Do or Die Reluctant Heroes

by Unknown

  Aaron answered the phone with a whispered, “Yeah? What?” which probably wouldn’t win him any prizes if the caller were someone from that nursery school Shelly so desperately wanted Rory to attend.

  Like one nursery school over another made a shit of a difference in Rory’s future as the next president of the United States, or whatever Shel had in mind.

  Aaron himself hadn’t gone to nursery school or preschool or early childhood development school or whatever the fuck it was called these days.

  Which … actually argued the case in Shel’s favor, since Aaron was now a stay-at-home-dad with a warrant out for his arrest.

  And oh yeah, his only living family was his douchebag of a brother, Ian, who had vanished almost a year ago—no doubt gone off to save the world. Son of a bitch.

  Ian had sent some lame-ass unsigned card when Rory was born. A card, and a hundred thousand dollars in U.S. savings bonds. His generosity was a thinly veiled reminder that he’d wanted them to move far away—or at least to leave Florida. He’d wanted them all to go—Aaron, Shelly, and Shel’s older sister Francine, too. But Ian couldn’t support them forever. His funds were not limitless, and Sarasota was where Shelly had a high-paying job and part ownership of a thriving computer software firm. The hope was that in just a few years, the company would go public, and Shelly could cash out, leaving them set for life—and free to vanish for good. Besides, Sarasota was a fairly large city, well over an hour away from Clearwater. As long as they were careful and kept their heads down, they were safe enough. They’d had that argument with Ian—and won it—long before he’d disappeared. Living under assumed names in Florida was safer than using their real names in Alaska—a fact that Ian had finally conceded mere days before he’d left.

  Since then, there’d been monthly postcards that all said the same thing in Ian’s crappy printing: Love you. Miss you. Stay safe. Don’t be stupid.

  Right now, though, there was silence on the other end of the phone, and Aaron heard himself saying, “Ian?” because he was just that stupid. He was loaded with undying hope that would spring to life at the tiniest spark. Like, what he was actually, stupidly thinking right now was maybe—maybe—Eee was calling from some spooky overseas job, hence the flaky connection.

  Yeah, right.

  Whoever was on the other end didn’t say a word, and the connection was cut with a very definite click.

  Aaron looked at his phone and the caller ID, of course, said private.

  “Fuck you,” Aaron whispered to the phone, and to his brother, too, wherever that douchebag was. And he went down the stairs and turned on the baby monitor in the kitchen, and got to work doing the dishes and cleaning the counters so that the granite sparkled and shone. If he was lucky, it would earn him not just a grateful smile but maybe a little something extra when Shelly got home from earning the big bucks that kept their perfect little family afloat.

  Phoebe learned quite a bit in the hours immediately following her prison meeting with Martell Griffin and Ian Dunn.

  First, she discovered that processing the release of a prisoner took several hours—which was actually much faster than she’d expected.

  Second, she found out that Martell’s need to rescue those kidnapped kids was deeply personal and heartfelt.

  He’d told her that he was good friends with a man who ran a Sarasota personal security firm called Troubleshooters Incorporated—a man who’d been assigned not to protect those kids, but to analyze and write a recommendation for upgrades to the security team currently being used to protect them. Ironically, he’d been in Miami, doing a ride-along with the Vaszko children and their bodyguards when the kids had been grabbed in a brazen daylight attack that left their two guards dead and Martell’s friend Ric seriously wounded.

  Shot in the chest, Martell had told Phoebe when they’d first left the prison interview room, as he’d gone through his phone, searching in vain for messages about Ric’s status. He’d then told Phoebe that he’d hoped to have a voice mail or text waiting for him from Ric’s wife, but there was nothing.

  No word.

  Which was not good.

  Martell had been deep inside of his own head, in his own private unhappy world, so Phoebe had left him pacing in the prison parking lot. She’d spent the bulk of the wait for Dunn’s release researching the former SEAL in the air-conditioned comfort of the Northport Coffee Shack.

  Where she’d learned quite a few additional interesting things—not the least of which was a wealth of information about Navy SEALs.

  Phoebe had heard a lot of buzz about SEALs since the death of Usama bin Laden. She’d assumed the SEALs were merely the Navy’s version of the Green Berets or Delta Force. But SEALs weren’t your everyday, ordinary commandos, they were super-commandos. Apparently, the training that they underwent was the most challenging and rigorous in the entire military. In fact, it was so intense that the vast majority of SEAL candidates dropped out. Only the best of the best made it through the program.

  And Ian Dunn had, at one time, been one of them.

  He’d joined the Navy as an enlisted man, but during his ten years of service, he’d not only gotten his college degree, but he’d also crossed over into officer’s territory by attending something called OCS—Officer Candidate School. By the time he’d left, he was a lieutenant and a SEAL team leader.

  And that was another thing she’d discovered—that SEALs always, always worked in teams. Which made her wonder: Where was Ian’s team? If, after leaving the Navy, he’d indeed become a thief of international renown, surely he hadn’t done it by suddenly, uncharacteristically pulling a Rambo, and working alone.

  So Phoebe had dug deeper, exploring, searching.

  She’d found no mention of Ian’s mysterious teammates, but she uncovered what seemed to be quite the urban legend about him on more than one military discussion board.

  The rumor, at least in the SpecOp or SEAL community, was that Ian Dunn gave away most of what he stole in his varied and apparently frequent heists. He only kept enough for operating expenses. And supposedly, the vast majority of the jewelry and artwork he quote-unquote liberated, was already stolen or otherwise ill-gotten gains. Nazi treasure. Fortunes made from war profiteering, or from the blood and tears of orphaned slaves.

  But not everyone on those Internet boards considered Dunn a hero. One anonymous poster claimed that when Dunn had left the SEAL teams, he’d cut ties and hadn’t looked back.

  That same anonymous person, jackal99, pointed out that the SpecWar community was made very uncomfortable whenever a highly trained, highly skilled SEAL went rogue. It happened. Rarely, apparently, but it did happen.

  “We all wince and start to sweat a little,” this alleged former SEAL wrote, “because we know what Dunn’s capable of. So we pretend that he’s working for the good guys, and the discomfort caused by his being out there is easier to deal with.”

  It was fascinating.

  But, without a doubt, the most interesting thing Phoebe found was a tiny little article that popped up when, on a whim, she did a Google search comprised of the month and year of Dunn’s legendary—and alleged—embassy heist, and the words Nazi treasure.

  According to this article, just a few short days after the burglary at the Kazbekistani embassy in Istanbul, the Los Angeles–based Simon Wiesenthal Center received a mysterious delivery of a package filled with priceless jewelry, believed to have been stolen by the Nazis during the Holocaust. The organization was working to identify the pieces and track their original owners, to see if there were any surviving family members or descendants.

  So, yes, that had been an informative few hours.

  But then Martell had texted, letting her know that Ian Dunn’s release was imminent, so she’d packed up her computer and headed back to the prison.

  Martell was right where she’d left him, wearing out his shoes, worrying about his friend.

  As Phoebe parked her new car in the mostly empty lot, his cell phone was to his ear. She gav
e him a questioning look as she climbed out into the heat of the day, not wanting to interrupt.

  In response, he grimly shook his head, and mouthed the words Nothing yet.

  There was no way he was going to get news of his friend’s death via anything other than direct communication. So this was a case of no news being extremely bad news.

  And, oh God, now, as Phoebe watched, Martell’s shoulders slumped and he leaned back against his own car, his hand up over his eyes. His long, elegant fingers massaged his forehead as he murmured something inaudible into his phone.

  Phoebe sidled a little closer and … Thank God?

  Yes, that was definitely a Thank God, and then, “Give him a big, wet kiss for me, and tell the dickhead that I’m working my ass off to clean up his mess for him.” Martell managed to laugh, even as he wiped his eyes and said, “No, seriously, Annie. Tell Ric not to worry. I can’t tell you who I’m working with, but we’re on our way to finding those kids. Tell him we will get them back. He needs to concentrate on healing. Yeah.” He ended the conversation with an “Aight,” and then a “Yeah, been there, done that. Believe me, I’ll be careful. Love you, too.”

  “Your friend’s okay,” Phoebe surmised.

  “Gonna be,” Martell told her as he checked his email and text messages one more time before pocketing his phone. “Gonna be a long road back. But if I could do it, he can, too.”

  Had she just misheard what he’d said? “You … were shot?”

  “Just like Ric. Point-blank in the chest.” He put a hand against his tie. “A few years ago. It was something of a surprise when it happened.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Usually when you encounter the business end of a handgun, there’s some, well, foreplay, if you’ll excuse the expression. A conversation, at least. A little Hello, how are you, and yes, this is a loaded weapon, thanks for noticing. But this wasn’t your everyday, average mugging. I’d interrupted an abduction in progress.”

  “Were you out of uniform?” Phoebe asked, because, jeez, for someone to just shoot a cop …

  “I wasn’t a uniformed officer,” Martell told her. “I was a detective. But this happened after I’d left. In fact, it was after I passed the bar. Most people think it’s why I left the force, but it’s not.”

  “I wasn’t thinking that,” Phoebe said.

  “Yeah, you were,” he said. “But it’s okay. Like I said, everyone does.”

  What she’d been thinking was that Martell was so … healthy. Tall, and handsome, and self-assured. And, yes, unafraid. Phoebe wouldn’t’ve faulted him one bit if, after an assault like that, he’d quit his dangerous job as a police detective and stayed hidden in the safety of the shadows, flinching at every loud noise.

  Of course, maybe he was like her and walked around packing heat, and fully trained in self-defense. In fact, the first thing she’d done after leaving the prison earlier this morning was to move her Glock from the lockup in her trunk and back into her shoulder bag, where it usually lived.

  Across the pitted, dusty, and barely graveled parking lot, the barbed-wire-topped inner prison gate began to creak slowly open, and Phoebe shaded her eyes to get a better look. But the outer gate remained tightly shut, which made sense.

  The entrances to the prison—even the one for visitors, over on the other side of the complex—were designed like the doors in that ancient TV show Get Smart. Before the second door opened, the first shut, guaranteeing that there could never be a direct mass rush for freedom, even in the unlikely case of the prisoners overpowering the guards and gaining control of the security grid.

  This gate here was essentially the service entrance. This was where prisoners came to be processed, and after serving their time and repaying their debt to society—assuming that was even possible—they were spit back out, into the harshness, heat, and dusty parking lot of the real world.

  “You ready for this?” Martell asked Phoebe. “He’s not going to be a happy camper, and it’s imperative that we don’t lose him.”

  She glanced at him, startled. “He’s not wearing a tracker on his ankle?”

  “Nope.” Martell gave her a tight smile. “Can’t risk it.”

  “Wow,” she said. “You’re more of a gambler than I thought.”

  He laughed, but it was humorless. “Yeah, I kinda went all in.”

  Phoebe chose her words carefully. “You know, Dunn may not be willing to do this job. He might decide to just disappear,” she pointed out, as the inner gate creaked closed, locking with a bang that made the entire compound seem to shudder. “It’s been my experience that alienation, anger, and betrayal aren’t usually the start of a beautiful friendship.”

  “I don’t need Dunn to be my friend,” Martell said tightly. “In fact, it’ll help enormously if he decides to rob the consulate at the same time that he’s saving the Vaszko kids. Further proof that the U.S. had nothing to do with the rescue mission.”

  “I don’t think he’s really a jewel thief.” Phoebe told the other lawyer a bit of what she’d just uncovered. “I mean, most of what I found out is at least part urban legend, true, but I think it would be a good idea if we viewed some of the so-called facts as, well, potential misinformation.”

  The look Martell gave her would have been funny, if lives weren’t at stake. “So what are you saying?” he asked. “That Ian Dunn’s, like, what? Batman?”

  “More like Robin,” Phoebe said, adding, “Hood.”

  Martell was not impressed. His laugh was more of a scoff. “I’m pretty sure Robin Hood’d be on board for saving two little kids.”

  “Not if whatever he was doing in prison was more important,” Phoebe volunteered. “Maybe his current mission will save more lives—like, hundreds or thousands.”

  Now Martell was looking at her as if she were full-on insane. “His current mission in prison is to pay for the damage done while playing Demolition Derby in a bar parking lot during a drunken temper tantrum.”

  Phoebe shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But this is not a man who has a drunken temper tantrum. As far as I can tell, Ian Dunn doesn’t touch alcohol.”

  “Because if he does, he gets ’faced and ends up destroying private property,” Martell argued. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of it.”

  “You’ve met him,” Phoebe said. “Is this really a man who staggers out of a bar, gets into his car, and intentionally crashes into more than a dozen parked vehicles? Because some woman refused to dance with him? I just can’t see him doing that.”

  “Alcohol does strange things to some people. He pled guilty.”

  “Exactly. I think he was in prison because he wanted to be in prison,” Phoebe told Martell. “And I think you pulling him out like this is a big mistake. I think it’s likely that a lot of people are going to be pissed off, particularly when your government client has an a-ha moment and its right hand discovers what its left has been doing.”

  He narrowed his eyes at her. “You think Dunn is already working for the feds.”

  Phoebe nodded. “I think it’s entirely possible.”

  Martell remained unconvinced. “Look, I’m just doing what I need to do to get this job done. If Dunn’s such a big hero like you say, then he’ll help us save these kids. And if he isn’t … Well, he’s going to help us whether he wants to or not.”

  “Okay,” Phoebe said. “Assume I’m wrong. Completely. He’s a criminal with a single motive—to make himself rich. I still don’t understand how you can be so convinced that Dunn is going to go from No deal to Thank you for the beating, my government master. How next may I please you? in a matter of a few short hours.”

  Martell laughed at her bad Igor imitation. “He won’t want to please me,” he told her. “But he’ll have to.”

  Now she looked at him through narrowed eyes. “What haven’t you told me? What’s not in my copy of Dunn’s file, that I also didn’t find today on the Internet?”

  “Have you ever heard of Manny Dellarosa?”
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  Phoebe squinted. “That name is … not completely unfamiliar.”

  “The Dellarosas are a local mob family. They run drugs, up out of Clearwater, north of Tampa. They also dabble in prostitution, human trafficking, gambling, and the random chop shop. They own two legit businesses—a trucking company and a series of warehouses scattered across the state—mostly to launder their ill-gotten gains.

  “Manny’s the boss,” Martell continued. “His brother Davio is his second in command; Davio’s son Berto is also involved. There’s a fourth Dellarosa—Vincent. Manny’s son. But he’s the family screwup. His job seems to be to spend their money, to get into trouble, and then run to Daddy for help.”

  “And Ian Dunn is connected to them how?” Phoebe asked.

  “A year ago, Dunn tried to frame Vincent for the very crime for which he’s serving time. That couldn’t have made Daddy Dellarosa happy, and in the end—presumably after pressure was applied—Dunn ended up pleading guilty to all charges.”

  And that was why the name Dellarosa was familiar. Vincent Dellarosa was on the lengthy list of people whose cars were damaged by Dunn, outside of that bar.

  “I didn’t see a copy of the police report,” Phoebe admitted. “As far as I could tell, from the moment our firm was involved, Dunn’s goal was to plead guilty, pay retribution, and accept responsibility, all in exchange for a lighter sentence.”

  “Whatever went down,” Martell countered, “it had to create tension between Dunn and the Dellarosas, right? So fast-forward to today, where Vince, the black sheep son, is currently awaiting trial for murder, over in Orlando.”

  “Seriously?” Phoebe asked.

  Martell nodded. “Trouble is that young man’s middle name. Here’s where this works to our advantage: Daddy and Uncle Davio Dellarosa are going to hear about Ian Dunn’s early release from prison, and think that he traded information for his freedom.” He smiled tightly at Phoebe as an alarm bell finally rang and the outer gate slowly opened. “Especially when, whoopsie-daisy, we leak information that Dunn’s going to be a star witness at Vincent’s impending trial.”