Midnight Kiss

by Lisa Marie Rice

  He was huge, so hard his penis was almost flat against his stomach. Deep red and shiny at the top. Completely and totally unlike any penis she’d ever seen in real life.

  Everything about him was just so fine, like a Greek god, only blond. And aroused. Long, hard muscles, broad shoulders, not an ounce of fat, just pure male. Both of them were naked. Luke had one big warm hand on her ankle. She was spread-eagled on the bed, completely open to him. It didn’t even occur to her to be embarrassed though he was probably seeing more of her than any of her fumbling lovers ever had. And he clearly liked what he was seeing because when she moved her legs even further apart, his penis, impossibly, rose a little.

  And her vagina clenched. And was getting wet. All of this was her body reacting without any input from her mind at all. She didn’t have to psych herself into arousal like she usually did. Her body was enthusiastically arousing itself. Just looking at Luke did the trick.

  And then he mounted her and it was almost overstimulation. The feel of him against the whole front of her body was amazing. Like warm steel, with that warm steel rod at the front. He bent his head and licked her neck and ohmygod yes. The neck was an erogenous zone. She’d read about it but had never experienced it. He licked behind her ear, nipped her skin slightly and she jolted, the electric thrill almost too much to bear.

  Somehow he’d found the time to put that condom on and was positioned right there, at her opening. Strong hairy thighs opened her legs up even more as he kissed her ear. It sent shivers over her entire body.

  “Okay?”

  What was he asking? Whatever it was, she was fine with it. More than fine. In fact, whatever he wanted should be happening right now.

  But she couldn’t answer because he was kissing her. There were other ways to answer, though, in another language. She lifted her hips and clutched his buttocks and that was a language he understood. He made a sound deep in his chest and thrust forward hard.

  It hurt, just a little. She wriggled, trying to accommodate him.

  “Sorry,” he gasped.

  His face was against her neck and she could feel the puff of air as he spoke. He dropped kisses against her jawline, up the side of her face, back down. His mouth settled over hers and he gave her sweet little first-prom date kisses. Such a contrast from his penis inside her, like two entirely different men were making love to her.

  He wasn’t moving. She was wet now and wanted him to move. Now.

  Hope shifted her head and bit him on the jaw.

  “Luke. Rangers lead the way.”

  “Oh yeah.” He kissed her deeply then and moved.

  Lorne Resnick pulled into what once had been a driveway, though now it was barely visible through the weeds. He drove under a big faded sign, HAPPY TRAILS TRAILER PARK, onto a rutted path and killed the engine when the path basically dried up.

  So, this is where Court Redfield had sent him. He scouted the terrain before opening the door. He was good with situational awareness. He was good with all of it, though the Army hadn’t appreciated his gifts at all. He waited for that little spurt of bile, for the sudden flush of anger, but it only lasted a second. Because, lucky him. Since the military had treated him like shit he’d ended up in a covert position in the CIA’s secret army, when special activities at the CIA was being run by Court Redfield. Court took them private, outside the power structure of the government. A tight little unit answerable to no one except Redfield himself. Almost ten times the pay and the only rule was get the job done.

  Resnick was good at getting the job done once you untied his hands.

  So he became the general of Court Redfield’s own private army and then damned if Redfield didn’t declare his candidacy for the Big One. He’d win, too. Redfield knew a lot of secrets and he didn’t play nice. Resnick was going to be the right-hand man of the goddamned President of the United States.

  Maybe even his surrogate son, since Redfield’s own son seemed to be a fuckhead who didn’t want anything to do with his old man.

  Resnick understood that, down to the bone, only his old man had been nothing like Court Redfield. His old man had been a nasty drunk who couldn’t hold down a job and made the people around him pay for his failings. Why Bard Redfield hated his father so much was a mystery, but it did create a sort of a job opening.

  Resnick was exactly the kind of guy a father would be proud of. At least a father who wasn’t like his own asshole father.

  Resnick was going to do Redfield’s bidding and make himself indispensable and move up in the world. Right up to the right-hand side of the most powerful man in the world.

  He sat for a moment in the California sunshine, hands dangling over the steering wheel, and let the images run through his head. Money and power, his for the asking. Women too. Women followed money and power like pigs to the trough. They were programmed for it. Resnick was on a trajectory that led right to the top.

  Since he’d joined Redfield’s private army his domestic bank account had swelled, but it was a shadow of what he had stashed abroad. He owned his own condo in DC but he also owned a working ranch in Argentina, a beachfront property in Aruba and a hotel in Tirana. All in the name of a holding company no one could trace back to him. Redfield himself had showed him how.

  There was more, much more, ahead of him. He just had to not fuck up. He’d fucked up — once! — in the military and had barely avoided a court martial but it had been the best thing to happen to him. Court Redfield had recognized talent and had scooped him up.

  And Court Redfield would soon be the most powerful man in the world, so that worked out just fine.

  Resnick shook himself. He was here for a purpose, not to daydream about marvelous futures. Though it was hard not to, hard not to look around this hardscrabble trailer park and reflect on how far he’d come. Because this was exactly the kind of place he’d come from. Where dreams had been ground into the dust so long ago they were barely memories.

  He got out of the SUV and stuck his Colt 1911 in his waistband, smoothing his jacket over it. He wore extra-thin leather shooting gloves. The Colt was scrubbed of all identifying marks and he’d loaded it using latex gloves. If anything happened, nothing could connect him to the gun and the gun itself would disappear in pieces thrown out the window over a radius of miles.

  There were plenty more guns where that came from. His boss could choose from a whole arsenal of untraceables.

  There was plenty of everything, actually. Weapons, IDs, hardware, money, transport. He had access to it all, and it was all the best. The only thing Resnick had to do was not fuck up.

  Be a weapon. Point and shoot.

  Resnick did a careful scan, 360°. There were no security cameras and hadn’t been since he turned off onto the country road. There had been three on the road from the city but none here.

  No cameras and no people.

  The place looked deserted, but it wasn’t. There were ancient rusted cars up on blocks but there were also a few working vehicles in sight. They were old and battered, but in use.

  All the trailer homes were locked up tight but there were signs of life. A trash-can barbecue with an irregular pile of chopped wood to one side. Dingy stained sheets flapping in the wind, hung from a line of plastic cord running from a trailer to a nearby tree. A supermarket pot of daisies on a rickety porch. There could well be people inside but they were probably sleeping off a bender or high.

  Resnick knew these people. They were his people. He knew what the trailer homes were like inside. He knew what they smelled like. He knew that many trailers would have a plastic tarp taped over the window frames instead of glass. He knew the residents all had substance abuse problems, impulse control problems, mental problems. Problems with the law and with what was in their heads. They’d been his people once, but not any more. He’d grown up in a trailer park marginally better than this one, but just as hopeless and ugly. Ten years ago, walking around this place would have given him the creeps, as if he’d been pulled back into the hell he’d
grown up in. Now, he felt nothing. This place had no power over him. He was someone else, someone with no connections to this kind of place, where hope died an ugly death.

  He was a warrior. A top-level security contractor who would soon be the right-hand man of the president of the United States. Nothing at all to do with the hungry, thin boy, son of Jimbo Resnick, alcoholic mechanic who couldn’t keep a job and who was a sadist. Whose son was terrified of him. That boy was gone.

  He straightened his shoulders and started walking the trailer park in a grid. North to south. East to west. Nobody came out of the trailer homes to challenge him. He didn’t even hear human voices, just a dog barking in the distance.

  When he finished, he stopped in the middle of the intersection of a couple of dusty paths. One led to what maybe had been a small canteen or grocery shop. One led to what had once been a swimming pool but was now cracked cement with putrid green scum on the bottom.

  This was his one lead and it went nowhere. Resnick didn’t know where to go after this, so he needed to squeeze this intel until something popped out. He was not going to disappoint Senator Redfield.

  He took another 360° scan of the area. Deserted and silent and run down. What would anyone do with this place? It was dead. Well, maybe not quite dead. There were a few signs of life and if people lived here, then there had to be a manager, of sorts. Someone to pay the monthly rent to, someone to intervene if there were fights.

  Where he’d grown up, the manager had been a big bruiser, more like a bouncer than a manager. If the water wasn’t running, he wasn’t your guy. If you didn’t pay, though, he got right in your face. This place had to have a guy like that. Even legally, someone had to be in charge.

  He set out to find that guy and finally, down a path that could barely be seen, he came across a cabin that was badly maintained and needed a coat of paint. It was isolated, fairly far from most of the trailers. You’d have to want to come here, you wouldn’t stumble across it. There was nothing around it anyone would want to see.

  Which was fine, in Resnick’s book.

  A board was nailed to the wooden siding. There was writing on it, in faded paint. Manager, Happy Trails Trailer Park. If it was Resnick’s call, he wouldn’t advertise that he was the manager of this shithole. It wasn’t anything to be proud of.

  He walked slowly up to the porch, hands out and loose. Nobody could see the 1911 in his waistband, or the ankle holster, or the Todd knife in its Kydex sheath clipped to the inside of his front right pocket, which he kept sharp as a scalpel.

  The door opened with a creak. A man stood just inside the doorway, his face in shadow. It was hard to make out his features and Resnick was sure that was deliberate.

  They stood staring at each other. Resnick took his measure. Tall, old, very skinny. He looked malnourished, like someone who didn’t take care of himself. Resnick needed intel this guy probably had. He could beat it out of him, trick it out of him or buy it from him.

  “Whaddya want?” The man asked. Not even a stab at Can I help you? “We’re full up.”

  Sure, Resnick thought. Bustling little business you’ve got here. Don’t know how you can manage it all.

  “Don’t need a slot,” he said. Slowly, keeping both hands in view, he pulled a photo out of his shirt pocket. The reason he was here. The first time he’d seen the photo, it hadn’t clicked. It was just one woman, like a million others. Maybe prettier than most but the world was full of pretty women. What did the Senator want with her? Maybe she’d seen something or maybe she’d heard something? Maybe they’d fucked and she wanted money. For whatever reason, the Senator wanted her dead, so Resnick was going to kill her.

  But then he’d looked again and realized exactly what was going on.

  She looked exactly like the Senator’s son, Bard. Who’d clearly had an accident with a condom twenty-five or thirty years ago.

  Resnick held the photo out in the palm of his hand. His left hand. His right was down by his side, fist open. Ready to reach for his weapon at any moment. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Yet.

  The old man frowned. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing to Resnick’s hand. Resnick walked forward a few steps and held his palm up shoulder high. The photograph was clear at that distance.

  The old man was shaking his head but Resnick had seen the slight step back, the widening of rheumy blue eyes. The wrinkles around his mouth had tightened.

  “You ever see this woman around here?” he asked.

  “Nope. Never seen her before in my life.” The old man was already backing away, about ready to slam the door in Resnick’s face. Not that that would stop him. The old door was essentially cracked plywood. A strong wind could bring it down.

  The old man was shuffling as he moved back into the cabin, trying to shut the cabin door, but Resnick was fast and he was strong. The old man didn’t — couldn’t — put up anything Resnick recognized as resistance. In a moment, the old man was sitting in a kitchen chair, tied down with duct tape that had been on a kitchen counter. If it hadn’t been there, Resnick would have used the filthy kitchen towels draped over the sink, or an electrical cord ripped off a lamp. Anything would have done. Resnick had been trained and trained well and knew how to improvise. This was nothing. The old man was weak and terrified. Resnick could have kept him in the chair through intimidation alone.

  But that would have taken longer and Resnick didn’t want to waste any more time here than he had to. The place depressed the hell out of him.

  The old man was panting. He’d put up a little resistance and it had tired him out. His face was covered in sweat and his chest was heaving. Shit, he had to get intel before the old man’s heart blew.

  Man, Resnick was going to eat a bullet before he got like that.

  Casually, he placed the muzzle of his 1911 right on the old guy’s knee and watched as his face froze. Yep, he had the geezer’s attention. He knew what a bullet to the knee meant.

  Resnick pressed down on the gun to give his words a little added meaning.

  “Okay, this is what I want. The woman in that picture is Hope Ellis. She was here. I could see you recognized her. I want to know exactly when she was here and what she said and you’d better give it to me straight because otherwise …” He smiled down into those weeping eyes, listening to the man’s terrified wheezing. “You know the rest. Now talk.”

  A quarter of an hour later, he walked back out the door.

  So — Hope Ellis had been here yesterday. The old man chased her off quickly. She’d been accompanied by a man the geezer described as ‘tall and strong’. Which could mean anything. A boyfriend? But the background info the Senator had provided on Hope Ellis didn’t include a boyfriend, tall and strong or otherwise. So that was an unknown quantity. The boyfriend wasn’t armed or surely he would have pulled it.

  The thing was, the geezer recognized her. He didn’t know her as Hope Ellis but as Cathy Benson, a little girl who’d lived with her single mother here in the trailer park maybe twenty-five years ago but had died, together with her mother, in a car accident. The geezer wasn’t absolutely sure when. Wasn’t sure about anything but the fact that she’d died. Still, the little girl had been very pretty and had had dark hair, green eyes and a narrow face just like Hope Ellis. And the photograph was of the woman he’d seen yesterday. He was sure of that.

  The geezer had been crying by the time he told it all to Resnick, who’d interrogated hundreds of prisoners. Terror and weeping did not make a man a good source of intel. Sometimes they lied, just to give something up.

  If so, tough luck.

  When Resnick was absolutely certain the man had given him everything he knew, he pulled the Todd knife and carefully slid it right in between the third and fourth rib, straight into the heart, and watched as the geezer died. It was a quick death, for which the old man should have been grateful. Quick and clean. No bleeding, all the blood stayed inside the chest cavity.

  On entering the cabin, Resnick had noticed a nice coll
ection of cheap rotgut whiskey bottles that were mostly empty. One was still three-quarters full, and doubtless would have been just another empty by nightfall. Resnick carefully carried the body to the messy, smelly cot and laid the man down. He poured the contents of the bottle on some dirty blankets he placed over the dead body and lit them up.

  He stayed long enough to make sure the fire caught and would burn the hut down completely.

  When the fire brigade came, they’d find what was probably a common scene in these difficult times. An old man, living in poverty, who drank too much, setting himself on fire with the cheap cigar Resnick had found and placed on the bed, leaving the box of matches on the floor next to the bed.

  The police would come and stay maybe half an hour. Maybe.

  Sacramento, like most cities these days, was strapped for cash. Police departments were understaffed and underpaid. They’d take in what had happened in a glance — sad old man getting drunk and smoking in bed. Nothing to see here, folks. Move on.

  Autopsies cost around five grand and Medicare didn’t cover it. Resnick was betting the old man had no family to demand and pay for an autopsy. The authorities would find a charred cadaver no one cared about and no one was going to probe around the burned skin for puncture wounds. Burned corpses were disgusting. Resnick had seen a lot of them while operational. They were grotesque and stank. Only the most hardened coroner would want anything to do with a burned body.

  Resnick had extracted what he could from the geezer and was good to go.

  He’d already muddied his license plates, front and back. He was riding a Suburban, black, like a billion other Suburbans out there. True, a Suburban in a place like this was unusual, but he had an app for that, literally. He pulled up a surveyor’s map of the area and sent up a mini drone, overlapping the drone’s footage with the map on his tablet.