Do or Die Reluctant Heroes

by Unknown

  “Diapers,” Aaron listed. “Baby food and formula, but a very specific kind. Rory has allergies.”

  “Write it down, please,” the man said gesturing toward the yellow laminated counter, where there was a long narrow pad and a pen. He’d already started a list that included toilet paper and dishwasher detergent. He held out his hand to Phoebe as he introduced himself, partly because she was closer and partly because Aaron was now giving his full hostile attention to filling that pad. “I’m Yashi. Joe Hirabayashi.”

  Phoebe already liked him. She shook his hand and said, “Phoebe Kruger. I’m Ian Dunn’s lawyer. I’m only here until he gets back, to make sure he has what he needs.”

  Yashi blinked. Just once. “Is that what Deb told you? Because I’m pretty sure you’re here for the duration. That’s what makes a safe house safe. Civilians aren’t allowed to come and go.”

  Allowed? That was not a happy word, considering the amount of work on her desk. “I’m used to keeping secrets,” Phoebe said. “Lawyer-client privilege?”

  “Of course,” Yashi said, but then added, “This is different.”

  “I’ll discuss it with Deb,” Phoebe said.

  He nodded. “Good.”

  Aaron, meanwhile, had finished his list. “The irony is that I had a car full of groceries when this bullshit started. Can you get this stuff now, please? Before Rory gets here? I’ve already heard him cry enough for a lifetime.”

  “I’ll do that,” Yashi said, reaching for the list. “I’ll pick up some pizzas, too.”

  “Bless you,” Phoebe said.

  He smiled at that—a microscopic movement of his mouth. He held out the list to her. “Anything to add?”

  “No, I’m fine,” she said. Like she’d said, she didn’t expect to be staying long. But breakfast had been a long, long time ago, so pizza would be a win. “Thanks.”

  “Tell Deb where I’ve gone,” he ordered. “If someone comes to the door, don’t open it—go get her.”

  “Understood,” Phoebe said, glancing at Aaron who was silently moving both his and Shelly’s bags into the living room.

  “Lock up behind me, please,” Yashi said as he went out into the evening.

  Phoebe did, locking both the button on the knob of the door and a thumb-turn bolt that was above it. Neither would be particularly effective against someone with a burning desire to kick the door open.

  She turned back to find Aaron vanishing into the gloom of a hallway opposite the one Deb had gone down. “I’m going to find a shower,” he announced, “and take one, before Rory gets here, while I try not to throw up.”

  “Ian will get Shelly back,” Phoebe said.

  Aaron stopped, and slowly turned around to look at her. “You really don’t see it, do you? That you’re already a high priestess in the church of Ian. Don’t worry, you’re not the first. He has that effect on almost all women, across all continents.”

  Phoebe laughed her embarrassment, turning it into a disbelieving scoff. “You’re wrong. I’m really not—”

  “Yeah whatever,” he said. “I’ve heard that before, too.” He vanished down the hall.

  Leaving Phoebe standing there, completely alone.

  Deb was still on the phone at the other end of the low-ceilinged but sprawling house.

  And Phoebe knew in that instant that Deb was not going to let her leave. Not to run home to change or to grab her own—what did Ian call it? A go-bag. She was going to be locked in here despite the fact that she wasn’t in danger. Apparently Jerry Bryant had been working for Manny Dellarosa, and regardless of what Ian believed, Phoebe knew—knew—that someone in Manny’s line of work would not harm one of his legal advisors.

  And she also knew, in that instant, what she had to do.

  Leave.

  Now.

  Before Deb got off the phone.

  Go home—it would take her five minutes to walk there—take a shower, wash the chlorine out of her hair, put on jeans that actually fit, grab the clothing and work files she needed and …

  She’d be back before anyone missed her, long before Ian’s couple of hours were up. If Yashi could go out into the world and run an errand, surely she could, too.

  Phoebe shouldered her still-damp bag, opened the door—checking to make sure that she could trigger the lock in the knob, even though that deadbolt would stay open. She pushed the button in and shut the door behind her and …

  It worked. It was secure.

  She went briskly down the driveway to the sidewalk and headed for home.

  They were almost there.

  “Which one is it?”

  Martell glanced over at Francine, who was driving his car. She’d taken the left turn onto the street where the safe house was supposed to be and had slowed to a crawl. “Five eighty-five.”

  They both peered through the darkness, searching for a house number.

  “It’s down a bit more, on the left,” Martell said, pointing to the right, where the reflective numbers 240 were on a mailbox in front of what looked like a castle, complete with moat.

  She nodded and drove a little faster. And then said, “If I were you, I wouldn’t be in such a big hurry to get there.”

  He looked at her, waiting for further explanation, and she actually laughed as she shot him another glance. Sure, it was a laugh of disdain, but it transformed her, and damn, she was beautiful. Even with no makeup on, dressed in faded jeans and a no-frills tank, she still managed to be prettier than 99.9 percent of the women on the planet. With her long blond hair, blue eyes, and a body that killed …

  And maybe there was something he was missing here, because he’d gone and gotten himself all distracted, but it sure seemed as if she were implying that … “You think Dunn is going to, what? Kick my ass?”

  “He’s already kicking your ass,” Francine said, pointing to another mailbox, this time in front of a house that looked as if it had been built by Frank Lloyd Wright on meth. “Three ninety-seven.”

  Martell nodded. They were almost there.

  “Look at the assignment he gave you,” she continued. “Chauffeur-slash-babysitter.”

  “Maybe he likes me the most,” Martell countered, even though he knew she was right. He was definitely on Dunn’s shit list. “Putting me in a car with an attractive young woman—”

  She blew him a raspberry. “And a baby he expected to cry for the entire ride? No, he hates you. I wonder what he’ll have you do next? Surveillance from inside a Dumpster?”

  “Please don’t suggest that to him,” he said as she slowed way down, because there came 585, on the left, as expected.

  It did not look like a castle or as if a drug-addled famous architect had been anywhere near the blueprint. It was boxy and built long before Martell had been born. It was both small and unassuming.

  “Is this really it?” he said aloud as she pulled up in front. It was quaint and even charming in an old-time Florida way, but he really would have preferred the descriptors that popped to mind be defensible and fortresslike.

  Considering it was supposed to be a safe house.

  “Maybe you should call your FBI contact,” Francine said. “Make sure we got the number right.”

  Martell dug for his phone, but then didn’t have to, because there came Deb, still wearing his shirt, barreling down the driveway as if she’d come racing out of a back door. Before she hit the sidewalk, she was already scanning the street, looking both ways.

  Martell opened his window, leaned out. “Hey. What’s up?”

  He’d startled her, so much so that she nearly drew on him. Instead, she came over, leaned down to look in to see Francine and the baby. “Get this car back behind the house,” she said, pointing. “Now. But be ready to leave, immediately. We’re pulling out.”

  “What? What happened?” Martell asked again.

  “It’s Phoebe,” Deb told him grimly. “She’s gone. She must’ve just … walked away.”

  * * *

  “She lives nearby,” Aaron s
aid as he helped the FBI agent nicknamed Yashi transfer the bags of groceries into Martell’s ancient car. Aaron had used Francie’s phone to call Ian on the burner cell, to let him know that Phoebe was gone, but his brother hadn’t picked up. Hopefully he’d call back soon. “Phoebe said that when we pulled up. Am I the only one who heard her?”

  “I didn’t hear it,” Yashi said, as deadpan and unexcited as he’d been when they’d first arrived.

  “I was on the phone,” Deb said. She was pissed. And not just because Phoebe had disappeared. She was pissed because the big, handsome black guy, Martell, had shown up with Rory and Francine—with his tongue hanging out.

  France had that effect on the het male population. Even Yashi’s pulse rate seemed to have rocketed up to forty-five upon sight of her. Dude had even blinked. Twice in a row.

  “I have three contact numbers for Phoebe,” Martell said. Aaron still wasn’t sure exactly what his deal was, other than that he was a lawyer who seemed to be working closely with the feds. Also, whatever upper-body workout the man did was highly effective. As Aaron watched, Martell stopped helping with the groceries and got out his phone. “Work, cell, and home phone—”

  “Do not call her.” Aaron said it at the same time as both Yashi and Deb. He was pretty sure Francine would’ve joined in the chorus, too, if she hadn’t ducked inside, upon arrival, to use the bathroom.

  “Give me her home number, though,” Yashi offered. “I’ll do a reverse lookup to get her address.” He had his own phone out and working, Internet connected.

  Martell was still frowning, so Aaron explained. “If the Dellarosas are watching her place, they’ve hacked into her phone line. If you call and she picks up, they’ll know for sure that she’s there. That’s if they don’t know it already.”

  There were numerous possibilities to this scenario. One, that Phoebe had walked home, arriving before Davio’s men staked out the place.

  Two, that they’d been there when she’d arrived and they’d already grabbed her, and …

  Three, that they’d been there when she’d arrived but she’d walked right past them, unrecognizable due to her funky clothes, thanks to her repeated dunkings in his swimming pool.

  Martell was still skeptical. “You really think she’s under surveillance? By Manny Dellarosa?”

  “Davio, probably,” Aaron said. “Manny’s in the hospital.”

  “Phoebe lives, literally, one block south of here, two streets down,” Yashi reported.

  “And the Dellarosas have already IDed her,” Martell pushed, “by … osmosis?” He answered his own question as he remembered, “Her car was parked out in front of the crime scene. Of course. Sorry. My bad. It’s been a while since I’ve done police work. But just as an FYI, if I wasn’t thinking about that, Phoebe probably wasn’t either. Also, as a lawyer, you kinda get used to having meetings with alleged criminals. You expect them to call you, not abduct you.”

  “At this point, for all we know,” Deb said shortly, “she’s working for the Dellarosas.”

  Holy shit. Aaron was stunned. The FBI didn’t know …?

  And now there was a fourth possibility—that Phoebe was working for Davio and had gone home so that she could call him and divulge the current whereabouts of Aaron, Francine, and Rory.

  “Forget the rest of the food,” Aaron said, looking over at Rory, who was waiting patiently in the back of Martell’s car. “We need to leave. Now.”

  “I’m sorry, what did she just say?” Francine was back from the bathroom and focused on Deb. She stood now in the kitchen door, angelically backlit. The look on her face, however, was not beatific. She turned to glare at Martell. “You told me Phoebe’s a lawyer.”

  “She is,” he said. “She works for Bryant, Hill, and Stoneham.”

  “There was a slight SNAFU,” Deb admitted. “We didn’t get a chance to clear her—”

  “That, I didn’t know,” Yashi said, his eyes wider open than Aaron had yet seen them.

  “We don’t know all that much about her,” Deb continued grimly, “other than she has no criminal record, and yes, she passed the bar in Florida, and as of last week has been employed by BH and S.”

  Francine came down the stairs. “Are you”—she looked at Rory, his car seat still belted into the back of Martell’s car—“effing kidding me? And you just let her walk away …?”

  “That’s my fault,” Yashi started, but Deb cut him off.

  “No, it’s mine,” she said. “I should have told you. I just assumed you’d stick around until I got off the phone.”

  The cell phone that Aaron was holding rang, sparing him from joining in the self-blamefest with his own recrimination of I shouldn’t’ve taken a shower and left her alone. It was Ian on the other end, and he’d apparently listened to Aaron’s message about Phoebe being gone. Unlike Francine, he didn’t bother to curb his language.

  “How the fuck did this happen?” Ian asked, plainly pissed.

  “Overwhelm,” Aaron told his brother. “I’m pretty sure Deb hasn’t slept in three days. Plus with you gone, there’s no clear chain of command. Typical charlie foxtrot.” That was military radio code for the letters C and F, which was the short form for clusterfuck, synonymous with goatfuck. A goat was an ineffective leader whose head was up his or her ass. Sometimes due to lack of sleep.

  “I need her home address,” Ian said. The her he was referring to was, of course, Phoebe.

  “Bad idea,” Aaron countered. “A waste of time, when we need to find Shel.”

  Ian sighed. Hard. “I’m not leaving her,” he said.

  “That’s right,” Aaron said. “You’re not. She walked away.”

  “She’s not working for Davio,” Ian said. “I know this.”

  “Do you know this with your brain or with your dick?” Aaron asked.

  “Home. Address.”

  Aaron rattled off the address and apartment number.

  “Now get the fuck out of there. Is Francie with you?” Ian asked. “She must be—you’re on her phone.”

  “Yeah,” Aaron said. “Why?”

  “Tell her to get you to Contact Point Zebra. She’ll know where that is, she’ll know what to do. Chain of command? Fuck the FBI. She’s now in charge. I’ll meet you there soon.” And with that Ian cut the connection.

  Aaron turned to his sister-in-law and repeated Ian’s words. “He said to tell you Contact Point Zebra—and that you’re now in charge.” He got up in Francine’s face. “Why would Eee do that? What the hell do you know, that I don’t?”

  Francine didn’t back down. She lifted her chin and said, “I’ve been working with Ian all this time, most of which he’s spent in prison, down in Northport.”

  “What?” Aaron felt all of the air leave his lungs—in fact, all of the oxygen in Florida left Sarasota as he struggled to keep breathing and to understand. Prison? Ian had been in prison?

  “I’ll tell you as much as I can,” Francine said, “which isn’t a lot. But right this second? We’re leaving. So get your ass in the car. Now.”

  * * *

  Ian was pissed.

  As a Navy SEAL, he’d been trained to expect disaster.

  Murphy’s Law was a given—whatever can go wrong, will go wrong—and Ian was never surprised when he got bitchslapped by the universe.

  But this entire day had been clown-car ridiculous. He was trapped in an ugly spinning vortex of Are you fucking kidding me?

  And that vortex had just been kicked to a higher speed, thanks to Phoebe Kruger.

  And this was on top of Ian’s arriving at the hospital to discover—of course—that Manny Dellarosa was in prep for an angiogram, which meant he was out of reach until tomorrow. Ian had already reached the acceptance stage of his grief about that, and was out in the hospital’s parking garage when he’d gotten Aaron’s message about Phoebe going AWOL.

  It hadn’t taken him long to “borrow” a car to rush to her rescue—although the way this day was going, he’d half-expected the damn thing to
be infested with rats or maybe poisonous snakes.

  He’d ditched the car without getting bitten—a small victory, but he’d take it—about a block away from “The Dockside,” Phoebe’s fancy-ass condo complex. Since he had no idea what was coming, he preferred to go in on foot, so he could keep to the shadows.

  As he moved through the humid evening, Ian hoped that Phoebe wasn’t there, in her condo, but he knew that she probably was.

  He also knew that his carelessness was in part, at least, to blame—he should’ve been more aggressive about the fact that she was in danger from the Dellarosas. Clearly, she hadn’t believed him. Lawyers. Jesus. They actually thought they were bulletproof. We deal with criminals all the time. Yeah, well, not like the Dellarosas, honey.

  Of course, there was also the idea that Ian couldn’t quite shake—that Phoebe’s naïveté was just an act, that she herself might work for the Agency. The Glock in her bag, her sharp mind, and her ability to think on her feet, plus her relative coolness under fire …

  Maybe she hadn’t innocently and/or stupidly gone home, but instead had faded back to Agency HQ, wherever that was.

  And that thought pissed Ian off even more than the sweat that dripped down his back. Oddly enough, he hated the idea that this woman might’ve vanished, possibly forever, since her mission had been accomplished when Ian had agreed to help rescue those kidnapped kids.

  He spotted a Dellarosa-dark car with two occupants, parked across the street from Phoebe’s condo building’s driveway at the exact moment that the burner phone shook in his pocket. He blended into the foliage as he pulled it out and glanced at the number. It was Martell, so he took the call.

  “Yeah.”

  “Sorry to be the bearer of more bad news,” Martell told him. “But Phoebe just called my cell from her condo landline.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeeeeah.” The lawyer drew the word out. “She wanted me to tell you that she was running a little late, that she’d be another fifteen minutes before she returned.”

  And that was that. No experienced Agency operative, she. Although it was interesting that Phoebe’s intention had been to return to the safe house. She was doubly naïve for not realizing that the FBI would’ve already gone into red alert and bugged out the moment she’d turned up missing.