His to Cherish

by Christa Wick

  "Mia, honey, you have to open your eyes before you fire."

  Blushing, I looked at the two men. Carl couldn't contain his amusement. His mouth was closed but his whole body shook with the laughter he tried to hold inside. Gillie just stared at me, his gaze patient and caring.

  Blocking Gillie's use of "honey" from my head so I could concentrate, I pulled the trigger while Carl still jiggled with mirth. The effect was like a chainsaw reaching that magic spot at which the weight of the tree takes over and snaps the trunk, dropping the tree in less than a second. Carl fell like that, his whole body rigid, toes up, rolling back on his heels. Gillie caught him by the shoulders, his own body giving a little twitch as he quickly lowered Carl to the ground.

  With the electricity fully discharged, it took maybe five seconds before Carl moved again. Gillie pointed at him the instant he did then hooked my gaze.

  "He'll be groggy and slow for another ten seconds or so, but those seconds he's out is how long you have to reload -- then you haul ass."

  I nodded and helped Gille get Carl to his feet. We made sure he was steady then waved at him as he walked to his house. He smiled, returning the wave before the screen closed on him.

  "Any time ya'll!"

  Alone, I returned to glaring at Gillie. "You don't play fair -- using his ability to feed his kids against me like that."

  "You're right, I don't play fair." He blinked, a secret smile playing at the corner of his mouth. "Not when it's important to me."

  Shit -- it was going to be another one of those rollercoaster days. I had been afraid for my life with Evan's arrival that morning, then afraid for my heart when Collin appeared, rescued me and offered me home office and, potentially, more if I left Keeling and rejoined the company. Now the vibe rolling off Gillie was far heavier than a protective new/old friend.

  "Really, I was thinking about helping him as much as you." Stepping right up next to me, he plucked at my shirt sleeve as his gaze slowly moved up my face to meet mine. "He's been out of work six months and it doesn't hurt his pride to get tased for money. He'd rather take that than a hundred in charity."

  "Fine," I relented. I couldn't be even half mad or fake made when his voice sounded so reasonable and his gaze appeared so earnest. I made sure the safety was engaged then jiggled the taser at him. "Do you think I'll have to use this?"

  "I hope not because the chance you'll have your eyes closed again is no better than 50-50."

  "I'm serious." I gave his shoulder a soft slug. "You said people might be cooking meth on the farm. Where is the sheriff's department at on busting Evan for it?"

  "A lot closer today than yesterday."

  I pulled back, my face contorting like I'd just put something in my mouth and couldn't decide if it was sweet or sour. "One day made a difference?"

  He swiped at his jaw, mouth contorting like he'd bit into the same piece of something. "Stark made a call to someone at the DEA and thirty minutes later we had database access we've been requesting for two years. He also looked at our--"

  I held my hand up, my brain finally identifying the taste as sour. "I appreciate everything, John, I really do. But if you want to man crush on Collin Star--"

  His mouth came down on mine, silencing me. The shock of it parted my lips for a second, just long enough for his tongue to slide in. A little sizzle sparked along my spine, my nipples puckering before I felt the shape of his hand against my hip.

  Wrong shape, wrong hand, wrong lips. I didn't mold to him like I did to Collin.

  I pulled back, reminding myself I didn't want Collin anymore, but it also was too soon to let anyone kiss me, even someone as nice and good as John Gillie seemed to be.

  "I'm not crushing on him, Mia. Just saying the man gets things done." His lips brushed mine again. "And he's got damned good taste."

  Protecting Mia

  For two weeks I watched Mia settle into Keeling. She didn't see me, but I was always nearby when she wasn't at work or in the care of Deputy Gillie. I rented a hotel room I never slept in and bought a sleeping bag for the cold North Carolina ground outside her guesthouse.

  Those hours when others surrounded her, I watched Evan or resupplied. I put remote cameras outside every building on the farm and in the trees where the road cut through them. I went inside the main house searching for evidence of any kind. With no computer or land line, I couldn't bug his phone or install a Remote Administration Tool hack on his computer.

  While I watched Mia, Stark International carried on like it didn't bear my name. I half hoped for an outbreak of global aggression so Trent would need an hour of my time to reassure some general or head of state, giving me hundreds of man hours in return. But the world spun on its axis, unaccommodating in its mock semblance of peace.

  I visited the county narcotics unit each work day in the hours before I knew Evan would be hauling his lazy, hungover ass out of bed. With the new database access I had gotten the unit, Mike Franklin, its leader, even set up a small work station for me with a laptop and temporary access as a "consultant."

  Whether it's moving guns, drugs, or troops, intel tactics are much the same and Stark International had successfully executed its share of contracts to slow the flow of drugs into the U.S. from Latin America. I just needed to apply the same techniques to the backwater microcosm of Martin County.

  Looking at the data, I discovered a worrying statistic right away. If the National Clandestine Laboratory Register for the state was accurate, Martin County only had one lab registered and that was over six years ago. Such a datapoint in a Latin American zone would have had me eyeing local law enforcement with suspicion, especially when another DEA database that recorded pseudoephedrine purchases for North Carolina showed several dozen county residents running just below the monthly quotas when their household purchases were combined. Add in clusters of known associates and the number doubled.

  I scanned the list of names, getting no easy answer. I could have asked someone at the unit to look over the names, but my ass would have been on the street five minutes later because I only needed the answer to one question -- who in the unit or the sheriff's office or any of the city police departments was related to someone on the list?

  My fingers bounced in agitation over the keyboard. Going back to the list, I pulled mugshots from the database of everyone on it who had an arrest record. I sent a copy to my phone and another to Gillie and Franklin, the only two I could halfway trust to make honest connections. I compiled a second list, complete with photos, of every law enforcement officer in the county. I deleted that one from the computer as soon as I sent it to my phone.

  I worked the list for the next nine days as I alternated between watching over Mia and following Evan Morris. When he visited a neighborhood, I crossed-checked it against the addresses on both the pseudoephedrine buyers' list and the cops. On that ninth day, I got two hits -- one for each list. Two door down from the house Evan visited lived a Stephen Cahill, on the buyers' list along with his brother Paul and their live-in girlfriends. At the far end of the block lived officer Kyle Dooley.

  I added Phil Nash, the owner of the house Morris visited, to my list then parked a block over while I waited for Morris to leave the neighborhood. When he did, I took a little walk. Down to my last camera, I attached it to a tree on the public easement area across from Nash's front door.

  Dooley visited Nash that night, going in empty handed and coming out with a small brown paper bag folded into a rectangle. Paul Cahill came the next day. From the archives of the local county paper and high school year books, I pieced together how Dooley was related to Nash through his wife and how the Cahill brothers were Nash's cousins. Even more damning, that lone lab bust on record for the entire county had been initiated by Dooley two days after Stephen Cahill had been arrested for a barroom brawl with the man running the meth lab. The way I figured it, Nash was the linchpin -- the connector between Morris, the Cahill brothers and Dooley.

  Making sure there were no signs of a close rel
ationship between Gillie and Franklin and any of the men, I sat down with the two on day eleven and showed them what I had. Two days later, the police surveillance put on Paul Cahill paid off, only he and his brother were cooking somewhere other than on Evan Morris' land and they didn't spill a single name.

  I still hadn't nailed Morris, just given him more reason to direct his anger at Mia.

  His to Cherish

  Another shift at the hardware store finished, I pulled into the drive of the horse farm. Gillie had told me that yesterday's bust of two brothers cooking on a local timber farm was connected to Evan, but there wasn't any evidence to arrest him on and the brothers hadn't named any of their associates. It sounded like, outside of Evan, everyone was connected by blood and, if they gave up just Evan, they had to know he would give up the family members they didn't name.

  Of course, Evan didn't know the Cahill brothers were keeping their mouths shut. No one had seen him after news of their arrest broke.

  I scanned the main house as I drove by. All the drapes were pulled tight, as usual, and the rusted out truck he drove wasn't parked out back. I just hoped I wouldn't find it in front of the guesthouse. If I did, I would keep my promise to Gillie and drive straight to the sheriff's station.

  Dodging the deeper ruts on the dirt lane running past the stables, I almost missed seeing a narrowly opened side door on the smallest building. I would have missed it altogether except for a flash of brightly colored fabric on the ground. I could see in the rear view mirror that it was red and white, with vertical stripes about the width of those on a flag.

  Evan wasn't the kind to fly a flag, but he would be careless enough to drop one and leave it. I backed the car up, keeping the vehicle in the lane while I studied the door. From the viewing angle, I couldn't actually see that the door was open, but the padlock was off and the fabric seemed to disappear out of view into the building. I hadn't seen one of the buildings unsecured until then.

  I rolled my lips with indecision. There could be something inside the building that would put Evan in jail with his buddies. Even if there wasn't, I had a gut feeling the flag wasn't Evan's but my father's or grandfather's. A lot of items had been missing from the boxes Evan had dumped in the spare bedroom of the guesthouse. Military medals from Vietnam all the way back to a Badge of Military Merit from the American Revolution. I expected Evan had sold off most of the memorabilia, but some of the flags had been more common, their greatest value sentimental and not monetary.

  Engaging the parking break, I grabbed the taser from the passenger seat and left the car. Standing outside the door, I confirmed it was, indeed, a flag that had been discarded, most of the fabric on the other side of the door it wedged open. I didn't pick it up immediately, listening instead for any sound that someone was inside. Evan would have heard the vehicle, would have been able to tell that I had parked it. He could be inside waiting for me, but where was his truck?

  I waited, my gaze focused on the flag as my ears strained for any restless motion inside the stable. The material was aged and I could see shards of glass around it and one broken side of some kind of frame. My father had kept several flags in his office in those triangular, glass-front boxes. The flag on the ground seemed the right age for the one he had kept from his father's funeral.

  An internal heat singed my skin, an angry sweat popping out along my brow. Evan had sold my families memories, carelessly stored others and now this discarded flag, its display box broken around it!

  Satisfied the building was unoccupied, I carefully lifted the flag from the ground and shook the glass out. Pushing the door all the way open, I propped it with a nearby rock. Light from the open doorway and some loose slats along the walls feebly lit a small section of the stable's interior. I could just make out a few boxes on a folding table and, beyond that, what looked like emptied milk jugs and two-liter pop bottles that had been refilled with other fluids, funnels sticking out of their uncapped openings.

  The sweat dotting my forehead turned cold as my heart rate doubled. This was the evidence Gillie needed!

  I stepped further into the room, drawn by what I could see at the surface of the boxes -- the distinctively banded red, white and blue satin bar of a Silver Star medal, a gold key chain and the loop it fed into on the pocket watch buried below.

  Damn it -- the box would become evidence, stuck in a security locker for years. Even then, if it did belong to my family, I might not get it back. Everything in the main house had passed from my mother to Evan, didn't matter if the medal had been pinned to a James' chest.

  I stepped up to the box and removed the Silver Star medal, holding it in the weak beam of light that reached the table.

  For Gallantry in Action

  Jessup K. Towers

  My heart sank as quickly as it had jumped up -- the name was unfamiliar.

  "Junkies bring that shit in like it's worth even a free hit." Evan moved from the shadows along the wall to block the rays of light in the doorway. The outline of a revolver with its long barrel gestured at me. "Drop the taser, little girl."

  With Evan beyond the range of the taser and a thick wooden beam between us, I started to place the weapon on the table.

  He pointed the gun straight at my chest. "I said drop it!"

  I released it with a jerk, the hard plastic casing bouncing off my toe before it landed more gently on the ground at my feet.

  "Kick it over here."

  I gave it an intentionally half-hearted shove with my foot so that it came to a stop at an almost equal distance between me and Evan.

  "Always were a sly little bitch." He crossed half the distance to the taser then waved the barrel of the revolver at me again. "Step around to the other side of the table."

  Buying time, I obeyed. Coming closer, Evan reached up, his hand waving aimlessly around until he found a metal chain and jerked on it. A single unshaded bulb flickered to life, its weak light fighting that from the doorway for supremacy.

  The extra light gave me a better look at the bottles. Most had only a little liquid in them, but one of the pop bottles had a thick, dark purple liquid with the consistency of sand on top of an even thicker, yellowish goo. This close to the makeshift lab, I could smell the strong odor of ammonia.

  Looking down at my feet, I noticed busted up batteries and more chemicals under the table. Brake cleaner, anti-freeze, paint thinner. An icy sensation flared up my spine as I recognized the ingredients Gillie had told me to be on the watch for and report if I saw them on the property.

  Evan moved close enough that, if we each extended our arms, our fingertips would touch. "Hand me one of them funnels."

  Not seeing a good enough reason to piss him off by disobeying, I reached for the funnel. Right before my fingertips landed on it, I stopped.

  He had lured me in here with bait that looked like it could have belonged to my father. He had only a small number of the ingredients of a meth lab and the chemicals hadn't been in the building uncapped like they were that long or I would have smelled them. Now he wanted me to hand him something when his own hands were gloved in latex.

  I traced the edge of one funnel with my fingernail and shook my head, softly laughing at him despite the cold fist wrapped around my heart. "It won't work, you know."

  "Oh, it'll work all right." He stepped a little closer, his gun arm extended, the barrel centered on my nose. "They're gonna find you here and see you were trying to set me up -- and how you bribed that dumb shit John Gillie with kinky sex to frame the Cahill brothers."

  I raised both brows and closed my eyes in mock surprise at the level of his stupidity. "Just how long have you been dipping into the product to come up with a hare brained idea like that?"

  Pointing the gun in the air, he shot a round off then pointed the gun at my face. I couldn't help the jump the blast produced, but I managed not to shriek. Waiting for my throat to relax enough to talk, I glared at him.

  "Impressive, but your plan doesn't work if I have a bullet hole in me or my
prints aren't on anything in here."

  An ugly grin crawled like a spider along his face. "Prints are on the silver star."

  Keeping the gun trained on me, he began to slowly circle the table. His free hand dipped into his pocket and pulled out a wooden matchstick. Fresh sweat broke out across my body. The stable was big enough with lots of space between some of the boards that discharging the gun had only presented a small risk of one of the chemicals combusting. The matchstick, once struck, would all but guarantee an explosion.

  The cold metal of the gun touched my cheek. I looked at Evan, the phlegmy eyes almost feverish. The barrel moved lower to the neckline of my blouse to molest the top swell of my breasts.

  "Fucking your mama was like fucking a bag of sticks." He pushed the barrel between my breasts, forcing a rough line up and down against the fabric. "And only in her cunt. I bet you let that Stark fella take you anyway he wanted, which means he definitely took that plump little ass of yours, didn't he, little girl?"

  My breasts heaved, anger and fear thrusting them up then down. "Don't talk about my mother."

  "Oh, I'm talking about you, sweet Mia." The barrel's tip traveled over the curve of my stomach, down my lower stomach to rest against my clit. "See, once they find your body, they're going inside the guesthouse, gonna find those expensive leather slut panties and a few big toys I planted after I rubbed a few of your and Gillie's things over them -- toothbrushes, used underwear--"

  Knowing I was dead if I didn't get out of there immediately, I bolted for the door. Wood splintered along the wall in front of me before I could cross half the distance.

  "I will fucking drop you, stupid cunt!"

  Keeping the gun trained on me, he circled back around the table then eased toward the door. Extending one arm for the door's edge, Evan did a double take, his fired his gun at something outside less than a second later.

  I heard a wet thunk that sounded like the hard, sudden penetration of flesh followed by a masculine grunt of pain before a second gun discharged. Evan moved too quickly, the bullet intended for his head embedding itself in the door frame he had just occupied.