Ham

by Dustin Stevens

  Which was the reason she had sent up that flare. The fact that had caused me to recognize instantly that she was in trouble and needed my help.

  “You knew my mommy growing up?” she asks, her eyes widening slightly.

  To most people, her surprise would sting. For me, it is a point of pride, confirmation that Amy made good on the promise we made so long ago to keep each other a secret.

  Just like Mikey had no idea who she was, even her own daughter doesn’t know who I am.

  Which is for the best. For everybody.

  “I did,” I reply. “Like I said before, she’s my best friend.”

  Lifting my gaze, I check the rearview mirror for the thousandth time, making sure Amy is okay.

  Stretched the length of the back seat, she is buried in a mound of pillows and blankets. Only her face is visible, her features slightly pinched as she sleeps. With the sun now streaming through, it seems to illuminate her features, making her almost glow.

  Which, as cheesy as it sounds, is pretty much how I’ve remembered her these last few years.

  “Did you know my dad too?”

  My grip constricts on the wheel as my eyes roll forward. Staring hard at the road before me, I can feel the tension of my grip travel the length of my arm, my jaw clamped shut.

  The man that is biologically Amber’s father was anything but a dad. He was an asshole and a predator. A man that saw someone in Amy’s condition and took advantage. A bastard that used sleight of hand and a basic con to get what he wanted from her.

  And then he disappeared from her life.

  Until I found him and made him disappear altogether.

  “Your dad?” I ask, not trusting myself to look her way. If her mother never once mentioned me, I find it unlikely she ever told her that she was the offspring of rape. That the man she still bore a slight semblance to was nothing more than someone that liked to present himself as an academic when in reality he just relished the proximity to young women.

  Or that he had died a most painful and heinous death just after she was born, his remains never to be found.

  “Yeah,” she says. “Back at the hotel room.”

  Jerking my head to the side, I can feel folds of skin form around my eyes as I look to her. Incomprehension floods my features, confusion pushing aside the anger I’d felt a moment before.

  “At the hotel room? You mean...?”

  “No,” Amber replies. Just as she spent most of yesterday, her gaze drops to her lap, her fingers laced together atop the fleece blanket covering her legs. “Not the one you shot. The other one.”

  The one that had Amy pinned down. The one that was clearly about to beat her or worse when I arrived. The one that was a big man when towering over his blind wife but went down like a bitch when I slammed into him.

  That one.

  “He’s your dad?” I ask, my words clipped and measured. Already, confusion is peeling back, replaced by the most vehement rage I have encountered in a long, long time.

  Probably since finally tracking down Amber’s father.

  “Stepdad,” Amber corrects. “But I’ve never really liked him.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The tangle of feelings Jensen Spiers is experiencing is the very definition of chaotic. Counterintuitive, even.

  Six days prior, his wife betrayed him. Disappeared with his stepdaughter. Hired someone to come to take her away, crushing Spiers’s nose and shooting his partner in the process.

  He has barely slept. His nose — and by extension, his entire head — is throbbing. Swelling has kicked in, making him feel like a human lollipop, the top portion much too large, throwing his balance off. The mask they gave him to keep things aligned no longer fits properly as a result.

  And it is hot as hell.

  Still, he can’t help but feel the tiniest bit buoyed. Not joyful, nowhere near uplifted, but for the first time in a week, there has been a positive development. One small thing that he can take advantage of.

  Work in his favor.

  The weak moan that his partner managed to shove out the night before plateaued at a single word. One syllable that he was able to manage before the medication and his body’s internal functions pulled him back under.

  But that was all Spiers needed.

  Tag.

  The technology was first developed by the Department of Defense a decade before. At the time, it was still considered the stuff of science-fiction novels and futuristic television. The sort of thing only shadow military groups and alphabet agencies could get their hands on.

  A spray-on tracking system.

  A methodology of spritzing someone with a compound of nanoparticles that could not be washed away, its molecular makeup could be tracked from virtually anywhere using a specific computer program.

  At the time of development, it was said to be illegal anywhere in the continental United States. The goal was to aid in the search for bin Laden, for tracking known terrorists at the height of Al-Qaeda’s international sway.

  No longer would there be any point in nabbing a single person when they could be questioned and tagged before being released. When they inevitably then returned to the cell or stronghold they operated from, a target instantly increased many times over.

  In the years since, both the technology and the politics governing it have shifted. As the Taliban has receded and ISIS has risen to prominence, their foothold on American soil has grown. Terror attacks have become more commonplace. The number of citizens killed at home has skyrocketed.

  And in direct correlation, so has the time and money invested in stopping them.

  The first use of such technology within the LAPD, to Spiers’s knowledge, was three years before. Those against the practice had been able to keep it at bay for a while before that, citing a host of moral and ethical complaints, but in the wake of the San Bernardino shooting, there was nothing that could be done any longer.

  The people’s right to privacy became secondary to their need to live.

  If that meant a few people with known ties to counterculture were singled out and monitored, so be it.

  That was how Spiers had seen it at the time. Even more so how he sees it now.

  In the moments before approaching The Sundowner, it never occurred to him to bring the spray, much less use it. Of the myriad ways he envisioned the encounter with his wife and stepdaughter playing out, none were anywhere near what transpired.

  He’d figured he would find them scared and alone. That he would demand they share what they knew. That perhaps they would balk, that he might have to make some threats. Maybe even bring them in and put them in an empty holding cell for a few hours, shielded from anybody else that might see them.

  But eventually, they would give him what he wanted.

  Never did he think they would have brought in a professional. Someone that could fight off he and Lucas both and whisk them away. Give rise to the need for future tracking.

  Luckily, his partner hadn’t been quite so naïve.

  Pulling into his driveway, Spiers leaves the car sitting outside the garage. He’s not going to be here long. The couple of hours of sleep he got sitting outside of Lucas’s room at the hospital is going to have to be enough to get him by.

  Staying there for the night was not ideal, but it was necessary. People on the force would expect him to be there for his partner. The story of him spending the night with the man’s wife and son will get out. It will frame the narrative, ensuring that it stays a story about someone shooting a cop instead of becoming a tale of how two officers were someplace they shouldn’t have been.

  And most importantly, it will keep anybody from looking too closely at why that was.

  Shutting the car off, Spiers looks to the rearview. Morning sun reflects off the bridge of the clear plastic mask he wears, obscuring some of his features from view. What remains are puffy and bruised, the first phase in what will be a recovery that lasts a week or longer.

  The taste of bile rises along
the back of his throat as he stares at it, recalling brief snippets of the encounter in the motel, before tossing them aside with a shake of his head. The movement does nothing to ease the rocking inside his skull as he steps out, slamming the door behind him.

  Stepping fast, he heads around the engine of his car and up the walk. His gaze down, his hands in his pockets, he doesn’t notice the envelope wedged into the corner of the front door until he is almost right on it, the manila coloring a stark offset to the red door.

  His pace slowing, his right hand reaches toward his hip. His eyes narrow, head glancing to either side, looking for any sign of somebody being nearby.

  Coming to a complete stop, he waits and listens, hearing nothing beyond the usual sounds of a suburban Monday morning.

  A sprinkler watering a lawn across the street. A dog baying in the distance. A trash truck a few blocks over.

  His knees bent, Spiers moves slowly up to the door. Body sideways, he keeps his right hand close to his service piece, reaching out with his left and snatching the envelope free.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Much like yesterday, Amber’s conversation is limited to a single burst. One quick back-and-forth between us that dissipates as fast as it arrives.

  The only difference is this time, I am left with a hell of a lot to make sense of.

  Seated on the passenger seat beside me, Amber has shoved the fleece blanket into the footwell. The sun sits at a forty-five degree angle out her window, shining on us both. Not as warm as Southern California, though the full chill of fall is still a couple weeks away, even this far north.

  Definitely something I haven’t missed since leaving the area.

  In her hand is the biggest granola bar I’ve ever seen, something fished from the bag of snacks I got at our last gas stop outside of Provo hours before. Smudges of chocolate line her fingers and mouth, her jaw flexing and clenching.

  She has no idea of the bombshell she just dropped on me. Of how much that shifts every notion I’ve been operating under for the last day.

  Or how badly I now want to shake Amy awake and start firing questions at her.

  Like why her husband was attacking her. And how long it had been going on. And what was the reasoning behind it.

  And when the hell she had gotten married.

  Three years have passed since I last saw her. The absolute final thing I did after handing in my walking papers to Mikey and heading south.

  At the time, it was just she and Amber living in an assisted community in Reseda. She never mentioned dating anybody. As far as I knew, the professor was only the man she’d ever been with.

  And now she’s married. To a cop.

  One that sees no problem in beating her or having his partner pin her daughter in the bathroom.

  The reason I left the life can best be summed up by an expression that I remember reading in a book somewhere years ago. The main character was also a soldier of fortune, a fixer for hire, and claimed that each successive trip left his wallet fuller and his soul emptier.

  Or something like that. Hell, I don’t have an eidetic memory.

  Point being, the lines that I had once seen as so clearly black and white had blurred too far. There weren’t even shades of gray any longer, just one big muddled smear. A smudge of pencil that had been rubbed and rerubbed a thousand times over until it was no longer legible.

  The people I was being sent to watch over very often weren’t worth it. Those that had been marked for death hadn’t done anything wrong.

  And people that were supposed to protect and serve ended up being the enemies themselves.

  I thought I was doing a good thing by walking away. I was going to be one less person clogging the system. I would go underground, live a quiet life alone, not making things any worse.

  The part I forgot was that things never stay status quo. While I might not have been making things worse, I damned sure wasn’t making them better.

  And I wasn’t doing my job, looking out for my sister.

  One after another, the thoughts and realizations rush forward. My mind no more than has time to grasp one and hate myself for it before another floods in.

  Teeth clenched, steering wheel in hand, I almost miss the sign directing me from the highway. Mashing down on the brake, I twist in the front seat, turning to brace Amy with one hand, the backend fishtailing.

  A single squeal of rubber against pavement screeches out around us, the sound echoing from the tall pine trees lining the road.

  On the opposite side of the median, I can see a trucker turn around, watching us as he barrels past, an open-air load of timber dragging along behind his rig.

  “Sorry,” I mutter, one more thing added to the tally of things I seem to be failing with at the moment.

  A foot to my left, Amber is perched on the front edge of the seat. Both hands are extended before her, mashed flat against the dash. The last remnants of the granola bar are pressed into it, flattened into a barely discernible shape.

  “Been a long time since I was up here.”

  Saying nothing, Amber pushes herself back into her seat, peeling the matted granola bar free. Turning back, I check to make sure Amy is still asleep before nudging the wheel to the right. Easing off the brake, we idle up the exit, waiting as we redirect and straighten out before punching the gas again.

  It has been a while since I’ve been up this way – years, in fact – but that’s no excuse. I’ve driven this route enough times to know it cold, muscle memory alone enough to get us where we need to be.

  The problem is I’m distracted. I’ve been playing catch-up since the second Mikey showed up at my place, and that’s a position I’ve always hated and done everything in my power to avoid.

  It’s time to get out in front of things. To talk to Amy, put together the full story, fill in the holes in the narrative I don’t yet have.

  In the meantime, I need to figure out a way to turn off whatever voice is in my head, refusing to shut up and let me focus.

  Pulling in a deep breath, I allow my shoulders to rise and my chest cavity to expand. I hold it as long as possible, until my airways begin to tingle, before releasing it slowly.

  One item at a time, I concentrate on the details of the world around me, committing them to memory, matching them with my own recollections.

  The woods have gotten thicker, the years having increased the growth to either side. Turning off the main highway, the road is nothing more than a standard two-lane, allowing the forest to encroach on the roadway.

  Lodgepole pines extend straight upward to either side, their trunks barren. Beneath them, the empty space is filled in with brush and shrubbery. Moss clings to most every exposed surface. A bed of dead pine needles covers the ground.

  The air is redolent with the smells of fall. Dying leaves. Pine. Rainwater.

  Soon, ice crystals will be added to the mix.

  For more than three miles we follow the road before taking another right. Moving deeper into the forest, the pavement recedes to a single lane, barely wide enough for the Forester to pass through.

  Overhead, much of the sun is blotted by the thick forestation, the temperature dropping by a half-dozen degrees.

  Once upon a time, there was no safer feeling in the world for me. Nowhere on earth I’d rather be, the mere sight of this place the closest feeling to home I’d ever known.

  Now, coming on the heels of what Amber shared an hour ago, I can’t help but wonder if I’m making yet another mistake.

  The last turn on our journey is a left down a narrow gravel path. Forced to take it slow, branches and pine boughs reach out from either side, sliding across our windows. Dusk settles in, no amount of ambient sun able to penetrate.

  A quarter mile back, the path ends abruptly at a wooden gate. Solid across, the structure is reinforced with black steel, all of it well-maintained, a clear contrast to the woods around us.

  Rolling down my window, I lean out to the side, knowing that even though I can’t
see it, the embedded camera and microphones are recording every move we make.

  “Open the gate. I have Amy.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  The woman standing on the front porch is no more than five-four. She is dressed in jeans and a flannel hanging open over a tank top, the ensemble doing nothing to obscure the fact that she weighs barely a hundred and twenty pounds.

  And making the size of the Winchester rifle held across her torso all the more striking.

  Standing atop the front porch, she stands with the rifle balanced across either palm, her feet planted square. Her long dust-colored hair is pulled back behind her, lips drawn into a grimace.

  From her vantage, she picks us up the moment we pass through the gate, the automated door closing the instant our rear bumper is through.

  If possible, it is even more efficient than the system set up at Mikey’s.

  On either side of the drive leading from the gate to the house, the forest has been peeled back. Clear-cut by five feet on either side, the total lane is more than twenty feet across, providing a clean line of sight to anything approaching.

  Entrenched in her position, she watches as we creep forward, the lane ending in a roundabout in front of a two-story farmhouse. Even bigger than I remember, the place looks like it’s been added to recently, the exterior yellow with white trim. Under the windows sit flower boxes, some variety I don’t have the slightest idea about hanging down in shades of purple.

  A wraparound porch encases the place, pumpkins and gourds set up in clusters around it, getting an early start on the fall motif.

  To the right of the house sits a red barn with white crosspieces, the sliding front door open. A wagonload of manure and straw rests just outside, ready to be spread in the pasture down the hill.

  Behind the house is a second smaller building, a new addition since my last visit.

  All in all, a charming, homey vibe. The kind of place meant to make visitors feel welcome.