Destination, Wedding!

by Xavier Mayne

  “You’re damn lucky I packed waterproof mascara, you brute,” Kerry teased, clutching a tissue in one hand while she embraced him with the other arm. “That was a master class, my good man. You won them all over within the first two minutes, and even that dick from Saint Whatever’s knew he was in the presence of a higher power. Dude.” She hugged him again.

  “Now, I made a promise to a certain Officer Gabriel Donnelly that I would get you to the airport in plenty of time to get on the plane to New York, so I must now march you right out the front door. Got your luggage?”

  Brandt reached behind the curtain that covered the wall behind the dais and pulled out his rolling duffel. “Good to go, chief,” he said smartly.

  “So, I’m also flying out today,” Kerry said. “Can I hitch a ride to the airport with y’all?”

  “You’re welcome, of course, but it’s just Ethan flying out this morning,” Greg said. “I need to work the rest of the meeting to make sure I ruthlessly exploit every tear shed in this room for the good of mankind.”

  “You go,” Kerry replied. “He set ’em up, now you knock ’em down, buddy.” She socked Greg on the arm, then turned to Brandt. “Ready to go?”

  “Don’t you need your luggage?” Brandt asked.

  “I have everything I need right here,” she said, pulling a small rolling bag from behind her chair. “I can pack for a five-day trip in this bag, including cocktail wear and something casually elegant in which to rock a walk of shame like a boss. I tell you, what the modern woman must do to keep all of this up.” She held her arms glamorously wide, as if she were a spokesmodel gesturing next to a very expensive car.

  Brandt and Greg exchanged a look and a shrug.

  “Oh, right,” she said, dropping her arms. “Forgot that my siren song falls on deaf ears in this group. All right, then, let’s fly,” she said, then hugged Greg. “Love you, buddy. I’ll see you soon?”

  “You will,” Greg replied, holding the hug a long moment. “You take care, Ms. Mercer.”

  “I will. And for at least a little while, I’ll have this hunk of man to take care of me.”

  “You don’t strike me as a woman who needs taking care of,” Brandt said with a laugh. “In fact, I’m a little scared to be setting out without Greg to protect me.”

  “You two,” Greg said, laughing. “Get going. Have a great trip, and I’ll see you at the wedding.”

  “Which reminds me,” Brandt said as he tucked his notes into his rolling bag, “Gabriel mentioned last week that you still hadn’t told him whom you were bringing.”

  “That’s because I hadn’t decided until last night.”

  Brandt waited a moment. “And that decision is…?”

  “You’re looking at her,” Kerry said, once again holding her arms dramatically aloft. She looked at their faces, then dropped her arms and slumped. “I have to stop doing that.”

  “That’s awesome,” Brandt said, genuinely pleased. “I can’t wait to introduce you to Gabriel. And I trust you will save me a dance?”

  “Of course,” both Greg and Kerry answered, and all three cracked up laughing.

  A first-class lounge

  “YOU KNOW, the drinks are free,” the man said as he sat down next to Donnelly.

  “Oh, thanks,” Donnelly replied distractedly. This was his first time in the first-class lounge. And likely his last time, given the travel budget of police officers.

  “You look like you could use one.”

  Donnelly looked up, surprised. “Is it that obvious?” he said with a chuckle.

  “Looks like you’ve got a lot on your mind, is all.”

  “I guess I do. And I guess I could use a drink.”

  “No, don’t get up. No sense shuffling all of those papers around.” The man stood again. “What can I get you?”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “Please. I’m already up. What’ll it be?”

  Donnelly smiled gratefully. “A gin and tonic wouldn’t go amiss right now, I guess. And thank you.”

  “No worries. I’ll be right back. You just try to keep all your papers in order until I return.” He smiled warmly, his voice light.

  The man was back shortly with a tall, elegant glass in which a lime wedge bobbed and glistened, surrounded by tiny bubbles. “I hope Tanqueray’s okay—I took a chance that you’re not a Sapphire man.”

  Donnelly took the glass from him. “Thank you so much. And I’m afraid my gin preferences are determined solely by what’s on sale.” He looked around the room. “Though that’s probably not something that gets said out loud much in a place like this.”

  The man laughed. “It can be a pretty stuffy place, all right,” he said, sitting in the chair perpendicular to Donnelly’s, setting his own drink on the low square table in the corner their chairs made. He tucked his messenger bag between himself and the arm of the chair, the strap remaining around his shoulder. “That’s why I often try to find someone who looks like he’s here for the first time. Much better conversation that way.” He extended his hand. “Name’s Sandler.”

  Donnelly grasped the other man’s hand. “Gabriel. Pleased to meet you, Sandler.”

  “Likewise.” Sandler took a sip of his drink. “Traveling for business?”

  “Pleasure, actually,” Donnelly replied. Then he looked at the piles of paper in his lap, and on the seat next to him. “Though it probably looks like I’m planning something on the order of the invasion of Normandy, it’s actually just a wedding.”

  Sandler’s eyebrow lifted. “Yours?”

  Donnelly nodded. “It’s in two weeks. It was supposed to be a small event at a local church with a few friends and family, but suddenly it’s turned into this huge, out-of-control Frankenstein’s monster of a thing.” He took a big drink of the gin and tonic. “As an example of how insane it all is, I’m about to fly to New York to get on a ship. A ship. Who does that anymore? But apparently that’s how one arrives at a wedding in a castle.”

  “Wow.” Sandler looked around the room. “Is your fiancée already there, waiting for you?”

  Donnelly rolled his eyes. “Not exactly. He’s at a conference in San Diego, and got stuck there for an extra day. So instead of coming home yesterday and making the trip with me, he’s going to fly there directly and meet me this evening, assuming everything goes perfectly to plan.” He sighed. “I’m sure it will be a lovely voyage straight out of a 1940s movie, but getting there with my faculties intact is the challenge.”

  “Well, congratulations,” Sandler said, holding his glass to Donnelly. “I wish you every happiness.”

  “Thank you, kind sir.” They drank, and then Donnelly looked up from his stacks of paper. “What brings you here?”

  Sandler’s small smile seemed well practiced. “I kind of live here,” he said. “I travel a lot for work.”

  “Ah, I see. I don’t know how you do it. I hardly ever travel, and I think you can see already it stresses me out a little. Especially when I’m on my own. If Ethan were here, he’d be pacing and fidgeting and getting me another drink every five minutes.” Donnelly shook his head. “It’s funny, but his mania kind of relaxes me. If I know he’s worrying over everything, then my job is to keep him calm, and that kind of keeps me calm too.”

  “You guys been together a long time?”

  “It’s been about four years. But for the first two of those, we were just partners on the job. Still, I count them because we were basically together 24-7.”

  “Let me guess,” Sandler said, rubbing his chin and looking at Donnelly through narrowed eyes. “Police?”

  Donnelly nodded. “Very good.”

  “Must be a pretty progressive police department if they hire enough gay officers to provide a decent dating pool,” Sandler said with a laugh.

  “The department’s been great, but we were pretty much the first to be out. Then again, I’m not actually sure how progressive they were when we joined up. We were straight when they hired us.”

  “Ah
,” Sandler replied thoughtfully, then sipped his drink. He stopped before swallowing, looked at Donnelly with a tipped head, then swallowed awkwardly. “I’m sorry… what?”

  “We were both straight at the time.”

  Sandler smiled, but his brow was furrowed. “So I did hear you correctly. I just have never heard anyone say that, I guess….” He stumbled to a stop and shrugged in confusion.

  Donnelly grinned. “Yeah, I get that a lot. I should probably come up with some other way to say it, or maybe not say it at all.”

  Sandler laughed. “No, please don’t try to be boring. Anyone can be boring. Especially in a place like this.” He looked around at the relentlessly sedate furnishings, the soft lighting, the hushed conversation going on in scattered groupings of suited-and-tied businessfolk. “But you are obligated now to tell me how it happened.”

  “Nothing really earth-shattering,” Donnelly replied. “We worked together for a couple of years and got to be best friends. Then we had a kind of stressful undercover assignment, and we were forced to face just how close we’d become. Ultimately the thought of losing him scared me more than the thought of not being straight anymore.”

  “That’s actually really beautiful,” Sandler said, his grin turning a little melancholy, just for a moment, before it reset into a more blandly positive configuration. “Good for you. So, tell me about the wedding.”

  Donnelly sighed. “Which one?” He chuckled and shook his head. “We’d been planning for more than a year, and then last month the whole thing got ripped out from under us, so now we’re working on ‘Wedding 2.0: The Destination.’”

  “How does that happen? What could possibly rip your wedding out from under you?”

  “That’s kind of a complicated story. Short version is that by doing our jobs, we managed to piss off someone very powerful, who decided to take a bit of revenge by getting our reception venue to cancel our reservation. The one we’d made a year in advance.”

  “Good for you,” Sandler replied.

  “Hmm?” Donnelly inquired through his sip of gin and tonic.

  “If you pissed off someone who’s that much of an asshole, then you clearly did the right thing. So good for you.”

  “Thanks, I guess. Hadn’t really thought of it that way before. But, it turns out to be no easier to plan a wedding from the moral high ground.”

  “But you’re taking a cruise across the Atlantic and getting married in a castle. In terms of romantic nuptials, that pretty much takes the cake.”

  Donnelly smiled wryly. “I guess we lucked out there. James, the person who got us involved in the case in the first place, felt bad about how our wedding got ruined, so he set this all up for us—cruise, castle on the coast of Devon, the works. I didn’t think it would have been possible to do on such short notice, but that’s the thing about money. If you are willing to throw sacks of cash at a problem, the problem usually goes away. Or becomes someone else’s problem.”

  “Well, I think it sounds lovely. I’m heading for London today, and I’m sure you’re going to enjoy the trip much more than I will. Your troubles are no doubt behind you, and it’s all going to go flawlessly from this moment on.”

  It was at that moment that the public-address system interrupted the luxurious quiet of the first-class lounge.

  “May I have your attention, please” came the dulcet tones of the concierge’s deep British/Indian voice. “We regret to inform you that due to volcanic activity in Iceland, all aircraft are being held on the ground at this time. We expect that flights will resume within a matter of hours, except for those bound for airports in the Northeastern United States, including the New York and Boston metropolitan areas. We apologize for the delay, and if there’s anything we can do to accommodate you in the meantime, I hope you will let us know.” The microphone clicked off, and about half of the people in the room rose and walked toward the desk.

  “Oh, that’s not good,” Sandler said.

  “If the problem is over Iceland, why can’t we get to New York?”

  “Because most flights over the Atlantic begin or end there. They’ll have flights incoming, but no flights able to depart for Europe, which means there’ll be a whole lot of planes on the ground, and then the overflow will be diverted to Boston and the other airports in the region. They’ll be hard-pressed to handle all of that congestion even without domestic flights coming in and out. Same thing happened last time Iceland erupted. It took days before the first flight could go, and weeks before schedules returned to normal. Flying around ash clouds takes a lot of extra fuel, so the airlines tend to cancel rather than reroute.”

  Donnelly sat back, aghast. “So there’s no chance I’m getting to New York today?”

  Sandler took in a tactful breath, clearly aware he was delivering bad news. “I’m afraid not, Gabriel. If you skip the cruise, you could try to get a flight through Atlanta or Miami, fly across to Rome or Madrid, and then connect to London by rail. It would be a long couple of days.” He glanced up at the concierge desk, now swamped with travelers. “Though you’d have a lot of company.”

  “But the ship is in New York. Ethan’s going to New York.”

  “Not today he’s not.” Sandler stood. “Let me get you another drink. And then we’ll get this figured out. Don’t worry,” he said with a bracing smile. “We’ll get you to the church on time.”

  Not quite the airport

  BRANDT LEANED forward, certain he had misheard the driver. “What was that about the flights?” he asked. The limo had been snaking its way slowly through traffic approaching the airport but hadn’t moved at all in the last twenty minutes.

  “They say that all flights to the East Coast are being held on the ground because of a volcano blowing up in Greenland or something,” the driver said, turning back to make himself heard. “That’s why there’s all this backup. Apparently they’re holding everyone here until they figure out which planes can go where. They expect to start moving planes within an hour or so. Unless you’re going to New York. You’re not going to New York, are you, sir?”

  “As a matter of fact, I am,” Brandt said miserably.

  “Well, at least you don’t have to worry about missing your flight because of this traffic,” the driver said with mock cheer. “Because that plane’s not going anywhere.”

  “Yeah, that’s awesome.” Brandt sat back in the luxurious leather seat, from which he took no comfort. He turned to Kerry, who was madly typing away on her phone. “What am I going to do?”

  She looked up, her eyes kind but her expression not hopeful. “My travel agent says it’s going to take all day to sort out the rest of the country, and not to even hope to get to New York until tomorrow evening. And you can forget about getting across to England; the volcano is apparently just clearing its throat. They expect a much larger eruption within the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.”

  “Oh.” Brandt’s voice was small, and even to his own ear sounded defeated.

  “Oh!” Kerry jumped and pointed at her phone excitedly. “My guy has a plan.”

  “Your travel agent has a way to get me to New York?”

  “Ah, no. That one would take an act of God, apparently. But here’s what he can do. He can get you on a flight from Tijuana to Mexico City, and then he thinks you could get a plane from there to Madrid. Then you’d have to find a way to get from Madrid to London, probably by train since the flights in and out of London are just as screwed as those in New York.” She looked up from her phone. “You won’t make it for the cruise, but you’ll at least get to your wedding.”

  “But we’re not in Tijuana. We’re in San Diego.”

  Kerry leaned forward to confer with the driver. “What would it take to convince you to take us to Tijuana? I would of course cover your expenses.”

  The driver smiled. “It would be my pleasure, señorita,” he replied with a grin. “Beats sitting in this traffic for another few hours.” He immediately swerved onto the shoulder and began to make his way
off the gridlocked boulevard.

  “But you need to get to the airport,” Brandt cried. “You can’t just go gallivanting off to Mexico on the spur of the moment.”

  “Listen to you, grandpa. Gallivanting. You need to live a little, my good man, and take life as it comes. All I was going to do when I got back to New York was wash my hair, order Chinese, and binge watch Orange is the New Black. Again. Does that sound healthy to you? A little run south of the border is exactly what the doctor ordered. And once we get to Mexico City, maybe I’ll just hop a plane to a beach somewhere.”

  Brandt laughed and shook his head at this free spirit Greg had unwittingly hooked him up with. “You are a piece of work,” he said when he caught his breath.

  “Nine out of ten people who’ve met me would agree,” she said, joining in his laughter.

  Soon they were rocketing south, heading for the border crossing. They busied themselves digging their passports out of their luggage and preparing for the crossing.

  “I have to let Gabriel know about this,” Brandt said, pulling his phone from his pocket. “He’s going to—” He stared at his phone. “Oh, shit.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “This isn’t my phone.”

  “But you just pulled it out of your pocket.”

  “I know. It looks like my phone, but it isn’t mine. Look.” He held the phone up for her to see that the lock screen displayed a picture of a somewhat grand building, clearly a hospital, that dated from early in the last century. He dropped it to his lap and stared down at it miserably. “We must have gotten them mixed up when we were taking pictures.”

  “Well, I’m sure you’ll be able to get yours back,” she said bracingly. “Though that doesn’t really help you now, does it? Here let me—”

  “Border ahead,” the driver called. “The guards are coming over.”

  They pulled their ID and passports together, and aside from the extra twenty minutes of conversation that Brandt’s badge and gun occasioned (the guards had never seen a biometric case—it only opened in response to Brandt’s thumbprint), the crossing was simply a matter of filling out the right paperwork for the charter of the limousine and paying a customs fee that Brandt suspected was somewhat inflated. But they were soon on their way.