by Don Bentley
“I understand,” I said, selecting a picture of Charles and handing her the phone. “I’ll wait.”
Tiffani stared at the picture, using two bloodred fingernails to enlarge the image before shaking her head. “Looks familiar, but I can’t be sure. I see a lot of faces. Wait there. I’ll be back.”
She pointed toward an unoccupied room.
I nodded, walked inside, and let Tiffani draw the curtain closed behind me. The furnishings were even less impressive up close. No part of me was touching the stained couch against the wall. Instead, I stood in the center of the room, staring at my reflection for a ten count. Then I eased back the curtain and checked the hallway.
Empty.
Edging past the curtain, I looked at the alcoves to either side and thought about what to do next.
I’d checked Charles’s location once more before handing the phone to Tiffani. The coordinates hadn’t changed. He was here somewhere, but I still didn’t know why. Seeing who else was frequenting the club was probably the only way I was going to answer that question. The curtained room across the hall from mine seemed like as good a place to start as any.
Edging across the hallway, I crept up next to the room and grabbed a handful of velvet fabric. As I collected my thoughts, planning what to say once I unexpectedly confronted whoever was inside, I heard what the pounding music had obscured. Voices. A man and a woman arguing.
In Arabic.
FOURTEEN
I leaned closer, convinced at first that I’d misheard, but Arabic wasn’t a language easily mistaken for anything else. Especially once you’ve heard it while facing the business end of an AK-47. But I digress. The two people in the room were screaming in Arabic, and they weren’t talking about the weather.
“Please, not again,” a woman said.
“Quiet, whore,” a man said.
The dull thump of flesh hitting flesh punctuated his comment, and the woman cried out. She might have said something else, but I couldn’t be sure. This was because the part of my brain that had been focused on translating was now focused on something else.
I ripped open the fabric and charged inside.
Spending eight years as a DIA case officer in garden spots the world over should have prepared me for whatever was happening on the other side of that curtain.
It hadn’t.
Like the previous room, this one had mirrors on the walls and a disco ball hanging from the ceiling. But that is where the similarities ended. Instead of a couch, a futon ran along the far wall. A futon occupied by a woman whose hands were secured to restraints attached to the furniture’s metal frame.
A man stood in the semidarkness above her, his back to me. He was in the middle of swinging, and his right fist connected with her nose, spraying blood across the nearest mirror. He raised his left hand to follow up.
He didn’t get the chance.
I closed the distance between us without conscious thought, snapping my knuckles into his right kidney. I started the punch with my toes and drove through my calves and hamstrings, picturing my fist exiting his stomach. The man collapsed like a deflated balloon, spilling across the screaming woman.
I chased the right with a left, not wanting his other kidney to miss out on all the fun.
A well-executed kidney strike will drop a man to his knees. Two in a row will take the fight out of most anyone. Though he was a good two inches taller than me, and at least fifty pounds heavier, my new friend was no exception. A high-pitched keening escaped his lips, and the smell of urine filled the air.
He was done.
I was not.
Grabbing his collar with my left hand and his shoulder with my right, I pivoted, hurling him across the room. He smashed headfirst into the far mirror, shattering it before sprawling through the black curtain into the hallway. I followed, murder in my heart and blood on my fists.
Left to my own devices, I would probably have beaten him to death. But we were no longer alone. Tiffani and a second man stood in the darkened hallway. The newcomer looked from me to the bleeding man sprawled across the floor.
Then he went for his gun.
FIFTEEN
The newcomer swept aside his sport coat with a practiced motion, right hand streaking for his waistband. And that was a mistake. I could smell his spicy cologne, which meant he was too close to draw his gun. He should have known better, but didn’t.
I did.
Leaping toward him, I smashed my elbow into his chest. Then I pistoned my legs, driving him into the concrete wall behind him with a block that would have made my eighth-grade football coach proud. He grunted, the air leaving his lungs in an onion-laced cloud. My fingers found his gun hand. I compressed his wrist against his holster, preventing him from clearing the pistol.
Or so I thought.
One second I was congratulating myself for not getting shot in yet another dimly lit room. The next I was staggering backward, blinking the stars from my eyes from the kind of headbutt that would have made Jack Reacher proud. Through equal parts luck and skill, I’d turned my head to the side just before impact. I’d saved my nose, but the blow still hurt like a son of a bitch.
Doing my best to ignore the white lightning bolts exploding through my skull, I tightened my grip on his wrist and yanked him toward me. He stumbled, and I stomped on his kneecap. He grunted, tumbling downward. I kicked him in the head as he fell, picturing myself punting a football.
His neck snapped with a wet-sounding pop.
Clearing his sport coat, I reached for his waist, found the holster, and drew his pistol. Turning, I looked for my next target but found only Tiffani. Screaming. The man who’d started this nonsense was gone.
But I had a feeling he’d be back.
“Who’s the girl in the room?” I said, pointing the pistol at Tiffani.
“I don’t know. I don’t know,” Tiffani said, covering her face with her hands as she backed away. “They just brought her in today.”
“Who?”
The door at the far end of the hallway crashed open, revealing a pair of men holding sawed-off shotguns. I dropped to one knee, firing as I went. Earsplitting shotgun blasts echoed down the hall even as I shifted the pistol’s green front sight post from one dark center mass to the other, squeezing the trigger until the pistol’s slide locked to the rear.
If the idiots had turned on the overhead lights, things might have shaken out differently. But they hadn’t, and it hadn’t. Their eyes had needed time to adjust to the dimly lit room, while I saw just fine. Still, it was hard to miss with a shotgun in an enclosed space. A couple of the buckshot pellets had scored the top of my shoulder, making my shirt sticky with blood. I turned toward Tiffani only to find her sprawled against the wall. Fear had kept her frozen in place, and now most of her face was missing.
Swearing, I discarded the pistol and grabbed my phone from her lifeless fingers. I sprinted back to the room with the shackled girl, and found her struggling against her restraints, her face a mass of blood and tears.
“Easy, easy,” I said in Arabic. “I’m here to help.”
She stopped struggling, her dark eyes watching me, even as her shoulders still shook with silent sobs. Her wrists were raw and bleeding from where the metal handcuffs had bitten into her flesh, and I had to fight down the murderous rage threatening to overwhelm me. Ripping through the seam ringing my shirt cuff, I extracted the key I kept secreted there and showed it to the girl.
“I’m going to unlock these,” I said, pointing to her cuffs, “okay?”
She nodded, her eyes never leaving mine. I slid the key home, twisting and then ratcheting loose the first cuff. The girl snatched her free hand toward her chest as I went to work on the second.
I should have seen what was coming next, but was too focused on freeing her before more gun-toting commandos arrived. To her credit, the girl waited for ex
actly the right moment. I had one hand on her wrist and was working the cuff’s locking mechanism with the other. The moment metal rasped against metal, signifying the lock’s release, she acted.
I caught her motion with my peripheral vision and ducked, saving my eye. But the handcuff’s metal teeth still scythed into my cheek. Rearing back, the girl tore the handcuff free before whipping it back toward my face. This time I was ready. Catching the chain on my open hand, I wrapped my fingers around the metal linkage and jerked the cuffs away.
“Goddamn it,” I said as blood poured down my face. “I’m trying to help. But if you want to stay here, have at it.”
I pressed my left hand against my cheek, trying to hold the scrap of skin in place, while drawing my Glock with my right. Squeezing around the curtain, I cleared the hallway with the pistol’s front sight post, angling through the open space like I was slicing a pie.
Empty.
For now.
“What’s it gonne be?” I said, looking back at the girl crumpled on the futon. “Leaving or staying?”
She looked at me for a long time, and I couldn’t imagine what she saw. Even so, I’d unlocked her handcuffs and refused to retaliate after she’d sliced open my face. That must have counted for something.
“Leaving,” she said, getting to her feet on unsteady legs.
Good enough for me.
SIXTEEN
Matty,” Frodo said, his deep baritone sounding somehow confined since my cell was on speakerphone, “where the hell you been?”
I was driving a rental, and I hadn’t bothered to sync my phone and now I was paying the price. Though to be fair, I hadn’t envisioned a contingency where I’d be nursing a facial wound with one hand and fighting DC traffic with the other.
Then again, with my history, maybe I should have.
“Chasing a lead,” I said.
“What does that mean?”
“Later. I need help. Now.”
“Talk to me, Goose.”
This was one reason I loved Frodo. When I needed help, he was all in, no questions asked. He’d had my back in firefights across the globe, and losing his arm had done nothing to diminish his loyalty. The world would be a better place with more Frodos.
“I need access to a safe house for me plus one.”
“Is this a party line?”
I looked over at the girl before answering. She was curled in her seat, staring outside. She didn’t appear to speak much English, but I wasn’t assuming anything. “Affirmative.”
“Current location?”
“North of the District, heading south.”
“Roger—give me a couple of minutes to see what’s available. I’ll text you an address. I’m assuming the house needs to be fully furnished?”
“Yep. Including a med kit.”
“For you or the plus one?”
“Both.”
“Severity?”
“Non-life-threatening. Can you suture with one hand?”
“Like a goddamn surgeon. I’m texting you the address now. See you in fifteen.”
“Roger that,” I said, and ended the call.
My head throbbed where bad guy number one had headbutted me, and blood from my cheek laceration was running between my fingers and down my wrist. I had a girl who wouldn’t talk in the passenger seat and a pile of dead bodies back at the strip club.
Still, somehow I already felt better.
This was partly due to the artificial high that always accompanied someone shooting at me and missing. But only partly. This was the second time in as many days that someone had tried to kill me, and I certainly hadn’t felt this happy yesterday. No, the reason I wanted to break into song was more savage. The tables had just officially turned.
Frodo was now in the mix.
The thought of my best friend joining the fray almost made me pity whoever’d been dumb enough to take a shot at me in the first place.
Almost.
SEVENTEEN
Doesn’t say much, does she?” Frodo said, gesturing toward where the mystery girl was sitting on the safe house’s plush leather couch.
Budget cutbacks had hit the Department of Defense hard, and the DIA was no exception. But judging by the furnishings in this three-bedroom bolt-hole, the Agency’s forced austerity hadn’t applied to the network of safe houses used by senior DIA officials to debrief repatriated case officers and foreign agents.
Rank did have its privileges.
“Not so far,” I said, wincing as I flushed the cut on my cheek with another squirt of hydrogen peroxide. “Though if I’d been through what she had, I’d probably be keeping my thoughts to myself too.”
“True,” Frodo said. “But if we’re going to help her, she’s got to talk.”
“You want to give it a go?” I said, preparing to affix the flap of skin back to the side of my face with a couple of butterfly bandages, “be my guest.”
“Use this instead,” Frodo said, handing me a tube of superglue from the med kit. “And thanks for the offer, but I don’t want to talk to your girl. She isn’t real keen on the male species.”
As usual, Frodo had things right. After hanging up with my best friend and former bodyguard, I’d tried to engage the mystery woman, but she rebuffed my attempts with one notable exception. I’d offered to drive her to a police station, and she’d adamantly refused, becoming almost hysterical in the process. At one point, she’d clawed at the door handle, ready to leap from our moving car, until I convinced her we wouldn’t go to the police.
Not involving the authorities actually made things easier. I hadn’t had time to process what had happened at the strip club, let alone what Charles had to do with any of it. But I did know that showing up at a police station in my present condition would generate far more questions than I had answers for.
“Can’t say I blame her,” I said. “When I found her, she was chained to a wall, getting the shit beat out of her.”
“Who was doing the beating?” Frodo said.
I shrugged as I pressed the flap of skin back into place, holding the cut closed as the superglue did its work. “I didn’t get a chance to ask him before more men with guns showed up.”
“Is he still alive?”
I nodded. “Yep. His two friends not so much.”
“Damn, boy,” Frodo said. “Between the shootout in Austin and this clusterfuck, you’re dropping bodies faster than Ebola. Might want to pace yourself. So, what’s going on?”
A buzzing from my pocket kept me from answering him, which was good because answers were still in pretty short supply. I pulled out the phone, examined the screen, and showed it to Frodo.
“Rawlings?” Frodo said.
“Yep. I have a feeling he’s not calling to shoot the shit. Can you watch her? I gotta take this in the other room.”
“No worries. Uncle Frodo’s got things under control.”
I walked down the hallway, took the first left, and found myself in a small but tastefully furnished bedroom. Shutting the door behind me, I put the phone to my ear.
“Drake.”
“What the fuck did you do?”
“Good evening, Agent Rawlings. So nice of you to call.”
“You think this is fucking funny? You near a TV?”
“Nope,” I said, sitting down on the bed.
“Then I’ll give you the CliffsNotes version. I traced a phone to a strip club in Bethesda. For you. Now that club looks like a war zone. Three dead bodies. Three!”
“Would have been four if I’d been half a second slower,” I said. “I was outgunned and outmanned and damn near bought the farm. Excuse me if I seem a little less than sympathetic.”
I’d started the conversation calmly enough, but the stress of the night must have gotten to me. I’d screamed the last sentence. Now my hands were shaking.
“Okay, okay,” Rawlings said, his voice dropping a register or two. “Tell me what happened.”
So I did, holding the phone with one hand while I tapped out the rhythm to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” with the other. Yes, it might be the world’s most overplayed song, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a masterpiece. Try humming the chorus, and see if your homicidal urges don’t just evaporate. Steve Perry could give Don Henley a run for his money when it came to songwriting genius. Anyway, before I knew it, my story had run its course and so had the trembling.
“Fuck me,” Rawlings said. “You’ve either got the worst luck or the best. I can’t decide which.”
“Join the club.”
“The girl might have answers. I want to talk to her.”
“What,” I said, “on the phone?”
“No,” Rawlings said. “I’m in DC.”
“Why?”
“Later. Give me the address to the safe house. I’ll be over with an Arabic linguist.”
“She’s not ready for that,” I said. “When I tried to take her to the police, she almost jumped out of a moving car.”
“It’s a common reaction from folks from that part of the world. In many countries, the police have the authority to detain and even torture people without probable cause or a warrant. If she’s been sexually assaulted, she might even be afraid that she’ll be held responsible.”
“So the guy who doesn’t speak Arabic is giving me a lesson on Middle Eastern culture? Thanks, jackass. I clearly hadn’t put that together.”
“Don’t get all sensitive on me. I’m just thinking out loud. But since you’re such a smart guy, you must have an idea or two. Let’s hear ’em.”
And that was the rub, because I didn’t. Or at least I didn’t until that exact moment.
“The girl is the key,” I said, “but she isn’t talking to us. Probably not to any man. She needs someone she can trust. Someone we can trust.”