I glanced away as Frank finally looked over at me, a perplexed look on his face.
“You alright?” he asked in concern.
I sighed and nodded at first. After a moment, though, I shook my head. “No. No, I’m really not.”
“Is it about what y’all talked about in the conference room? That closed meeting?”
I nodded.
He sighed, glancing over at me. “That bad?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say it’s good.”
He grunted. “If it’s about your safety, don’t worry. We’re going to have plenty of people watching you.”
“It’s not just that. It’s just…it’s something else. Have you ever had one of those moments where, I don’t know, everything just changed for you? Where, just all of a sudden, it was like white became black and black became white? A complete flip?”
He glanced at me, a little smile on his lips. He nodded after a moment, the smile now reaching his eyes. “I reckon I know what you mean. Not in the exact same way, maybe, but close enough.”
“Everything changed. Last night, everything was fine. Tonight? I don’t know.”
“Yep. Sometimes things happen like that. Gotta roll with the punches, though. You tap the mat, you get back up. Keep on keeping on.”
I frowned and turned my attention back out the window to the highway sign for Enchanted Rock. Just fifteen more miles. “But I don’t wanna.”
“Reminds me of something my Uncle Isaac always told me. Life is full of pain, but that’s not what it’s about. It’s about how you react to it. It’s not just there to punish, it’s there to teach.”
“Know what, Frank? Your Uncle Isaac sounds like a pretty unpleasant person.”
He nodded. “That he was. But he taught me a lot about pain and how to react to it.”
“Not really helping his image.”
He laughed. “Don’t worry, not much could. Uncle Isaac was a real grade A piece of shit. But he was right. Life is about how you react to what gets thrown at you. Do you wanna face it? Or do you want to curl up in a ball, or try to run away?”
“I don’t know. I just know that, no matter how this all turns out, nothing’s going to be the same for me when it’s all over.”
“Well, whatever you decide you want, no matter how you decide you want to react to getting knocked around by life, Frost Security is here. Okay? I’m here. No matter what happens, I’ll have your back on this.”
Coming from any other man in my life, his words wouldn’t have been much comfort. But, for whatever reason, coming from Frank O’Dwyer, they were. Maybe it was the timbre of his voice, or just the confidence. But I knew he was going to keep his word. Even if he died trying, he was going to keep it. For a moment, he reminded me of my father. Rather, how I remembered my father. A man of his word, a man who actually kept his promises when he made them.
I didn’t know what to say. Instead, I nodded a little numbly as visions of police coming to my childhood home filled my head. Of my father being taken away in handcuffs, of everything my family had worked for burning to the ground, of me getting turned down from every party, every gala, every event.
Ashley Maxwell. Pariah.
That was about to be me.
But what had Frank just said? You tap the mat, you get back up? And life wasn’t just about the pain you experienced, but how you moved forward from it.
I took a deep breath, mulled over his words, and tried to take some solace in them. Before I knew it, we were through the city limits of Enchanted Rock and headed into town.
By the time we’d pulled up at Frost Security and Frank had turned off the SUV, I’d come to my decision. I turned to him and put my hand on his again where it was on the steering wheel. “Frank, I need to talk to you. About something serious.”
He just looked at me, his eyes boring into mine.
I expected him to grab my hand. To nod. To let me pour my heart out to him. To give me his undivided attention.
“Can it wait?” he asked very seriously. “I’m very, very hungry.”
You’ve got to be kidding me! After all that we’d talked about on the way back up here?
I sputtered. “What?” I pulled my hand back from his and climbed out of the SUV, my feet almost getting tangled and sending me tumbling onto the rock and gravel lot. “Screw you, Frank!” I slammed the passenger side door behind me and stomped up to the office’s front patio.
“Ashley, wait!” he said as he jumped out of the cab of the SUV. He came at a half jog, taking the steps up to the porch two at a time.
“Fuck you, Frank,” I growled.
“Dammit, Ashley, you don’t understand. I had to do that.”
“Had to act like an asshole?” I asked, armed crossed. “Or treat me like shit?”
He shrugged, his jaw set and his brow furrowed. “Both. It was something Simon said. I don’t trust the men working for your family. I wouldn’t be surprised if the truck was bugged.”
I shook my head and sighed. “Well, that makes two of us because I don’t trust my stepmother or my father’s assistant.”
“Come on,” he said, lightly grabbing me by the elbow and guiding me towards the office’s front door, “explain inside. I know there isn’t anyone listening in here. Well, no one except Gen or Lacy, that is.”
Chapter Twenty-five - Frank
Ashley and I came in through the front and I immediately went to the kitchen to get us some coffee. The drive up from Durango had taken well over an hour, and I was dragging from the long day. The office was quiet except for Lacy in the back corner office.
“They’re here,” she said over the phone. “Expect you soon?” A pause. “Got it.” She hung up and came out of the office.
“Lacy,” I said as I handed a cup of coffee to Ashley, “meet Ashley Maxwell, our client. Ashley, meet Lacy.”
The younger girl with fiery red hair and a shock of a blue highlights, not bothering with the niceties of polite society, lifted a hand in a noncommittal wave. “What up?”
“Uh.” Ashley shot me a curious glance. “Nothing?”
“Cool.” Lacy turned to me. “Phones? Both of you? Either of you?”
“Right.” I set my old, burnt coffee down that no amount of cream and sugar would ever cover up, and took my dismantled phone from my pocket. I handed it over to her. “Any hits on the other phones?”
She nodded. “Yessir. Some bad malware on it. Without getting too into the coding of it, I’d say it’s Russian-made.”
“Like the guy at the hardware shop?” Ashley asked.
Lacy raised an eyebrow at her, but shook her head. “Maybe, maybe not. But probably not. Russian hackers write all sorts of code and programs, sell them on the gray market, places where you can get away with selling questionable goods with lots of disclaimers. Like, I could sell you the same kit that someone used on these phones, but I say it’s for personal use only, right? Because who wouldn’t want to be able to track their own cell phone with GPS and turn it into a passive listening device?”
“Can you clean it?” I asked.
“Scrubbed the other ones, so I don’t see why not.” She turned to Ashley. “You got one, lady?”
Ashley shook her head. “Left it at the cabin when the shooting started.”
Lacy nodded. “Probably the only time I’d leave mine behind, too. You know the email you use for managing it?”
“Yeah,” Ashley said, giving her a weird look. “Why?”
“Well, give me your login credentials and we can wipe it remotely. Easy-peasy.”
“Makes sense,” I admitted.
“That's why they pay me the big bucks, Frank. To be your electronic guardian angel.”
Ashley handed over her information and Lacy typed it into a memo program on her phone. “Not even going to bother saving it,” she said, winking before turning and heading back to her wire and monitor filled hole in the back of the building.
“Dossiers?” I called to her back as she left. “Everything we got
?”
“On your desk!”
I turned back to Ashley, but she was on my heels already. We both crowded into my office, and I nodded to the visitor’s seat as I settled down behind my computer. Two manila files were sitting on the desk, ready to be reviewed.
“And stay off your computer!” Lacy shouted. “Still haven’t had a chance to scrub it!”
Ashley winced as I shouted back that I’d heard. I grabbed one of the files without knowing which one and passed it to her.
She took the file with a questioning look.
“If you’ve been shot at because of all this, you deserve as much as I do to know what’s going on.”
She just nodded in appreciation and flipped her file open and began to read.
I opened my own, the one on what we knew about drug cartels, any reports of activity in the area, likely culprits. It was slimmer than my chances with Ashley.
As I dug through the short dossier, my empty stomach grumbled in protest at the coffee I was pouring on top of it without the benefit of food. There was nothing new in the file, nothing I didn’t know already from my experience in South America, or had read in the different reports that filtered up from the south of the Mexican border. They were bad dudes. Real bad dudes.
I closed the file and tossed it on the desk, rubbing my eyes.
Across from me, Ashley made a face as she read through the file. “Anything in yours that’s worthwhile?”
She glanced up at me, and her eyes said everything I needed to know. Her file was clearly more interesting than mine.
My stomach grumbled again, spurring me to check the time on my watch. It was late, and Dixie’s was going to be closing soon. “While you’re doing that, I’m gonna go pick up some burgers. We haven’t eaten all day.”
She slapped her file down on her desk. “What? You can’t leave, you’re my bodyguard.”
I sighed. “You’re safe here, Ashley. No one’s going to try anything here.”
“Did you think someone was going to show up at the cabin today?”
I grumbled, even as I was trying to push my sudden hunger pangs to the side. “But we need to eat something.”
“Almost forgot! Jake’s on his way with food!” Lacy called from her office.
“See?” Ashley asked, a smile on her face. “I win.”
“Don’t think that’s necessarily a win.”
“Really? Sounds like a win to me.”
I put my hands in the air. “Fine, lady, whatever. You win.” I went to get up from my chair. “While you’re reading that, though, I’m going to check and see what Lacy found out about the cabin alarm.” I headed out of the office and went back to Lacy’s dank hole she called home.
Whereas our offices were brightly lit with tasteful office blinds and overhead lighting, Lacy’s little domain was dark. She’d hung dark curtains over the windows and put dimmers on the overhead lights so it was mainly illuminated by just the glows of her computer screens. Inside, she sat surrounded by her desk, her giant headphones covering one ear as she stared in parted-lipped bliss at the monitor in front of her.
I knocked on the open door to get her attention. “Hey,” I said as she glanced at me and pulled her headphones all the way off. “Find out anything about the alarm?”
“Right,” she said, sitting back in her chair. “Not a whole lot. The alarm did go off, but no one was dispatched.”
“No one?”
“Code was entered a few minutes later, and someone answered the phone when they called, gave the signal that everything was fine.”
I scratched my chin. “Huh. Who would know that kind of information?”
“Don’t look at me dude, I’m just relaying the info.”
“How’d you end up getting the information, anyways?”
She quirked a smile. “You really wanna know?”
“Could I lose my license over it?”
She shrugged, that little smile still on her darkly painted lips. “Let’s just not discuss it, then?”
“Good idea,” I said with a nod. “Anything else new? That cartel file was slim.”
“Gave you the best I could. Do you know how many different cartels are in Mexico right now, dude? Eight, and that’s just the major ones. There are all these smaller ones, all with their own routes and supplies. Without knowing more, man, I’m as in the dark as anyone else.”
I just grumbled and wiped a hand down my face. My stomach growled right alongside my throat and chest, though.
“Frank!” Ashley called. “Think I found something!”
“Be right in there,” I yelled back down the short hall, and turned back to Lacy.
Lacy gave me a look. “You’re letting her look through my files, dude? That’s totally against protocol. Boss man’s going to pitch a fit when he finds out.”
I shrugged. “You let me worry about Peter, okay? I just thought she should know what was coming after her. It’s about her father after all.”
“Her father?”
I nodded. “Yep.” I told her about the meeting, about Simon and Eagle Eye, about their office down in Durango. About my concern about them bugging the car.
“They’re the ones who tipped you off?”
I nodded.
“You know, anyone could have dropped those files on our phones,” she pointed out.
“Why tell us, then?”
“Throw us off the scent? Maybe they were worried some hotshot hacker chick you had working for you would figure it out and trace it back to them. But, if they told us about it, we wouldn’t follow that lead.”
I laughed, shook my head. “You’re going to show them, though, aren’t you?”
Lacy grinned, raised an eyebrow. “Maybe?”
“Frank!” Ashley called again. “Seriously?”
“Check into the snoopers on our phone a little closer, then?”
“On it.” She pulled her headphones half-on like before as I turned and headed back to my office.
As I got back into my office, the front office doors opened. “Someone order burgers?” Jake called as he stepped inside.
“Back in my office!” I called as I stepped inside and turned my attention to Ashley. “What’d you find?”
She sat there, a shocked looked on her face. “This man,” she said as she held open the dossier she’d been looking through, her finger on a black and white photo of a stern-looking man with thin lips and a heavy brow, “I know him.”
“From where?” I asked as she handed me the folder.
“I met him once at a fundraiser my mother was putting on; my father introduced us in passing.”
I glanced over the notes.
Ivan Sokolov, Russian oligarch who rose up during the nineties after the USSR collapsed, and ended up fleeing the country and settling in America. Dead from a heart attack two years before. Brother to Yuri Sokolov, the presumed identity of the man we’d seen in the hardware store.
“Do you remember when you met him?”
“A few years ago? At least four, maybe five? I’m fairly certain it was before my mother’s cancer.”
I nodded. “How’d he know your father? Were they in business together?”
She just shrugged at first, but then made a face. “I didn’t even think about it at the time. But now? Now, after what they told me earlier today?”
Shit. Maybe that’s what she wanted to tell me just as we’d pulled up at the office. It must have completely slipped my mind because of the hunger and the dossiers on my desk when we came in. “Earlier today?”
“Burgers?” Jake asked from behind me. Neither Ashley nor I responded at first, so he shoved past me and came in, dropping the greasy bag on my desk. “Burgers anyone? No? No burgers?”
She and I both looked at the bag of takeout hamburgers on the desk, then glanced up at Jake and the ludicrous smile on his face, the fragrance of grilled meat filling the air and kicking my salivary glands into high gear. “Guess I’ll just show myself out.”
“Yeah,”
I mumbled as he left. I pulled our dinner from the bag, and she made a face as I set one down in front of her. “Nothing else open this late.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll eat. Guess it’s been a while since I had a good burger, anyways.”
“That’s the spirit. Besides, Dixie’s is the best,” I said as I collapsed into my chair and pulled myself up to the desk like a starving man at his last meal. “Promise.”
She unwrapped her burger and took a timid, polite bite.
I tore into mine like a ravenous beast. “Now,” I said between my first and second bite, “I get the feeling this is more complicated than just someone trying to steal something from your father.”
She nodded.
“Tell me. Tell me everything. I promise we can figure this thing out, Ashley, but we can only figure it out together.”
“Okay,” she began. “Where do I start?”
“The beginning. That’s where it always starts. Your father’s business. Tell me about why these guys want whatever he has.”
But, just as she was about to begin, the boss man himself finally arrived.
Chapter Twenty-six - Ashley
Peter Frost himself stepped into the office and gave us both a long look. This was my first time meeting him, and something about the quiet authority around him made me stop chewing. “The second you two are finished eating, I’d like you both in my office.”
Across from me, Frank just nodded and took another bite of his burger.
Maybe it was because he could kill a man with his bare hands or just the way he set his jaw, but I had to remind myself to swallow the food already in my mouth. I’d met millionaires, billionaires even, that weren’t as confident of themselves as he was. They were all brash and bluster, nice suits, displays of wealth. I looked up at Peter, looking like a poor lumberjack in his flannel shirt and jeans, my eyes wide, burger in front of my face. All I could do was silently nod.
Peter left, and Frank and I exchanged glances.
My stomach fluttered around the half of a greasy burger. Suddenly, I was having misgivings about all this. How much should I tell them? I didn’t want to incriminate my father anymore than he had already done to himself. Despite my feelings about engaging in conspiracy to try and protect my father, I didn’t want to be the one responsible for bringing him down. I’d already been such an awful daughter over the last year. Could I handle the shame of tearing down the family business on top of that?
Frost Security: The Complete 5 Books Series Page 38
