“I’ll figure something out. Just gotta get her somewhere safe. So we need the boat, so Lola can get us in there.”
Filipo tapped the shotgun barrel against his palm, eyeing me thoughtfully. “Your trouble…it gonna find its way down here?”
I bobbed my head side to side. “Maybe. Seems likely, honestly.” I jerked my chin at his shotgun. “Anyone shows up that ain’t me or her, shoot first and ask questions later.”
Filipo nodded. “Got’chu. Got no hold up ’bout that. My girl, here.” He nodded at Lola. “You and her—”
“Ua lava, Filipo. That’s my business.”
“That susopoki what done you over—”
Lola’s eyes blazed. “I said enough, Filipo. That’s…my…business.”
He raised his hands. “Fine, fine.” A thumb jerked at me—“But this pukio, if he—”
“Filipo!” Lola hissed.
He let out a breath, stood up, and patted the air placatingly. “You know I’m gonna worry. But you take care of it. Whatever. I’ll get the boat in the water.”
He left the trailer with a slam of the screen door, and that sound, the bang of the door…fuck, man. Shoot a fucking cannon next to me, I won’t flinch. Grenades going off every which way? No problem. That slam of the screen door? I jumped half a foot.
And bet your ass Lola noticed. “Thresh, you okay?”
I shook my head. “This fucking trailer, man. Keep expecting to see my old man stumble outta that bathroom.” I had to shut my eyes and shake my head to clear the thought. “Sooner we’re gone, the better.”
I shoved open the screen door, exited the trailer, careful to not let the door slam—old habit. Lola wasn’t far behind me, her hand on my shoulder as I moved toward the Jeep.
She didn’t say anything, which was fine, since there wasn’t much to be said.
Eventually, she glanced up at me, digging a toe in the dirt. “Where we’re going, there’s no signal of any kind. You want to get hold of your guys, you’d best call them now.”
I nodded, dug my burner phone out of my pocket, dialed Duke. It rang, and rang, and rang…which wasn’t like him. He always answered on the second ring, always. Especially if it was me calling. Worry seared through me. I dialed Puck.
“Who’s this?”
“This is Thresh. Burner phone.”
He’d answered on the fourth ring. “Hey, Thresh, can’t talk long, man. Got some shit going on.”
“That shit come in the form of Euro-trash thugs?” I asked.
“Got it in one. You too?”
“Yeah. I’m about to go way off the grid and wanted to check in. You hear from Duke?”
“Negative. He’s been radio silent for a few days. Anselm called me, though, gave me a head’s-up. Problem is, these guys aren’t the typical bone-headed thugs Cain usually hires. These dudes know their shit. Watch your tail, big man.”
“This is what he wants, you know.” I let out a frustrated breath. “Separating us, keeping us off-balance.”
“Got that right, and it’s working.” I heard rustling in the background, the blare and roar of a train. “Gotta go, my ride’s here and I’m gonna lose you. Listen, you remember the spot I showed you? The Ozarks? Where we shot cans and got shitfaced?”
“Yeah,” I answered.
“Meet me there. Soon as you can make it. We gotta coordinate, take these fuckers down and go after Cain. This shit ain’t gonna fly. I got plans, and they don’t include running around this damn globe ducking bullets.”
“Hear that, Puck, I hear that. Can’t say when I’ll make it, but I’ll be there.”
“Check you later.”
“Right.” I ended the call, dialed another number.
Three rings, and Anselm answered. “Thresh. Did you lose your tail?”
I wondered if I wanted to know how Anselm knew it was me, since I was on a burner. “And a couple others.”
“They are on Puck’s tail, and Duke is not responding to communication. I am in search of his last known whereabouts.”
“Yeah, I just talked to Puck.” I lowered my voice, even though there was only Lola nearby. “I spoke to Cain himself, briefly.”
A stunned pause. “I see… and?”
“I think Cain might be a little smarter than Harris gives him credit for. He’s going after all of us in A1S. At once, I think.”
“I wondered about this.” Anselm paused for a moment. “I have not noticed a tail, but then, I think anyone would have a difficult time finding me anyway, even if they knew where to look. I will stay out of their purview as long as I can, see what I can do.”
“I’m getting Lola somewhere safe. You need to make sure everyone else knows what’s going on.”
“What is this safe place?”
“Her dad is a hermit, lives deep in the Everglades somewhere. I figured she could chill with him till we get this sorted out.”
“I think you should stay with her, Thresh. I know you will disagree, but you are recently injured already—”
“I lost one tail and took out three others. I think I’ll be fine.”
“We must begin assuming Cain is a very real threat, with a reach further than what we had originally considered.”
“You’ve got a point, but—”
“Thresh.” Anselm cut me off, his voice hard, which got my attention. Anselm was unfailingly polite under all circumstances, and never raised his voice. So for him to snap at me…
“Anselm?”
“You have never, in the years I’ve known you, expressed interest in any female to the extent which you have toward this Dr. Reed. This means something, for me. You must protect her. If they found her, when none of us even knew her name, then I think this danger goes beyond our scope of understanding. Stay with her. Protect her. I will have Lear begin tracking you, and then arrange an extraction. For her to be safe, and for us to have the use of your skills in your full capacity, then she must be in a place which we can control.”
“Fine. Agreed.”
“Das ist gut. Expect a call from Lear.”
“Thanks, Anselm.” I was about to hang up, when I remembered a promise I’d made, back in Miami, to a certain hipster-douche. “Anselm, one other thing. I sort of borrowed a car. It’s parked outside a trailer in Plantation Island, Florida. I’d like it returned to its original owner if possible, or have the guy recompensed, if not.”
“Consider it done.”
“Thanks, again.”
“Es ist nichts.”
I hung up, then, and Lola leaned against me.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“Just making plans,” I said.
“Which are what?”
“Well, for now, we continue with our original plan to go see your pops, and then we hang tight. My boy Lear is going to use his hacker magic to track us, and someone is going to pop in for an extraction.”
“An extraction? What does that mean, exactly?”
I shrugged. “I dunno. A helicopter, probably.”
“There will be nowhere to land, and the backwash could cause major damage,” Lola pointed out.
“It won’t be that kind of an extraction, babe. Harris will swing by with a helicopter, pop into a hover a hundred or so feet up, and someone will be in the back to lower down a cable which we’ll hang on to while they haul us in.”
Lola stared at me, looking skeptical. “That sounds…fun?”
I laughed. “Don’t worry, Doc, I’ll keep a good hold on you.” When she only frowned harder, I rolled my eyes at her. “You’ll be clipped to the cable. It’ll be fine. I’ve done it dozens of times.”
“If you say so.”
I gestured at the nearby river, which I assumed led out to the channels and canals into which we were soon to be venturing. “I’m trusting you to get us in there, you trust me to get us out, okay?”
She nodded. “Fine. But I’m not super keen on helicopters.”
“And I’m not super keen on riding in a tin pot through a vast
wetland. Times like this, you do what you gotta do.”
My burner phone rang just then. I accepted the call. “Lear, talk to me.”
“Got to make this fast, Muscles. Just stay on the line for me while I run the triangulation…” The line went quiet for several moments, and then I heard Lear snap his fingers on the other end. “Gotcha. Damn, you are way the hell out there, man.”
“Just getting started, my friend. I won’t have signal where I’m going.”
“That doesn’t matter. Now that I’ve got your location pinged, I can keep a close eye on you. Harris is getting a bead on a helo down that way, and then he’ll scramble one of his faster rides to get down there.”
“Is everyone else accounted for? I spoke to Anselm and Puck, and now you, and you’ve spoken to Harris.”
“Duke is the only one we can’t get hold of. Layla is with Harris, obviously.”
“Can you do anything to find Duke?”
“That’s why I’m trying to get you sorted as fast as possible. Either he’s intentionally gone dark, or something happened, because I’m having trouble pinning him down. I know Anselm is working things on his end, too. We’ll find him.”
“I’m not worried about him,” I lied. “I’m worried he’ll have all the fun without me.”
“He would never.” Lear was tapping at a keyboard in the background. “Okay, Harris is en route to you. He said to expect him in a few hours.”
“Great. See you soon, little buddy.”
“Oh fuck off, you damn tree.” He clicked off with an amused chuckle.
I stuffed the phone back into my pocket, and ran my palm over my mohawk with a frustrated huff. “Goddammit, Duke.”
“Someone is missing?”
I didn’t bother trying to hide the worry in my voice; something told me Lola wouldn’t see it as a weakness. “Yeah, my buddy Duke. He’s never out of communication. He’s permanently attached to that fucking iPhone of his. He’s even got this bulletproof case he had custom made, so he can take it out on ops without risking it getting blasted. For him to not answer anybody, let alone me? Not like him. Even if he’s in the middle of getting it on with a girl, if one of us calls, he answers. Even if just to say he’ll call back when he’s done. Even Anselm and Lear are having a tough time getting a lock on him. It’s worrying, and I don’t worry easily.”
“I’m sure he’ll be fine. He’s probably just doing the same thing we are.”
“Yeah, but you don’t know Duke. Subtlety is even less his strong suit than it is mine. And he may not even stop to check in with anyone before he goes on a rampage if he were to catch wind of someone following him. The dude is my equal in every way when it comes to wreaking ruin, but once he gets his ire up, it’s almost impossible to rein him in. I learned early how to shut my shit down. Duke…doesn’t have that off button. And it can blind him.”
Lola’s eyes were soft on mine. “You’re really close to Duke, aren’t you?”
I had to look away, because the expression on her face was doing something weird to my heart, and my worry for Duke was putting a lump in my throat. “Yeah. Everybody at A1S is family, and the only family I got, but Duke…he’s the brother I never had.”
“He’ll turn up. He’ll be fine.”
Filipo was approaching on foot, waving for us to join him.
“He better, or Cain is gonna see a side of me he’ll wish he’d left buried.” I nodded at Filipo. “Time to go.”
* * *
Since it was nearing sundown, Filipo insisted on taking us in himself, and I noticed Lola didn’t argue very much.
The trip was slow, oppressively hot, and stultifying. Bugs bit me nonstop, and every channel looked the same as the last. Oh sure, it was beautiful enough, but not my thing. Give me mountains or white sand beaches and, preferably, the snow bunnies and beach bunnies to go with them. This endless slog through one identical waterway and channel after another, the banks sliding past on either side in sludge-slow increments, the motor buzzing weakly, our bow barely causing a ripple…?
No thanks.
I understood within ten minutes what Lola had meant by having to know exactly where you were going, though, because that’s how fast I was lost. Filipo, however, obviously knew exactly where he was going, because he never hesitated when it came to turning into a minor offshoot, or cutting across a larger bay and into another tiny canal. When we hit larger, more open areas, Filipo would gun the motor a bit, which always caused me relief but, for the most part, he stuck to tiny, narrow channels, meandering our way slowly south and west. At least, that’s how I interpreted our overall vector. It was hard to keep track.
After what I reckoned to be over an hour, and probably closer to two, Filipo slowed to a crawl, scanning the bank on our left side. When I say bank, I mean a wall of mangrove trees, unbroken, thick boughs waving softly in a slow hot breeze, the occasional tree arching out over the water. I don’t know what Filipo was looking for, since there didn’t seem to be anything to find, even as I scanned the same bank, looking for any kind of irregularity. Filipo just trawled along slow enough that I could have gotten out and crawled on my hands and knees faster, bum arm and all.
And then, seemingly at random, he swung the tiller of the boat to angle the bow toward the bank. As we got closer, I saw it: an opening in the trees, so narrow and so well obscured by low-hanging branches that you’d miss it if you weren’t looking for it very carefully, and knew what to look for ahead of time.
As we cut toward the opening, Filipo cut the outboard motor and tilted it up out of the water, and then pulled a long, thick pole from a set of hooks spot-welded to the inside lip of the boat along the right side. The trees concealing the opening were swiftly approaching, despite our slow pace, and it wasn’t until Filipo spoke up that I realized exactly how low those were.
“Best duck, uso,” he called up to me, “or you get a nasty whack on the head.”
I ducked, just in time, and even then the branches scraped and grabbed at my head as we slid under them. Once past, we found ourselves in a tree-shrouded tunnel, the water so shallow it was a wonder we didn’t run aground. Filipo dug the pole into the water, still sitting, and used it to push us forward, pulling at the pole until he reached the end of it, when he would extend his grip, plant the end in the bottom of the waterway and push/pull us along.
“This little inlet is invisible from the air,” Lola said. “Dad showed me once, when I was a kid. He had a friend take us on a helicopter ride, and we passed right over this spot. You wouldn’t even know it was there.”
I snorted. “Babe, when you said your dad lived remote, you weren’t kidding.”
She grinned. “Thresh, honey, just wait until you see this place. We still have a good ways to go yet.”
She called me honey.
I tried not to read too much into that, but it was tough. I called her all sorts of stupid names, but that was just how I was. Words like honey and baby and sweetheart just sort of popped out when I was talking to a girl I was digging on, and I dug Lola hard. Anselm was right on that score.
We traveled via pole-driven locomotion for another ten or twenty minutes, and then the channel just sort of dead-ended in a copse of huge, ancient-looking mangrove trees whose roots extended away from the bank and into the water. Filipo just kept poling us toward the bank, and then when the prow scraped sand, he hopped out.
“Haul us in, yeah?” Filipo murmured. “I gotta see if Tai is around.”
“Meaning, you’d best stay here until he finds Dad. Unannounced visitors, even me and Filipo, make Dad antsy.” Lola had taken off her shoes and socks and was rolling her yoga pants up to her knees, and then she hopped out of the boat and into the water, helping me haul the boat up onto the bank.
There was another boat there on the bank, a long, narrow, shallow-draft dugout-style canoe, hand-carved from the trunk of a tree, with an outrigger float extending off to one side.
“That your dad’s boat?”
Lola glanced
at it. “Yeah. It’s called a paopao.” She smiled. “Dad showed me how to build them, actually. We made one together, one summer. It was fun. I did an essay on the process and got extra credit the next year.”
I chuckled. “Suck-up.”
She pulled a face. “Dad made me, as a matter of fact. Despite the fact that I have an M.D, I actually hated school.”
“I still have the one you made, you know,” came a honey-slow, cavernously deep voice, from off to my left. He had an accent, but it was soft, arching his vowels, only barely making his words sing-song, unlike Filipo’s accent, which was pronounced and thickly Polynesian.
Lola glanced past me, and her face lit up. “Dad!”
She jogged past me and into the arms of a truly mammoth individual. Coming from me, that’s saying a lot. He wasn’t much over six-three, maybe six-four, but what he lacked in height, he made up for in sheer bulk. Lola had said he’d been a bodybuilder, and I believed it. Dressed in a pair of knee-length cut-off khakis and a pair of water shoes and nothing else, I could see he’d lost the ultra-sharp definition of a bodybuilder, but had clearly packed on additional mass in the form of sheer muscle.
Every inch of his upper body from wrist to wrist, across his shoulders and down his chest to his diaphragm was covered in intricate tribal tattoos done in thick black lines and angles and whorls, and the designs continued down beneath the waist of his shorts, and reappeared on his calves, ending at his ankles. He had a scuffed and battered kukri in one hand, and a modern fishing rod and a string of more than a dozen huge fish in the other.
His voice as he spoke to his daughter was even, calm, affectionate.
But when his gaze fixed on me…
He was not happy to see me.
“Who is this, Lola La’ei Solomon?” His voice, now, was cold. Still quiet, still calm, but…frigid.
“I go by Reed, now, and you know it.” Lola put herself between me and her father. “And he’s a friend of mine. I know how you feel about visitors, but I…well, I didn’t have much choice. You know I wouldn’t have brought him here if I could avoid it.”
“I get you changed your name, baby girl, but you’ll always be a Solomon.” He glared at me past his daughter’s shoulder. “You haven’t even visited me yourself in over six months, and now you bring a stranger?”
Thresh: Alpha One Security: Book 2 Page 13
