Tragic Desires

by A. M. Hargrove

  “We took care of that before we landed here,” Huff says. “Took a side trip into the airport in San Angelo.”

  “Great thinking. Then I’ll need one of you with me and one of you to drive the car back.”

  Blake volunteers to drive.

  “On the way back to our hotel, Blake, I’ll need for you to get Gemini a wig. Short hair, light brown, big sunglasses, and some baggy clothes. Maybe a bohemian dress or something. Can either of you do fake tattoos?”

  Jeff says, “I can. I have some here. What are you thinking?”

  “Something visible, maybe on her neck or forearm. I want it to be identifiable so that if they see her, they automatically discount her.”

  “Yeah, I can take care of that. No problem.”

  “Great. Then we’ll leave tomorrow morning.” I look at Gemini and see she’s not doing too well. We share a look and she shakes her head. Then I think about her headaches and the morning hours. “Gemini, if you have a migraine in the morning, we’ll delay departure until it’s gone. Okay?” She nods.

  When I explain her headache situation, they agree that would be the best plan. Then Huff makes hotel reservations for us near the University of Texas. It’s so hectic there, it’ll be ideal for us to be coming and going. One more glance at Gemini tells me I need to get her upstairs.

  “Jeff, I need a glass and then we’re going to catch some sleep. I think Gemini’s feeling a headache coming on.”

  “Sure thing,” he says.

  Once we’re upstairs, I ask again if she needs pain meds and she tells me no. “Gemini, it’s not a good idea to cold turkey this stuff. Tapering is what you need to do. You can end up in lots of pain and right now, the last thing you need to deal with is the complexity of withdrawal. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it, but I don’t think now is the right time.”

  She chews her lip and crosses her arms over her belly, hugging herself.

  “What are you feeling, babe?”

  “I’m nauseated and my stomach is cramping. And I’m freezing.”

  “Are you going to be sick?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She needs a pill. At least one. So I go and get one, along with some water. When I get back to her, she’s sitting on the edge of the bed, rocking back and forth.

  “Here. Take one.”

  She downs it. Then I tell her to stand so I can pull back the covers. She gets into bed and I get in behind her. Her shivers are so fierce, the bed shakes. My arms find their way around her and I pull her against me, leaving no space between us.

  “Drex, can you lie on me?”

  “Is that what you need?”

  “Y-y-yeah.”

  Her body shivers so badly, every part of her is in a massive shakedown. I lie on top of her, but since I’m so much larger than she is, I don’t want to crush her. I support most of my upper body weight on my elbows.

  “N-n-no. Lie on me.”

  It worries me that she won’t be able to breathe, so I say as much. But she burrows into me like a small animal searching for warmth. After a bit, her trembling evens out and her breathing eases.

  “Better?” I want to make sure she has enough space to breathe.

  “Mmm. Thanks. I think the pill is kicking in too.”

  Raising myself to my elbows, I look at her and say, “Gemini, you can’t fucking do that anymore. I get that you want off those things. But, I need you centered. I need your mind to work alongside mine. I can’t solve this thing and help you if you’re not lucid or physically capable of helping me. Understand?”

  She scrunches up her face. “I’m sorry. I thought I was doing the right thing.”

  My heart contracts with the sincerity of her words. She wants to be off the drugs and I don’t blame her. “You’ve changed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just a little bit ago, you wanted to shoot yourself. Now you want to get off your meds.” I shake my head.

  “You act like that’s a bad thing. And I’ll want to shoot myself again, when another one hits. It’s not that I have a death wish … it’s just that the pain gets so bad, I think sometimes that’s the only thing that will get it to stop. If these would go away, I would never think that. I didn’t use to be this way.”

  The look on her face twists my guts. I slide my hand in her tangled hair. “Well, it’s not a bad thing to want to get off those meds. We’ll get you through this. I’ll help you. I promise.”

  She puts her hand on mine. “I want to believe you; I really do. But I don’t think there is any help for this. They’ve tried everything, Drex.”

  “You’ve never seen my friend, Brady. The neurologist. I know he can help you. Brady Griffith is a genius. He’s helped more people with post-concussion syndrome than you can imagine. He works with military guys that have been victims of IEDs. I’m going to figure out how to get him here.”

  The doubt lingers in her eyes, but that’s a promise I make to myself.

  “You can’t be charging off and trying to do these things for me. Don’t you have a business to run and a life somewhere else? You need to get back to all of that. But I want you to know how much I appreciate everything you’re doing for me.”

  There’s something about this girl that nudges my heart. She’s different than the others I’ve known. She’s probably the one who needs me the most, but the one who asks the least of me. I find that so unusual.

  “Gemini, I want to help you.”

  “I know, and I don’t know why. But you didn’t answer my question. You have a business to run, right?”

  “Yes, I do.” And before I can say another word, she jumps in.

  “Then you need to get back to wherever it is you live. I can take care of myself and get all this figured out. It’s not fair to put you in danger. You don’t need to risk yourself for me.”

  “I live in Denver. And I was a soldier, and that’s what soldiers do. I’m used to it.”

  “But it’s not right, you doing this.”

  “Why not? If I don’t help you, you won’t make it out of here alive. I’m telling you, Gemini, these guys don’t play nice. They will tear you down until you beg for death. And I can’t let them do that. This is what I was trained for and it wouldn’t be right to know that I could’ve stopped that from happening. This is my choice, so stop worrying about it.”

  She has a way of pinning me with one look. It’s very disconcerting, like she can see into my soul.

  “Why, Drex? Why me?”

  And that’s a very good question. One I’m not sure I can answer. “When you were drugged that night, I knew if I left you there, something terrible would happen to you. Colt gave the order to abandon the operation, but I couldn’t leave you. So here we are. I believe everything happens for a reason, good or bad. Maybe we’ll both figure it out one day.”

  “I don’t want to be the one responsible for you getting hurt or for messing up your job.”

  She doesn’t know anything about my job or business. I suppose I should tell her.

  “You can’t mess up my job. The company’s mine.”

  “But don’t you have to run it?”

  She hasn’t a clue about the size and scope of DWInvestigations. “The headquarters are in Denver. I started it up right after I left the military and used my contacts to network. It catapulted me into a whole other bracket and I hit it big. I have a crew of awesome employees and they take damn good care of things. Initially, the business took off so fast I was spread too thin and working nonstop. So a friend recommended this guy to help manage things and he’s the one who guided me into making the right business decisions. Part of the reason why I was so good was that I had the right connections with certain people and could get things done where other PI firms couldn’t. We do high-profile cases … kidnappings, cyberespionage, corporate espionage, stuff like that. So don’t worry about disrupting my business. It’s in good hands.”

  She frames my face with her hands and whispers, “But that still doesn’t g
uarantee you won’t get hurt and I won’t take a chance with that.”

  “Well, I guess we’ll have to promise each other we won’t get hurt.” Her closeness is more than I can take and before she can say another word, my lips crash onto hers. They are simply too tempting to ignore. With that sweet body of hers beneath mine, I know I’ll have to cut this short. So I end the kiss, even though that’s the last thing I want to do.

  Rolling off her, I ask, “How are you feeling now? Chills gone?”

  “Yeah,” she says.

  “Good. I’m going back down to talk with the guys for a bit and let you get some sleep.” I know she’s disappointed, but it’s the right thing to do. If I stay, things will happen … things with consequences … things I’m not prepared to deal with.

  “Thanks for warming me up.”

  What she doesn’t know is that I’d like to do way more than just warm her up. Instead, I paste on a smile and get up.

  “Sleep well, Onyx. You know where to find me if you need me.”

  WHEN I REJOIN the men, I tell Huff I want to get Brady here and why. He assures me that shouldn’t be a problem.

  “Where do you want him? Here?”

  I think for a moment. “Not Austin. That’s too much. Where can we fly him, Jeff?”

  “San Angelo. Midland/Odessa.”

  “How long can we stay here?”

  Jeff laughs. “You gonna pay me room and board?”

  “If you want.”

  “Indefinitely. And that’s without the fees.”

  My face must be all sorts of serious because Huff says, “Dayum, boss, you’re gonna give yourself a tension headache if you don’t ease up.”

  He’s right. My head feels like a band is tightening around it. “I want Gemini to see Brady. She suffers from severe migraines due to post-concussion syndrome. I think he can help her.”

  “Shit. That sucks. Well, if anyone can help her, it’s Brady,” Jeff says.

  “My exact thoughts. So Huff, let’s see if we can get him here ASAP. I want her to see him before we do anything else. She can’t travel during the day. Hell, she can’t do anything during the day. The daylight kills her. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Boss, are you, er, involved with her?”

  Our eyes meet and without hesitation I answer, “That’s not any of your business.” But that’s all I say, because I’m not sure what the hell one would call things between us.

  “Our plans are on hold until Brady sees Gemini. Now, I want to go through her things again and see if there’s anything we missed.”

  I grab the box and we go to work dissecting it again. I’m troubled by the fact that her mother didn’t leave any clues to the file she took from her lover’s computer.

  “Why wouldn’t she leave Gemini any clues? It doesn’t make sense.”

  Jeff stops what he’s doing and says, “She did leave clues. We’re just not finding them. She was smart, Drex. She did it this way on purpose. If she hadn’t, Gemini and she would never have survived for as long as they did. As good as the WPP is, you and I both know they have holes as big as Texas. Let’s find the key we’re looking for. And not the metal kind … the one that will lead us to what this one opens.” When he finishes speaking, he’s holding up the small key Gemini found in the envelope.

  We fumble through the papers and as we do, I break things down in my head. This isn’t the smart way to do this.

  “Stop. Everyone each take a document. I want each of us to read it as though it has something encrypted in it.”

  Huff asks, “Like what? Got an example?”

  “Not really. I just have a gut feeling that each of these things holds a clue. Why else would they be in here? Why wouldn’t she have destroyed them? They don’t really tell us anything, do they?”

  “He’s right,” Jeff says. “Let’s look at these one by one. Pay particular attention to dates and numbers.”

  It takes us more than three hours to find a pattern, but eventually one emerges. And it’s Jeff who finds it. “Drex, do you know when Gemini was born?”

  “Not off the top of my head, but isn’t her birth certificate in there?”

  He digs through the box and finds it. A smile spreads across his face. “I think I may have something here.”

  My curiosity is all consuming. “What is it?”

  “Huff, Blake, what are the dates on the documents you checked?”

  They thumb through their papers and say, “June.”

  Blake says, “Years ranging from 1993 to 1994.”

  “Mine are the same,” Huff says.

  “So Gemini was born in June ’91, correct?”

  I nod. “June fifteenth.”

  “Then all these documents are from that month and then when she was two to three years old. What I’m thinking is that the clues must center around her birthdate of six and fifteen. Or maybe zero, six, fifteen and maybe the year too. What I’m not sure of is if it leads us to an address. But it’s a starting point.”

  “How so?” Blake asks.

  Now it’s my turn to smile. “She was very clever, this Michelle Sheridan. Or Rachel Miller. By using Gemini’s birthdate, we can cross-reference all the storage facilities in the Austin area for addresses that contain those numbers. Jeff, where’s your laptop?”

  “On it,” he says. Upon returning, he searches storage units in the Austin area, looking for any with addresses comprised of the numbers six, fifteen, and possibly parts of either 1991, 1993, or 1994. After just a few, he hits on one, ironically located on none other than Sixth Street.

  “Jesus. That has to be it—1615 W. Sixth Street. You’ve got to be kidding me.” I rub my face as I think about everything and what we can possibly find inside that unit.

  “Okay, Drex, now we need a plan to get in there. You know the unit number will be similar, right?” Jeff asks.

  “Yeah. I’ll get Gemini to call and say it was in her mother’s name. I’m sure Michelle Sheridan left something in the lease giving Gemini access, in case of her demise.” I think about Gemini’s reaction when she hears this. “Hey, I need some shut-eye. Let’s pick this up first thing in the morning.”

  Sleep is most likely the last thing I’ll be able to do. I’m troubled over what in the hell Michelle Sheridan could possibly have hidden. Whatever it is was dangerous enough to have gotten her killed and to have her leave such cryptic clues. I’m also wondering when the CIA is going to be banging on Jeff’s door. I’ve no doubt they’ll find us … either they will or Aali Imaam. And then there’s Colt and his op to worry about. I need to check in with him to see if he has any more leads and to find out if the guys I sent are doing their jobs. Finally, there’s this thing bursting between Gemini and me. I could try to lie to myself, but what good would that do? Something big is happening because I never have these kinds of feelings about a woman and if I do, I can usually shove them aside and move forward. But not with her. She’s in my head and other places too. I absolutely need to keep my shit straight here.

  IT’S LATE, MAYBE four in the morning, when I wake. I’d hoped the axe man wouldn’t visit, but he’s returned, axe swinging away. For a moment, I’m disoriented. Then it comes back to me: I’m at Jeff’s. I need my meds. How in the world did I ever think I could get off these things? I guess I felt so good around Drex that it gave me false hope of living a normal life. I move to stand and the blinding pain is so fierce, I hit the floor and moan.

  Shit! Moving is nearly impossible, but I know I must if I’m to get any reprieve. I push to my hands and knees and inch my way to the bathroom. Now I’m faced with another dilemma. I don’t even know where the Lortab is. Drex has put it somewhere. Maybe if I kneel I can find it with my hands. But that doesn’t work because I can’t reach. As I try to stand up, I end up face-planting on the tile, smacking my cheekbone in the process.

  I’m so dazed I don’t hear him speaking until he turns on the light, and then I scream.

  “Oh hell. I’m sorry.” The light switches off
and he picks me up and puts me in bed. Then I feel his hand on the back of my neck as he supports me and hands me my pills with water. I make a mess of things because my hands are shaking so badly and I can barely swallow.

  “Don’t move. Just stay still. I’ll be right back.” I’m not sure what’s going on and I dare not check to find out. He soon returns with an ice pack and cool cloth. But I’m in such a bad way, I can’t lie still.

  “What can I do, Gemini? Just tell me and I’ll do it.”

  There’s an urgency in his voice. But why? This is the same thing that happens every day. I wish I could answer him, calm him down, but I can only writhe in pain. His hand is on my back, but I hurt so much I don’t want him to touch me. I pull my knees to my chin and ball up. Why must these headaches come on so damn strong and hurt so damn bad?

  His hand is in mine and I’m squeezing it. I have to be hurting him, but he doesn’t say a thing. He lets me squeeze away. Weirdly enough, this action soothes me. The pain crests and I feel the wave slacken, thank God. My breathing slows and I release his hand.

  “Better?”

  “Only just.”

  He lets out his breath, as if he’s been holding it.

  “Jesus, Gemini. We’ve got to get you some help.”

  I nod.

  He brushes my hair back and when his hand touches my cheek, I wince. “What’s wrong?”

  “I fell. In the bathroom.”

  “Let me see.” He angles my face toward the moonlight streaming in through the window and says, “You’ve got yourself quite a knot there. It’ll match the other bruises you already have. I need to get you another ice bag.”

  I clutch the new ice-filled bag to my cheek and the other to my head. If the axe man weren’t visiting, I would laugh at the picture I must make. The bed moves as he gets in and the covers are pulled over us both. He must’ve decided to sleep the rest of the night with me, which is fine. I don’t want to be alone.

  “Thank you, Drex.” My voice is thick with the effects of the pain meds. “It seems my debts to you keep mounting.”

  “You’re welcome. And they’re not debts.”