She looked through the door again.
“If I didn’t care about you surviving, you’d already be dead.”
“Yeah,” she muttered, her voice sounding tired and weak, and aimed into the darkness down the chute.
“My ass is on the line, too,” Cole said. “For you.”
“Yeah,” she said, a little louder this time. She reached for the door, holding it open wider.
“I have to go,” Cole said. “Are you ready?”
She raised her leg, one foot stepping onto the lip of the chute. She turned back quickly to face him, and to say, “Thanks.”
Cole nodded. “Just make sure you get the hell out of Hawaii.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t go to the cops. Don’t tell anyone. Just leave.”
She crawled in, sitting with her legs pointing down like she was a kid atop a waterslide. And suddenly, as if she just remembered what the chute was used for, she took her hands off the metal bottom, holding them up in the air with a little groan. “Okay,” she said. “I’m going. But you’ll hear from me.”
The idea of her tracking him down again didn’t bother him as much as he’d thought. It meant they’d both be alive.
She gave one last nod to him. And then she pushed off and slipped quietly down out of sight.
7
Cole
He knocked on the door and took a deep breath. When he closed his eyes, he could see her again, that last look of fear in her eyes before she turned away from him, before she faced the descent, sliding down into clutches of uncertainty. Now he was there, too, at the door of Captain, rattled with uncertainty. What would be waiting for him beyond that door? Would it be Captain? Or his other alias, Roger? It was a bad sign when he was Roger. Roger meant that someone was about to die.
Cole had to get himself together. He couldn’t face either alias this way.
He knocked again, until a voice from inside told him to come in.
Inside the room, the voice was louder, and clearer, and as pretty as the mouth that did the telling. Captain’s Hawaiian secretary had always smiled at him that way, sexily, inappropriately for the office. Inappropriately for a married woman, certainly. It used to turn him on, but now it just terrified him. Especially today.
“Interesting morning?” she said, flicking her hair off a bare, tanned shoulder.
“You mean afternoon?”
She shrugged. “I just got here.”
“Where’s Captain?”
“What happened?”
“Huh?”
“Tell me what happened out there,” she said, “with that girl.”
“It’s nothing you haven’t heard already.”
She was smiling again, a healthy, youthful shine on her sun-bronzed face. Captain was smart about her, and he lacked the possessiveness and jealousy that would otherwise get in the way of using his girl as a kind of office bait. A little honey trap that could catch any of his workers who’d slip up for even just half a second, the slightest gap of judgment, of thinking with the wrong head.
Cole had occasionally caught himself slipping over the edge of the trap to peer into his own demise. He’d get flirty, maybe sometimes overly so. But that wasn’t what Captain cared about. He wanted information. He wanted the kind of things mentioned offhand, between the flirting. Slipups. Sometimes Cole even thought she was trained to go after these things. His Hawaiian girl, his secretary, was more like a predator than anything else.
“We had a break-in,” Cole said.
She scrunched up her face and said, “Really? A break-in from some girl?”
“A woman,” Cole said.
“She’s my age.” Captain’s secretary propped a pen up on her bottom lip, tapping it. “A girl my age, or so I heard.”
“If you already heard about it—”
“What was she doing?”
“I don’t know,” Cole said. “She fell through the ceiling, landed on the beltway.”
“She hurt?”
“No.”
“She still alive?”
Cole thought for a moment. “No.”
She sighed, swinging her legs back under her desk. She stared at her screen. “You killed her?”
“Where’s Captain?” Cole said.
“Did you?”
“Should I just walk back there?”
“Well, hold up,” she said, spinning her chair away from the computer again, away from her work. Perhaps swinging to her real work, working on him. Grinding him down with, “Hold up, come on, come on. Come here.” She nodded to the chair next to her desk. “You’ve been on your feet all day, right?”
“Afternoon.”
“Then just chill with me for a minute. Can you? For a minute?”
“For what?”
“I dunno.”
“For the gory details?”
She shrugged innocently, her dark hair swaying with it.
“You’re a real sicko,” Cole said.
“Aren’t we all?”
Cole took his eyes off her, staring to the hallway behind her desk, to where Captain’s door would be. “I’m going back there.”
“I don’t care,” she said.
Cole made it past her desk and into hall. A man was already sitting in a chair next to the closed door of Captain’s office. He was an islander. T-shirt and jeans, baseball cap. No visible weapon at his side. “What’s up?” Cole asked him.
“Just waiting.”
“Is he in there?”
“I don’t even know anymore, man. It’s been a while.”
Cole knocked on the door a few times, stopping when he heard sounds within. The screech of a closing drawer. Muffled movement toward the door. It opened, a few inches, and there was Captain’s face staring back at him. “Oh, it’s you,” he said around a dangling cigarette. “Get the hell in here.”
Cole got the hell in there, happy to be finished with the gauntlet of closed doors. He took his usual seat against the wall, next to the always-open filing cabinet, feet up on a stack of banker’s boxes and staring out from his favorite vantage point to the docks through Captain’s wide window. It was a little hard to believe, after all the excitement today, that he had just come from there. From across the Pacific. From the pan to the fire.
“Hell of a way to start the work week,” Captain said, chuckling to himself. He stood next to the open window, smoking. He stepped in the middle of it to block Cole’s view. “You take care of her?”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” he said, stepping back to the side of the window, the sunshine pouring back in. “Was that your second time now?”
“First.”
“Huh?” Captain sounded amazed, or maybe appalled. “Your first time offing someone?”
“My first time for you,” Cole said, “in that room.”
Captain chuckled again, turning away from his killer. “I was gonna say . . .” He took a drag from his cigarette and stared out the window.
“How often do you have to use that room?”
“For that?” Captain said. “Not often. I mean we’ll take out the trash, you know, that definitely happens. But as far as actually whacking someone in there . . . How’d she take it? She go easy?”
“Yeah.”
“Get anything else out of her?”
“I didn’t ask her anything.”
Captain turned around to face him, frowning. “You didn’t? How about her phone’s password?”
“No.”
“Well, let’s see that phone,” Captain said, holding out his palm. “Tell me you at least have that.”
It hit him in the chest first, a hot, burning pain.
What was that? A heart attack?
“Hey. Where is it?”
Cole’s mind scrambled to comprehend how he’d lost the phone. He checked his pockets again to be sure.
“What the fuck? Did you lose it?!”
“No,” Cole mumbled, searching his clothes. And then searching his mind, his foggy memory of how
and where he could have lost it . . .
“Seriously. Where is it?”
Fuck . . . She had it. He’d given it back to her for some reason. And then down she went, down the chute and into the garbage.
Cole sputtered, “I’m . . . I think . . .” In the deepest throes of desperation, he lifted himself off the chair to check underneath where he’d been sitting, to see if he’d been miraculously sitting right on it.
Her phone wasn’t there.
Of course it wasn’t.
“We’ve got a major problem here,” Captain said. “You have a major problem.”
“I do,” Cole said. “You’re right.”
“You’re fucked if you don’t find that phone. You know that. You’re fucked if you don’t find it and get it back to me ASAP. I don’t care if you have to go crawling down that chute yourself.”
Cole had already stood up on wobbly legs, backing away from the window and from Captain. “I’ll find it. I’ll go look outside.”
“No, I want you to ride down that chute yourself. Get a good feel for it.”
“I’ll check the dumpster outside,” Cole said, his voice and his composure quickly returning. There was only so much crap he could take from Captain. It had been a long day, already. A long year.
“No,” Captain said.
“Yeah. I’ll be back. With the phone.”
Cole left the office before Captain could respond, though he could still hear some unhappy grumblings from out in the hall. He gave a little wink to the Hawaiian man waiting outside the door. And none for the Hawaiian woman at the front desk, whom he stormed past without a single glance.
It took him several minutes to find the right key, his hands shaky as he tried each of them from his key chain. With each wrong guess, he had time to imagine her landing. How it must have felt, sliding through darkness and ending up in a big dumpster. And then getting out . . . He wondered how she managed to scale the fence surrounding it. The only other way out was through the gate that he, after almost five minutes, finally got to open.
He rushed in, stepping onto a pile of concrete blocks next to the metal bin, using them as steps to finally get a vantage point into the trash heap, where he’d hoped to God he wouldn’t still find her.
Thank God. All that was in the bin was rubbish. Mostly paper and cardboard, along with variously crumbled blocks of Styrofoam. A soft landing. He hadn’t sent her down onto a bed of twisted, rusted scrap metal. Although, he supposed, there was a slight possibility of a harsh landing. But that was the chance he’d had to take. She might not have understood it at the time. And perhaps she never would. But at least she was alive to even be able to consider it.
Cole was relieved, also, not to see any blood spatter or body parts. So far, it was a good start.
“Hey,” he said quietly, just barely above the sound of a passing fly. “Anyone there? Hello?” He let his voice waft over the trash heap. There was no answer. Not even the soft ruffling of movement. He said it one last time, “Hello?”
His response came from behind him, far behind, the low wail of an ocean freighter setting off from the port. A light breeze came through the back alley, kicking up and rolling an aluminum can. Sounds of traffic, of midday city life. But the trash pile, as he’d suspected, was completely silent and dead. Even the fly had left him.
Of course she’d fled. What would she have been waiting for, anyway? Annica was long gone. Her and her phone.
Cole spent a few minutes halfheartedly rummaging around the trash, pretending to look for the “missing” device. He knew it was with her, wherever she’d run off to. He’d have to track her down, then, for a variety of reasons—the most pressing of which was find out exactly why she’d followed him into the building in the first place. He’d recognize her anywhere, but he thought he’d kept his own identity under wraps. He had plans of getting to the bottom of that mystery, of actually gaining her trust and engaging with her. If only he’d had a little more time before things spiraled out of control.
He finished moving around a few broken chunks of plywood, finally turning to look up the wall of their building, up at the third-story windows, up near where Captain’s office might be. Could that miserable bastard see the trash bin from there? What did he know?
There was a faint human outline in one of the windows. Maybe Captain’s office. A big wide window, cracked open a quarter of the way, the shape, a white dress shirt, leaning to the side. Cole watched for the trail of smoke that would indicate Captain, but saw none. Maybe it wasn’t even a human shape at all. Either way, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched. And that he might be in the biggest trouble of his life.
8
Annica
She knocked on the door and then looked down at her clothes one last time. There were no gratuitously disgusting stains. No obvious signs that she’d just crawled out of a garbage bin. She picked up a bunch of her shirt, raising the fabric close to her nose. It didn’t smell fresh. Nor did it smell of rank garbage juice. She imagined her own body smelled worse with all the fear sweating out of her in the last hour. She could use a shower, and a drink. Something comforting. Something she could escape into. A meeting with Jackson and his happy wife Mira probably wasn’t going to do that.
And when it was Mira, alone, who opened the door, Annica just broke out in laughter.
“What?” Mira said, laughing. “Hello?”
She got herself together enough for a greeting. And then an awkward hug that neither woman seemed to have wanted—or even initiated. But it happened nonetheless, their bodies coming together and colliding like two cars on an icy street. Arms like autumn tree branches coming around, dead, barely clutching. The soft patting of backs to hurry things along. And then, thank God, a mutual peeling away, and most likely the mutual relief that such forced affections wouldn’t have to happen again for a few hours, at least.
They were past the greeting and the hug, and—for the most part—the awkwardness of seeing each other. It was a necessary obstacle, and Annica could tell by Mira’s already tiring smile that they could at least share some mutual ground about something. It was nice. Even if that something had to do with a shared dislike for each other. They’d gotten off on the wrong foot at the first meeting, only days after Jackson had first met Mira, and the relationship between them had never fully recovered. Hadn’t had a chance, she supposed.
No, it wasn’t dislike. That wasn’t it.
And it wasn’t jealousy.
She had nothing to be jealous about . . .
“Yeah,” Mira said, showing Annica inside the cute, almost treehouse-like rental property. “It’s just a quick walk to the beach, right down off those steps there to the back. We’ve got it for the whole month, so feel free to stop by whenever.”
Sure. She would do that . . .
Mira showed off the beautiful redwood interior of their open-concept living room, the exposed vaulted ceilings, the teak furniture. Annica couldn’t deny its charm.
“I don’t know where he keeps finding all these properties,” Mira said. “He said something about rent to own, but I won’t push him on that. He’s already building something out in the Keys. But Hawaii’s no Keys.”
“Yeah,” Annica said.
“Where are you staying?”
“Umm . . .” Annica wondered how to best describe an extremely modest hotel that looked no different than any other big chain stay across mainland United States. Though she hadn’t even had a chance to check in yet. She hadn’t had the chance for anything.
“No,” Mira said, “I mean, where are you staying in Virginia? Are you still out by the coast, or are you moving toward the city?”
“I’m between living situations right now.”
“Oh,” Mira said.
“So . . .”
“Yeah.”
Annica laughed the awkwardness away. “Um yeah, but this is so nice.” They stopped by a window overlooking the backyard’s slope to the sea.
“Jackson
calls it the pole house.”
“He calls it what?”
“I guess that’s the technical term for it here,” Mira said. “A beach house, raised up like this on those stilts.” She pointed down to the wooden poles propping up the house.
“I guess it’s good for a tsunami,” Annica said, chuckling. She looked down a little stone walkway which curved through the lush green of their backyard, all the way to the white sand of the beach.
“It’s been nice,” Mira said, raising her hands to the window. “I guess we should probably open this.”
Annica got tired of waiting. “So where’s Jackson? Surfing already?”
“No, he’s in town.”
Her heart sunk a little. “Oh?”
“Some sort of last-minute thing.”
Fuck . . . she would have to wait here. Alone with her. Annica tried to bury her disappointment, looking again out the window, but it came to the surface, frothy and angry like the tide churning across the beach below the house. “Why didn’t he tell me?” she said to Mira, a little too sharply. She forced herself to take a deep breath. The situation with Sharky had rattled her more than she wanted to even admit to herself. “Sorry.”
“For what?”
“I just thought he was here.”
“I’m sorry, then,” Mira said. “I should have told you.”
“It’s okay. I mean . . .” Annica had to look away from Mira’s skeptical smile. “It’s, whatever. I just thought he’d tell me. It’s no big deal.”
“No, it’s not. Have you had lunch?”
“No.”
“Want some?”
“Not really.”
“Want anything?”
Annica wondered how she could ask for a coconut, sliced at the top, and with a half bottle of rum poured inside. Was there an easy name for something like that? Alcoholism?
“Want a drink?” Mira said.
“Please.”
They were sitting outside soon after, in the shade of three closely clustered palm trees. Annica looked up at the coconuts nesting along the fronds, and then down to her own drink—a plastic cup filled with ice and rosé. Not exactly what she hoped for, but it would do. Anything with alcohol would at this point.
Dark Salvation (DARC Ops Book 7) Page 6