by Nikki Duncan
“How old were you? What made them do all that with you?”
“I was twelve and getting my butt kicked in school.” A blind kid on the playground at recess made a much easier target than a trained blind man walking around town. Bullies often outgrew their tendencies after life knocked them back a time or two, which it was well known for doing.
“So what happened when you went back to school? Did you kick anyone’s ass?”
“Not for a while.” The feel of fists slamming into his face, a throbbing nose pumping blood and shooting burning shards of agony through his brain, his lip busting against his teeth and swelling instantly, snapped into his mind as clearly as the times he’d been bullied. “Have you ever seen a Great Dane puppy? They’re all feet and skinny, gangly body.”
She laughed as she pulled the car to a stop. “You’re telling me that was you?”
“Oh yeah. When I wasn’t hiding from the bullies, I was tripping over my own feet and crashing into walls.”
“You were clumsy? I find that very hard to believe.”
“The only thing I was missing from being a full-on reincarnation of a nerd was the pocket protector and thick-rimmed glasses.” The pens wouldn’t have done him any more good than the glasses.
“Then may I say that you grew up nice.” She cleared her throat. Her heart kicked. “Very nice.”
“Thank you.” Her admission that she appreciated his body filled a need that his adolescent heart had never had fulfilled. Still, admiring his body didn’t mean that she accepted his scars. “Eventually, the day came when I couldn’t avoid the bullies anymore. I was walking home one day and they ambushed me.”
“We’re here.” Kieralyn stopped the car and slid the gear shift into park.
“You parked where I told you?” Ian got out and let Maximum out of the back seat.
“Yes.”
Kieralyn locked the doors and they headed inside through Maximum’s kennel.
“So, what happened when they ambushed you? Is that when you used what your dad taught you?”
“Yeah.” Against his will, but it had forced him to test himself. To trust that he didn’t need to rely on people for the simple things in life. “One took Maximum’s harness and pulled him away from me. Two more moved in on me.”
Ian keyed in the code to let them into the lab. The locks reengaged with a swish when he closed the door behind them. “Long story short, I walked away with a couple of new bruises. One of them walked away with a broken jaw, another had a dislocated shoulder, and the one who pulled Maximum away left with a nasty bite in his leg.”
“Wow. Not bad for your first fight.”
“Yeah. Despite the victory, I can’t claim to have enjoyed myself.” He unhooked Maximum’s harness. “Give me a minute.”
He left Kieralyn in his lab and went to Dante’s desk for an extra desk chair. It would be more comfortable while they worked than the wooden guest chair.
“Why didn’t you enjoy your success?” she asked when he returned.
“I’d stooped to their level.” He flipped on the lights for Kieralyn, and pushed the chair over to the console. The buzzing of the fluorescent bulbs would irritate him while he was working, but she wasn’t familiar with the room’s layout. He’d deal with it. “I hadn’t been able to walk away.”
He pushed a button and turned on his favorite Pavarotti CD. Maximum padded over to his bed in the corner of the room and curled up to go back to sleep.
“You don’t always have a choice.” She sat her bags by the door and moved to his side. Her jaw creaked as she yawned. “Fighting is a necessity in some instances. Is this what you were listening to when I was here last time? Doesn’t it interrupt your work?”
“Pavarotti, and it depends. This and jazz engages the part of the brain I use for analysis and increases productivity. As for the fighting, I know that now. Hell, I knew it factually then, but to grasp all the nuances of fighting at twelve… Even the brightest kids would struggle with that.” He sat in his chair and brought up the program that would activate the listening devices.
“You had Maximum. Your dad and his unit taught you these lessons after you’d lost your sight.” She settled into the chair beside him. “Was your sight the reason you were being bullied?”
“I was an awkward kid pulling straight As with no effort. The eyesight only made me an easier target in their eyes, but they harassed me even before then.”
Cuing up the recording devices, the voices of the men from his patio poured clearly from the speakers.
“It’s not our fault.” A man with a smoky rasp to his voice whined. It sounded like he was pacing. Maybe limping. “That son of a bitch was fast.”
“Isaacs won’t see it that way,” said the South American from the bar. The one who had been holding Kieralyn and pretty much calling the shots. “He won’t care what we were up against. We were told to deliver her to him at the club. We failed.”
“She had help.”
“Help that’s landed our asses in this cage.”
“Big deal. Isaacs has cops on his payroll.” This was the one to count on for information. It would never occur to him that someone might be listening in or that he should be cautious what he said. Even in a cage with no one around but his cohort in crime.
“You still shouldn’t have called him.” The South American thought more clearly. He was more experienced. “He’s going to be pissed that he’s tied to us on this. Besides, we don’t know which cops he owns. Talking to the wrong one could land us in deeper shit.”
Keys jingled and scraped in a lock. Iron squeaked as a door opened. “Someone’s coming.”
Cop shoes smacked the floor, sucking slightly against the linoleum. A key slid into another lock. “You’re free to go.”
There was muttering and more talking as they went through the discharge process. As soon as the men stepped outside the front doors, night street sounds blended with the bar owner’s heartbeat through the mics.
“Boss.”
“Shut up, Sanders,” the bar owner snapped.
“Isn’t that the man from the first recording?” Kieralyn asked.
“Yeah. He’s also the club owner.” Ian waved her to a nearby computer. “Using Churchill 1952, key into that computer. Do a search for Isaacs and the club. Maybe you’ll find a paper trail to back up anything we hear.”
“Winston Churchill? And why 1952?”
“Yes. That’s the year he’s known for speaking at Chateau Laurier in Ottawa. ‘Withhold no sacrifice, grudge no toil, seek no sordid gain—’”
“‘Fear no foe’,” Kieralyn continued. “‘All will be well’.”
Ian raised his brows and smiled at her. She knew Churchill. She’d been a geek too. He wouldn’t have guessed it. He didn’t have many people he could talk to about history. Maybe Kieralyn would indulge him. Later.
“Let me get this straight.” The boss’s voice was hard with suppressed anger. “I tell you to follow the woman, to get answers, and you wind up in jail.”
“I followed them to a parking lot where they got into a car.” The South American man spoke. Did these people never use names in a conversation? “I text messaged Sanders to pick up their tail.”
“Once I saw where they went, I headed back for Horatio.” Seriously? Horatio? It was one thing for a TV show character to have that name, but who tortured a kid for life by naming them Horatio? Regardless, they didn’t seem to know who he was yet. Good. Kieralyn clicked away on the computer. “We were going to bring her to you.”
“As soon as she was alone, we approached her.” Humility softened Horatio’s voice. He wouldn’t completely submit to his boss, but neither would he blatantly disobey. He knew how to stay in his place. “We would have taken her—”
“But her lover came out.” Ian grinned at the idea of a grown man whining about getting his ass kicked by a blind man wearing nothing but boxers. The sad thing was that it hadn’t been hard. For hired muscle, the guys didn’t have many original move
s. “They knocked us out.”
Kieralyn chuckled. “Wonder how he’d feel if he knew you were blind?”
“He’d ignore the knowledge. Currently, I think he’s aiming for sympathy.”
“I don’t think their boss has any. I know I don’t.”
Oh, but she was wrong. Not for these men, and she didn’t recognize it, but sympathy is what had her trying to help him get around. It’s what made her think she needed to protect him.
“And now, they’re both likely gone,” Isaacs snapped.
“We’ll go back and check his place,” Sanders offered. “We’ll find them. After he’s dead she can join the other women on their trip to Venezuela.”
“That’s right, boys,” Kieralyn muttered. “Run your mouths and give me proof.”
Ian echoed Kieralyn’s sentiment. Regardless of what she found on the computer, they could now tie the club and Isaacs to the attempt on Kieralyn. They were one step closer to proving the connection to the missing women. And his father. “You could call your team in now. You have enough for a warrant.”
“You’re right.” She tapped away on the keyboard. “But there’s more to learn before I do. I can’t be impulsive with this. I need to know where the women are, and we know based on the last recording that they won’t be moved until El Dogo gives the order.”
The fundamentals that had formed Ian had happened between his tenth and thirteenth birthdays. And in the lessons with his father and honorary uncles he’d learned more than how to fight. He’d learned to respect and appreciate life.
His father had shown him the importance of setting a level of moral expectations for himself and always living up to it. Again he struggled to believe that El Dogo was out to harm the missing women. Then again, maybe he was remembering incorrectly. His father had been a successful operative, which required him to be a good liar. Ian had to face the possibility that El Dogo was the real personality of the man he’d called father. He had to accept the chance that his father had spent his life putting on a show for the family.
“Then we’ll get you proof. And we’ll keep our ears open for news of El Dogo.”
Going along with Ian’s plan seemed to be paying off. Besides, her team wouldn’t appreciate her waking them up in the middle of the night to talk possibilities.
Energized by the excitement of having a new direction to go with her case, Kieralyn settled in to work. The keyboards and control panels were marked with Braille as well as the traditional letters and numbers. She hadn’t thought of it before, but it explained how he commanded the equipment so easily.
Ian’s computer sprang to life seconds after she entered his password. She too used Churchill as her password, though she placed the year at 1940. On June fourth in 1940 Churchill spoke about never surrendering. His words “we shall not flag or fail” had become her motto over the years. It drove her today more than ever before.
How odd was it though that they would use the same quote? Ian had admitted to being a bit of a geek in school. She had used books as an escape. The diversion she found in her studies kept her from thinking too much about when she might be moved again, what the new circumstances of charity handed out might be like, and who would she be reliant on for food and shelter.
Granted, most of the homes hadn’t been too bad. It didn’t take more than one to harden your skin and heart. To accept that charity was filling your belly rather than love. Books made no demands for gratitude. They didn’t expect repayment for kindness, lay guilt trips, or prey on perceived weaknesses.
Books had been her escape and the main place she’d learned most of life’s important lessons. She doubted Ian could say the same, but what did it say about them that in addition to an obvious attraction they also shared an appreciation for history? Churchill, to be more precise?
A window popped up on the computer screen. The owner of Jazz on the Rocks was Dorado Inc, a foreign corporation based in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. With Bureau restrictions, she would have just hit a dead end. The NSA—and Ian by extension—didn’t have such restrictions. After a few mouse clicks, she had the computer searching for registered officers of the corporation. With the computer running the new searches and looking for information on the names she’d heard, she turned to watch Ian.
She hadn’t fully believed he would get anything useful off the recording, but he had. And now less than twenty-four hours later he’d granted her access to his equipment without a thought to her security clearance. He’d gotten her closer to solving the case, freeing the women, than she’d thought possible. Lana would be free before much longer and then they would set to work locating any other women who had been taken.
Ian worked at the control panel. He seemed to be recording everything while at the same time processing voice patterns.
“I’m putting a display up for you that’ll show our men’s movements.” A map came up on one screen. Two dots moved along the streets, leaving behind a pale line. If they were really untraceable, his devices would be amazing tools.
“What happens if they take showers?” She shook her head. “I mean to the bugs and adhesive.”
“The adhesive bonds the device to the hair or skin, but it will naturally disintegrate after two or three soakings depending on the length of access to water. They’ll never know they had it on them.” Mischief glinted in his eyes when he smiled at her. “If it does fall off, they’ll think it’s a gray hair.”
She laughed. “Brilliantly evil. I love it.”
The computer beeped and captured Kieralyn’s attention. The accounting records for Jazz on the Rocks were perfect. Beginning with the amount put in for start up cash, how long it took to turn a profit and how much of a profit they were turning.
A lot of those books she’d read had been on math and accounting. The numbers on the reports before her were too perfect. Every month revealed a steady increase. In the three years they’d been open they had never had a month where they showed less than a five percent increase over the month before.
Clicking through the pages to the end, she checked out the signature. Luther Isaacs. No surprise there.
She leaned against the back of the chair and sucked her bottom lip between her teeth. She was missing something. Something little that would fill in a major hole. Or she had it before her, but wasn’t seeing it. The words and numbers on the screen blurred.
Snapping her fingers, she straightened and initiated a new search to see what other assets Dorado Inc listed. A minute later, a list popped up on screen. A warehouse, two yachts, some cargo vans and the jazz club.
“Why would a company based in the Dominican Republic own a jazz club in Florida?”
Ian kept working at whatever he was doing. “Diversification.”
“Unless you count automobiles and a warehouse near the club, they aren’t diversified. They claim no other holdings in the United States or the Dominican Republic.”
He tilted his head and drummed his fingers on the counter. “What’s the name of the company?”
“Dorado Inc.”
“That’s Spanish for gold. Use variations of gold for the name and do another search. You could also reverse the spelling and run another search.”
“All right.” She yawned so wide that her jaw popped. Not very original, but he hadn’t led her wrong yet.
“When you have the run started, we’ll go get some sleep.”
“I can keep working.”
“Kieralyn.” He rolled his chair to her side and rubbed a hand over the back of her neck. “You’re exhausted.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re yawning, your heart and breathing are slowing down and tension is knotting your shoulders.” He brushed a kiss below her ear. “You need rest if you’re going to have the stamina to see this through. A massage wouldn’t hurt.”
A massage. As if he would stop at a simple massage. Her muscles spasmed and pulsed as if they’d heard the words and knew what they meant. Or maybe it was the idea of lying down
and having Ian touch her again.
Chapter Seven
Ian listened to Kieralyn’s heart as she initiated the search. Her passion and laughter swept over him like a balm, soothing the loneliness he hadn’t recognized. A self-inflicted loneliness that he would not allow himself to return to when she went back to her life. For years he’d felt like a single salmon swimming upstream. Only he never gained any distance in work, relationships or his search for his father.
Kieralyn held herself back, didn’t let him see the deepest parts of her spirit, but he would enjoy her while she was with him. Pressing a few controls, he flipped off the opera and keyed up the CD his sister, Jennifer, had recently made for him between baking wedding, birthday and graduation cakes. The music was a somewhat odd mix of songs by an Australian singer, Delta Goodrem, and a guy named Eli Mattson whom Jennifer had seen on a televised talent show. Both artists played the piano beautifully. There was a purity to their sounds that Ian enjoyed, but he rarely listened to the CD. Now he realized why.
The emotions in many of the songs too closely mirrored what he’d been feeling. They drove home the message that he was missing out on something great in life. Hell, they depressed him. Finally, he saw the songs the way Jennifer had meant them. As hope that he could have everything he’d always wanted.
“It’s running,” Kieralyn said just at the beginning of a song about being strong, a song about how it always seemed to be raining.
“Good.” Ian grabbed her hand and pulled her to him. He cupped the back of her head and eased her head to his chest. Swaying slowly from side to side, he maneuvered them into a simple dance.
Delta sang sensually about holding on to your spirit, about keeping it together when the light fades away and your darkest hour strikes. Life hadn’t hit that point of desperation for him, but for the women currently held in captivity, the women they were working to rescue including Kieralyn’s friend, it could very soon.