by Scott Blade
“Take a seat, Widow. You’ll get a good view from there.”
I stared at the seat, but didn’t sit down.
Kelvin asked, “What’s the problem?”
Talbern said, “His cuffs. Take his cuffs off. He’s not going to sit on them.”
Kelvin nodded and looked up at me.
The jet had relatively high ceilings. I could stand up, tall, but the aisles were too tight for two people to stand side by side. I had to swivel around and look back at Kelvin.
I said to Talbern, “Thank you.”
She smiled.
Kelvin said, “You going to behave?”
“Just put them on the front if you’re worried about that.”
Kelvin shrugged and I realized that they had never flown a prisoner before. That’s why the Gulfstream looked like a jet for a private business. It was because that’s exactly what it was. It wasn’t a disguise. It was probably borrowed or rented by the FBI.
Which told me that whatever they wanted me for, it was important if they were sparing no expense to fly me to wherever.
Kelvin took out the keys and uncuffed me and then recuffed me in the front. I nodded in a polite thank you gesture, which was more out of reflex than anything else. I wasn’t thankful, because I was still pissed off that I was even in this situation.
That’s what I get for trying to do the right thing.
After I sat, neither Kelvin nor Talbern sat next to me, which I had expected.
They didn’t sit together either.
Talbern sat at the front of the jet, near the cockpit and Kelvin sat all the way at the tail, last row.
The second guy from the flight crew had turned out to be a flight attendant because he walked over to me and told me to put on my seatbelt.
At first he seemed professional and behaved normally. But then I lifted my hands and showed him the cuffs.
I asked, “How am I supposed to do that?”
He stared at me for a moment.
The cabin was calm around us. No sounds but the humming of the engines and then the steady rise of the noise as the pilot fired them up to get moving.
I hadn’t made any attempts to scare the guy, but suddenly he seemed a little scared.
He started to reach down for my seatbelt, like he was going to strap it on me himself. But he hesitated halfway, like he realized that I was a dangerous prisoner and not to be trusted.
He stopped.
I stayed quiet.
The guy flinched as a small hand grabbed him from behind.
I saw the fingers come over his shoulder. Saw the red painted nails.
Talbern asked, “What’re you doing?”
The flight attendant said, “He needs to be wearing his seatbelt.”
“Step aside,” Talbern said and they shuffled in the aisle and shifted and traded places.
She stepped into the row and leaned over me.
She smelled incredible, more like an attorney or a manager of a designer store over an FBI agent. Her ponytail cascaded down and fell over her right shoulder.
Her breasts were not in my face, but not far off.
The front of her blouse came open a little—only a little. But I could see enough. She had amazing breasts; that was clear. Slightly bigger than average. She was blessed with a serious display of womanhood. No doubt about that. No confusion on that point.
And then there were her eyes. They were some kind of green, crossed with some kind of blue, mixed with a hint of yellow. I wasn’t sure what color to call them. Teal wasn’t right and to say they were turquoise was an understatement.
The best that I could come up with was immaculate. They were immaculate. Truly, a work of nature.
They were so mesmerizing that I forgot about my view of her breasts. And that was not in my nature. I am only a man, after all.
For a brief moment, we locked eyes as she reached down and grabbed my seatbelt. She pulled it over and across my waist and strapped me in.
Then she asked, “Is that too tight?”
I nodded and said, “No.”
Which took me a second to realize that I had meant to shake my head, not nod it.
She smiled, stepped back and away from me.
“From now on, if you want to give him anything or need to adjust his seatbelt, don’t do it without talking to me first.”
She had spoken to the flight attendant.
He simply nodded and said, “You all should strap in. We’re taking off.”
He shuffled back to the cockpit.
Talbern said, “After we take off and it’s safe, I’ll come back and check on you. Okay?”
“I look forward to it,” I said.
Instantly, I felt stupid for that. Beautiful women have a way of making a man say stupid things. I was no different than any other man, in that regard.
She gave me the same smile as before and turned and shuffled back down the aisle to the front row.
My feelings of embarrassment settled away after I thought about the fact that I was in handcuffs and she was an FBI agent. Saying something stupid was the last thing that was standing in my way of impressing her.
I settled back in the chair, which was about as comfortable as its first impression had made on me, five minutes earlier. I’m not sure what type of chair that it was called, but it was somewhere shy of a captain’s chair, but certainly comfortable enough for a captain to use.
Everyone strapped into his or her seats, the flight attendant joined Talbern in the row at the front, and the jet started moving.
We nudged forward for about ten minutes—waiting. For what? I didn’t know.
Whoever does know what’s going on flights?
Finally, we ended up on a clear runway and the jet amped to life. The wing’s rear flaps creaked out and folded downward and the engines sprang to life like they had been simply humming in standby mode before.
For a small jet, the Gulfstream screeched and roared down the runway as loud and as aggressive as a large passenger jet.
In seconds, we were airborne and climbing the sky.
CHAPTER 14
WE FLEW NORTH and away from Orlando, away from Cocoa Beach, and away from Florida, which was where I wanted to be. Already, my irritation with this whole thing was getting to me. The first part of my experience had been irritating, but at least I had been curious as to why a nameless dog tag had gotten me into this mess in the first place, but now I didn’t care. Now, I was inching toward simply wanting off the plane and back to my peaceful life.
We flew on to a destination I wasn’t sure about.
The flight attendant came around to me early on and asked if I’d like a snack.
Talbern stood behind him. She had seen him coming over and gotten up and walked with him.
I said, “I’d like some coffee.”
She seemed to think for a moment and then she shook her head in disapproval.
The flight attendant said, “Sorry.”
“Then I’m fine. Thank you.”
He shuffled back and walked to the end of the cabin to Kelvin.
Talbern said, “Sorry, but I think that a hot cup of coffee onboard a plane can be like a small, liquid grenade. Not a good idea to give it to you.”
I nodded.
She paused a beat and then sat down in the chair next to me.
I was a little stunned.
She said, “I apologize for all the secrecy. We really have no idea what’s going on. It’s not our case. We were just told to pick you up and bring you…”
She stopped cold, like she wasn’t supposed to tell me where we were going.
I nodded and said, “I guess we’re going to Virginia.”
She paused a beat and then she said, “New York. Actually.”
“I had a fifty-fifty shot that it was one or the other.”
“I suppose you’re right. We are headed north.”
“And you’re FBI. If you had been another agency, then I might’ve been off base.”
She k
new that it was simple deduction. I had the suspicion that she was playing good cop. But I said nothing about it.
If I had the choice between sitting next to the beautiful Talbern, versus not sitting next to her, I’d choose her every time. No question.
She looked forward at the flight attendant, who was staring back at us and then he whipped his face toward the port side of the plane.
Talbern asked, “Who is Jack Widow?”
“Come on. You know who I am. Certainly, you’ve got my records by now.”
“I saw your file, Widow. But there’s a black tag on it. And it’s a military black tag. Which means Special Forces?”
I stayed quiet.
“What I do know is that you were in the Navy.”
“That’s all you know?”
“You grew up in Mississippi. I assume that must’ve been a small-town childhood. Your mother was a sheriff of a small town there. But she was murdered. I read that you left the military while she was in the hospital.”
She paused, swallowed, and said, “No one ever caught the guy who did it.”
I asked, “They didn’t?”
But I already knew the answer to that question. I had caught the guy.
She shook her head.
We hit a patch of turbulence. Talbern stayed cool as our seats rocked for a moment, and then everything calmed down.
She looked back at Kelvin. I assumed that he shot her a suspicious look, showing anger at her for being so friendly with me because she turned forward and stayed quiet.
CHAPTER 15
THE GULFSTREAM GLIDED in over the tarmac for a long second. The landing gear touched down and the wheels screeched. A temporary gust of smoke streamed up from the tires and whiffed away into the sky.
Talbern had stayed in the seat next to me and the silence had stayed with her for the rest of the flight until we completely landed. The flight attendant made the announcement by telling us that it was safe to remove our seatbelts and move about the cabin.
I got the impression that it was ten seconds after he started to tell us that he realized that he didn’t really need to. We weren’t on a commercial flight, after all.
It seemed that he did the whole song and dance out of habit, a sign of long instilled career programming like a retired baseball player accidentally trying to enter a stadium through the staff entrance rather than the public entrance.
Talbern smiled at me and said, “Okay, Widow. Let’s go.”
We exited the plane at another empty private jet hangar, same as before, only now it was completely night time and this hangar was at JFK Airport. I was sure about that.
I had seen JFK many, many times.
Over the course of my career, I had stopped in the international terminal many times. Likewise, I had reentered American soil through the bureaucratic nightmare that was JFK’s customs section for international travelers.
If I could remember all the times that I had to go through that process here, then it would be a number that was far into the double digits. Possibly, even the low triple digits.
I could jokingly say that the amount of free sky miles that I would’ve racked up would’ve enabled me to fly for free for the rest of my life. The problem with saying that in a joking manner was that it might’ve been more of a truth rather than a joke. It wouldn’t have surprised me.
Stepping off the last step of the landing stairs, Talbern tugged at my arm to follow her and Kelvin to another FBI SUV. This one was also black. Windows tinted. Big tires.
The difference in this one was that even though it was unmarked, it did have a light bar on top. It wasn’t an obvious, big thing with big round lights. This one was a thin, single bar, but it was plainly in view of anyone who took a good look at the vehicle. It wasn’t embedded into the grille like most other official vehicles that I had seen before.
We were met by a single agent. He was a young, black guy who had an air of novice about him. He was a grunt, I assumed. He was only here to transport us to wherever we were going.
They put me into the SUV first. Buckled me into the backseat. They were nice enough not to make me sit on my hands, like before and left the cuffs in the front.
Talbern ducked in over me and buckled me in.
The driver fired up the SUV and we were off.
EVEN THOUGH I was no longer on Cocoa Beach, the heat in New York City felt as blistering as the heat in South Florida. The whole Eastern Seaboard was going through record heat waves. I was sure that New York’s proximity to the Atlantic Ocean added the right amount of humidity to the equation to help it feel like Miami heat.
During the sixty-five-minute ride across Brooklyn and into south Manhattan, we hit a steady stream of moving traffic.
The agent driving knew his streets well.
The bulk of Brooklyn was an easy ride for the time.
I leaned over and took a glance at the time display on the dashboard. It was seven-forty-seven in the evening when we arrived at the Federal Plaza on the corner of Broadway and Worth Street.
We passed around the front of the plaza. There were scaffoldings and thin, metal constructs plastered across two side streets. Like most major cities, New York was under constant construction and changes.
Crowds of people walked in every direction. All of them had different destinations—hundreds, probably. But they all fell into a natural current. Some going uptown, some headed down. People of all shapes and sizes, all different ethnicities, classes. There were people from all walks of life.
New York City was a city built from peaceful chaos.
I liked New York City. There was no place on Earth quite like it.
The driver stopped at a security gate on one of the side streets and smiled at a guard hut. The hut had tinted windows, but an open doorway. I saw two guys in there. One of them seated and punching keys on a keyboard. An old computer monitor flashed light across his face.
The other guard stepped forward and peered through the window.
He didn’t bother to ask the driver to roll down the window. He waved us forward.
We drove into the building and down into an underground parking structure.
The driver didn’t park. Instead, he drove us right up to an elevator hub and said, “You can go in here.”
Kelvin said, “Where are we headed?”
“Tenth floor.”
I followed behind Kelvin and into the elevator. We rode up to the tenth floor.
The doors opened and I was shocked to find a lobby full of people.
Each of them stared at me with a shared look on their faces.
They looked at me with expressions of both confusion and horror, all at the same time.
CHAPTER 16
TWENTY FBI AGENTS stared at me.
A black sign on the wall to the left, big and boxy, had white letters pinned to it. This was the New York FBI’s Homicide Division. Which made me realize that I was in far worse shape than I had expected.
The people in the room appeared to have held their breath simultaneously as they waited for the elevator to arrive at their floor.
No one spoke for a long second.
Then a tall, slender man stepped forward. He had a face like a sundried prune and about the same amount of hair on top of his head.
But he had the opposite demeanor about him. He was the only person in the room to smile.
He reached his hand out for Kelvin to shake first.
They shook hands and greeted each other like long lost friends, only it was all professional. Then he stepped over to Talbern and greeted her.
A woman stepped behind him. She was forty and not a day older or a day younger.
I could see muscular bulges in her arms under her coat. She had tanned skin and a tight neck, like she was in the gym every morning before breakfast.
She said nothing.
She didn’t smile at Kelvin or Talbern, but she nodded to each of them.
She didn’t look at me. There was something off-putting about it, l
ike she was avoiding making eye contact with me on purpose. In fact, I sensed that she was going above and beyond to avoid looking directly at me. Which was weird.
I had never met her before, but I was getting the distinct impression that she hated me. It was worse than that, even.
The tall man stopped in front of me. He gave me a long look up and down.
He didn’t speak to me.
I finally spoke. I asked, “You like what you see?”
This didn’t faze him like I had intended.
He said, “This way, gentleman.”
Of course, Talbern wasn’t been a gentleman, but he was referring to the three of us.
The tall man turned and walked through the crowd of FBI agents and we followed. First was the woman who hated me, then Kelvin, then me, and Talbern taking up the rear.
I felt all eyes on me as I passed through the tunnel of people. We passed a reception desk that was empty and made our way down one short corridor. The slender man turned a corner and walked us halfway down a long corridor, past office windows and cubicles and one large bullpen.
Computer monitors flashed and FBI screensavers danced across screens like a rehearsed light show.
Every chair was empty because all the people who worked there had been in the elevator lobby, waiting for me like I was a local celebrity.
The slender man stopped and opened one door that was a set of double doors. We followed him into a conference room, one by one.
The conference room was all white walls, no windows. The complete opposite of the rest of the rooms on this floor that I had seen so far.
We crowded in and the slender man said, “Have a seat.”
He walked over to the front of the room and stayed standing. The agent who hated me followed behind him and stopped on the opposite side of him. She was holding the de facto evidence bag with the dog tag that I had found in it.
Kelvin led me to sit at the far end of the table. He had pulled a chair out for me.
He and Talbern sat several feet behind me, near the door, leaving me seated at a long, oval conference table alone.
The slender man said, “Mr. Widow, my name is Raymond Pawn and this is Kim Marksy.”
I nodded and stayed quiet.
“Mr. Widow, do you know why you are here?”
I shook my head and said, “I’m sure you’ll tell me.”
