Blind Shot

by Lola Feri

  “Those were all selling points, yes,” I said. I kept my eye on the road because if I didn't, I knew I would see Cortez smirking like a Cheshire cat. I had a feeling that he had my number. It wasn't a particularly rare or unusual number, but there it was.

  “So what's the top speed on this thing?”

  “It's listed at 130 miles per hour.”

  “That's not what I asked.”

  I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye.

  “Beginning to sound pretty insubordinate there, Agent,” I said mildly.

  “Just asking a question, sir,” he responded, a slight smirk in his voice. “That means it's been tested at 130, not how fast it can go if you open her up.”

  I stayed quiet, but I knew the answer to that question. Cortez chose to take it as me ignoring him and laughed again.

  “Jesus, you probably did buy it for the gas mileage and the looks. Was it always a dream of yours to have a Mercedes or something? Did you figure out that you could flash the keys at a college-town bar and get lots of little sorority girls running after you?”

  “When I was your age, I wanted a classic,” I said evenly. “Big. Fins.”

  “Hell, you could get those monsters tearing ass down the freeway too if you souped them up some.. Wasted on you, sir...”

  “Guess so,” I said, enough in my tone to make Cortez sit up and take notice. Smooth action was another reason I picked this car, and I had sped up to 95 without Cortez noticing.

  “Nice action,” he admitted.

  “Not bad at all.”

  Now that he was paying attention, there was no reason to take it easy. I didn't flatten the pedal to the floor, but it was close, and the car surged forward, grabbing the asphalt like a hungry animal. Cortez let out a laugh that sounded almost boyishly delighted, hanging onto the door handle with one hand.

  “Come on, faster,” he urged, and I didn't take my eyes from the road.

  The manual says that my car can hit 130. After a few very quiet modifications made at a place that owes me some favors up in Baltimore, it hits 130 easily, and after that, all I need to do is to sweet talk it up to 160 and beyond. The SLR-McLaren hit 200 with ease, but it was flashy enough that I didn't care to push my luck. My sedan, however, looks steady enough to take kids to school, and it hid its wilder side pretty well.

  “There's an auxiliary odometer in the glove compartment,” I said easily. “Check it out.”

  “No fucking way, 200 in a sedan? Fucking hell,” Cortez cackled. “Does it go higher than that?”

  For just a second, I wanted to find out. That Baltimore shop had told me that the Maybach would top out at 200, but there was probably some room for error. I could feel the way the car responded to my every touch, how the world whipped by around us. There was a faint tremor that ran through the car's blue-blooded frame, which told us the strain it was under, and I knew that Cortez was feeling it too.

  Then I remembered that I was 48 and a responsible handler delivering my new asset to his lodgings, and that maybe I didn't need to prove anything.

  Even if I wanted to?

  Maybe especially then.

  I eased the car back, throttling the speed back almost guiltily. I would be lying if I said I had never done it before, but this was the first time I had done it with a passenger in the car. I had handled problem assets before, though maybe none as bad as Ryland Cortez. I knew that the best thing to do with them was to be firm and fair, demanding but not unreasonable. Nowhere in my experience did that include taking them for a joyride with the asset.

  I thought Cortez would continue mocking me, but when I glanced at him, there was only a slightly disappointed look on his face.

  “We could turn around,” he suggested suddenly. “Take one of the loops out onto the country roads. Bet no one would mind you opening the engine up out there.”

  “Maybe another time,” I said, surprising myself a little.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Ryland

  My new handler lived in a small brownstone in a quiet part of downtown, a place that at a glance I could tell was designed for young families, retirees, and dull professionals. Of course he blended right in.

  There was an underground private garage for the car, and the short flight of stairs took us up to a living area that was what the magazines would call tastefully furnished. As I looked around, Garrett handed me a small envelope that jingled when I took it.

  “Keys,” he said. “That'll get you in the front door and the garage door. I've already had your biometrics added to the retinal scanner after you bypass the main door.”

  “Paranoid much?” I asked with a grin, and he smiled at me thinly. He looked different; plainer than the guy who had pushed his car up to 200 miles-per-hour for me.

  “Paranoid is good because you're alive if you’re paranoid,” he said. “Doors lock automatically behind you, so don't forget your key.”

  “Yes, Dad,” I sighed, and he ignored it.

  “Are you hungry?”

  I was. The drive had woken me up some, but I had started the evening ravenous.

  “Your room's up the stairs to the left. I've got some pizza I'll throw on. I'll get you when it's ready.”

  Walking up the stairs, it struck me how familiar this was. I had been in and out of foster care since I was eight, and going to check out my new room was something I remembered very well. When I was lucky, there was a bed, and when I wasn't, there might be a thin sheet of plywood with some foam on top of it.

  If I worried that Garrett was going to put me into something like his linen closet, I was wrong. The small bedroom was neat, with a gray-blue comforter and a stack of pillows on the bed. It should have been sterile, but there was something personal about it. More like a home. I must have been exhausted, because the idea made me smile a little bit. I shoved the thought away because I didn't need to get weirdly mushy just a few hours after meeting a handler who probably wasn't going to be any different than the others.

  I sat my go bag in the closet. I didn't have a gun, but for right now, I was fine with it. I was too tired and exhausted to care. I sat down on the bed and found it incredibly comfortable, and that was about the last thing I remembered.

  ***

  I awoke with sunlight streaming through the blinds. I sat up, still fully dressed from the night before, but someone had come in and thrown a blanket over me. I pushed it away and stood up just in time to catch a knock at the door.

  “Yeah?”

  “Breakfast in fifteen,” Garrett said crisply. “There's time for a shower if you don't take a long one.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” I muttered, but after I heard him descending the stairs, I made my way to the bathroom across the hall. I'm a pro at the five minute shower, and after that I could change into fresh clothes. It was just jeans and a T-shirt again, my actual gear was in storage some place, and I would have to have it forwarded.

  I padded down to the kitchen, inclined to snark at Garrett for being some kind of super spy den mother. I didn't because then I might not get the sausage and eggs he was preparing.

  “It's not always this good,” he warned me. “This is because I realized you haven't had a meal in the last twenty-four hours.”

  Honestly, I was expecting to make do with the pizza he had said he would make last night. I wasn't going to complain. He chuckled a little at the hungry look I was giving the plates. I was so focused on stuffing my face that I almost missed the next thing he said.

  “Eat up, and then we're going to start talking about schedules.”

  “What?”

  He put a generous portion of eggs and sausage in front of me, and then I was too hungry to worry about it much. I wolfed it down, only slowing when I realized that there was actually plenty more coming. When I was about done with the protein, I realized that he had put out some fucking fruit as well; cantaloupe, honeydew and grapes, and I think I lost my mind for a little while. I'd been
eating road food for so long that I barely remembered what fruit looked like. I ate the fruit ignoring the amused look Garrett was giving me as he ate his own food.

  By the time I was full, I realized I was feeling much more laid back about everything, which was probably Garrett's plan all along. Even the glare I mustered up to use on him was blunted by how well-fed I was.

  “So schedule.”

  “Yes. They’re giving us at least some time to get used to each other, but with things heating up in China and Brazil, that might be less time than is idea. We're going to have to learn to work together and to do it well, and that means sticking with a schedule.”

  I scowled at him.

  “I can handle my own goddamn range time,” I said. It was true. I carried some of the highest marksmanship scores on agents of my ranking. I was easily meeting the metrics and blowing them out of the water.

  Garrett laughed as if I had said something funny.

  “Of all the things I'm worried about, your range time is close to the bottom of it. We'll be getting a few hours a day at the agency's facility here in town, but I'm talking about things like food, breaks, sleeping and waking up.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me? I didn't join the army when I was 18 and I sure as shit am not starting now.”

  He gave me a patient look, and suddenly I wanted nothing more than to rile it up. What did this man look like when he got mad? Could I drive him to the screaming mess I had made of Starzek and the ones who came before him? Thinking about Starzak irritated me, and I pushed the thought away.

  “You can't just expect to come and go as you please. As far as I'm concerned, the time you're spending here is time on duty. Just maybe not the kind of duty that you're familiar with. You have a responsibility to stay disciplined and to make sure that when we do return to the field, you're in good condition to do so.”

  I glared at him.

  “Look, you might be married to the agency, but I sure as shit am not. I mean, hell, I think the paperwork has me listed as a contractor or something like that. I'm like... I don't know, a gun you take out of the locker and fire when you need it, right? If the gun's there and ready to go, you don't care if it, I don't know, goes out to a club and gets laid or something, right?”

  For some reason, instead of being pissed off, he smiled at me, almost like he was proud of me.

  “Exactly. The gun needs to be there and ready to go. I saw your reports. You take care of your weapons. You clean them. You maintain them. You never slack off on that, no matter how tired you are or how bad the situation gets.”

  “No...” It was a matter of pride and simple common fucking sense.

  “So you see what I mean. How's your arm?”

  I blinked at him.

  “Are you trying to mess with my head?”

  “Making a point. How is it?”

  I shrugged, glancing down at the four stitches on my forearm. The skin around it was sickly green and bruised, but it was healing up all right.”

  “Fine, I guess.”

  “No pain? No heat from it?”

  “No, shit, why do you want to know? Can't you get all this crap from the medical server?”

  “I can. But the best information I have, I'm going to get from you. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to be spending a lot of time together over the next few weeks. We're going to learn about each other, figure out how we might work best in the field, things like that. But just being together, you learning about my expectations, me learning about your needs that are going to make us function more easily.”

  Something about the way he said needs got my attention. It made me think of jerking off the night before, how I was hoping for someone who looked a lot like him. It made me grin.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked, and I shrugged.

  “If you're going to be looking after my needs, does that mean I come to you whenever I get a hard-on?”

  He blinked at me slowly and I leaned forward smiling, ready to dodge and hit back if he threw a punch.

  “I mean hell, you're so good at taking care of breakfast, maybe you wouldn't mind sucking me off too? Are those the needs we're talking about?”

  Instead of snarling at me and pushing me away, or taking a swing at me, Garrett just gave me a long level look.

  “You've got hands,” he said, and I laughed.

  “Christ, I was joking about married to the company, but are you queer or something?”

  “That's not a word we used,” Garrett said thoughtfully. “It was a cruel thing to say back when I was younger, but I guess things change. No, I'm not gay, if that's what you're asking.”

  “Or bi?”

  There was actually a faint smile on his face when he shook his head.

  “You seem pretty okay with it...”

  A complicated look crossed Garrett's face. It looked sad and maybe angry or regretful. Instead of shouting at me or walking away, however, he only stared up at the ceiling for a minute, as if he wanted to make sure that his thoughts were together.

  “I've never slept with a man,” he said finally. “I don't care who you sleep with as long as you're both happy to be doing it. And to be perfectly honest, I'm going to be keeping you so busy that you're not going to have time to think about it at all.”

  I gave him a skeptical look.

  “You are really impressed with your own management abilities.”

  He smiled faintly.

  “I am,” he agreed.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Garrett

  I'll be perfectly honest, I was expecting a lot more trouble from Cortez, or as I eventually learned to call him, Ryland. I'd made burgers as a kind of reward for doing all of his conditioning exercises without too much complaining. I make a decent burger, and it was pretty obvious that Cortez had been used to fast food his entire life. He ate the first as if he was starving, and then the second like it was a revelation.

  "Good, Cortez?" I asked, unable to keep a slight smirk out of my tone.

  "Stop fishing for fucking compliments, you know it is," he retorted, frowning a little.

  "What is it?"

  "If you're making me burgers this good, why don't you call me Ryland?"

  I hesitated. It was a bad idea. The relationship between a decent handler and his asset is friendly, but actually becoming friends could endanger them and everyone else on their team. I knew the answer was an easy-going no, but Ryland was already shaking his head.

  "Don't know what I was thinking," he said, mocking himself as much as he was mocking me. "I'm probably lucky you don't actually refer to me by my fucking serial number."

  "I could call you Ryland," I hazarded. For some reason, it gave me a strange little thrill when I said his name. It was probably because I wasn't meant to be saying it, but I wondered if it was more than that.

  His reaction was subtle, a widening of the eyes and a shifting of his posture, but for a man who had done as many infiltration details as he had, it was as good as falling out of his chair.

  "Don't hurt yourself or anything," he said, but I could tell he was shocked and pleased. Then I wondered how long it had been since anyone had used his Christian name, and I hid a wince.

  "Do you want to call me Alec?" I asked, because it seemed only fair. I knew that was a bad idea, and he seemed to agree, shaking his head no.

  "Doesn't suit you," he said bluntly. "I'd rather call you Garrett."

  Plenty of people used my first name, but it was only sitting at my kitchen table with a delinquent asset that I realized how few of them actually knew me. Neighbors, spouses of co-workers, people like that called me Alec. Everyone who had ever been close to me, held my life in their hands, or let me hold theirs, called me Garrett.

  *

  Ryland never got easy to work with. He was everything the reports had promised. He was willful, contrary, and challenging on a good day, and on a bad one he was obstinate and insolent to t
he point of insubordination.

  He was also strong, terrifyingly quick, and remarkably intelligent. The tests he had been given at the beginning of his tenure with the agency marked him as average or perhaps a trifle lower, but after spending just a week with him, I could see how wrong they were. Of course he refused to be tested again.

  "I'm not sitting in a goddamn classroom all over again to be told how stupid I am."

  We were having this conversation early one morning in the training facility in town. It was a decent workout space, and Ryland was practicing his climbing abilities. Now he was handling a two-story climb with minimal hand-holds while having an argument with me, and I wondered all over again who had tested him and if we had fired that person yet.

  "These test scores paint a completely incorrect picture of you and your capabilities. They might explain why your handlers…"

  He pried one of the handholds free and dropped it so it landed right next to me. If he wanted to give me a concussion with it, he would have, so I just waited.

  "That's on them," he said flatly. "They treated me how they wanted, so I did what I had to do."

  He finished his climb and I let him because he wasn't wrong. Ryland might actually be a genius, and the fact that no one had seen it at all wasn't right.

  Of course, if I had reported his formidable intellect to the director, I would have been asked why he was such a liability in the field. And my response to that would have been "possibly because a lot of the other handlers here are terrible."

  Ryland might complain and snark and swear, but at the end of the day, I told him the truth.

  "Do what I say, give me a good reason not to, or get out."

  The first time I had told him that, he pulled back, almost shying like a horse. I kept my voice level and my expression bland, because Christ, I didn't want him to walk. He was good, maybe the best I’d ever worked with, and after having worked at the agency for 25 years, after having run close to 30 percent of the North American ops for ten, I didn't want to lose him.

  Still, it was the truth, and if he couldn't get along, it would be better for everyone if he took himself off the board.