Redemption Key (A Dani Britton Thriller)

by S. G. Redling

  “You’re really hard to find,” she said.

  “Am I? I wouldn’t think so.”

  Dani stepped closer, not knowing what to do with her hands or how to stand. Of all the scenarios she’d pictured, this cold reception wasn’t one of them. Choo-Choo sat in the only chair on the porch, forcing her to stand like a student called to the principal’s office.

  He let her stand there for several moments before he spoke. “Did you know there is not one single Danielle Britton in the entire state of Oklahoma? Not one. It’s not that unusual a name, is it? What do you suppose the odds of that are? And I had it on excellent authority there would be at least one.” He shrugged, the closest thing to an expression he’d shown so far. “I didn’t look any further than Oklahoma. I figured you had your reasons to lie to me.”

  “I didn’t lie to you.” She took a step closer, trying to read him. “I lied to them.”

  “Of course, because that would keep ‘them’ from finding you.”

  “I didn’t know where I was going. They were recording everything we said. They dumped me on the sidewalk with just my car keys. I just—”

  “What the fuck, Choo-Choo?” A tall, bronzed woman stomped onto the porch, her armload of thick copper cuffs clanking together. She stopped when she saw Dani. “Who are you?” The woman didn’t wait for her answer. “What the fuck? I mean seriously. Sibbie is in tears telling everyone that you hit her. Did you hit her?” He didn’t react. “Jesus Christ, Choo-Choo. I don’t know why I let you in the door. I really don’t. I don’t need your scene. I don’t need this shit. If you can’t behave like a human being why don’t you and your . . . your . . .” she waved her hand in Dani’s direction, “get the fuck out of my house.”

  Choo-Choo sighed. “Fuck off, Caroline.”

  “Fuck you!”

  Dani said nothing. She thought she had a filthy mouth, but from what she’d seen tonight, these people tossed f-bombs like confetti. She wondered if they even heard the word anymore.

  Caroline studied Dani once more. “I don’t know who you are or what the fuck you’re doing here, but hopefully you have enough sense to avoid this blond hot-mess piece of shit. Take my advice. He doesn’t pay off.”

  Choo-Choo gave a halfhearted eye roll as she stomped back off the porch, returning to the party. He let the silence grow awkward again before he spoke. “How long are you here?”

  “I’m flying out at midnight. That airport in the middle of the island.”

  He rose from the chair with the same feline grace she remembered. He didn’t look at her. “Congratulations on finding me. Have a safe trip back to wherever it is you call home.”

  “Wait.”

  His smile was tight. “If you’ll excuse me, I must go and make peace with the tribe. After all, these are my people, aren’t they? It won’t do to let hard feelings fester.”

  He breezed past the trellis toward the party.

  Just like that, Dani stood alone in the dark. Choo-Choo was gone.

  Dani found her own cache of profanity as she made her way through the darkness back to the main road. She’d come all this way for nothing. She’d hoped, no she’d expected him to have missed her as much as she’d missed him. It was stupid. She was stupid. They hadn’t been close friends at Rasmund. None of them had been the close-friend type.

  But after everything that had happened . . .

  He’d taken a bullet for her. She remembered two shots ringing out, his long body falling over hers to push her out of danger. Was she remembering it right? Maybe he’d just been ducking for cover. Maybe she’d just imagined their closeness after the grueling ordeal of recovery. Maybe she had made up a bond that never existed.

  He thought she’d lied to him.

  “Fuck!” Dani shouted to nothing. They’d been monitored in the military hospital. Every word was recorded. She just wanted to get away from them, and Choo-Choo was nowhere near ready to be released. He needed weeks of recuperation.

  Because he’d taken that bullet in the chest.

  And he thought she’d lied to him.

  She grappled with the idea of going back in and forcing him to listen to her, to let her explain. But she’d seen him in the crowd as she left, his arm draped around the mollified Caroline, a cluster of people laughing at whatever was falling from his beautiful mouth. He was home. He was in his element. However he might have felt about it during his years at Rasmund, he had obviously come to accept his place in his world.

  Dani decided she hated Martha’s Vineyard. It was dark. Not dark like the remote Redemption Key. There were no streetlights on purpose. Only money, real money, could buy this kind of maintained rustic charm. What kind of island didn’t have houses with beach towels hanging from the railings? Where were the aboveground pools and plastic floaties? What the hell was lemon curd and why did it cost fourteen dollars a jar?

  The best thing about her inner tantrum was that it made the miles pass beneath her feet as she stomped along, hoping she was headed toward the airport. She cleared a small bend in the road and saw a figure leaning against a rough wooden fence.

  “Taking the long way?” Choo-Choo asked.

  Dani looked around her, trying to find the road he must have taken to beat her here. “I don’t even know if I’m going the right way.”

  He stuck out his thumb and headlights magically appeared. A busted-up, blue-and-white Range Rover pulled over, and Dani heard the strains of bluegrass music pouring from the window. He opened the door for her, letting her crowd in with the pack of twenty-somethings who greeted them with way too much enthusiasm, in Dani’s opinion. She did catch the hiccup of attention when at least two of the passengers recognized Choo-Choo.

  “West Tis,” he said, slamming the door. Dani knew he felt it too.

  “I didn’t lie to you,” she said softly as they pulled back out onto the road.

  “I know.” He rolled an unlit cigarette between his fingers, then motioned for her to wait.

  She sat close enough beside him that their thighs touched. He didn’t pull away. His shirt was open several buttons and she could see the edges of a jagged scar.

  They said nothing as they rode, listening to a heated argument about the set list at some Avett Brothers concert and pretending they didn’t see the surreptitious glances at Choo-Choo. When they pulled up to the front of the small airport, Choo-Choo didn’t even wait until they’d stopped before opening the door. No thank-you, no good-bye, he just stepped down from the car and waited for Dani. She could hear the laughter as they pulled away.

  They sat side by side on an outdoor bench, watching small planes and private jets taxi here and there. Martha’s Vineyard airport was a busy place for the rich at midnight.

  Dani’s fingers were soft. He didn’t flinch when she pulled down the collar of his shirt to look. She saw that he would have to take it off for her to see the entire scar.

  “When did you get out?”

  “Three months ago.”

  “What?” That was nearly twice as long as she’d been held.

  Choo-Choo made a sound that tried to be a laugh. “There were complications.” Dani waited while he rolled the unlit cigarette back and forth in his hand. The muscles in his jaw clenched and tightened, and it looked like his mouth struggled to either form words or keep them in. He stared straight ahead as he spoke.

  “Their story needed some amending.”

  Dani remembered the story. “The alleged party yacht in the Seychelles.”

  He nodded. “It didn’t quite cover the presence of an enormous bullet hole in my chest. If you can believe it, they had me say that we had been attacked by pirates.” Dani would have laughed at that if his lips didn’t look so tense. “It seemed a bit lurid to me, but everyone bought it. Everyone except Grandfather.”

  “Your grandfather didn’t believe you fought pirates?”

  “Grandfather didn’t believe any of it. He didn’t believe I’d walked away from Rasmund. He started asking questions right away, hiring his
own people.” He turned to stare at her, his eyes cold. “You can imagine how well that sat with our employers. So they had to sell the story.”

  Dani tried not to show her relief when he dragged his gaze away from her. Choo-Choo was still so beautiful—his high cheekbones, his perfect nose, his now sun-kissed skin. But there was something off about him, something hard and scary under his beauty. Something sad.

  He licked his lips several times, his mouth sounding dry as he spoke. “They gave me this . . . creation. A chemical cocktail, something custom-made.” His eyes fluttered shut and his voice grew breathy. “It was magical. It was magic. It shimmered underneath my skin like angels. It was heaven on fire. It was . . . it was the love of my life.”

  His lips parted, his eyes stayed closed.

  “Then they took it away.”

  He drew back into himself, swallowing hard. “They gave me a few days to truly appreciate the depth of my loss before they bundled me up and deposited me in a men’s room in Penn Station. Fun fact: writhing on the floor, biting on the metal door frame while shitting yourself will not get you thrown out of a men’s room in Penn Station.”

  “Oh Choo-Choo . . .”

  “I think it took two days for my family to find me. Nobody asked me any questions after that. Clearly the pirate story had been a little fantasy I’d spun for them. The ‘real’ story was as convincing as they’d figured it would be. Junkies will get shot from time to time, after all.”

  Dani didn’t know what to say. She watched him turn the cigarette end over end. “Are you clean now?”

  He laughed. “As a whistle. You could give my blood to a Girl Scout.”

  “Well that’s good, right?” She rubbed her hand along his leg. “You’ve kicked it.”

  He caught her wrist and squeezed hard enough to make her wince. His voice was a hiss. “I haven’t kicked shit. I would do anything—anything—for one taste. I would sell my eyes. I would peel off every inch of my skin and crawl over salted razor blades for one drop. Nothing compares to it. Smack, crack, oxy—nothing comes close. I’ve tried. It’s like jumping off a stepladder to reach the moon. I can’t even kill myself because I’m afraid I’ll miss a chance to feel that one more time. There isn’t anything that comes close. So I don’t do anything.”

  He dropped her arm and stared straight ahead. “I don’t do anything but want. I want and I want and I want. And I hate.”

  Murfreesboro, TN

  9:50pm, 82° F

  “You have got to be kidding me!”

  The secure phone he had been given by his handler chirped again. Two jobs in one state? In one day? Booker figured if he had done this many jobs on his own before being compromised by the US government, he could have retired five years ago. As it was, he worked twice as hard now for a tenth of the money and it was really starting to annoy him.

  Did they not have anyone else they could call?

  Booker had never minded killing people. It didn’t thrill him; it didn’t repel him. He was never haunted by any of his victims. Except his first one, and she haunted him for reasons other than the bloody mess he’d left her in over twenty years ago.

  Almost thirty years ago.

  God, he was getting old.

  This job, this new “arrangement,” wasn’t helping things. Thanks to the broad reach of his new employer, Booker had clocked more air miles this year than ever and Booker hated airports. He could feel his soul wearing thinner and thinner with every pat-down, every inane TSA checkpoint. And because his employer was also the employer of every TSA agent in America, his documents and identity passed inspection without a second glance.

  It was boring.

  Booker scrolled through the message on the screen, reading the details of the next target, and started to laugh. Unbelievable. No, completely believable. And predictable. He had known it was just a matter of time.

  Booker typed in his obligatory assent—like he could say no—and his smile widened. This could work out very well for him. The doctors had been right. Booker was lucky.

  11:35pm, 77° F

  “I thought you’d be scarier looking.”

  “I get that a lot.”

  “Where’s your piece?”

  Booker sighed, reaching for the plastic tote bag in the floor well between his feet. “I’ve got everything I need.”

  Agent Gregory Davis took another bite of his shawarma, ignoring a dribble of greasy white sauce that fell on his suit. The car they were parked in stunk of garlic and onion and the stinging smell of the athletic cream the federal agent wore. Davis’s sunburn made his pale red hair paler. When he’d picked Booker up at the hotel, the agent had tried to regale him with tales of the weekend softball game where he’d gotten the burn and the pulled shoulder muscles. Booker had shut the conversation down with an icy stare. Judging from the stuttered mid-sentence halt, Booker figured the agent found him scary enough.

  “So you’re some kind of consultant, right?”

  “Something like that.” Booker felt around in the tote.

  “Not FBI though. So what? NSA?” Booker said nothing and Davis nodded, talking around another greasy bite. “You’re some kind of interrogation specialist. You’re going to get our suspect to talk, right? What do you use? Brass knuckles? Drugs? Because, hey buddy, this gangbanger eats guys twice your size for lunch. What is that?”

  “An afghan.”

  “An afghan?” He spit a piece of lettuce onto the seat near Booker’s leg. “You’re gonna knit while we’re on stakeout?”

  “It’s crochet and it’s very relaxing.”

  “Yeah I bet. What are you making next? Your prom gown?”

  Booker began another row, pulling several lengths of yarn free of the bag. “May I ask you a question?”

  “It’s about time. I’m getting pretty tired of the sound of my own voice.”

  “Me too.” Booker didn’t wait for the agent to catch the insult. “Your laptop. Does that have access to FBI files?”

  Davis slowed down his chewing to squint at him. “I can login. Why?”

  “Would you? I’d like you to look up someone for me.”

  “Why? Why can’t you do it? You’re such a hotshot.”

  “It’s complicated.” Booker looked up at the scowling redhead. As expected, the agent looked away. Not many people would stare him down. “You should understand that.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Finish your sandwich.” He handed him a napkin. “I don’t want you to spit it out all over me when I tell you what comes next.”

  Davis had sense enough to do as ordered. Booker had turned forty-one in the hospital; the agent had to be almost a decade younger. The redhead also had four or five inches and at least forty pounds on him but still had the instincts to sense a threat.

  Being corrupt often gave people that sense.

  Booker nodded toward the backseat and Davis reached back for his laptop. He opened the machine and brought it to life but paused at the FBI login screen.

  “Start talking.”

  Booker finished the row he’d been working on and flipped the yellow afghan over on his knees. “You think I’m here to help you interrogate your suspect, right? I don’t even know who your suspect is.”

  “What are you here for?”

  “Login.”

  “Talk first.”

  Booker stared squarely into the agent’s red face. After a second or two, Davis reddened further and typed in his password. Booker went back to his crochet. He didn’t know what it was about his stare that so unnerved people and he didn’t care. It worked.

  “They’re onto you,” he said to the man. “The Bureau . . .” The agent’s fingers froze on the keyboard. “They know you’ve been selling information, and they know your backup plan is to blackmail your supervisor with some damaging sexual misconduct allegations. Your supervisor is a well-connected man. You should have picked a better target. They know you can prove he’s guilty and they know there is no way to keep that inf
ormation private if you come forward with the evidence.”

  Davis shook his head. “And they sent you to scare me into giving up the evidence.”

  “No,” Booker said. “They sent me to kill you.”

  Davis sputtered. “That’s . . . no, you’re full of shit. You’re trying to trap me into admitting something. You’re wearing a wire, right? Well I got shit to say to you. I’m not dirty and if you—”

  “You are dirty. They’ve found your money trail. What they can’t find is your evidence. Their thinking is: I kill you, the information leak stops, and the evidence against your supervisor dies with you. They blame your death on your gangbanger and take him down as a bonus prize. Very tidy.”

  Davis watched Booker’s fingers move over the yarn. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because we are in a unique position to help each other. I’m not supposed to access a particular file that you can access. You’re not supposed to walk away from this encounter. You help me; I help you.”

  Booker didn’t flinch when the muzzle of Davis’s gun pressed against his temple. He did notice with some happiness that the residual numbness from his surgeries was abating.

  “What if I just blow you away right now, blame the banger, and take the credit?”

  “Because the people you work for sent me. Trust me. People like this have backup plans you wouldn’t believe. If I don’t call in within the hour, they activate your tracker and will hunt you down within two hours for killing another federal agent.”

  “What tracker?”

  Booker flicked the damp lettuce shred off the seat. “The tracker you swallowed. How was your shawarma?” Davis swallowed loudly. “I’m looking for a woman.”

  “How are you supposed to do it? To kill me?”

  “The next time you turn the key, the ignition sets off enough C-4 to vaporize the car. I’m told it’s the signature move of your suspect.”