by Matt Lincoln
“All too true,” Xavier commented with a heavy sigh. “Well, onto other concerns. Header, I input the data locations into Wraith so that we can get a better idea of where to start looking. It’s going to be a wide search pattern, but it’s the best I could do with the information we got from Speirs.”
“Everything’s got to start somewhere, right?” I grinned over at Rosa. “Still no luck with the water situation at your place?” Not that I expected anything drastic to have changed overnight. I just wanted to talk about something else until we got closer to the supposed location.
There is a complex meeting tonight to address matters, but I don’t think I’ll go, she replied. I doubt many would be able to translate all the things I want to say, and besides, I already know that they are trying to fix it. It’s just going to take an excruciatingly long time, apparently. She sounded a little defeated by this, and I felt bad for her circumstances.
“Well, not to add insult to injury about personal matters and problems, but I can’t find a single, decent office employee for the marina. I have interviewed close to twenty people, and none of them are willing or able to commit to the skills and tasks I outlined.” It really was infuriating. I owned a marina that couldn’t board anyone because I didn’t have an employee to work in the front office.
“What are the job requirements?” Xavier asked. “Maybe you have some odd phrasing or misleading items that aren’t bringing you the kind of people that you need. I can look over it if you want.” His offer was genuine, and I couldn’t be happier to let him have a go at it.
“Yeah, thanks,” I replied gratefully. “There’s a copy of the ad in the local paper. You can find it online at their site easier, though. And I put it up on the job-desk websites, as you mentioned. But everyone that responds is making demands for changes.” I had already altered the ad a few times. “I tried to be as flexible as I could. But I have to have someone here if I want to make any kind of money off of this place.”
I could hear Xavier typing away and mumbling to himself now and again. “The pay is certainly a draw. I can see why some people wouldn’t like the days off.”
“I did some research of my own, thank you very much,” I interjected, “and I need someone in the office over the weekends. That’s a hard fact. Tuesdays and Wednesdays seem to be the least busy days, and so Lael and I figured that we could handle those days ourselves. That’s not too much to ask.” At least, I didn’t think it was.
“No, no, that makes a lot of sense,” Xavier agreed. “You know, maybe you should drop the accounting part and just find a temp to come in and do that once a month or something. That could be throwing a lot of people off if they’ve never had the experience.” Xavier sounded like a real pro back there. I admired that.
“Okay, Xavier,” I conceded. “I’m handing this off to you. You know what I’m offering as pay and the weekly schedule. Can you please make the necessary adjustments to find me someone to come in and run the office?” I jokingly sounded a little more desperate than I needed to in order to get him on board.
“I’ll get started on it right away.” His tone of voice lifted, and it seemed I had delighted him with that request.
Rosa had been listening to all of this quietly and with her usual bemused look on her face. I glanced over and caught it, wondering what had her in such a good mood with everything else going on around her.
“What’s up? You have a secret making you smile like that?” I teased.
Of course, I do. But that’s not why I’m smiling, she stated coyly. It’s been too long since we’ve all been together like this. No super threats hanging over us, no one trying to blow us up, expose us, kill us, you know, the regular day-to-day stuff. Her grin widened. This is what our day-to-day should be: hunting down treasure of some sort, investigating small, non-earth-shattering threats, and cruising on the open seas. I’ve missed that.
I returned her grin. “Yeah, I know what you mean. Things have been a little intense lately. But so far, it looks like Judge Fu and her corrupt DEA Task Force have gone underground for the time being. The Yabut haven’t been skulking around Miami that I’d heard of or noticed. Maybe they’ve high-tailed it back to Colombia and decided to stay there.” It was wishful thinking, I knew it, but a man could dream.
“Wasn’t Kippy Ozoa going to Colombia to take them head-on?” Xavier asked, taking a break from his typing. “Maybe she was able to do something from over there to disrupt them. Hey, maybe she annoyed them to death, and they gave up?”
I never knew Xavier to have such a wicked mean streak of humor. It made me chuckle at the thought. “You know, there’s as much of a chance of that happening as anything else.” I contemplated that for a minute. “Do you think that maybe we should contact George and ask him about that? It’s been quite a while since anyone heard from her, and I’m not complaining, but we all know that the Yabut are a serious threat as a whole.”
George Yout was a mutual friend of the team and an elite medical doctor here in Miami, specializing in the rich and famous. He also happened to be the ex-husband of one of our less-than-favorite acquaintances, Kippy Ozoa. She was a well-connected mercenary based out of Cape Verde. We’d become aware of each other over a case involving a certain Federal Judge, Miranda Fu, when her son, Arik, was seemingly kidnapped by a drug cartel called the Yabut out of Colombia.
It turned out, though, that Judge Fu was leading a DEA Task Force to curb the sale and distribution of designer drugs. They’d started here in Miami and were using the Yabut to flush out the real dealers and makers, but that quickly turned into something else entirely. It all became a multi-layered double-cross operation where Arik was used as a pawn, and his life was little more than an afterthought for his mother.
That’s how the team knew about Kippy and her mission in Colombia. It was all tied together, and George was somehow all tied in, too. But it wasn’t all bad. I’d met his daughter, Verity, an art historian now living and working in Miami. We’d tried a bit of the relationship thing, but neither one of us was ready for a commitment to each other like that. We’d mutually decided to stop seeing one another, and for the time being, I was single and not necessarily looking for anything new.
Are you actually worried about that creature, Header? Rosa asked. Or is this a sly way of running into Verity again? I wasn’t entirely sure that she was teasing. I needed to set her straight.
“No, Verity and I are done,” I insisted. “One hundred percent. Besides, I think she’s kind of got a thing for her boss, anyway. But that’s not the point. I did promise Ozoa that I’d keep an eye on George while she was out of the country, and since no one here has been shot, stabbed, or maimed lately, I haven’t had much need of contacting him. That’s all.” George wasn’t the kind of friend I’d go grab a beer with.
“I spoke to him two days ago.” Xavier just casually dropped this into the conversation like it was common knowledge to all of us that he and George were close. “He’s doing okay. He is thinking of expanding his practice and might be looking for someplace outside of the city. I told him that I’d get him some quotes if he was really interested in moving out of Miami, but I think he’s just bored.” He stopped talking long enough for us to ask why.
“Is he that shook up about the break-in he and Verity experienced a while back?” I inquired.
Xavier nodded his head. “I think so, reading in between the lines of our conversations. And well, Arik’s in college, living at the dorms, and Verity found a place closer to her workplace, so George is back home alone again. He told me that he’d gotten used to having guests and live-ins, so now, he’s getting kind of lonely. That’s all.”
I had no clue that was what was going on. “Maybe we should…” I had no idea how to finish that sentence, let alone that thought, either. “Huh. Well, we could always offer to, um…” I was drawing a blank there, too.
Rosa kept her hands in her lap and completely out of the conversation.
Xavier must have felt the awkward ten
sion that his comments had caused because he started onto a whole different subject after that. “I heard from Mia the other day. She’s traveling with the mercenaries, which sounds exciting, but she says that it's not. She’s learning some new languages, picking up some advanced weapons training, that sort of thing. And most importantly, she’s happy doing it.”
Mia was another acquaintance we’d met due to Kippy and Judge Fu. This young woman, though, had just been a bystander in all the Yabut dealings. Mia had been a nurse and had gotten caught up in a romantic situation with Arik and kidnapped alongside him. We’d rescued her early on, but she’d had to face other more practical problems like the Judge somehow blocking her application for an American work visa.
Kippy, for her own mysterious reasons, took Mia into her mercenary group and was helping her build something of a new life. I wouldn’t have ever sanctioned that type of lifestyle for a person like Mia, but she didn’t have much to fall back on, other than her medical training. I guessed that all in all, she was trying to make the best out of a bad situation.
“You should invite her for a visit, Xavier,” I suggested. “She probably wouldn’t mind a break and some American pizza if I remember correctly.” I hoped he knew that I was serious. Xavier and Mia had sort of tried to start up something romantic, but it was a complicated business and too messy at the time. Now, though, with some time apart and heads thinking more clearly, it seemed to be better timing for them.
“We’ll see,” he answered vaguely. “Hey, we’re getting close. Slow Wraith down, and I’ll scan the base ground to see if this fits into what we’re looking for.”
The rest of the morning was pretty much quiet and peaceful, with no determined hits on the Hester’s location. But at least we could rule out a few miles of the ocean floor, and that was something. We all knew it was going to be slow going, and we’d prepared for that. It was a good thing we all liked each other’s company so much. Otherwise, the next few trips out might have been less than pleasant ones.
On the way back to the condo that evening, after a few errands and some shopping that I’d been putting off, I pulled into the underground parking garage. It wasn’t late by anyone’s standards, but it was that time of evening where not much was going on. I locked up my vehicle, stuck the keys in my nearest pocket, and started for the elevator with an arm full of shopping bags.
The place was quiet down here, almost eerily so, but I’d kind of gotten used to it by now. That was why when I thought I heard someone grunting or groaning behind a car, I paid attention. I stopped and listened for a second odd or misplaced sound, hoping to pinpoint if that was really what I’d heard. Then I saw a head pop up from behind a silver four-door truck. My eyes connected with a woman’s, and that was all the motivation that she needed to make a run for it.
I tried not to drop my bags too roughly, but I knew that I hadn’t gently let them fall, either. I raced to the other side of the truck and found an elderly woman on the cold floor, holding onto her bleeding head. Her purse’s contents lay scattered near her, with the wallet only feet away. I had a pretty clear idea that the younger woman had attacked and robbed the senior citizen and had run off into the garage.
I returned to the injured lady just in time for the security guy to come running.
“I saw it all happen on the camera,” the security guard asked with a shaky voice. “Do you know where that girl went?” He couldn’t have been more than a few years out of high school by the looks of him.
“You call this lady an ambulance and the police. I’ll go after the other one.” Yeah, technically, it was his job to do that, but he looked too scared to be able to confront a battery suspect right now. I hurried in the direction that I last saw the woman and caught a glimpse of someone ducking down and hiding from me only a few feet away.
I wanted to offer her an easy way out, so I called out to the seemingly empty garage. “I have already called the police. And no one likes to hear about an elderly person getting attacked. It’s not going to help anyone if you keep hiding. Just come back with me, and we’ll wait for the---” There was a noise off to my left, and I turned just in time to see the woman try to run past me.
She was a quick one. I’d give her that. But I stuck out my leg, slid across the pavement, hit the ground, and I still tripped her up. She screamed and fell to her knees, busting her shoulder against the bumper of a luxury sedan. Her cries continued as I made my way over to try to help her out.
“You freak! Are you trying to kill me? Help! Help, I’m being attacked!” She screeched at me. It looked to me that she might have dislocated her shoulder.
I pulled back from her and raised my hands to show that I wasn’t a threat. That’s how the police found us, with her screaming that I was trying to kill her and me standing a good six feet away with my hands clearly at my sides. When all was said and done, the security cameras in the garage proved that Mrs. Archuleta had been attacked near the silver truck and that the younger woman was the perpetrator.
The elderly lady’s credit card was found on the suspect, who was taken away on a bench warrant for other theft-related crimes. After a trip to an area hospital, that was. And I found my bagged items right where I’d left them, and only a little worse for wear. Not a bad situation or way to end a day, all in all.
5
Eve
When Xavier told me that Jake had bought a marina, I thought he must like boats a lot more than I remembered. Then when Xavier texted me the address and information, I thought it was a little out of the way from where he lived, but maybe he got a great deal on it, or there was something in the area that would be a great pull. But as I sat in the back of a cab heading to the location, I was… surprised. I was a little shocked that of all the places Jake could invest in a business, it was this far away from Miami and, well, pretty far away from a lot of stuff.
Still, Jake must have had his reasons, and I was ready to hear all about it. Maybe I should have called or texted first to let him know that I was coming to Miami, but there was that silly, romantic part of me that wanted to do the big bombshell arrival. Plus, Xavier gave me the go-ahead, not citing any difficulties, so I went with that.
The cab dropped me off at a nearly empty parking lot, but I immediately recognized Jake’s Mercedes that he was still driving from the last time I was here. This place wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Not that I had imagined anything awful, but considering the area, I was unsure what I’d be walking into. Seeing it now, I felt stupid for being so concerned.
There was a two-story brick building with a small sign above the door that read ‘Office.’ From here, I could see out into the beautiful, rolling water of the Atlantic. It didn’t look like Jake had many boats docked here, but maybe that was on purpose. One large yacht seemed to have the whole place to themselves.
I couldn’t help but notice a huge black and gray building sitting in the middle of one of the bays, and my first thought was that it was a kind of boat mechanic place or something like that. Not being overly familiar with how marinas worked or what they really did day-to-day, I figured that I’d get Jake to explain it to me later.
As I got closer to the office, I could see that no one was inside of the room. The stairs leading up to the second floor had a chain across them, and I did know enough to know that this was an unwelcome “stay out” sign. So much for going that route.
Well, I was here, so I was going to make the best of it. I started walking out toward the piers with the roped-in walkways, grateful that I’d come dressed comfortably. Sneakers, shorts, and an oversized graphic tee made me feel right at home here. Of course, I’d left all of my luggage back at the hotel and had brought seemingly half of my closet with me. I had no idea how long I was going to be in Miami, and I needed to arrive prepared.
I heard a large metal gate or door opening behind me, so I turned to see the side of the black and gray building being slid open. And there was Mr. Jake Header. My smile must have grown twice the size because I wa
s feeling so nervous at just seeing him again. I started walking back to where he was, wondering what I was going to say when I got there.
I’d be lying if I said that I hadn't rehearsed this a bit. It had been a few months since we’d seen one another, and emails, phone calls, and texts just didn’t have the same feeling once we reached a certain point. So yeah, I had maybe gotten a little speech or ice breaker line ready, but now, looking at him, I couldn’t remember a single word of it.
Jake just so happened to spin around, checking over his shoulder for something, when he saw me. It embarrassed me to admit it, but my heart kind of skipped a beat when I connected with those green eyes. He stopped what he was doing and gave me the biggest smile. Then he started walking toward me.
We met up halfway, and before I knew it, we were in each other’s arms, and I was kissing him. Once I realized what I had done, I pulled myself away and tried to apologize.
“Sorry, heat of the moment kind of thing there,” I mumbled.
“Don’t apologize to me. That’s the best hello I’ve gotten in a while.” Jake grinned at me, and I couldn’t help but return it full force. I was just so happy to see him again.
“You look good.” I was hoping that was a little more normal thing to do. And he did, dressed in a heather red tee-shirt and a pair of old jeans. “I guess that Miami’s been working out for you, huh?”
“It has, for the most part,” he answered coyly. I could tell that my sudden appearance was baffling to him, but I hoped in a good way. “So, what brings you here, Eve, and why didn’t you call? I could have planned a big airport reunion or something like that.” He was still cheerful, and I knew that he would never have done anything even remotely like that, but it was cute of him to say so.
“Well, I wanted to surprise you,” I admitted. “And I didn’t know how long some of my other stuff was going to take this morning, so my ETA was, let’s just say, fluid.” While I was ecstatic to see him, I wasn’t exactly here only to see Jake. I was actually in Miami on a job. “Um, because I’m sort of here on a work thing.”