by A. J Tata
Mahegan understood. Relive the date. Take him home. Have sex. Momentarily forget about the pain. Random sex would be salve for the wound. He wasn’t having any part of that.
“Address?”
She reached up and fumbled with some touch-screen buttons on the GPS display until she was able to hit HOME. The map lit up and showed they were less than two miles away. He followed the directions, and as they approached their destination, he said, “So what’s the third thing you know?”
Grace was half lucid but heard him. “I know that you should tuck me in.” She smiled. She was definitely beautiful and sexy. Her left breast was nearly hanging out of her black top as she leaned toward him. “And then I can tell you my big secret.”
“I guess it will have to wait,” Mahegan said. “Because I’m not taking advantage of you.”
With mock anger, Grace asked, “Who are you to say that you shouldn’t take advantage of me? Maybe I want you to have that advantage taken.”
Mahegan chuckled. “You’re not even making any sense now, Grace.”
“Grace. Full of Grace. Amazing Grace. That’s what he used to call me. My boyfriend.”
“Well, he’s a first-class idiot for breaking up with you. What’s his name? I’m not doing anything between midnight and five a.m.”
“Ha! That’s funny. Theodore Throckmorton. Aka Ted the Shred. He surfs like a wild man. You gonna go scare him for me? I don’t love him anymore, anyway.”
Mahegan’s mind computed the name. Ted the Shred was the son of Brand Throckmorton, whose house was now a crime scene involving Captain Maeve Cassidy. He immediately understood her disquieting nature in the pub.
After a few turns on suburban roads, he was upon the complex. The building was upscale, with an empty guard shack and an open gate. A thick forest of pine trees provided a cordon of privacy along the parking lot. Crape myrtles stood atop boxwood hedges. The headlights of the low car cut across the swimming pool and the clubhouse.
She said, “Here,” and he parked as close as he could to where she had indicated. Then she said, “One-twenty-four.”
He walked her past the BMWs, Mercedes, and Audis, and while handing her the keys, he saw a yellow Lamborghini parked near apartment 124. Then he saw a tall, broad-shouldered man wearing designer jeans, a fitted Italian shirt, a sport coat, no socks, and Sperry Top-Siders.
“Amazing Grace,” the man said. “Here I was, thinking about having a conversation about our relationship, and you’ve gone and found this . . . refined gentleman.”
Mahegan pulled up short, holding Grace as much as she was holding him. He sensed her fear and could feel her shaking, either in rage or panic. He figured panic.
“What are you doing here, Ted?” She spoke with startling clarity, Mahegan thought, given that fifteen minutes ago she was at least acting drunk. He felt her stand up straighter, bringing her head to just below his scarred deltoid. She tightened her grip on his left arm, a silent cue not to leave her alone with him.
“I’m here to talk. I got your texts and your e-mails and your voice mails and your snail mails. You’re upset. I’m here to console you.” Throckmorton smiled with a crooked grin that dimpled on the left side. His wavy light brown hair was tousled, but Mahegan thought it had that “intentionally arranged to not appear arranged” look.
Mahegan and Grace were two steps below Throckmorton, who was leaning against the door to her apartment. Mahegan gauged his size and strength, placing him a couple of inches shorter than him and about thirty pounds lighter, but by no means a pushover. Throckmorton filled out his designer sport coat with a bulk that indicated he would at least put up a fight. Mahegan considered that he might have a weapon, a gun or a knife, stowed away on his person. Mahegan had also done some surfing in his childhood, and he knew the strength and endurance that were required to be a waterman.
Still, never one to shy away from confrontation, Mahegan stepped up and pulled Grace behind him with his left arm. He’d thought about leaving her below, but he wanted no separation for Throckmorton to be able to get between him and Grace. He locked eyes with Throckmorton and saw a glint of humor, as if he were saying, “Let’s go.”
Ted the Shred, Mahegan thought. A surfer. Scrappy. Competitive. Fearless. Tough. Athletic. Strong.
Mahegan pulled up three feet in front of Throckmorton, continuing to guide Grace behind him with his left arm. She followed his cue.
“Big one you got here, Amazing Grace. You just going to bang him for a night? A week? What? What’s the timeline? We’ve been down this road. You always come back to me, right?”
“You should leave,” Mahegan said, locking eyes with Throckmorton.
Mahegan took a step toward Throckmorton, who squared up but still didn’t acknowledge his presence and kept talking past Mahegan to Grace.
“Big hands, big feet. That how you gauge them? Just walk into the bar and look for the biggest—”
Mahegan put a hand around Throckmorton’s throat, slammed his head into the red apartment door, just below the numeral 2 of 124, and began to lift him off the ground. He sensed Throckmorton’s quick hands going for something in his jacket. He was right. Throckmorton’s right hand was pulling at a snub-nosed revolver in the interior pocket of the sport coat. A clean grab and he might have gotten off a shot. As it was, the hammer snagged on the lip of the pocket, and Mahegan used his other hand to put a vise grip on Throckmorton’s wrist, focusing the pressure on the socket where the forearm met the hand, the articular disk. It was that gap between the two forearm bones where the radius and the ulna met the carpals.
He immobilized Throckmorton’s hand, causing the pistol to hang loosely from the jacket, then fall to the concrete with a scratching noise that sounded like sandpaper. Mahegan was squeezing the man’s neck hard and felt some of the fight leave him, but he didn’t discount the possibility that Throckmorton had another weapon. He banged Throckmorton’s head against the door hard enough to cause a concussion, but not hard enough to crack his skull. He didn’t want to damage Grace’s door.
As he was squeezing Throckmorton’s neck and wrist, his mind slipped to another place and time. It was his worst memory and the one thing that haunted him most: men treating women badly.
He was seeing the pockmarked face and greasy hair of James Gunther, who was standing over his mother. So he kept banging the head and squeezing the neck and the wrist until he felt something snap in his hand. He also heard screaming and realized it was Grace.
“You’re going to kill him! Stop!”
Her voice brought Mahegan back to the moment, and he found himself staring at the white face and blue lips of Ted Throckmorton. He looked down and saw that he had snapped the man’s ulna, the smaller wrist bone. A hematoma was already forming and puffing. He released Throckmorton slowly. The man was gasping for air, and his good hand immediately came up to his throat, which was making a wheezing sound, like a steam valve opening a fraction.
Mahegan studied the man with detached objectivity. He could kill him at this very moment, but the crime hadn’t demanded that punishment. At least not that he had seen, but the contempt with which Throckmorton had spoken to Grace reeked of abuse, either verbal or physical. He was a man used to getting his way, to luxuriating in the excesses of wealth. It was hard for Mahegan not to land a killer blow to the head as the man slid down the door. There were multiple options. A forearm to the face could snap his neck. A roundhouse kick to the larynx could collapse his windpipe. A head butt to the face would certainly break his nose and possibly shut off the remaining oxygen flow to the man’s lungs. Ted Throckmorton most likely deserved any one of those fates, but he would not receive any tonight.
Mahegan grabbed the man by his shirt collar and belt, lifted him like a sack of flour, and heaved him onto the hood of the Lamborghini. The man instinctively put out his hands to break his fall, and the full weight of his large frame landed on the shattered wrist. His howl was the plaintive yelp of a severely wounded dog.
Mahegan
turned and picked up the pistol, then pocketed the weapon. He looked at Grace, who was frozen in place, and asked, “Keys?”
She handed them back to him, her hand shaking and her eyes shifting between him and the nearly unconscious Ted Throckmorton, splayed on the hood of the race car like an art exhibit.
Mahegan opened the apartment door after trying the third key, knowing better than to ask Grace, who looked catatonic. He escorted her through the doorway, stepped inside, flipped the locks, and pulled the chain across the runner. He moved Grace, still frozen and hugging herself, to the kitchen, where he looked out of a small window and saw Throckmorton sliding off the hood of the car. He was holding his wrist and grimacing. He looked at the apartment door, as if thinking about attempting to enter, but quickly dismissed the thought. He fumbled with his key fob, managed to get the car door open, and after a minute backed out and sped away.
Mahegan turned and looked at Grace. “I can stay or go,” he said. “If I stay, it’s down here, standing guard.”
She nodded. “Stay.”
“Has he hurt you before?”
Grace looked away.
After a long silence, he said, “Not my business. But I’ll stay tonight.”
She nodded again and said, “Stay.”
Mahegan studied the kitchen. Organized, neat, clean. Everything in its place. She was a fastidious woman. The insecurity she had demonstrated at the Irish Pub was a manifestation of her breakup, and now, on the rebound, she saw him as willing prey. Nothing wrong with that. There was a brief period of time when he had considered it, before the beers and the fight, but not now. His fight-or-flight instinct was telling him to defend and protect.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I understand.”
“There’s a sofa. I’ll be upstairs. If I leave before you—”
“You will.”
“When I leave before you, you can use the guest bathroom upstairs and to the right. There are clean towels. I’ve got food in the refrigerator. Depends on what you like.”
“I’m good. You okay?”
Grace was halfway up the stairs. She stopped and turned around to look at him. Mahegan could see family pictures lining the wall of the staircase. Asian parents, smiling. Siblings playing at the beach. College friends in fancy dresses. A wedding.
“Yeah. I’ll be fine,” she said. “But can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“You could have killed him.” Not a question, but a statement, like a certainty.
“No. If I had wanted to, I would have. I just beat the life out of him. He comes around me again, I’ll do the same.”
“He’s a powerful and dangerous man, Hawthorne. Be careful.”
“Nothing I haven’t dealt with before. Now can I ask you a question?”
She tried a half smile, but it quickly faded. “Sure. After everything I’ve put you through.”
“You don’t owe me anything. But if you were dating Brand Throckmorton’s son, what the hell were you doing at the crime scene? Isn’t that a huge conflict?”
She shrugged. “Griffyn specifically requested me. I recused myself, but he calls the shots.”
Mahegan nodded. “What was the third thing you know?”
“Well, I know a third and a fourth thing now. But the third thing is that Maeve Cassidy’s husband might be someone you want to talk to. I’m told he’s on his way to pick up his kid from the babysitter. He’ll probably be home in the morning, if we’re done with him at the station already. We do think he’s involved in something called an EB-Five program. Something to do with legally selling visas to the highest foreign bidder. Might be a good place to start.”
Mahegan thought of Petrov’s green card. It said “EB-5” on the back. “Okay. And the fourth?”
“Ted will not stop until he hurts you bad. He and his family play for keeps.”
Mahegan nodded. “So do I.”
“Yes. I can see that. The only difference being that Ted would have killed you, and since you didn’t kill him, now he will have his daddy fix it.”
“If I need to kill Ted Throckmorton or anyone else that deserves it, then I will. There’s an old Croatan saying. ‘Old age is not as honorable as death, but most people want it.’”
Grace looked away, thought about it, and said, “Sounds Japanese. Like the kamikaze pilots.”
Mahegan shrugged. “Probably lots of cultures embrace the idea of a noble death while fighting for something you believe in, as opposed to a life of avoiding danger and getting old.”
“Probably.”
“I don’t say that to scare you. I just need you to know that you can go upstairs and sleep soundly.”
“I understand. I will try to sleep.”
With those words, Grace slipped quietly upstairs. Mahegan walked to the back of the apartment, which was framed in standard fashion with a combined living and dining room that led onto a concrete slab patio. He stepped through the sliding glass door, stood outside, and listened, hearing nothing but the distant hiss of light traffic. He looked up and saw a deck leading from what he presumed was the master bedroom. He saw a light turn on and go off. There were no stairs, but it would be an easy enough climb for someone determined to get onto the balcony and into her bedroom.
He reentered the apartment, slid and locked the door, placed the bar inside the sliding door frame, and climbed the stairs. He knocked lightly on Grace’s door and said, “Grace. Do you have a bar in your sliding glass door in there?”
The door opened, and she was standing there in a UNCW T-shirt that barely covered her below the hips. “Yes. I lock it every night,” she said.
Mahegan studied her. She seemed drugged and withdrawn. He had witnessed it before in combat. She was experiencing post-traumatic stress. Whatever Ted Throckmorton had done to her, it had been serious. He nodded and began to turn.
“I’d like for you to check it,” she said.
Mahegan turned back toward her and stepped into the room. She moved, but only marginally so that he was forced to brush against her. In response, he held up his hands and lightly touched her shoulders as he slipped by. Her hand came up and touched his as he continued moving. The shock of her touch distracted him. The king-size bed and the walnut chest of drawers slipped past him. He studied the lock on the sliding glass door, tried it. It was solid. He unlocked the door and tried to move it against the bar in the well of the slider, and the door held. He closed and locked the door, tightened the curtain, and turned.
She was standing behind him, an apparition in the dark. He could see her mouth parted slightly and her hair falling on her neck. Her arms were slender yet strong. Her legs were toned. Everything was perfectly in place. But this was not the place for him.
“You’re secure. I’ll be downstairs.”
“You don’t have to be,” she whispered.
He hesitated. “Actually, yes I do.” He walked quickly, her scent reaching out like a long arm, pulling him back. But he was strong. He knew desire could be fulfilled another day, when it was right.
Tonight he had to protect her, this woman he barely knew. Mahegan determined that she needed him in that way more than she needed him in any other.
CHAPTER 8
MAEVE CASSIDY PACED FIVE STEPS ACROSS AND FIVE STEPS BACK, then repeated the process for the 157th time. She was odd that way. She did the math. Her stride was greater than three feet, so she was walking over fifteen feet across each time. She knew plywood came in four-by-eight-foot sheets typically, so it was most likely sixteen feet across. Her cell was four sheets wide and two sheets deep. The deep sheets were end to end, while the wide ones were side by side. Sixteen by sixteen feet.
A single trip across the plywood box was a sortie, as the military called it. One hundred fifty-seven sorties at sixteen feet each equaled 2,512 feet, which wasn’t much, not even a half a mile, but it was enough to help her burn some nervous energy.
With each hour that passed, her mind shifted from confusion to clarity . . . and fear
. She raced between three thoughts: Piper, danger, and her cheating husband. She held close the precious few minutes she had spent with her daughter, Piper, after arriving at their home yesterday afternoon, before heading out in search of her husband. Not their daughter, but her daughter. Pete Cassidy was not high on Maeve’s priority list right now. He had always seemed to be a good husband, but the shocking image of him with another woman, coupled with a year at war and what she had done, erased any memory of the before picture.
Pace, pace, pace. More sorties, more steps. Absently, she clutched her reddish-brown hair, which was oily and sticky. Her mind spun from Piper to the second of the three thoughts, which was the danger she suspected was bearing down on the United States. Her knowledge of what might lie ahead was dangerous for her and her family.
Maeve had left the only clue she could safely leave behind: a half-used bottle of henna extract. Henna, a plant that grew in Afghanistan and that men there used as makeup, for example, lining their eyes or darkening beards with it, was her big clue. How stupid, she thought to herself. Who could help her? But that simple bottle of henna extract that sat perched on the top of Piper’s chest of drawers was her only hope . . . and perhaps the only hope for several cities along the East Coast.
Pace, pace, pace. Had she done enough? In the darkness, she looked at the outline of her crumpled uniform jacket in the corner of her cell, had an idea, stashed it away, touched the wall, walked to the other side, touched that wall, and continued her regimen.
She tried to stay focused on Piper with every step, but her alternating strides brought images of her frenzied departure from their home in Cary, the candlelit room in Raleigh, her husband groping an attractive woman, and the sheets twirling, as if spun by a dervish, which was the third thought that haunted her. Then she was back to Piper, who was hugging her mother, most likely not entirely remembering her, which hurt. Maeve remembered inhaling the scent of the fine blond hair, freshly bathed with baby shampoo. The clean, innocent smell of her child was offset by the wicked scent—oils and lotions—of her husband’s infidelity. The fear of a catastrophic attack on the East Coast, using liquefied natural gas, or LNG, which she had helped steal from Pakistan, then overrode everything else.