by Tom Abrahams
The wall behind me opens with a loud hydraulic hiss. The doorway is narrow and short, maybe five feet tall. Instinctively I slide to the side of the door, pressing my backpack against the wall.
If I try bursting into the room, I’m at a tactical disadvantage. If I wait, whoever comes through the awkward door loses the upper hand.
Sliding down the wall, resting my butt on my heels, I listen for any sound coming from inside what I now know is Dr. Wolf’s lab.
“Did you do that?” says Salt and Pepper. “Did you open the door?”
“Why would you think I did it?” That’s Mustache Duke, his voice sounds closer to the opening. “I’m standing here with you. Both of my hands are on the girl here.”
“Go check it out,” says Salt and Pepper, clearly the leader. “I can watch moneybags here while she gets us what we need.”
I inch my body farther away from the door. I’m next to the ladder, hoping that I’m far enough away from his peripheral vision that he’ll be completely in the hallway before he sees me.
“For the last time,” Bella snaps, “I don’t have what you want. I’m looking for the same thing, okay?”
“I don’t buy it,” Salt and Pepper again. “Duke, go check out the hallway.”
“Fine,” he grunts through his moustache. His heavy boot steps approach.
Sliding my back up the wall, I swing the Tec-9 to my left hand, turning it backwards and gripping its barrel like a knife. I hold it, extended, in position above the opening. It’s five pounds feeling more like fifty, given my awkward stance.
“I’ll be back,” says Duke. “It’s probably nothing.”
With my right hand I grab the fifth rung of the ladder to feel for the hidden lever. I find it as a shock of white hair ducks through the opening.
“Pssst,” I whisper right as Duke clears the door.
He snaps his head toward me and her looks up in time to get the back end of my machine pistol slammed down into the middle of his forehead. Before he crumples to the floor, I twist the lever to the right. The door hisses shut at the same instant the back of Duke’s head cracks against the floor. He’s out cold.
I sling the Tec-9 back to the right side of my body and move to Duke’s head. There’s already a dark purple, rectangular bruise between his whisker-like eyebrows. He’s slack-jawed, his tongue hanging from his open mouth. From behind his head, I grab his armpits and drag him away from the secret wall-opening.
Now what?
I figure I’ve got a couple of minutes before the door slides open again and Salt and Pepper peeks through it looking for his partner, so I crouch down beside Duke, put my pack on the floor next to me, and dig through his pockets.
He’s wearing a tan hunting vest over a black T-shirt and some jeans. There are six pockets in the vest, and one of them holds a cell phone and a Bluetooth headset. Another contains a Leatherman in a belt loop pouch. His wallet has a couple of hundred dollars in tens and twenties. I pocket the cash and the keys to the Suburban before stuffing everything else into my pack.
I’m only three or four feet to the side of the secret opening, shouldering my pack, when the door hisses open. I don’t have time to react with the Tec-9 before Salt and Pepper squeezes through the opening facing me, his semiautomatic 9mm leveled at my chest.
***
Salt and Pepper’s face contorts with confusion, his eyes narrowed and darting between me and Duke’s limp body on the floor next to me. That moment it takes for his brain to process what’s happened is enough time for me to close the distance between us and tackle him. My momentum carries him backward into the bottom of the suspended tank, which hits him with a hollow thud between his shoulder blades.
He grunts, all the air escaping his lungs, and we tumble to the floor beneath the tank. I land on top of him, and grab his face with my right hand, gripping it like a basketball. I drive my left shoulder into his right arm, forcing his gun free.
Struggling to keep my position, my neck gets yanked sharply to the right. He’s grabbed the Tec-9 strap and is blindly tugging, trying to gain control of the pistol with his left hand.
He gets his hand around the barrel, and I hit the magazine catch release under the trigger. The 50 round cartridge drops out of the magazine catch and into my hand. Fighting against the strap’s pressure cutting into my neck, I grip the magazine as tightly as I can and jam it into the right side of his head.
It stuns him and he loosens his hold of the pistol strap. I grab the strap at my neck and yank it over my head, freeing myself from it. Rolling back to straddle him, I grab his ears and slam the back of his head against the floor. His eyes flutter, he gasps, spit bubbling along the side of his mouth, and he passes out.
I don’t think the blow to head killed him. He’s still breathing, and I collapse on top of him, rising up and down with his labored breaths.
That didn’t go as planned. Then again, I didn’t really have a plan.
The left side of my neck feels burned. My right hand aches almost as much as my left shoulder. My lower back feels bruised, probably from the pack banging against it during the scuffle. It’s like I can feel the pain-numbing adrenaline leaking from my body, replaced with a rising wave of nausea and exhaustion.
Hand to hand combat is not my thing.
“Jackson?” a meek voice calls out. “Are you okay?”
“Uh huh.” I gather my strength and use Salt and Pepper’s body to push myself up. “You?”
Bella nods, her eyes revealing a fear I hadn’t seen from her in the long day we’d spent together. She’s bent over, her hands pressed against the secret opening.
“This formula, or whatever it is, it must be valuable, right? You’ve got all kinds of crazy going on here.”
“Did you find Mack? Is he alive?”
“Yes, he’s okay. He’s still in the Suburban. I left him a gun.” A ping of dizziness dances through my head, blurring my vision for a second, before I regain my balance.
“How did you find us?” Bella steps through the opening, stepping carefully around Salt and Pepper. “I mean, how did you know they’d bring me here?”
“I didn’t know,” I admit. “I used the Tile app on my phone. There’s a tile in my bag here, and I remembered your cell had the app too. It told me where you were.”
“Really?” she asks in surprise. “I can’t get that thing to work if I’m more than fifty yards from it.”
“You gotta have someone else’s phone near it,” I explain. “It relies on a lot of people having the app to work right. Not perfect yet. Just got lucky.”
Bella notices Mustache Duke laid out on the floor to her left. “How’d you do that?”
“Tile app.”
“Funny.” She shoots me a disapproving look. “What now?”
“Now you tell me a little bit more about what it is were up against here.” I bend over to grab the magazine and the Tec-9 from the floor. “You know a lot more than you’ve told me. I deserve some additional information.” I point the pistol at one body and then the other.
“Fair enough,” she sighs. “You’ve earned it.”
***
Salt and Pepper moans before jerking his eyes open and sucking in a gulp of air. He looks unhappy.
I wouldn’t be happy either if I were duct taped to a lab table.
“You’re not going to get away with this,” he threatens, his voice hoarse.
“That’s kinda overdone isn’t it?” I’m sitting in a rolling desk chair a couple of feet from him. Mustache Duke is on the next table over, same treatment, still unconscious.
“I mean really,” I push against the floor with my heels and roll toward our irritated prisoner. “You’re not going to get away with this!!” I mock. “That’s so overdone.”
“You’re in way over your head,” he croaks, trying to clear his throat.
“I’m not the one taped to a table. So…there’s that.”
He winces and presses his eyes closed.
“Head hurt?”
Bella appears on the other side of the table. Salt and Pepper doesn’t say anything.
“The tables are turned,” she says.
“Nice turn of phrase,” I wink at Bella. She smiles.
“As I was saying,” she turns her attention to Salt and Pepper, “I’m the one asking questions now. And you’re going to answer them.”
He clenches his jaw and struggles against the tape I used to bind him, but he says nothing.
“Who are you working for?” Bella folds her arms. “Who sent you after me?”
No response.
I stroll up to the table, find the swollen bruise on the right side of his head, and press into it with my thumb. Salt and Pepper squeezes his eyes shut and bites his lower lip against the pain, trying to move his head away from the pressure.
Bella softens her voice and moves next to his ear. “Here’s the deal. Nobody is going to come looking for you. This lab, despite being breached, is still relatively hidden. If we leave you here, strapped to this table, another sticky piece of duct tape over your mouth to keep you quiet...” She holds her hands as if to say, Oh well…
I pick up my remaining roll of tape and rip off a piece long enough to cover Salt and Pepper’s mouth. The sound of the tape tearing from the roll is still echoing in the lab when he breaks.
“Okay!” he blurts out. “Hang on a minute. I need a second to collect my thoughts.”
“Is it a second,” Bella asks, “or a minute? When I get to one, that’s it. We leave you here with your buddy over there. When he dies, and I don’t think it’ll take very long without a doctor, it’ll get ripe in here pretty quick.”
“But—”
“Occasionally dead bodies make noises,” I chime in. “They grunt or groan, maybe even squeak. That’ll be fun with the lights off, right?”
Bella shoots me a look that suggests I stay out of her interrogation. She’s in CSI mode or something.
She holds up her fingers. “Five.”
“Okay, wait!”
“Four.” She folds her thumb against her palm.
“Seriously!”
“Three.” Bella tucks her pinkie.
“Blogis!”
“Blogis?” Bella folds her arms. “Is that who sent you?”
“Yes,” he says. “Liho Blogis.”
“What kind of name is that?” I ask. “Is that a man or a woman?”
Another laser beam from Bella. “And who are you?” she asks Salt and Pepper.
“Sal,” he says. “Salvador Pimiento.”
“What exactly is it, Salvador, that Blogis wanted you to get from me? Why did he hire you and send you here?”
“He told me that you had information about a valuable process,” Sal swallows hard, his voice still cracking from the dryness in his throat. “He said it was worth a lot of money.”
“And?”
“And that the process was in pieces.” He swallows again. “Can I get some water?”
“We don’t have any,” she snaps. “Keep talking.”
He blinks hard a couple of times, a tear rolling across the bruise on his temple, “He said you had part of it, he had part of it, and that you probably knew where more parts were hidden.”
“Why did he think that?”
“I dunno.” Pimiento turns to me. “He figured that the lab had stuff in it. And he knew that if it did, somebody would come to find it.”
“You didn’t know it would be her?” I ask, avoiding eye contact with Bella. “I didn’t know for sure,” he says. “But I had good intelligence it would be her.”
“Intelligence?” Bella barks. “What intelligence?”
“It makes sense,” Pimiento says. “You’re the head of the company, the lab is super top secret. Why wouldn’t the head of the company come to check on her huge secret science experiment?”
“You didn’t say that it made sense,” I push. “You said you had intelligence.”
“Blogis,” he closes his eyes and coughs. “Blogis gave me everything.”
“Where is Blogis?” I asked. “Why isn’t he here?”
“Ha!” Pimiento laughs through another cough. “Here? Blogis? Nah. He wouldn’t do this level of work. He hires it out.”
“Where is he?”
“I dunno. Ukraine somewhere, maybe. He’s Ukrainian. Or Russian. Not sure.”
“Ukraine?” I remark. “What a coincidence!”
CHAPTER 7
Mack is in the same spot I left him; sitting in the back of the Suburban, six shooter in his hand. The passenger side rear door is open. He doesn’t look great, but he peps up a little when he sees Bella trailing behind me.
“Hey,” he manages, “you made it back.”
“We did,” Bella sighs. “How are you?” She leans on the door and peeks her head inside the SUV. “Are you going to be okay, Mack?”
“Yeah. I’ve been through worse.”
I step to the back of the SUV and toss in my backpack, which now holds my Tec-9 and Sal Pimiento’s loaded 9mm Sig Sauer.
“We’re taking you to the hospital, Mack.” She puts her hand on his shoulder before gently pulling a seatbelt across his body. “You need to see a doctor.”
“I’ll be fine,” he protests, tugging on the shoulder strap.
I slam shut the SUV tailgate.
“Could you be louder?” Bella snaps. “We don’t need attention from anyone right now!”
“Thanks for the tip,” I mumble, walking to the driver’s side and hopping into the driver’s seat. The blood from Max’s nose is almost tracing the pigment changes above his upper lip. His lower lip doesn’t look any better. “Mack, how’s the bump on the back of your head?”
“Uh,” he reaches back to find it and winces when he does. “Oooh. It hurts. Like I said, though, I’m good to go. Let’s hit the road.”
“Bella’s right,” I say, “you need medical attention. We’re dropping you off at the hospital between here and Deadwood. It’s, like, two minutes away.”
Bella shuts his door and gets into the front seat next to me. “Really, Mack,” she says, “you’re of more use to us once we know you can think straight.”
He doesn’t say anything as I crank the engine, making sure the headlights and running lights are off until we’re out of the parking lot.
“Think I can call now?” Bella asks me.
“Wait till we’re out of the lot,” I suggest. “We need a little bit of distance between us and those idiots.”
“What happened down there?” Mack asks.
I glance in the rear view mirror at Mack. He’s backlit from the building lights behind us. “First, you tell us what happened to you.”
“I got jumped.”
“By whom?” I ask. “Your buddy Duke?”
“I got jumped from behind, so I don’t know. I guess it had to be Duke if the other guy was in the bar with you.”
“Had to be Duke,” Bella concurs. “When Pimiento shoved me into the car, Duke was in the driver’s seat and you were slumped over, unconscious.”
“All I know,” Mack says, trying to speak clearly through his swollen lower lip, “is that I walked out of that bar and BOOM! Next thing I remember is Quick giving me his gun and telling me he’d be back.”
“Oh yeah, I’m gonna need that back when we get to the hospital.”
“Here you go,” he leans forward and places the pistol on the center armrest between Bella and me. “What happened down there, Quick? Where are Duke and the other guy?”
I take my right hand off of the wheel and put the gun inside the center armrest compartment. “Bella, you want to tell him?” I flip the headlights on and pull out of the lot onto the highway.
“When we got here,” she explains, “both men took me by the arms and essentially carried me into the building.”
“They killed a guard,” I add.
“Yes,” she says. “They shot him when he asked for identification. Then we got onto the elevator and down to the lab level. They knew the lab was down there, b
ut didn’t know exactly where.”
“You told them?” Mack asks.
“Of course I told them,” Bella says, irritated by Mack’s question. “What was I going to do? They’d have killed me if I didn’t.”
“You took them to the lab...” I prompted.
“Yes,” she nods, “I took them to the lab. Once we were inside they started asking me questions. They wanted information.”
“What kind of questions?” Mack asks. “What information? Did they say who else had seen the video of Wolf’s assassination?”
“That’s a weird question,” I interject.
“Pimiento seemed to think I had additional pieces to the process,” Bella says.
“Additional pieces?” I ask. “How did they know you had any pieces?”
Bella purses her lips, processing my question before dismissing it. “They just did. They knew I had a part of the process and that there are three, maybe four, other components out there.”
“What did you tell them?” I press. “Did you tell them you have more than one piece?”
“No,” she answers, “because I don’t. I only have the one section. But they thought that I had more information than that, and they knew I was going to Ukraine.”
“They knew you were going to Ukraine?”
“Well, they mentioned Odessa, so maybe they didn’t know. But it seemed coincidental. I remember thinking to myself that they knew and wondering how they knew.”
“So they didn’t necessarily know anything,” Mack interjects. “They may have the same information you have. If they’re affiliated with Dr. Wolf’s killer, then they know everything he knows. He took the hard drive.”
“What hard drive?” I ask.
“There was a hard drive that Dr. Wolf kept in his lab,” Bella tells me. “There was a list of contacts, people he trusted. It also contained GPS coordinates to a half dozen locations where he might have left the missing parts of the process.”
“Now this Liho Blogis guy has a list of people and places which will lead him directly to the entirety of the process. If that’s the case, how are we even in the game?”
