by T R Kohler
Despite the long walk up the driveway, already the pain she felt had receded, barely more than a dull thud. Raising her gaze, she took in the walls around her, an equal mix of artwork in gilded frames and stuffed works of taxidermy from around the world.
“Here we are,” Rocco said, sweeping into the room, a silver tray in hand. Padding across the Persian rug covering the floor, he pulled up just short of Ember and placed the platter down atop a polished side table.
On it rested a matching dish filled with ice water, a roll of fresh gauze, surgical tape, and a washcloth.
Beside them sat a decanter filled halfway with amber liquid and two crystal glasses.
“Sorry to have kept you waiting,” Rocco said. “I hope you weren’t too uncomfortable.”
Snorting just slightly, Ember managed to bite back any further comment, instead gesturing to the walls around her. “Not at all. I was actually having a great time just taking in the view in here.”
Matching her gaze, Rocco swept his focus over the walls before settling his attention on Ember’s outstretched leg. “May I?”
“Oh, you don’t need to do that,” she replied. “It really wasn’t that bad.”
Looking down to the lower four inches of her jeans stained almost black, the denim crusted stiff, she added, “I’m just a bit of a bleeder is all.”
Raising a single eyebrow, Rocco said, “Really, I must insist. I feel awful about what Toby did, and Mr. Tam would be most unhappy if he heard such a thing occurred and we didn’t do all we could to make amends.”
No part of Ember wanted to have this man she’d just met working on her leg. Already she was embarrassed, first from having Kaia laugh as she tumbled over the fence, then from being chased down by a dog within her first few seconds on the job.
Still, Rocco had made mention of Mr. Tam. If there was any chance she could salvage the interaction, get something useful out of the trip, this had to be it.
“Well, okay, if you insist,” she managed, doing her best to sound sincere. Lifting her leg a few inches, she allowed him to peel back her jeans, the skin beneath stained crimson.
“Oh, my,” he whispered, reaching for the washcloth beside him. Dipping it in the water, he squeezed away the excess and said, “Please go ahead and lie back. A lady doesn’t need to see this.”
Ember felt her annoyance spike, the statement practically dripping with misogyny. Seeing a few dog bites on her leg wouldn’t crack the top one hundred of things she’d witnessed in her former life. Wouldn’t even make the top ten of injuries she’d endured herself.
Or that she’d inflicted on others, some for far less than the tone the man was taking with her.
Swallowing hard, she stared down at the wound for a few moments, long enough to let it be known that the sight of blood didn’t bother her, before slowly lowering her shoulders to the seat. Sinking into the soft cushion of it, she drew in a deep breath, feeling the cloth as it gently grazed over her skin.
“This room is amazing,” she tried again. “I’ve never seen such a collection of things before.”
The words sounded a bit contrived coming out, but she had to at least give it a shot.
“Yes,” Rocco said, continuing to work on her leg, “Mr. Tam has a warehouse downtown, but prefers to use his home as kind of a reserve display place. Anything that comes through that catches his eye or he thinks a particular customer might enjoy, he puts here. Sometimes he is right and they snatch it up, other times, it stays here.
“Bit of an odd assortment, but everybody needs a hobby, right?”
Ember’s hobby had been collecting vintage glassware. At the time of her death, she had amassed a whopping fifteen pieces.
Things like what she was staring at was nothing more than a rich boy with no idea how to spend his money.
“Of course,” she said. “That’s actually why I was stopping by. I had heard Mr. Tam was the authority on high-end goods in the area, and I was desperate to speak to him about something in particular.”
With no clue what that item might be, Ember left things deliberately vague, hoping Rocco wouldn’t press the matter.
The rag gave one last pass over her skin, wiping away any remaining residue, before Rocco dropped it back into the bowl of ice water. Taking up the roll of gauze, he began to wrap it around her calf, the material so light it was barely felt as it went into place.
“Ah, so that explains the acrobatics out on the front lawn earlier,” Rocco said, just a slight hint of levity in his voice.
“Yeah,” Ember replied, feeling a flush come to her skin. “Sorry about that. I was just a little desperate is all.”
In and of itself, the most truthful statement she had made all day. She now began to understand why so much of what she heard from people on the job sounded like complete bullshit. Making up credible lies on the spot wasn’t as easy as one might believe.
“Ha! Yes, definitely not the first time we’ve seen someone try to storm the gates. I had no idea how competitive antiquities could be until I came to work for Mr. Tam.”
It was the fourth time he had referred to his employer by his formal title. Never once John Lee, or Johnny, or John Boy. Always, Mr. Tam.
“So you’re in the business as well?” Ember asked.
Finishing with the wrap, Rocco cut away a piece of the surgical tape, threading it once behind her calf and pressing it into place.
“Me? Oh no, I just watch over the grounds here,” Rocco said. “Mr. Tam is the type of dealer that likes to be involved, really inspect whatever comes into his shop. Malaysia, Singapore, Morocco, I can’t keep track of where he is at any given moment.”
Whether the last statement was meant to stem any further questioning or just a lucky break on the man’s part, Ember couldn’t be certain.
Either way, it effectively served as an ending to their conversation.
“There we are,” Rocco said, working the stiff pants leg back into place. “You weren’t lying either. You really are a bleeder.”
A half-smile came to Ember’s face as she pulled herself to a sitting position and lowered her leg to the floor. Pressing the ball of her foot down into the rug, she tested how it felt, noticing only a slight pull along the outside of her leg.
“Thank you,” she said. “Though you really didn’t have to do all that. I was the one trespassing here, after all.”
“Bah,” Rocco said, waving a hand. “You’d be surprised at some of the devils trying to get in here. This was nothing.”
Reaching over, he removed the topper from the decanter and poured an inch into the bottom of the two glasses. “Now, I can’t in good conscience give you anything for the pain, but I have found this tends to work better than any medicine I’ve ever found.”
Swirling the glasses in either hand, he extended one to Ember, the floral notes of vanilla and jasmine finding their way to her nose.
“From our personal stock,” Rocco said.
Lifting his glass, he held it before him and said, “May you find whatever it is that you came here looking for.”
“Thank you,” Ember murmured, touching the rim of her glass to his before taking down the shot of alcohol in a single swallow.
Never in her life had anything burned so badly, searing her throat from her lips all the way to her stomach.
Growing up, Ember had never been one of those girls that imagined her life’s work as being a mother. While other girls were playing with dolls, or planning their wedding, or picking out baby names, she was with her father in the den watching episodes of Matlock or NYPD Blue.
There was never any doubt from an early age what her career prospects were, perfectly aligned with her father’s position as a lieutenant detective with the Washington State Police.
Even after getting married, family aspirations were shunted off to the side as she climbed the ladder, working her way from the academy to the streets as a beat cop, before taking over the rookie desk in the Homicide Detective Division.
Which was
why it was all the more shocking, just three months into her tenure there, when she discovered she was pregnant.
Glancing over into the passenger seat, Ember couldn’t help but smile at the sight of her son Emory. Strapped in, he was dressed in golashes and a heavy coat, his white-blond curls peeking out beneath a wool cap.
At the corners of his mouth was a juice stain, accentuating the smile on his face.
Ember still couldn’t believe she’d ever imagined a life without him in it. Even in the last eighteen months, when so much in her world had gone sideways, he was a constant that never faltered.
“It’s good to see you, Mommy.”
Flicking her glance from the street ahead, trees pushing in from every side, the icy slush continuing to pelt the car, to the passenger seat, Ember smiled. “Good to see you too, buddy.”
“Daddy said you weren’t coming, but I knew you would make it.”
The smile dimmed slightly as Ember again checked the road. Working without the GPS, she tried to remember the right street to turn on, slowing to check a sign before speeding up again.
Inside, she felt a spark of animosity flare, the comment just one in an unending string her ex-husband seemed to be lobbing her way since their separation.
“Why would he say that?”
Looking down, Emory laced his fingers in his lap. Turning his hands palm-up, he fluttered the tips. “I don’t know. He just said between the weather and work and stuff, you would call and cancel.”
The tendons along Ember’s hand bulged as she squeezed the wheel tight. Clenching for a moment, she let the vitriol she felt for the man pulsate through her system before releasing, allowing it to slowly recede.
The man had ruined enough of the last year. He wasn’t taking this weekend, too.
“No such luck,” Ember said. Jabbing a finger out, she went right to Emory’s ribs, wagging it up and down. “You’re stuck with me for two whole days.”
Scrunching his body to the side, giggles erupted from the boy. “Don’t! That tickles!”
Giving him one more prod, Ember raised her hand to his head. She shook the cap he was wearing once before tugging it away, running her hand over his curls.
In the dark of the car, they were so white they almost glowed.
“Your hair’s getting long,” she said. “Trying to grow a ponytail to impress your new girlfriend?”
Shaking his head from under her grasp, Emory ran a hand down over his curls. Smoothing them back into place, he asked, “What girlfriend?”
The girls her ex-husband cycled through to work as nannies was a source of constant problems during their marriage. His condition for her pursuing a career was always that he needed someone to help around the house, especially after Emory was born.
Early on, Ember had agreed, imagining a frumpy older woman in a uniform like Alice from The Brady Bunch.
What she had gotten was a steady line of foreign imports, each more striking than the one before.
And an endless source of trouble for the both of them.
“Shasta,” Ember said. “Good catch. She seems nice.”
“She is nice,” Emory said. His features screwed up, he turned to look up at Ember. “But she’s not my girlfriend, she’s Daddy’s.”
Silence fell in the car as Ember stared straight ahead, unable to meet Emory’s gaze, to respond in the slightest. She felt her mouth go dry as all senses seemed to dim, her sole point of focus the small patch of ground framed by her headlights.
“Is that right?” she managed.
“Yeah,” Emory responded. “He says in the fall, she’s going to be my new mommy.”
Chapter Eleven
The term safe house was really a bit of a misnomer. Any place where Jonas and his team chose was about the safest on Earth, their perimeters incapable of being penetrated, their defenses impregnable.
To the point where at times it was difficult to keep boredom from setting in, the team perpetually waiting for an enemy that wasn’t likely to ever show.
Even the Secret Service agents guarding the White House had the occasional crazy to keep them interested.
Rarely did the team use a location more than a time or two, this particular site carefully selected weeks before. Once an agricultural outpost, it was little more than a single structure, a pole barn with wooden sides and a metal roof. From the outside, it looked like hundreds of others throughout New Mexico, years of neglect and exposure to the elements having eroded much of the original luster.
It wasn’t until one stepped inside that they truly appreciated the work Jonas and his team had put in on such short notice.
What was originally one large space had been sectioned into quarters. Taking advantage of the existing structural supports, they had put walls up throughout, cleaving the area into four equal portions.
One was a sleeping chamber, a trio of beds arranged in equal intervals. Interspersed between them were a couple of nightstands and foot lockers for personal things, everything tidy and in its place.
Jonas did not abide messiness. It was a personal peeve of his that had become a mantra for the team, believing that an unruly living area was an indicator for how one conducted themselves the rest of the time as well.
And a team with tasks as important as theirs could not afford such folly.
The second room in the spread was a combination kitchen and dining area. Equipped with basic furnishings, it was designed to be run from generators or natural gas, requiring nothing from the traditional grid. Using it only when necessary, the three men rotated cooking duties, eating just twice a day.
Not knowing how long they would need to be onsite when they first arrived, enough dry goods had been procured to last for more than two weeks. Stacked in the corner, enormous bags of beans and flour sat under the bright beams of the afternoon sun streaming through.
In the air were the scents of coffee and diesel oil, the smell the last remaining semblance of the barn the place had once been.
The third room, and the first that one entered upon coming in from the outside, was a living area. Equipped with two aging couches, the twin pieces of furniture were arranged to face one another, a battered coffee table between them.
Piled high in the center of it was a stack of playing cards, the mass growing ever larger as the other two men on Jonas’s team sat on either sofa, tossing them down one at a time.
Seated in an armchair in the corner, Jonas flicked a glance up from the Field & Stream magazine he was reading, the article something about hunting whitetail deer in Montana.
A pastime, and a location, Jonas had never given a single moment’s thought to.
“When was the last time you two made a perimeter sweep?” he asked, his tone laced with boredom, a touch of admonishment also present.
At the sound of it, both men looked his way, the one on the right pausing, a card held just a few inches above the table, ready to be cast onto the pile.
“Half hour ago,” Micah replied. “And a half hour before that, just like always.”
The comment was made free from inflection, though Jonas picked up on the insinuation just the same. The men were starting to feel the strain of their situation. Just thirty-six hours had passed since their arrival, and already tedium was beginning to set in.
“Not a peep,” Micah added.
The youngest man on the team, Micah had smooth light-brown skin and hair buzzed short. A head taller than Jonas, his frame was long and lithe, a body cut from ropy muscle and tendon.
Leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, he looked much too large for the couch he was sitting on, limbs folded onto themselves, joints jutting at hard angles.
“Nice day, though,” Gad said from across the table. “Good to be out of San Diego for a while.”
A few years older than Micah, Gad wore his dark hair a few inches longer, a matching mustache covering his top lip and drooping down on either side of his mouth. Much shorter than his cohorts, he was at least twice as thick, built lik
e a whiskey barrel.
And twice as dense.
Flicking his gaze between the two men, Jonas didn’t bother to return comment. Both had been correct. Neither needed validation from him, or anybody else, on whatever they said.
It was one of the reasons he had personally selected them for his team.
Grunting softly, he returned his focus to the magazine before him, the reading material the only thing left in the barn that he hadn’t already been through.
A few more minutes, and he might find himself growing as restless as his counterparts.
Waiting to make sure the conversation was over, Micah and Gad slowly returned their attention to the game. One card at a time they tossed them onto the pile, everyone resuming a state of silence.
A state they remained in for just a few more minutes before the sound of Jonas’s phone erupted. Loud and shrill, it sprang forth from the small device on the corner of the table, every person snapping their attention toward it instantly.
Rising a few inches from his seat, Micah peered the length of his nose at it, reading the name on the screen before glancing up to Jonas. “Rocco.”
A single pulse of adrenaline slipped into Jonas’s system as he folded the magazine closed and placed it to the side. Since arriving the night before last, he had been expecting to hear from one of two people.
Of them, Rocco was the one he had least hoped for.
And the one that represented the most potential trouble.
Pushing himself upright, Jonas grabbed up the phone. He didn’t bother looking to his men again as he stepped out through the front door. Leaving it open behind him, he strode across the bent grass outside, pressing the phone to his ear.
“Rocco,” he said simply.
In the distance, Jonas could hear the sound of the Cimarron River. Just below the bluff the barn was positioned on, it had started to recede for the summer, its current still strong and swift as it rushed by.