by Nicole Fox
A few days after she flew back to New Orleans, I got a call.
“Wally's World of War, this is Andrea speaking,” I droned into the receiver as I twirled an old pen with my fingers.
“Hello Jace,” Claire McKesson's voice said from the other side.
“Fancy hearing from you,” I said with a sigh. “Didn't you just call a little while ago? Checking up on me to make sure I'm not out running around looking for Koen?”
Claire laughed. “No, I'm just calling to see if you wanna come home.”
I dropped the pen. “What?” I hissed.
“We've got a lead, and I need you and Koen back here.”
“When?” I asked, suddenly breathless from the news.
“Yesterday, if possible. Figured you'd say yes, so I've already got a ticket in your name at the airport. You leave tomorrow morning.”
I nearly cried from joy as I hung up the phone, despite the fact that I might be walking into a death trap. Anything could go wrong. Anything.
But, at least I'd get to see my man again. No matter what happened, that would be worth it.
# # #
Koen
The agents had picked me up from the used car lot and taken me right to the airport. They asked if I needed anything from my old place, but I told them not to bother. All of it belonged to Peter O'Dwyer, anyways.
I touched down at Louis Armstrong New Orleans Airport later that night. It'd never felt so wonderful to have my teeth snapped together by a shitty landing. We bounced down the runway as we began to slow, then taxied to the gate.
Agent Claire McKesson was waiting for me when I walked out of the jet bridge and into the terminal. She smiled warmly. “No luggage?” she asked.
“Why bother?” I asked. “How'd you get in, anyways? Thought no one was allowed back here?”
She grinned. “Perks of the job,” she said. “Got a car out front waiting for us.”
“Is she going to be there?”
I had to ask. Ultimately, she was the only reason I'd come home. I wanted to take down Aleksey, of course. But, if I could do it with Jace by my side, that would be even better.
“Who?” Claire asked, teasing me a little.
“You know who.”
“Benji?” she asked, shaking her head. “No, Benji has to work tonight, I think.”
“McKesson,” I said, my voice carrying a note of warning with it.
“Oh, don't get your big bad biker briefs in a bunch,” she said, laughing a little at my expense. “Of course she'll be there. She touched down just an hour or so ago.”
We got out of the terminal and climbed into the back of a big black Tahoe with heavily tinted windows that was waiting for us. We sped through traffic, headed for our destination.
The office space was small, but discreet. Just a simple office in a business district on the outskirts of the city. No sign above it, or lettering on the doors. I briefly wondered if Fed would be there. Claire and I got out and headed inside while the driver stayed with the car. As we walked, I scanned the parking lot, searching for his bike or any sign of a friendly face.
Nothing.
We entered the building and headed back through the small reception area, which was nothing more than a vacant cubicle, without even a computer or phone set up within. With Claire in the lead, we turned down a hallway and went into the third door on the right.
And there, as the door opened, she was. Her hair was a little longer, her makeup a little less heavy. But, still, just as pretty as I remembered. She was seated at the conference table, surrounded by Fed and several of the other agents who had been working the case.
I was stunned. This was real, right? I almost pinched myself.
Jace, though, must have been waiting for this for hours. “Koen!” She sprang up from the table like a puma and came running at me. “Babe!”
She was on me in a flash, and I caught her in my arms as she wrapped her legs tightly around my waist. “God I missed you,” I said, pulling her close to me as we spun in a circle in the doorway, her shoes knocking against the metal frame of the door. We both laughed frantic, half-sobbing laughs.
She released me from the death-grip of her thighs and dropped to her feet. I leaned down, pulled her face close, kissed her hard. Our arms went around one another, completely oblivious as we disappeared into our own little world.
When we came back up, both grinning as we looked into one another's eyes, I realized Fed and the agents, even Claire, were giving us a light, sarcastic round of applause.
“Alright, you two,” Fed said. “Get a room later, we got work to do still.”
I blinked as I looked at Fed. I recognized him, that was for sure. But he was so different, now. Gone was the facial hair, the earrings. He'd even started to let his hair grow back out. And, to top it off, he wore khaki cargo pants and, of all things, a bright red polo shirt.
“Fed?” I asked, my arms still tightly wrapped around Jace.
“You got it, brother,” he said, grinning wide enough to split his face as he came over to me. He grabbed my hand and shook it before pulling me into a big bear hug. “Good to see you, man,” he grunted in my ear.
We clapped each other on the back. “Damn, Fed,” I replied, “what the Hell these monsters do to you?”
He let go of me and held me out at arm's length. “Me?” he asked as he reached out and brushed a piece of lint from my shit. “Look at you, man. Dress shirt and slacks and shit. They reformed your sorry ass.”
I grinned and hugged him again, both of us laughing.
Instead of just three months, it had felt like three years. Longer, even.
Agent McKesson cleared her throat from the head of the table. “When you three are done,” she said, “we can get down to business. Then, all of you can go get married for all I care.”
The three of us laughed, then took our seats. Jace and I sat next to each other at the conference table, our hands tightly clasped together where no one could see. So tight, it seemed, we'd never again let go.
“Probably wonder why we brought back,” Claire said, dropping a telephone book sized file on the conference table. “This is the accumulation of everything we know about Aleksey Volkov. We've been going back through this stuff day and night since we sent you into Witpro, trying to find something we could use to put him away.”
Jace and I both nodded. We knew she'd been doing everything she could to bring us back home.
“The problem, it turns out, is that we'd been looking at it all wrong. We'd been looking for ways to prove that he was illegally selling his arms and somehow hiding it off the books, coming up with fake serial numbers, fake figures. All of that. Every time the Port Authority would do an audit on a Volkov Arms truck, we'd get jack shit, though.”
She picked up another much slimmer folder and tossed it on top of the yellow pages thick one. “That right there, guys, is the information we got from Fed and Koen when we first all came into contact. I was going back through the files and I realized something didn't seem right, so we started going back through the information we'd obtained from the Port Authority on the comings and goings. Turns out, the trucks he's using aren't his own. We didn't realize it, until we started to match the times and dates you'd given in your accounts of the robberies with the shipment dates that the PA had. None of the trucks you robbed were coming in marked as Volkov Arms, they were under a host of other subsidiaries and shell corporations.”
I cocked my head to the side. I hadn't ever really thought about it, before, since I'd just been knocking over the trucks Fed's contact had been giving us. We didn't really need to know which companies he was using to run them with. That part hadn't mattered to us.
“Which explains a whole lot of things,” Agent McKesson continued. “We think he's stamping guns with serial numbers he already has in product, and hiding the costs and proceeds off books. What you were stealing, guys, wasn't from the main stash, what he sells legally to wholesalers and governments. They were guns that manu
factured illegally to be sold overseas. Nothing ever shows up on his audits, or in his tax documents for Volkov Arms as a loss, because they were never there to begin with.”
“So,” Fed asked when Claire paused for a moment, “you're telling us, we weren't cutting into his company's profits at all? Like zero? Zip? Zilch?” Claire nodded in agreement. “We were stealing guns specifically made to be sold to people under the table? That they all had serial numbers linked to honestly bought guns?”
“Precisely. You never would have noticed they were fake because you didn't have access to the ATF's database.”
Aleksey had a solid plan, I had to admit. I mean, if anyone saw the guns, they wouldn't immediately think something was up unless they had the numbers in front of them. I leaned forward, my chin propped up on a fist. “Alright, but what can we do to help you? What do you need from us?”
“We were hoping,” Claire said, looking around at the table of FBI agents, “that you could help us pick out some of the trucks he might be using. We've been able to dig through his finances and figure out a financial structure using public records, but we think there's still gaps in our information. That said, some of our CI's have let us know that he's moving something, and soon. Maybe as early as tonight or tomorrow.”
“Lemme get this straight,” Jace said as she leaned forward and looked around the table. “You want us to go down to the ports and point out which ones we recognize?”
“Nail. Head. Got it,” Claire said.
Jace looked to me, and I just shrugged. “Seems simple enough.” I turned back to Claire. “When? Right now? Tonight? I'm down.”
Claire flashed a bit of a smile. “We can start as soon as you're able.”
The meeting convened after that, and Jace and I climbed back into the Tahoe with Claire. This time Claire hopped up front in the passenger seat, and left the back to me and Jace. She and I snuggled up together, not giving two shits about whether or not there were two federal agents playing chaperone.
About an hour later we were down at the docks, with Claire and her driver using their federal authority to muscle past the guards. The sun was low in the sky, but the port didn't look like it was close to shutting down. Ships were still loading and unloading, and would be all through the night.
We cruised around the lot, the windows up, blocking any outsider's view of it. The agent carefully drove along the roadway, careful of any intermodal haulers coming through. Finally, we came to a stop as we approached a ship Claire thought might be used for the shipment out.
“That's it,” she said as she handed me a pair of binoculars.
I rolled down the window a little and peered out from the back, the binoculars pressed to my face. The tractor looked familiar, but I still bit my tongue. I'd been so cocky in the past, so full of my own ego, and had made so many wrong decisions.
“What do you think?” Claire asked.
Without saying a word, I slowly shook my head. I just couldn't afford to be wrong. I lowered the binoculars and passed them off to Jace. “Here, babe, you take a look. You saw the truck as well as I did.”
Jace looked at me uncertainly. “You sure?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “Your memory's as good as mine, right?”
She nodded and bit her lip, put them to her eyes. She spent even longer than I had, finally agreeing with me. “Yeah,” she said, nodding. “I'm pretty sure that's the one.”
“You sure?” Agent McKesson asked.
I grinned. “Yeah,” I said, kissing Jace on the cheek, “she's sure.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Koen
We were back in shitty motels with bad sheets. Jace and I had both petitioned Claire for something a little ritzier for our first night together, but it really didn't matter in the end. The scratchy cloth of the linens and covers might as well have been silk for all we cared as we lay beneath them, naked and covered in sweat.
“Goddamn I missed you,” I said as I stroked Jace's face. “Every night, every morning. I couldn't think of anything else.”
She leaned in, kissed me, and grinned. “I took up reading books on old wars to try and get you out of my mind.”
“Old war books, huh? Did General Sherman's march to the sea make you forget me?”
“Not for a second,” she replied. “Now, D-Day and the beaches of Normandy, though . . .”
I pulled her in and kissed her again, over and over. “How about now?” I asked between kisses.
As she laughed and squirmed in my grip, the room's phone began to ring from her side of the bed.
“Stop it, Koen!” she squealed under the barrage of my lips. “I gotta get the damn phone!”
I let her break free of my grip and roll over to pick up the handset. “Hello?” she asked.
My eyes traveled down the curve of her back, the swell of her hips. I was already getting hard again just looking at her, remembering how she'd felt moments before.
She put the phone against her shoulder. “It's for you, babe. It's Claire.”
I got up and padded around to her side of the bed, still completely naked. I put the offered phone to my ear. “Yeah, Claire?”
“There he is,” Claire said, her voice unusually chipper and upbeat, “the man of the goddamned hour. How you feeling? You guys enjoying yourselves, yet?”
I felt Jace's long fingered hand wrap itself around my length. I glanced down and saw her lick those full lips in their perfect cupid's bow as she slid across the bed and closer to my manhood. Apparently, she was ready for another round, too. “Uh huh,” I mumbled.
“Just calling to give you guys an update. We took the information with your statement up to our bosses, and they've authorized us to start putting together the information for a search warrant on the company that rig from last night belonged to.”
Jace was swirling her tongue around the crown, now, and I'd leaned back a little as the pleasure began to flood into me, muddling my thoughts. Still, though, I tried to focus on Claire's words without letting her know what we were doing.
“We're ninety-nine-percent sure that this is going to be it,” Claire said. “We'll put this fucker away with everything you two have given us.”
“Oh,” I said, my voice sounding ridiculous to even me, the owner, “that's real nice.”
“It's fantastic news! Don't you get that?” Claire asked. “Wait . . .”
I groaned low as Jace slipped her lips completely over the head, taking me into her mouth.
“Are you two . . .? Oh, Jesus fucking Christ. I'd say get a room, but for Chrissakes, Koen. At least don't do it while I'm on the phone.”
I cracked a grin. “Don't blame me, Agent McKesson. She started it.”
“Whatever. It's almost over, Koen. Talk to you soon.” She hung up the phone, crashing it down loudly in my ear. On purpose, I was sure.
“Good news?” Jace asked as she stroked me and beckoned me back into bed.
“Yeah,” I said as I crawled into bed with my woman, pinning both of her thin arms to the mattress. “We'll talk about it later, though. After.”
Despite the tenor of the conversation I'd had with Claire, and how confident she seemed, I was still secretly worried. I knew this wouldn’t be the end of Aleksey. Not by a long shot.
# # #
Jace
Koen explained to me what was all was going on, about the warrant, about the company they were now looking into. It all sounded great on the surface. A win for the good guys, even if we were anything but.
“You don't seem as happy as Claire did on the phone,” Koen said, stroking my cheek. We were still naked in bed, and I could feel the heat rolling off his body like a furnace cranked up to full blast. “You okay?”
I turned and kissed his fingertips, then sighed. It was so wonderful to be back in his arms, to be back in New Orleans. Even the smell of the place, which was fucking awful, seemed like a good thing. The river rising up, filling my nostrils. And the hot sun, with all the mosquitoes and muggy ai
r, beat the Hell out of Seattle's drizzly weather day in and day out.
“No,” I said after a moment, “I'm happy that they might have a chance at getting him. That's good, you know?”
“But, still . . .” Koen said, pulling me into his arms.
“Still,” I agreed as I laid myself against his chest. “Tomlin's gone.”
“Yeah,” he said. holding me closer and tighter. “I know. Aleksey took a lot from both of us, didn't he?”
I turned my head, kissed his broad chest, took a deep breath of his skin and musky man smell.
“I love you, Jace Spears,” he said after a while. “I'll love you till the stars burn out, and the world ain't nothing but darkness.”
