“He’s angry, too,” Rachel said.
“Thank you, Chris,” Davie embraced him, a quick but friendly hug which left Rinehart with a slightly sad smile.
“Are they angry for the same reason?” I asked Rachel.
“No,” Rachel said. “Similar, but not the same. Maybe he’s pissed you’re boinking his lady.”
“Ah, yes.” I replied. “I’m familiar with that brand of anger.”
Rachel and I went to get coffee so the group from Friction Commodities could talk privately. After, Rachel and I went with Davie back to The Lexington to pack a few bags. I figured I’d stay with Davie until she felt settled. That, and the lake house had a very nice master bedroom.
I went up to my condo and did a fast walkthrough to make sure everything would survive without me for a couple of days. The pile of laundry twitched as I entered my bedroom, and I peeled the stack of clean towels aside to find a bright-eyed squirrel.
“You’re probably not the same one,” I told it. “But if you are, you made an excellent wing man. Thanks.”
The squirrel broke for the nearest dark hole, but I scooped it up in a pair of old jogging shorts, swung it around, and cracked the bundle on the top of my dresser.
What? Squirrels are vermin, people! Glue a puffy tail on a rat and it’s basically the same animal. I didn’t have time to run this one over to the park.
I dumped the slightly soggy mess of squirrel bits and jogging shorts down the garbage chute, then addressed the intake vents. “Let that be a lesson to you,” I said, wagging a finger at the air. “I don’t mind if you stay where you are, but if you come into my house, we’re going to have problems.”
I met the women downstairs in the lobby, and Davie and I got into an unmarked SUV idling at the curb.
“Good luck,” Rachel told me over the link.
“Four guys in custody and one in the morgue?” I replied. “It’s over. We’re just killing time to be sure.”
“No, I saw what she packed for you.” Rachel winked at me as we drove away. “Like I said, good luck.”
TEN
At the time this all happened, Patrick Mulcahy was my boss and one of my best friends, and was on the verge of becoming crazy-rich through marriage. The OACET house on Raystown Lake in Pennsylvania belonged to Mulcahy’s fiancée in name, but it was a new purchase for her and she let the cyborgs treat it as community property. I wasn’t even sure she and Mulcahy had visited the place.
I, however, had been there many, many times. The real estate agent had described it as a secluded rustic ranch house, which I suppose is accurate if your definition of “rustic” includes multiple buildings adding up to slightly more than nine thousand square feet. There was the main house, two guest cottages, a boat house, and a stable. The property was located at the edge of the Lake Anna State Park and could only be reached by private road or by open water. It was the ideal site for a security detail.
Or, you know, other things.
The interior of the main house had been fully redone before Mulcahy and his fiancée purchased it, and the place was magnificent. Exposed beams, fireplaces big enough to roast entire cows, a sunken garden surrounding a pool… Oh, man. The best part was the master bedroom with its French doors overlooking the gardens. You and your date could go out on the balcony and watch the moon rise first, then wrap yourselves in blankets and play on the daybed until the sun came up later.
“Holy shit,” Davie said as the car rounded the circular driveway and the main building came into view. She glanced at me, wide-eyed. “Oh, you are definitely in trouble, mister. If I had known that this is what you meant by a safehouse…”
We pulled up to the front door and I escorted her up the walk. The car with the Metro officers drove in behind us. A tall, broad-shouldered brunette in a tight white shirt and dark jeans greeted us by name as she passed us to meet them.
“Housekeeper?”
“Former CIA,” I replied.
I hoped I didn’t have to go into detail, but Davie was intrigued. “Really? What did she do at the CIA?”
I paused. “She was a wetworks specialist.”
“…oh…”
“She doesn’t do that anymore,” I assured Davie. “Ami’s an Agent now. She’s the one coordinating your security. She also plays a mean game of tennis.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Davie said in a small voice.
I stopped and took her hands; we hadn’t kissed since the park and this definitely was the wrong moment to start again, so I kept some distance between us.
“We’re good people, Davie. What we do isn’t who we are.”
“No,” she said, pulling away. “But it’s a big part of it.”
We walked up the massive central staircase without speaking. I showed her to the master bedroom and stood in the doorway while she started to unpack.
Davie noticed I hadn’t followed her in. She sighed, exasperated. “Come on,” she said. “Put your stuff down.”
I dropped my bag on the floor, then came up behind her and wrapped my hands around her waist. She exhaled softly and leaned against me.
“I don’t want to sound… I don’t know what I sound like,” Davie said. “I’m grateful for everything you’ve done for me. And I really like you, Josh, but… I might be a little too old to think that this is all meaningless fun.”
I didn’t think it was meaningless, either, and told her so.
“Yes, but for you it is fun. Am I wrong?”
“No,” I said. “You’re right. I love every minute of it.”
“You realize I took the job at Friction to put some stability in my life? I was tired of moving all over the world, the knives at my throat. But even the worst day of my life overseas was more peaceful than it’s been since meeting you.”
“That’s not fair, Davie. None of what’s happened to you is my fault. Things went bad for you before we ever spoke to each other.”
“I know,” she nodded. “You’re right, it’s not fair. But that’s how I feel.” She was silent for a few moments, then added: “I think the problem is I know practically nothing about you. So when you’re okay with someone getting murdered in front of you, then suddenly you’re all buddy-buddy with the killer…
“I’m scared,” she continued. “Last night was exactly what I needed. I felt safe with you. It was a good ending to a night that started with three men trying to kill me. But…”
“But you don’t feel safe with me now.”
“No.”
I rested my chin on her shoulder. “What can we do to change that?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Looks like we’re trapped here for a couple of days. How about we take it slow, get to know each other better?”
“Will that change anything?”
“It can’t hurt. We’re good people, I promise. Besides,” I added, “if you leave, I’m stuck with your share of the beer.”
“Can’t argue with math,” she chuckled. “All right. I’ll try to keep an open mind. For your liver’s sake.”
“Thank you.” I held her for a few more moments, running over the last few days in my mind for something that would break her out of her sudden funk.
“Do you want to see the horses?” I asked her in what I thought was a brilliant moment of inspiration.
Davie thought about it for a moment, and smiled up at me.
ELEVEN
In hindsight, I should have thought the part about the horses through. Davie was a country girl, and it was a matter of moments before she had decided we were taking the horses out to stretch their legs. She had two of them saddled and ready to go before I could find a graceful way to mention I had never actually touched a horse before today, much less ridden one. But I’m combat trained and I’ve got superb scores in the FBI’s disaster driving course at TEVOC, so I figured I could pick it up as I went along.
I’ll wait until you’re done laughing.
Now, let me tell you something about testicles and hors
es, with a little extra information about physics and simple machines. When you're chopping wood, the goal is to take a wedge-shaped piece of metal and, with great mechanical advantage, split a log along the weakest point encountered at point of contact. Put a man on horseback and you get the same effect, only the axe weighs eleven hundred pounds and is shaped less like a wedge and more like the front end of an El Camino. And while you're trotting along, this El Camino crashes into your personal weak point every half second.
Also? My horse didn’t like me. It kept turning its head to snap at my legs. Once, its teeth connected with my pants; cloth tore and my bare knee poked out. The horse, thrilled with this success, kept trying for flesh for the rest of the ride. I was sure that it wasn’t a coincidence that we were usually going over a particularly bumpy part of the trail when it snaked its head back to make me jump and lose what little balance I had.
Also, also? Davie’s guard detail was mainly cyborgs. They were watching us from their spotting points in the woods, and they had a crystal-clear view of me dancing around in the saddle, wincing, blinking away the occasional tear. Ever have twenty people laugh at you? Okay, fine, we all went to middle school, but have you ever had twenty people laugh at you in your own head?
Let’s sum this up—as I watched Davie astride her horse, hair flowing in the wind, the light of the late afternoon sun through the leaves dappling her skin like a painting by Monet, I prayed for the sweet release of death.
After the longest hour in recorded human history, we returned to the barn and dismounted. Davie was transformed. She was bright, happy, finally back to the version of herself that had played tag with me in the park that morning.
I figured the bruises were worth it, until my horse attempted one last bite and nearly took a chunk out of my thigh. I glared at the horse and pulled up the tail of my shirt to show it the butt of my gun, then pointed at the horse with two fingers.
“Oh yeah, Mister Ed,” I whispered. “I’m keeping my eye on you.”
The horse aimed a kick at me and I darted out of the stall.
Davie had seen the horse lunge. “He doesn’t seem to like you.”
“That’s because he senses I’m low on glue.”
A heavy hoof hit the back of the stall door. I jumped.
“Come on,” she laughed. We walked, hand in hand, up the garden path. “Haven’t ridden in a while?” she asked me.
“About twenty-nine years.”
“Josh! Why didn’t you—” Davie smacked my shoulder. “You should have told me you’d never been riding!”
“I thought I could wing it,” I said, shuffling sideways to dislodge my underwear.
“You can’t get on a horse for the first time and go trail riding! You need…” She shook her head, then rose up on her toes to kiss me. “Thank you,” she said, her arms draped over my shoulders. “I mean it. And never do that again.”
“Deal,” I agreed.
“Do you need an ice pack?”
“I would not say no to an ice pack.”
Davie wrapped an arm around my waist and we followed the path to the main house.
“When was the last time you rode?” I asked her. “Afghanistan?”
“Please,” she said. “I work with oil tycoons. For me, Afghanistan was Range Rovers and helicopters.
I laughed and tried not to limp.
We entered the house through the side door, and Davie marveled at the chef’s kitchen. I was more interested in the food. The makings of a fantastic buffet were starting to come together. A safehouse is either run by a schedule or a committee, and we had enough people on site to throw the schedule out the window. As long as everyone rotated through their shift as planned and got eight hours of sleep, they could do whatever they pleased during their break. There was always someone on a food run or cooking up a family-style platter of pasta, and the leftovers were available for the taking.
Davie and I raided the fridge and found a bucket of cold fried chicken and a side of apple pie. We devoured the chicken, but Davie declared the pie to be inedible storebought swill and dumped it in the garbage.
“The secret to pie,” she said, sweeping around the kitchen and peering into cupboards, “is the crust. And the filling. And the topping.”
“So the secret to pie is pie?”
“Am I wrong?” she asked, placing pie tins next to an oversized marble rolling pin on the counter.
“It's not all that much of a secret,” I told her.
“Yet so few people ever get it right,” Davie said, tossing a handful of flour on the counter with a flick of her wrist.
She set me to chopping fruit while she explored the kitchen. The appliances were new, except for an old Vulcan stove which Davie declared had shown up in a few of her more domestic erotic dreams.
“This was my great-grandmother's recipe,” she said as she pulled the ingredients together until they formed a sticky ball of dough. “It’s not, though. Everybody in my family calls it that, even my grandmother. It's one of those old family recipes you pass down through doing, not writing. The name stopped mattering a few generations ago.
“And if it did come from my great-grandmother, it’s not her original recipe,” Davie continued. Both the story and the act of rolling out the crust were second nature to her, and they came out of her as all of a piece. “I know my grandmother and my mother tweaked it, and when they taught it to me, I added my own twist. It’s something new by now. But I like to think that when I changed it, I got rid of someone else’s tweak and brought it closer to great-grandma's original recipe. Or maybe my great-grandchildren will hate how I added cloves and they'll take those out, and it’ll finally go back to being what it was.”
“Or they'll throw in an extra pinch of a spice we don't have a name for yet,” I said. “And it’ll be something new again.”
She nodded. “And they'll put that in great-grandmother’s recipe when they teach it to their own children and tell them to treasure it, as this is great-grandma's recipe and it's been in the family since before there were apples in America.
“But,” she added as she used a steak knife to poke an elegant lacy pattern around the weave. “They will always serve it with vanilla ice cream.”
“Always?”
“Always.” Davie pointed the knife at me. “Vanilla ice cream never changes. Vanilla ice cream cannot change. Vanilla ice cream is a constant in the universe of pie.”
Three pies went into the oven to bake, and I headed downstairs to find us a good bottle of wine. The wine cellar had yet to be unpacked, and it took me ages of crawling through cardboard boxes to find a vintage that paired well with pie (praise be to Google for the cream sherry suggestion). When I returned to the kitchen, Davie and Ami were sitting at the harvest table, heads together.
“Oh boy,” I said, and went to dig around under the counter for the automatic wine chiller. “Please be discussing shoes.”
“Sexist,” Davie said.
“Male pig,” Ami agreed.
“Male slut,” I corrected her. “Was it shoes?”
In reply, Davie held up a Kahr P380 handgun and aimed its muzzle at my chest. I was so startled I nearly dropped the wine.
“What the shit, Ami? I’m gone for fifteen minutes and you’ve set her up with hardware?”
“It’s a mousegun.” Ami ignored me and spoke to Davie. “Small and light enough to carry concealed, powerful enough to put down an assailant at fifty feet. I’ll teach you how to shoot in the morning.”
“I’ve shot guns before,” Davie said. “I’ve never carried one, though.”
“Then let’s go over the basics. Lesson one,” I said, pulling up a chair beside them. “Never aim a gun unless you intend to use it.”
“It’s not loaded,” Davie insisted. “Ami broke the whole thing apart to show me how it’s put together.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I replied. “The rule is you never aim it unless you intend to use it.”
Davie looked to Ami, who nodded. “Magic b
ullets are more common than you’d think,” Ami explained. “You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve checked the chamber and one’s appeared on its own.”
The color blanched from Davie’s face and she carefully set the gun down on the table.
“Let’s go practice,” I said. I stood and shoved the gun back at Davie. It skittered across the table and she picked it up by instinct. “Come on,” I said, walking towards the door. “We’ve got about an hour before the pies are done.”
“Nicely done,” Ami sent to me through the link.
“Davie freezes up when she’s not moving,” I replied. “But if she gets some momentum, she’ll run you down.”
“I’ve noticed,” Ami said appreciatively.
We headed out to the lake. I took off my pants and dragged a bright orange buoy through the icy water until it was a hundred feet offshore. When I got back to the dock, Ami was showing Davie a large-caliber pistol with a noise suppressor.
“It’s still going to sound like a gun,” Ami warned her. “But it’ll sound less like a gun, and that’s what we need. We’re about three miles away from the nearest neighbors, so this will cut the sound and keep them from calling the local cops on us.”
“Does the mouse gun have a silencer?”
“Mousegun,” Ami corrected. “One word. And it’s called a suppressor, not a silencer. ‘Silencer’ is a Hollywood term. I haven’t threaded the mousegun’s barrel to adapt it to a suppressor, but I can try if it’s thick enough.”
I checked myself for leaches and then sat down on the warm wooden dock, my back against a post. The sun was almost touching the trees and the sky was starting to color over in reds and deep blues. I watched as Ami helped Davie improve her shooting stance. They couldn’t have been more different: Davie was slim, toned but still soft, while Ami was tall and broad and all hard muscle.
Pretty women with guns. Oh my.
Davie might not have sensed it, but Ami knew I was watching them. Ami and I have found ourselves in bed together on many a cold night, and she knows how to work me. Her hands on Davie’s hips, touching her arms just so…
I stood up and went for a walk. I am not, nor will I ever be, the creeper with an erection who leers at the ladies.
Russians Came Knocking Page 6
