by Dale Mayer
“It’s really isolated here, isn’t it?” she asked.
“It is. It’s a great place for an ambush.”
Instinctively she took a step closer to him.
He chuckled. “That works every time.”
She smacked him lightly on the shoulder. “If that works with all the girls, you should be ashamed of yourself.”
“Oh, I am. I am.” He tried to sound serious.
She just rolled her eyes at him.
Suddenly Kanen stood in front of her, his gaze going from one to the other.
Was that worry in his eyes? “You okay?” she asked.
He looked at her in surprise. “I’m fine. The coast is clear.”
He reached out a hand, and she placed hers in it. As they walked along together, she looked around to see that Nelson had disappeared. “What’s going on?” she asked. “You show up, and now Nelson leaves. Like musical chairs. Plus, when you arrived, you looked worried.”
“Of course I’m worried,” he said. “What if you prefer Nelson to me?”
“As if,” she snorted. “A new friend is always nice to have, but it certainly isn’t a replacement for an old one.”
“No, but a shiny new penny is always more attractive than the dull old one you’ve been carrying around.”
She realized his tone held a note of insecurity. She squeezed his fingers and whispered, “I don’t prefer him over you. I don’t prefer either of them over you. Honestly, you’re the best man I know.”
He squeezed her fingers now, then stopped her as she started to go around the corner.
She hesitated, watching as he studied the surroundings, never losing that sharp attentive look as he searched through the buildings, almost as if he had X-ray vision, seeing what went on inside each one.
“Do you really think he’d come here?”
“I think he has no choice,” Kanen said. “We’re only here to check it out, to make sure nothing else is here that we should know about.”
When he felt it was safe, he took a step forward, tugging her gently along behind him, always protecting her, always keeping his body between her and any assailant. She wondered at that. Was there ever a more certain man born with a protective gene? Was Kanen born with that instinctive need to look after others? She certainly hadn’t been born with it. At that thought, she wondered what kind of a mother she’d make.
For a long time, that was all she’d thought about, but, since Blake had been so against having children, she had tried to not push it too hard.
Apparently she had, though. Blake had struggled with that. And that was sad. She hadn’t wanted to bring him any heartache. Yes, she wanted a family. But she wondered if she could look after her child as well as Kanen looked after her.
Or maybe that was a genetic skill that blossomed when you got pregnant and had a child. She’d never even babysat when she was growing up. She was an only child and had basically been orphaned at a young age. Now she had to wonder about her mothering instincts. Did she have any?
Luckily those thoughts were interrupted as she neared her storage unit. She pulled her key ring from her pocket and found her spare key to open the lock on the door. This was a key lock, not a combination lock. She studied it for a long moment, trying to remember when they’d put it on. And why this kind of a lock versus the other? But she gave up. She had no way to know what was in her husband’s mind at the time.
As she stepped back with the lock in her hand, the men grabbed the handles on either side of the rolling garage door and slowly raised it. She hadn’t been here in a long time and assumed nothing had changed. But, as they flicked on the lights, she realized everything had changed. “I don’t know what all this stuff is,” she said.
“What do you mean?” Nelson stepped forward, blocking her view. She was forced to look at him. “Are you saying this isn’t your unit?”
She looked around him, returning her attention to the contents. “I don’t know. It’s my lock.” She held up the key still in the lock in her hand. “But I don’t remember the unit being this full.” He stepped out of the way as she walked forward, looking at the furniture. “For all I know, Blake, being Blake, might have let somebody else put their stuff in here too.”
“Interesting,” Kanen said. “More questions we should have asked him before he died, huh?”
She didn’t know what to say, but Kanen seemed to have second thoughts about Blake. She spun to look at Kanen. “But you know what Blake was like. If anybody needed anything …”
Kanen nodded. “I do, indeed, know all about that. And it is definitely something he would do. If you only had a portion of this storage unit filled, he would easily help somebody out by offering them the free space.”
“He had the unit before we got married. We stored some stuff in here, but it wasn’t even close to full. You and I moved some stuff here after Blake passed away, … but again it wasn’t this full. Someone put more in here after Blake’s death.” Several narrow walkways seemed to be between items, as if people had been back and forth, among all this stuff. “The thing is, I’m the one with the lock and the key. So, unless somebody has duplicate keys … Well, Bob did force me to give him my spare key, but I didn’t give him the correct unit number.” She studied the couch underneath a few boxes. “I don’t even know whose couch that is,” she said in confusion. “I’ve never seen it before.”
She walked farther down this path and stopped in front of a filing cabinet that was easily accessible, enough room so that the drawers could open. She tried to open one, but it was locked. She glanced back at Kanen. “This isn’t my filing cabinet. And it’s locked.”
He pulled a small tool kit from his back pocket. “It’s your storage unit,” he said, “so let’s find out what’s in here. Maybe it’ll tell us whose stuff is stored here.”
He quickly broke into the filing cabinet. She didn’t even see how he’d done it, he was so fast. She studied the tool kit in his hand, then raised her gaze to his.
He gave her a crooked smile and said, “My SEALs training has offered many avenues for future career potential.” He pulled open the top drawer, finding it full of files.
As she flipped through them, she gasped. “These are all photographs. All of these are photographs.” But they weren’t photographs of people in compromising positions, they were like portrait photos. As they checked the folders, names were on the top. “Are these proofs? So people can call and ask for more copies or something?”
“That’s how it would have been done in the olden days,” Kanen said, “but, with the digital photos now, it’s obviously very different.”
She nodded. “But this points to somebody hanging on to all the old photos.”
“True.”
They went through drawer after drawer after drawer. “These literally are all from one business, Finest Photos,” she said.
“And they’re all old,” Kanen confirmed. “If you look at the dates, they’re all from before 1995, when the poor man was charged with blackmailing his clients and was sentenced to jail.”
She spun around. “None of this makes any sense. Why is this Finest Photos stuff in my storage unit?”
“A question we’d like to ask you ourselves,” said two men from the entrance.
She spun to see the same two MI6 officers who had been at the photographer’s shop. She frowned at them. “Oh, did Kanen tell you we were coming here?”
“Yes, but we should have known about this unit earlier.”
Unbelievably she looked at them. “This is a storage unit my husband and I have. But this isn’t my stuff.”
“Can you prove that?” the first man said, his voice soft.
Her blood froze. “You can’t possibly think I’m involved in this.”
Kanen pulled her closer. “Nobody thinks you’re involved,” he said in a hard voice, his gaze never leaving the two men in front of them. “The agents might try using the element of fear, to see if they can shake some answers out of you, but that obvio
usly won’t work now either. And it’s certainly not a technique I approve of.”
The two men stared back at him, their faces bland.
“Kanen?” she asked, her voice low. “What are they doing here?”
“We’ll all find answers together. Unless,” he firmly said to the men, “you’re planning on charging her with something right now.”
The men measured each other, and then finally the MI6 agents shook their heads. “We came here for answers. We’re not ready to charge anyone yet,” the first man said, but he left that threat hanging in the air.
Kanen felt Laysa tremble in his arms. He held her tight and said, “It’s all good. You’ve done nothing wrong.”
“But what if Blake did?” she whispered in a voice so low and so full of pain that nobody could mistake how the thought hurt her.
“We’re not going there until we have a real reason to,” Kanen said. “Blake was my best friend too. If he was involved in something, we can’t ask him questions because he’s gone. We can only pick up the pieces of what he’s left behind and hope we can sort it out properly.”
The agents came forward. Even though it was cramped in the storage unit, they pulled open a drawer to the filing cabinet and took a look for themselves.
“Don’t look at me,” Laysa snapped at them. “I’m just as confused as you guys are.”
Taylor, from the other side of the unit, said, “Let’s all calm down and start analyzing what we’ve got here. Obviously somebody has used this place for a long time. But why and who? What’s the chance Blake found the bag here and moved it to the gym locker?”
The color drained from her face. “In which case you’re implying my husband was involved in some way.”
He shook his head. “No, only that he found what he thought were incriminating photos and decided to pull them out of the equation. We don’t know anything yet, but I suggest we take the opportunity to find out.”
*
The next hour was spent sorting through as much of the storage unit as possible. There were boxes full of paperwork, which appeared to be all the leftover files, photos, prints and negatives from the grandfather’s chain of stores that closed in 1995. It didn’t help in finding the current owner of this collection, but it was fascinating reading.
One box she got excited about. “It’s all the court documents,” she said. “Look.”
Kanen flipped through the files and realized they were transcripts of the court case, copies of legal documents filed on the man’s behalf. “I’m sure it’s fascinating reading,” he said, “but I’m not sure how important it is to us now.”
“But we know there’s a connection,” she said. “I just don’t know what it is.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Kanen caught a movement. He spun to look at the front entrance. Some of the sunlight was fading, but it was still light enough inside to see clearly.
Leaving her in the middle of all the men, Kanen stepped out to the open side of the storage unit and took a look around. A truck was parked near another unit. The truck bed was open, and people were moving furniture out of the unit into the back of the truck. Taking a chance, Kanen walked around the block of units. There were ten storage units in each of the blocks, five facing one way and another five backed up to the others, facing the other way.
He walked to his right through the back and around to the front, looking for a sign of anybody having been here. But he found no new footprints in the grass, and, from the front, the area appeared to be empty.
As he returned, one of the MI6 guys stepped forward and asked, “Did you see anything?”
Kanen shook his head. “I can’t help feeling we’re being watched anyway.”
“That makes sense. We have two men on watch.”
While Kanen felt much better hearing that, he didn’t like anything else about this. Bob was desperate to get whatever it was he wanted. As far as Kanen was concerned, it was the photos from the gym locker. What he wanted to know was how did the guy know the images had been here? Was it just a lucky guess? Maybe he’d seen them here?
Or … did this come full circle back to the gym manager—Mark?
Kanen pulled out his phone, and, as the MI6 guys worked beside him, he called Mark. “So who did you tell?” he asked without preamble.
Silence loomed for a long moment. “What are you talking about?”
“You heard me. Who did you tell that we’d been to see Blake’s gym locker?”
Chapter 14
She heard Kanen’s voice somewhere in the vicinity of the storage unit’s opening, but she was kind of stuck in the back, busy looking in boxes of paperwork. It was fascinating to think that the entire photography shop business had ended up here. But also made her think Bob had to have been the one to store this here. Who else would have all this material? But none of that explained how this stuff ended up in her storage unit.
With all these thoughts rolling through her head, she wasn’t sure what to think. She looked up, peered around the boxes but saw no sign of Kanen. She turned to Taylor and Nelson and asked, “Where did he go?”
Neither man looked up. “He’s doing a perimeter walk,” one said. “Nothing to worry about,” the other one added.
“Are you sure about that?” she asked. The back of her neck twinged; she didn’t feel anywhere near as confident as they seemed to be.
Nelson looked up and studied her. “What’s the matter?”
“I think something is wrong.” She snapped closed the file in her hand and stormed toward the front of the storage unit. There she looked around but still found no sign of Kanen.
Both Taylor and Nelson joined her. They stopped her from walking outside near the main roadway. “You’re not going after him,” Nelson said, his voice hard. “Let me contact him, and we’ll see what’s up.”
She waited anxiously, her nerves getting the better of her as she waited for Nelson to text Kanen. The problem was, if he was in trouble, he needed to stay hidden, and the ping of texts would give him away. A phone call could be much worse. If Kanen didn’t have his cell on Silent mode, it could put him in a lot of danger.
When there was no answer, Nelson and Taylor exchanged hard glances. They marched her back to the MI6 men. Taylor said, “She stays with you. We’ll look for our friend.”
Instantly the suited men were on alert. “What’s happened?”
“Kanen has disappeared and isn’t answering his phone,” Taylor said.
The men pulled weapons, tucked her behind them and motioned for Taylor and Nelson to go.
She could hardly breathe now. She kept thinking about all the things that could have gone wrong with Kanen. But the agents weren’t interested in listening to her attempts to get them all to go after her friends.
The agents stared at her, their faces bland and hard.
“And what if the other two are walking into a trap?”
“Then they’re walking into a trap,” one agent said.
She wanted to call them Cheech and Chong, just so she had a way to tell him apart. Both men were about five foot, ten inches tall. Both had dark brown hair. Both were long and lean and had a mean look on their faces when they wanted to. Most of the time, they looked like ordinary men. Maybe that was part of the magic of MI6 agents, that they had the ability to be completely unassuming and to blend into a crowd without any discernible, memorable features.
As it was, she wasn’t in any way happy to be left behind. She pretended to go back to looking through the files. And then she smelled something at the rear of the storage unit. She turned and yelled, “Smoke!”
It came from a small hole underneath the storage unit. Suddenly flames shot through the hole.
She watched as the boxes of paperwork caught fire. The men hustled her forward to the front of the unit. She looked at them and said, “You do realize what they’re trying to do, right?”
They didn’t say a word, just shunted her between them and rushed her in between the two blocks of storage units. A
ll of them were accessible from the outside. She presumed these units backed up into other units.
She turned to look at the agents. “Somebody started the fire in the unit behind this one. Go check it out!”
They just crossed their arms over their chests. She glared at them. “Then I will.” She dashed forward. One of the agents tried to grab her and missed. She picked up speed, raced around the corner, counting off the same number of units until she came to the one that backed up to hers.
The door was down. A lock hung on the outside. Swearing to herself, knowing the agents were right on her heels, she went to lift the lock—finding it just resting there, not clicked together—when a bullet pinged into the door above her head. Now she was really in trouble. Someone outside was shooting at her.
She flattened to the ground, noting the fading sunlight. She decided to quickly stand and pop the lock, dropping again to push up the big rolling garage door, enough that she’d get in this adjoining storage unit by crawling underneath the door. She was a sitting duck in the unit, but at least the door was between her and the bullets.
Inside, with the storage unit door about six inches up off the floor, she turned on the light and stared. Wisps of smoke trickled along the back wall, shared by this unit and hers. This unit was almost completely empty, except for a desk that had been set up like an office. As she inspected the bulletin boards around the desk, she realized this was more of a central station, a control room, so to speak. Whoever was doing this had used this particular storage unit as his base for whatever his plans were. How strange. But it also meant he knew she was in here, and, with the light on, she was beyond just a sitting duck. If he didn’t get to her, the smoke would soon enough.
She quickly moved to the desk to see if there was anything of interest. There were pictures of gyms. Pictures of weightlifters. Even a picture of her beloved husband.
She reached out with two fingers and stroked his face. It had to have been taken close to a year ago, just before he died. He’d had a mustache then. It had been a relatively new look for him, and this picture showed him with one. She didn’t understand why Bob, the photographer, her assailant, had these gym photos. Unless Bob really had met my husband at the gym?