by Bower Lewis
She thrust the sweatshirt into his hands, unable to listen to any more. She turned back and approached the stall. “Why is the senator locked up?”
Rockwell crossed his arms through the slats with a malevolent smile. “I’ve got a senate race to win, sweetheart. If my candidate isn’t intelligent enough to avoid getting duped by a pampered fucking poodle and his working-class distraction, I’ll just have to monitor his movements more closely.”
Patience caught the look in Zane’s eye just in time to grab his arm as his fist came within millimeters of Rockwell’s jaw. He slammed it into the gate instead, eliciting an appreciative nod from the SCUD.
“Stop doing that!” he shouted. “Drilling these two in the face is the only reasonable response to just about anything either of them says, but you keep getting in the way. Would you please knock it off?”
Patience honestly intended to diffuse his anger when she reached for his arm, but the sparks in his eyes disoriented her like solar glare and she inadvertently slipped her fingers into his hair and kissed him. Her uncle’s approving smile froze in his face before disappearing altogether. He gaped, slack jawed, as his arms uncrossed from his chest.
“What the hell are you doing, Pax? You can’t behave this way on a job! Stop it!”
Forsyth glowered and muttered to Rockwell about the horrors he’d endured the night before as Zane struggled to hold onto his rancor. He lost that battle fairly quickly, though, and pulled her to him.
“Damn it to hell,” John growled. “Someone let me know when they come up for air.”
Forsyth and Rockwell stared up at him, but neither responded. Patience’s phone let out a disapproving squeal finally, and she released an out-of-breath Zane.
“I know,” she said to the screen. Heat spread into her face like lava. “Yes, I understand!” She dropped it like it was on fire as Zane came to stand beside her with his head bent low.
“You’ve really got to find a better time to do that.”
“I realize that.”
“It’s just that you seem to have developed this compulsion to kiss me at the most complicated moments. It’s not that I’m complaining, mind you, but it can be a little inconvenient when I’m trying to concentrate.”
“I said I know.” She avoided eye contact with everyone in the room. “It was an accident, Zane.”
The basement was unified by awkward silence, with the sole exception of Rockwell, who appeared perfectly at ease as he stared back through the gate with a wry and twisted smile.
John coughed finally and clapped his hands once.
“Well then, let’s get me down from here, so we can finish our business and move on to something else. Someplace far, far from here.”
Patience turned back with a heavy expression on her face.
“I haven’t decided what to do about you yet, Uncle John. Your solution is as big a problem for us as our problem is, and we haven’t got time to fight you both. If what you’re telling me is true, then that’s a whole other problem of its own. Is He with us or against us? Because, right now, I really just don’t know.”
John’s expression turned uncharacteristically pensive.
“Well hell, kid, you’ve got His number. What are you asking me for?”
She shook her head and looked away again. “I’ve only ever asked Him for one thing directly, and you came crashing through my door thirty seconds later with your bloodlust and your assault rifle. I knew better than to do it at the time, and believe me, I’ve learned my lesson.” She took the sweatshirt back as his wound began to drip again and pressed it to his head. “You never once let us know that you were all right, or gave us any reason to believe you weren’t dead or locked up somewhere terrible, having God only knows what done to you. As far as I’m concerned, Uncle John, you can hang up there all night.”
His eyes lowered upward toward the ropes binding his knees. “Hurting you and your mother was the last thing in the world I ever wanted to do, Pax. I’m real sorry about that.”
Rockwell cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, but are you all out of your goddamned minds? We’re in the middle of a hostage situation here, and you’re behaving like the panel of a Jerry Springer reunion special. Do you think we might return to the crime in progress, or is working through Pink’s angst and family drama really our first priority tonight?”
Zane reached through the slats and grabbed him by the collar. Patience started for his arm, but she caught herself in time and jumped back as his fist cracked against Rockwell’s jaw. The campaign manager’s head flew back and to the side, and then it fell against his chest. He groaned and slumped sideways and Zane dropped him to the floor of the stall with a bead of drool hanging from his chin.
“Thank you.” He shook out his knuckles and glanced down as the whimpering senator scrambled to the back of the stall. “I still owe Joey a few, as I recall.”
Patience pulled out the phone and held it up. “You can make it up to him later, Zane. We need him conscious for this. Anyway, it’ll be a lot easier to get through while Rockwell’s out.”
“Fair enough.” He took the phone from her hand. “But allow me to do the honors. Why don’t you go sit with your uncle for a while?”
• • •
“Photoshopped,” Forsyth cried, in what had become his mantra during the minutes Zane stood over him, BlackBerry in hand, as he scrolled through The Biz’s photos. They’d pulled up a folding chair and offered him a seat, but the senator was making himself a less than gracious audience, nonetheless. “Photoshopped! Photoshopped! Photoshopped! It’s so obvious that this is a joke, Zane. Do you think I’m a complete moron?”
Zane declined to answer that. Patience just rubbed her eyes and nodded toward Rockwell, now sitting half-upright in the corner of the stall.
“Do it,” she said. “That one won’t stay down forever.”
“Are you sure?”
“Unless you’d rather I did.”
“Oh, no!” A smile sprang to life in the corners of his mouth. “I’ve got this.” Zane pulled a chair up next to the senator’s and held up a picture of a man with a few more lines etched into his tanned face, and a few new streaks of gray mingling with his expensive gold highlights, but it was undeniably a picture of the partially charred, lifeless remains of U.S. Senator Joseph M. Forsyth.
“What the hell is that?!” Forsyth yelled. “Oh my God! You sick fucks!”
Zane jumped back just in time as Forsyth turned and vomited onto the floor before his feet. Patience grabbed some rags and a bin of water from a sink beside the workbench and returned to stand before him.
“It’s good to know that when the images of starved children and demolished cities aren’t enough to get your attention, a picture of your own dead self will do the trick.” She cleaned him up as best she could and dropped the rags onto the mess on the floor. “You’re not evil, Senator, not entirely. But you’re disastrously stupid and such a sucker for the influence of others, not to mention the neediness of your horrendous ego, that I could just weep from contact-shame. Those character flaws don’t mix well with power. In fact, they’ll get the whole world killed if you ever make it to Washington. Don’t worry about that, though. We don’t intend to let that happen.”
Forsyth stared up at her as beads of sweat trailed over the sides of his face.
“But you don’t understand what’s going on,” he whispered. His eyes traveled back to the BlackBerry, so Zane raised it higher for him to get another look. “There are powerful people involved here, people who will never let me out of this election. They’ve invested epic amounts of money into Tuesday’s outcome, and they’re not the kind of people who’ll let you live to disappoint them twice.”
“Yes,” Patience said. “SolarTech Industries. We know all about them, Senator.”
He recoiled in the chair, his eyes wild and staring. “You don’t know anything! I don’t know where you heard that name, little girl, but SolarTech, most definitely, is not the company I was referrin
g to. Measures have been taken to ensure that no link has ever existed between the Forsyth campaign and the company I was referring to, so don’t bother trying to figure it out. Whatever you’re trying to pull by dragging this SolarTech into this, it’s not going to work.”
Patience shrugged. “Then you’re fine. It’ll be just another day at the office when Zane contacts the local media outlets and accuses SolarTech of coercion and illegal third-party campaign contributions.”
“You can’t do that!” he shrieked. “I’ll be dead in an hour!”
It was almost discouraging how poorly he performed, considering how much trouble he’d caused them over the past eighteen hours. She turned to say as much to Zane, but was cut off by a squeal from the phone. He checked the message and cursed into the screen.
“Troopers,” he said. “They’re at the bottom of the driveway.”
She grabbed the phone as it squealed again, then pointed a finger back at him. “There’s an APB out on you, Mario. It seems the troopers have found their Bugatti.” She turned her frown up to the ceiling. “Of course, a little more notice would have been helpful.”
THYVE ONLY JUST FOUND THE CAR!
I DONT NO WHICH PATH A MAN WILL TAKE UNTIL HE TAKES IT
FREE WILL… WHT WAS I THNKNG? :-(
She ignored that last bit and looked back to Zane.
“What should we do?”
He grabbed the ladder Rockwell had used to run John up onto the rafter and started working at the knots around his legs. The SCUD swung recklessly forward and reached for him, nearly knocking Zane to the floor as he grabbed hold of a wrist.
“We can’t risk the troopers poking around the basement windows and finding your uncle hanging here, Patience. Help him.”
She climbed up behind him with Rockwell’s Buck knife in hand and slid the blade beneath the ropes. John battled gravity with brute obstinacy as Zane held tight to his arm. Then he dropped like a stone, pulling Zane over the beam as Patience dove for his legs. Her weight and Zane’s together barely matched her uncle’s as John centered his feet beneath him and let go. He dropped to the floor as easy as a playground stunt and plucked his niece from Zane’s legs.
Zane exhaled and swung himself over the beam, dropping to the floor beside them with his gun already trained on John. The soldier just clapped his hands once with a grin on his face.
“Well, that got the blood pumping. What’s next?”
Patience took Zane’s gun so he could return Forsyth to the stall and collect the rest of the weapons. John reached a hand out for his rifle and she shook her head.
“The Lord’s got no beef with those troopers up there, Pax, so neither have I. I don’t kill for sport. You can’t send me up there unarmed, though. That’s reckless and damn stupid.”
Zane nudged him with the rifle and she pointed toward the stairs.
“Take it up with your boss, Uncle John, and be glad that I don’t trust you. If I did, even just a little, you’d be locked in that stall with the other two. Now, quit griping about your gun and let’s go.”
He shrugged and started up the stairs. Patience and Zane followed, until Forsyth rattled at the gate with a protracted sob.
“I don’t want to be senator anymore,” he cried. “I’m in deep shit, here, don’t you understand? I don’t want to have my pancreas fed to me before I’m chopped into little pieces and tossed off the side of a yacht, but I don’t want to kill the world, either. Please don’t rat me out to SolarTech, and please don’t make me burn up in a fiery flame pit of doom. Come on, Tex, this is me. My mother referred your mother to her nanny service, remember? Please, man! I don’t want to die!”
Zane pulled the BlackBerry from his pocket and stepped down a few stairs.
“What was that, Joey? I didn’t quite catch that last bit.”
The senator sobbed some more about the unfairness of his predicament, until Zane had heard enough and closed the video capture on the phone. He emailed the file to Rockwell and nodded as he passed Patience on his way back to the door.
“That ought to get Rutherford off the hook for the moment. Where were the troopers?”
“Circling the Bugatti,” she said. “One of them was at the back when I looked, checking out the airbrake.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
John was effectively, if oddly, cleaned up by the time the troopers’ boots thudded against the porch. He’d pilfered a Stetson from Rockwell’s wardrobe and pulled it low to cover his forehead, and his blood-stained camo jacket had been traded for an overtaxed, chartreuse V-neck sweater.
Zane locked the weapons in the liquor cabinet, then answered the door at their knock. He led the troopers back out to the driveway—once they’d checked everyone’s IDs and were satisfied that he was, indeed, that Zane Grey Ellison. They’d looked askance at the soldier a few times, but there wasn’t much they could say about him once his record came up clean, so they just patted Zane down and directed him to the car.
He smiled back at Patience as the door closed behind them. She hurried to the window and the phone squealed.
IT WONT HELP HIM IF THEY CATCH U SPYNG
JST HAVE SUM FAITH AND LET HIM DO HIS THING
She glared down at the text, angry and frightened about what would happen next.
“Let him do his thing? Zane shouldn’t even be here, Biz. All he was trying to do was settle into a new life, which was disorienting enough, but You wouldn’t take no for an answer. You hauled him into the middle of Your problem with me, and now he’s likely going to jail for something he shouldn’t have been involved in at all. Zane can’t go to jail, for crying out loud. He’s still figuring out how the microwave works!”
John pulled her back to sit beside him. He turned his eyes to his banged-up knuckles with a heavy sigh. “There’s so much wrong with what you’ve just said, kid, I don’t even know where to begin. Your friend is here today because he chooses to be. Don’t diminish what he’s doing by pretending he’s got no place in it.”
Patience didn’t respond to that. Being ganged up on by Uncle Uzi and The Biz was a bit too much to take, given their situation. She turned away from him, until her brooding was cut short by the roar of the Bugatti’s engine, followed by a rush of footsteps. She started for the door again, but John grabbed her arm and held her there as Zane sped down the driveway with the cruiser in pursuit.
“If you’re not ready to trust the man upstairs,” he said, “then trust your man on the street. It’s not your place to decide his role in this. That’s up to him.” He glanced to the window. “And Him.” He took her chin in a calloused hand and turned her face back to his. “You don’t have to be here, kid. God gets told no every second of every day. Your resistance doesn’t make you special; it makes you a pain in the ass.”
She just looked back to the door and he nodded.
“If your friend needs busting out tonight, then we’ll go bust him out. In the meantime, you’ve gotta learn to relax and roll with the punches. You’re throwing away good energy that could be used for better things.”
She pushed his hand away and stood up.
“Relax? Zane’s being chased by troopers in a beast that can get up to a third the speed of sound and we’ve been sent here by a duplicitous God. You can relax all you like, Uncle John. I’ll hold on to my anxiety a bit longer, thanks.”
John stared back with an expression of sincere confusion. For once, he had no glib reply.
“What do you mean by ‘a duplicitous God’?”
She turned to Rockwell’s bookcases. “We agreed that there’d be no bloodshed if I did this for Him. Sending you here clearly shatters that agreement. He betrayed us.”
“Ah ha!”
He glanced to the window with the smirk of a man who’d cracked the code at last.
“So that’s what You’re up to, is it?” He slapped his hands down onto his knees and shrugged. “Well, it seems awfully labor-intensive, if You ask me, but who am I to argue?”
Patience turned back at that.
“What are you talking about?”
He clasped his hands behind his head and relaxed back against the couch. “God’s been giving me just the scantiest bits of information about this mission, and that’s unusual for Him. He’s actually a bit of a micromanager, if you want to know the truth. But this morning, He showed up and said, ‘John, get your ass up to Boston and help your niece out.’ So, up I got and here I am. You two definitely need the help, there’s no question about that, but I’ve been curious about why He’s been keeping me handicapped. That answer seems clear enough now. He’s trying to honor His agreement, while sending you the help you sorely need.”
Patience looked back to the bookcase and stared at the rows of uncracked spines, trying to digest as little as possible of what her uncle had said.
“That doesn’t make sense. If you two are as tight as you’ve claimed, why didn’t you just ask Him what He was up to instead of hassling me about the way I’ve been doing things?”
“Because when God tells me to do a thing, kid, I do it. I don’t question Him, and I sure as hell don’t call upon Him to justify Himself. You’ve still got some work ahead of you in that regard, from what I’ve observed.”
Her brows drew together as she stared back at him, sitting comfortably and complacently, and ready for whatever might transpire. She couldn’t imagine ever feeling so sure of herself, but it quieted her mind a bit to see that he did.
“Does this mean that you’re with us now?”