Trigger

by S. G. Redling

  “I don’t need a phone down here.” His voice tone was as cool and clear as the ice in his eyes. Not rude, not angry, just desolate of tenderness, polite to the point of cruelty. “When I see Teddy at Mondy’s funeral, I’ll give her the number at the bar should she need to reach me.”

  “It’s a bit more complicated than that, Sinclair.” Listening to the two men talk, Dani supposed that frigid tone was probably taught at their boarding schools, perfected at cotillions and country clubs. They certainly seemed well matched. “Teddy is worried about you.”

  “There’s nothing to worry about.”

  Mr. Charbaneaux heaved a great sigh. “Let’s sidestep the criminal elements and law enforcement issues of late. Teddy believes, as do I and your parents and Teddy’s staff, that you are in danger. For once, it is not a danger of your own making.”

  Dani flopped back in her chair, physically restraining herself from smashing the Heineken bottle across the old man’s face. Danger of his own making – what a turn of phrase to choose. Dani and Choo-Choo had been thrown into the jaws of monsters through no actions of their own, had repeatedly faced death and imprisonment for reasons they couldn’t fully comprehend, much less have played a part in.

  But that didn’t matter to the FBI. It didn’t matter to Rasmund or Tom Booker. And apparently it didn’t matter to the Charbaneauxs.

  Small explosions of red mottled the golden skin of Choo-Choo’s neck.

  He was pissed.

  But his voice stayed cool. “Well, Grandpa, I will assure you and the family and Teddy and her staff that I can take care of myself.”

  “So you say.” Cold smile. “But did it ever occur, Sinclair, that maybe you’re not the only person we are worried about? That maybe it’s not simply your choices you have to worry about? Teddy is worried about you because Teddy is also worried about herself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There have been threats, Sinclair. Threats on her life, on our family. She has brought in a new security firm who is running risk assessments. They believe the threats are credible and are doing all they can to minimize her vulnerabilities.” Grandpa waited to deliver his final blow. “One of her largest vulnerabilities, one of the key methods they believe Teddy can be affected, is through you. Everyone knows she loves you.

  “If they want to get to Teddy, it is believed they will go through you.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “You don’t have to go.” Choo-Choo stuffed the last of his t-shirts into his backpack. All that remained of his personal possessions were a pair of mismatched flip-flops near the cots under the mosquito netting. Even though the entirety of those possessions fit easily into the brown canvas bag, the little kayak shack felt empty with their absence.

  “I know,” Dani said, packing her own duffel bag with the clothes she had hauled in from the tub at Jinky’s. The fishing camp had never been demanding on the fashion front.

  “I’m coming back.”

  “I know.”

  Dani had no desire to go to Connecticut, especially in October, especially with the senior Charbaneaux. But Choo-Choo had to go, he explained that to her. He’d loved his uncle. He worried about his sister. The funeral would be short. He had given her a dozen reasons why he had to return with his grandfather to the family home, but she knew there was a bigger reason.

  He wanted them to see him clean. Choo-Choo never talked about it. Their friendship existed in a place beyond gabby confessionals. She knew the hell he had been through. She knew the way his family looked at him and she had a good sense of the depth of the degradation he had endured as a result of the addiction.

  Choo-Choo wasn’t vain. People thought he was arrogant and weird. His name and his looks and his general demeanor set him apart from nearly every crowd of people on Earth. Dani herself had been intimidated by him when they had worked at Rasmund. He had that way about him.

  But he was different now. Redemption Key had changed him. It had changed both of them, healing in a way that probably didn’t look like healing to anyone with a basic understanding of human psychology.

  The gunshot wounds, the paranoia, the danger and terror had sickened them. The freedom of Redemption Key had healed them. They were nobodies here. They mopped and hauled and scratched mosquito bites. They had blood on their hands and had made peace with that.

  Choo-Choo wanted to see his family now that he had found a place for himself. She supposed he wanted to know if they would see that in him, if they would look past the epic fuck-up reputation and see the man he really was.

  Funerals awakened that urge in people, Dani knew. So, he had to go to Connecticut, and he had asked her to join him. She didn’t want to go but she knew she had to. Because as much as she believed in the man Choo-Choo had become, who he really was, she didn’t trust them not to break his heart. She didn’t trust them not to wear him down with the old magic that big families could wield. The Charbaneauxs were enormously powerful people and she worried about the depths of that power when it came to her best friend.

  That’s what she told herself as she stuffed her one dress into the top of the duffel bag, but she knew she wasn’t telling the entire truth.

  Dani was leaving the warm waters of Redemption Key and heading into the lair of the Charbaneauxs because she didn’t know if she could be brave without Choo-Choo by her side.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

  Thursday, October 8, 2014

  5 p.m., 40 hours to trigger

  Booker waited in the lobby of the photography studio in the midst of a sea of pink and lavender tulle. Every available chair was taken by women toting garment bags and makeup kits, hot rollers and baskets of ribbons. Where the women didn’t sit, tiny girls leapt and preened, some digging spangled body suits out of body crevices, some patiently enduring the cosmetic ministrations of the adults. Some, he noticed with a touch of envy, had given up the ghost, curled up in laps and on bags, mindless of the damage they were doing to their dance costumes.

  Nobody had asked why a man with no children was sitting in the lobby of the Millbury Photo Studio while the Tippy Toes Ballet Club was in for their end of season portrait. If they had, and if he told them the truth, they wouldn’t have believed him anyway. Who would believe that Millbury Photo Studio was run by one of the best-connected forgers and papers network on the East Coast? That the very photographer they were lining their children up for, Haley Millbury, was in fact a gifted documents forger? Or that the reason Tippy Toes Ballet Club got this unfortunate time slot here at the studio was that the dance teacher, whom they knew as Lucia Robinson, was in fact Booker’s point of contact into the invaluable world of the Paper Sisters?

  He would have apologized to the children if he didn’t need this appointment so badly. Or if he cared, which he didn’t.

  “Miss Robinson!” The high-pitched squeals arose as the inner door to the waiting room opened. Lucia Robinson smiled warmly at the little girls mobbing her knees. Standing at five feet five, Lucia looked taller, her long dancer’s legs and perfectly disciplined posture giving her the illusion of height. Chinese American, she wore her straight black hair in a long, low ponytail that she could whip with emotion. Booker knew the woman better by an alternate alias, Lucia Papers. She wasn’t just a money launderer and point woman; she was also an extraordinary dancer. Booker didn’t know which she loved more, the former or the latter, although he knew the former paid far better.

  She patted heads and admired hair and makeup. She endured mild haranguing from several of the mothers who seemed to read something behind her smile because they cut their complaining off early. She met briefly with a chubby young man carrying a clipboard and then instructed the children to follow him into the studio for the group shot.

  What she didn’t do was look at Booker.

  He stayed where he was as she followed the children into the studio. He enjoyed the immediate decrease in volume when the door closed behind the
m. He crossed his legs and relaxed, staring at nothing, and waited.

  Ten minutes later, the volume increased and then decreased as the door to the photography studio opened and shut again. On silent dancer feet, Lucia strode past him, not looking at him, not waiting for him to follow. He didn’t need a prompt. He rose as she passed and came into the office behind her. In here, at the back of the building, he could smell the green onion smell of the Tex-Mex restaurant below them.

  Every time he came to Bethlehem, he enjoyed long lunches and dinners at Los Banditos. Enjoyed might be a strong word. He lingered over the meals. He didn’t mind the food, but taste had nothing to do with his dining decision.

  A commonly held wisdom in the art of avoiding surveillance was to always vary your routine. The idea was sound. If you didn’t want someone to be able to track your every movement, you had to make them guess where you were. However, there was an additional layer to that, one which had served Booker well throughout his career. That was the idea of predictability blindness.

  If you always do the same thing the same way, anyone following you will expect your patterns. It’s the reason breaks from the norm alert police and operatives that something is afoot in your life. Therefore, if you know you will be required to access someone or something in a particular location at an undetermined time in the future, you would be wise to include that location in your regular routine.

  Since his indentured servitude to ISOC, Booker had been wary of making contact with any of his old sources. Nothing would get him killed more quickly than leading some federal law service into the heart of the people he had formerly relied upon. He had been forced to surreptitiously peek into the edges of his old life, trying to ascertain whom he might have given up while under sedation without accidentally giving away any more information. One way he did this was by periodically lingering over watered down margaritas and over-salted refried beans at the Tex-Mex joint. He could watch the comings and goings of the Paper Sisters and see if anyone paid him any particular attention.

  Booker had zero doubts about the fact that he was being tracked. At first, he had assumed it was with the cell phones he was required to pick up and dispose of with every job. He knew his itineraries were tracked and logged and he felt confident in the ability of facial recognition software to find him by anyone authorized to recognize his face.

  The GPS tablet with Dani’s tracking information had added an unexpected layer of paranoia. That was why he was here to meet with the Paper Sisters.

  “So, you need a med scan, right?” Lucia hopped up onto the desk, sitting cross-legged on top of the blotter. Her posture and her smile, to say nothing of her youth and beauty, might have made a less experienced man relax. Booker had done too many jobs with and for the Paper Sisters, this one in particular, to make that mistake.

  “I do. I suspect I have a tracker in my body.”

  She tilted her head with a girlish grin. “So you came here?”

  “I’ve been coming to the restaurant downstairs regularly enough that it shouldn’t seem irregular. I don’t know how closely the tracker is following me or if anyone is paying close enough attention to it at this moment to notice that I’m not at ground level.”

  “We’ve seen you downstairs. We’ve been waiting to hear from you.”

  Booker said nothing. He knew they would have seen him. That was part of the point of eating there regularly. What he didn’t know was if he had divulged any damaging information about the women’s valuable network to his new employers. If he had, if that was the reason Lucia and her sisters were waiting for him to make contact, there was no point in worrying about it any longer. He would not be leaving this room alive.

  “Kaneisha is out back with the van. She said she can give you a prelim scan.” Booker relaxed a bit at that. He wouldn’t be dying in the office. Lucia stayed seated as he rose.

  “I appreciate this.”

  “I know.” She didn’t smile. “I hope this works out, Tom. We miss working with you.”

  “Likewise.”

  In the alley behind the building, the green onion smell morphed into something far less appetizing. Booker stepped around an oozing dumpster to find a wide white shuttle bus trimmed in green and gold, the logo for a senior living center emblazoned on the side. He saw nobody in the driver’s seat as he approached but the double panel door swung open once he stood in front of it.

  “Come on in.” Kaneisha Papers waved him into the van’s interior. “I’ve only got an hour’s break. Let’s move this along.”

  Booker settled into a vinyl seat bolted to the van’s floor. Last time he had seen Kaneisha, she had been working toward her LPN license. The lack of license had never kept him from calling upon her for emergency medical treatment from jobs that had gone awry. He knew she had a steady hand with stitches and a good source of pain meds and antibiotics.

  “Congratulations on getting your LPN,” he said as she typed into the laptop attached to the wall of the van.

  “Thanks,” she scanned the screen. “This job sucks but it has its perks. This van for one. Especially since Tracy has part ownership.”

  “That must make things easier.”

  Tracy Papers was the head of the Paper Sisters. A chef in central New Jersey, she had risen through the ranks of the previous generation of sisters to control the network. Booker had only met Tracy once and found her wonderfully untalkative and brusque. She didn’t micromanage her employers and she recruited well.

  Kaneisha held out a small device attached to a machine beneath the laptop. About the size of an electric razor, it had a wide head and finger grips on the handle.

  “Stand up and stay still,” she said, bending forward in the chair to hold the wand at his left shoe. “I’m going to start here and move up your body. Do you have any bullets, shrapnel, or surgical implants I should be aware of?”

  “None that I know of.”

  “That’s the problem, isn’t it? You don’t know.”

  Booker stared into the distance as she scanned his feet and legs. He raised his arms as she thoroughly examined the area of his hips and groin. There was no need to feel self-conscious around Kaneisha. She had seen him naked more than once and had no interest in him as a man.

  She stepped behind him, scanning his back and shoulders, the lengths of his arms and in between his fingers. Finally, she moved before him and ran the device up along his throat, around his ears, and over his skull. She made no sounds as she worked, watching the screen as she swept the reader. When she scanned his face, Booker kept his eyes straight ahead, looking over the tight braids lining her small head just below his.

  She swept his face once and then again. She instructed him to open his mouth and she wedged the reader in between his lips. Then she withdrew it and scanned his right jaw again.

  “There it is,” she said, dropping the scanner to type into the machine. “Right sinus cavity. Can’t tell much about it without taking it out. Sure hope there isn’t audio on it.”

  A cold rage blossomed in Booker’s gut. They had installed a tracker in his body. He had been naïve to not have anticipated this.

  “When were you operated on?”

  “Almost a year ago. Had my cheekbones reconstructed.”

  “Plastic surgery? They didn’t change much.”

  “That wasn’t what they were going for.”

  Kaneisha typed into the laptop. “Do you know who they are?”

  “Federal. No letterhead. I got embroiled in a job that went bad.”

  “You didn’t know who hired you.” It wasn’t a question.

  “No. By the time I figured it out, it was too late.”

  Kaneisha finished typing and turned to face him. She didn’t invite him to sit.

  “You’ve done some damage.” There didn’t seem much point in arguing it which she appeared to appreciate. “Didn’t touch us, but there were some uniquely targeted infiltrations after you went missing last year.”

/>   “I was heavily sedated.”

  “I would hope so, if they rebuilt your face. Why did you wait so long to reach out?”

  “I wanted to be sure I hadn’t given you up. I’ve kept my distance as much as possible. Still on the job, just using different suppliers.”

  “Federal suppliers.”

  “You might say.”

  Kaneisha considered him for a long moment. Booker knew he wasn’t clear of trouble yet. The Paper Sisters maintained their reputation for excellence and brutality by holding their associates to impeccable standards and by exacting swift and irreversible revenge on any who fell short. Booker knew their standards and means. He had been hired by them on many occasions.

  “Tracy is going to want to know about this. She’s going to want a full list of all your current contacts and suppliers, and I mean a full list. If you’ve got a new dry cleaner, she’s going to want that name.”

  “I can have it by tonight. I have to be in Connecticut for a job in the morning. I’m picking up a car at the airport. Can I drop the list in the usual place?”

  “That should work. You have a phone?”

  Booker pulled out the ISOC-issued burner. “None I’d like to share with you.”

  She nodded and reached into a tote bag bearing the same logo as the van. She handed him a similar cheap phone.

  “Keep this with you. I’m going to check in with Tracy. She may have some more questions for you. Be available. You know the drill.”

  “I do.” Booker tucked the phones into his pockets. He took a chance before leaving the van. “I appreciate this, Kaneisha. I’m hoping this unpleasant period comes to an end soon.”

  She crossed her legs and smiled up at him. “Well, Tom, it’s going to come to an end one way or another. Let’s just hope it ends as well for you as it does for us. Personally,” her smiled warmed up, “I’d like to have you back. Professionals are hard to come by.”

  Booker thanked her and let himself out of the van. So far so good. Both Lucia and Kaneisha seemed genuinely pleased to have him back. Neither woman was prone to sentimentality and neither willingly risked the wrath of Tracy or the organization as a whole. That meant word had not spread of his impending doom which heartened him.