“I’m not waiting,” Mark growled.
“Wait for what?”
“Ann ran away. She’ll call the boys.”
“Ann.” The Boss pondered that name for a while. “The dead girl’s sister?”
“Her.”
“We can’t count on that. What if she’s–”
“She’s all right, and she’ll call the boys.”
The undertone was new. The Boss knew his men, and in the past years had come across Mark’s temper more than once. The snarl was pure rage, but the undertone was something else. Fear. Desperation. In the dark, the Boss frowned. “Are you and her–”
“There are things I have to tell her. She’s not going to die without hearing me out. So she’s all right, and she’s gonna call the boys.”
Just when you think you’ve seen it all, the Boss thought. He leaned his back against the wall, linked his fingers on his flat belly and took a long breath.
* * * * *
Ann followed the lights coming from the house. She reached the surrounding fences, walked the perimeter from the beach to the front gate overlooking a small road.
At her left, her grail: a buzzer.
She rang the bell and fixed her hair feeling very stupid. She was on the run, a fugitive. Fugitive didn’t ring doorbells, did they?
Well, no other way to get hold of a phone, and the sooner she got one, the sooner she would help Mark. Plus, Benson couldn’t risk having the police at her heels, she’d said it herself. In a stranger’s house, she would be safe.
“Hello?” a woman’s voice asked from the entry phone.
“Hi, I’m sorry to bother you but my car broke down and my phone died. Can I come in for a quick call to my brother?”
Man, she’d gotten good, lies flew out of her like fresh water. She prayed that the woman would buy the explanation.
Time dilated as she waited, heart pounding in her head and eyes on the forest she’d just left. She expected armed men to spit out from that black hole any second now.
The gate buzzed open.
Relieved, she hurried inside and closed the entrance behind her. Hinges screamed into the silence, smacked goose bumps on her arms.
She jogged across the courtyard to a man waiting on the threshold. He was in his sixties, she guessed, blocking the main door with his thick frame. He didn’t want her to miss the rifle at his side; Ann didn’t.
Was he with Benson? Had she run into the arms of the enemy?
Ann had no way of knowing, so ignored her pounding heart and smiled.
“Hello,” she greeted him cheerfully.
“Are you the girl in trouble?”
“I’m afraid I am.”
“Here.” He handed her a cell phone, stepped back and crossed his arms. Not the friendliest man, but at least she had a phone.
Under his suspicious eye, she inched few steps away. She smiled broadly, and took off her right shoe. The small piece of paper was crumpled and abused, but numbers were still clear. She punched them in.
“Cell phones,” she says by way of chit-chat. “No way we can remember a number nowadays, right?”
The man was not a chatty one. Maybe it was a Florida men thing.
The phone rang. Once, twice. Then a vexed voice. “Bear, what the fuck! Falcon was crazy with worry! First Mouse, then you, and then Boss. He with you?”
“Hi, it’s me,” she said.
Silence. “Who are you and how did you get the number?”
“Come on, bro, it’s not funny. It’s me, Ann,” she infused her voice with forged easiness. “My stupid car broke–again. I would have called Mark but you know him, always busy.”
Still guarded, the voice lost some hostility. “Where’s he?”
“I told you, he couldn’t come. He’s playing one of his dumb war games. Listen, can you pick me up or not? I’ll tell you everything as we go to my car.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m not sure. Somewhere close to Miami, I think.” She turned to ask the man, repeated the address to the stranger on the phone.
“We’ll be there in 40 minutes. If you play something funny, you’re dead.”
The communication broke down, but Ann kept talking. “All right, thanks. I’ll wait for you. Bye.”
She clicked the key to close the call and smiled at the man. He hadn’t moved. “My brother will be here in 40 minutes.”
“Good.” He took the phone and the shotgun. “This is a safe area. You can wait outside the gate, no one will bother you. You have a good night.”
One last nod and he dismissed her.
No danger, right, Ann scoffed. With nowhere else to go, an unspecified number of armed men on her tail, and the man she loved kept hostage, she’d never felt safer.
She crept back into the bushes, crawled into a clearing in the middle of a thicket, big enough for her to hunker down. Her invasion set that little underworld into chirping, crawling, sneaking.
Breeze combed palms and trees, but didn’t reach her.
The shivering didn’t start until she couldn’t have said if all the things prickling at her skin were real or if it was a product of her spooked mind, until humidity attacked her sticky skin.
When a tear spilled out, she gathered her knees in her arms, lowered her head, and cried.
Chapter 25
Ten minutes, ten hours, Ann had no idea. The sky didn’t reach that cavern of wood and leaves. If the passage of time had changed the night, the balance of its shades, she couldn’t say. No passers-by, no cell phones, no watch. She was in a vacuum, surrounded by bugs.
She cried. Got by. Cried again. Stopped.
Three cars cruised on the road. For three times she waited, her eyes wide in the dark, too scared to tremble. Her heart had beaten so fast and she’d held her breath with such ruthless determination that, when the cars had driven away, her head swayed.
The mugginess of the night reached her bones. She doubted the mosquitoes had left enough blood for her to function. She itched all over.
The thought of Mark obsessed her, fear seeped into her thin-skinned heart.
She cried again.
When a car stopped nearby, exhaustion made it hard to raise her head.
Light steps crunched on the ground.
Her head fell back against wood and she closed her eyes. She was ready – she didn’t care for what.
The whisper travelled in the wind, thin like dust of butterfly wings, powerful enough to snatch her from numbness. “Girl? You there?”
The steps faded away; a car door clicked closed. If she didn’t get up, they would leave her there. Her legs, stiff from the long wait, burned when she tried to use them. She crawled with the same ease of an old, rusty cat through branches and thorns, not feeling a thing.
She popped her head beyond the wall of leaves. On the other side of the road, a small truck waited, black as the night and as silent.
The whisper came again. “It’s us. Bear’s people.”
How could one of Benson’s men know Mark’s Team name was Bear? On the other hand, Benson seemed to be well informed about them. Well, it was sink or swim.
She made it to the road still crawling. She wanted to, had to, get up, but her limbs crumbled.
A red dot appeared on the road. Too numb to react, she followed it until it rested on her. They were aiming at her. “I can’t stand,” she said weakly. “I can’t…” Her voice trailed off, chocked by exhaustion.
The red dot stood still, but the truck door opened. A man got off, walked to her.
“I’m Ann,” she said to the nearing shape.
He stopped a foot from her. “Where’s Bear?”
“They have him. We…” She shook her head to clear the jumble. “We must help him.”
The man crouched down. With the last strand of strength, she looked into his eyes. Good eyes. “Please. Please help him.”
And her entire body slipped away from her.
She vaguely felt strong arms picking her up; the dry, crispy
air of an AC system, the cold leather of a car seat. A promise: “we’ll find him.”
Content, she let herself go into unconsciousness.
* * * * *
A flash of thought. A name on her lips. Ann jolted up on the sleeping bag she was on.
They had carried her in a tent hot as an oven. Around, two sleeping bags, computers, few backpacks. The barrel of a gun stuck out from one of them.
“Where are we?” she asked rubbing her eyes.
“Hey, look who’s back!” The man sitting on the ground at her side gave her a long sideways glance.
Her heart nearly hit the top of her head when an order, a whisper made of frozen steel, came from a dark side of the tent. “Sit back.” The man moved into the weak light. His eyes were clean from any emotion. Instinctively, she retreated a bit.
A murmur, warmer this time, relaxed her. “Are you hurt?”
She shook her head 'no'. “Who are you?”
“The Team. What’s left of it.” He moved a little closer. His face was tanned, with sunken cheeks and no laugh lines around his mouth. “I’m Falcon. He’s Snake.”
“Hey, girl,” Snake addressed her cheerfully. “So, what’s up with you and Bear?”
The mention of his name set her fears free and she jumped to her knees. “They have him, they have Mark. We need to do something, right now. We–”
“Relax, girl. We will,” Snake said. “It’s not like we can leave him there. He’s Bear.”
“We’re going to him? I don’t know where he is.” Ann looked around her, lost. “I don’t know where we are.”
All she had from Falcon was a dry, “We need a plan.”
“But–”
“No more.”
She frowned. “Do you have to have communication issues to work in the Team?”
“No, it’s just the two of them, Falcon and Bear,” Snake explained, stretching and yawning. “Falcon’s the worst. It can get real boring around here.”
“Can I keep talking if I ignore him?”
“That would be super.” Snake smiled, but his cheerful scrutiny never left her.
“We don’t have much time,” she said sitting cross-legged in front of him. “They can’t kill him until they get hold of the phone, but they can hurt him.”
“Care to give us the long version of the story? All we have is that we found Mouse dead, Bear disappeared and then the Boss.”
She gave Snake a full report before asking, again, “Where are we?”
“You can call it a base, if you’re not picky.”
She shrugged. “What do we do for Mark?”
Snake turned to face her. In all the years with the Army and then with the Team, he’d seen frightened people, concerned people, grateful people. But they usually didn’t care much if some of them didn’t make it back – it was their job, after all. Like all the clients before her, she begged for a life. Just not hers. It was enough to spark a doubt. “Out of curiosity, how well do you know Bear?”
Ann didn’t think Mark would really appreciate her telling his men she loved him, and she hoped he loved her back. A man’s pride was a tricky thing. At loss for words, she stalled. “I… we… Let’s just say, I want him back safe.”
Grinning like a naughty boy, Snake turned to Falcon. “You heard that?”
Falcon nodded.
Snake chuckled, sighed philosophically. “All right. Apparently, we have a Lady Bear. Let’s roll, we have work to do.”
Falcon took a black backpack, unzipped the tent, and left leaving Ann with Snake.
“Where is he going?” Ann asked.
“We need some info.” On the floor, Snake balanced a laptop on his crossed legs and started punching on the keys. “When Mouse was here it was easier. He could find out everything with this thing. Me? Not so good.”
He got lost in the images running on the screen for one moment. “But not bad. Look, here’s the house where you called from and the area around it.”
The green spot of trees where she wandered looked smaller on the screen.
“He’s in here,” he said, pointing to a house. “It’s the only place with a crazy alarm system and armed personnel. I couldn’t break into their camera, that was for Mouse. Luckily, the neighbours’ systems aren’t as good. See? That dude is a security guard. Man, he’s ugly.”
“Can you see Mark?”
“No. All I have’s a partial view of their gate, the garage and some window. We need more before going in.”
He left the laptop, tossed some bag away from one of the sleeping bag. “How did you manage to fly, anyway? You’re nothing more than a squirrel.”
“I punched a man in the nose. Mark taught me how.” Memories tarnished her confidence. Fear tasted sour and ugly.
Snake nodded. “Bear’s always been good at that. He’s always had a good plan and a heavy fist. His expertise, if you want.”
“What’s yours?”
He shrugged. “Let’s see, medium fist, logistic. I love big-ass guns. Falcon’s a sniper. The Boss keeps an eye on everything.” With ease, he threw a pillow on the camp bed. “Look, why don’t you catch some sleep? You zoned out for a while but you’re wiped out. I’ll call you as soon as Falcon’s back.”
Sleeping was a big word, but everything inside her was unraveled. If she wanted to be of any help, she had to think clearly. “I’ll rest for a while.”
She sat, crossed her legs and eased her hands on her knees. Fiercely, she battled against false images of danger, of Mary, of Mark hurt, of a future without him. Slowly, painfully, the chaos subsided and she pressed harder into quiet, into that core full of love for him. She grabbed it, lived it until it was the only thing about her, until it was her. Angles and endless holes became gentle curves and planes. She fell asleep into that space of cotton and light.
A hand shaking her shoulder woke her. She opened her eyes on Snake’s smile. “Falcon’s back.”
“I’m ready.” And for the first time, for Mark, she was.
Like a war council, they sat in a circle around many sheets of papers.
“What do we know?” Snake asked.
Falcon voice never rose to more than a whisper. “Eight dogs.”
“I didn’t see dogs,” Ann said.
“Security guards,” Snake explained. “Dogs are guards.”
Falcon pointed at the house map. “Three still: two in the garage, one in the study.”
Snake scratched his unshaved chin. “They talk?”
“Headsets.”
“They see?’
“Infrared everywhere, in the house and on the perimeter. Beach side’s the worst.”
Snake chuckled. “A damned safe. The thing Bear and Boss would love.”
“They took him, too.” Ann hugged her knees. “The Boss. Benson said that to Mark.”
Snake slapped his thigh. “I knew it! I knew he was after you. He ditched us,” he scorned, hitting Falcon’s arm. “They both did.”
“Mark thought it safer,” Ann explained.
Dark lightning wiped out any sign of his easy attitude. “He didn’t trust us.”
Men of honor, Ann thought, studying the battle-hardened faces in front of her. Men who lived in brotherhood. They faced war, blood and death without a flinch and there they were, crushed by their captain’s doubt. Yet, they were there for him, despite everything.
“Do you know why he went to Benson’s?” she asked. “We could have gone to the police and got this mess over with. I wanted to.”
Snake shrugged. “Catch the bad guys? He’s always been that kind of dude. Protect the people and stuff.”
“He was there because of you. Doubting you broke his heart.”
“Yeah, well, it’s the least–”
“Shut up, Snake, I’m not done. He was worried, too. If the safe house location was out, if they knew who you were, you might have been in danger, if you weren’t dead already.”
Snake’s eyes grew big. “He didn’t trust us, and thought we’re sissies who can�
��t protect ourselves?”
“If you want to be stupid go ahead,” Ann snapped, short on patience. “He’s stubborn and distrustful, but he loves you. And that’s why he’s locked up there.”
Snake fiddled with a pack of ammo. When he looked at her, his playful smile was back in place. “Promise not to tell him, but we love him too. And that’s why we’re getting him back, even though he was an asshole.”
“I’m not going to tell him about the asshole part – he doesn’t take it well; being called names. But I am going to tell him you love him, because it’s a very nice thing to say and people like hearing it.”
“Shit,” Snake muttered, then cleared his throat. “All right. When and how do we get in the house?”
“Benson said she’d be at the docks tomorrow,” Ann said. “She’s away until the cargo’s safe.”
“We move at dawn, then.”
Falcon studied the blueprint of the house on the computer screen. “Bear’s here,” he said, pointing to a small, blind room in the corner of the garage. “It’s the safest place. No windows, the only door opens into the garage guarded by two dogs.”
“I can distract some of them,” Ann proposed. “I can walk back the way I ran away, from the beach side.”
“They give the alarm, one S.O.B comes after you. Two, if they’re pro.” Snake played the action in his head. “That leaves us with three. Not even fun.”
“You want to be bait?” At the thought, Falcon’s serious face cringed. “Bear’s gonna kill us if something happens to her.”
Snake shook his head. “We can use one more person.”
“She doesn’t count as one person,” Falcon stated. “She’s half my size, a third of Bear. She’s gonna get hurt; we’re gonna get killed–by him.”
Ann was so tired of having the same conversation over and over again with everyone. “First of all, I ran away, didn’t I? Plus, nobody expects me to fight, and that’s the element of surprise. I’m not sitting here while you risk your lives for my man. I’m coming with you, and I’ll help. Get used to the idea or chain me. What were you saying, Snake?”
A long, silent exchange passed between the two men before Snake resumed his planning. “You distract the dogs, we get in, kill them, take Bear and run.”
Guns For Angels Page 17