stepped in. Though he didn’t want to give her a false sense of security over something like this because the gunmen could just as easily
have been one or more of Wagner’s teammates. But Fallon didn’t want to consider that either.
By the time they had finished with all the questions, she looked absolutely exhausted and heartsick. Then they were finally released. It was well into the afternoon, and they’d seen several of the locals coming and going, trying to get details and answers. The whole time a large circle of curiosity-seekers surrounded them.
By the time they finally loaded up into their vehicle and left, Fallon said, “I think everybody and their dog was out there.”
“I saw the woman we spoke with out there too,” Linny muttered. “It’s not surprising that she would want to know what happened. What I wonder is whether she had any part in it. I wanted to walk over and say something to her but figured it was better off if I didn’t.”
“You don’t know how she would have reacted.”
“She also probably doesn’t know about her friend Ben being dead.”
“Right.”
“Still, I feel so sad for Wagner. I know his wound’s not as bad as it was bloody, but still he’ll need a few days to recover.”
Fallon did too, but this wasn’t the time to deal with it.
“I contacted Ice as well,” Quinn said.
“Well, it’s not all one issue,” she murmured. “Obviously we have something else mixed into this.”
“Actually,” Fallon said, his tone dark, “I think someone was using more vulnerable members of society to make their agenda happen.”
Quinn looked at him, even though he was driving, and said, “You want to elaborate?”
But she jumped in and said, “That’s actually a good idea. I mean, I hate to say it, but it’s, you know, from a killer’s perspective, probably a good idea.”
“Yes,” Fallon murmured. “But it leaves people vulnerable here who could later expose you.”
“Right.”
At that, Quinn pulled off to the side of the road and said, “Okay, English, please.”
“Not a whole lot to say,” Fallon said. “Just that we think somebody was using people from this chat group, who all lived in a certain area near here and who all had a connection to the compound. Who knows how he found out about that connection, but anybody who saw these pictures would know, right? But they used the art forum nuts to get to us. They used these guys as pawns, then took them out one by one, cleaning up behind them without a care, in order to get to us.”
“Yet why would you take out all these people just to send a message? Why not come to the compound and completely annihilate us?” she asked.
“She’s right. Has to be another reason in there,” Quinn said.
“Maybe somebody was doing a quid pro quo,” Fallon muttered.
Quinn nodded slowly. “That would make sense. You get rid of this person because that’s what I want, and I’ll do the same for you.”
“But who’s connected to all this?” she asked. “Who would do something like that?”
“Now that is what we don’t know,” Fallon muttered.
Chapter 14
As soon as they got home, Linny needed something to do to keep her busy and decided on making an early dinner. She went to the fridge and pulled out the steaks she’d planned on cooking tonight. She looked at the men and said, “Anybody up for barbecue?”
“That sounds like a good idea,” he said. “We’ll go check security.”
She nodded and said, “I’ll season these and let them sit for a while and get a big salad ready. Then I’m heading for the pool. If there’s one thing I need right now, it’s a little stress relief.”
“Got it,” Fallon said. “You go do that.”
She headed back to the kitchen, seasoned the steaks, and threw together a salad, trying to focus only on the pool that waited for her. She went up to her room and quickly changed into her bathing suit. Grabbing her towel, she headed down to the pool, spread her towel over a lawn chair, and, standing at the edge of the cold clear water, she dove right in.
This is what she needed. As soon as the water crashed over her head, she felt some of the stress coming off her shoulders. Immediately she broke through the surface and started out with a steady front crawl. She swam one length and then another. And then back and forth again. Such coiled-up tension ran through her that she needed an outlet of some kind.
She expected the men to join her as soon as they were done with their security checks, whatever that meant in this case. She had a good idea of how the place ran, but she wasn’t up on all the latest things that they had to work on. And it was still a crazy system they had. It was intense, with a lot of monitors. She needed to learn it, just as she had learned the previous one.
When she finally came to a stop, she pulled herself out of the water and sat here, her back to the house, just studying her surroundings, spending a few minutes trying to enjoy the Zen backyard space that Uncle Dave had worked so hard on. Bullard had designed a lot of it, and Uncle Dave continuously improved it. Her uncle was really talented, and he had spent a lot of his life here, so it was home for him. She couldn’t imagine him ever leaving.
Then, with a pang, she thought about herself ever leaving it too. Change was hard, and change like this was even more brutal. She stretched, stood, and walked to a patch of sunlight, where she did several yoga moves to slow down the rest of the stress eating away at her.
By the time she was done, she walked to the lawn chair, stretched out, and closed her eyes. A little bit of a nap could never hurt, especially with all that had gone on over the last few days. Soon she drifted in and out of sleep. She heard somebody come out and check on her, mumbled to him, then rolled over and went back to sleep again. When she woke the next time from her power nap, she felt a whole lot better.
She sat up, stretched again, and walked back to the kitchen. The steaks sat where she’d left them, and, for that matter, everything else had been left as is too. She walked to the fridge to see if the guys had put any beer in. Normally they kept it full and cold, but the last few days had been anything but normal. Not hearing anything, she walked into the command center and found no one there. She kept on going throughout the house, looking for the men. Only as she went back upstairs to their rooms did she get seriously worried.
She grabbed her phone from the pocket of her coverup and sent Fallon a text. Where are you?
When she got no answer, she felt her blood run cold. The compound was huge, but did somebody get in while she was sleeping? Just the thought made her cringe, to think that somebody might have seen her in the pool, or even worse, while she’d been stretched out asleep on the lawn chair. But she saw absolutely nothing to confirm a stranger was here or that the men had left.
She quickly raced to the garage, but all the vehicles were still there. Slowly she walked back to the kitchen and then outside to the lawn chair, where she had been, and started fresh. From there she followed back to where the men had said they would be, then she texted everybody she knew, but nobody had heard from the men. She went back up to her bedroom, quickly changed, again came back downstairs, wondering what her options were. Because the way it looked now, she was alone and on her own because Fallon and Quinn were missing.
Had they been taken?
They wouldn’t have left her behind intentionally. She remembered somebody coming out while she slept by the pool, but surely the guys wouldn’t have left without her?
In her heart of hearts, she didn’t believe that Fallon would have left her voluntarily. Deciding to give the place a complete sweep, searching every closet and every floor, she started in the basement and worked her way up. When she circled around to the garage, stepping inside, she saw a chain wrapped around one of the floor-to-ceiling cupboards and frowned. She headed over and, using a pry bar, with great difficulty managed to snap the chain.
As soon as she did, the double doors opened, and a man she’d never seen before crashed out. She stared at him in shock, automatically bending to see if he was alive. Not only was he not alive, but also he was recently dead
if the pool of blood inside the cupboard was anything to go by. Blood was all over him, as if he had taken a heavy blow and then had been immediately locked up. He was still warm too. But then, hell, she hadn’t been asleep very long either. This now changed the entire game.
She quickly took a picture of the guy’s face and sent it to Ice, with a text message. He’s dead.
Ice phoned a moment later and said, “Do you have a place you can lock yourself in?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I’m sure as hell not doing that if Fallon and Quinn are here somewhere and hurt.”
“I get it,” she said. “But, if you get hurt, that won’t help anybody.”
“None of this is helping us,” she said. “The last I heard, they would check on the security. I went to the pool, swam a few laps, and then I crashed, took a short nap.”
“Then all hell broke loose while you were out. I got it,” she said. “That’s the way the other end likes to work.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, that somebody waited for the perfect opportunity and probably jumped one of our guys, then the other.”
“And left me there, sleeping?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Ice said apologetically, “but they probably didn’t think that you were much of a threat.”
She gave a stark cry at that. “Then I need to find him,” she said fiercely. “I’m not losing Fallon, now that I’m finally with him.”
A strangled note came from Ice. “With him?”
“We’ve been dancing around this for years, and now we’re together,” she added fiercely. “I’m not losing that.”
“I get it,” she said. “We’ve got men coming toward you.”
“Doesn’t matter if they are or they’re not,” she said. “They’ll be walking into a trap.”
“And you have to expect that,” she said. “Whatever is going on right now, they have probably got whoever it is, still there, waiting for you to do something, playing with you.”
