Midnight Trust

by M. L. Buchman

  Renata, on the other hand, had seemed so warm and open. He’d watched from a distance as she drank and joked with the others around the campfire. Had watched as she’d taken one of the men off into the trees and had listened to the friendly catcalls that had followed them each night. Most of those men were dead now. He flashed on the image of the man who had come at him with a knife as Chad had taken the last motorcycle. La Capitana’s lover of previous nights—down and dead.

  He wondered if it pissed her off to know her lover was dead? Or was he just some random hombre she’d used to soothe that awesome body?

  That was the thing about women that was so different from the male drug runners. Men got even. They might be vicious, but by comparison the women were downright nasty. Women waited and then did something truly horrid—the guy losing his balls before being fed to the Orinoco crocodiles. Men tried to win. Women were all about getting even—bad enough to count in this life and the next.

  “Anything you want to be telling me?” he asked Tanya as the last of the jokes rattled about the group.

  She didn’t say a word.

  Way too chill.

  7

  Tanya glanced around the suite.

  Chad’s room was obvious by the beautiful Mk 21 sniper rifle he’d leaned inside the door. Not wanting to separate the man from his weapon, she set it outside before closing and locking the door.

  The room had its own bath. Not American large, but generous by Colombian standards—not that she cared. She used Chad’s toothbrush. She considered swirling it in the toilet before putting it back on the counter, but she might need it again later. Her own gear was—she couldn’t even remember where at this point.

  She stripped slowly. Partly because every muscle was stiff and sore. Partly because she hadn’t slept in long enough that she didn’t want to risk losing her balance accidently and ending up in the toilet herself. The failed attack on the drug lab had been two days ago or three? She couldn’t straighten it out. Adding “staying up all night to keep watch while Chad slept” to her grudge list didn’t help her mood.

  She’d definitely need to borrow a blouse. The bloody-stained hole that Melissa had hacked out of the shoulder to fix Chad’s gunshot wound wouldn’t go well out in public. Carla had the figure, but was about eight inches too short. Melissa was tall enough, but was so slender that there wasn’t a chance of her clothes fitting. Sofia landed halfway in between on both counts, but appeared to favor tighter clothes—her black t-shirt had certainly clung enough to show her fine physique.

  Clawing out of her khakis—which were only disgustingly dirty, not bloody or torn, so she’d deal with them later—she managed to drag herself into the glass shower enclosure.

  Hot.

  She ran the water hot and let it drag all the frustration, trail dust, and grime out of her hair. The soap stung like murder on her shoulder, but she scrubbed at it until the caked and dried blood stopped coloring the shower water at her feet. After she washed herself head to toe twice more, she decided that she wasn’t going to get any cleaner on the outside.

  Cranking the heat a little closer to full steam, she let it pound down upon her neck and back as she leaned her head against the stall’s wall.

  She needed to think.

  La Capitana taking on el Clan del Golfo…that had meaning. Somehow it tied into the delivery that Delta Force had interrupted at the ferry crossing. And somehow Chad had stepped back into her life.

  Tanya wasn’t big on regrets. Her father’s “fall” from the sidewalk. Leaving her mother and lecherous stepfather to rot in their homemade hell together. Each of the steps that had led her from the year of mandatory Army service into Mossad, and finally Kidon, had served her well. Her life as a counterterrorism assassin in defense of the homeland had left a trail of bodies behind her. Few of those bothered her either.

  Removing the Iranian nuclear scientists thankfully hadn’t been hers to do. That one had seemed borderline—they were scientists, not combatants or criminals or former Nazis.

  She’d spent most of her career in South America. Her father had been an Argentine Jew—though not a religious one before or after “moving back to the homeland.” He’d insisted that Tanya only speak Spanish at home, despite living in Tel Aviv. It had made her a loner in the neighborhood and became a true burden when she reached school. In vengeance, she’d learned German, Hebrew, Yiddish, and English—though the last was her weakest as Chad kept pointing out. She’d also learned how to win her own fights—which Chad might learn soon if he wasn’t careful.

  Yet in a life of so few regrets, she’d regretted leaving this team in the midst of a massive storm on Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela. For those three brief days, and one battle-filled night, she’d belonged.

  She shouldn’t miss that.

  It was weak.

  Tanya Zimmer was never weak. She’d spent a lifetime building the woman who was never weak. And she wouldn’t be weak now.

  When everyone was asleep, she would slide out and find a way to pick up la Capitana’s trail on her own. She was strong, but she was also very patient. If it took a year to track down her target, she’d do it, now that the woman was in her sights. She had a face, a very memorable one. That was more than anyone before had ever had.

  A hard slap, which she’d like to place on the other side of Chad’s face, turned off the water. She shoved open the glass door and confronted the large towel being held out in front of her.

  “Goddamn it, Chad!” If the bathroom was a little bigger, she’d place a roundhouse kick into that smug face. Of course a cheap door lock wouldn’t even slow down a Delta operator.

  “I stopped him halfway through the door.” Carla sat on the counter, almost bringing her to eye level with Tanya.

  “You probably just saved his life,” Tanya took the towel and began drying her hair as the steam swirled thickly about the small room. The white-and-blue tile walls were streaked with tears of condensation.

  “I would appreciate it if you didn’t kill any of my teammates. At least not without checking with me first.” Carla’s smile was always a surprise on the rare occasions when she let it out.

  “Fair enough. I shall give you warning on anyone other than Chad.”

  “Guess that’ll do.”

  “It is the best I will be giving you.” Since Carla didn’t show any signs of leaving, Tanya continued drying herself off.

  “Other than shooting you, what have you got against him?” Carla leaned back against the mirror and folded her hands in her lap as if she was some little girl, not a beautiful and lethal Delta operator. The first one to ever fight her way in through the full Delta Selection and Operator Training Course.

  “Other than shooting me?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Tanya kicked down the lid and sat on the toilet. The small room was still too hot and steamy to cover herself with the thick towel. “That isn’t enough?”

  “I know when I see a woman who is really pissed off. I’ve got a mirror after all.” She gestured to her own face and shook her head. “Not enough.”

  Carla had never been one to pull her punches, verbal or otherwise. They had the latter in common, but Tanya had often found the subtle approach more sustainable. Not so Carla.

  “Long time ago you called me ‘sister,’ Tanya.”

  “To confuse a hotel maid who had the very hots for both of us and much information we needed.”

  Carla smiled briefly at the memory, so briefly that it evaporated even faster than the last of the steam.

  Tanya casually draped the towel over her good shoulder and let it cascade down her front.

  “I never had a sister,” Carla’s tone was almost wistful. Once they’d stopped mistrusting each other, they had functioned with a near-sibling level of sympatico.

  “I haven’t had much luck with sisters. Mine killed herself when she was fourteen.” Then Tanya choked. She’d never told anyone about Jimena. She did her best to never think about her. And she wouldn’t now
either. Wouldn’t think about the massive drug overdose that had removed her older sister from her life. Or about how Father had “accidentally killed himself” stumbling off the sidewalk on the day of Jimena’s funeral. His abuse had driven Jimena to her addiction and her intentional overdose—Tanya had been the one to find the body and the note (a note she’d never shown to anyone).

  Carla nodded as if she’d said nothing unusual while Tanya tried to remember how to breathe. “I joined because of a dead brother. Shot in the head during a black ops mission.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “Do what? Join the Army?”

  “No, how did you just speak of him without wanting to cry?”

  Carla’s smile was sad this time. “Who says I did?”

  “Can one of you explain women to me?”

  Richie and Melissa were crouched over a laptop trying to composite together enough slices of Renata’s face into a single image to send off for recognition analysis—left eye from one image, nose and right eye from another but at a different angle. Kyle and Fred were online back to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, working to trace back the drug path they’d interrupted last night. Maybe, if they could figure out where the drugs originated, they could trace some link to la Capitana.

  Carla had slammed his own bedroom door in his face, and who knew what the hell she and Tanya were talking about. Carla read him the riot act—without saying a word. All he’d been planning to do was go talk to Tanya. Instead Carla had delivered a sound lambasting with a single, long, fulminating look and a stony silence. Shit but that woman was scary when she was on about something.

  Duane and Sofia had taken the last of their breakfast out onto the balcony. Chad had followed them out and they all sat looking at the vista of Medellín.

  The city fell away almost vertically below them. The core of the city had long since filled the narrow river valley. The poor had rapidly covered the surrounding hills, building barrios whose poverty became more and more staggering with each layer out from the city. And where there was abject poverty, the drug culture dug in its talons. Comuna 13, where the team now sat, had once contained the most violent barrios of any city anywhere—including Detroit. It was healing now, but Chad wasn’t heading back to Detroit anytime soon to see how they were doing.

  Their suite looked down on one of the signs of that change. It was a real oddity—the first of its kind anywhere. A thirty-story outdoor escalator wound its way up the face of the hillside. What had been a painful, hour-long commute along twisting, one-lane roads across the face of the steep hillside between the poor barrio and the promise of wealthy jobs below was now nine minutes on the escalator. With the new connections had come new developers. As workers flowed down the hill during the day, money had flowed up the hill each night, pushing back the drugs. It drove the violence outward, into the poorest and newest slums surrounding the city, but in another decade or so, perhaps they too would be as connected.

  If the city was healing itself, then what the hell was wrong with him?

  “You always said you knew everything about women, dude. Now you’re asking for advice?” Duane lay back in his lounger with a mug of chili-pepper hot chocolate in one hand and Sofia’s hand in the other.

  “Life made a shitload more sense back in the Green Berets, man.” Back then, men had been men and women had been available. Now?

  “Wouldn’t know. I was a Ranger.”

  “Pansy,” Chad accused him, but didn’t put any heat behind it. Duane was weirdly defensive about his old unit.

  They stared in silence out at the city as the morning sun warmed the night air from the typical low of sixties slowly toward the average midday seventies. Five thousand feet up in the Andes and six degrees off the equator, it never became too hot or too cold. He could see settling here. There’d be gangs to fight back for years to come. The food was such a far cry from the fare of Detroit—the one place on the entire planet he never intended to go back to. The nightclubs here were filled with hot music and hotter women who—

  “Would you like a woman’s opinion?” Sofia said softly.

  “Don’t bother,” Duane closed his eyes as if getting ready for a nap. “He already knows everything about women, just ask him.”

  He didn’t like it, but didn’t see any way around it. “Okay, hit me.”

  “I think Tanya already has done that.” Sofia was in her absolutely logical intel analyst mode. Why didn’t that sound good?

  “Try me anyway.”

  “It’s not women who are confusing you. It is one woman.”

  Crap! He’d been right. It wasn’t good.

  Carla handed Chad’s comb to her.

  Tanya took it with a sigh and began working at the snarls in her hair. Each stroke and the resultant twinge in her shoulder reminded her that he’d shot her, and each released snarl emphasized that wasn’t the problem.

  “He couldn’t make you so angry just by being himself.”

  “Sure he could.”

  Carla grimaced. “I suppose. But he isn’t often a real asshole unless he’s doing it intentionally.”

  “How can you tell with him?”

  “I never figured that out. He just knows that I can be much more of an asshole than he can, so he doesn’t mess with me.”

  “No sane person would mess with you.” Carla’s size had nothing to do with her intense competence. Also, she hadn’t picked up the nickname Wild Woman by being calm and predictable. Her fighting style reflected the same chaos—she was even more wholly unpredictable to her opponents than to her teammates.

  “Good. I like it that way. So does Chad, just in case you’re wondering.”

  “He likes being scary?”

  “He grew up on the streets. That’s all he’s ever told anyone about his past—not even Duane, as far as I know. Never once said a word about his parents.”

  Neither had she about hers. How had she not known that they shared the Street in common?

  “So, now what’s really bothering you about him?”

  “I’d prefer any other topic, which I’m guessing…”

  “Is off the table. There was no one to corner me on my shit, so I figure it’s the least I can do for my friends.”

  “Are we friends, Carla? That is definitely not something I have experience with.”

  “I have six.” Carla nodded toward the rest of the suite. “Total. And I’m married to one of them.”

  “What about Fred Smith?”

  Carla sighed. “Never imagined being friends with a CIA agent, but he’s a good guy. But would I trust him with my life?”

  A measure that sounded about right to Tanya.

  “Guess I have, a couple dozen times over the years. Okay, six friends and one husband. There’s also this woman who once called me sister,” Carla nodded to indicate her. “Melissa and Sofia can barely use my name without stumbling over themselves. They’re awesome, but treat me as something ‘other’.”

  “Because you scare the shit out of anyone who is sane?”

  Carla shrugged.

  “Good thing I’m loco.”

  “Good thing,” and once again that softer version of Carla showed through for an instant. “So, sister, you do know how far gone Chad is on you?”

  “Of course. So much that he shot me.”

  Carla’s look told her that was irrelevant. Chad’s loyalty was never in question, even if he’d doubted hers.

  “Not that he knows it either, but guess again, sister.”

  Was Carla saying that she expected to actually become related to Tanya by the connection of team—which for her would be far deeper than blood?

  Chad’s comb caught a snarl so badly that it almost sliced off Tanya’s ear when it let go.

  8

  Chad had tried to doze on the lounger throughout the day.

  When Carla had strolled out of his bedroom—offering one of her unreadable (but thankfully not overtly hostile) looks—she’d made a show of closing the bedroom door sol
idly behind her.

  Tanya did not follow her out of the room.

  The “Do Not Enter” was clear, but there was no indicator of what the hell had happened behind that closed door. Or where he was supposed to sleep. Clearly not on Tanya’s shoulder—he was still pissed that he’d simply passed out on that prime real estate yet didn’t remember any of it.

  The problem was that the couches in this place were about a foot shorter than he was. Great for lovebirds like Richie and Melissa—who had eventually retreated into their room to sleep away the day just as the others had.

  Sucked for him.

  He liked taking up his man-space when he slept. If there was something warm and soft to curl up in his arms while he was doing that, he never had any complaints about sharing—as long as he could stretch out.

  That sure like fuck wasn’t what was happening here. The lounger was built for Colombian natives—maybe miniature versions of them. His feet stuck off the end and every time his arms came uncrossed, they slipped off the sides and he smacked his knuckles on the concrete. Even lying out here on the balcony, he could feel the ever-so-happy couples sleeping together behind him.

  At first he’d thought it was kind of cool that, for their one team, the military was looking the other way. No question about the leadership team Kyle and Carla made together. He’d never served with better and never expected to again. Each day with them was something special. No way was the military dumb enough to break up something so successful.

  Richie the Nerd had needed a woman bad. When Melissa the Cat had prowled into his life, it was like nerddom on steroids. He’d made her a better nerd and she’d made him an even better fighter. Couldn’t wish a better match for him.

  His buddy Duane going down had been tough to swallow. But Sofia was such a freaking dynamo, it was damned hard to complain—dangerous too. The analytic brain she stowed inside that pretty head of hers was such an asset that it was hard to argue. As an unexpected bonus, instead of getting pushed out of his friendship with Duane, they’d gotten closer. He loved hanging with the two of them. And Sofia always added a quick beat to any teasing going back and forth. He sometimes wondered how different things would have been if he’d been the one sent into the human trafficking camp that Sofia had uncovered rather than Duane. But you didn’t envy your best friend’s woman no matter how hot she was.