by Mike Nappa
“No, I don’t know what you mean,” Trudi snapped. Then she decided to set the bait. She pointed to the first number on the sheet. “Is that how many diamonds we’re supposed to find?”
“No, there’s only two—aw, man. You always do that to me. Why are you able to do that to me? I’m supposed to be a professional.”
“Two what?”
“Come on, Trudi.”
“If we succeed in this little mission, I’m going to find out sooner or later. Just tell me now. Two what?”
Samuel sighed. He reached into the inside pocket of his coat and pulled out a wrinkled napkin, which, Trudi noticed, matched the style of napkins used right in this Denny’s restaurant. On the napkin someone had written: Two emeralds.
She leaned back in her seat, thoughtful. Samuel held the silence for her, waiting. Finally she spoke.
“All right. That’s easy then. Listen, Samuel. I don’t know why Dr. Smith is going to such lengths for a few random jewels, but there aren’t any emeralds in the world that are worth risking our lives. Let’s just leave them where Truck hid them. Let’s just let greedy old Dr. Smith have them. Gems are worth even less than money; you can always buy more gems. So let’s just walk away. I’ll hire security back home, keep a watch for Dr. Smith types. You go back to chasing bad guys around the world. Everybody’s happy, right?”
Samuel frowned. Trudi recognized his stubborn face coming to the surface.
“Right. Yes,” he said. “You’re right. That makes perfect sense. For you. In fact, here.” He reached in his pocket and pulled out the keys to his GT. “Take my car. Keep it. Go home, get a bodyguard, and be safe. But me, well, I made a promise, and if Truck wants me to secure two emeralds for him, or two pink slippers, or two cow turds left over from the 1996 chip-tossing championship, then I intend to do it.”
Trudi was suddenly angry. She felt the heat well up within her until it spilled out of her mouth and across the table at her ex-husband.
“For what, Sam? For what? Because you made a promise to your CIA handler ten years ago? Because you’re a man of your word or something? Well, I’ve got news for you, cowboy, you’ve broken a lot of promises to a lot of people. You’re good at it, in fact, and I’ve got the divorce papers to prove it. So what, now you’re suddenly a man of conscience? Now you’re a rogue of virtue? Save it for the flea market, baby, ’cause I ain’t buying that load of junk.”
They were silent for a long time, neither wanting to say anything more but neither willing to get up and leave either. The other patrons at Denny’s gave them sidelong glances, and the family in the booth next to theirs decided to take the rest of their meal home in Styrofoam. Still they didn’t speak. Finally, Angela came wandering cautiously over to their table.
“Everything all right over here?” she said gently. “You folks want some pie or something?” She looked at Trudi with sympathy in her young eyes. “On the house if you’d like it, honey.”
“No, thank you, Angela. Just the check please.”
They drove back to the hotel in the same silence they’d invoked at the restaurant. They got in separate beds, and Trudi waited to fall asleep. She listened for Samuel’s breathing to turn light and even, and soon realized that he wasn’t sleeping either. Finally she slipped out from under her sheets. She stood for a moment in the tiny aisleway between his bed and hers. He didn’t move.
In the faded darkness, she couldn’t see his face, but she could make out his stomach rising and falling gently. She watched it settle and firm up for a moment, then heard a gust of air blow out from between his lips. She watched his stomach filling up with air, deflating, filling, deflating. Still he didn’t move.
She wanted to slip her body under the sheet and press herself next to him, feel his arm slide over her again, feel the warmth of his chest burn hot against hers. But she knew the rules. She knew those days were long gone.
“All right,” she whispered toward him. “We’ll go get the emeralds. But I’m doing this for you, not for Truck, not for any stupid promises you made, not for anybody or anything else. For you. That’s it. You understand?”
He didn’t say anything. Trudi nodded to the darkness and returned to her bed, alone. She wondered, for probably the thousandth time, if she would ever again feel like she was home.
16
The Mute
Thursday, September 10
The Mute walked gingerly across the blackened ground, careful to avoid any potential hot spots left over at ground zero of what the news media was now calling the Great Conecuh Fire. He’d had to ditch his Jeep Wrangler Call of Duty MW3 Edition about five miles south, well out of sight of the fire authorities and volunteers still fighting the blaze some four miles west and north of here. The hike to the center of Truck’s old farm had been surprisingly, and thankfully, boring.
Once, he’d run into a volunteer cleanup crew, maybe two miles in. The men and women on that crew looked tired and unwashed, hands and faces bearing streaks of soot, clothes smudged and in need of a good laundromat. And they’d looked proud, satisfied, as though working miles behind the lines, here in this awful, ashened desert, was a privilege and they were the elite few allowed in. The Mute felt slightly patriotic just watching them dig and turn, tossing detritus left from the fire into a few heavy pickup trucks parked nearby. He watched them shrugging off the heavy burden of loss with first steps toward rebuilding, with first hopes of a better, brighter future. These people were signs of life, proof that even disaster can’t kill the human spirit, not completely.
One of the men had saluted when he saw The Mute trudging through, mistaking his blue work gear and sturdy hiking boots for a fireman’s tools, assuming The Mute thus embodied the heroes still on the ground to the northwest of here. The Mute returned the salute, paused to appraise their work and nod appreciatively. Then he’d moved on quickly through the cleanup site and toward the ruins that once were Truck’s home.
There was nothing but rubble on top of more rubble, splintered wood, baked brickwork, fallen foundations. It spread across the land in jagged memories of what once stood, wind blowing pieces out of proportion, everything crushed and crumbled again underneath the fiery fist that had pounded the earth in this place.
The Mute knelt beside what had once been steps to the porch of Truck’s main house. He couldn’t help but smile. Even in this mess there was still life. A grasshopper sparked and flew from one dead ember to a patch of blackened grass. Somewhere in the unseen distance he heard a resonant knocking and realized a red-cockaded woodpecker had found at least one place to work its percussion upon nature.
Without warning, a thrushing sound arose behind him. He turned quickly, hand at his back, resting on the Kahr handgun stashed just inside his waistband. Unbelievable. He wouldn’t have supposed it possible if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes. A lean and lithe bobcat peeked in his direction then skittered away into the distance, perhaps still hunting for a white-tailed deer caught unexpected by the fire and trapped on this side of nowhere.
Signs of life. He breathed them in, breathed the hope he felt by seeing them. It had been more than a week since the attack on Truck’s property, since the girl with the emerald eyes had been hidden somewhere out of sight. At first The Mute had worried, had ground his teeth in frustration at the Great Conecuh Fire that prevented him from searching the heights and plumbing the depths to find her. Then, even in the rubble, he found life in crazy places, life that survived and would in some ways thrive as a result of this devastation.
If a grasshopper could endure the fiery furnace and still not perish, then that pretty little girl could do it too.
So he waited, and watched, and counted the moments until the fire had finally progressed enough, finally moved far enough away to take its heat, and the heroic workers who faced that heat, far enough away to allow him to return. To allow him to listen to the wind, to follow the clues, to track the footprints left in the air.
The girl was alive. He believed it, and so it was tr
ue.
The girl was safe. He trusted that Truck would have made that happen.
The girl was waiting. Waiting. Waiting.
The Mute started digging in the sooty refuse that surrounded Truck’s old porch. It seemed as good a place as any to look for some new clue. Maybe something there would flash a hint, would give him at least part of the map he was supposed to have gotten from that inept CIA agent Samuel Hill.
Maybe, if he worked hard into the night, if he never stopped believing . . . maybe he could still find the girl.
Maybe he would even find her in time to save her.
Again.
17
Trudi
Sunday, September 13
Trudi heard a soft knocking at the door of the hotel room and involuntarily put her hand over her mouth. She recovered quickly, though, and dabbed the mute button on the TV set, straining to hear anything more.
Had she just imagined it?
She held her breath and rolled silently off the bed, then tiptoed her way to the room’s window. She looked out at the parking lot, searching for Samuel’s car somewhere within the yellow lines that marked off the cement below. She couldn’t find it.
Samuel had gone out to get dinner about half an hour ago. Was it too soon for him to be back? And if he was back, why was he knocking? Why not just use his key?
She stared at the back of the door, not sure what to do next.
If this were a movie, she told herself, then Jonathan Smith would be waiting outside that door. He’d have already disabled—maybe killed?—her ex-husband. He’d be standing there, leering toward the peephole, holding a weapon. Waiting to pounce on her as soon as she opened the door.
She really wished she had her gun. Or that she’d gone out to get dinner with Samuel, but after the way their week had gone, that seemed to be unwise.
On the morning after the first night here in Birmingham, she’d awakened before him, staring at the ceiling feeling both whole and broken. It had been wonderful to reunite, at least somewhat, with her ex-husband. It had almost been a healing of sorts. But there, in the pale light of morning, all the memories came back to her. All the reasons why they’d split up in the first place. The knowledge that he had a child with another woman. That now, Trudi herself could possibly be “the other woman.”
He roused slowly in the bed beside hers, sat up on an elbow, and looked at her in the face. He read the message there, and now it was his turn to sigh.
He rolled back onto his bed. “Tru,” he said. There was a plea in his voice.
She turned her back and went to the bathroom. She turned on the water in the shower but let herself sob for a moment outside the spraying water first. Then she collected herself and went through her morning routine. When she came out of the bathroom, he was up, shirtless, sitting in a chair, staring out the window. He looked toward her when he heard the bathroom door open.
They shared a silent moment and both understood. They were still ex-husband and ex-wife. They still had crazy killers on their trail. And they still had to run some stupid jewelry-store errand for the recently deceased Leonard Truckson.
Samuel waited in the chair. His eyes looked tired.
Trudi took a deep breath and did what she had to do.
“I’m going to get breakfast,” she said formally. “Want me to pick up something for you?”
He let his head dip forward toward his chest, now staring deeply at the floor.
“Just coffee,” he said. “Black.”
He didn’t move from the chair. Trudi nodded, even though he couldn’t see it. She turned and exited the hotel room. And it was done.
When she returned to the room, he was dressed and looking through files on his laptop. “Thanks,” he said when she handed him the coffee. It was all business after that.
“Still nothing definitive on our elusive Dr. Smith,” he said to her, “but I’ve got at least one contact who places him somewhere in Iraq near the beginning of the second Gulf War. So that may be something.”
She nodded.
“I’ll go back to Truck’s math problem and see if I can figure anything there.”
That’s how they’d spent the rest of the week, taking turns searching out clues on Dr. Smith and working out logarithms to try to decode Truck’s note. And they’d fallen into the habit of not eating meals out together. One would go out for food and bring back something for both of them. It was a distance created, and needed, a separateness to help redefine each day the limits they now lived under. So when Samuel had offered to go get dinner tonight, she was obligated to let him go alone. She hadn’t really given it a second thought until now, until that indistinct knocking at the door had suddenly caused visions of movie-style madness flashing through her head . . .
There was silence outside the door now, not even the sound of footsteps or voices in the hallway. Nothing. Had she imagined—
Another knock. A little louder this time. Three quick raps on the outside of the door.
She knew that Samuel always carried two guns, no matter where he went. Even at her mother’s Thanksgiving table several years ago. Two guns. That’s just what he did. After their first night here in Birmingham, he’d stopped trying to conceal the Glock 36 in his shoulder harness. But she still hadn’t seen where the other gun was hidden. Maybe he’d stored it here in this room? Maybe she could find it before—
She took a deep breath, said a silent prayer, and slid her feet toward the door. She held the breath in her lungs while she peeked into the peephole, knowing that her head would briefly dim the yellow pinhole of light that flickered on the other side of the hole, but also knowing that if she didn’t, she’d never be able to open a hotel room door again in her life. She refused to be a person who let fear take charge.
The Lord is my shepherd, she told herself. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for you are with me.
She let out her breath in a deep sigh. On the other side of the door was her ex-husband, holding a soda in each hand, and in his mouth he clenched a large white bag with a Chinese emblem on the front. He was frowning, trying to lean in and use his elbow to knock again on the door. Trudi opened the door before he had to knock again.
“What took you so long?” he asked after Trudi relieved his mouth from the burden of carrying their dinner. “I was starting to get worried.”
“I need a gun,” she said.
“What?”
“I need my gun. It’s only two hours back to Atlanta. Let’s go get my gun.”
“No.”
Trudi frowned. “So, what, you’re kidnapping me now? You’re telling me what I can and can’t do? Because you tried that little trick a time or two before, and we both know how that worked out for you.”
Samuel set down their drinks and waved his palms in mock surrender.
“No, of course I’m not telling you what you can and can’t do. I’m just saying . . .” He paused, then apparently chose to reword what he was going to say next. “Okay, why don’t you tell me why you think you need a gun?”
Trudi felt like fuming at him. She didn’t need a reason for anything with him, not anymore. She didn’t have to ask his permission either. But she took a breath and decided that, if the roles were reversed, she would want him to treat her with a similar kind of respect.
“Just now, when you knocked on the door, I realized that we’ve been here almost a week—long enough for anybody really looking to find us. And when you didn’t identify yourself, I had no way of knowing whether or not it was safe to open the door. I was in here all alone, unarmed. A sitting duck.”
She noticed him give a quick rub across a small scar just in front of his right temple. It was an involuntary movement, she was sure, but it made her feel good anyway. She’d once cracked the bone outside his right eye when he thought it would be funny to jump out at her from a dark closet. She’d responded instinctively, with a sweeping roundhouse kick that finished with a trip to the emergency room for Samue
l. He’d never tried to scare her like that again.
“I see. Okay, I understand. But it’s unwise for you to go back to your home or your office until we know that Dr. Smith isn’t waiting. And it’d be next to impossible to buy you a gun here, what with waiting periods and identity checks and such.”
“Waiting period? Identity checks? Seriously? With your contacts, a little thing like a waiting period for a gun shouldn’t be much of an issue. Or is this just about the fact that you’re a man and you think only a man should have a gun? That you feel some macho need to protect a poor li’l helpless gurl? Is that it, you big strong man, you?”
“Well, just be patient, Tru. And think about it with a level head. You know I can take care of you. Why would you need a gun if I’m with you?”
Trudi felt fury building up inside her. This guy really was a pig sometimes.
“Why do you need to be such a domineering mule?” she spat. “I take care of myself, Mr. Samuel Hill. I’ve done it my whole life. I don’t need you, or any man—or any woman, for that matter—to be my own personal protector. If you wanted that job, you never should have . . .” She stopped herself from saying the really hurtful part and took a deep breath before continuing.
“No, right, I know—” He tried to get a few words into the break, but she wouldn’t let him.
“And I certainly don’t need your permission to take my own self to my own office to get my own gun.”
“Trudi, listen—”
“No, you listen. You think you always know what’s best. Why do you always have to be right, even when you’re dead wrong? I need my gun, Samuel. Now, either do something about it, or try to stop me. What’ll it be, cowboy?”
“Come on, Trudi, be reasonable.” He put his palms out and up, pleading for some kind of truce. “We can’t go back to Atlanta. It’s not safe. You know that. Even the ‘Independent Woman’ version of you knows that. We’ll just have to work out a different plan.”