Trigger

by S. G. Redling

  Tom Booker knocked her to the ground. Nobody stopped him. In this sea of humanity, nobody stopped him. They were going to stand there and watch him tear her to pieces and there was nothing she could do about it.

  One of the voices in her head screamed at her to kick, to fight back, but her body wouldn’t hear it. Adrenaline and physics and the sheer crush of humanity around her compelled her to bundle tight, pull into herself like a pill bug.

  She waited for the burn of the knife. She waited for the triumphant war cry of her tormentor. In the handful of seconds in which she fell, she understood a moment of peace.

  It would be over soon. One last moment of terror, of pain, and then she would be free.

  Instead she was lifted, hauled up like a sack of laundry, hard muscles pressing against the backs of her legs and under her chest, lifting compacted form and using it as a battering ram. She tucked her head more tightly as they plowed through the crowd, gawkers giving way to this predator as high grass would part for a hawk dragging a rabbit from a warren.

  Her instincts worked faster than her conscious mind and she kicked her legs straight out behind her. The grip (Tom Booker’s grip, a voice in her head screamed helpfully) slipped but didn’t fail. She arched her back, making herself long and unwieldy, kicking bystanders who let them pass. Maybe the mob recognized a bigger danger, recognized it and allowed it to carry Dani through them without a thought or question of stopping it.

  Fuck that.

  With just the most basic of plans – be difficult to hold – Dani began to buck and writhe, her head twisting on her neck, her mouth biting air hoping to find flesh. Booker wrapped an arm around her knees, nearly letting her slip butt first to the ground. Dani jerked a leg up, gravity working in her favor as it dragged her to the ground, out of his grasp. She corkscrewed her body to the left, away from Tom, trying to roll out of the fingers digging into her rib cage. She felt concrete gritty beneath her fingertips.

  “I won’t hurt you, Dani.” Booker’s voice was part growl, part grunt. “You know that.”

  She knew a lot in that moment, none of it good. Her left palm made contact with the concrete as her right leg kicked out of Booker’s grip. For one moment, she hung there, like a kid mid-somersault. All she had to do was kick back and she could tumble from his grip, hit the ground, and run. That peace she had felt earlier had burned away, replaced by the will to live.

  She wasn’t going anywhere with Tom Booker.

  Rather than letting her roll to the ground, Booker raised his knee fast and hard, slamming it into her kidney, doubling her over his knee and knocking what little air she had out of her. She crumpled and Booker renewed his grip on her, wrapping himself around her like someone lifting a large dog, arms and legs trapped within a powerful grip.

  Now she started biting for real. She sank her teeth into the white expanse of his dress shirt and heard his sharp hiss of pain but felt no release in his grip. So, she doubled down on the German Shepherd act and capitalized on the only movement available to her. She shook her head from side to side, worrying the flesh between her teeth, ignoring the blood she tasted.

  Booker’s growl turned into a short roar of pain. She dropped inches in his grip and felt the concrete scraping beneath her bare feet. She forced her body to bend toward the ground and felt the glorious sensation of traction. She was on the ground. She had leverage.

  She kicked and twisted, expecting Booker to grab her around the waist, keep her off balance, but he held only onto her arms, that grip loosing as her bite deepened.

  She was winning. She was getting away.

  She pressed into the balls of her feet, preparing to shoot out into the sea of legs surrounding her when Booker twisted. He turned hard, using her like a battering ram once more. Only this time her head didn’t clear a crowd of gawkers. This time it slammed sideways against a wall of metal. The corner of her skull made contact first, sending a booming metallic echo through her head, turning her legs to jelly.

  The world flip-flopped in the most nauseating way and Dani felt herself moving through space limply. She landed on her back on something scratchy and bad smelling. Booker scrambled up next to her, doors sliding shut behind him.

  “Go.”

  The Earth lurched again beneath her as an engine roared to life.

  Dani lay still, panic and crushed hope and bewilderment freezing her in place.

  Booker winced at the blood on his sleeve, shooting her a look she couldn’t read. Then he tugged on the hem of her twisted dress, pulling it down to cover her thighs.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “You’re safe.”

  “Am I?” Dani lay still. The van moved in that start-and-stop way of city traffic. “Where are you taking me?”

  “Not far.”

  Dani worked to slow her breathing, her brain kicking into survival mode. She was alive. The limited space in the van could work in her favor since she was considerably smaller than Booker. This wasn’t a passenger van. It didn’t feel like what she imagined in her many nightmares to be a kidnapping van. Carpet, handrails, bench seats under one window, a small padded seat bolted to the floor in front of a small desk behind the driver.

  The driver.

  Another dump of adrenaline and Dani forced herself to lie still.

  Booker had a partner?

  She studied his face as he hovered over her, staring through the side window, pleased to see the blossoming of blood on his shirt where she had bit him. In all of the millions of permutations of terror she had imagined regarding Tom Booker, the thought of him having a partner had never entered into her thoughts. While the thought of two people taking her should have doubled her fear, if not squared it, the idea of Tom needing help made her feel – what? Confused? Disappointed?

  Partner or not, Tom Booker rarely disappointed when it came to being dangerous. She remembered the unspeakable damage he had brought down on a filthy child molester, the extent and viciousness of his attack.

  Not the best thing to dwell on when speeding through New York City in a van.

  Dani studied his face, the fine lines around his eyes, the full lips slightly chapped. His hair was longer than when she’d last seen him on Redemption Key. Not long, but longer. Where did Tom Booker go to get a haircut? It didn’t seem like the kind of thing that happened in the real world. She had always imagined he rose from a pod or off a charging dock in which his white shirts were pressed and whitened while his knives were sharpened and his brain was reprogrammed with a thousand new ways to be terrifying.

  “Would you like to sit up?”

  “Yes.”

  Dani rose slowly, pulling her legs in while Booker folded his, settling back against the rear of the passenger seat. Sitting up, she could see the driver of the van – a woman, young looking, black, with hair braided neatly across her skull. Small purple earrings bounced from her earlobes. Were those teddy bears?

  The woman glanced over her shoulder at Dani.

  “You got her, Tom?” She sounded like a teenager.

  “Yes.”

  The girl reached down between her legs without taking her eye off the traffic in front of her. When she extended that arm back toward Booker, Dani noticed two things – a slim dark arm covered in brightly colored friendship bracelets and a large automatic weapon.

  “I’ve got this if you need it.”

  Tom waved the weapon away. “I don’t need it. Do I, Dani?”

  “No,” Dani said, the last of her saliva burning off on a breath.

  The van tipped in a sharp turn and Dani slid into the door. Booker shifted like he was going to catch her but instead caught himself. He placed his hands on his knees. Dani saw the shine of the hard, black shoes beneath his bent knees. She tried to imagine Tom Booker as a kid, sitting around a campfire just like that, but in every image that came to mind, he wore that crisp white shirt and those hard, black shoes.

  “Would you be more comfortable in a seat?”

&n
bsp; He nodded toward the padded bench bolted to the wall.

  “No, I’m fine.” The van doors were to her right, separating in the middle like elevator doors. When they opened, she and Booker would be equidistant from the street. The part of her mind responsible for such decisions had been running calculations on how quickly she could scramble from the vehicle if the opportunity arose. “Thank you though.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Did he just smile? His eyes did. It sounded like a smiling response. Judging by the quick curious glance of the driver, she thought so too.

  The van came to stop in a shaded parking lot. Dani saw green all around them and heard the shrieking of children somewhere off to their right. A park? Central Park? Dani didn’t know the city at all. She took in what she could of the surroundings without making it look like she was mapping out an escape route. If this was Central Park, it was a lot smaller in real life than it looked in the movies.

  The driver came out from her seat and perched on the small stool bolted to the floor next to Booker. She flipped open a laptop also bolted down and scrolled through screens. She spoke without turning their way.

  “You going to tell her what’s going on or do I need to sedate her?” When Booker hesitated, she pulled a small plastic syringe from her pocket and flicked her thumbnail against it. “Chill her or kill her, it’s all the same to me, Tom. But she is not getting out of this van with any questions to ask.”

  “I don’t need to be sedated,” Dani said before Booker had a chance to answer. She leveled her gaze at Booker, keeping her voice soft. “Talk to me, Tom.”

  “Talk to me, Tom.”

  Booker kept his hands on his knees, ready to knock the syringe out of Kaneisha’s hand if necessary. He knew he was taking too long to respond but he wasn’t ready. All the scenarios he’d run in his head hadn’t prepared him for this. Sitting cross-legged on the floor across from Dani. It wasn’t like in Florida – she wasn’t working, she wasn’t beating a man to death with a boat cleat. She didn’t even look scared.

  He felt that familiar thrill run through him, in part from the heat of the bite mark she had left on his arm. What did it take to scare Dani Britton? He had basically kidnapped her and yet she had calmed down immediately. Did she understand what he was doing? She was smart, he knew that. Maybe she had already figured it out. Maybe she knew why he was here.

  “Talk to her, Tom.” Kaneisha’s voice held none of the quiet patience of Dani’s. It was all warning; a threat he knew she was more than capable of carrying out.

  “You’re being tracked.”

  Nothing registered on Dani’s face, just that same open expression. There was something intoxicating about that patient attention. So few people ever made eye contact with him. Booker wondered if he had ever been listened to like this before.

  “You have a tracker implanted in your body. It’s how they keep track of you.”

  “Who?” Dani asked.

  “My employers. Your employers. Well, your former employers.”

  “Rasmund?”

  Booker shrugged and Dani nodded. It didn’t matter what you called them, and Dani knew it. She let out a breath of a sigh and Booker fought the urge to lean in to hear it. He watched her fingers rub her thigh where he knew a bullet wound lay.

  Kaneisha snapped him from his thoughts. “You got scars, Dani? You had an operation?” Dani nodded, pressing her palm flat on her thigh. “Then let’s start there.”

  Dani’s eyes widened and she looked to Booker. He reached for her, stopping short of touching her. “It’s okay. It’s a scanner. It doesn’t touch you. You don’t have to do anything.”

  “Unless I can’t find it,” Kaneisha muttered, pulling out the scanning wand. “If you know it’s there and I can’t see it through all that fabric, you gotta lose that dress. Aren’t you hot in that thing? It looks itchy.”

  “It’s fine,” Dani said, climbing to her knees. At the mention of her removing her dress, Booker found he couldn’t look at her at all. Instead he got to his feet, looking out the windshield, giving Dani what little privacy he could.

  Kaneisha spoke low and soft, maybe to herself. Computer keys clicked. Dani didn’t make a sound. He watched a squirrel dive from a tree into the shadows of Riverside Park.

  “There it is,” Kaneisha said. She typed into the laptop. “Right shoulder. Looks shallow.”

  Booker turned at that. Dani’s dress hung off her shoulder, revealing that sunburst of scar tissue he had seen in the bar in Florida. It stood out white and thick against her tan skin. Her fingers kneaded a long, jagged scar line that pointed to her bicep. Dani’s expression had changed. She no longer looked calm and receptive. She looked angry. And scared.

  “They put something inside my body? I mean, I knew they tagged my car. They took all my money.” Her words poured out faster and sharper. “But they put something inside my body? What the fuck do they want from me?”

  “They want to keep track of you.”

  “Why?” Dani yanked her dress back up onto her shoulder. “They already send Feds down to push us around. Why do they need to track me? Do you have one of these?”

  “I did,” Booker said. “It was in my sinuses. Kaneisha took it out.”

  “Your sinuses?”

  He nodded. “They had to have put them in when we were under sedation after what happened in D.C.” He tried to read something, anything, in Dani’s eyes at the mention of that rainy night but she showed nothing. He had tried to kill her that night. She had tried to kill him. They had both wound up under sedation by far more dangerous people.

  “So, Choo-Choo has one too.”

  “Who?”

  Kaneisha cut her answer off by swearing at something she read on her phone. “Chit chat is over, Tom. We’ve got to go, and your girl here has got to go somewhere else. All kinds of shit is going down.” She jumped into the driver’s seat and punched the engine to life. She threw the van into reverse so quickly, Dani fell forward into the computer station, knocking the scanner to the floor.

  “Are you okay, Dani?” Tom said, catching her as the van made a jerky lurch forward. “You’re bleeding.”

  “I’m fine.” Dani snapped, pulling away, examining a hot looking scrape on her forearm when it had barked against the computer shelf. She dropped to floor across from Booker, holding on to whatever she could to keep from rolling around while Kaneisha sped up the hill from Riverside Park. “Where are we going?”

  Kaneisha answered for him. “You’re going up to the road as far as I can take you without being seen. Then we’re getting the hell out of here. I don’t know what happened at that little shindig of yours but there are cops everywhere.”

  “Where?” Dani asked. “At the funeral?”

  Kaneisha nodded, swearing at a driver blocking her path. “Some kind of explosion. Don’t know the details, don’t care. All that matters is that you better show back up there or make yourself disappear for good because I’m not going anywhere near that many suits and guns, not for someone who’s not family.”

  “What about the tracker? Can you take it out?”

  Booker spoke quickly. “Yes. We can. Just not now. Not until we know what’s going on.” He grabbed a canvas tote bag that had been stashed under the passenger seat and pulled out a cheap looking phone. “Take this. I’ve already programmed the number. When I know it’s safe, I’ll call you.” He pressed the phone into her hands, his fingertips grazing the tops of her knuckles. “Don’t worry, Dani. I’m going to get you out of this.”

  The van bounced over a curb and then stopped. Kaneisha pointed to the door.

  “We’re starting right now, Tom. She gets out now.”

  Booker pushed open the sliding doors of the van and watched Dani scramble out.

  “Don’t lose that phone, Dani. I promise I’ll get you out.”

  The van dropped off the curb with a groan, kicking up a cloud of dust and gravel. Booker lost sight of Dani as Kan
eisha sped away but not before he saw her staring at the phone in her hands.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  5 p.m. – 16 hours to trigger

  Now what?

  Dani stood at an intersection, a crossroads both literal and metaphorical. She didn’t know what to do in either case. She looked around for a street sign. 111th Street. That was too many streets for one city to have, she decided. Where had the funeral been? 110th? Then how had the drive been so long? Didn’t Choo-Choo’s cousin Olivia live nearby? Not that that would help any. It wasn’t like she could go door to door knocking and asking for her.

  Sirens sounded around her. It seemed like they came from all directions. Did New Yorkers even hear sirens anymore? Were they the urban equivalent of crickets?

  All of these thoughts were placebos, distractions from the enraging truth Booker had just delivered to her – she had a tracker implanted in her body. Inside her body. Some cynical part of her brain marveled at the possibility of being shocked anymore. After everything Rasmund – or whoever the hell they were – had done to her and Choo-Choo, why should it surprise her that they would implant a tracking device under her skin?

  Because her body and mind were the last domains she had left to her.

  Yes, they had blown her life to pieces. Yes, they had stripped her of her freedom and career and resources. And yes, they had operated on her so that she might survive the ordeal they had put her through. Their carelessness in that matter had seemed like a message in itself. She and Choo-Choo both were riddled with scars from the surgeries. Whoever had operated had not bothered with a gentle touch or cosmetic concerns.

  Dani knew they had left those scars for a reason – a permanent reminder that their lives had been in enemy hands, that their bodies could be broken and marked.

  But to implant something underneath the skin?

  Her stomach rolled at the thought. She didn’t know it was possible to feel more violated than she had before. She felt stupid and childish in believing she had reached the limit of their machinations. Hot anger blew through her. She didn’t have kayaks to wrangle or beers to haul to burn off the sharpest edges. Here in the middle of this huge, busy, noisy, smelly city she had nothing to do, nowhere to run. She couldn’t even go for an actual run unless she wanted to break her feet in these stupid oversized shoes, and this oversized dress.