As we made our way over to the heavy, insulated inner door I could hear music coming from the other side.
“It’s a party!” Amber cheered.
I frowned.
Chapter 20
“Oh, don’t be such a grumpy butt,” she chided. “Loosen up.”
We pushed through the heavy interior door and stepped into a frat house wet dream. The interior space was about 50 feet square and two stories tall. Upstairs and one side was all glassed in office space and next to those were men and women’s locker rooms. The downstairs space was all open and the warehouse guys had dropped off a selection of couches, recliners and an inflatable video screen with a projector which was playing a movie no one was watching. The sound system was blasting out Walk This Way.
There was a buffet that the guys had seriously worked over and a keg of beer. One of the two large trash cans was already overflowing. On a couple mats off to one side Bobby and V were sparring. For a big man Bobby was surprisingly quick on his feet. V tried a sidekick which he deftly blocked with one hand and swept her other leg. She hit the mat hard and Bobby was smart enough not to follow her in, as the bicycle kick she tried got nothing but air. V was laughing and bleeding out of one corner of her mouth, Bobby was bleeding from a small nick on his head.
“Is that fighting or foreplay?” Amber asked.
“Not sure what the difference is for V,” I replied. In front of the TV there was a collection of couches and Anita, Q and Jesse were all laughing and talking.
Oh, what the fuck. “You want a beer?” I asked Amber.
“Sure!”
I tapped off two and already the keg was noticeably lighter. We joined the group in front of the TV.
“I’m surprised you’re still here,” I said to Anita.
“What the fuck?” she sighed. “In for a penny--”
“In for a pound,” I finished for her.
“This is excellent,” Jesse applauded, gesturing around the warehouse with his beer. “I thought we’d be sleeping on air mattresses.”
“We don’t have houses like you all do,” I informed him. “So we’ve learned how to set up living space anywhere. We even have a mobile camp that can be air dropped and set up in less than day, including communications and a perimeter barricade.”
“Nice!” Jesse approved.
“Where’s Dugger?” I asked.
“He went upstairs to take a shower,” Jesse informed us. “He got teased all the way down here for getting his ass kicked by a girl so I think he wanted some alone time,” he grinned. “No offense,” he said to Amber.
“None taken,” she said easily.
“It was pretty impressive the way you put him down,” Jesse went on. “We’ve been watching these two go at it for an hour now,” he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at V and Bobby.
“Everyone in our operation has to go through combat training,” I explained to Anita. “If you sign on with us, you’ll have to go, too.”
“I’ve already had quite a bit,” she reminded me.
I nodded. “Then it should be easy for you. Everybody goes, even combat vets. Hand to hand, small arms, driving school and tradecraft.”
“We already know you can shoot,” Q added.
“Was it hard?” Anita asked Amber.
“Hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Amber admitted. “Hey, have we got clothes here? I need to change,” she said, tugging at the hem of her cocktail dress.
“Upstairs,” Q pointed toward the office. “There are signs taped on the doors.”
“I’m going to go change,” she informed me. “If they’re too small I’m going out to the van and cut the pervert,” she promised.
Anita cocked an eyebrow.
“Deek thought it was funny to send Amber clothes that were a half-size too small,” Q explained. “He’s over that,” he said to Amber.
“Good,” Amber concluded. “Okay, be right back.”
“Can we get anything for you?” I asked Anita. “Since you’re tagging along with our merry band. We can send someone out to your apartment.”
“In my job?” she laughed. “I carry spare clothes in the car.”
“They set up an extra room for her,” Q advised.
“Good,” I affirmed. “Must be kind of surreal,” I said to Anita.
“That’s an understatement,” she laughed. “And yet I feel right at home here.”
“We rarely spend more than one night in the same place,” I informed her. “Houses, boats, planes, hotels, campers, places like this,” I gestured around the warehouse. “Even luxury tents.”
“Those are awesome,” Q agreed. “We should do that again.”
Jesse volunteered to fetch another round of beers.
“So they’re not...your people?” she asked with a nod toward Jesse.
“They’re just filling in for this job,” I informed her.
“They seem pretty sharp,” she agreed. “And pretty capable,” she added with a look toward Bobby, who had V in a leg lock.
“I trust their employer,” I said evasively. We hadn’t known Anita long enough to mention Teddy’s name.
“You definitely have some interesting friends,” she pointed out.
“You don’t know the half of it,” I assured her. “You sure you want to sign on to all this? We could still come up with a plan to keep you clear of it.”
“I haven’t completely decided yet,” she said, looking around. “It just feels so…”
“Rootless?” Q finished for her.
“Yeah!” she agreed. “You know how many nights I spend in my own apartment?”
Actually, ever since I starting thinking about bringing her on board, Deek had been doing a little digging. Nothing too extreme for a federal agent but, yeah, we knew how many nights she was spending at home.
“We have logistical people who handle all the details,” I pointed out.
“They deliver your clothes?”
“Pretty much whatever we need,” Q confirmed.
“Clothes, food, phones, cars,” I added. “We don’t own anything. One or two of our people maintain a house, for their own reasons, but it’s optional.”
She turned thoughtful. “How come you’re not worried I’m trying to infiltrate your organization?”
“Couple reasons,” I said. “We’re not a criminal organization, no one would give you authorization and you picked the absolutely wrong night to start. Call the SWAT team in now you’d break up a kegger in warehouse we own where everyone is over 21.”
The other reason was we had people in D.C. looking into it and none of them could find any investigation related to us. We found several related to Sergei, which confirmed everything Anita Guerrero had told us.
“Besides, don’t you want to nail the bastards who killed Rafe? We were like brothers.”
“You never actually met him,” she reminded me.
“Don’t bother,” Q advised, “you can’t win that one.”
“Still, not everything you do is strictly legal,” she pressed.
“Is everything you do completely legal?” I countered. “You made an official report on those guys you greased from the parking garage? Turned in the surveillance footage from security cameras at the garage and everything?”
She drained the rest of her beer. “Not entirely,” she admitted.
“We do what we need to get the job done,” I informed her. “Any organization that does what we do will have to color outside the lines sometimes. How far have the feds gotten with Sergei?”
“Nowhere.”
“In less than 24 hours we had him taking a shot at us and trying to frame us for murder.”
“But if everyone operated like you do--”
“It would be chaos,” I finished for her. “Look, I’m not gonna blow smoke up your ass and tell you we operate from some lofty ideals of right and wrong. We’re in this for money and the only way you make money is to work fast, get shit done and keep a low profile.”
�
�Money isn’t your primary motivation,” she observed.
“Not anymore,” I agreed. “But it’s how we keep score.”
“Tell me about the old days,” she pressed. “It was something government. They still cover for you guys.”
“Another time,” I said reflexively. Despite my earlier conversation with Amber I wasn’t going to let go of the compartmentalization until we had a plan that made sense.
“Here we go,” Jesse came back with four beers.
“I need to go change,” I announced grabbing my beer. “Be right back.”
I ran into Dugger coming down the stairs. “Mr. Fatman,” he said tentatively. “I wanted to apologize about this afternoon. I didn’t know Amber was your girl.” He definitely had some of the starch taken out of his attitude.
“Let me tell you something about Amber,” I began, borrowing Teddy’s speech to Q. “She’s not anyone’s girl. If she’s with me that’s how she wants it and if she wanted to be with someone else, there’s not anything me or anyone else could do about it. And if she was the type who could be sidetracked by a two-bit con artist, then she’s not the girl I’d want to be with anyway. So you can keep moping around like a whipped a dog or you can nut up and do the job like I know you can. It’s up to you. She’s not the type to hold a grudge.”
“Thanks,” he said, continuing down the stairs.
“Oh, Dugger,” I said. He stopped and looked back. “All the women in my organization get the same combat training Amber went through. Make a run at any of them again and I’ll let them bleed you out in the parking lot. You feelin’ me?”
“Yes, sir,” he said crisply.
“Alright then, there’s still plenty left in the keg. Get yourself a beer.”
I went on up to the office and Dugger headed out to the garage to hang with Mateo and Deek, which was probably the smartest choice.
The office had double doors and I was surprised that the music was barely audible in the offices. Even though our relationship wasn’t official, the warehouse people had set us up with a king size futon bed and stashed our gear in the same room. I knocked tentatively.
“Come in,” Amber said.
She was sitting cross-legged on the bed in her underwear, organizing her clothes. The little black dress was on the floor.
“How’d you know it was me?”
“Who says I did?” she joked. “Seriously, because anyone else would have texted me instead of coming up here. Dugger wouldn’t have the sack to knock on the door and no one else would have a reason.”
As usual her logic was flawless.
“When did you become such a badass?” I joked.
“You made me that way,” she accused, taking my beer away from me and downing half.
“I set your feet on the path,” I admitted, “but you walked it.”
She thought about that one a minute. “I know how to wire C4 and make a breaching charge,” she said. “I know how to use a nitrox rebreather and can find my way out of a wreck at 120 feet after being spun around in the dark. I can fight, I can shoot, and I know I can take two days of interrogation. I know how to pick locks and get out of handcuffs. I know how to handle almost every major combat injury you can imagine. And I know I can outrun Russian mobsters on a motorcycle.”
She reached over and took my hand. “Imagine what I’ll know in six months.”
“I see your point.”
“I’m not sure you do,” she said matter of factly. “Because without you, I wouldn’t know any of that. I’d be a floor nurse at some shitty hospital still turning tricks on my days off out of sheer, mind-numbing boredom. I’d have an apartment and bills and...boring shit.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” I reminded her. “Everything you accomplished you did on your own.”
She sighed. “You’re not dumb, so why are you playing dumb?”
“Because I don’t want to have this conversation right now.”
“Then you should probably head back downstairs before everyone thinks we’re having sex up here.”
“Let them think that,” I dismissed.
She rolled her eyes. “We’re on the clock,” she reminded me. “Who are the rest of the team fucking?”
“I see your point,” I said, getting up and putting on some clean clothes.
“I meant what I said on the phone,” she said as I opened the door.
“So did I,” I said closing it behind me.
I went back downstairs remembering why relationships you paid for by the hour were such a luxury and not quite sure if I felt more like Professor Higgins in Pygmalion or Frankenstein. What was more certain was I had created a monster, one that was now growing out of my control. Or perhaps it had been an illusion of control all along. Amber had the expert, street-level deception of a hooker but not the training. Now she had both and that new person was learning how to flex those new muscles. There was no putting her back in that box or any box for that matter.
This is why I had avoided relationships in my life. You go into them thinking you can manage them and, if Amber were some naive, superficial twit, that would be completely true. But she had become a razor stamped out of cold, hard steel and polished to an edge that could slice to the bone. She had confidence, she had focus and now she had a mentor in Flower and friends in Charlotte and Jacklyn. There was no managing Amber anymore and I was strapped to that rocket.
“What have I done?” I asked Q, who was at the keg tapping another beer.
“Sounds like you could use this more than me,” he said, handing me the first one and reaching for another cup.
“I had no right to do that to you,” I said absently.
“Do what?” Q asked, pouring his own beer.
“Saddle you with Amber.”
Q laughed. “Like you, of all people, couldn’t see that coming?”
“I didn’t think it would be this fast,” I admitted.
“It was Flower and Charlotte, wasn’t it? They’re like some weird as shit catalyst.”
“Crazy bitch critical mass,” I said, finally getting my own mind around it.
“And now we’re adding another one,” Q nodded toward Anita Guerrero.
“She’s the sane one,” I realized as I said it.
V and Bobby had finally worn each other out and were back talking to Anita and Jesse. V was animated and laughing, the kind of easy camaraderie I hadn’t seen for a long time from her. Not since we broke up the Sneaky Bastards.
“So are the women going to end up running things?” Q asked.
“Kinda,” I confessed. “Maybe not officially but they’re going to have definite opinions on how things go.”
“Flower knew Charlotte and I would hit it off, didn’t she?”
“What do you think?”
“Ah! Laser guided pussy.”
I winced at the revelation. It was a waxed and perfumed ambush and we had walked right into it.
“Doesn’t the Foreign Legion still take enlistees?”
“They do,” he said, “but you’re too old and they take women now, too.”
“Thanks for that.”
“Anytime. Hey, Deek has something for us, he said not to show Anita.”
“I hope it’s something that blows shit up,” I said heavily.
While it didn’t blow things up, what Deek had was a close second.
“I had a hell of a time getting these,” he informed us, as Q dragged a box out of the back of his pickup. Inside were pair of rugged looking small assault rifles.
“I couldn’t find two AS Vals, so you had to settle for one of those and a VSS Vintorez,” he explained.
“It means ‘thread cutter’,” Q clarified, hefting the weapon.
While they looked similar the Val had a quick point scope, a folding stock, forward handle and a flashlight with the switch mounted on the forward stock. The Vintorez had a wooden stock and longer scope. It felt as heavy as it looked but it was solid and both weapons were balanced perfectly. The other box was a st
andard ammo can.
“That was the really hard one,” Deek explained. “You can’t import ammo anymore and it’s nearly impossible to find in the states.”
I opened the can and found boxes of stubby 9mmx39 ammo and extra mags. The heavy slugs had a tapered tip that was designed to spall after impact.
The Blue Tango Salvage: Book 2 in the Recovery and Marine Salvage, Inc. Series Page 23
