by Lexy Timms
“Could it be possibly that AIR FORCE ONE landed on her doorstep?” Luke said the words loudly and with more than a hint of defiance, clearly aimed at his father. “You haven’t exactly been discrete, wouldn’t you say?”
William rather pointedly ignored him. “Regardless, the local police are searching for Amanda Pinal. They’re getting a little twitchy about not getting in the house, so if you’ve all concluded the search to your satisfaction I invite you all to leave. In the meantime, Luke will join me. We need to head to the municipal airport and find out about getting a helicopter. Your services,” he turned and pointed to Marcus, “will not be required.”
“I was hoping Luke could go with me!” Dani moved in closer to Luke and took his arm. She looked at him with big eyes, and what she hoped would pass for a pout. She really wasn’t very good at this, and she wondered why in the hell they hadn’t included acting classes alongside martial arts and surveillance techniques. She took a deep breath and tried again. “There are so many decisions to make!” She even batted her eyelashes for good measure, hoping she wasn’t overselling the thing.
“Work comes first, I’m afraid.” William was sounding more and more like a pompous boor. Dani was starting to wonder how in the world Elaina had put up with him long enough to marry him. She only just kept herself from rolling her eyes, and instead pulled out all the stops on what she hoped would be an Oscar-worthy performance. So, Dani swallowed her pride and pouted, lower lip protruding and trembling just a little. She even willed her eyes to tear up a little as she walked by Luke and said, “Don’t worry, I won’t give them more than five dollars.” She paused for effect, sighed a little, and wondered how in the world actors stood it, that feeling of every eye in the place on them. She only just kept from shuddering.
Clandestine. I like work that’s clandestine. Behind the scenes.
Luke’s eyebrows shot up and he looked to Marcus.
“Luke, Edwin, stay here. I’ll make arrangements for a helicopter,” William said, lifting the ever-present phone that had to be welded to his palm by now.
“Why do I have to go?” Edwin asked. Dani shot him a look, wondering if maybe she wasn’t the only actor in the place. Her father had been a king of business, had faced down the mob, had pulled her out of a firefight only days before.
He met her glance evenly, his face betraying nothing.
Shit. This gets more and more complicated. What’s he up to?
“Because you know the code,” William snapped without looking up from his phone. “And you know the material.”
“So does she.” Elaina pointed to Maria. Dani just about screamed.
I swear, if she wasn’t Luke’s mother... I need her more than anyone here.
Calm. Be calm. You’ve got this.
“Frankly, until she tells me who she works for now, she needs to remain where I can find her.” William lifted his head and looked at Maria thoughtfully.
“No,” Dani said, speaking fast so that no one would be able to interrupt, so that no one could have so much as a second to think about what she was saying. “You said I could take her. This is my wedding we’re talking about. The real one. The one that’s supposed to matter! You will NOT...” Dani stalked toward the man, seeing his eyes widen in shock, “repeat, NOT TAKE MY WEDDING AWAY FROM ME!”
She was crying. Actually crying.
And she wasn’t acting.
Dammit.
William’s eyes widened a little, and he actually stepped back a pace. “Seeing as you feel so strongly... I mean, I don’t believe your mother is currently needed for anything either.” He darted a glance around the room at the others. “But, if she’s not where I need her, when I need her, she will miss the next twenty years of your life as well.” He shot a look at Maria, who rolled her eyes. “I’m not kidding about that.”
Take what victories you can find. Back off, now.
Dani swiped at the tears, all smiles now. “Marcus, dear,” Dani purred. “Would you mind driving us to a woman’s frou-frou gathering of wedding apparel?”
Marcus shot a glance at William. “I’d be honored. The car we rented is right outside.”
William left the house, gathering flunkies to order a helicopter and get the latest on the location of Ms. Pinal. Dani had to be careful, as he was still within earshot. She shoved the flyer into Luke’s hand and kissed his cheek, almost losing her resolve to see this through, when his arm wrapped around her, pulling her close. He smelled like heaven. Only reluctantly did she pull herself away, nodding as significantly as possible at the flyer, praying that he’d figure out what she had.
Her stomach tied itself in knots. He wasn’t good at following her train of thought. Their track record wasn’t exactly stellar.
Luke stopped Marcus as he walked by.
“Navy?” he asked. This time it sounded like a challenge.
“Royal,” Marcus said, looking pointedly at Luke’s grasp on his arm. Luke released him, and they nodded to each other.
Men.
The flyer was half crumpled in Luke’s hand, already forgotten.
Shit. We’re toast.
LEAVING TURNED OUT to be more of an adventure than expected. A crowd was collecting around the emergency vehicles. Children and dogs played on the sidewalks, mothers with strollers congregated to talk in worried whispers. Several had their phones out, filming the scene.
“We should have gone out the back door,” Dani murmured as they crowded off the porch into a sea of blue uniforms, who apparently had nothing better to do than wait around for them to leave so they might... what? Truly investigate? What kind of power did William have anyway? None of this was natural. None of this even vaguely looked natural.
“The tin-foil hat crowd is going to have a field day with this. Don’t look, dear. Some of them have face recognition software. Here.” Elaina rummaged in her purse and came up with a large pair of sunglasses that she plopped onto Dani’s face before Dani realized what she was doing.
“This way.” Maria seemed not to care, nodding casually at the officers and walking out, head up, shoulders back, like she owned the place. The police fell back, a veritable Red Sea parting before Moses.
“You’ve got more balls than most men I know,” Dani murmured, finding a grudging respect for the woman despite the anger that was going to take a lot longer to work through than some heist together on a Saturday afternoon. Though, so far, as a bonding activity it wasn’t bad, even if she had some new bruises to show for it.
“So, where are we really going?” Marcus asked as he got behind the wheel, unperturbed by the arriving media vans. He took the rental car around the block as slowly and reluctantly as any man heading to a bridal show would do. It took some careful navigating, and a lot of feigned indifference when someone pointed the car out to some yahoo holding a television camera.
Dani really was starting to wonder what was going to be showing up on the news that night. “I’ll tell you when we’re out of here. Just get us back to the expressway.”
Once free of the immediate police influence, Marcus gunned the engine and headed across the surface streets to the highway at a speed just shy of what would likely get him a ticket. Dani couldn’t resist looking back. Once past that street, everything just looked so utterly normal. Regular houses, with regular people who did ordinary, regular things.
When has my life ever been anything like that?
For a moment she felt a pang of something akin to loneliness, or even loss. She missed her brother and what had passed for family. She had no idea what to do with this woman next to her, who was her mother. Or the father who had so many masks she couldn’t tell which one was him anymore.
I can’t think about this anymore. I need to focus. The end is in sight. I just need to get us there.
“I don’t want us to get stopped,” Dani warned Marcus, noticing that the needle on the speedometer had been steadily creeping up since they’d gotten on the main road. “I know where the stick is, but we need to get
to it before anyone else does. Especially if William is right about ‘other players’ involved now.”
“So?” Marcus pressed, asking again. “Where are we really going?”
“We really are going to the bridal show, Marcus,” Dani said, twisting her hands nervously in her lap. Usually she was so unflappable but this...this entire situation was not to her liking. “I handed the flyer to William and almost died. I banked on him having no interest in weddings and lace.”
“Trust me,” Elaina smiled, “that man wouldn’t recognize a bunting from a Kleenex. He has no concept of weddings.”
Maria turned to her, her eyes clear and assessing. They were both in the back seat; Elaina had taken the passenger seat up front with Marcus. “Frankly, my dear, considering everything Marcus told me, I am rather surprised you do. It’s quite a change from trekking through jungles while being shot at.”
“He told you about that, too?” Dani looked at the driver, who patently ignored them.
“Excuse me?” Elaina asked, turning to face them. “What am I missing?” Her face was alight with eagerness, eyes bright and interested. “Tell me everything!”
“Well,” Dani colored, “it was a long time ago...”
“Three months,” Marcus muttered, not quite under his breath.
“Don’t help,” Dani snapped. “I’m still not so sure about you. You were supposed to be my father’s guard. Why were you telling tales about me? And how in the world did you know about that anyway? I sure as hell wasn’t writing home about my escapades.”
Marcus suddenly became very interested in traffic, making a left-hand turn with exaggerated care.
“He was never your father’s guard, my angel.” Maria put a hand on her daughter’s arm. “He was assigned to be yours. A position he filled for sixteen years.”
“Why so long?” Elaina asked. “I would think that they, whoever they are, could have replaced you after five or so, to keep the assignment fresh.”
Marcus craned his neck, to regard a street sign with rapt interest. “Would you say that I turn right at the next light to get the on-ramp? I can’t tell where that sign is pointing.”
Maria laughed. “Why do you think?” She smiled. Like the rest of us, he allowed his emotions to get in the way of his job. I daresay we all fell for the men to whom we were assigned. So did he.”
“You were in love with my father, Marcus??” Dani quailed.
“That is not what I meant, angel!” Maria said hotly. “His feelings are more paternal.”
Dani blinked. Marcus was busily studying the road ahead, his foot a little heavier on the accelerator than it had been a moment before. His knuckles were white where he gripped the steering wheel.
“Were you assigned to your husband?” Maria asked Elaina.
“Only after the wedding,” Elaina said. “No, I had to leave the agency when we became a couple. I was only a researcher, never did much in fieldwork, but still, it was interesting work.”
“Analyst?” Maria asked.
“Intel and projections,” Elaina said, blushing modestly. “We looked for trends, spots where trouble might break out, where things might go wrong, and fed real-time data to the agents. It was a lot harder in the days before internet searches and email.”
“I bet! A great deal of my information came from that department,” Maria said, leaning forward, eyes alight with curiosity. “They were the only people who supported me. You don’t know a man named Robinton, do you?”
Dani opened and closed her mouth a couple of times, not sure how the conversation had gotten so derailed. A moment ago, they’d been talking about the bridal show, and now it was old home week at the spook circle?
“No, but it’s been a quarter century since I was there.”
Dani sat up, noticing the signs for the next exit, and frowned. Weren’t they going the wrong way?
“He was a good man. Oh, for heaven’s sake, angel, if you have something to say, just say it. Don’t drill a hole into the back of the man’s head; just speak up.”
Dani looked to her mother and then to her future mother-in-law, not sure they’d shut up long enough for her to get a word in edgewise. “Head downtown, Marcus. The Houston Convention Center, please. I think that way.” She pointed.
“Yes, miss,” Marcus said, and swerved across three lanes to the ramp that would take them off the bypass and head downtown. Horns blared. They only just missed getting flattened by a semi.
“Really?” Maria blinked. She looked to Elaina. “Well, I’m an emotional wreck after that—how about you?”
“It did get chilly in Houston,” Elaina agreed, shooting her future daughter-in-law a look.
Dani lowered her eyes. Her jaw clenched. Maria sighed, and relented. “All right, can you at least tell me why we’re going there, and what was on the flyer that nearly stopped your heart?”
“The address.” Dani spoke softly, and looked at the women rather pointedly, waiting them out. Elaina and Maria looked at each other, and mimed taking out a key, locking their lips, and throwing it away. Dani rolled her eyes.
“The convention center?” Elaina asked, apparently forgetting she’d only just promised her silence. “That should be a standard address; it’s hard to misplace a building big enough to house a convention.”
“No, not the FROM,” Dani said, giving her a look. “The TO. It was sent to the same address as the house we broke into—”
“I broke into,” Maria clarified.
“...and we entered,” Elaina reminded her. Maria nodded, conceding the point.
“But the name was wrong. It was addressed to Great Cakes. I looked it up on my phone and there is a Great Cakes in Houston.” She pulled out her cell phone to show them. The webpage showed a confection as large as a VW, and mostly created out of sugar and air. The text over the image read: “Great Cakes—We Bake for All Occasions and Occasionally.”
“Ew.” Maria handed the phone back to her daughter, and shook her head. “Tell me you’re not seriously considering that.”
“Okay, they’re not marketers. They’re bakers. Anyway, since the address was to her house and she’s not home, I assume she would be there.”
“That doesn’t get us closer to the stick, my angel.”
“Don’t you see?” Dani was warming to the topic. When the expressions of the other women maintained a double look of absolute mystification, she grew more candid. “Mrs. Pinal overnighted the statue to her daughter!”
“Ohhh.” Marcus met her eyes in the rearview mirror. “Oh, very clever indeed.” He looked so much like a proud parent, Dani found herself unable to continue to talk for a moment past the sudden lump in her throat.
I can’t think about that right now.
Maria hit Marcus’ shoulder. Hard. “Well, go on for the sake of the rest of us who don’t share your rising intellect!”
Marcus glanced at Dani and filled in the details. “The reason Mrs. Pinal spent the time and money to overnight a statue, a small, lightweight little statue, is because her daughter couldn’t wait to get it in the regular mail. She needed it today.”
“When Uncle... when Benny arranged for my faux wedding, he had the cakemaker do ‘whatever’. It was ghastly, but I do remember that it had a pair of little doves shoved into the frosting.”
“Sounds lovely.”
Dani shot her mother a look, not entirely sure if that was sarcasm or not. She suspected it was.
“Well, it didn’t do much to break his fall either. He landed on top of it,” Dani said, and shook her head.
“Landed?” Elaina asked, eyes growing wider by the minute. In a moment they’d take over her entire forehead.
“Fell out of a helicopter,” Dani added, just to see if they would.
“After a perfectly thrown bottle of Champagne connected with his head,” Marcus added.
Maria turned to her daughter. “You?”
Dani nodded. Maria sighed. “My dear angel. Bullets are for killing, Champagne is for sipping. We reall
y must work on your charm school basics.”
Elaina turned back and faced the front. “I think I’m going to like being a part of this family,” she said to no one in particular. “It almost makes up for all those years I wasted married to Luke’s father.”
“Well, we obviously don’t need them!” Maria said, leaning forward to look out the front window. “Let’s go get that damn stick and show them what women can do! How far are we from the exit?”
“Uh, I’m hoping for a sign...”
In the awkward silence that followed, Dani started to giggle. It became infectious, and soon all four of them were smiling.
Maria hit his arm again and shook her head. “Men!”
Chapter Twelve
“Is this the helicopter that brings the president to Air Force One? Or is it the helicopter that Howard Hughes paid Frank Lloyd Wright to design?”
“You really have quite the chip on your shoulder,” William said, shooting Luke a nasty look that showed he was about at the end of his patience. They ducked, and ran bent over toward the helicopter, the spinning blades of the aircraft already cutting through the air, and every piece of debris, every rock every stick was now a missile heading for them at breakneck speed.
Even William was silent until they boarded and put on their headphones.
“Where are we going?” Edwin asked, jumping into the question before father and son could restart the argument. Luke shot him a grateful look, honestly tired of fighting, but unable it seemed to let it go on his own.
“The police tracked down Ms. Pinal,” William informed him. “She runs a bakery called—” He had to think for a minute “Good Cakes, something like that. I have a couple of cars heading there now for her protection.”
They headed across the skyline in silence until Luke asked, “So, this bake shop has a helipad?”
“No!” William was getting rather good at rolling his eyes at this point. “But an office building nearby does. We’re appropriating it.”