Gray Wolf Security: Back Home

by Glenna Sinclair

“You’re going to scare that girl away before she’s been here a full day,” I growled.

  “I was just being polite,” Sam argued.

  “You were practically drooling on her!”

  “I was welcoming her to the family.” Sam crawled back up in to his stool and opened her laptop again. “Wasn’t I being nice, Jorge?”

  The silent man who spent all day sitting on the couch, reading one magazine after another, glanced up. He grunted, a sound that was not really a word but wasn’t not a word, either.

  “See,” Sam said.

  I just shook my head, moving around the front desk to look at the day’s scheduled appointments. The guy who ran this thing, this Todd Michaels, streamlined the whole operation when he took it over, insisting that johns make appointments a day before coming to see the girls so that we could vet them. He was careful, this Michaels person. He was paranoid of the cops raiding the place. Sam told me it was because the cops had raided the nightclub they’d been running and his brother was caught up in it, spending a couple of weeks in the local jail before getting his ass murdered in Mexico. Sam had no sympathy for the guy, insisting he deserved what he got. Shouldn’t have had his guys take his ex-wife, he told me. Damn rookie mistake!

  Sam was convinced he was so much smarter than the next guy. He was too arrogant to see how wrong he truly was.

  I pulled out the schedule and noted that the girls were booked for the entire afternoon and evening. Business was good. But I was more interested in the other paperwork that was carelessly scattered across the desk.

  This was once a working hotel, taking in guests even as the girls worked out of a half-dozen rooms. But Michaels paid a sort of rent to the owner, ridding the place of most of the employees, leaving only the maids and laundry crew around. The owner, from what I understood, was pretty happy with the deal, preferring to sit on the beach all day rather than deal with the headaches that came with running such a motel. And it opened more rooms to the girls, allowing more privacy and space for more girls. The hotel had twenty-five rooms. Eighteen of them were filled at the moment.

  If the whole thing didn’t make me absolutely sick to my stomach, I might actually see the genius in the way this Michaels ran the place. I was kind of looking forward to meeting him.

  Whenever that might happen.

  I glanced at Sam. He was involved in the video once again, breathing heavy as he stared at the screen. Talk about disgust! I wanted to smack him. I wanted to push him off that stool and beat the shit out of him! I fantasized about all the things I would do to him when the time came. Shooting him was just the last step. He’d be begging me to shoot him by the time we got there. I was going to torture this fool exactly the way he’d tortured—

  “Malcolm?”

  I jerked, yanking my hand out of the narrow cubby I’d been in the middle of searching. If I was going to take these idiots down, I was going to have to find some concrete evidence. The shoddy way Sam took care of the business side of things around here, there must be something on this cluttered desk.

  He never even noticed all the times I’d searched it since I’d come to work here a week ago.

  “What can I do for you, Peach?” I asked the young woman who’d come down the hall, calling my name—my cover’s name, anyway.

  Peach, a petite Hispanic woman with the biggest, darkest eyes I’d ever seen, sidled up beside me, a big smile on her painted lips as she ran her hand over my arm.

  “I was wondering if you could come rehang the curtain rod in my room. Damn thing keeps slipping down every time a customer barely touches it.”

  “No problem.”

  I followed her into her room, the sweet smell of flavored lubricant and the musky scent of sex hitting me in the face. I figured I grow used to the smells of a brothel after a while, but it hit me in the gut every time.

  “Which one?”

  Peach moved up behind me, her hands sliding over my back before slipping underneath my t-shirt. I turned, caught the soft smile on her lips that highlighted the dead light in her eyes, the disinterested look of a woman who’d been using sex as a defense mechanism since she was a small child.

  “Peach—”

  “Ana,” she said softly. “My name’s Ana.”

  “Ana.” I pulled her hands out from under my shirt and held them tight in my hands as I drew her close to me. “You don’t have to do that with me.”

  “You don’t want me?”

  I looked down at her, at the blue silk robe that had fallen open and the lacy bra and panties it exposed underneath. Like most of the women here, she was beautiful. Her body was slender and boyish in its lack of curves, a look that was more the result of genetics and occasional starvation than a healthy diet and daily workouts. If we were standing there, acquainted under different circumstances, I might consider it. But I could never forget the reason I was here.

  “You’re fucking beautiful, Ana. Too beautiful for the likes of me.”

  She blushed and smiled all at once, her head tilting in a sort of bashful movement. I would bet that she could count on one hand how many times a man had made her blush that way.

  “Malcolm?”

  Seemed I was popular today. I looked up to find Emma and Kari standing in the doorway, Kari’s eyes narrowed as she took in the scene: Peach, nearly naked, her body pressed to mine. I immediately let Peach go and strode to the door, my arms bulging as I crossed them over my chest.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Sam needs me on the front desk. Can you finish up the tour? I showed her the first floor, but we didn’t get up the stairs.”

  “Okay.”

  Emma turned to Kari and touched her arm. “You’re in good hands with Malcolm. He’s like a big brother to all the girls.”

  “I bet he is.”

  “Or maybe potential beau is a better way of putting it. I think all the girls here have a crush on him.”

  “Who wouldn’t?” Peach asked, moving up behind me, her hand resting on my ass. “He’s a charming bastard!”

  Kari’s eyes moved slowly over Peach, her expression unreadable. “But it looks like you’ve won him over.”

  Peach couldn’t have been more pleased by that comment. She was literally beaming when I turned to gently remove her hand from my ass.

  “You should get ready for your first appointment,” I told her. “I’ll come check on that curtain rod later this evening.”

  “Don’t make me wait too long, darlin’,” she said with a wink.

  I could feel the rage rolling off of Kari as we walked to the back stairs. The moment the heavy doors slammed behind us, she slapped me hard on the small of my back.

  “Asshole!”

  I grabbed her upper arm and shoved her back against the wall with a hand pressed roughly against her mouth. Her eyes widened, fear very clear in their expressive depths. I wanted to let her go, I wanted to explain everything to her, but I couldn’t.

  “Didn’t you learn a damned thing yesterday?” I demanded.

  That made her eyes narrow.

  I gestured with my own eyes, controlling my movements so that the camera behind me wouldn’t pick them up. She stared at me for a long moment, but then she slowly moved her gaze in the direction I was attempting to get her to look. I knew the moment she spotted it, saw the understanding come into her eyes. But it did nothing to dislodge the anger or the fear that still resided in her eyes.

  I stepped back and she moved around me, pushing hard against my side like she was hoping to knock me down the few steps we’d already gone up. At the top of the stairs, she burst through the doors like a monster was after her.

  She wasn’t going to make this easy, was she?

  Chapter 11

  Kari

  I smiled politely at the man who came through the front doors, pretending I didn’t find him completely disgusting. There was a gold band on his finger. He probably had a wife and whole litter of kids at home waiting anxiously by the door for him to come home. Instead of
having dinner with his kids, instead of helping his wife get them ready for bed, instead of showing his wife a little affection after a long day chasing after those energetic rugrats, he was here – visiting a prostitute who might send him home with gifts his wife never asked for.

  Asshole.

  It was like a mantra running through my mind all night. Every time a john walked in, every time I caught Tommy watching me, that word rushed through my mind.

  Asshole.

  “How might I help you, sir?”

  “I have a meeting with Peach.”

  I nodded, checking the book Tommy had laid out in front of me on the desk and explained how it worked. There were no names—no male names, anyway—only initials. I touched my finger to Peach’s column and followed it to the appropriate time, making sure she had someone scheduled. I wasn’t allowed to ask his name, wasn’t allowed to say his initials aloud. Tommy said Jorge was familiar with each of the men and he would signal me if someone looked suspicious.

  Suspicious. In a whore house. It was kind of a ridiculous notion, if you asked me.

  Jorge hadn’t moved from the chair where he seemed rooted, so I assumed all was well. “This way,” I said, finding it difficult to keep the wariness out of my voice.

  I’d been at this job for two days now, escorting men who had better places to be than here to the rooms of women who’d seen more hardship than all of their customers put together. Most of the women were friendly. Reserved, but friendly. And surprisingly sober and upbeat despite their profession. It was not what I’d expected.

  And the way they looked at Tommy…I wavered between feeling sorry for them, wondering what he’d done to encourage their adoration, jealousy for the charm he poured on them like sugar in sweet tea, and a bit of pride that, for a short time, he’d been mine.

  But if working this case had taught me anything so far, it was that the Tommy I’d known for weeks and weeks was not the real Tommy.

  Or had he always been Malcolm and I was just too stupid to see it?

  I tapped on Peach’s door before opening it and standing aside to allow her last customer of the night inside. Peach was a popular girl here. She was always booked solid. Why Tommy would look twice at her confused me. Did he get off on using women like her? Was he more like these johns than I’d ever imagined?

  Why else would he be here? If even his bosses at the FBI had no idea what he was up to, then maybe this was the real Tommy and the man I’d known—the honest, straight-arrow FBI agent—was just an act.

  Not that it seemed I would ever learn the truth. We were never alone together in a place where we could talk about it. There were cameras everywhere here in the hotel. Even the bathrooms. I felt like I was living inside the Big Brother house every second I was in this place, and that was without the microphone Audra continued to insist I needed to wear whenever I came through those doors.

  I walked back to the desk and sighed as I settled on the high stool. My feet were killing me. I don’t think I’d ever worn heels as often as I had in the past week.

  “Feet hurt?” Sam asked, looking up from the camera feeds he obsessively watched every night while drinking slug after slug from the whiskey bottle he kept in his jacket pocket.

  “It’s been a long night.”

  “Let me rub them for you.”

  Sam came around the desk and grabbed my ankle even as I attempted to pull away. He lifted my shoe off while staring into my eyes, this sick smile twisting his thick lips.

  “You have gorgeous feet, my love,” he sighed as he ran a hand over my heel. “People tend to gloss over the foot, but I happen to think it’s one of the most erotic parts of a woman’s body.”

  “I had a boyfriend once who told me my toenails were perfection.”

  Sam smiled as he lifted my foot to his mouth and pulled my big toe inside. I grabbed the edges of my chair, trying not to fall off as every nerve in my body crawled upward with revulsion. His hot breath was like acid on my skin, the smell of booze pouring from every orifice, every pore of his body turning my stomach over and around and every which way as cramps soared through me.

  Disgusting wasn’t a big enough word for the way that felt. And when his eyes gleamed as he caught sight of my panties exposing themselves as he lifted my foot even higher, forcing my skirt up my thighs. I reached down and yanked at my skirt, but with my leg in the air, it didn’t do much good.

  “Sam, I think I should get back to work.”

  “I’m the boss,” he said, tugging my toe from his mouth, “I say when you work and when you don’t.”

  He ran his hands over my foot, pressing his fingers into the instep, rubbing with too much pressure for it to be called a massage. And that look on his face as he maneuvered my leg to show more of my crotch…if Tommy hadn’t suddenly appeared the way he did, I might have put that foot somewhere Sam wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much as he might have thought he would.

  “Stop fucking around with the help, Samuel,” he said, grabbing his shoulder as he wedged himself into the narrow space behind the desk, a narrow space made even narrower with me and Sam inside. “There’s a john on the second floor complaining he didn’t get his full hour. You need to go up and deal with it.”

  Sam sighed, his eyes scraping over my face a second longer. “We’ll get back to it later.” He winked and smiled that leering grin he reserved just for me it seemed.

  I immediately yanked my skirt back into place, aware of the uncomfortable tug of the teeny .22 caliber pistol I had strapped to the small of my back as per Joss’ orders. Tommy picked up my shoe and held it out to me, an apologetic look on his face.

  “He has a thing for redheads,” he said, as though that explained everything.

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “He’ll get bored if you turn him down often enough.”

  “Is that why he doesn’t bother Cinnamon? Or Apricot?” I groaned, feeling stupid just saying the names. “Who came up with these stupid nicknames, anyway?”

  “Don’t know. They were in place when I arrived.” He smiled that cocky smile he has. “Maybe the previous entrepreneurs had a thing for fruit and spices.”

  “Entrepreneurs? Is that what you call yourselves?”

  Tommy glanced over at Jorge. “We’ve got to call ourselves something.” Satisfied Jorge wasn’t paying any more attention that he normally did, he leaned close and slipped a piece of paper into the strap of my bra. “Maybe we should be calling you Nectarine.”

  I turned my head away from his encroaching presence. “I’ll quit before I allow you to call me that.”

  “Feisty.” A smile burned in his eyes. “I like that.” I walked to the office door, the same office where we’d had our first encounter here, and paused, turning to look at me again. “You can go. There’s only a couple of johns left. Sam can make sure they find their way out.”

  “Thanks.”

  I jumped down from the stool, half expecting Jorge to stop me, but he didn’t. I could feel his eyes on me as I walked toward the main doors, but he didn’t speak. In fact, I was pretty sure I’d never heard him speak.

  My skin crawled as I forced myself to keep a normal pace down the hall. Even as I stepped through the doors and the night air blew across my skin, I expected Jorge to suddenly grab me and take the paper Tommy had slipped me out of my shirt. He didn’t. No one did.

  I walked to the small apartment Gray Wolf had rented in my cover’s name and kicked off those damned pumps that were killing my feet. I went into the bathroom and stripped, catching the folded paper before it could fall to the floor. I didn’t open it, not yet. I showered and scrubbed my skin raw as had become my habit after spending any time at all in that motel. When I was satisfied that I’d gotten all the scum off me—taking extra time to wash my foot, especially that big toe—I climbed out and dressed in a pair of jeans and a light sweater that covered every inch of me from my neck to my wrists to the tops of my thighs. Only when my hair was twisted up into a knot, all the makeup gone from my f
ace, my skin covered, did I feel safe and clean again.

  I sat on the edge of the bed and dropped the earrings Audra gave me into the teeny case she’d given them to me inside of. “Goodnight,” I said before snapping the lid closed.

  Only then did I look at the paper Tommy had taken a minimal risk to slip me.

  It was a small piece of paper, only a few inches in diameter, folded a dozen times to make it the size of a Scrabble tile. Written on it was an address about a mile, mile and a half, from where I sat, and a time that was less than forty minutes away underneath.

  He wanted to meet.

  I debated it for about thirty seconds before I burst to my feet and shoved my feet into a pair of boots. I’d hoped this was what he’d wanted.

  I had too many questions to deny him.

  The address turned out to be an all-night diner. He was waiting, still dressed in what appeared to be his uniform at the motel: jeans and a t-shirt. This particular t-shirt was a vintage one from a concert tour of some long-forgotten band. He’d been wearing it at the motel. I remembered Peach asking him if he’d ever heard any of the band’s music.

  I slid into the booth across from him and felt a rush of anger as I studied his face.

  “Asshole!”

  He tilted his head to one side, an overwhelming sadness filling his eyes. “I’m sorry, Kari. I never would have touched you if there was any other way.”

  “You know what my boss called it?” I growled the words, biting out my anger with each word. “Rape. She called it rape!”

  He nodded. “I couldn’t blow my cover.”

  I nodded, snatching up a knife from the cutlery set out on the table. I wished it was a steak knife or a butcher knife, but it was only a butter knife. Yet, I was pretty sure a butter knife could do some real damage given the right amount of pressure behind it.

  “I couldn’t blow your cover. Do you know what Sam would do to you if he knew you were with Gray Wolf?” He leaned forward, tried to grab my arm, but I moved out of his reach. “They know all about Gray Wolf. Apparently it was your agency that ended their last endeavor.”