by Tara Wylde
I cock my head and strain my ears. “I don’t hear anything, but I guess there’s only one way to know for certain.”
“Right,” Ronan agrees. He casts another glance at the door. “And even if there is someone in there with the parrots, we have the element of surprise on our side.”
I really don’t know if that is going to actually work in our favor, but I am tired of crouching on the floor behind this damned plane. I don’t know why, but the longer I’m in the hangar, the more creeped out I get.
Ronan starts to move but I put a hand on his arm, stopping him. “Wait a minute. Just to be clear. We’re going to go in. Find out once and for all whether the box contains stolen macaws. And get out and call the police. Right?”
“Sounds like a plan,” Ronan agree. “But we’ll have to stick close to this place until the police get here.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Because we don’t want Canton to come back and take the birds before the police get here.”
For the sake of my rapidly fraying nerves, I decide that hanging out and waiting for the police is something that can be done from outside this place.
“Fine,” I say. “Let’s get this over with.”
Cassie
We got lucky with the hangar door, but are less fortunate with the office. It’s locked up tight.
Ronan rattles the door knob a second time.
“What was that for?” I mutter. “Did you think the ghosts that probably haunt this place decided to unlock the door for you?”
My sarcasm doesn’t faze Ronan. “They would if they liked rare parrots.”
“Since the room is still locked, I think it’s safe to assume that they don’t.”
“Probably.” Ronan glances at my hair. “I don’t suppose you have a bobby pin stuck somewhere in your hair, do you?”
I smirk at him. “Sorry, I’m not a bobby pin kind of girl.”
Ronan heaves a long-suffering sigh. “That’s what I was afraid of.”
He digs his wallet out of the back pocket of his uniform and opens it. After a second, he pulls out a gas station rewards card.
“Silver lining. We know that no one is in there,” I point out.
“True.” He returns the wallet to his pocket before sliding the edge of the credit card into the door’s lock.
“You actually know how to do that? I’m impressed.”
“I did know how to do this.” Ronan stares hard at the lock and moves the credit card with short, precise movements. “The same aunt who taught me how to fly also taught me how to pick locks. Claimed it was a skill everyone should have, though this is the first time I’ve actually needed it. There.” A wide grin spreads across his face. He reaches out and turns the door knob. The door springs open. “And I didn’t even break the card.”
“Someday, I want you to teach me how to do that.” I grope along the wall beside the door until I find a light switch. Two bare bulbs, one on either side of the space, click on.
It’s a small room, about fifteen feet by ten feet. The bare concrete has a few miscellaneous stains. Several empty boxes are on one side of the space. The crate we saw being loaded in and out of the airplane is opposite us.
Behind us, the door clicks shut.
I stare at the crate. It’s about four feet wide and about as tall as Ronan’s six foot two. A row of small holes have been drilled on the top and halfway up the front.
“They left them in the crate,” I whisper. I’d expected to find the birds in a large cage where they’d at least have good ventilation, not still locked in a dark depressing box.
“Which means they don’t care as much about the bird’s welfare as they should or I’m wrong and they didn’t steal the macaws, or that’s not what’s in the box.” Ronan starts walking across the room to the crate.
I follow close at his heels. “’But if the macaws aren’t in there, why are they being so secretive with this box? There has to be a reason they dragged it all the way out here and locked it into this room.”
Ronan nods grimly. “You’re right. Whatever is in that thing can’t be legal.”
We reach the crate and Ronan uses his gas station rewards card to unlock the crate’s latch. Both of us hold our breath as he slowly opens the door. A half-eaten, mostly brown apple rolls out of the crate.
Ronan opens the door a little wider and gasps. “Shit.”
Heart pounding so hard I’m afraid it’s going to burst out of my chest, I take a long step backwards. “What?”
“We were partly right,” Ronan says, continuing to stare into the box. “There aren’t any macaws in this thing.”
“Then what is in there?”
Cassie
I peer over Ronan’s shoulder.
A piece of plywood is installed in the very middle of the crate, dividing the interior into two sections. Hanging upside down from the top of both sections are the biggest bats I’ve ever seen.
Their bodies are as long as my arm, their faces are distinctly canine-like in appearance, and their leathery wings are completely wrapped around their bodies in a way that reminds me of Dracula. The group contained on the bottom are larger in side. Their bodies are covered in thick hair that’s black with russet ends. The top half of the crate contains bats that are a lighter brown color and have pale, fawn colored rings around their eyes that creates the illusion that they’re wearing glasses.
Each bat has its eyes closed and appears to be sleeping.
They’re bunched up tight, so it’s difficult to count, but I’m guessing there are at least thirty bats in the crate.
“They aren’t real, are they?” I ask. Maybe instead of an exotic animal smuggling ring that we expected to find, we’ve actually uncovered something to do with weird, realistic-looking stuffed animal toys.
“I hope not.” Ronan does a full body shudder. “I’ve never liked bats.”
It’s like his words flip some sort switch in the crate. Two of the bats’ eyes, which seem to take up a large portion of their faces, pop open.
Ronan yelps and springs backwards. He crashes into me, knocking my feet out from under me and I fall to floor. My butt hits the ground with a bone-jarring, teeth-snapping thud.
“Oh my God, Cassie.” Ronan drops to his knees beside me. He runs his hands all over my upper body. “Are you okay? I didn’t mean to … that thing opened its eyes, and I just reacted.”
“My ass is going to be nice and bruised tomorrow,” I tell him, “but otherwise I’m just fine. I guess that answered my question about whether they’re real or not.”
A shrill chattering sound fills the office. Ronan and I watch as one of the bats confined to the upper level of the crate unfurls its long wings. Its long toes release its grip from the top of the crate. For a split second, it falls but than its wings catch the air and it starts to fly. The other bats follow suit until all thirty are airborne. The space is too small for the animals, whose wingspan must be close to six feet across.
One flies so close I get a clear glimpse of its sharply pointed incisors and a horrifying thought occurs to me.
“Um, Ronan?”
“Yeah?” He doesn’t sound like he’s handling being trapped in a room with this many flying bats well.
“Do you know if these are vampire bats?”
There’s a long pause as Ronan tries to process the possibility that we might be trapped in a room with angry bats that suck human blood.
“I damn well hope not,” he finally responds. He grabs a box, rips it apart and rolls the cardboard into a long tube which he holds like a baseball bat. “But I’m not letting any get close enough to find out.”
The shrill sound of their chattering makes my brain hurt. If I wasn’t hearing it firsthand, I’d never have believed a group of bats, not even bats the size of winged dogs, could make so much noise.
“Why the hell would anyone ship a bunch of bats?” Ronan half shouts in order to be heard over the animals.
“Money,” a voice yells from the opposite
side of the room. “That’s why.”
As one, Ronan and I turn to see Lynette, Paul Canton, Bruno Garrick and a few others I recognize as being Northwest executives but can’t remember their names, standing near the office door. We’ve been so distracted by the enormous monster sized bats, we failed to notice the door opening.
Bruno’s and my eyes meet. His face contorts into a sneer.
“Get them out of here,” he demands.
Cassie
Paul Canton and a sandy-haired, heavyset man crouch low to avoid the swooping, crying bats. My heart races and my hands cover my belly in an instinctive attempt to hide the child that might be nested there.
My eyes dart around the office, desperately searching for another escape route, but there aren’t any. And despite my natural inclination to fight, there’s no point. I’m outnumbered. It’s better to conserve my energy.
The sandy haired man grabs Ronan, and Paul wraps a large hand around my upper arm, levering me to my feet and forcing me to march toward the door. The bats continue flapping around the room, a few barely missing hitting me as they search for an escape route.
The crowd at the door backs out of the way just enough for our captors to force us through. They shut the door before any of the bats escape.
Bruno draws a Glock from his pocket and points the deadly hole in the barrel right at my chest. Lynette does the same, aiming her gun at Ronan. Bruno’s gun doesn’t bother me as much as hers. I want to place myself between Ronan and the gun.
As much as I want to protect him, that doesn’t stop me from being irritated that he’s put both of us in this position. I shoot him an angry glare. “I said we needed a better plan than ‘follow the crate’, but you couldn’t be bothered to listen.”
“Money?” Ronan asks, sounding as if he faces angry exotic animal smugglers and their guns every single day of the week. “Who the hell pays for bats? And where the hell did you find monster bats?”
“The bats are black flying foxes and spectacled flying fox bats. They’re native to Australia. These are juveniles, just old enough for their mothers to leave while they go hunting, making them easy to catch,” Lynette explains. “They’re endangered but since many people find them a nuisance, taking some for our own purposes isn’t difficult. And as for who pays for bats, there are a lot of people in this world that will. I have five different buyers lined up, and a few more will come out of the woodwork and make a generous offer once word gets out that they’re here in the States.”
“Smuggling animals was your idea, Lynette?” I don’t know why, but it never occurred to me that a woman would be the mastermind in such a plan.
Lynette shakes her head. “Not entirely, no.” She nods at Bruno, who is still leering at me. “Bruno was already involved in the trade, though on a much smaller scale.”
“I matched buyers up with large cats and other exotics that had already been smuggled here. Pretty good money,” Bruno tells us, “but nothing compared to what we’re making now. Lynette is the one who came up with the idea of purchasing an airline and actually smuggling the animals into the country. She financed the operation. I put together a crew.” His gaze bores into Ronan. “It took us a little while to get things rolling, but for the past few years, we’ve been making a very tidy profit, and no one has been none the wiser until you started poking your nose into things.”
Ronan crosses his arms over his chest and studies Bruno. “You didn’t randomly stumble upon us in this hangar. How’d you know we were here?”
“The two of you are idiots,” Lynette pipes up. “I have cameras in my office. I knew you saw my computer files and that you thought I was embezzling. I’m not, by the way. I just do some creative money shuffling from time to time to help hide what our side business brings in.”
“The fact that you’re also Ronan James Smith, of Texas’s famous Smith family, and working for a tiny, floundering airline also told us something,” Bruno adds.
I struggle to wrap my mind around this latest bit of information. I’ve heard of James Smith. It’s impossible to live in this part of the state and not have heard about him. He has quite a reputation as a playboy and slacker. According to the media, the only thing he is interested in is women, fast cars, and spending his daddy’s money. I don’t remember hearing one word of him being a pilot.
My hand moves to my lower belly, covering the place where I might be carrying a child-Ronan’s child. All this time, I’ve thought Ronan was a stand-up guy, gradually accepting that not only was he a guy I could trust, but even love, yet he’s been lying to me the entire time. And if he lied to me about his identity, what else was he lying about?
If we somehow make it through this situation, how am I supposed to trust him again?
“We’ve been planning this shipment of flying fox bats for weeks.” Lynette’s words draw my attention away from Ronan’s betrayal and back to the current predicament. “Once we realized that the two of you suspected me of embezzling and that you thought Northwest’s problems ran deeper, we realized that the shipment provided us with the means to smoke you out.”
Bruno chuckles. “It was pathetically easy. I can’t believe how easily you took the bait. As soon as we saw the pair of you take off on your little scooter to follow Paul and the bats, we knew what we had to do.”
Beside me, Ronan tenses.
“What do you mean, you knew what you have to do?” he asks.
Ronan
Just when I think things have gotten as bad as they can be, I learn I’m very wrong.
Cassie was right, I was in no way shape or form ready to take on a ring of exotic animal smugglers. I thought it would be easy. I never dreamt things could go so sideways. On more than one occasion, my Aunt Evie has said something about how I plunge into things without thinking about possible consequences.
I slide a sideways glance at Cassie. She’s staring at Bruno, her chin lifted at a defiant angle, her jaw set, fury dancing in her eyes.
She’s magnificent. The most amazing woman I’ve ever met. From the second she first spoke to me, I’ve been steadily falling deeper and deeper in love with her, blindly hoping she’d sometime return even a sliver of those feelings. And I thought she had.
“If you’re not going to use that thing—” Cassie nods at the gun in Bruno’s hand. “—then you should put it away. Looking at it is getting on my nerves.”
Bruno flushes and pulls his lips back, exposing his teeth. “And you’ve spent the past three years strutting around this place, acting like you’re better than everyone else, refusing to give me or any other man the time of day. Least not till he”–Bruno jerks his chin in my direction—“came along. What’s so special about him anyway, other than he’s got more money than King Midas?”
“Until thirty seconds ago, I thought he was just another pilot,” Cassie says.
She throws a sideways look my way. Hurt and anger swirl together in her eyes.
The sharp knife of guilt rams into my heart. All along I knew I was going to have to reveal my true identity, but I’d always planned on doing so in a manner that would make the truth easier for Cassie to swallow, in a way that would convince her that even though I’ve kept a secret from her, she doesn’t need to worry about me doing so ever again.
Now, unless some miracle occurs in the next ten seconds or so, I’ll never get the chance to even attempt to make things right, to convince her to see the situation from my side of the fence.
“Bullshit,” Bruno hisses. “Not for a single second do I believe you didn’t realize who you’ve been fucking.”
“Enough,” Lynette bellows. “What are we going to do with them?”
“There’s enough crap in here,” Paul Canton says, “that we could shoot them in here and stash the bodies in some of the junk and no one would ever find them.”
“Or we could promise to never say a word about this to anyone and walk away from Northwest forever,” I counteroffer.
Lynette, Bruno, Paul, and the two still unident
ified goons stare at me like I’ve lost my mind. Truthfully, I’m not so certain I haven’t.
“How stupid do you think we are?” Bruno says.
I decide to let the question slide.
I focus my attention on Lynette, hoping that as the only woman in the group, she’ll be more swayable than the men. Plus, I sense that she’s the one running this whole exotic animal smuggling thing. Bruno might think he’s the brains of the operation, but I suspect that’s just because she lets him.
“Letting us go would be a lot less messy than shooting us, plus you wouldn’t have to worry about the sound of gunfire bringing everyone running.”
Lynette snorts. “Boy, if it was up to me, we’d slit both of your throats and feed you to the lovely pair of breeding tigers we acquired last week. It’d be cheaper than feeding them beef.”
My stomach quivers at the thought. So much for thinking women don’t like messy murders. Beside me, Cassie goes pale. She clutches her stomach. Obviously, the thought of being tiger food has reaggravated her upset stomach.
Lynette glances around the hangar. “I think Paul is right. We should dispose of them here.”
Sweat races down my back. I try to make my mind work, to come up with something that will get Cassie and me out of this situation, but my brain has shut down.
“I don’t want to drag the bodies farther than necessary,” Bruno argues. “Let’s make them walk to the back of the hangar.”
As much as I hate the idea of being marched at gun point in order to make things easier for the people who fully intend on shooting me, I also feel a faint glimmer of hope. Considering how much junk is stored in this hangar, there’s a chance that I might see something I can use to protect me and Cassie.
“Fine,” Lynette says. She waves her gun in a get moving gesture. “Move it.”
Eyes scanning the piles of stuff in search of something useful, I start to turn. Cassie has a completely different plan. She glares at Bruno, her expression mutinous.