by Riley Morgan
If he could believe what Lena had told him, Zeus would have one of his goons sneak into Ramon’s room while he slept and kill him. Tonight. There was one tiny advantage that Ramon had. As long as Zeus did not suspect that Ramon knew of his plot, he would be safe until at least then. That was good, because Ramon had big plans for the afternoon. They started in Zeus’s office. Ramon knew that Zeus would be leaving for a few hours to sure up some final arrangements for Lena’s marriage and the subsequent business deal. He always locked his office door when he was not in it, but Ramon did not understand why. The lock was the same as all the others in the house. Three decades old and meant for simple privacy, not security. He picked it with a paperclip and a screw driver. It would have been faster and easier to force it, but that came with the risk of leaving more detectable damage. He didn’t need Zeus to realize that something was up before he was gone.
In a dresser drawer in Zeus’s office, Ramon found what he was looking for. Nearly fifty thousand dollars in cash. The wad of bills was heavy in his hand. It was, by far, the most amount of money that Ramon had ever had at one time. That only mattered if he could keep it. He stuck it into his jacket pocket and went through the rest of the desk looking for anything that might help. It was full of papers for the most part. They might have been valuable under certain circumstances, but Ramon didn’t have time to find out. He went through the desk carefully, trying not to disturb it or leave signs of his activities. He found nothing of particular use until he opened the bottom drawer on the right side of the desk. Inside was a snub nosed revolver and a box of ammunition. The gun was loaded, and Ramon tucked it into his waistband and stuffed the box of spare rounds into his other jacket pocket.
Ramon hated guns. He had since he was sixteen when his sister died. But he wanted to live to see tomorrow, and given the circumstances, he decided he would have to stomach whatever means were necessary to see another sunrise. He locked Zeus’s office up and snuck outside, undetected. He then went to the kitchen where Michaela and Tia were working on lunch. He gave both women a hug and kissed them on the cheek. He explained to them that he would not be here tomorrow, and that it would be up to them to look after Lena. They did not ask questions. They understood all that there was to understand.
His next stop was to pick up his bags. He took both go bags and the luggage that he taken with him when he came to the Buldova estate for the first time. If everything went according to plan, he would leave no trace of his time here except for the fortifications to the compound and a lasting mark on Lena’s heart. He carried his things downstairs, constantly looking for anyone that might spot him in his getaway. To help, he put on a hat and a pair of sunglasses. The house was almost entirely empty, all of the goons were with Zeus, away on business. He snuck out of one of the side entrances of the house and slipped across the narrow gap between the house and the garage.
Ramon loved the garage. He wished that he’d had more time to spend there. He couldn’t even begin to estimate the value of the cars that were stored there, but he knew exactly how much he’d wanted to take one out for a spin.
Sometimes, dreams come true. He dropped his bags in the middle of the floor and went to the lockbox. He picked it in ten seconds flat and opened the metal door. Inside were the keys to every car in the garage. Ramon hadn’t even thought about what care he would take. He looked back at the roster of high performance automobiles. Some were curvy classics that he’d known since he was a kid. Others were strange, aggressive, angular. They looked like metal monsters from some science fiction movie. As much as vanity egged him to take one of the several supercars, he figured that reliability and all around performance was more important than flash and straight line speed. He searched the contents of the box until he found the keys for the silver Nissan GT-R that was parked across from his own humble Honda. Most people upon looking at the car, would not think much of it. It didn’t have the slinky flash of European supercars, but that was what Ramon wanted. He could still keep a low profile. Or a lower one, at least. The car chirped and lit up as he unlocked it and placed his bags into the truck. He was momentarily distracted by a pile of small electronics on the garage attendent’s desk. They looked an awful lot like blastic caps and remote detonators that he’d seen in IEDs in Iraq. He wondered what they were doing here in the garage, but he hardly had the time to play detective.
He walked across the garage and got in and acquainted himself with the car. It felt like sitting in the cockpit of a fighter plane. He adjusted his seat and the mirrors, found the wipers and the lights, and felt out the pedals. Then, holding his breath in anticipation, he pushed the ignition and smiled with glee as the car roared to life. He pulled out of the garage and nursed the car forward to the gate. This was the riskiest part of the plan. He figured Zeus had it on orders that Ramon was not to leave. If anyone knew that, it was the person working the gate. But he’d also seen one of the goons at the gate getting chewed out for not letting Andris out of the complex fast enough, and so Ramon was going to take a gamble.
He pulled straight up to the gate and began to lay on the horn, flipping off the gate camera. He prayed that the hat and sunglasses made him look questionably like one of the step brothers.
The gate didn’t move.
Lena
Lena went back to her room and locked herself inside. She thought that she was safe there, but when she lay down in bed and looked at her phone, she realized that she wasn’t.
She had one message. A picture. From Damien. She recognized it immediately. He’d taken it about a year ago while they were both still at school. It was of the two of them smiling on the way to one of his fraternity formals. She looked happy. But when she saw it, her mind went to a set of pictures that had been taken later that night when she was admitted to the hospital. In those pictures, she was not smiling.
The six hours that had elapsed in the time between those photos being taken were among the worst in her life.
She’d met Damien at his frat house, dressed in a formal gown that she’d been saving for a special occasion. They’d pregamed at the house, each of them having a few drinks before the bus left for a Miami nightclub. The picture was taken out in front of the house, just a few minutes after Damien had said that he loved her for the first time. She’d believed it. They got on the bus and went to the club. They danced and drank for a couple of hours without anything really noteworthy. As the night went on, Damien’s possessiveness and jealousy began to get worse. He pushed other guys away from Lena on the dance floor. He began to accuse her of being flirtatious, of seducing other men at the club.
She tried to console him, but that made things worse. He thought that she was deceiving him. He said a lot of awful things. Lena stopped drinking. Damien did not. They missed the bus back to campus. Damien called a cab to his parents house and screamed at Lena the whole way there. She never gave up on trying to talk him down. She apologized, she soothed him, she told him how much she loved him, but he only got worse.
By the time that they made it back to his house, she had made up her mind to leave. She didn’t know where she would go, but she knew she couldn’t stay with him. When Damien got out of the taxi, she told the driver to take off, that she’d pay the fair and then some if he’d just get her out of there. He refused. She tried to tell Damien to let her go, but he just dragged her from the cab and up to his room.
She’d tried everything she could to resist him. She could no longer remember what she’d said right before he hit her. He kept hitting her. She’d always thought to herself that she was grateful that he had. The pain gave her something to focus on, something to take her away from what he did next.
She did manage to sneak away in the middle of the night when Damien passed out drunk. One of her greatest regrets in life was not killing him while he slept. How much trouble would that have saved her?
The pictures that the hospital took were unrecognizable. Then, so was the picture of her smiling outside the frat house. She had changed so much
after that night.
A sound outside snapped her out of her nightmare. There was a silver sports car in front of the gate, honking. The gate sat still. The car honked some more. She heard the engine rev, but nothing happened. Finally, the gate lurched and rose into the air.
The car sped away.
Ramon
Ramon turned onto the main road and pressed the accelerator to the floor. There was a short pause, and then the magnificent machine sprung to life. The engine whined and thrashed as it jumped into high gear. Ramon felt his teeth pushing into his brain as his body slammed into the seat. Just under four seconds later, he was going sixty miles an hour. Five seconds after that, he was putting distance between him and the Buldova estate behind him at the rate of one hundred miles an hour. The roads that ran through the Everglades were straight and flat. He could see oncoming cars and obstacles in the road a mile away. Even at 120 miles an hour, Ramon could come to a dead stop in under 500 feet. Doing so would cause him to black out momentarily, but it was possible, technically speaking.
He thought about what he was leaving behind him, and what he was taking with him. He knew some people in Miami that would fake some papers and make the car his for a small percentage of the cash in his jacket pocket. He knew some other people who would gladly give him was of cash that rivaled his own in exchange for the keys.
The thought of just running crossed his mind. He had turned the Buldova estate into a fortress. Breaking in was damn near impossible now. What Zeus’s henchmen lacked in brains they made up for in numbers, and with the improvements that Ramon had made, the place practically defended itself. Ramon would just get himself killed trying to break in, and he’d probably hurt Lena in the process. Why not run and live to fight another day? He’d only known Lena for a couple of weeks. Why not let some time pass before he decided that he was ready to die for her?
The thoughts didn’t stick with Ramon for long. He pushed them out of his head. He knew what he wanted. He knew what he had to do. He sped back to Miami.
When he got there, he bought a new phone and called Gabe to schedule a meeting. He didn’t tell Gabe anything over the phone, just that it was an emergency.
He stayed at a cheap motel just outside town, away from the crowds and the noise. Somewhere he could think. He need a plan. One that didn’t involve breaking into Fort Buldova all on his own. Tomorrow, he’d ask Gabe for help, but he had no intentions of asking his old friend to join in his fight. Supplies, materials, messages, that was fine, but he wouldn’t put Gabe back into the line of fire.
His efforts were thwarted by thoughts of Lena. He hoped that she was safe. He hoped that he’d see her again soon.
Bit by bit, a plan began to take shape in Ramon’s head. He knew when the family was supposed to be flying out of Miami. Based on that information, he could make a reasonable guess at when they’d leave the compound. Once they were on the road, it would be just about impossible to ambush them. The best place would be just around the corner from the estate at the place where their private road hit the main road. There, he could attack while they were stopped to make a turn. He could block the road in one direction with his car around a blind curve and ambush from the other. If he managed to time it just right, he could catch the driver of the car at a dead stop, point blank. Then he’d have Lena get out of the car and into his, and he’d disarm her guard at gunpoint. By the time anyone knew that there was a problem, he and Lena would be miles away and moving fast.
That would have to work. The only other thing that he knew was that the family was flying to Havana and the wedding would be on a yacht. He didn’t even know what country’s flag the boat was flying, much less it’s port of origin, name, number or any other shred of information that could help him find it out on the water.
He supposed that a final option would be to wait until after the wedding. Let them think that he’d left town. Have someone take the stolen car up north and leave it somewhere that the police would find it. Let his trail cool down. Then he could rescue Lena from a less militarized location from a less suspecting keeper.
But after he’d seen what Damien did to her, how he treated her, he knew he couldn’t let that happen. What would be left of Lena by the time he got there, one, two, three weeks later?
The wall of the hotel room bore many rough patches where holes of varying shapes and sizes had been plastered over. Tomorrow, it would need one more.
Lena
The next day, Lena woke up to a new taunting message from Damien. Whereas the last one had simply been a cruel reminder of what awful things he had done to her in the past, this one was a thinly veiled threat of what terrible things he could do to her in the future if her behavior did not please him.
It was a group photo that they had taken the first time Lena went to Damien’s house in Miami to meet his family. In it were him, his parents, his two older brothers, and the oldest wife, Anna. Lena had only met her once, at the dinner when this picture was taken. She was sweet, six or seven years older than Lena, and quiet. If she had said anything at all over the course of the two hour long dinner, Lena could not remember. There were details that did stand out though. Anna had long, slender fingers. Eight of them were beautiful. Two of them were bent at unnatural angles, black, blue and swollen.
When the meal was being served, the table passed dishes around and each person served themselves. Lena was sitting across from Anna and noticed on several occasions how she would drift off, somewhere else. When her husband would nudge her to take whatever dish from his hands, she’d jump, just a little, obviously startled.
The worst thing was when the all got up to go outside and take the picture in front of their house. Everybody filed out into the cool night air. When they assembled, Lena realized that not everyone was there. She looked back into the house and saw Anna limping down the hallway. Later, while they were all gathered in the living room for coffee and desert, Lena peaked under her floor length dress and saw that both of her feet were crushed and broken. It didn’t look like they’d ever been given medical attention.
For the next two months, Lena made every excuse possible not to go back to Damien’s house. She didn’t know what had happened to Anna, but she figured that it had happened there. Lena didn’t want to end up like her.
She heard bit and pieces about Anna. Damien was suspicious that she seemed to be more disconnected from the family. He suspected an affair. One night, Damien came over absolutely livid. When he walked into Lena’s dorm, he was on the phone with his brother trying to console him. Apparently, his brother had caught his wife with the pool boy, in their marital bed.
After that, she didn’t hear anything about Anna. Lena assumed that she’d been kicked out and tossed into the world adrift. She didn’t think anything of it. That’s life in Miami. Her semester started to wind down and things with Damien were easy. She went back to his house a few times after the semester ended and things seemed a little less tense than before. Damien’s brother had a new girlfriend, and she seemed a lot more outgoing and comfortable than Anna had.
Later that summer, human remains were found in an alligator up in the swamp by where Damien lived. More remains were found in a mangrove forest, and in two other gators. It was weeks before they were matched to Anna.
Damien and his family never mentioned it. Lena was just watching the news one day when she saw Anna’s picture and the headline. Since then, she’d suspected what Damien and his family would do to anyone who crossed them.
Now, Damien wanted to make sure that she was absolutely clear.
Ramon
Ramon left his hotel room at sunrise and went downtown to the restaurant where he and Gabe had agreed to meet. It was a Cuban joint as old as the city itself. Whenever Ramon had money, it was his favorite place to sit and watch the crowds go by. He could lounge in the shade with a mojito and a cigar and the hours would just fall off of the clock. It was perfect.
Gabe was sitting outside with a table when Ramon pulled up and stuffed a
fifty dollar bill into the vale’s hand. The way he saw it, it was entirely unlikely that he was going to live to spend very much of this money, so he’d might as well enjoy it while he could.
“Nice wheels, borrow them from the boss?”
“Borrowed. Yea.”
They hugged and Ramon sat down where a drink was already waiting for him. He took a sip and lost himself in the sharp lime and cool mint. He’d been sober for two weeks and the metallic bite of the rum hit him hard. He told himself he’d only be having two today.
“So, what brings you back to the city?”
“I have a problem.”
Almost three years ago now, Ramon had said the exact same thing to Gabe in the mountains of Afghanistan. Ramon’s patrol had encountered an enemy mortar team that was using a civilian home as their operating base. The two combatants had their position set up in the brick courtyard of a shepherd’s small house. The family, and old woman, her son, his wife, and their children, hid inside.
The mortar team had been attacking Ramon’s squad for the better part of the week. They hadn’t caused any casualties yet, but there had been more than a few close scares.
Ramon scouted the area around the house looking for a clean shot into the courtyard, but there was none. Approaching the house would be dangerous, it was in a shallow valley, surrounded by the rocky crags that make up Afghanistan's landscape on all sides. The mortar team was almost certainly not alone. At the very least, they’d have spotters. If one of those spotters was up in the hills with Ramon and saw him out in the open, well, that would be that.
So Ramon radioed Gabe, who passed the message along to their squad leader. They sent reinforcements to attack the mortar team’s position. Ramon’s CO gave him the order to fire a tube-launched grenade into the courtyard.
