by Jance, J. A.
Mina knew how much Mark had appreciated the fact that she understood his need to hang on to the derelict old wreck. It had escaped being mortgaged along with everything else, because the lending officer from the bank had claimed it was essentially worthless.
Sometime earlier—during that terrible year the fish in the Salton Sea all died for no apparent reason—there had been a period of months when almost no one had been able to use their cabins owing to the fierce odor of dead fish. While the owners were mostly absent, someone had broken into Mark’s cabin and most of the others and vandalized them all. As a consequence and at great expense, Mark had insisted on installing a system of roll-down metal shutters that covered the cabin’s windows and doors.
It had been an expensive process, not unlike putting lipstick on a pig, but the shutters made the cabin, humble as it was, impervious to intrusion. Once the shutters were in place, Mina had made her own contribution. She had hired a workman to install a fireproof safe concealed behind what appeared to be an electrical box in the cabin’s only closet. The safe made a perfect hidey-hole for Mina’s private hoard of cash, not just Gallegos’s cash but other monies she had accumulated over the years by skimming funds off the top and hiding them without Mark’s ever being the wiser.
Mark Blaylock was under the impression they were going broke. Mina knew that wasn’t entirely true. Mark would be broke; Mina would be fine. She would see to it.
Driving to the Salton City cabin early that evening, Mina threaded her way through various campsites with their outdoor bonfires and their amazing collections of ATV rolling stock parked outside massive motor homes and fifth-wheel campers. Using her remote control, Mina opened only the shutter that covered the front door, then she let herself inside with a key. Without the AC on, the place was like an oven. She held back only as much cash as she thought Richard might demand. She stuffed that into her Gucci bag and then put the remainder in the safe.
She was in the cabin for only a matter of minutes, but by the time she left, she was dripping with sweat. She paused outside long enough to relock the front door and close the shutter. With the now-empty athletic bag safely stowed in the trunk of her car, she headed for the airport.
Mina knew that she was cutting it close, but she didn’t need to check any luggage. Besides, with this new influx of cash, she was once again flying first-class. That meant security wouldn’t be a problem. She’d be there in plenty of time to board her plane.
9
Grass Valley, California
September
Richard Lowensdale was busy chatting with Lynn Martinson that Saturday morning, trying to prop her up in the face of that day’s so-called family meeting, which was part of her son Lucas’s incarceration process. Lynn, her ex-husband, the ex’s new wife, the druggie sixteen-year-old, Lucas’s court-appointed attorney, and his counselor would all be in attendance. Lynn was expecting the session to be one of blame-game finger-pointing, and Lynn’s devoted listener, Richard Lewis, allowed as how that would probably be true.
He read Lynn’s messages and sent back what he hoped sounded like sympathetic one-word comments—encouraging words, as it were. The truth is, committee meetings of any kind bored the hell out of him, so listening to Lynn going on and on about a meeting that was going to take place half a continent away was not high on Richard’s agenda. The more she blathered on about her problems, the more he knew it was time to take her off his list. She just wasn’t fun anymore, and any woman who wasn’t fun wasn’t worth having around.
So when there was an early-morning doorbell ring at his front door—a totally unexpected doorbell ring—Richard was grateful for the interruption and was glad to tell Lynn someone was there, that he had to go to the door.
Richard was smart enough about home security to have a CCTV camera on his front porch, one with a video feed that went directly into his computer. Before leaving his desk, he switched over to that screen and was pleased to see Mina Blaylock—the beautiful Mina—waiting there for him to open the door. He wasn’t surprised to see her. He knew exactly why she had come and what she would need. The only thing that did surprise him was how long it had taken for her to show up on his doorstep.
As he started toward the door, however, he looked around the room and had a glimpse of how bad it was. The house was a mess. When his mother and Ron had lived here, you could have eaten off the floor. Now you couldn’t eat off the dining room table. For one thing, Richard had turned that into his primary assembly station for model airplanes. His own collection, layered with dust, covered the bookshelves where his mother had once kept her collection of murder mysteries. Those had been banished to the trash heap at the bottom of the basement stairs.
There were plenty of people who wanted to fly model airplanes but didn’t have brains enough to put them together properly. In addition to building his own planes, he made several hundred bucks a month on the side by doing the assembly work for those dunderheads. They sent him their kits and their money; he sent them their planes.
Doing that, however, meant he needed packing material. That was also in the dining room. The packing station was his mother’s old buffet, where instead of good china, packing boxes and tape and shipping labels held sway. To the side of the buffet, on the floor, a huge plastic bag spilled a scatter of foam peanuts in every direction.
Richard spent most of his waking hours either working at the dining room table or at his computer at the far end of the small living room. Over time, there had come to be trails from the computer station and the dining room table that led through the debris field to other rooms in the house—the bathroom, bedroom, and kitchen. Most of the time he didn’t worry about any of this.
The string of women he romanced over his VoIP connection had no idea how dirty his house was or how long it had been since he’d had a haircut—or a shower. The delivery guys who handed him packages or dropped them on the front porch or picked up the outgoing ones didn’t mind how Richard or his house looked. It wasn’t their business, and it wasn’t their problem.
Now, though, with Mina standing out on the front porch, Richard realized how the house would look through her eyes—how he would look—and he was embarrassed. He spent a few minutes clearing a spot on the couch so she’d have a place to sit down. Finally, when she rang the doorbell again, Richard made his way to the door.
“Hey,” he said. “What’s up?”
“Hello, Richard,” Mina said. “Can I come in?”
“Sure,” he said. “What brings you to these parts?”
He pushed open the screen door. Mina looked great, but then she always looked great. He often wondered why she put up with Mark. He seemed so . . . well . . . ordinary. Boring and old. Mark had to be pushing sixty, probably twice Mina’s age.
Richard led her through the entry and into the living room. He gestured her to a place on the couch while he resumed his place on the chair in front of the computer. On the screen, Lynn Martinson was leaving him a long text message. More whining, no doubt.
“I need some help,” Mina said, then she corrected that statement. “We need some help.”
Clearing a path through the mess on the floor, Richard rolled his desk chair closer to the couch. “With what?” he asked.
That was disingenuous. Richard knew exactly what Mina needed help with—a problem with the drone guidance system. The reason Richard knew all about that problem and how to fix it was that the problem was his own creation. One of his last acts when leaving Rutherford International was a bit of “gotcha” sabotage. He had inserted the problem, a single set of rogue commands, buried deep in the thousands of commands it took to run the supposedly scrapped drone and make it work on GPS coordinates.
Richard knew that a sharp programmer might be able to locate and fix the problem, but a search like that would take time and money—lots of money. He also understood why it had taken so long for the problem to come to light. That had to do with the fact that no one had bothered to do a drone test flight for well o
ver a year. No test flights meant that RI had no customers.
If Mark and Mina knew about the problem now, that meant they had needed and tested a working model—for someone. A customer of some kind must have come out of the woodwork. Richard knew it sure as hell wasn’t the military, because as far as they knew the drones were history. Besides, if it had been someone on the up-and-up, Mina wouldn’t have come skulking up here unannounced to ask Richard for help.
As far as Richard was concerned, a customer who was interested in staying under the radar was very good news. It meant money was in play—lots of money, for the Blaylocks and, if Richard played his cards right, for him as well.
“What do you think is the problem?” he asked.
Mina shrugged. “I have no idea,” she said. “Neither does Mark. We need someone who can troubleshoot for us. We’re not in any condition to start bringing people back on a permanent basis,” she added, “but since you’re so familiar with the project, we were hoping you’d agree to come on board on a consulting basis.”
“What happened?” Richard asked.
“We put a drone up in the air, or rather, Mark put it up in the air. He’s flown them before with no trouble, but this time it crashed and burned.”
Which, Richard thought, is exactly what I programmed it to do: take off, fly flawlessly for a while, and then drop out of the sky for no apparent reason.
Richard let the silence between them stretch for some time before he shook his head. “I just don’t see how I can do it, Mina,” he said reluctantly. “Not after what I hoped would happen between us. There’s too much history. Just seeing you again is enough to break my heart.”
Lying to someone’s face was a lot more difficult than telling lies over the phone, but between the last time Richard had seen Mina and now, he’d had a whole lot more practice in the art of prevarication. And he had to admit that she was a pretty capable liar herself. Ignoring the mess around her, she watched him with a kind of almost breathless, bright-eyed attention. That was how she made men sit up and take notice.
“I’m so sorry, Richard,” she said. “Please understand. I had to let you go along with everyone else. Otherwise Mark would have figured it out.”
For months after Richard went to work at Rutherford, Mina had flirted with him shamelessly and hinted that she was interested in having a little fling with him. That was all that happened in the end—flirting. In actual fact, he’d hardly ever gotten to first base with any real women. They scared the hell out of him. Richard talked a good game, but when it was time to deliver the goods, he always came up short.
He had hoped things would be different with Mina, but the flirting had come to naught. Later, when he’d been given his pink slip, rather than facing up to his own shortcomings, Richard had convinced himself that was why he’d been let go—because Mark had somehow caught on to what Mina was thinking. That was the real reason Richard had dropped that little programming bomb into the Rutherford works. It was the best way for him to even the score. And now, months later, when they finally knew they had a problem, not only did they not know he was responsible for their difficulty, they had come to him to fix it. How wonderful was that?
Richard wanted to leap off the couch and dance a little jig. Instead, he sighed and shook his head as though he were allowing himself to be persuaded entirely against his will.
“All right,” he said resignedly. “What do you need and when?”
“I need to fly a ten-kilo payload, one hundred or so miles, to predetermined coordinates.”
Richard had been wondering about the end user. Mina’s statement provided the answer. After all, this was California. Other businesses might be struggling to survive, but the illegal drug industry was still booming. Richard wanted Mina to verify it, though. He wanted her to understand he wasn’t as dumb as she thought he was.
“I suppose that means we’re dealing with one of the drug cartels,” Richard said.
Mina looked him square in the eye and didn’t deny it, and she didn’t object to his use of the word we either. In fact, she used the same word herself.
“We’ll make a lot of money,” she said.
“Who’s we?”
“All of us—you, me, Mark. How long do you think it’ll take to troubleshoot the problem?”
The real answer was about two minutes, but he didn’t tell her that. She wouldn’t pay for two minutes.
“I don’t know how you expect me to do that,” he said. “I don’t have any of the code, and even if I did, finding something like this won’t be easy.”
Mina reached into her purse and pulled out a thumb drive, which she handed over to him. “I brought the latest version of the programming with me. Here it is,” she said. “Everything you need should be on that.”
The fact that Mark and Mina still had drones and were getting ready to sell working models meant that the Blaylocks had gone over to the dark side. From Richard’s point of view there was a definite upside to working the dark side—lots of money.
“It’ll take me at least six months, but that’s not a guarantee,” he said. “Fifty thou total. All communications are to be done this way, in person and eyeball to eyeball. No e-mails back and forth; no telephone communications; all payments to be made in cash. Half down; half on delivery.”
“Five months, not six,” Mina countered. “I need to be able to do the test flight before the end of January. I’m offering twenty thousand down, and ten a month until the job is completed. Plus, I’ll give you a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bonus in January after a successful test flight.”
Once again Mina reached into her oversized purse. This time she plucked out a packet of cash and handed that to him as well. “Count it if you want.”
Richard didn’t have to count it. He knew it was all there. He couldn’t help but be a little disappointed. He’d had no idea that she knew him so well. The fact that she was offering more than he’d asked was surprising.
“Oh,” Mina added. “There is one more thing. We’ll need the ability to remotely detonate this thing.”
“As in blow it up?”
“Yes,” she said. “Blow it to pieces.”
“That’s a little more complicated,” Richard said with a laugh. “But I get it,” he added. “It’s like the beginning of one of those old Mission: Impossible stories on TV where they say, ‘This tape will self-destruct in thirty seconds.’”
Mina frowned. “I don’t think I ever saw that movie.”
“It wasn’t a movie,” Richard said. “It was an old TV series. From the sixties.”
“I never saw that either,” Mina said.
But Richard had seen those shows, countless times. Ron Mills, Richard’s stepfather, had loved Mission: Impossible, especially Cinnamon. He had owned DVD versions of all three seasons. Richard had found those DVDs in the same box in the basement where he had found his mother’s prized boxed sets of Murder, She Wrote VCR tapes.
“Too bad,” he said. “You’re missing out on an essential piece of Americana.”
Mina stood up and gathered her purse. Richard didn’t bother getting up to show her out. He looked at the money—money he had never expected to see. Without having to pay taxes and at his current rate of expenditure, that much money and the rest Mina had promised him would last for a very long time.
Richard felt an immense sense of satisfaction. He had Mina Blaylock just where he wanted her. Richard knew that if there was that much money lying around just for the asking, then there was obviously far more where that came from.
Sacramento, California
Brenda’s enforced jail-based sobriety didn’t exactly take. It lasted long enough for Valerie to drive her home to Sacramento from Barstow. It lasted long enough for Brenda to be far too sober during the name-calling blowup between her sister and her mother, Camilla, when Valerie dropped Brenda off at their mother’s P Street home.
“Here’s your jailbird,” Valerie had said, opening the door so Brenda could make her way inside. �
�I brought her home to roost.”
Camilla heaved herself up out of the chair and hurried to meet them. “I’m so glad you’re safe,” she said, hugging Brenda close. “When I didn’t hear from you, I was worried sick.”
“She’s a drunk, Mom,” Valerie said. “She wrecked her car and she damned near killed herself. She probably would have done us all a favor if she had.”
“Valerie,” Camilla said, “you mustn’t talk like that.”
“Why not? You don’t think she’s learned her lesson, do you? Just wait. She’ll be drinking again the minute your back is turned.”
“Valerie . . .”
“Save your breath, Mom. I don’t want to hear it, and the next time she gets in hot water, don’t bother calling me. I did this once. I won’t do it again.”
Valerie had slammed out the door on that note and hadn’t been heard from again. She hadn’t phoned. Camilla called and left messages. Valerie didn’t call back.
As for Brenda? Unfortunately, Valerie’s assessment proved to be correct. Brenda was all right for a couple of days, but then she got around to opening the mail, including the background check on Richard—Lowensdale, it turned out, not Lattimer. Reading through the material and uncovering the fabric of lies behind everything he had told Brenda was enough to push her off the deep end once more.
That night, after her mother was asleep, she let herself out of the house, walked six blocks to the nearest liquor store, and bought a supply of booze that she smuggled back into the house and upstairs to her room. One of the pieces of furniture in the room was her mother’s old hope chest. From Brenda’s point of view, the best thing about it was the fact that it came with a lock and key. Brenda deposited her booze purchases in among mother’s extra sheets and pillowcases, then she turned the old-fashioned key in the lock and hid the key in her purse, concealed in her hard plastic tampon holder.