“Hi, I’m Billy.”
“Hello there, Billy, I’m Blue.”
“Blue? That’s a cool name.”
I grinned.
“You don’t know the half.”
“Are you waiting for someone?”
“I sure am.”
“Who might that be, maybe I know them.”
“I’m waiting for Mr. Right.”
“Oh, I see, well, the pickings are slim here tonight. Most of these guys are either married losers looking to score or old geezers.”
I smiled. “Why aren’t you nominating yourself?”
He looked me over and sighed.
“I would if I was able, but I got a girl already.”
“Do you treat her right?”
He smiled as if to himself.
“I sure try to.”
“Do you think you’ll marry her someday?”
“Oh yeah, once we leave college.”
“Marriage doesn’t scare you?”
“No.”
“Is does some men, in fact, some men run the other way.”
The waitress called Billy’s name. She was standing at the opposite end of the bar and needed a drink order filled.
“I’ve got to get back to work, Blue.”
“Don’t be a stranger, Billy, and take care of that girl of yours.”
“I will, and good luck finding Mr. Right.”
Mr. Right walked in just as I was beginning to think he never would.
He was in his forties, but had a trim, athletic build, along with a classically handsome face. His hair was dark, and his eyes were a bright shade of green.
He stepped inside the bar and looked around for what seemed like a long time, before releasing the door and finally entering. The other women in the place looked him over and smiled, as their eyes followed his every move. He appeared to be as out of place as I did. I hoped that we would soon look out of place together.
When he noticed me, his eyes roamed over every inch and when the appraisal was complete, he smiled.
I smiled back at him, and then mouthed the word, “Hi,” but to my surprise, he took a seat at the other end of the bar.
That’s right, play hard to get.
Billy the bartender had been in the kitchen. When he returned to the bar by walking through a pair of swinging doors, Mr. Right sat up straight and began watching him with rapt attention. As Billy walked over to take his drink order, Mr. Right gave him a warm smile.
Perhaps Mr. Right was looking for a Mr. Right of his own? But no, I doubted it, not given the way he had eyed me.
As I sat and patiently sipped on my third, and then my fourth drink of the night, Mr. Right engaged Billy in a long intermittent conversation and showed a definite interest in the young man. Just as I thought I was forgotten, Mr. Right walked over and sat beside me, while instructing Billy to bring me a drink.
I hoped the other men in the bar were paying attention because that was the way to do it. Be bold.
“Billy tells me that your name is Blue.”
“That’s right, and what’s your name?”
He smiled. “I’m John Smith.”
“Oh really?”
“Does my name matter?”
I smiled. “Not in the least.”
We talked for a few minutes and then left the bar together, but not until he gifted Billy with a huge tip.
Once we were outside, I looked around at the quaint town and again thought that it would be a great place to live. Having grown up in a small town, I knew that intimate sense of belonging that living in one could instill; it was something that those raised in big cities didn’t readily enjoy.
Despite the coolness of the breeze coming off the river, I felt better out in the night air, but I had more to drink than was normal for me and could feel the effects. That said, I was far from drunk, or even intoxicated, and the anticipation of what was to come was more potent than the depressing effects of the alcohol.
My motel was a short drive away and we arrived there in minutes. After I opened the door with the key card and turned on the light, Mr. Right stood in the doorway and gave the room a careful appraisal, just as he had given the bar upon entering.
There wasn’t much to see, just the one room with a queen-sized bed and the bathroom on the left.
When he finally entered, I was stretched out atop the bed and smiling up at him.
“Well, Mr. Smith, what are you waiting for?”
He laughed, locked the door, and crawled atop the bed to lie beside me. As he moved his hand along my hip and toward my breasts, I brought out the stun gun I’d hidden beneath the pillow and blasted him on the back of his neck.
He went rigid from the current and I hit him with it a second time. I then grabbed the handcuffs that were hidden beneath the bed and bound his hands behind him, before removing the gun that sat in a holster on his back.
By the time he was returning to normal, I had his knees and ankles duct taped together and a gag taped firmly in place in his mouth.
Above the tape, his eyes were two pools of rage as he muttered threats that were unintelligible.
In truth, he looked little like the man I was after, who should be blond, blue eyed, and have a narrower chin and longer nose; still, hair can be dyed, contacts worn, and plastic surgery performed.
I reached under the pillow again and brought out the gadget that Lawson supplied me with. It was about the size of a deck of playing cards and looked like a cell phone. After turning it on, I bent down and pressed the screen against his right thumb. I had to do it three times because he struggled, but I managed to get a print that wasn’t smudged too badly.
Several seconds passed after I pressed the button marked, COMPARE, and a green light illuminated on the device.
“It’s a match, Mr. Smith. That means you’re really William Stinett.”
The fight went out of the man then, perhaps up until that moment he thought he was simply being robbed.
I took out my phone and called Lawson.
“Any luck, Blue?”
“Yes, I have him. I have William Stinett.”
“Are you safe?”
“Yes.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in a motel room just outside the village of Port Byron, Illinois.”
“Port Byron?”
“Yes.”
“We expected him to be in Byron, Illinois, where the nuclear power plant is.”
“The similarity in names is just a coincidence, but I’ll explain that later.”
“Right, I’ll send a pick-up team immediately, better yet, I’ll join them.”
I gave Lawson my exact location and ended the call. Afterward, I went into the bathroom where I could keep an eye on Stinett via the mirror on the dresser, and yet avoid his venomous gaze.
I washed the make-up off quickly and changed into the clothes I had left sitting atop the toilet tank. In the mirror, I saw Stinett wriggle around at the foot of the bed as he struggled against his bonds. The effort was wasted, and he soon gave up.
Once I had changed into a pair of comfy jeans and a white lace, peasant blouse, I dialed my phone again. A voice soon answered, Ramón’s voice, the voice of my dear husband.
“Hi, Blue.”
“Hi, baby.”
“Does this call mean you’re coming home soon?”
“It does; I found the man I was after and brought him back to my motel room.”
“I would be jealous, but I suspect things didn’t turn out the way he’d hoped.”
“Not unless he was hoping to be handcuffed while wearing a gag.”
Ramón laughed. “There are those who enjoy such things.”
I laughed along while thinking how much I loved him.
After I’d proposed to Ramón, he’d said, “Yes, I would love to marry you, would you love to marry me?” I immediately said yes in return and then the two of us giggled like children as we embraced.
We married only a few weeks later and I
’ve been happier than I ever thought possible.
“What time will you arrive home?” he asked.
“I’m not sure yet, but I should make it back by morning. I could stay here tonight and catch up on sleep, but I’d rather get home as soon as possible.”
“I’ve missed you. The days seem like months when you’re gone.”
“Tell me about it, but now I’ll have some down time.”
“We could go see your sister again, and baby Blue.”
My sister Jenny had given birth to the most beautiful little boy in all the world. He was named after my daddy, just as I was, and the little rascal had inherited our green eyes.
“We were there not too long ago, but you haven’t been home in a while, why don’t we visit Santuario and see Walter?”
“Walter would love to see you too, so yeah, we’ll spend a few days there, but I also have a present waiting for you at home.”
I grinned. “You’re going to spoil me.”
“A man can never spoil his wife too much.”
“Nor a wife her husband,”
We talked a little longer, and afterward, I went back and sat on the end of the bed to keep an eye on Stinett.
Once Lawson arrived, William Stinett was carted off by a quartet of black-clad men with guns.
Stinett had been wanted by the FBI for twenty years, because back in 1994 he was the mastermind of a plot to set off a dirty bomb inside a nuclear power plant. The bomb wouldn’t have caused much damage to the plant but would have likely led to the plant becoming impractical to operate. High levels of radiation would have flooded all workstations.
Stinett’s plan was foiled before he could enter the plant and he murdered a security guard and escaped. When his abandoned device was dismantled, it was found to contain Caesium-137, a highly radioactive substance that was not easy to come by. The substance was something that should have been impossible for a radical college student to acquire, which is what Stinnett was then.
After disappearing for a time, Stinett resurfaced in Cuba and was later thought to be living in Venezuela. The FBI and the CIA have always wanted the answer to the question of where Stinett acquired the Caesium-137. Now that they had him, it was certain that they would get the answer, one way or another.
Lawson sent me a smile as we sat in the rear of a black SUV headed for the airport.
Thomas Lawson was probably in his forties but appeared very fit and could possibly be years older than he looked. He once told me that he had never been a field agent. I thought that he would make a great spy, or a poker player, because his face usually betrayed nothing of what he was feeling.
Since I started working for him, I found him to be an easy person to deal with, and I’d also come to suspect that he wielded immense influence and power. If he had a boss it wasn’t evident, and I’d seen powerful people act wary around him.
He never mentioned his personal life, and probably had little time for one. The man was an enigma, but I liked him very much and I considered him a friend.
“Once again, Blue, this was excellent work, but tell me, how did you know that Stinett would show up here in this town?”
“I didn’t know for certain, but I played a hunch, and the hunch was that he had slipped back into the country for something other than a desire to wreak havoc.”
“And what would that something be?”
“His son, he wanted to see his son.”
“William Stinett doesn’t have a son.”
“He does, he’s a young bartender back in Port Byron named Billy.”
I took out my phone and showed Lawson the picture I had surreptitiously taken of Billy while I was at the bar.
He studied it.
“If I didn’t know better, I would say that was an old photo of Stinett.”
“Yes.”
“How did you discover that he had a son?”
“Billy’s mother was Ellen Campbell, Stinett’s college girlfriend. She was found to be innocent of collaborating with him at the time Stinett fled the country. Not long after that, she dropped out of school, then married an older man, a professor at the college she formally attended; his name was Keith Jeffries. Jeffries is listed as Billy’s father on the birth certificate. He passed away from a heart attack when Billy was fifteen.”
I saw Lawson smile and knew he was beginning to understand.
“Ellen Campbell-Jeffries died last month,” he said. “The FBI had people staking out her grave just in case it was Stinett’s destination, but the odds of that were thought to be low.”
“They had the destination wrong, but the reason for his visit was an emotional one. Stinett is known to be an atheist who doesn’t believe in an afterlife. I strongly doubted that he would risk his freedom to visit a gravesite. Still, the timing of Ellen Campbell’s death did seem to be the catalyst that made him leave his sanctuary. When I studied the file the FBI has on her, I found an old photo of her taken with her son when he was six. I thought there was a resemblance to Stinett.”
“And so, you tracked Billy down to Port Byron?”
“Yes, and I spent the last four days keeping tabs on him. Then tonight, I decided to venture inside the bar because the intel said that Stinett was definitely in Illinois.”
“Yes, we deciphered part of a coded text that mentioned the words Illinois and Byron, so naturally we began thinking of the nuclear power plant in Byron Illinois, not a bar in Port Byron.”
“Stinett wasn’t here to cause trouble; he was here to lay eyes on his only son. Either Ellen Campbell got word to him about Billy before she died of cancer, or with her death, someone decided to share the secret with him. Either way, Stinett risked himself so that he could see his son.”
“And this Billy, did he appear to know who Stinett was?”
“No, I would guess that Billy still thinks Professor Jeffries was his father.”
“We’ll keep it that way; I see no point in disrupting his life by letting him know he’s the son of a domestic terrorist.”
“And what will happen to Stinett?”
“He’ll be interrogated and likely spend the rest of his life in a cell somewhere, while he pays for the murder of the guard he killed.”
“I used to bring in bail skips and see them back on the street just weeks later.”
“The stakes are higher in your new profession, but then, so are the risks.”
“I’ve no complaints, and I must admit, it’s nice to have access to your resources; without the intel you provide, I never could have found Stinett.”
“I’m glad you appreciate it, because I have a packet of it waiting for you on the plane.”
I stared at Lawson.
“You told me I would have some time off if I found Stinett.”
“And you will, weeks in fact, barring emergencies, but the package will contain details of your next assignment. I can tell you right now that she’s the toughest target you’ve ever gone after.”
“She?”
“Study the packet at your leisure and then get in touch.”
“I take it the woman is dangerous?”
“Yes, and she actually managed to elude our mutual friend, Dr. White’s husband, although at the time he was preoccupied with capturing the serial killer Robert Michael Rothman.”
“Rothman? Then that would mean the woman is—”
“Victoria Belle, yes, and she’s as unpredictable and dangerous as they come.”
Chapter 14
I arrived home just before dawn and Ramón came out to meet me.
After hugging and kissing each other in greeting, he grabbed my bags and we entered our house. It felt so good to be home. It was wonderful to have an actual home and not just an apartment where I slept when not working.
Married life agreed with me more than I could have hoped for, but I knew it was because I had chosen my mate well, and not anything to do with the institution itself.
Although my new profession as a special agent took me away from home for da
ys, and once, even weeks, it conversely came with long breaks of down time. After spending the last ten years hustling around the state of Texas in a steady pursuit of bail jumpers, the frequent breaks were welcomed. They allowed me a lot of time to enjoy life with my husband.
I had kept my maiden name after marrying, a decision I reached partly at Ramón’s insistence. He said that my name fit me perfectly and that it would be a shame to change it just for the sake of custom. However, Ramón’s surname was Acero, which meant Steel in Spanish, and so one way or another I would always be Blue Steele.
After pouring a mug of coffee, I leaned back against the kitchen counter and smiled.
“Where’s this surprise you mentioned?”
“It’s outside, and I think you’re going to like it.”
“Show me.”
He grinned and pointed out the back window.
“I’m a little surprise that you haven’t noticed it already, but then, the sun has just risen.”
I put down my mug, turned around to look, and saw that there was a brand-new building on our property. It looked suspiciously like a stable.
I jerked my head back around and stared at him.
“You didn’t? Oh my God, are there horses too?”
He began laughing at my reaction.
“Of course there are horses.”
I smothered him with kisses, and then I was practically dragging him out the patio door.
“Let’s go look.”
On the way there, I began to wonder about the quality of horses that he had gotten. Ramón was new to riding and still had much to learn.
I need not have concerned myself, because when I looked in the stalls, I saw two old friends.
“Midnight and Willow? We own Midnight and Willow?”
Ramón was beaming.
“We do now. John and Candace were kind enough to sell them to us.”
John and Candace were John and Candace Miller, owners of the neighboring farm and new friends. They owned several horses and had offered to let Ramón and I ride on their property.
I had fallen in love with a quarter horse named Willow, while Ramón preferred to ride an Arabian named Midnight, and now we owned them. It was like a dream come true.
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