by Ethan Cross
“This is where you live?” Black asked Munroe.
“You like it?”
“It’s beautiful.”
“Well, don’t get the wrong idea. Even though we’re only an hour out of DC, this place cost me less than a third of what a little condo would have in the city.”
The interior stunned Jonas even more. Oak cabinets, hardwood floors, open staircase, a sun room, pocket doors, sky lights, stone accent walls, walkout basement. By his standards, it was a mansion. He felt like he had just been adopted by Daddy Warbucks.
Once inside, Munroe navigated the house like a sighted person. With the exception of tripping over a basketball bag that someone had dropped in the middle of a walkway. Munroe growled and kicked it to the side. He directed Black and Annabelle to the kitchen table and started preparing a meal.
Munroe pulled food boxes and can goods from the cabinet and held his phone up to each. A mechanical voice on the phone announced the name of the product. One by one, Munroe scanned the cans and packages, sitting the ones he wanted aside. He grabbed out measuring cups and cooking utensils marked with small Braille labels.
Munroe asked if they wanted something to drink, and Black watched with interest as Munroe hung a device with two extended prongs over the edge of cup and poured in the liquids they had requested. The device beeped when the liquid reached the proper level.
A door opened from the garage, and two young girls stepped into the kitchen. They both held cellphones in front of their faces, typing furiously. The older girl said to the other, “I’m telling you. He’s got a horse face.”
“Shut up, Mak. At least I have a boyfriend.”
They both came up short at the sight of the large, dark, tattooed man sitting at their kitchen table. Before they could run screaming for the hills, Annabelle rushed over and gave each girl a hug. But they still eyed Jonas cautiously.
“This is Jonas Black,” Annabelle said to the girls in her sweet Southern voice. “He’s going to be working with your dad and me.”
The perky younger sister stuck out her hand. She had bleach-blonde hair and bright blue eyes that reminded him of Munroe’s, only without the vacant stare. “I’m Chloe. The pretty one. That’s Makayla. The weird one.”
Black laughed and shook Chloe’s hand. The older girl, Makayla, looked him up and down and said, “What’s up.” She wore ripped up jeans and a Nirvana T-shirt. On first glance, Makayla seemed to be the antithesis of her sister. Perky versus reserved. Pretty versus smart. Cheerleader versus rocker chick. But Black sensed that Makayla carried a lot more weight on her shoulders and in her heart than her younger sister.
He couldn’t help but think of his own brother. He and Michael had also been very different. Michael had been thin and wiry. He ran from conflict, while Jonas always seemed to be fighting someone or something. One played guitar, one played football. One went to college, one went to the military.
But blood would always be thicker than personal style and interests.
Munroe walked in and hugged both girls before saying, “Who dropped their bag in the middle of the hallway?”
Makayla rolled her eyes. “Take a guess.”
“Chloe, you know how important it is to put your things away when living with a person who’s visually impaired. A place for everything and—”
“Everything in its place,” the girls finished in unison.
Munroe frowned. “Okay, smart asses. What’s been going on while I’ve been away?”
Black watched Munroe and the girls as they laughed and joked back and forth and fell into the easy rhythms of a family. Chloe had a new boyfriend. Makayla needed help with a political science project. Chloe wanted permission to go to a concert. Makayla needed gas money.
He guessed that Chloe was thirteen or fourteen, while Makayla was at least sixteen. With a heavy heart, Black thought of a boy that was about Chloe’s age. His name was Will. Will Black. And unlike Munroe’s daughters, Will had grown up without his father.
They all ate dinner together—the best meal he had in a long time—but Black still felt like an outsider, even though everyone asked him questions and included him in the conversations. He remembered a Sesame Street song from his childhood, One of These Things is Not Like The Others. And that was him. He just didn’t belong. Strangely enough, he felt more at home and at ease within the walls of a prison than he did sitting with a family around a dinner table.
The girls warmed up to him quickly, especially Chloe. She showed him a website called YouTube that he had heard about but had yet to experience for himself. “OMG, you have to see this,” she said before showing him a myriad of funny and interesting content—a guy getting a DUI and shot with a taser while riding a lawnmower, hilarious examples of bad lip reading, funny real life news footage converted into song parodies, and videos on recycling like how to make a life vest or raft out of empty two liter soda bottles.
After the meal, Annabelle showed him to a guest room and then brought in some sleep clothes that she thought may fit. She teared up a little, and he guessed that the clothes had belonged to her brother.
He lied back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. It all felt so surreal. The day before he had been sleeping on the floor of a cell in Ad Seg, and now here he was at a house in the countryside less than five miles from the President’s own private retreat.
A few minutes later, the sound of arguing echoed out from one of the bedrooms down the hall, and curiosity got the better of him. He crept into the hallway so he could hear what was being said.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Deacon Munroe ran his fingers over the fabric of the garments in his closet and found the suit he wanted to wear the next day. In the past, he had tried several different organizational methods for the blind involving marking the garments in some way or sorting them by color on the clothes rod, but those still required outside help. So when a handy device called the Bright-F became available, he jumped at the chance. The gadget functioned by detecting the brightness, saturation, and hue of objects, allowing the device to determine the object’s color. It had also allowed him to more easily handle his own laundry. One step closer to total independence.
As he waved the flashlight-shaped scanner over his clothes and compiled the proper outfit for the next day, Annabelle sat down on the bed behind him. He could feel her disapproval from across the room but knew her feelings didn’t relate to his wardrobe choices.
“Just say what’s on your mind,” he said. “Your stare is burning holes in my back.”
“You sure didn’t waste any time.”
“In what?”
“Replacing my brother.”
“Jonas Black is a big, dumb animal. He’s hardly meant to serve as a replacement for Gerald.”
“Then why?”
“You know damn well why.”
“This investigation already took my brother. I don’t want to lose you too. Just let it go, Deac. Let NCIS handle it.”
He walked over and sat next to her on the bed. He wanted to take her hand but wasn’t sure how she would react. They had yet to speak of their kiss and her abrupt exit. She seemed content to pretend that it had never happened. “NCIS doesn’t have both oars in the water on this one,” he said. “I owe it to your brother to find the people responsible.”
“You’ve never been a crusader.”
“Maybe now’s a good time to start.”
“By bringing a murderer into the house where your daughters sleep?”
He shook his head and gave a dismissive laugh. “You read his file. Black’s a soldier and a trained killer, but he’s not a murderer. Not really. He had less than six months left on his sentence.”
“I know. He seems like a good man, but…”
“I’m not running from this fight, and make no mistake, it will be a fight. Good old-fashioned, down and dirty. Jonas Black is an attack dog.
And, when I find the people to blame for this mess, I’m going to let that dog off his leash.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Wyatt Randall may have been some kind of scientific genius, but he wasn’t good enough at being on the run to hide from Antonio de Almeida forever. Randall had phoned his mother to let her know that he was okay, and the considerate act had been his downfall. Almeida easily tracked back the call to a small rent house in the countryside near Annapolis, MD that Randall had paid for with cash. Almeida found it terribly convenient that Randall had chosen a place with no immediate neighbors to hear the scientist’s screams.
Now, Almeida stared down at Randall’s lifeless form. After knocking the man out, he had placed him in the small home’s bathtub and prepared him for the interrogation to come. Before beginning, Almeida took a moment to pray for Wyatt Randall’s soul and for God to open the man’s heart and mind to answer his questions without suffering needlessly.
With a wave of smelling salts beneath his nose, Randall’s eyes fluttered open and darted around his surroundings with animalistic fear. The rest of his body didn’t move.
“Hello, Wyatt,” Almeida said. “Don’t bother trying to move your arms or legs. I’ve injected lidocaine into your brachial plexus nerves and the subarachnoid block, essentially paralyzing your extremities.”
“What the…Please…You can’t kill me. Lennix needs me.”
Almeida shrugged. “I think that like many Americans you overestimate your own self-worth.” He moved to the edge of the tub and leaned down close to Randall. “When I was a boy in Colombia, I was stolen from family and forced to work as slave labor in the coca fields. This was years before I met Ramon Castillo, and the man in charge of the fields showed no compassion to me as Ramon did. They encouraged us to chew on the coca leaves as we worked. It gave us more energy, and as we became addicted, we were more dependent on our captors. The leaves had a strong tea-like odor and a pungent taste. I can still feel the texture on my tongue. One night, a group of Colombian and American soldiers raided the camp, and during the fight, the building where the children were held caught on fire. Almost all of my friends were burned alive. Only myself and a few others, who had been selected to work that night, survived the battle. In the confusion, I ran into the jungle and hid beneath an outcropping along the bank of the river. But the mud there was like quick sand. My feet sank down, and I was not strong enough to pull them out.”
“Please, I—”
“Shhh.” Almeida hushed him gently like a mother comforting her child. “It started to rain, and the waters of the river slowly rose around me. Creeping up my body like some great beast was devouring me, like the way an anaconda feeds. I learned that day how frightened and helpless it can make a person feel to see his or her own death slowly approaching. I have never felt fear like that again. I would have given anything to hold back the waters. Luckily, God answered my prayers, and I learned something from that experience. I learned much about myself, but also about the nature of fear and our primitive survival instincts. Later on, I put this knowledge into practice when I went to work for the Castillo Cartel.”
“You’ll never find anything if you kill me.”
Almeida ignored the comment. His calm and smooth exterior never cracking. “Today, Wyatt, you will feel what I felt as the waters slowly consumed me. I’m going to turn on the faucet here in the tub, just a slow stream, and your paralyzed body will be unable to escape it. I will not stop the flow until you’ve told me all that I want to know. Please do not test my resolve on this. You will tell me where to find the stolen files or you will die. But first, you will learn the true power of fear.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Jonas Black gritted his teeth and popped his massive knuckles as he descended the stairs to Munroe’s kitchen. His anger hadn’t subsided since the night before when he had overheard Munroe and Annabelle’s conversation. He felt the urge to show Munroe exactly how much of an attack dog he was, but he also knew that any man who could pull him out of prison could see him back in a cell just as quickly.
When he reached the bottom floor, the smell of bacon and eggs made his mouth water, and his hunger momentarily eclipsed his indignation. It had been a long time since he had eaten a home-cooked breakfast.
Munroe apparently wasn’t down yet, but his two daughters sat at opposite ends of a big rustic-looking kitchen table. Annabelle was at the stove, humming the Ray Charles song “Georgia on My Mind” and cracking eggs into a skillet. She noticed him and said, “Good morning, Mr. Black. How do you like your eggs?”
“Sunny side up would be wonderful.”
“Coffee?”
“Sure. I take it just like my last name.”
She poured him a cup, and he took a center seat at the table, the two girls flanking him on each side and his back to the wall with a good view of the whole room. It was an old habit of maintaining full situational awareness. In fact, the idea of eating bacon and eggs and being served coffee seemed so surreal and alien to him that he once again realized he felt more on edge at that moment than he did standing in the prison yard among murderers and rapists.
Makayla ignored him, but Chloe said in her bubbly voice, “Good morning. I bet you slept like a log. With this being your first night outside of a prison cell, I mean.”
He smiled back and shrugged. “Actually, I had trouble sleeping. Bed was too soft.”
“I don’t know how that’s possible. I would sleep in a bathtub full of marshmallows if I could.”
“Just depends on what you get used to.”
“Gerald never had a problem with it,” Makayla said, not looking up from her cell phone.
He didn’t know what to say to that, and he supposed there wasn’t a good response. Everyone in the house had recently lost someone whom they loved dearly, and now Black had stepped in and, by no choice of his own, was sleeping in the dead man’s bed and wearing his clothes. He felt like a new dog brought home from the animal shelter the same day the last dog was hit by a car, and he suspected that when any of them looked at him it dredged up memories of the better man they had lost.
He noticed Annabelle wipe at her eyes even though she acted as if she hadn’t heard Makayla mention her deceased brother. They all sat in silence for a moment, the awkwardness growing heavy. Black searched for something to say and blurted, “Do you girls like magic tricks?”
“Not really,” Makayla said.
Chloe frowned at her sister’s rudeness and said, “Sure. What do you got?”
“I’ll be right back.” Black ascended the stairs and rummaged through his old military duffle until he located a battered pack of Deland’s automatic playing cards. He returned to the kitchen table and placed the cards in front of Chloe. “You know how to shuffle?” he said.
She picked up the deck, examined both sides, and then started mixing them up.
“Shuffle as many times as you want,” Black added.
She re-sorted the deck four times and then placed them back on the table. He grabbed the cards and, looking away, fanned them out with the faces toward her. “Pick a card. Any card. Don’t let me see the card, and don’t tell me what it is.”
She slid her fingers over the top of the fan and grabbed a card out of the left side. Black placed the rest of the cards back on the table.
“Okay,” he said. “Now, I want you to hold the card up between us and focus on what card it is. I’m going to read your mind.”
She rolled her eyes and gave a little giggle as she held up her card. He stared at her for a moment. Then he instructed her to place the card back into the deck and shuffle as many times as she wanted.
As she shuffled, Black said, “When I was your age, I wanted to be a magician. I saved my lunch money for two weeks to buy that deck of cards.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You wanted to be a magician?”
“You act surprised.”
&n
bsp; “It’s just that you’re so big.”
“Big guys can’t be magicians?”
“Well, it would be harder for you to make yourself disappear, but what I meant was that it seems like you’d want to play football or basketball or boxing or something like that.”
He nodded, thinking again of her father referring to him as an attack dog. “That’s what everyone else said too. I guess that’s why I never got past the card tricks. That and my brother made fun of me. Sometimes people take one look at who you are on the outside and instantly form a conclusion about you. When on the inside, things may be very different from how they appear.”
When Chloe was done shuffling, Black cut the deck into six equal piles. Then he placed the third pile on top of the sixth, the first onto the fifth, the fourth onto the second, and formed them back into a whole deck. He asked Chloe to shuffle them again. She did so, and he started flipping over each of the cards to see their faces. He flipped through the deck until he reached the eight of hearts. He pulled it out and dropped in front of Chloe. “Is that your card?”
“Holy shit,” Chloe said.
“Chloe!” Annabelle yelled from across the room, where she was also watching the trick as she cooked. “Watch your mouth!”
“Sorry, but that was amazing. Did you see that Mak?” Chloe asked.
Makayla grunted in response, and Chloe added, “Do it with Mak now.”
Black turned to Makayla, who rolled her eyes and, with what seemed like great effort, put her cell phone on the table. Black repeated the whole process again with Makayla. When they were done and Black had correctly guessed her card, she sat up a bit straighter and furrowed her brow. “Do it again,” Makayla said.
Black replicated the trick with her four more times, and with each repetition, her gaze grew more intense and focused. She looked as if she was trying to burn holes in the cards with her eyes. By this time, Annabelle had delivered a plate of eggs and Black started eating. But Makayla’s eyes remained on the deck of cards.
