Trigger

by S. G. Redling

  Fay. Who had been her best friend for years. Who died bloody and furious in a hail of gunfire at Rasmund when assassins had been sent in to wipe them all out because of the paperwork and chain of command and all those other things Cara complained about so blithely.

  Dani surprised herself with how good she was at pretending; how easy it was to talk with Cara. Dani had never been quick to make friends but maybe the desperation and alienation she felt here in Connecticut had finally brought out her social side.

  What was that saying about making strange bedfellows?

  Dani caught herself. She couldn’t remember the expression. That was happening more and more lately, odd bits of trivia slipping through the cracks. More than once she’d caught Cara eyeing her intently as she fumbled for an incomplete idea or memory.

  Had she noticed the moment that Cara had excused herself for good? Had she made a point of excusing herself or had she just slipped away under the guise of checking on something and just not returned? Had she sent a clear signal that Dani – with her mental gaps and social awkwardness – had missed?

  Her glass was empty. She spied a pile of limes in the nearby planter that had grown. Somewhere in the firelight out in the yard, someone exclaimed in a shocked voice.

  “Sinclair!”

  Not Choo-Choo. Sin, Sinclair, a Charbaneaux.

  Dani was all alone.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Poor Dani, all alone. Cara watched from a small alcove off the main patio. So many cubbies and nooks in this magnificent house. So many places to step back and disappear, watching all the wonderful pieces falling into place.

  Mr. Clagg, her immediate superior – and she used that word loosely – had warned her from the beginning of the Rasmund cleanup that things weren’t going to go as smoothly as she predicted they would. He had warned of catastrophes and snags. He had insisted to Cara and to his superiors that Cara wasn’t as good at her job as she thought she was.

  That made Cara laugh. Especially once her contacts farther up the food chain had sent down an order for Cara to work unrestricted on this job, essentially putting Clagg the Crab on ice. This job was one hundred percent her baby, her masterpiece, her chance to finally shake off the niceties she was forced to endure and get her hands on some real power.

  She wasn’t there yet. Cara hadn’t risen as quickly or efficiently as she had by being careless or by celebrating prematurely. There were still so many factors in play, so many pieces to keep moving across the board that she had designed.

  Still, there were so many delicious moments to savor.

  Like watching little Dani Britton drinking her anxiety down to a bitter mud pit she would never fully extricate herself from. Watching the brilliant Senator Meeks hitting all her marks, saying all the right things, acting with that adorable earnestness that made her constituents and the media love her like a movie star. The whole family really, they all played their parts to aristocratic perfection. All so perfectly groomed, so well read, so involved in the world they would never admit to owning as fully as they surely knew they did.

  And all around them, beneath them, behind them worked people like Cara. Like her team. Bodyguards, tech crew, drivers, coordinators, all busy maintaining the illusion of perfect safety and threat containment.

  She kept the information segregated within the team. They were used to working this way. Nobody knew everything. Nobody had a master plan. Everyone under her umbrella worked on a need-to-know basis and were happy to do so.

  These were Cara’s people, people who helped clean up Rasmund, who helped clean up a lot of situations they had also helped smash to ruins. Some of them were cowboys, some of them were heroes. Some were straight up mercs.

  All of them were expendable.

  And they knew it, even if they wouldn’t admit it to themselves. This wasn’t the sort of business one retired from. At best, they could hope to be injured badly enough that their services were no longer required, and they could live out the rest of their short lives in quiet pain.

  Maybe that wasn’t what they considered at best. Probably not. Probably what they all hoped for was to go down in a blaze of gunfire, a firefight, an honorable death in the service of the cause.

  Did it matter what that cause was?

  She hoped not because they would be sorely disappointed to learn that ‘the cause’ was as variable as the price of oil or the going rate for gold.

  The cause was the continuation of power. The cause was of no interest to Cara.

  What did interest her was the anticipation of future encounters, particularly the encounter of Dani Britton with the strangest member of Cara’s team, the blue-eyed loony in the hard, black shoes waiting for orders at the motor court in Norwalk.

  When would she allow them to meet? At the last minute? Right before the trigger? Would Booker hide from her or would Dani catch a glimpse of him out of the corner of her eye? Would she doubt herself? Or would she try to talk herself out of the ensuing panic, trying to convince herself that she was imagining things, that she couldn’t trust her own eyesight or imagination? Cara hoped to see the encounter. How would she play it? Would she immediately relate to Dani’s panic? Or would she give her that oh so infuriating blank stare of confusion?

  Cara caught herself folding the corner of the green damask curtain in her hands into a tight square. These curtains were probably worth more than her entire wardrobe and her wardrobe wasn’t cheap. Nothing in this house was. It was a lovely, if overwhelming, estate. Nobody could truly call it a home.

  Especially once the trigger was pulled.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Friday, October 9, 2014

  10 a.m. – 23 hours to trigger

  Dani woke up alone. Choo-Choo hadn’t come back at all. She had tried to catch his attention sometime after midnight. The party hadn’t slowed a whit and, despite his movements through the thickening crowd, he had never once come any closer to her hiding spot behind the planters.

  The gin and meat pies were souring in her stomach when she saw the kid in the ascot being hauled away to bed against his will. She heard singing behind the hedgerow accompanied by a piano that had somehow made its way out into the yard.

  The rich really were different.

  No sign of Cara either. Dani had spied her leading an impromptu meeting of several muscular armed men who had remained on the perimeter of the yard. They listened to her attentively before following her into the house. That was the last Dani had seen of her.

  The only other person Dani spoke with before throwing herself into Choo-Choo’s bed was a butler – valet? Manservant? Who the hell knows – who informed her that she had taken the wrong stairs and thus had to trek twice as long around the cavernous interior to find the bedroom.

  Awake now, Dani didn’t know what to do. She wasn’t hungry. She wouldn’t have been able to find the kitchen anyway. Wasn’t the funeral today? Was she supposed to go?

  She sat cross-legged in the bed, trying to twist her anxiety into anger at her friend. Would she have to stay in the room alone all day? For how long? She didn’t know anyone else in this family, and her gin-soaked brain wasn’t helping recall any of the thousands of names she had encountered last night.

  With no plans, no allies, no idea even how to get out of the house, Dani decided to do the one thing that always made her feel better. She decided to go for a run.

  Tossing off the bedclothes, she dug through her bag for her running clothes. She’d only brought the one pair of running shoes she owned, shoes that dearly needed to be replaced but that would get her where she wanted to go today, which was anywhere but stuck in this enormous manor.

  Hell, she figured if she couldn’t find the front door, she’d just run the stairs and hallways for a couple hours. That would be mileage enough.

  She had just slipped on a lightweight T-shirt (that didn’t smell as clean as she had thought it was) when Choo-Choo pushed open the door.

  “What
are you doing?” He looked her up and down, his gaze pausing on the wound on her thigh.

  “What does it look like?”

  “It looks like you’re not planning on going to the funeral with me.”

  Dani took a deep breath and resisted the growing urge to throw something at him.

  “I didn’t know when the funeral was since, you know, we haven’t spoken since we got here.”

  He glanced over his shoulder at something in the hallway. “I told you I have a big family. I had a lot of catching up to do. You didn’t seem that interested in joining in.”

  Anger and fear, hot and red, rose up into her throat but Dani fought them down. Choo-Choo had a lot of crap to get through. He had told her he didn’t really want to be here, he didn’t want to stay, and she had to believe him.

  “It wasn’t really my scene.”

  This would have been the perfect moment for Choo-Choo to agree with her, to commiserate about all the small talk he had undoubtably had to suffer last night. Instead, he just leaned against the doorframe and kept glancing out into the hallway.

  “You don’t have to go to the funeral today if you don’t want,” he said, not looking at her.

  “Do you want me to go?”

  Dani couldn’t admit to herself how much rode on that question.

  Before Choo-Choo could kill her or save her, voices chattered out in the hallway and a cluster of women appeared.

  “Does she have anything?” A skinny dark-haired girl stuck her head in the room. When she saw Dani, she showed a mouthful of square white teeth that identified her as family. “Do you have anything? I have some if you need some.”

  Dani looked to Choo-Choo for an explanation. He looked to the crowd.

  “She needs something.”

  “What do I need?”

  He didn’t look at her. “A dress for the funeral. Did you bring one? And not that little black dress you wear at the bar.”

  She hadn’t. He knew that. He knew every stitch of clothing she owned because he had seen her wear all of it. They’d shared the laundry line. They’d shared everything and he wasn’t the type of person to miss a detail like that.

  “Great!” Toothy relative said. “Here’s what I’ve got.”

  And that was how Dani Britton wound up in a size 8 navy-blue Ralph Lauren sweater dress and size 7 navy ballet flats – altogether too large yet intended to accommodate that “sporty” figure of hers the family kept referring to with thinly veiled air quotes. A scuffle had broken out among the skinny sisters over who originally owned the dress, none of them willing to be associated with a garment of that size. The dark toothy sister put the argument to rest by placing the blame on cousin Olivia’s shoulders, claiming she too tended to sportiness. Dani thought she remembered meeting this fellow sport, and if her memory was correct, the woman in question was a good six inches taller than Dani.

  It didn’t matter, she kept telling herself. Even if the dress had been made to order, she would have been uncomfortable. If anything, the looser (and beautifully soft) dress could be seen as a kindness, were she in the mind to search for such things.

  Truth be told, she was.

  Loading up for Uncle Mondy’s funeral involved rows of vehicles – limos, Range Rovers, black cars with diplomatic plates – and armies of men and women with clipboards, tablets, and earpieces. The family moved among the military engagement as easily as they had moved around the patio. Children scampered between the legs of Secret Service agents. Teddy powdered her nose in the reflection shared with two Marines. Someone was passing around a bottle of bourbon and Dani didn’t see anyone pass it by without a slug.

  If possible, there were more people in the hallway and driveway than there had been on the patio last night and Dani gave up trying to remain at Choo-Choo’s side. She kept him in her peripheral vision, however, and every glance he tossed her way kept her from screaming and running from the room.

  Finally, Cara made her way through the crowd, earpiece in place, cellphone beeping and ignored. She stayed near the senator whose security she was responsible for, commandeering a particular vehicle for the arrival. In this task, she was not alone. At least three coordinators were wrangling groups into vehicles, with not a little sparring of their own.

  Funerals always evoke a pecking order – who grieves the most, who sits in the front, who rides in the limo. It’s an emotional status test and on this scale, there were plenty of people aware of the stakes. With nobody to talk to and very little to keep her from bolting, Dani held her stress at bay by people watching.

  The Charbaneauxs and satellite families might pretend to be unconcerned who rode where and with whom and in what order, but when a decision was announced, Dani saw nostrils flaring, assistants grabbed in discreet claws, and plans were rearranged.

  The rub seemed to be who would ride in the final limousine. Obviously, Uncle Mondy’s children and wives would arrive at the end of the motorcade so that they would properly be the focus of comfort.

  Between that arrival and the general admission gawkers who would be forced to pay their respects behind the ropes lay a minefield of social positioning.

  Knowing she had no dog in the fight, Dani found the maneuvering fascinating. Jack and Connie Charbaneaux angled for last car – limousine of course. But Aunt Katherine Wren stood strong in her insistence – never uttered aloud but rather presented in slightly too-loud comments about how unimportant these decisions were.

  All Dani knew was that she wasn’t going to be in an A-class car. And if later arrivals meant higher status, Dani figured she might as well walk over to the funeral right now.

  Dani missed the moment it all came together, when the warring factions came to a silent agreement, but all at once she found herself getting herded into a black Town Car, third from the front of the line. Before she could offer herself the small comfort of thinking someone in this vast sea ranked even lower than she, she overheard one of the coordinators mention that the first of the family cars couldn’t contain “complete nobodies.”

  So she found herself sandwiched in among a frail elderly couple who talked only to each other, a red-faced man who had taken far too many sips from the flask in his jacket, and, if she wasn’t mistaken, sporty cousin Olivia who dove into the car like it was the last chopper out of Saigon.

  Olivia slid into place against Dani, proving that she was indeed at least half a foot taller. Brown curly hair and deep dimples – to say nothing of the absence of cadaverous thinness – softened her features and blurred the aristocratic genetics.

  Once the door was closed and locked, certain nobody would be joining them, Olivia breathed a sigh of relief and smiled at Dani, deepening the dimples.

  “You’re Choo-Choo’s friend, right?”

  “Yeah, Dani.” Dani felt something unclench in her chest. God, had she become some kind of stray dog, pounding her tail at the slightest kindness? She put that thought away in a box. “You’re the first person here I’ve heard call him that. I didn’t think the family approved of that nickname.”

  She shrugged. “It’s what he wants to go by, so it’s what I call him. I don’t think it’s any worse than any of the others. The Charbaneauxs have always been big fans of bizarre nicknames. I swear, writing out Christmas cards is hellish.”

  Dani tried to untangle the mass of information she’d been swimming through. “You’re not a Charbaneaux?”

  Olivia’s face didn’t so much harden as settle into a calm mask. Dani knew that transition – guarded, practiced, wary.

  “No, I’m a Wren. One of the big four – Wren, Charbaneaux, Leighton, Nestor. All related. All crazy. All attending this funeral.”

  Dani rolled the names around in her head. All of them had the familiarity of Ford and Chrysler in the American lexicon.

  “Nestor. Like Desmond Nestor?”

  Olivia shot her a strange look. “Yeah, that’s whose funeral this is.”

  “Uncle Mondy is Desmond N
estor?” Dani couldn’t keep her voice down and got a scolding hiss from the elderly woman. Olivia just laughed.

  “Who did you think it was?”

  “I had no idea. I don’t follow politics much. But Desmond Nestor used to be in politics in Oklahoma. Secretary of State?”

  “Governor. Ages ago.”

  “He’s got a rest area named after him.”

  Olivia laughed again and Dani blushed. Of all the things to get starstruck over.

  “Laugh if you want but that was a really nice rest area.” She stopped herself before sharing that it was one of the places her relatives would arrange to swap her to another household in the many moves of her childhood after her mother had died. Dani had spent countless hours standing in the shade under the awning, looking up at the bronze profile of Desmond Nestor on the engraved plaque. Funny, she couldn’t remember any of the details written below the image. In her young mind, having his name on this oasis of shade, toilets, and vending machines made him important enough.

  “It’s a small world,” Dani said under her breath.

  Olivia sighed. “Especially when there are so damn many of us.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  New York City

  Friday, October 10, 2014

  2 p.m. – 19 hours to trigger

  Cara sat in the back of the cathedral overseeing the funeral. She hated funerals, not for any feelings of grief but because they involved people feeling comfortable making a mess of themselves. Crying, sniffling, wiping their noses and then their eyes as if germs would somehow spare someone because they’re a tiny bit sad.

  There was nothing for her to do but wait it out, so she did what she liked to do anytime she was unable to do anything productive. Cara made lists.

  In honor of sitting through a funeral, which she hated, she started with a list of other things she hated. Toes. Meat on the bone. Actually, any sort of food with a remainder – meat on bone, shrimp with tails, uncored apples, strawberries with those awful little caps still attached. That could be a list all on its own. She also was developing a deep dislike for Jack Charbaneaux’s personal secretary, who had run herd over the limo line like Rommel storming North Africa. The woman was effective but too bosomy for Cara’s taste. Too ample and comfortable in her girth. She took up a lot of room and made a lot of noise. Cara added those things to her list, in a mental subset underneath the woman who, to Cara’s horror, had continually pulled a damp tissue from her bra to wipe her eyes.