by Mark Stone
Mangrove shuffled uncomfortably, the way liars always do.
“He’s trying to poison your mind,” Mangrove said. “He’s trying to talk you out of a good thing.”
“If you consider jail and public shaming to be a good deal, then I guess he’s right,” I muttered. “But you haven’t done anything yet, Doug. You’re guilty of opening a bank account and having some questionable taste in whom you decide to visit at a seedy motel.” I shook my head. “And who among us hasn’t been guilty of that at one time or another? You can walk out of here. You can be on your merry way. I know life isn’t easy, but it’s better than it would be if you started doing the wrong thing.”
“I knew he had done wrong, and I was going to help him,” Doug said, shame filling his voice.
“But you didn’t,” I said. “And now, if an opportunity like this comes up again, you won’t take it. You won’t even consider it because you’re not a thief, Doug. You’re a soldier, and you’re better than that.”
“Do you want the gun?” Doug asked me as he moved toward the door.
“What?” Mangrove asked, his eyes widening quickly.
“No, Doug,” I said. “I kinda want to do this with my hands.” I nudged Doug’s shoulder as he passed by. “Do me a favor, though. Tell the kid at the front desk that Lucky John said to finally bring up those towels.” I glared at Mangrove, whose eyes were filling with fear faster than I could keep track of. “We’re gonna need something to sop all this blood up with.”
5
“I told you that you’d like this place,” Davey said, smiling at me as he looked down at what had to be the biggest margarita I had ever seen. It had sugar on the rim instead of salt and was blood red thanks to an infusion of strawberry, two things that I thought were just south of sacrilege myself. But hey, this is America. I guess people can drink what they want.
Davey took a huge gulp as I looked around the place, the first of many if my friend had any plans on actually finishing that drink tonight. He had brought us to a club, and while that loud thumping music and dark strobe light atmosphere had never really been my thing, I had to admit that my best friend was right when he told me this place was different.
‘Jackrabbit Jill’s’ wasn’t so much a traditional club as it was a sleepy indoor bar that led out to a jam-packed outdoor stage area that pumped salsa music as the stars looked down at the throngs of people dancing along to it. The fact that it sat on the beach, close enough to the ocean for you to be able to smell the salt in the air, only added to its charms. So, of course, I liked this place. It may have technically been a club, but I was only human.
I shrugged and leaned against the bar we were sitting at. “It's not bad.” He may have been right, but I didn’t see the sense in giving him a big head about it. Given the fact that telling him he made a ‘decent amaretto sour’ was enough to throw him behind the bar of the Rusty Bucket at a professional level, telling him how much I dug this place would probably get him wanting to be a party planner or something.
“You just need to relax,” he said, shaking his head as his feet tapped against the wooden beams that made up the deck. He moved along with the beat of the salsa music, which was pretty infectious if I had to say so myself. Davey had always been that way. You get a couple of drinks in him, and he was as loose as if he’d just had a full body massage. “Not that I blame you,” he continued. “If I did even half of what you did today, I’d have expected a parade and to be hoisted up on the shoulders of lesser men and carried around.”
“Lesser men?” I asked and chuckled as I picked up my beer and took a swig.
“Yeah,” he said. “You know, all the lesser men who wouldn’t have singlehandedly foiled a scheme to frame a veteran for stealing a widower’s life savings. Trust me, there are a lot of them.”
“Doesn’t make them lesser,” I said, running a hand through my hair and looking out at the water, dark but calm tonight. “Just makes them different. You know, I went to bootcamp with a kid named Artie Miller. He was a great guy. We got so close we were practically brothers.”
“Hey, now, you’re starting to make me jealous,” Davey quipped, smiling as he took another drink of his too huge and too red margarita.
“Calm down, you moron,” I answered. “The point is, we got stationed in different places and lost touch, but I heard from him a few months ago. He’s a trauma surgeon now. He reaches into people’s bodies and fixes what’s been broken. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t even come close to it. There are different kinds of talent, and every man has his own gifts. You just have to figure out what they are and use them the best way you can.”
“That’s actually kind of beautiful,” Davey said, looking at me as though he was surprised something like that could even come spilling out of my mouth.
“I’ve been told I have my moments,” I said, shrugging.
“I wonder what my gift is,” Davey mused.
“There are some questions that even I can’t answer,” I said, nudging him on the shoulder. “Maybe it’s having great taste in friends.”
“I seriously doubt that,” he responded. “Maybe it’s my way with words. Random did tell me that I seemed to know my way around a sentence when I talked to her earlier.”
A groan escaped my lips. “Seriously?” I balked. “What were you doing talking to that woman?”
“She just showed up at the door of the house,” he explained. “She had a bottle of wine and said she wanted to apologize for sneaking up on you earlier today.” He looked down at the wooden beams that comprised the floor. “It didn’t hurt that she was wearing this sundress that really made her look—”
“Oh, she is good,” I said, interrupting my friend. “Let me guess. She knew about what happened with Mangrove earlier.”
“She did seem to be abreast of the situation. Yes,” Davey said.
“Don’t you get it?” I asked, splaying my hands out in front of me. “She didn’t come there for me. She must have heard about what happened with Mangrove and knew I would be busy at the police station, giving my report about everything.”
“Then, if not for you, why would she come?” Davey asked.
“Why would a beautiful woman who wants to do a piece on me show up in a skimpy dress with a bottle of wine when she knew I wouldn’t be home?” I asked, my eyes growing wide at the fact that I even had to finish this statement. “If I have to answer that question, then it makes my point for me. She wanted to see you, Davey. She thought she could get you liquored up, maybe flirt with you a bit, and she’d be able to get some information out of you.” I leveled a more serious look at my friend. “Tell me that I’m not giving you enough credit. Tell me that you saw past this and that you didn’t tell this woman anything about me.”
“I didn’t,” he said, though I could see in his eyes that he was revisiting the experience, retracing things in a new light to try and remember what he did or didn’t do. “I mean, I don’t think I did. I might have told her that your middle name is Leslie.”
“That’s your middle name!” I replied.
“Oh, like I was gonna admit to that,” he answered.
“Look” I said, taking a deep breath. “I don’t know this woman. I have no idea what she wants or how she’d portray me. I know what she says, but I’ve seen too much to be able to trust everyone at their word. I need you to promise me that you’ll be careful and that you won’t talk to Random again without my being there. It’s important to me, Davey, so I need you to take it seriously.”
Before he could answer, I felt a tap on my shoulder. Turning around, I saw a woman who pinged at my memory in a way I couldn’t quite place staring back at me. Maybe she looked like someone I used to know, or maybe I had seen her walking down the streets of Bonita Springs and noticed her. She was definitely pretty enough that I would have taken a second look. Still, I was a little busy right now, and if she wanted to dance, she was going to have to wait until I was done with this conversation.
“I’m sorry
,” I said, looking down at her. “I'm kind of in the middle of something, but if you’d give me just a bit, I’d love to talk and maybe—”
“You don’t remember me,” she said, cutting me off. “That’s okay. It’s been awhile. My name is Wendy Lockheart. A year ago, you got me out of a very sticky situation, and I’m sorry to say, I think you might be the only one who can do it again.” She shuffled. “Well, the only two.”
“Two?” Davey asked, puffing up like a rooster who had just found his way into the henhouse.
“I’m sorry. I’m not talking about you,” Wendy said.
“Then who are you talking about?” I asked, watching Davey instantly deflate.
“She’s talking about me,” a light voice sounded from behind her. Looking past the woman, I saw a figure that also pinged at my memory. This time, though, I didn’t have to wonder why. I would know this woman anywhere. An incident a few months ago had changed my life forever but had also joined us in a way that I’m not sure could ever be broken.
“Charlotte?” I asked, taking her in as my eyes widened.
“Charlotte?” Davey asked, surprised himself. “As in, the girl you saved at the truck stop? As in, the reason you won the lottery?”
“One in the same,” Charlotte answered, settling beside me and tweaking the collar of my shirt in a familiar manner. “It’s good to see you again, even if it looks like you and I are about to get into a lot of trouble all over again.”
6
I looked at both of the women, sitting there on my couch and looking at me as though everything was normal, as though they hadn’t just walked back into my life and shaken everything up. I still had no idea what they wanted from me, but judging by the looks on their faces and the fact that they seemed to have teamed up to find me, I knew it couldn’t be good. Stuff like this was never good.
“I still don’t know why we had to leave the club.” Davey pouted, crossing his arms over his chest as he glared at me, expecting an answer to his question that would satisfy him.
“I needed to get somewhere quiet, somewhere I could think and put all of this together,” I answered as though it should be obvious, because honestly, it should be.
“Get what together?” Davey balked. “You still don’t know what’s going on here. In fact, you don’t even remember a full half of the people sitting on the couch right now.”
My eyes fell on Wendy, looking up at me silently with an arched eyebrow and a calm look on her face. He wasn’t wrong. Though, after seeing her and Charlotte at the club, I urged them to follow me back to my house in an attempt to sort all of this out. I still couldn’t place the woman whose life I was supposed to have saved.
“It’s all right,” Wendy said, nodding at me as if to let me know she was serious. “I’ve changed a lot in the past year. I’m not that innocent wilting flower who can be held against my will and forced to unlock safes for brutes.”
“Princeton,” I muttered as the cobwebs in my mind finally fell out. I felt like such an idiot as the truth came spilling into my brain. She was the woman back in the factory in Princeton. She was the girl those goons were forcing to tamper with the boss’s safe. I had saved her life. I had helped her out. Her hair was a little longer, and she moved with much more confidence than I’d seen her showcase that night, but it was definitely her. There were no buts about it.
“I knew it would come back to you,” she said, smiling.
“You remember her now?” Davey asked, looking over at me. “What kind of life do you live, dude? How many people are you saving on the day to day that you can’t even recognize them?”
“It wasn’t like that,” I muttered, looking at Wendy in a whole new way. “She was being held by some guys who were forcing her to try to break into a safe. I was running security for the place back then. I just did my job, and then the police came and took care of the rest of it. It was no big deal.”
“It was certainly a big deal to me,” Wendy answered. “What I went through at the hands of those men was nothing less than scarring. It changed my entire life. In fact, it’s one hundred percent why I am where I am now.”
“You mean sitting in my living room next to the girl who helped me gain nationwide notoriety?” I muttered, shaking my head.
“I mean trying to do the right thing,” Wendy said. “I didn’t always do that. I’ve always had skills. I was always the smartest person in any room, and that’s not always a good thing when you’re talking about the mind of a young person. I didn’t always do the right thing, and before long, the rooms I found myself in—the rooms I was still the smartest person in—were filled with the worst kinds of people in the world.”
“We all make mistakes when we’re kids,” Davey said, waving off the shame in the woman’s voice. “This one time, when I was sixteen, I distracted a store clerk while my buddy Jasper made it out of there with three entire cases of Bud Light.”
“When I was sixteen, I helped a crooked businessman electronically smuggle sixty million dollars out of the country and into secret offshore accounts,” Wendy returned.
Davey blinked hard, shuffling as he looked down at the floor. “I mean, it’s not a competition.” He shook his head. “Though, I have to admit, when you think of a super hacker, the name Wendy doesn’t really come to mind very quickly.”
“My father was a Peter Pan fanatic,” she explained. “He had a first-edition copy signed by J.M. Barrie himself.” She sighed. “He was a good man, better than me.”
I glared at my friend for just a second before turning back to Wendy. “You did some bad stuff,” I said. “My friend’s tame comparison and your father’s penchant for fairytales aside, I agree with his sentiment. We all do stupid things, and I’m not a cop. If you want to turn yourself in, I suggest you run on up to the police department. There’s a woman up there named Mia, and I can promise you that she won’t cut you any slack. As for me, I’m still struggling to see what the connection is here. Are you telling me that I misunderstood what happened back in Princeton? Because you looked like a hostage when I saw you.”
“I was,” Wendy answered. “It’s just more complicated than that.” She sighed loudly and deeply, the kind of sigh that can only be emitted from the mouth of someone who had made more mistakes than she cared to admit at the moment. “I was a prodigy. I was one of the youngest tech geniuses the world had ever known up to that point. I mean, I was really something.”
“I get it. You were the Doogie Howser of the Silicon Valley set. Let’s keep the story moving,” I said.
“Unlike Doogie Howser, I didn’t always use my prowess for good,” Wendy said. “I did a few noble things here and there, but only if people could pay for it. I’m not thrilled to admit it, but my services were for hire back then. If you had the coin, then you had my services. It was as simple as that.”
“You’re not endearing me to you,” I answered.
“Good,” she said, moving closer to me as she crossed her arms over her chest. “You need to know what kind of person I was back then so you know exactly what kind of people we’re dealing with today. I mixed in with the worst of the worst, and I never cared to think about any of it. The way I saw it, the world was a crappy place. It was going to tear itself apart sooner or later, anyway. I would be a fool not to make myself rich from the destruction.”
“So, awful, then?” Davey asked with arched eyebrows. “That’s the kind of person you were. Awful.”
“Worse than awful. I was indifferent, and indifference can be the most dangerous thing in the world if you couple it with the skills I possessed.”
“What did you do?” I asked, basically grunting at the woman. “It’s not that I’m not completely enthralled by your story, because trust me, I am. But I’m sensing all of this is just a prelude to the part of the story where you tell me you’re responsible for some kind of hell that you’re about to lay at my doorstep.”
“See?” Charlotte said to Wendy, though she was looking at me. “I told you he was more th
an just a pretty face.”
“Mr. Lucky,” Wendy said, ignoring Charlotte’s comment, “you’re right. I am responsible for what’s happening right now, even if I had no intention for things to ever get this far. But the hell you speak of isn’t at your doorstep. In fact, at this moment, it’s on a pier waiting to sail off into the Gulf. And if it does that without you onboard, I’m afraid it could mean catastrophe for a lot of people.”
“Define a lot of people,” I said, narrowing my eyes at the woman. “And what kind of catastrophe?”
“Let me ask you, Mr. Lucky,” Wendy said, her voice taking on a serious and almost reverent tone. “What do you know about nuclear codes?”
7
My eyes narrowed as I gave the woman a onceover. I was, by no means, a stick in the mud. I mean, I’m the same guy who filled my vice principal’s car up with shaving cream and filled the ketchup bottles with red paint during senior prank week in high school. Still, if this Wendy chick enlisted Charlotte and came all the way down here, pulling me from what looked to be a very relaxing and fun night, just to play a joke on me, I was not going to be happy about it.
But that was the thing. No one would have done all that just for a joke. Wendy Lockheart, or anyone else, for that matter, would never go to all this trouble just to see the look on my face. It couldn’t be a joke, but it had to be. It had to be because otherwise, what this woman was talking about was freaking nuclear codes.
“Say something,” Wendy said, staring at me with every bit as much intensity as I was giving her. “I came here because you’re the only person who can help me, John. You can’t do that if you’re going to react like a deer in headlights.”