by Ali Vali
The ten o’clock news had headlined the crime scene in one of the large homes in Uptown New Orleans, and even though Don was back home, his satellite service was set up to show the news from New Orleans. It hadn’t fazed him at first, but then he saw Aubrey and Peter Tarver walk out of the house. The sight of her sent him into a panic that spiked when he called Wiley and the phone went right to voice mail. That meant the phone that was supposed to be turned on at all times wasn’t, which in turn meant the GPS tracker was also off. If Wiley had been responsible for the headlines yet again, there was no way to prove it.
“Not at all,” Don said, after muting the set and freezing the picture on Aubrey and her father. “What can I do for you?”
“I need an answer in a few hours, if possible. My folks tell me our problem is about to be moved, which would only escalate the fallout from all this.”
“Before I can utilize any solution, I need clearance. This isn’t like calling Terminix for a bug problem.” He advanced the recording a frame at a time but still saw nothing out of the ordinary that would require a call to his commanding officer. Even if he’d seen Wiley holding Aubrey’s other hand on the way out, he’d talk to her before deciding on the next step. “You also have to realize that a go from my superiors doesn’t mean instant gratification. A job like this takes planning, and that takes weeks for perfection.”
“I called you because you control perfection, and she’s usually ready to go when called, from what I’ve read about her.” From Walter’s tone he could tell he was talking with a clenched jaw. “Don’t make the mistake of dragging your feet, Colonel. Reliable assets get reassigned all the time, and I’m an expert in how to do it. Work with me, or you’ll spend the rest of your career shuffling paperwork at a recruiting office and trying to talk pimple-faced boys into enlisting. You can spend the rest of your days trying to find another Wiley, though I highly doubt you’ll be that lucky.”
“Go ahead and make your calls, then. You’ll find that assets also are retired all the time, and if I’m reassigned that’s exactly what will happen. After years of service I’m sure she’d appreciate you activating the release clause in her contract.”
“Are you two delusional? This is a time in our country’s history when you get to go when you’re done, and people like me make that decision for you.”
“People like you?” Don had to laugh. “You’ve never put in the kind of time my friend has, and that combined with a perfect completion rate earned the exit contract that the president signed. Force the issue and not even the total power of the Oval Office can stop her bill from getting stamped Paid in Full when it comes to any commitment. Do it and I’ll send you a thank-you note for doing her a favor.”
“No one’s that important.”
“If you’re a gambler, Mr. Robinson, then make your call. Before you do, think of only one thing.”
Walter laughed this time. “What, how pathetic your threats are? Or how much pleasure it will give me to bring you down?”
“Both good suggestions, but no. After you finish banging your head into the brick wall of the exit clause, think that there’s no asset that equals the one you’ll be responsible for cutting loose.” Don didn’t see any other news on Aubrey’s case, so he turned the television off and powered on his computer. “Good luck getting any cooperation from the Pentagon after that.”
It was satisfying to end the call on the asshole, but this wouldn’t be the last they heard from him. Don knew the type well, and so did Wiley. They’d eventually win the war but not before a few intense battles.
His bags were still packed from his morning trip to New Orleans, so he booked himself on the next transport headed south. Hopefully he’d hear from Wiley in the next few hours before his flight, if only to warn her about Walter. As he touched his car-door handle, his phone rang and he fumbled to get it, relieved since he thought it was Wiley.
“Where the hell are you?” he asked, without checking the ID screen.
“I’m guessing you were expecting someone else,” General Carl Greenwald said.
“Sir.” Don lifted the phone away from his mouth to take a deep breath without his superior officer hearing him. “My apologies.”
“Problems?”
“Nothing a new girlfriend couldn’t help.”
Carl laughed. “If that’s how you answer the phone, I’d be bitchy too.” As Carl spoke in his usual slow pace, Don’s phone buzzed, showing he was missing a call from Wiley. “I don’t like to intrude on your evening, but I just got off the phone with some asshole from the CIA.”
“Walter Robinson?” He was trying to stay calm but was mentally cursing.
“Actually his name was Craig Orvik, Mr. Robinson’s boss. There’s nothing I love more than having some egotistical airbag ream me over something I don’t have a clue about.”
“Walter is determined to get us to share the Black Dragon, but I haven’t finished vetting the facts.”
“Is she stable and settling in?”
“Beautifully, sir.” Wiley was important, but Don needed to get back to what Carl and this guy Orvik had talked about. “Did you and Orvik come to an understanding?”
“If you hear from Walter again, call me. Company assets will have to solve the problem these guys are having if our friend decides this isn’t something she wants to do. I explained that if either you or our friend says no, they need to move on.”
“Thank you, sir.” The call ended painlessly, but once Carl heard about the crime scene in the house inhabited by Aubrey Tarver, he’d be calling back. Once that happened he’d have to have a great explanation ready so he could keep his job as Wiley’s contact. Without him as a middleman, and if the brass thought Wiley wasn’t stable, Carl would reshuffle assets, as they were referred to. In military speak, that meant that another asset would retire the Black Dragon permanently.
“Running a few errands,” Wiley said on the message she left. “Give me a few hours and I’ll give you a call.”
“I hope you’re taking deep breaths, kid. If you leave a death trail, this isn’t South America or Iraq, and people like Carl are going to notice.”
*
The ride back to New Orleans had taken forty minutes longer since Wiley had bypassed the twenty-four-mile bridge, not wanting any record of her SUV on the traffic cameras. Tinted windows and the early hour had been their only two bonuses so far, and she was glad she’d returned home to pick up the vehicle.
The long ride hadn’t produced any other excitement, so Tanith had fallen asleep in the backseat. Wiley could feel Aubrey’s eyes on her, but she concentrated on the road, not wanting to get into a conversation she was too tired to intelligently participate in. She wasn’t looking forward to one even after forty hours of sleep.
Once they were in the warehouse district she circled the block before she opened the garage door and drove in. With a flip of a switch the alarm was disarmed and she was free to turn the ignition off. Not even that woke Tanith, and Wiley envied the deep, peaceful sleep that she hadn’t enjoyed in years.
“Is this your place?” Aubrey asked, turning away from her and looking at the neatly lined toolboxes and workbenches. “I hope it is. You must be in heaven here.”
“I haven’t experienced heaven in years,” she said, not being able to hold back the honest response. “The living quarters are on the top floor.” She got out and walked to the back for their bags. Tanith’s head popped up when she gently closed the door, which changed her assessment of the peaceful part of that sleep equation. “There are three guest rooms, so pick the ones you like best.”
“Thanks again for all this,” Aubrey told her as she guided Tanith toward the elevator.
“I hope you haven’t forgotten what you mean…what you meant to me.” Wiley corrected herself, but from Aubrey’s expression she’d caught her lie. “You don’t have to thank me for something I offered to do a long time ago.”
The second and third floors were dark, but a dim pocket light over The Dra
gon Tree Legacy painting made it easy to navigate to the light switches on the fourth floor. Wiley illuminated the space and didn’t disturb Aubrey as she stood in front of the painting and stared.
“This is beautiful,” she finally said, her cheeks wet. “Who did you get to paint it?”
“It’s mine. I decided to see where the doodling took me and tried oil instead of a pencil.” She waved toward the hallway on the side opposite her room and home office. “You both must be tired, so follow me.” Since she’d activated the lights the rest came on automatically as they moved through the space. “The alarms are armed again, but feel free to move around. You’ll be okay as long as you don’t open an exterior door. The kitchen is on the third floor, but I don’t have much in the way of food.” Aubrey opened her mouth to say something, but Wiley simply said “Good night” before she walked away.
The morning would be soon enough to start their lines of communication, so she turned her cell phone back on and headed to the office next to her bedroom. When she sat in her chair, the exhaustion she’d been trying to ignore almost swamped her, but she dialed Don’s number.
“I only have a few minutes,” he said when he answered.
“Big plans this early in the morning?” A glance at the grandfather clock across from her and a quick calculation meant it was now half past five in Washington.
“I was able to get on a transport headed back your way. Walter’s raising hell, and I watched the news from your hometown. I saw an interesting picture of Aubrey and Peter leaving a house where four people were found dead.”
“You were the one who handed me the message. I called and caught her at a bad time.”
“How do you define ‘bad time’?”
“Her partner was handcuffed to her shower massager while some guy practiced his chain-saw skills on her limbs. Aubrey and her daughter were in the attic at the time.”
“Jesus,” Don said, exhaling loud enough for Wiley to hear him despite the engine noise in the background.
“God wasn’t anywhere near that bathroom, believe me. If you aren’t on the plane, don’t board. I’m not saying I won’t eventually need you here, but I have to figure out why this happened and how I can prevent it from happening to Aubrey and her child.”
“She has a child?” Don asked as if he hadn’t understood or heard her before.
“Smart girl who sounds like she’s wiser than her eight years. Don’t worry, Don, I’m not freaking out over this and I don’t need you here. I’m going to get them out of this tight spot and go back to my canvases.”
There was a long pause, as if Don was debating whether to take her advice. “I want updates, and call me the minute you hear from Walter, because I know the dick is going to try to go around me to get to you.”
“Thanks, and you got it. Like I said, I might need you here soon, but there’s no reason to crowd up the place if it isn’t necessary. And to keep your ass out of the crack it’s in, call Carl if you haven’t already. You want him hearing all this from you.”
“How about those dead guys?”
“The only drug-related thing we’ve been asked to intercede on is what Walter’s harping about, but what happened to Aubrey’s partner is definitely drug-related.”
“You’re taking this well.”
She laughed and pried her body out of the chair before she fell asleep in it. “Yeah, it’s always great to hear the woman you assumed was the love of your life took up with a cokehead who’s dealing on the side.”
“Love fucking hurts,” Don said, and the background noise had faded away.
“Yeah, fuck you too, buddy. I’ll call tomorrow after I get some sleep.”
She took the phone with her and dropped it on her nightstand before heading to the bathroom to strip for a quick shower. She put on a pair of pajama pants and a T-shirt, in case she had to deal with any unwanted visitors. Before closing her eyes she brought up the different surveillance cameras located throughout the property and left them on the big-screen television hanging on the wall across from her bed. For now all was quiet.
“Let’s hope it stays that way, but it won’t. I know a lot more about that than about love,” she said, and laughed before closing her eyes and falling asleep instantly.
*
“Sometimes people sure make this too fucking easy for us,” Mitch said. He and Freddie were parked a block from the Tarver home, staring at Aubrey’s old Honda.
“This is the kind of neighborhood where everyone wakes up at four to run a marathon before work.” Freddie divided his time between studying the house and the rearview mirror. “That ain’t gonna be cool if things don’t go well.”
“Relax,” Mitch said, as he touched the butt of his gun tucked into his waistband. “Emray told me this guy’s retired, so no one’s going to miss him if he doesn’t show up for work. All we need to do is go in there and ask his daughter where our money is. The fastest way to have that conversation is to use the kid. Are you up for that?”
“That bitch ain’t so fragile. She killed all our guys, so watch your back.”
They quietly shut the doors to the luxury sedan they’d borrowed from the hotel parking garage and kept to the street as they moved closer to the house. Everything was quiet and dark, which made Mitch relax and take his time with the lock. The house would stay dark since Freddie had cut the main power source, effectively knocking out the alarm system as well. It was funny to him that people put their safety in the hands of companies who paid their technicians a little more than minimum wage. They installed systems that might’ve told them if a moron was breaking in, but they were better off with a dog if you took a little extra time to cut the juice.
“Start in the master bedroom and take care of the parents while I look for Aubrey and her kid. Do not let that old guy get the jump on you. We’ve had enough fuckups for tonight, and I don’t have the balls to tell Emray we botched this too.”
It took less than five minutes to see that the house was empty. All the cars were parked outside, but the entire Tarver family had disappeared and left nothing behind to clue Mitch into where they’d gone. The quiet left him cold, since for the third time in less than twenty-four hours he’d have to call Emray and tell him he’d failed. His boss wasn’t the forgiving kind, and this was strike three.
“If they came here they took all their stuff, because the other three bedrooms are clean,” Freddie said after they’d met back in the kitchen. “What now?”
“Hopefully wherever they are, they’ll have access to the local news.” Mitch opened the oven, disabled the pilot light, and turned the knob as far as it would go. He did the same to the gourmet stove with the six burners before he pushed Freddie to leave. “Give it a good ten minutes,” he said as they walked quickly back to the car.
None of the neighbors had stirred twenty minutes later, so Mitch was confident there would be no witnesses to report what happened. No one would be able to describe the man who’d set up his shot by using the roof of his car to steady his hands, but he kept his eyes on the house as Freddie did just that. The three bullets that pierced the den windows in rapid succession set off the explosion that rocked everything in a two-block radius. Even if the Tarvers wanted to stop running, they wouldn’t have a place to run home to. Destruction on this scale caused fear, and that’s what he wanted most—Aubrey and her daughter to be afraid of what would happen if they didn’t cooperate. If Emray gave him free rein, Aubrey would think what happened to Maria had been a blessing compared to his plans for her.
*
“Holy hell, she was right.” Karen Tarver sat in the backseat of Peter’s Suburban and watched the house they’d built after Peter’s retirement from the military get blown to bits. The sight made her angry, but she was relieved she’d listened to Wiley about taking the things that were important to her. All the family photos and other treasured mementos were safely boxed in the back of the large vehicle.
“I don’t think Wiley told us what could happen to simply gain
points with Aubrey. She’s not the fabricating kind—never was.”
“Your views on the subject have always been a bit biased, honey.” Karen watched as her neighbors came running out, robes flapping open, with stunned expressions. She had a strong urge to open the door and yell that they were all right, but she stayed in Peter’s embrace since the two morons who’d done this were still parked close by. “Do you remember she gutted Aubrey and walked away without a bit of remorse?”
“I was pissed then, and I’m still pissed, but I’ve always thought you were biased too when it came to Wiley.” Peter spoke softly, his mouth close to her ear.
“What do you mean?”
“You let your feelings about your experiences when we were first married bleed into your attitudes when Aubrey and Wiley started to get close.” He held her in place when she tried to move away. “I can apologize forever and it won’t be enough to make up for all the moves and lonely nights.”
Wiley resembled this part of Peter the most. They never argued about anything, not really. Instead they explained their side rationally, and no matter how angry she got with him, Peter never raised his voice or loosened the reins on his control. When Aubrey had told her what happened she saw history repeating itself and wanted better for her.
“It was hard, but we made it through.”
“That’s because you gave us a chance. You never gave Wiley that, and—”
“All this is my fault, then?” she asked with heat.
“I don’t blame you for anything.” Peter turned her so they were facing each other. “I just want you to lay aside the old hurts and give the kid a chance. I may not have liked why Wiley left, but I understand it. Look out there,” he said, and turned toward their burning house. “This isn’t over, and it won’t be until these people either get what they want at any cost, or someone stops them.”
“It’s up to the ‘kid’ to do that, then?”
“If you’ve got a slew of better ideas, now’s the time to share them.”
