Breaking Creed (10 page)

She had just made a mistake. A big mistake. Whatever game the girl was playing, Creed decided he disliked even more the one her keeper was playing. A teenager he could forgive for making up stories and games, but this woman’s insistence on lying was making him suspicious and starting to piss him off.

“All the more reason for us to catch up,” Creed said, and smiled as he offered a hand to Amanda. “I was just going to take a break. How about I walk you to your ride?” And with only a glance at the woman, he added, “I’m sure Officer Salazar won’t mind helping you process your luggage.”

“Not a problem. I can do that. Anything for you, Mr. Creed. We certainly appreciate all your help.”

Creed shook the man’s hand, thanking him. Officer Salazar’s back was turned to the woman and he wasn’t able to see her eyes flash daggers into Creed.

“Amanda and I’ll meet you out front.”

He took the girl’s arm as he pulled the pink squeaky elephant out of his shoulder pack and tossed it to Grace. She caught her reward in midair. At least he was able to get one of the three females to stop staring at him.

18

“Y
OU
HAVE
EXACTLY
THREE
MINUTES
to tell me what the hell’s going on,” Creed told the girl as he tightened his grip on her arm and led her through the crowds in baggage claim.

With a glance over his shoulder, he saw the girl’s keeper still watching them, even as CBP Officer Salazar stood beside her at Carousel #3, waiting for her luggage to come around on the conveyor belt.

Grace scampered beside them, squeaking her pink elephant in her mouth. At least one of them was happy with their day’s findings.

“She’s a bad woman,” Amanda said, noticing him look back.

“Less than three minutes now.”

“She’s made me do terrible things.”

“Like carrying drugs?”

“What? No! That’s crazy.”

But he could feel her body almost melt.

“Bad decision to lie to me. I know you have drugs somewhere on you. Are they in your handbag?”

She shook her head.

“Because I’ve seen it all. Candy bars with cocaine middles. Peanut butter jars.”

Grace and her squeaking managed to clear a path as people stepped out of their way to see what was making the unusual sound, despite the clamor of so many other noises.

Creed pulled the girl across to the other side of the concourse and toward the Ground Transportation exit.

“Please, don’t let her take me,” the girl whispered when she saw where they were headed. “They’ll kill me this time.”

“Where are the drugs?” he asked.

“There are no drugs.”

“Grace says there are, and she’s never wrong. One last chance, where are the drugs?”

“You’ll turn me in. I’ll be arrested. Please, they’ll kill me.”

“I know most of these officers. They won’t hurt you.”

“They have people who’ll get to me. They’ll kill me.”

She was shaking now, and her skin was slick with sweat. If this was part of some game, she was very good at it.

And then she said something that made Creed’s insides twist into knots.

“I’m only fourteen and my stomach hurts so bad because they made me swallow forty-two balloons.”

“Holy crap,” he said under his breath.

He felt her eyes searching his reaction. He slowed his pace, took some deep breaths. He looked back toward Carousel #3, trying to see through the crowds. The woman and Salazar were gone. Luggage retrieved. Salazar would make sure it was processed quickly.
A car was probably waiting out front. If not the car itself, then certainly the driver. If the girl was telling the truth, the driver would most likely be armed. And there could be others watching.

Creed reversed course. Immediately Amanda thought he was taking her back to the CBP officer, or worse, back to her keeper. She started to cry. She was too weak to pull away from him, and now he understood that she was in pain. That’s why she was shaking and sweating.

“Settle down,” he told her.

Instead of continuing back into baggage claim, he took a right and led her toward a door that warned
NO EXIT
. One of the benefits afforded him and Grace was a parking slot just outside the terminal. Creed pulled his ID badge off his neck and slid the card through the slot beside the door. The flashing red light clicked and started flashing green.

He pushed the door and held it open for Amanda to go through. When she hesitated, Grace nudged her leg, then went around her and marched across the threshold as if she were showing her what to do, even standing on the other side as far as her leash allowed. She waited and wagged, a bit impatient with this new part of the game.

He saw the girl turn to look back. She was clearly debating her choices.

“You came to me,” Creed reminded her. “If you want my help, you’re gonna need to trust me.”

He watched her face—pain, fear, anxiety—she couldn’t hide it anymore. He almost wished she’d choose to stay. He still had time to fetch Officer Salazar and let him take care of her. That was CBP’s job. Creed and Grace’s job was simply to search and find. Maybe if he didn’t still remember those girls and boys from the fishing boat—the looks on their faces forever embedded in his memory—maybe he’d have let Salazar take care of it from the very first lie. Because
he knew as soon as this girl walked out this exit with him, his life would never be the same again.

She looked up at him, eyes watery, nose running, and nodded. “I guess I have nothing to lose,” she mumbled, so quietly he figured she was telling herself instead of him.

And she squeezed past him through the doorway and into the hall that would take them directly to his Jeep.

He let the heavy door shut behind him and waited for the lock to click. All the while, in his mind, he kept thinking that he had absolutely everything to lose.

19

C
REED
WATCHED
THE
REARVIEW
MIRROR
. His security clearance parking meant he didn’t have to deal with any of the airport checkpoints. Whoever was waiting to pick up this girl and her keeper would never get a glimpse of his Jeep Grand Cherokee leaving.

Maybe if he was lucky—God willing—it would take them a while to figure out who he was. But because of his and Grace’s unwanted celebrity, they certainly would figure it out quickly. And when they did, they would know exactly where to find him. Right now Creed wasn’t sure what would be worse—the drug thugs finding him or having to tell Hannah that he was bringing home one of their mules.

Hannah had brought home quite a few unsavory characters from Segway House: drug addicts, runaways, wounded soldiers like Jason. But this was different. None of them had targets on their
backs. Nor did they have thousands of dollars’ worth of cocaine in their gut that belonged to someone else.

He glanced at the girl and wondered if her name was even Amanda. She had curled herself tight into the passenger seat, buckling up only on his insistence. Still, she managed to hike her feet up and hug her knees to her chest. He’d covered her with a jacket when she mumbled that she was cold. She kept the jacket in place, though she turned down his request to flip the seat warmer on. It had to be almost ninety degrees outside. He kept the temperature on her side of the Jeep at seventy-three.

She no longer trembled but her face still glistened with sweat. She was still in pain. She’d taken a bottle of water that he’d offered earlier but it remained in the cup holder on her side, unopened.

Creed had never dealt with drug mules before, but he knew enough to realize that if a balloon with cocaine had burst inside her stomach, she’d already be dead. But there was nothing to stop it from still happening. A few times he had to look hard to make sure she hadn’t died on him. He kept thinking she had fallen asleep because she was so quiet, but each time he glanced over, he noticed that her eyes stayed open. Her head pressed against the seat’s headrest. She stared out the window, almost as if she were expecting to recognize some of the scenery.

She didn’t ask any more questions and neither did Creed. He didn’t want to hear anything else, not right now. There would be plenty of time to decipher her lies. Hannah would help him figure out what to do with her. She’d be madder than hell with him, but she’d still help.

It was about a four-hour drive from the Atlanta airport to his home in the panhandle of Florida. Usually he took Interstate 65, but outside Montgomery, Alabama, he exited and traveled a two-lane until he was convinced that no one had followed him.

Every time he glanced in the rearview mirror to check on Grace,
she was staring at him from her perch. The backseat of the SUV lay flat with Grace’s bed in the middle and their equipment squeezed into the far corner. She had her pink elephant beside her but she caught his eyes in the mirror every time he looked at her. Then she’d turn her head and glance in Amanda’s direction.

Under other circumstances he’d probably laugh at her persistence. She didn’t understand why he’d brought the “fish” with them. He’d never brought it inside the car before. In all of her training and in all of her past experiences, he would ask her to “go find fish.” People in a crowded airport looked at Creed funny when he used the word “fish,” but if he used the word “drugs” for the cue, they might scatter and run.

Grace was one of his multitask dogs, which meant she could search for bodies dead or alive as well as particular things, like drugs. But she needed different cues to know what she should search for. Creed put different harnesses or vests on her for certain tasks, but he also used different words for what she was supposed to search out.

So Grace was confused. Today she had completed her task successfully. She had searched out and found what he had asked for. For which she’d been rewarded with her pink elephant. But unlike ever before, her master had brought the “fish” with them, and poor Grace had no idea what she was supposed to do with it. She was looking to him to help her figure it out.

“It’s okay,” he told the dog. “Just lie down, Grace. All done.”

She laid her head down on her front paws but her eyes stayed on Creed. He’d feel them there for the entire trip back home.

20

WASHINGTON, D.C.

O’D
ELL
COULD
SEE
B
ENJAMIN
P
LATT
waiting for her in the far corner booth of Old Ebbitt Grill. He was looking at a menu and hadn’t seen her yet. A half-empty pilsner reminded her how late she was. Still, she took an extra few seconds to stand back and take a good look at him.

Despite the restaurant’s dim light, she knew she would automatically peg him for a military officer—ramrod-straight back, clean-shaven, handsome face, short-cut hair, and the long, steady fingers of a surgeon. The serious set of his jaw remained, whether examining test tubes of level 4 viruses or simply making a decision between cheddar or American cheese for his burger. Sometimes she wished he wasn’t always so serious. He had a wickedly dry sense of humor and a kind and gentle manner, but his position demanded a tougher façade. O’Dell was one of the few people who saw the other side of Benjamin Platt. His serious manner was, of course, an understandable occupational hazard of his chosen profession.

As an infectious-disease officer (actually, director of USAMRIID, pronounced U-Sam-rid—United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases), his choices had to be careful and measured. The habit seeped into his personal life. Even his choice of seating was a well-thought-out process, taking the side of the booth that put his back to the corner wall so he’d be able to see everyone approach or pass by the table.

Maybe it didn’t bother her because her own career had ingrained similar habits in her that she had allowed to invade her personal life. Only recently had she realized how much of a personal life she
did not
have. When you chased killers for a living, you tended not to trust anyone except yourself. It was easier to keep people out.

She’d learned to compartmentalize the horrible crime scenes she’d witnessed over the years, and along with those images she’d stashed into separate compartments, she added the emotions of anger and fear. She’d gotten so good at it that she didn’t even realize she did the same thing with her personal life, bordering off her feelings and keeping people at arm’s length.

Then one day she realized she no longer even had much of a personal life. Why had she been surprised? You couldn’t shut people out just because you didn’t want to risk feeling too deeply or possibly getting hurt. Especially when she worked so hard to put up all those barricades in the first place.

In her experience, the hurt always came. It was just a matter of time. And that was the one thing she and Ben shared. They were so much alike that it was easy to be together. Like they had an unstated understanding of what to expect from each other. But perhaps that wasn’t enough to build a relationship on.

He saw her. Smiled. Like an officer and a gentleman, he stood up from the booth to greet her.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said as he leaned over and kissed her cheek.
He smelled good, like he’d just gotten out of the shower. And only now did she realize that his hair was still damp, his face smooth from a second shave of the day. His khakis looked freshly pressed and his polo shirt was neatly tucked in. Had he primped just for her? Like a date? She searched his eyes for an answer, but he was already looking for the waiter.

“You’re always worth the wait,” he said with a glance as he continued to politely wait for her to sit down before he slid back into his place. He waved at a waiter, finally getting one’s attention. He pointed at his own pilsner and held up two fingers.

Maggie smiled and wondered when they had become so predictable with each other. Maybe it was simply that they had become comfortable with each other. Nothing wrong with that. Theirs had been a crazy dance. They had become friends—very good friends—then almost lovers. “Almost” because of Ben’s deliberate and measured choices, as though taking that next step was something that needed to be analyzed and calculated.