“Probably?”
“Most likely,” I corrected.
She sighed and sat back in her chair regarding all of us. She reached over and dragged the appetizer plate closer, selecting one of the small pieces. “Any of your people get hurt?”
“Nothing we can’t handle...thanks to you.”
“When you called I figured you could use an extra hand.”
“You figured right,” Q confirmed. “We were hosed.”
“I saw that,” she confirmed. “There wasn’t anything I could do for you,” she said to Amber.
“I can take care of myself,” Amber said tightly, feeling her own brand of competitiveness with the new arrival.
“Sergei’s disappeared,” Anita continued. “Miami Metro thinks he skipped town.”
“He’s not far away,” I guessed, “and we have a plan to bring him back.”
“Why do I think I’m going to regret this?”
“Do you still keep in touch with your friend back in D.C.?” I asked, changing the subject.
“We haven’t talked in a while,” she admitted, “but there’s no hard feelings.”
“He could probably use some time in the sun about now, don’t you think?”
The hostess materialized and announced we had another guest. Behind her, using a modified walker instead of his wheelchair, was Deek. He made his way up to the table, surprised to see Anita there. But on the grand scale of our weird shit-o-meter that barely got a reading, so he sat down anyway.
“Arriveth the pervert,” Anita guessed.
“I know who you are but we’ve never been properly introduced,” Deek grinned.
“We should probably keep it that way for as long as possible,” she replied. “Besides, what’s your code name going to mean to me?”
Deek’s smile never wavered. “Fine with me; you’re the one missing out.”
“You brought us a present,” I said, noting the bulging bag on the front of his walker.
“I’m a poor Santa Claus,” he admitted. “I wasn’t expecting company,” he said with a grin Anita’s way. He extracted a long, thin box and passed it over.
I flipped open the lid and inside were four shiny new earpieces. “Oh, nice,” I said, extracting one of the small buds and passing the box over to Q. These were about half the size of our old ones.
“As you can see they’re smaller and lighter,” Deek began, “but they have a longer battery life and a longer range.”
“There’s no charger port,” Q observed.
“You just lay them on their charging pad,” Deek explained.
“And they’ll work in Miami,” I guessed.
“From Jacksonville to Key West,” Deek confirmed. “I’m still working on the west side of the state but should have that contract by the end of the month.”
“What else you got?” I asked.
“New phones,” he grinned, pulling three out of his bag and passing them around. “These look and act like regular phones but have special features behind biometric locks. End to end encryption, secure email, advanced facial recognition that’s so good you can pan your camera around a room and it will automatically start tagging people.”
I powered my phone up and it did look like a regular phone. Deek showed me where the biometric scanner was and that opened a hidden panel with the really interesting apps. I tried the facial recognition app by panning it around the room. Little boxes appeared around people’s faces as I panned. Some names popped up immediately, others took a minute and the longer it had to work, the more names it filled in.
The couple in the next booth turned out to be a doctor and a very friendly woman most definitely not his wife. After a minute the device indicated she was a pharmaceutical rep and former Miss Kansas. By tapping on a particular person the app started collating all the public information we had access to about that person. In the doctor’s case in mere seconds I had his name, address, specialty practice, office location, and pictures of his family. The longer it worked the deeper the data, one of the menu items that appeared was travel history. I tapped that and discovered he had recently flown to Atlanta. It was freaking amazing.
“You should stop by the warehouse later,” I suggested. “If you like this,” I waggled the phone, “then you’re going to love what we got.”
Amber pretended to take a picture of Deek but actually scanned the table behind him.
“I could have made a lot of money with this phone,” she marveled. To prove it she went over to the table and asked one of the women if she was the Mrs. Carmichael who taught freshman English at Palm Beach Community College.
“You probably don’t remember me, but I loved your class,” Amber beamed.
“Oh, thank you!” the woman gushed. She introduced her husband and friends in an instant bonding moment. In Amber’s days as Heather that capability would have been a goldmine for a hooker. After a minute of happy patter she excused herself and returned to the table.
“That’s freaking awesome,” she concluded, echoing our thoughts. “You did alright, pervert,” she said to Deek, patting him on the arm.
“Wait until you see what it can do once it’s fully integrated with the beta site,” he informed. “Speaking of which, the beta site is the new alpha and we’re building a new beta.”
I could well imagine the price tag for that development and I had to remind myself that creative destruction was an essential component of capitalism.
“Hey, you sure you want to have this discussion now?” Deek asked.
“I think he means me,” Anita Guerrero picked up.
“We invited her to join the team,” I pointed out.
“That hasn’t been decided yet,” she added quickly.
“My work here is done anyway,” Deek said, standing to leave. “Maybe I’ll stop by the warehouse on the way back, make sure the guys got everything set up. Nice to meet you in person, Marshal Guerrero.”
“Wish I could say the same,” she smiled.
“I’ll grow on you,” Deek grinned.
“Is there a treatment?” she joked. We all got a laugh out of that one.
“See you later, pervert,” Amber stood up to give him a kiss on the cheek.
Deek made his painful way through the narrow spaces between the tables and the rest of us ordered dinner. I encouraged Anita to stick around and eat with us so we could go over the rest of the plan.
The food and wine flowed and by the end of dinner Marshal Guerrero seemed a little more comfortable with the plan.
“What the fuck?” she said at length. “You can only get fired once.”
“But you can get prosecuted over and over,” Q reminded her.
“Thanks for reminding me,” she panned.
“Think your friend will go along?” I asked.
“I don’t see he has much choice,” she conceded. “He’s really not a bad guy once you get past the bullshit exterior. He’s screwed anyway if this doesn’t work.”
Fred showed up just in time for dessert and was similarly surprised that the Anita Guerrero was still there.
“Anita, could you do me a favor and drop my associates off downtown?” I asked. “The three of us have some business to discuss,” I said, nodding at Amber.
Fred got a brownie and we finished our desserts as Q, V and Anita made their way out.
“Well, here we are,” Amber sighed.
“I already went over the personnel issues with her,” I explained.
“I’ll be honest,” Fred began, “I’d hate to lose you.”
“High praise,” I observed. “I could count the number of people on that list on one hand, and that goes back as long as I’ve known Fred.”
“Which is a long damn time,” he added.
“In that case I’m sorry,” she said to me. My heart sank but part of me knew she’d be safer on the Star with Fred than she’d ever be in ops.
“But you’re stuck with me,” she continued. “I’m sorry, Fred, I’m staying with ops,” she said tur
ning back to him and giving him a big hug.
“Well, that’s disappointing,” he said.
“One of us was going to be disappointed,” I reminded him.
“I was really hoping it would be you,” he said with a grin. “That means you’re buying dinner,” he added, waving for our waitress.
We sat through Fred’s dinner with another bottle of wine and went over his part of the plan.
“I like it,” he said, still chewing his way through his seafood pescatore. “I know damn well that was one of their boats.”
What he liked most was including Pierson Brothers in the payback. Even if all they’d done is give the bad guys a lift, they had taken a shot at his boat and his crew and Fred was itching to send a message that you didn’t fuck with his boat or his crew.
“Alright then,” he said, standing to leave. “I’m going to go find myself a better looking medic.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Amber teased.
“I know,” Fred groaned. “But I can damn sure find one that’s less sassy.”
Amber laughed. “Can’t argue with that,” she said, standing up to give Fred another hug.
We were taking care of the check when Mrs. Carmichael, who I had to admit was pretty hot for an English teacher, appeared. “I hope I’m not interrupting,” she said. “But we were wondering if you and your father would like to join us for a drink?”
Ouch.
Amber bit back a giggle and thanked Mrs. Carmichael profusely. “Dad and I have to get back,” she apologized. “Mom gets a little crazy if we’re out too long...ever since the accident and all.”
I cleared my throat. “We should go, sweetie.”
We said our goodbyes and we had gotten there early enough that we had one of the parking spaces right across from the windowed side of the restaurant.
“Are they looking?” Amber asked when we got to the Jeep.
I checked the side mirror. “Looks like it,” although objects were closer than they appeared.
“Come here,” she grabbed me pulled me over for a long, deep sloppy kiss with lots of tongue.
“You incestuous old man,” she chided, fixing her lipstick in the Jeep’s mirror. “Tonguing your own daughter.”
“I think that was your tongue,” I corrected. “Unless I grew another one in the last few seconds.”
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” she said, starting the Jeep and backing out. She waved at the two couples at the table. “Bye,” she said, laughing.
Even with the wind noise from the top down it was an awesome night.
“Did you notice my lipstick matched the Jeep color?” Amber asked.
“I did not,” I said truthfully.
“Miss Flower says fashion is not an accident.”
“I would never argue with Flower about fashion,” I agreed.
“She’s funny; I like her,” Amber concluded.
“She likes Q,” I pointed out.
“Flower likes men,” Amber corrected. “Women who like men like Q.”
“She likes women, too.”
“Yeah, but that’s something different,” Amber explained. “She doesn’t lean that way. It’s more of a...” she mulled her choice of words for a second. “More of a penis thing,” she concluded.
In a weird way that made perfect sense. Flower’s world was ordered by relationships and intimacy was the glue that cemented relationships. Amber was trying to frame that in a way I could understand.
I decided to change the subject. “I’m glad you stuck around. I really didn’t want you to go with Fred.”
“I know,” she affirmed. “I knew when I called you from Nashville.”
“Pretty smart girl,” I pointed out.
“Pretty smart guy,” she countered.
“You know what we do is dangerous as shit.”
“Now you tell me!” she joked. “I got shot at on my first day, chased through the streets of Miami on a motorcycle by the Russian mob and then spent three days on the run. I think I have a pretty clear idea of what a day at the office is like.”
“That’s not the whole story,” I said tiredly. “It’s just a total freak coincidence that our last two jobs have been in this area. Imagine all that happening in Islamabad, followed by four months in a Pakistani prison.”
“You mean they don’t have concierge service?” she joked.
“I’m serious,” I countered. “The shit we do is seriously dangerous.”
“Deek let me read some of your mission files,” she confessed. “So I know exactly what you go through. If I was worried I would have stayed on the Star.”
“He did what?!”
“Maybe I wasn’t supposed to tell you that,” she grimaced.
“Which ones?”
“Maybe that one in Karachi,” she said dismissively. “And the one in Singapore.”
“Shit.”
“Bogota, Khartoum, the oil tanker outside of Ataba…maybe a couple others,” she said lightly.
“Goddamnit!”
“Pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to tell you,” she said more definitely.
“I’m going to kill Deek.”
“He just wanted to make sure I knew what I was getting into,” she said defensively. “Who am I going to tell?”
“That’s not the point,” I countered. “We have compartmentalization for a reason.”
“Maybe there’s too much,” she suggested. “Maybe it’s time to let other people in.”
I was about to argue and then it dawned on me that she might have a point. If we were going to forge a closer relationship with Teddy’s people, they had a right to see what’s behind our kimono. In our old line of work secrecy was a way of life and, for some jobs, it still made sense but, in a lot of cases, it didn’t anymore. All the security paranoia hadn’t stopped Sergei. Maybe it was time to consider a new strategy but I didn’t like Deek and Amber making it up on their own.
“Maybe,” I agreed, “but this wasn’t the way to broach the subject.”
“Yeah, sorry,” Amber agreed. “You have a right to be annoyed at that.”
And there it was, her simple and direct way of dealing with shit. Yeah, you’re right, time to move on. Her own subtle way of denying conflict life-giving oxygen. Now if I wanted to continue the argument I’d have to give it CPR. In the meantime, she’s moved on. I’d be chasing her down the road, dragging along an old fight that was already half dead. That was a lot of work just to continue a disagreement. What really bothered me is she made it look so effortless.
“Did you want to fight about it some more?” she asked when the silence dragged out.
“No,” I said, dropping the lifeless body of the argument next to the road.
“Don’t take it out on Deek,” she pressed.
“I won’t,” which was as close to “yes, dear” as I’d ever get.
The warehouse was a straight shot down Okeechobee and then north. It looked like any other old, industrial building in the neighborhood around the railroad tracks except for the formidable fence topped with razor wire. It was also redesigned with the A/C units and fans set into false fronts in the walls facing the street. That had two purposes: One the big fans would mask noises coming from the inside and the other was to disguise the shape of the interior space. A large parking lot and storage area surrounded the building but was completely empty. That was the zone anyone trespassing would have to cross to get to the building. We’d had a few people try to get in over the years. Those the cops didn’t pick up would get other subtle reminders, like having their cars catch on fire. After a couple of those, people stayed away.
The gate opened automatically for us and closed behind us. The big garage door on the side of the building similarly opened for us. This end of the building was a big garage and the van, along with Anita’s car and Deek’s pickup were parked inside.
Deek stuck his head out of the van. “Have you seen this shit?” he beamed.
“They did that in a day,” I infor
med him.
“This is freaking awesome,” he agreed. “Mat..Mateo and I are making some upgrades,” he informed me. “We’re probably going to be here awhile. I gotta have some shit from the office delivered.”
“We’ll be heading out after lunch tomorrow,” I informed him.
“We’ll be ready.”
The Blue Tango Salvage: Book 2 in the Recovery and Marine Salvage, Inc. Series Page 22