Noah's Nemesis

by Dale Mayer

  “Oh, I understand the questions thing,” she said, reaching up a hand to her sore head. “Any chance of a coffee while we’re doing that?”

  “Of course,” she said, “and food. How’s the stomach?”

  “It’s up and down,” Di said. It felt so damn good to be in a place where she was safe and with friends. Ice led her into the huge kitchen that Di had heard so much about, and then Ice promptly disappeared. Dianne was immediately engulfed in gentle hugs from an older man. She accepted them gratefully.

  “You must be Alfred,” she said, studying the wispy hair around his face and the sheer gentleness of his countenance. She knew that he was an old military friend of Levi’s, and, while she wasn’t exactly sure how it all worked, it was obvious that he was happy here.

  He beamed at her. “Indeed, I am,” he said. He patted her back and said, “Come sit down. Sit down.”

  She allowed herself to be led to a large comfy chair at the table. This chair was different from the others, but it was one good to snuggle into. She sank into it gratefully and was quickly presented with a cup of coffee and a tray of goodies. She looked at the tray in astonishment.

  “Where on earth did you get these from?” she murmured, as her hand hovered over the tray, while she made her selection. When she appeared to be taking too long, Alfred immediately grabbed the tongs and put three on a plate for her.

  She laughed. “How did you know I was deciding between those three?”

  “Because that’s where your hand kept going,” he said, with a bright smile. “Now you just sit and rest. You’ve had a terrible experience,” he said. “Nobody should go through that.”

  “Well, it seems like that’s just my day today.” She looked up, and there was Noah, leaning against the doorjamb, grinning at her. She rolled her eyes. “How do you guys stay skinny here?” she whispered, as she motioned at the plate in front of her.

  “We don’t even try,” he said, patting his stomach. “At least some of us are busy enough that it doesn’t make a difference.”

  “At the moment,” she said, “but wait until you try to stop being busy sometime.”

  He chuckled, sat down beside her, and said, “How are you feeling?”

  “Like shit,” she said cheerfully. “But this is helping an awful lot. I’m fortifying myself right now,” she said, “for the questions to come.” She picked up a big croissant, took a bite, and then closed her eyes with a happy sigh.

  “Wow, that look on your face …”

  Her eyes flew open, finding Noah studying her. She flushed. “A little too much, huh?”

  “Nope,” he said, “passion is everything. Whether it’s for food or other things.”

  She rolled her eyes at him.

  “No, not like that. I just meant, like career, children, whatever it is, do it with all your heart,” he said. “It’s nice when I have somebody like Alfred and Bailey who can cook like they can.” He added, “We all enjoy the benefits, and I do something I really enjoy outside of this.”

  She smiled. “And what is it that you enjoy?”

  “All kinds of stuff,” he said, with a cheeky grin. “But I really enjoy action and putting the bad guys in jail.”

  “Good,” she said. “Sounds to me like there’s no end of bad guys.”

  “Nope, sure isn’t,” he murmured. He looked at the plate and then got up and walked over and picked up a couple treats of his own.

  She snorted. “See? That’s what I mean. How can you not eat constantly around here?”

  “I wouldn’t want to overeat,” he said, “but this is pretty spectacular.”

  Bailey walked into the room, pushing a cart carrying a big water jug with lemon slices in it, alongside some scones and lemon curd. She placed the cart near the table for everyone to help themselves.

  Noah looked at her and asked, “How do you guys just keep bringing out all this good stuff?”

  She smiled at him. “Well, if we told you guys our secret recipes, we wouldn’t have a job.”

  “Nope, nope, nope,” Noah said. “I have no intention of that. I’m way too happy to have you around, keeping us all fed.”

  “You mean, fat and fed,” Bailey said cheekily.

  Noah looked at her in mock horror. “Surely I’m not getting fat.”

  “No,” she said, “not yet.” And, with that singsong answer, she walked back into the kitchen.

  Noah looked over to find Di grinning at him. “Oh, you enjoyed that, did you?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, I kind of did.”

  “Glad to see you stocking up yourself,” he said.

  “I’ll need it,” she moaned, as she picked up another piece.

  “They won’t grill you,” he said softly. “They’ll just ask you questions.”

  “Yeah, but just asking questions means reliving all that horror.”

  “Speaking of which,” a voice said from the doorway.

  Dianne looked up to see Levi. Immediately she put down the croissant in her hand, got up, walked around to him, and they shared a big, careful hug.

  He held her gently, then pushed her back a bit to get a look at her. “How are you feeling?” His gaze was searching, looking for the truth that she didn’t want to tell anybody.

  She bolstered up a bright smile and said, “Honest, I’m doing much better.”

  “Well, good,” he said. “And thank you for not lying and telling me that you’re doing fine.”

  She snorted. “Since when did you ever let me get away with a lie?”

  “Not lately,” he said. With an arm around her shoulders, he led her back to the table. “I see Bailey and Alfred have already found you,” he said, motioning at the plate of treats.

  “My God,” she said, “how the devil do you possibly keep them here? I’m surprised they haven’t been stolen from you.”

  “It’s all about love,” he said in that same gentle tone.

  She smiled and nodded. “That’s what you keep telling me. I’ve just never experienced it to the level that you seem to have perfected here.”

  “Well, we’re working on it,” he said. Levi looked at Noah and raised his eyebrows in a comical gesture and said, “Some of our guys are still holding out.”

  “Hey, I’m probably one of what? Three single guys left in this place?” Noah shook his head and muttered, “Don’t go looking at me.”

  “You’re afraid of falling in love,” Di teased.

  “Nope, not afraid of it at all,” he said. “I’m afraid of falling into what looks like love and is not.”

  She settled in her chair again and stared at him. “You know what? I think that’s probably my problem too.”

  “In what way?”

  “My last relationship kind of sucked,” she said. “It wasn’t that bad, but it just wasn’t good enough to maintain. We didn’t want to be alone, so we kept it going, trying to give life to something that was dead and gone.”

  “I’ve had that happen a time or two myself,” he muttered. “It’s not how I want to have a relationship.”

  “Nope,” she muttered, “not at all.”

  Ice walked in just then, with her son, Hunter. Di looked up at the baby and held out her arms. Hunter, who had never even seen her before, immediately held out his arms.

  Ice laughed. “Well, that was easy,” she said. She handed off the toddler into the arms of her friend, and Hunter immediately reached out and grabbed hold of Di’s hair with both fists.

  Dianne let him tug and play, kissing his soft forehead. “He’s beautiful,” she whispered.

  “Well, I’m biased,” Ice said, pouring herself a coffee and sitting down at the table. “But you’re right, he is.” She chuckled and said, “And, while you’re holding him, he’ll make life a little easier for you, while you tell me what happened.”

  Dianne wrinkled up her nose at her friend. “Right to business, huh?”

  “Yep, sure am,” she said, “and the longer you evade it, the more details we’ll miss out on.”


  Looking at Ice in surprise, Di nodded slowly. “I wasn’t thinking of it from that perspective.”

  “Nope. Now stop stalling and start talking.”

  Di gave the little bit of details that she had, and, as she watched, Ice recorded it. “Why tape it?”

  “So we have details to refer back to,” she said. “We tend to miss out on things, or something comes up later that didn’t seem relevant early on. I just do it as a matter of course now.”

  “Makes sense.” Di turned to Noah. “Maybe he has something to add.”

  “Nope,” he said, “I don’t. When I got there, you were in the back of your vehicle.”

  “Any chance I crawled in there myself?” she asked.

  He looked at her in surprise and then said, “I don’t know.”

  “I—” She started to speak, then frowned and sighed. “You know? I just don’t know. I don’t know why I would have, except that I was terrified, and, sitting there in the front seat, I felt like I was more vulnerable and open, than if I was hidden in the back.”

  “And that would make perfect sense if you had,” he said, “and it would alleviate the thought that somebody was hanging around, watching for you.”

  “But why wouldn’t I have just laid down in the front seat?”

  “Because you had a gearshift between the two bucket seats,” he suggested.

  She looked at him and frowned. “Right, I did. I usually rent vehicles without them, but this was the only one they had. I didn’t even realize why because rentals don’t often have standards anymore.”

  “Not many people know how to drive them either,” he murmured.

  She nodded. “But I learned to drive in the outback of Australia, and we could drive anything there. It’s a skill I’ve never really lost.”

  “That’s good,” Noah said. “It’s not a skill that everybody has, so it’s rare to find a rental with a manual transmission these days. Is there any reason to suspect that vehicle was a part of it?”

  Everybody at the table shook their head.

  But Ice made a note. “I’ll call them and see. It will be one more thing to check off the list.” She picked up the phone, while they were all sitting there and talking. By the time she got off, she shook her head and said, “It’s the only one they had, and it’s usually a staff vehicle. But, they had some accidents and mechanical problems and came up short on vehicles, so this one was pulled into use.”

  “And because I could drive a standard, I was given this one. Okay, so mark that off the list, as you said,” Di murmured.

  “Why were you staying at that hotel?” Noah asked her suddenly.

  She shrugged and said, “The conference is being held there, so I thought it would be more convenient,” she said.

  “I guess,” he murmured. “I just wondered if that had anything to do with it. You’re attending this conference?”

  “Yes.” She nodded. “Hosted by the health food industry,” she said, “so I was there for my work.”

  “Anybody else know about it?”

  “Everybody back at the company I work for,” she said. “Anybody who was at the conference or organizing the conference would have known about it. It was well publicized.”

  Noah looked at Ice and Levi. “What does this Maxwell guy do?”

  “He was in construction,” Levi said. “That’s one of the reasons his son was taken. Somebody was trying to apply pressure to have Maxwell do a job without all the safety protocols required, and he wouldn’t do it.”

  “So they grabbed his son?” Noah asked, incredulous.

  Ice nodded. “It was a multimillion-dollar job they needed done, and everybody had refused. So they were desperate and decided to get ugly in their tactics. Unfortunately everything went wrong, and his son was killed in the process.”

  “Were you involved in that?” Noah asked Levi.

  He shook his head. “No, I wasn’t. Not at all.”

  “So why target you then?”

  “Because he asked me for help.”

  There was silence at the table.

  “Ouch,” Noah said. “And you couldn’t help, why?”

  “Well, for one thing, I wasn’t in Australia,” he said. “Two, my teams were spread very thin. And, three, the papers said various local authorities were already on it, and Maxwell didn’t give me much time, which happens with kidnappings, especially of children,” he said heavily. “Ice and I discussed this at the time,” he said, looking over at Ice, who nodded, “before I told Maxwell. He needed immediate help in Australia, and the local police already had a team in place.” He sighed. “But then everything went wrong, and so—” He left the words hanging. “He probably blames me.”

  “Okay, I get that, but why attack me though?” Dianne murmured.

  “Somehow he knew about the personal connection between you and me—plus, no offense here, but you would be easier to get to than one of my men—and, because of that personal link, it was just all about maximum pain.”

  “I’ve heard that phrase related to serial killers a couple times,” Di said, “about them wanting to get maximum pleasure out of other people’s pain.”

  “Yes,” Levi said, “that’s generally how they get their kicks. What makes their life happy and worth living is to see other people suffer. Usually these guys have messed-up histories, where they’ve suffered terribly, so their only way of regaining power in their life is to make others suffer, claiming joy in proving they aren’t suffering anymore.”

  “That’s kind of twisted, isn’t it?”

  “It’s definitely twisted, but we don’t have too much to go on here. I don’t think Maxwell has any of that going on. I think it’s all got to do with the loss of his son.”

  “And now he’s what? Trying to make you deal with the same pain? Wouldn’t that mean he would be trying to kidnap Ice or your son here?” She looked down at Hunter in her arms, his two fists in her hair, yet gently curled against her breast, snoozing.

  “Precisely, which is one of the reasons we’ve put everybody on lockdown,” he said. “That’s exactly what somebody who lost a child could try to do.”

  She winced. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to bring that up.”

  “Not bringing it up doesn’t make it go away,” Levi murmured. “We’re not about hiding our heads in the sand here.”

  She nodded. “I’ll need to go back to the hotel.”

  “And you want to stay there?”

  “Well, I’m still part of the conference, and I’m supposed to speak tonight,” she said. “I really don’t want to make this trip for nothing.”

  “And you were supposed to stay with us this weekend anyway.”

  She nodded. “And I didn’t have the hotel booked over the weekend either because I was coming here.”

  “So, you have two more days paid for at the hotel?” Noah asked.

  “Three. The conference runs Monday through Thursday, but Monday is a short day, as is Thursday. Just Tuesday and Wednesday are truly full days for the conference, then Thursday morning is just a recap. So I’ll check out that day.”

  “I don’t want you to be there alone,” Noah said, frowning at her.

  She gave him a good frown back. “What you want isn’t necessarily what’ll happen,” she said.

  “Maybe not, but we don’t want somebody grabbing you now that they know you’ve come here, and Ice has opened her door for you. That just adds to the theory that you’re important here.”

  “So, if they find me again, what? They’ll keep me?”

  “Well, Maxwell gave you a message,” Noah said, “and you passed it on, but that doesn’t mean he’s not waiting on you to give you another message. Especially if he knows the delivery system worked.”

  *

  Noah hadn’t meant to make it sound quite so harsh, but—from the pale skin, wide eyes, and shocked look on her face—he’d been a little more direct than he’d intended to be. He looked over at Ice and mouthed, Sorry.

  Ice shrugged. “No style po
ints perhaps, but he’s telling the truth.” She looked at Levi and asked, “Do you have anything for Noah in the next few days?”

  He shook his head. “Now we do.”

  Dianne glared at them. “You’ll saddle me with him?”

  Noah snorted at that. “Why not?” he asked. “I’ve been there since the beginning.”

  She nodded slowly. “No, you’re right there. You have been, indeed, and I shouldn’t be bitchy about it,” she said.

  “Well, I’ll put that down to still being fairly stressed.”

  She looked at him, smiled, and said, “Thank you for the rescue.”

  He nodded his head elegantly and grinned at her. “You’re welcome,” he said, “but I’m still coming to the conference with you.”

  She rolled her eyes at that. “You’ll really love it.”

  “Can’t be that bad,” he said. “I mean, what was it? Natural foods? How bad could it be?”

  She snorted. “Considering the time right now and the fact that I have to be back in about seven hours to give a workshop,” she said, “it could be pretty bad.”

  He frowned. “Any security at this place?”

  “Not any more than usual,” she muttered. “And it’s not like I can ask for more because I was attacked in the parking garage.”

  “I already spoke to the hotel about that,” Levi said. “They don’t even have cameras on that level.”

  “Of course not,” she said. “That would make life too easy. The good thing is, I can already ID the guy, so it doesn’t really matter.”

  “Exactly,” he murmured, then turned to Noah. “You okay to go into town for a few days?”

  “He doesn’t have to stay there,” she protested, but Noah gave her a hard look.

  “Yes, I do.”

  She fell silent, picked up a cinnamon bun, popped a big bite in her mouth, and glared at him, as she chewed furiously.

  He grinned and said, “That’s right. Take your temper out on that cinnamon bun instead.”

  She groaned and said, “Now you’re making me feel like an idiot.”

  “You’ve been through a shock, not to mention the bonk on the head,” he said. “You’re not thinking clearly.”

  “That’s hardly the issue,” she snapped. And then she immediately pulled back. “But obviously I still have a problem.”