by Dale Mayer
“I don’t know,” he muttered. “It’s possible.”
“What happened to the other two men who were involved in this?”
“Hired guns. I needed them to get the women out of the hotel room.”
“Did you kill the gunmen afterward?”
He sucked in his breath, shook his head, and said, “No.”
“So who killed them?”
He was silent for a long moment.
“You must have some idea,” Asher said.
“I might,” he said, “but I’m really hoping not.”
“Why is that?”
“Because the only people who would care are the ones setting this up,” he said. “But I didn’t tell him who I was hiring.”
Asher laughed. “But they’ve been tracking you two brothers and the poor guy out on the boat,” he said. “And they took out your two assistants, the pros who did the kidnapping. You took out your own sister, and now the only witnesses left are just the two of you. So, once the mastermind behind this all has the girls where they want them, you guys are redundant, and you’ll go by the wayside, like the first two men hired.”
“No, no, no,” he said. “I’m the boss here.”
“You’re not the boss of anything, and apparently you’re on the verge of getting yourself knocked off too because, once this job’s over, there’s no reason for them to keep you.”
“I’m valuable,” he said.
“You screwed up by involving other people. I’m sure they didn’t like that.”
“I had to,” he said. “We all need backup.”
“Absolutely. But they obviously didn’t like your choices.”
“Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know.”
“So, your friend on the boat already has an X on his life too.”
He winced. “I hope not.”
“Because this is a good friend of yours, isn’t it? Someone you like, that you’d hate to see dead?”
He nodded slowly.
“And he did this as a favor for you, didn’t he?”
He nodded. “I can still save him.”
“And what about the women?”
“I don’t care about the women,” he said tiredly. “I just want this shit over with.”
“When you take on jobs like this,” Ryker said, his voice hard, “it doesn’t matter what the hell you want anymore. You’re now somebody else’s pawn. And with two down, actually three”—he cast his gaze at their dead sister—“that only leaves three more to go.”
“Did you kill my brother?” asked the man.
“No, your brother is fine for the moment.”
“Then kill him, will you? I don’t want him to know.”
“Know what?”
“Know what I’ve done,” he said.
“You want me to kill your brother, so he ends up not finding out what you have done?”
Yes,” he said. “It would be much easier.”
“What is it he doesn’t know about?”
“I told him this was a good job. And that we would be safe.”
He looked down, studied the brother, and said, “Is something wrong with him?”
The brother shook his head. “No, no, no. But he’s a little simple. And he has these rages. He got really angry when I took on this job.”
“Smart boy,” Ryker said. “So your brother will find out that his older brother, who he loves dearly, has put them up for a job that’ll get them killed.”
“Not if you kill him now,” he said.
“We don’t arbitrarily kill people,” Asher said in exasperation. “Otherwise, we would have already killed you.”
“You should have,” he said, nodding. “You really should have. Because, when I get out of here, I’ll come back after you.”
Asher smiled at him and said, “Yeah, and how will you do that?”
But the prisoner smiled up at him and said, “You think you’re so smart. Without my sister, you had nothing.”
“Yeah, but now we got you.”
At that, the brother’s smile was wiped away.
And just then his brother stirred. “What’s the matter?” he said, sitting up and holding his hand to his jaw. “Vitus? What’s wrong?” And he stopped and stared at the strangers.
Asher could immediately see the rage taking over this brother. He was a big boy too, so Asher looked at Ryker and nodded. Without warning, Ryker turned with a right fist uppercut under the jaw and knocked him back out again. The younger brother fell down with a hard crash and went out again.
Chapter 10
This wasn’t the way Mickie would choose to travel, hunkered down in the back seat. She kept out of sight as an unmarked vehicle arrived and then led the two brothers away, while Asher watched as a body bag was removed from the house too. Then the strangers all left.
Asher and Ryker walked back to her and got in the car. She asked in a subdued voice from the back seat, “Do you guys just make phone calls and have the world jump at your fingers?”
“We’re on a job,” Asher said. His voice was patient and calm. “What do you want us to do? Call the Shanghai police?”
“No,” she said. “Maybe. I don’t know. Who you did call?”
“A group related to our US government,” he said. “We’ll take care of this.”
“What’ll happen to the brothers?”
“They’ll be interrogated for more information, and, when they’ve given over whatever they’ve got, they’ll be taken to the appropriate Shanghai law enforcement division to be charged with the murder of their sister.”
“It probably won’t stick, you know?” she said, her voice teary-eyed. She pinched the bridge of her nose. This had been a stressful and exhausting night. She took several slow calming breaths. “What are we doing now?”
“I need to take you back to the hotel so you can crash.”
“And what about the two people behind the scenes? The one who paid for this and the one who’s picking up the twins? Or are they the same, I wonder.”
“Another reason why we need to be on hand,” he said, “to make sure that whoever it is who’s faking this rescue doesn’t get away with it.”
“It’s not like the one brother gave you much information to help track down the twins, did he?”
“No, not necessarily. But we do have a better idea. We just need to get out in a boat and find the twins ourselves.”
“That won’t be so easy,” she said, wondering if she’d be along for the ride too. Not that she looked forward to another stakeout, this time on the water, but neither did she want to sit in a hotel and wait and worry, while they were off doing their thing. As it was, anytime she thought she heard a noise, she jumped through her skin to avoid thinking it had anything to do with them.
“It’s what we do,” he said. “We’ll start quite a ways up the coast. We already have a boat waiting for us.”
“I’m coming with you,” she said.
The two men exchanged looks. Asher shook his head. “It’s better if you don’t.”
“It would have been better if I hadn’t come to China at all,” she said. “But it is what it is. I’m here.”
“True,” he said. “So, now what?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I could go back to the hotel, but, if you find the twins on that ship, you know that they could be in terrible shape.”
“And they could be 100 percent medicated,” Ryker said. “That’s what I would do.”
“Sure, but,” she said, her voice fatigued, “chances are you wouldn’t have gotten caught, and this guy already has, so we know that he’s not as good as you. Besides, unless they understand Alisha’s diabetes, the sedatives or the insulin could kill the twins.”
“Maybe. But, at the same time, an awful lot of other things can go wrong. We must look out for you too, making you a liability we can’t afford as well.”
“I don’t want you looking out for me,” she said. “I want you looking out for the twins.”
“We
won’t save them to end up with you in trouble,” Asher said, “so just get that out of your mind.”
“I don’t want to get that out,” she cried out. “I just want this all over with.”
“You’re obviously exhausted,” he said. “So, if you’re coming with us, lay down flat. Pull up the blanket over your head, and go to sleep.”
She stared at him for a long moment, wanting to kick and throw things, and yet, she knew it was precisely because she was so exhausted. She stretched out on the back seat as the vehicle drove off. She pulled the blanket up over her and said, “You didn’t use to be so bossy.”
“You didn’t use to be so argumentative.”
She gave a half snort at that. “Maybe, if I was, it would have been easier.”
“What does that mean?” he asked, half turning to look down at her.
She smiled up at him. “I was kind of lost in your shadow back then.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I was so insecure, and you were bigger-than-life, larger-than-life even back then. Your personality, your physique, everything you were, … it was like the best of the best. Whereas I was the worst of the worst, and I wasn’t heading anywhere.”
He stared at her in shock.
She shrugged. “It’s how I felt.”
“And you really think that’s how I saw you?”
“No,” she said, “but I knew that would wear off when you realized life with me would be dull and boring.”
“And how could it possibly have been dull or boring?” he asked. “I loved you.”
“You did. But you didn’t really know me. You didn’t really see me.”
“And because you thought I was in love with a mirage, you broke up with me?”
“I broke up with you so you could move on and have a better life,” she said. “I joined Doctors without Borders so that I could at least feel like I had done something with my life. That was a great way to gain medical training, so I could continue to help others.”
“And yet, at no point in time did you ever really deal with the fact that you should be helping yourself?” he questioned.
“My grandmother really helped me get things together,” she said. “Mentally, emotionally.”
“In what way?” he asked.
She shrugged. “She was really smart. And she kept getting me to deal with the fact that I am who I am, and who I am is just fine, and I didn’t need to change for anybody.”
“What kind of changes were you doing when you signed up for Doctors without Borders?”
“I was following your footsteps but trying to be different,” she said as she yawned. “If you were such a fine example of humanity, I wanted to at least do something to improve. But Doctors without Borders turned out to be such an emergency-room situation, and that wasn’t me. It wasn’t who I was meant to be but somebody else. Instead, I should have gone into private nursing earlier. Because I’m really serving humanity then.”
“Oh, I get it,” he said in surprise. “So, you joined Doctors without Borders because you thought that was the right thing to do. You went into medicine because you thought that was the right thing to do too. What was it that was truly the right thing for you to do though?”
“To go home and look after my grandma,” she said. “That was the right thing for me to do.”
“For then.” He studied her closely. “What’s the right thing for you to do now?”
“Take the twins home, help them adjust to life again, and then do something else.”
“Why something else?”
“Because I don’t want to care for other people right now,” she said. “I want to do a few things for myself.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” he said. “Just exactly what would that entail?”
“Well, you’ll be busy traveling the world,” she said, “so obviously I won’t spend time with you.” She heard his shocked gasp and realized what she’d said. She lifted a hand. “Forget that. I’m too tired to know what I’m saying.”
“So, you don’t mean it?”
“I don’t even remember what I said,” she said. Another yawn broke free. She tried to shake the fog from her brain. “Seriously I have no clue what I just said.” Of course she did, but she wouldn’t let that rear its ugly head.
“Good night,” she said. And with that, her breathing fell into a deep and heavy pattern.
“Is she really asleep?” Ryker asked.
“She is now. I’m not sure what she was talking about either.”
“What she was talking about,” Ryker said, “makes a whole lot of sense to me.”
“I don’t think so,” Asher said. “Not a whole lot of that was rational.”
“I think what matters is, what do you want to do about this? What do you want out of the relationship?”
“I’m not sure. It never occurred to me that she wanted to spend time with me. That there was even another chance at a relationship to spend time in.”
“No, because, in your mind, that relationship was over. But I think she’s seeing something that she never really walked away from.”
“That doesn’t make any sense either,” Asher said, twisting around for another look at Mickie.
“How heartbroken were you when she broke up?”
“Devastated,” he said shortly. “She was my everything.”
“It sounds like her own insecurity broke you up though and that she’s finally figuring out who she is.”
“Yeah, just ten years too late.”
“But not too late if it isn’t too late for you.”
“Meaning?”
“It’s never too late,” Ryker said. “Think about it. There are all kinds of reasons to try a relationship again.”
“No,” he said. “The last thing I want to do is get dumped again because of her insecurities.”
“I don’t think she would now,” Ryker said. “Sounds like she’s come a long way.”
“Maybe,” Asher said, but he wasn’t sure. But neither could he stop looking back at her and seeing that same young girl who he’d fallen in love with. “How could she think she wasn’t good enough,” he wondered out loud.
“Young girls,” Ryker said. “They don’t necessarily make sense. You just accept that that’s her insecurity and help her grow past that.”
“I didn’t even know about it,” he said. “How was I supposed to deal with it?”
“You didn’t then,” Ryker said, “but you can now. But that would mean going down that relationship lane again.”
“I’m not sure I’m ready for that.”
“Did you ever have another relationship since?”
“Sure,” Asher said. “Several. Just none quite the same.”
“Of course not. You didn’t care for them because you still cared about this one.”
“Just means I’m a fool,” he said. “She was my one and only love. It never allowed me to feel that deeply again.”
“No,” Ryker said. “No emotion is foolish. Especially not when you love deeply already. You’ve always been like that.”
“Maybe,” Asher said. “But that doesn’t mean I want to go in that direction again. That’s just suicide.”
“No, that’s called second chances.”
“Who said I wanted one?”
“Doesn’t matter if you want it or not,” Ryker said. “It’s waiting there for you. But the thing is, are you too scared to step forward and take it?”
“Fear has nothing to do with it.”
“Actually, in this case, fear has everything to do with it,” Ryker said. “I already know you care. I see it in the way the two of you look at each other. I can feel the energy in the room when you two are together. So that’s not the problem. Trust is. And more than that, there’s fear. She walked away from you because she was afraid she wasn’t enough. And you’re not willing to take a step in her direction because you’re afraid that she’ll repeat her actions from back then.”
“And that’s whe
re the lack of trust factor comes in,” Asher said. “I gave her my heart, and she threw it back at me.”
“Maybe,” Ryker said with a head nod. “But she’s in the process of handing you her heart. Will you give her the same treatment?”
“No,” Asher said, “because I won’t accept it in the first place.”
“Too late,” Ryker said with a gentle laugh. “Not only did you accept it ten years ago but you haven’t actually given it back. She’s in stasis, waiting for her life to move forward, and so are you because still you hold her heart in your hands.”
“But I don’t want to.”
“It doesn’t matter if you want to or not. The fact is, you’ve been in this position for the last ten years,” he said. “You’ve never changed in the meantime. It means that a big part of you really wants it.”
“Well, that part of me can just take a hike,” Asher said. “If she wasn’t the woman for me back then, she’s not the woman for me now.”
“She might not have been the young girl for you last time,” Ryker corrected, “but that doesn’t mean she isn’t the perfect woman for you right now.”
At that, there was nothing more Asher could say.
Chapter 11
No way would Mickie let Asher know that she was listening to any of their conversation, but she was damn glad she’d heard it. Mickie was exhausted and drifting in and out of sleep, but, when she caught parts of the conversation, she couldn’t possibly go asleep again. She lay here, wondering if it was possible to have a relationship with Asher again. Did she even want that? She’d walked away last time, thinking she didn’t deserve him. The ten years hadn’t changed a lot, but it had changed enough of Mickie to become her own woman. She’d gone through enough that she’d built herself up inside to understand more about who she was and why she was where she was at. Her grandmother had been instrumental in getting her to this point. Mickie hadn’t lied about that.
Her grandmother had been one of those unique people with a view of life that had just mesmerized Mickie. Sometimes her grandmother would say things that Mickie would stop and think about, and her grandmother had a most contemplative turn of phrase that made Mickie see the world completely differently. She missed her terribly. She figured that was why she had accepted the job to look after the twins. They had needed her as her grandmother had needed her. Was Mickie ready to let go of that?
