by Sam JD Hunt
Rex held up his hand, “No, you can’t do that. I want you safe and out of prison. Let me handle it my way. I’m going to have a couple of federal agents I know watch over you. Get some rest, and watch that concussion.”
Al gave me a firm hug and a kiss on the forehead before we left. “Penelope, are you sure you don’t want to stay here where it’s safe?”
“Not a chance,” I answered without hesitation. Rex looked over at us. “She’s stronger than all of us. I need her help to find them.”
*****
From a nearby hotel room, Rex got to work within minutes. “Hey, yeah, it’s me, Roger.” There was a pause before he said, “I know, I know, it’s been too long. I’ve missed your beautiful face.” I glared at him. He winked at me and said to the woman he was flirting with, “How are the grandkids? Is Blake still playing for Syracuse?” I smiled at him and shrugged. “I know, we’ll have dinner soon. How is Fred? Is he still working for The Company too?”
The Company? Rex is so full of secrets, I thought.
“Sorry to hear about that. Minor heart attacks at his age are common; hopefully he recovers quickly.” There was another pause as he listened, then he answered, “Yeah, I hate to ask, but I need a couple of geo locations,” he said. “I know, I know. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. I’ll owe you one,” he said to the voice on the other end of the line. “Yes, ma’am, I’ll owe you a trip to the spa, then. Here are the echoes,” he said before slowly relaying both Nate’s and Amber’s cell numbers. “I don’t have a day, Betty, I need that information now. Please, it’s a matter of life or death to me,” Rex paced the floor as he talked. “Okay, but call me as soon as you have it. And, yeah, I’ll settle down soon and have babies, I promise.”
He hung up and plopped down into a chair, his phone resting on his knee. “Wait,” I said, “you’re trying to trace cellphones? How can you do that?” He squinted at me. “I’m not answering that, Princess. I’ll pull in every favor, break any rule, and trample everyone who gets in the way of finding our Nate—that’s all you need to know.”
Within minutes, his phone buzzed. “Betty, yeah, you’re a goddess,” he said, hopping out of the chair and grabbing a notepad and pen from the desk drawer. “Got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve also got the name of the spa I’m sending you to. Thanks! What about the other one?” He paused, his expression puzzled as he listened to his contact on the phone. “That is whacked out. Thank you, ma’am, we’ll talk soon.” He ended the call and looked over at me excitedly. “Let’s go.” I grabbed my bag and slid my shoes on.
“You found him?”
He gestured to the door, “I found his phone. It’s a start.”
We drove an hour in our rental car to a gated mansion on the outskirts of Durham, North Carolina. “Now this looks like Nate’s style,” I said. Rex thought for a minute, glancing up at the surveillance camera watching us. “How do we sneak in?” I asked.
He flicked a button and rolled down his window, pressing a call button on the wall. “We don’t. I think here we’ll go with the more direct method,” he said.
We sat in the car for at least five nervous minutes, but there was never an answer from the speaker box. Instead, the heavy gate opened, and with a shrug, Rex drove toward the sprawling house.
Within seconds, we were surrounded by men with automatic rifles. “Stay calm, baby,” Rex said to me before throwing his hands into the air and nodding at the guards. A man in a dark suit opened the driver’s door and gestured for Rex to exit.
“Stay in the car, sweetheart,” the man said to me. Rex turned around and faced the car without being told to—I could hear his palms land on the roof. From the passenger seat, I could only see from the middle of Rex’s chest to his waist. I gulped nervously as the suit man patted him down and pulled the Glock from Rex’s waistband.
The man then asked, “Is your lady armed?”
Rex’s chest rose, and then fell before he calmly answered, “Uh, I’m not sure. Probably—she’s a firecracker, that one.”
The suited man laughed—which seemed so odd to me that they were sharing a joke in this tense situation.
“Penny, do you have any weapons in that designer handbag?” Rex asked, his face dipping down into the driver’s side window. He smiled at me, and gave a quick nod, meaning he wanted me to tell the truth.
“Um, well, I have a knife and pepper spray,” I said.
The suited man’s head leaned down into the window next to Rex’s, his shiny dark hair flopping over his face. “No worries, Miss,” he said, “we all have that shit.” He held out his hand. “I apologize, but may I ask to have a look through your bag?”
I was completely confused. We were at some mansion Rex tracked Nate’s phone to, and being held at gunpoint. Why was everyone acting so calm? As if this were normal? I handed the man my purse as the answer hit me, filling me with both relief and dread. This was normal, in this world. Drugs—it had to be about drugs. Rex had spent most of his adult life navigating this world—he knew immediately what was going on and how to behave. It all clicked into place as I looked up at the mansion in front of us. My heart broke for Nate.
“Enough formalities,” the suited man said. “Who are you, and what the fuck do you want?”
Rex leaned against the side of the car. “I’m Roger Renton, and this is Penny Sedgewick. We’re looking for our friend Nathaniel Slater.”
“That’s all?” the man asked. “Why do you want him?”
There was a tense pause before Rex answered, “Because we’re in love with him. He belongs to me.”
I let out a small gasp at hearing Rex speak the truth to this stranger. “Fair enough,” the man said, as if Rex had just said the most normal thing in the world, “but he’s not here.”
“You know him?” Rex asked.
“We’ve met, but I haven’t seen him in years. Turn around and go home, Roger and Penny.”
“Listen, I don’t want any trouble. His phone is here. Any chance I could get it?”
The man sighed and glanced at me, then back to Rex. “No,” he said flatly, “go home.”
Rex stood up straight and looked into the man’s dark eyes. “We’ll go after we talk to Michael.”
The man twitched with the first sign of nervousness I’d seen from him. “Mr. Pinson doesn’t see visitors unannounced,” he said, twisting a ring on his ring hand.
“Tell Michael that Colonel Rex Renton would love a quick word with him.”
The suited man glanced over at the five men still pointing machine guns at us. “Watch them,” he said before walking to the side of the pavement and pulling out his cell phone. After a few minutes, he walked back to the car. With an annoyed glance at Rex, he gestured toward the house. “Mr. Pinson will see you now.”
We walked in front of him, the group of guns following behind the suited man. I whispered to Rex as the heavy oak door opened in front of us, “How did you know who lived here?”
Rex put his arm around my waist and said, “We go way back. He’s from Medellin. Just be respectful, and quiet.”
We were led through the opulent mansion into a library where an obese man sat behind a desk that took up half the room. He stood up when we entered. “Thank you, Dante, that will be all,” he said to the suited man.
“But sir,” Dante began, but was cut off by the man clearing his throat in warning. “Yes, sir,” Dante said before turning to leave the room.
The man walked over and vigorously shook Rex’s hand. “Holy shit, Colonel, imagine seeing you again!” My head spun. This man, bald with rough skin, had to be over four hundred pounds.
“Michael! I see you’re doing well. Please call me Rex,” he said to the man as if they were old friends.
“Please, sit.” Michael gestured toward a leather loveseat in front of the desk. I could hear him wheeze as he strained to breathe before he fell into his oversized desk chair.
“I hope nothing is wrong with my family,” Michael said as he attempted to lean
forward.
“No, no, they’re fine. I had to let Maria go last year, sadly. There were some issues caused by my late wife, Evelyn,” Rex said.
It was petty and jealous, but I hated that he called her his wife rather his ex-wife. They were divorced when she died trying to kill us both.
“I heard about her unfortunate demise,” Michael said, “I’m very sorry.”
The room was silent until Rex spoke again. “This is Penelope Sedgewick. We’re here for Nathaniel Slater’s phone—he’s very dear to us.”
The man pulled open a drawer at the side of his desk and pulled out a black iPhone. “It’s nice to meet you, Miss Sedgewick,” he said to me before looking toward Rex in confusion. “The battery is completely dead, how did you track it?”
Rex sighed and shrugged, never answering the question.
Michael, accepting he wasn’t going to get an answer, slid the phone across the desk. “Listen, Colonel, I don’t want any trouble. I didn’t know this Slater guy had anything to do with you and your line of work. The phone was left at the place of business of one of my under-soldiers in the Wilson area.”
Rex shot me a quick glance, then turned his attention back to Michael. “So Nate was at a drug house and left his phone there? Why would they bring it all the way up to you?”
Michael answered, “They knew who he was—a rich young billionaire. They took his phone hoping to find something on it to blackmail him with. I wanted to be the first to have a look, but haven’t had the time to charge it yet. It only arrived here last evening.”
Rex nodded. “Thanks, Michael, I appreciate your candor. This is personal with Slater and me, not business. Let me have the phone, keep my visit here quiet, and I’d be happy to show our gratitude when I get back home to Colombia.”
The large man glanced at a framed map on the wall—a map of Colombia. “I miss it,” he said with longing, “and I respect that you fell in love with it. North Carolina is lovely, but it isn’t home.”
Rex slipped Nate’s phone into his pocket and looked back up at Michael, “It’s been years since I’ve lived here, but no, it isn’t.”
I’d forgotten that Rex was stationed a few hours from here before he retired from the military.
“Thank you, Michael, we need to go. I’m worried about our friend.”
The man pushed up on the desktop with his palms, hoisting his rotund body up to his feet. He extended his hand again to Rex, and then to me, and walked us out toward the front door where the suited man, Dante, was waiting. Dante handed Rex his gun before opening the front door.
“Hey Colonel,” Michael said as we walked away, “are you still best friends with that green-eyed crazy fucker, Luther?” Rex turned toward Michael and shook his head, a look of sadness clouding his eyes, before he turned back toward the car, taking my hand and helping me into the passenger seat.
He was silent as we drove back to the freeway toward our hotel in Wilson, Nate’s small hometown. “That was crazy,” I said finally, unable to contain my wonder any longer.
“I mean, like you knew that guy? That whole thing was off the hook.”
Rex turned on the radio, a sure sign that he didn’t want to talk about it. When we were on the freeway, he pulled out Nate’s phone. “Do you have a charging cable? Let’s fire this thing up,” he said. I dug through my purse until I found one and connected Nate’s phone to the port in the dashboard. We nervously waited to see the Apple logo light up on the screen.
“What about Amber’s phone?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah, somehow it’s blocked, scrambled.”
“So she ditched it? Got a burner,” I said, once again drawing on my knowledge of television police dramas.
“A burner,” he chuckled, “no, the phone is live, in use, but not traceable.”
He glanced down at Nate’s phone, now charged enough to start up.
“Is it locked? Scroll through his texts,” Rex said, as anxious as I was.
“Uh, yeah, but I know his code.”
As I started through the texts, most were from me. It hurt to see them, but it hurt even more when I got to the ones from Rex. They started soft, then got angry, then, the ones that tore me open the most, were the last ones—they were desperate, begging Nate to answer, to come home. Then, on the day Rex sent me away, the texts from Rex stopped.
I wiped away tears as I switched to the ones from Amber.
“That guy, Michael,” Rex began, his eyes on the road, “he’s a drug dealer here, but he stays in the lines, DEA doesn’t mess with him much. He’s local shit, not anything we cared about. But, he’s from Medellin. His sister got wrapped up in some ugly shit in, I forget, Panama maybe, and we helped him out. Raided the dude who raped her, a major dealer who we did have an issue with. Luther and I brought his sister back to him here in North Carolina, we were over at Bragg then. We got to talking further, his family lives near us. Maria is his cousin. Anything on the phone that’s useful?” He nodded toward the phone in my lap. “Not that I can find. I do see a text from Amber telling Nate that Kip is looking for her, and that she’s afraid. She said she left our place to go be with this new boyfriend of hers, she calls him RLV.”
“RLV?” Rex asked.
“Yeah, she just uses those initials for him.”
“No locations?”
“No, not after she says she’s going home to stay at their dad’s place.”
“Uh, look and see who he called. I’ll take a better look at the phone when we get back to the hotel,” Rex said as we exited the freeway.
In our hotel room, the same fairly simple place we stayed when Nate’s mother was in the hospital, I kicked off my shoes, turned on the TV, and poured a glass of wine from a tiny bottle in the minibar. Rex was busy with Nate’s phone—he was going through all of the internet searches Nate did from the time right after he left us until the phone was taken. “This is odd,” Rex said over his shoulder.
“What is?”
“Nate was emailing with Luther after I kicked him out. Nothing important, but I didn’t realize they were close. Nate said that one time Luther emailed him, the one I saw that he wouldn’t elaborate on. But this looks like…” Rex ran his hands through his hair and went silent, reading the emails, I presumed.
“Looks like what?” I asked, anxious.
“Well, they were talking a lot after Luther left. Uh, it looks like Luther… Shit, that sick fucker was dropping hints that I would be happier with just you. He’s too subtle to say it outright, but he was steering Nate that way. He tries in here to explain away everything—swears he never tried to hurt you, asks to meet up with Nate to explain the camera-thing. Standard Luther mind-game shit, but I’m shocked Nate was giving it any attention.” Rex leaned back in his chair. “The emails between them seem to have stopped when Nate left. Luther emailed him twice, but Nate didn’t answer.”
“I don’t understand why Luther was messing with Nate’s head like that. What was it to him?”
Rex didn’t answer, and just as I was about to press him further, his own phone buzzed. He gave me the just a minute sign and answered the call. “Oh hey, Father—did the news of my mortal sins spread all the way to your holy ears?” Rex laughed as he listened to the caller for a moment, then went silent, the color draining from his face. “Shit, Dan, you’re the best, I owe you big time. Yeah, again,” Rex said excitedly. He waved toward our luggage, and gave me the “gather it up” sign. “I will, I’ll be careful. Cheers, bro.” He flicked the call off and smiled wide at me. “So do you remember Father Bowen? A friend of his, another special ops guy who was there with him the night Evelyn was shot, saw Nate in Miami today.” If a heart could actually jump for joy, mine did at that moment. “Let’s go!” I squealed, gathering up my things as quickly as I could. Rex’s face lit up as he packed up his laptop and Nate’s phone, the only things he’d unpacked.
The drive back to the airport felt like it took forever—I was desperate to find Nate. I booked our flight from my phone while Rex dro
ve, his fingers nervously tapping on the steering wheel.
“Do we have a plan?” I asked as I booked a hotel.
“Well, this guy saw Nate at a club in South Beach, so let’s start there. Fortunately for us, people tend to notice the beautiful Nathaniel Slater, so we’ll ask around.”
As Rex drove, I thought back to the night I met Father Daniel Bowen, a special ops guy who worked with Rex fighting drug dealers in the jungles and cities of Colombia.
“I can’t believe he’s an actual priest,” I said aloud.
“Dan? It’s not that odd. I mean Monk is a monk.”
I looked at him in disbelief. “You’re shittin’ me.”
He pointed one finger at me. “I hate you swearing, Princess. I might need to spank you again,” he said with a wink.
Major Bowen, as he was also known, was the one who’d rescued me, along with the badly injured Rex, from a drug kingpin’s estate over a year ago when Rex’s ex-wife, Evelyn, shot him several times. I killed her with Rex’s gun, but Major Bowen claimed he did. The official report of that night shows a very different story than what really happened.
“Penny, I’ve been thinking about what you said about marriage, you know, proposing to Nate,” Rex said, reaching to turn the radio down.
“So you’ll do it?”
“Uh, no. It doesn’t seem right.”
I was furious. “Jesus Rex! When are you going to get past your fear of—”
“Please don’t use that as a swear word, baby, okay? It’s not that. I want to marry Nate, be joined with him, spend the rest of my life with him, raise a family with him—the whole thing. It’s just I also want that with you, and so does he. And, I hope, you want that with both of us.”
“I do,” I said, unsure where he was headed.
“Well, we can’t all three be legally married, it’s just not ever going to happen. I hate the idea of two of us being legal, the others not. It doesn’t sit right with me. But I was thinking of asking Dan to come out and do something for the three of us. It won’t be legal, or officially Catholic, but I’m all right with that.” Rex looked over at me, scanning my face for some sort of approval.