by Odell, Terry
But he was a man. He’d probably respond to anything female. They were play-acting. That was all. From the recesses of her brain, she became aware of throat-clearing noises. Breathless, she pulled away.
Steve gave her a chaste parting kiss, but he didn’t release her. He nuzzled her again, squeezed her hand. Whispered in her ear. “I need a minute with Bill.”
Bill stood a respectful distance away, although the room was too small to make that distance mean much. She returned Steve’s hand squeeze. Ducked her head. Spoke softly, but loud enough for Bill to hear. “Sweetheart, they brought me down here without any warning. I really could use a” —she pretended embarrassment, although after kissing him that way in front of Bill, she didn’t think there was much point. “You know… a ladies’ room.”
“Oh. Yeah. Of course.” Steve lifted his brows in Bill’s direction. “We’re allowed to use the bathrooms, right?”
“Sure,” Bill approached Elle. “I can show you.”
“If you’ll point me in the right direction, I’m sure I can find it on my own,” she said.
“This way.” Bill opened the door and ambled down the corridor, away from the door through which Maria had brought her. That door, Elle assumed would be locked.
He paused after a few steps. “It’s unisex. First door on the left.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I won’t be long. I can find my way back.”
He shrugged. “There’s really nowhere else to go. The other rooms are storage. Aguilar keeps them locked.”
“Doesn’t sound like he trusts anyone,” Elle said.
Bill shrugged again. “He leaves me alone. Except for this snafu, it’s usually an easy gig.”
“Doesn’t the Big Brother approach bother you? No privacy?”
Another shrug. “The control room is clean. So are our quarters, once you get inside.”
She would have loved to pick Bill’s brain, but Steve obviously wanted to talk to him. She started for the door Bill had indicated. “I’ll see you in a few minutes.”
The bathroom didn’t begin to compare with the ones in the rooms upstairs, but it was clean and there was plenty of toilet paper, soap, and paper towels. A canister of air freshener sat on the toilet tank. Her only gripe was the seat was up—guys never learned. Then again, maybe all the geeks down here were guys.
She figured she had no more than ten minutes before Bill would come after her. After using the facilities, she had nothing much else to do. No makeup repairing, no hair fixing. She could worry about Trish. Or she could contemplate that kiss. The kiss that had every female part of her tingling. Hell, it had her toenails tingling.
She ran cold water in the sink. Dampened a paper towel and daubed the back of her neck.
Get with the program. Trish. Find Trish.
The sink was a pedestal—no vanity filled with amazing things she could MacGyver into a weapon, or use to escape. The only window in the room was above the toilet. If she stood on top of the tank, she might be able to reach it, but it was too small to squeeze through, even if it opened. Which it didn’t. Air conditioning seemed to be the rule here, so why bother with windows that opened if they had to be closed for climate control anyway? And if it helped keep people inside—well, so much the better. For Aguilar.
Bill seemed satisfied to do whatever he did here. He certainly wasn’t Mexican. She wondered how long he’d been here, if he’d been bribed, kidnapped, or answered a classified ad. She laughed at the craziness of her thoughts. Her brain was bouncing around more than a hooker’s boobs. She didn’t have a watch, but she thought she was pushing the limits of a bathroom break. She dried her hands, tossed the paper towels in the wastebasket.
Whatever reason Steve had for insisting she be brought to him, it certainly wasn’t because he couldn’t work without his fiancé at his side. Maintaining their cover? Or being protective? She could only hope he’d find a way to explain.
She opened the door and thought about what Bill had said. The other doors led to storage rooms. They were locked. But were they? He’d said there wasn’t surveillance in this area. She tiptoed quickly down the corridor to the first door.
Locked. So was the second. Logic said they were probably what Bill had described. Storage closets. But she damn sure wanted to see for herself. Trouble was, she couldn't pick an electronic lock.
She wondered how long before she could use the bathroom excuse to do more exploring. Meanwhile, she had to project the compliant captive image. She strode quickly down the hall to the computer room.
Soft voices came from inside. She pressed her ear to the door.
Chapter 14
Jinx and Bill stood facing each other, almost circling like a couple of dogs establishing which was alpha. Jinx waited, hoping Bill would fill the void. They didn’t have much time before Elle returned—he trusted she’d give them as much as seemed reasonable, but he still wasn’t a hundred percent sure whose side Bill was on.
Stay in character.
Only now he had Elle to worry about. He figured he’d stick with the fiancé story.
“Any eyes or ears in here?” Jinx asked.
“This wing is clean,” Bill said. “We told Aguilar surveillance would interfere with what we have to do, and he bought it. Sometimes you want to scratch your nuts without someone watching. But it’s possible for people to listen in the old-fashioned way. Ear to the door. Aguilar installed a keylogger, but I found it and sidetracked his efforts. I decide when it works, so he gets what I want him to see. Not that he could understand anything we do. Mostly, I think he wants to be sure we’re not wasting time watching porn.”
Jinx waggled his eyebrows. “And you’d never do that, of course.”
Bill’s eyes widened in mock disbelief. “Of course not.”
Jinx shifted the conversation. “If Aguilar can peek in here, we can peek right back.”
Bill sneezed again, then sniffled. “Sometimes the best defense is a good offense.”
Okay, this guy was pretty good. “The phone problem?”
“It keeps changing.” Bill cocked his head. “But let’s cut to the chase. You work for Blackthorne, Inc., not Treadwell.”
Once in a while, you had to take a leap of faith. “Right. And I trust that stays between the two of us. What did Fozzie tell you?”
Bill seemed to relax at the mention of Fozzie’s name.
“That he was behind most of the glitches. Asked if I wouldn’t work too hard to find them. Said a man from Blackthorne would show up posing as an RF engineer and to keep an eye out. He didn’t say anything about your fiancé, so that threw me.”
“She surprised me in Cabo and was with me when I got… recruited. I’m here to find some Blackthorne operatives and a client’s daughter. Where is Fozzie, do you know?”
Bill shook his head. “He—rightly so—said the less I knew the better. Makes deniability easier. He demonstrated his capabilities, told me a few things he’d done—made some seem to be accidents, others as if Aguilar’s rivals were behind them—enough so I didn’t doubt he was telling the truth. He said he’d know when you were on the job.”
“In that case, I’d better get working.”
“What can I do?”
“Stay out of my way,” Jinx said. “Unless you know where my people are stashed. I’m here to find them. And maybe tweak this fancy new computer a bit.”
Bill’s pale eyebrows winged upward. “I don’t want to know what you’re doing, do I?”
“Better if you don’t—assuming you plan to stay here. You do know you’re working for a drug lord, right?” Jinx couldn’t understand why anyone would willingly do so. He slipped the St. Christopher medal from his neck and set it on the desk.
“Beats a life in prison, which is where I’d be if I still lived in the States. Which assumes I could get out of here.”
“So you work on the cell phone system and turn a blind eye to everything else?”
There was a tap on the door. “That’s probably your fiancé.�
� Bill went to open it, leaving Jinx’s previous question unanswered.
While Jinx might not agree with Bill’s sense of morals or ethics, this wasn’t the time or place to try to change him.
A fresh breeze of Elle-scented air preceded her arrival at his side. “Miss me?”
Now that she mentioned it, damn it, he had. He gave a noncommittal “Mmm.” Let her interpret it any way she wanted.
“Can you really fix the cell phone network?” she asked.
He turned and grinned. “All this time you’ve known me, and you doubt my talents? Ye of little faith.”
The door opened again. Jinx spun around. Aguilar stood there, lips flattened. “You will have your Red Bull within two hours.”
“In two hours, I should have something to report.” Jinx turned to the computer and woke up the screen. He assumed it was something Bill had been working on—it certainly looked complex enough to make Aguilar believe Jinx had been hard at work. “I’m about to run diagnostics.” He shot Aguilar a pointed stare. Waited.
“Very well,” Aguilar said. His voice was tight, as if the words were trapped behind his teeth.
Jinx waited until the door clicked shut and Aguilar’s footfalls disappeared in the distance. “You have a pocket knife? Anything with a small blade?”
Bill shouldered Jinx aside and reached into a desk drawer. He fumbled through an assortment of pens, paper clips, junk snacks, a penlight and other typical detritus, latching onto a mini Swiss Army Knife. “Yes, but what are you going to do with it? Breaking the system isn’t going to do anyone any good.”
“I’m not breaking it, I’m fixing it,” Jinx said. “But first, tell me how you can use this new computer with a cell system that’s been running for several years. What with all the regulations, I’m guessing Aguilar had to rely on older equipment, second-hand parts. The weak link in the operation has to be acquiring the hardware. You can’t walk into your local Radio Shack and buy this stuff.”
“Aguilar wants state-of-the-art computers, so we get state-of-the-art computers. What he doesn’t know is the new one can’t talk to the system. The old computer is in there.” Bill gestured to a tall, louver-door fronted cabinet at the far end of the room. “We log in from this one. Makes everyone happy.”
Jinx shook his head. But Aguilar’s lack of comprehension was to Jinx’s advantage. He took the knife from Bill and pried open the slender blade. He picked up his St. Christopher medal.
“Now we find out whether this was all worth it,” he said. He wriggled the blade into the almost invisible seam of the medal and popped it open. He lifted out the SD card—the one he and Zeke had programmed and hidden there, playing the odds there would be access to a card reader. Aguilar’s new computer with its built-in slot erased that problem. “Voila.”
Elle smacked his shoulder. She leaned in close and whispered in his ear. “You are so not an RF guy from Treadwell. I almost bought it. My contact was right. You are from Blackthorne.”
Jinx slipped the card into the slot on the side of the computer. “We can discuss that later. While we’re stuck here, I’m Stephen Brand, the love of your life.”
“What’s happening now?” Elle asked, pointing to the screen.
He flexed his fingers like a concert pianist before a performance. “I’m taking over.”
Elle’s heart rate quickened, and she wasn’t sure how much of it was because she was standing close to Steve—who, as she’d first suspected, wasn’t really Steve—or because she thought she had a much better chance of finding Trish with a Blackthorne operative at her side.
She tried to find a better way of thinking about it than at her side. Because her brain didn’t function in her cool, detached cop manner when he was nearby. His scent, his smile, his sense of humor, all combined into a magic formula that scrambled her brain.
Bill seemed distracted. He watched Steve—she’d continue to think of him as Steve until it was safe to break cover—but didn’t seem to be paying a lot of attention. While Steve worked, Bill glanced at the monitor, paced the room, sat in his chair, got up, paced, and studied the monitor again.
“Is something wrong?” Elle asked him.
“No, not really. I’m trying to figure out whether I want to spend time on the rock or in the hard place. I’m comfortable the way things are.”
“Working for a drug lord,” Steve muttered.
“I’m alive,” Bill said, his tone growing testy. “Well fed, normally left to be my own boss. Decent living accommodations. All I have to do is keep a cell phone network operational.”
“So drug runners and kidnappers can talk to each other about running drugs and kidnapping people,” Steve said.
“If you’re going to start messing with things, Aguilar will blame me,” Bill said.
“What will he do?” Elle asked.
Bill looked at her as if she were crazy. “What do you think? He’s not going to dock my pay, if that’s what you’re thinking. His reprisals tend to result in accidents of the fatal kind.”
“What do you know about the other things he does?” she asked. “With women, in particular. I got the impression I was here to be his… mistress… but it wasn’t going to be a long-term gig.”
Bill flopped into the chair and tapped a foot on the floor. “The people who live in the employee compound all work on the estate. He brings women in, but we rarely see them arrive or leave.”
She couldn’t keep from thinking of Trish. Had she been here to service Aguilar? Had he discarded her? Was she dead? Her racing heart had nothing to do with Steve’s proximity now.
“You have to know something. Or know how to find out. Please. What’s going to happen to me?”
Bill’s expression turned to granite. He leapt to his feet, his fists balled at his sides. “I don’t know. I do cell phones. Now shut up.”
Steve whirled around. “Hey, watch it. No need to talk to her like that.”
The anger she saw flash in Steve’s eyes was genuine. For her, not his make-believe fiancé. After that came confusion at Bill’s abrupt attitude shift.
“It’s okay, Steve,” she said. She’d seen johns react like Bill when things started going south. From calm and rational to borderline violent in the span of a heartbeat. The shrinks—and the johns’ defense attorneys—explained it away with a variety of technical terms and a lot of psychobabble. She recognized a nut job when she saw one, and Bill was definitely crossing the border into the land of the unbalanced.
She sat in the other chair, lowering herself to eye level, posing less of a threat. Gave Bill as much of an apologetic smile as she could muster, doing her best to defuse the anger—between both men. “It’s all right, Steve, honey. I’m sure Bill would help us if he could.”
Bill was still glowering. “If this geek waltzes in, takes twenty minutes to fix what we’ve been working on for days, it’s going to hit the fan, and I have no intention of getting sprayed.”
Steve seemed to take her cue. He held his hands up in a gesture of submission. “Hey, man, I understand. I can drag this out as long as you want. Or, if you prefer, I could tie you up, lock you in the bathroom. Absolve you of any responsibility.”
Elle looked at Bill, who seemed to be considering it as a viable option. After a moment, he sat down, elbows on his knees, head in his hands. “I was told to stay with you.”
“And you do as you’re told,” Steve said.
Elle shot him a warning glance, shook her head. After making sure Bill’s head was still down, she twirled her finger by her ear. Steve’s eyes widened, but he nodded in understanding.
“I’m going to go back to what I was doing,” Steve said. “But slowly. With lots of mistakes, okay?”
Bill groaned. “I’m dead meat. I didn’t fix it. If you fix it, I look stupid. If you screw up, I’m toast for not catching it.”
A frisson ran down Elle’s spine. If Steve fixed it, and Bill was, as he put it, dead meat, would Aguilar keep Steve captive in his place?
No, Agui
lar might try, but Steve was Blackthorne. He’d get out. He had to. Blackthorne had a client to find. And if Steve was supposed to find her, then he’d help her find Trish. Wouldn’t he?
A glance at Bill showed him still hanging his head. The foot tapping grew faster and louder. She shifted in her chair, watching to see if he’d notice. No response. She stood. Again, no reaction. She crept closer to Steve. The fiancé cover had its advantages. She rested a hand on his shoulder, bent down, her lips to his ear. “Don’t get him angry.”
“I kind of figured that out for myself,” Steve whispered. “He said if he was in the States, he’d be in prison. I didn’t ask what for.”
She threaded her fingers through his hair, massaging his scalp. “My bet is something violent. Think you can talk him into letting you tie him up?”
“Maybe he’d let you tie him up.”
“You so don’t want to go there.”
“Move over,” he said, his tone shifting from teasing to dead serious. “Stand behind me.”
“What?”
“Block the monitor. Watch Bill. Just do it.”
Elle nuzzled Steve’s neck once more—for show, she told herself, even if there was no audience—before moving around and arching her back against his chair. Bill had stopped tapping his feet, but he hadn’t lifted his head.
Keys clicked as Steve worked. They stopped, and his fingers drummed the desktop. From the urgency in Steve’s tone when he’d told her to block the monitor and watch Bill, she figured Steve was doing more than fixing the cell phone service. Bill’s head lifted, but his eyes didn’t seem focused. He blinked a few times, scratched his head. Elle smiled. She approached Bill, angling forward, giving him a glimpse of her cleavage. The sundress Aguilar had provided was modest enough, but the lingerie was pure Victoria’s Secret.
She lowered her voice to a purr. “Bill, I bet you know all sorts of inside secrets, being in charge of communications. Mr. Aguilar said you were his top man. What’s it like being so important?” As she spoke, she sidled closer to him, making sure she was still blocking his view of the screen.
