by Stacia Stone
Hunt has ripped the sheets off every piece of furniture and opened most of the boxes. He surveys the storage unit with an inscrutable expression. “You said your father hasn’t been here since your mom died?”
I sigh. “Yes.”
“And that was ten years ago, right?”
Something about his tone makes me turn to look at him. “That’s what I said.”
“It seems like your dad’s the type to want to keep track of his media coverage, most egotists are like that.” He holds up a stack of magazines that were sitting in the seat of an antique armchair. The various levels of fade in the colors means they’ve probably been collected over the course of several years.
“So he kept some old magazines.” I don’t like the comment about egotism, but choose to ignore it. “That’s totally normal.”
“When was Daddy dearest profiled by Time Magazine, was it during the last senatorial race?” He holds up a magazine that I recognize from my dad’s last run for office. “What was that, about two years ago.”
I feel my heart start to beat a little faster. My father always makes such a big deal about never coming out here. Too many memories, he always said.
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“It means he’s been here, and a lot more recently than eight years ago.” Hunt tosses the magazine aside. “In fact, the year of this profile is the same year that the multi-million dollar super PAC funding his campaign was started. Makes you wonder where the money came from.”
“Fundraising and donors—"
“Corporate donors who give money through dozens of intermediaries so it’s difficult to track down the real source of the money.” Hunt scoffs. “If you’re gonna funnel money from illegal weapons deals and human trafficking, that might be a good way to do it.”
“You’re wrong.”
“That much intel can’t be wrong. Your father is a part of this.” His voice is cutting. “Whether you’re willing to believe it or not. All I want right now is proof.”
“That magazine doesn’t mean anything.”
“It means that your father has been here. Recently. Makes me wonder why, especially since he didn’t bother to tell you about it. Although if I was trying to hide something, I’d use a place that nobody expected me to go. Is this unit even in his name?”
I swallow hard. “It’s in my mother’s name, but that makes perfect sense. She collected antiques. She had the unit before they got married and paid the rent for years in advance. He just never bothered to have it transferred into his name after she died. It probably never occurred to him.”
“Or he wanted to make sure that anybody looking for information wouldn’t think to come here.” Hunt stalks around the room, closely inspecting the boxes. “I pulled every piece of intel that was available on your father, both public and private. There’s no record of a storage unit. It didn’t occur to me to check under the name of his long-dead wife.”
“None of that matters.” I shove a box away and rise to face him. “We came all the way out here and there’s still nothing to find. You’re just wrong.”
“Someone saw him, Sophia. I know he’s involved, and he’s going to lead me to the others.”
“If he was taking regular trips to Africa, I think I’d know.”
“I could probably fill this storage unit with things you don’t know.”
I’m done trying to convince him. “Just be careful with the furniture, it’s all French Restoration. My mother loved this stuff.”
“Hmm.” He moves toward me. A flutter of anticipation that I can’t stop ripples through me, but he pushes me aside to get at something behind me. “That doesn’t look like something out of a catalog.”
“What—"
He picks up what looks like a wooden stand covered in rawhide with colored strings pulled down the sides. “This belong to your mother?”
I’ve never seen it before in my life. “Probably. Maybe she liked drums.”
“They call it a djembe, actually. I used to see them all over in Mali.” He hefts the thing up his hands, testing the weight. “Seems like an odd choice.”
“Is this really the time to be critiquing my dead mom’s taste?”
He looks a little taken aback and sets the drum back down. Then, seeming to make a decision, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a switchblade. “This didn’t belong to your mother.”
Realizing his intention, I lunge for the drum but he easily pushes me aside, holding me back with the weight of his body. I watch in horror as he takes the blade to the top of the drums, slicing easily through the leather.
“I hate you!” I beat on his backs with my hands balled into fists, the blows as ineffectual as the wind beating at a mountain. He puts up with the abuse for about a minute before turning around and painfully gripping both of my arms.
“That’s enough.” He says, voice dark. When I make another move towards him, he pushes me hard enough that I stumble back and sit down hard on a Louis XV armchair.
“It is enough!” I snap, suddenly so angry that I feel the sharp pain of tears. I’ve always been the type to cry more from anger than any other emotion. It was never a problem until I met him. “I’ve had exactly enough of this bullshit. It’s bad enough you’re messing with all of my mom’s stuff. If you cut up anything else, I swear to God I will kill you.”
Hunt doesn’t react to my outburst. Instead, he shoves his hand inside the drum and roots around inside of it.
Momentarily forgetting my anger, I watch him in shock. “What are you doing?”
When he pulls his hand back out of the drum, there’s a thick stack of papers in his hand.
Why would papers be sewed inside of an African drum?
“What is that?” I ask, even though I realize that I already know the answer.
He smiles in cold satisfaction. “Exactly what I’ve been looking for.”
Chapter 17
It’s all here. Correspondence, bank statements, transfer advice: everything I need to prove the link between Senator Reynolds and the mercenaries trafficking guns and slaves in Mali. My heart pounds hard enough to beat right out of my chest as I quickly scan each page. There isn’t time to completely analyze it now but once my team and I can dig into, I know that we’ll be able to identify every person who has ever had their hands on this blood money.
It might seem strange to hang onto evidence of a serious crime, but for the Senator this is likely the best insurance that he has. Getting into bed with criminals is a dangerous game, and the Senator is just one piece on the board. Hanging on to incriminating evidence uses the threat of mutually assured destruction to prevent a double-cross. If any of the other actors tried to move against him, he could go public with proof of their misdeeds and burn it all to the ground.
Sophia is saying something, but I’m too focused on the culmination of months of work represented by this few dozen pieces of paper.
Her voice finally filters through the haze. I look up to find her staring at me, eyes wide with what I can only assume is alarm.
I don’t want to listen to her defend her monster of a father even though I know I shouldn’t expect her to do anything else. She loves him because he’s the man who raised her and he probably kept her away from the worst parts of himself. She can’t do anything besides insist it all has to be a mistake. That doesn’t mean I want to hear it.
When I finally focus on her face and on the hand, that’s frantically pulling on my arm, I realize she’s saying something completely different.
“Do you hear that?” Her voice is pitched high, just on the edge of panic.
Once she says it, I realize that I’ve been hearing it too.
Police sirens.
I roll the papers into a tube and shove them in the waist of my jeans. I don’t really care what happens to me at this point, whether it’s prison or a grave, but this information has to be protected.
Sophia doesn’t fight me as I push her out of the storage locker and back toward
s the car. My sidearm is in its holster at my side but one 9mm isn’t going to do much against a SWAT team.
The sirens only get louder once we’re back to the car. I have to shove Sophia toward her door and she stumbles before catching herself. Her eyes are distant and unfocused like her brain has fully left the building. Maybe it’s shell-shock or trauma but she needs to snap the fuck out of it.
I’ve barely managed to get the engine turned over before the first car comes speeding around the row of storage units. It’s a plain black sedan with heavy-tinted windows and a blue police light stuck up on the dash. An identical vehicle speeds after the first one.
So not the local cops. Fuck.
I gun the engine, push the clutch into gear and floor the accelerator. My heart pounds as we speed towards the two vehicles. The second one has moved up so they’re driving side-by-side and completely filling the aisle with no room to maneuver around them. If this were a game of chicken, I’d be on the losing side.
There’s less than a hundred yards separating us and the ground is getting eaten up fast.
Sophia stares straight ahead
Popping the emergency brake, I wrench the wheel. With a loud screech of the tires on pavement, the car makes a ninety-degree turn through a break between buildings and into the next aisle.
In the rearview mirror, I watch as one car makes the turn behind me. I wait a beat but the other car doesn’t follow behind it, which probably means that they’re hoping to cut us off by coming down from the other side.
I floor the gas pedal, urging the rust bucket forward with as much mental urgency as I can muster. The cars trailing me have better engines, better handling and higher top speeds so it’s going to be close. It’s not even a choice about getting caught, I’ll go down before I lose the information that I’ve found.
The second car makes turns out in front of us, a couple hundred yards away. I was right about them trying to pen us in. The storage units are arranged in a grid pattern but the buildings are different lengths depending on the size of each unit so the gaps are laid out in random intervals.
There hadn’t been enough time for me to get the layout of the place before we made our move on the storage unit, which was a stupid mistake on my part. I’d been too focused on proving Sophia wrong about her father and too distracted by whatever it is that’s happening between us to be smart about it. When Savage shows up, he’s going to rip me a new asshole.
Unless the dicks chasing us manage to get it done first.
This entire time, Sophia has been completely still and silent beside me. I don’t have to guess why. She just found out that the man she probably trusted most in the world is the kind of monster who destroys nations and traffics children for personal profit. That can’t feel good.
I take a narrow turn between two buildings and the bumper screeches against the wall as I get too close to the side of one building. Quickly, I regain control of the wheel before we crash.
When I spare a glance over at her, Sophia doesn’t look like she’s so much as blinked.
“Hey!” I yell, more than once before she slowly turns her head towards me. “You okay?”
Her mouth opens but no words come out of it. She’s moving like someone hit the slow-motion button.
“No,” she finally says, so softly that I can barely hear it. “I mean…I don’t know.”
There isn’t really time to comfort her but I try, anyway. “Everything is gonna get worked out.”
She turns away to stare out the window. “You don’t know that.”
“I will work it out.”
My words hang in the air between us, full of a dozen unspoken things.
I want to let her go, I realize. I want to let her get back to some semblance of a life before she’s completely chewed up and spit out. Even if I know that it’s crazy and a great way to get myself sent to prison, not to mention losing the information that it’s taken almost a year to get.
And I have to think about my guys. Savage and Frost gave up everything to get this done. And I made a promise to Kidd that I’d see this all the way to the end.
Even with this rationalization, I realize that my foot has lifted slightly off the gas pedal and our car has slowed down. Just enough for the car behind me to get close enough that their front bumper just barely kisses our rear.
I look in the rearview mirror and in almost the same moment, scream at Sophia. “Get down.”
Without waiting for her to respond, I shove her head towards the dash just as the sound of gunshots explodes around me.
These aren’t the fucking cops.
My ears are ringing so loud that Sophia’s screams seem like they’re coming from a mile away. Bullets shatter the front windshield and I can barely see through the hundreds of spidery cracks in the glass. I hunch down in the seat as shots continue to fly over my head.
Sophia comes alive then, at the worst possible moment. She starts banging on the door and frantically looking behind us. “It’s over! Let me out!”
“Sophia, stop!”
Her voice is high and reedy with panic. “Just let me go with the police!”
“This isn’t the police.” I make another wild turn and almost lose control of the car. We spin out and nearly wreck into a building but I right the wheel with only inches to spare. Both sedans are behind us now, but only one was shooting. I consider returning fire but there’s a near 100% chance that their windows are bulletproofed and I don’t want to waste ammunition. “The police don’t shoot at cars with hostages in them and especially not at the windows.”
“Well, who is it then?” She demands, anger and fear always two sides of the same coin with her.
“You want to call up dear old dad and ask him?”
She doesn’t answer and I make the mistake of glancing over at her. In that same moment, one of cars following us manages to clip our bumper and then we’re spinning out of control. I see the brick wall coming toward us as if in slow motion but not in enough time to stop it.
The impact deploys the airbags and give me a knock to the head that feels hard enough to send me to outer space. I don’t lose consciousness, but for a minute the smoke from the air bag powder makes me wonder if I’ve died and gone to heaven
For a moment, everything is blissfully quiet and hazy. I almost forget where I am. And then I turn to see Sophia slumped against the dashboard, unmoving with blood running down the side of her face.
Reality crashes into me with all its noise and chaos. My legs are stuck up under the wheel. I can’t get it to budge even when I push into it with all my weight. I’m not in pain right now, probably from the adrenaline, but I know that I will be soon. But pain, or the future promise of it, doesn’t matter to me much at the moment.
I stretch to get my fingers up against Sophia’s neck, her pulse is faint but steady. The blood is coming from a gash on the top of her hairline, head wounds always bleed in a way that’s more dramatic than life-threatening.
She’s going to leave. The relief that moves through me is so overwhelming that it almost makes me pass out.
Almost, right now I have more important things to deal with.
I watch in the rearview mirror as a handful of men get out of the cars and start making their way slowly towards us, guns drawn. I know immediately that I was right on the money thinking they weren’t cops. Cops don’t move with flanking techniques straight out of Fallujah. These are mercenaries.
And I bet I know exactly who hired them.
Sophia’s side of the car is wedged up into a corner between the wall of the building in front of us. The side of a perpendicular building is pressed up so tightly against the door that it can’t open more than an inch or two. They have to come around to my side.
Ignoring the streak of pain that probably means something in my shoulder is torn, I work my hand far enough behind me that I can just get ahold of the barrel of my gun.
I have it pulled out and cocked just as one of the mercenaries gets to the busted out
window.
“Don’t.” That one word is full of warning. The mercenary — dark sunglasses and a half-mask pulled up over his mouth completely obscure his features — freezes when he sees the gun aimed directly at his face. His assault rifle is partly raised, but not high enough to get a shot off before I do. “Tell your friends to back up or I’m putting one between your eyes.”
The mercenary makes a small motion with his free hand and the other men with him fall back until they’re out of my peripheral vision. I don’t dare to turn to look to see how far away they are. All of my attention is on the man less than a foot away with an AR-15 aimed at the vicinity of my crotch.
“How do you want to do this?” I ask, my voice dangerously casual.
The man doesn’t rise to the bait and the only movement he makes is a minute slide of his finger closer to the trigger of his assault rifle. I can tell he’s well-trained.
“We’re here for whatever you got out of that storage locker. Give it up and we’ll be on our way.”
“Who sent you? Senator Reynolds?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.
“That’s classified.”
I raise an eyebrow at that, ignoring the shooting pain that rockets through my head. “Does he know that you almost killed his daughter?”
He gives the barest of shrugs. “Orders were to get anything you took out of that unit. Anything else is to be considered low priority.”
His words stop me cold. I’ve always known that the senator has ice running through his veins but I never really thought he’d place his daughter’s life behind keeping his own secrets. Fucking monster.
“And you weren’t told to put a bullet in my head for good measure?”
“Low priority.”
“And what about the girl?”
The mercenary gives Sophia the smallest glance. “You hand that information over and the two of you get to walk away from this. You might be able to take me out, but I’ve got four men behind me.”
So he’s giving me a choice. Our lives in exchange for the information. There’s a chance that I could get myself out of this. If I shoot him, the others will move on me. But if I can grab his weapon and take advantage of the small amount of cover from the car and take them out. With a significant amount of luck, I could make it out alive with the evidence of the Senator’s crimes still in my hands. But the chances of Sophia surviving a firefight are so small that they don’t even round up to zero.