Charged - Book One (5 page)

I knew Rusty’s. I’d been there a couple of times
during my career, back when you could smoke in the place.
Everything was nonsmoking now in Seattle. It was a small, yuppie
café about a fifteen-minute drive from my place. You couldn’t miss
it. The sign was bigger than the place itself and the coffee was
good.

On the way there, I thought about Kye. I knew I
wouldn’t be taking her to Aaron’s and giving her the box. I wanted
to believe her, but I didn’t. To make matters worse, this was theft
and tampering with evidence. Even if I handed the box over to the
Seattle police, there would still be charges against me. And now,
Aaron was involved.

Why had my feelings for a childhood friend allowed me
to slip beyond all of my ethics? I tried to convince myself that it
would turn out okay and my sentence would be reduced to a
misdemeanor with no jail time. I knew I was the only one who cared
about what happened to Richie. I attempted to push all this out of
my head and continue with my plan.

When I got to Rusty’s, I left the cane in the truck.
I went in and ordered a strong black coffee. I knew once Kye opened
the door, half of the men in the place not already with a woman
would take a look at her. She was stunning.

After forty-five minutes, I started to worry. She
didn’t seem like the kind of person who would be late for anything,
especially if it meant getting the box.

I looked around the room and realized I was so busy
thinking about Kye that I didn’t notice the two men at a corner
table were out of place. They weren’t talking, they weren’t
drinking their coffee and they were staring at me.

They looked huge and they were wearing suits that
didn’t quite fit their muscles. I should’ve brought Aaron with me.
His orange hair would’ve been a good distraction for my getaway.
But I didn’t need him getting hurt. I looked around, but I didn’t
see Kye anywhere, so I finished my coffee and left.

In the corner of my eye, I could see the men at the
table also getting up. I started to head toward the truck, but
there were two more men in suits standing right by it. They saw me
walk across the street and now I had four guys trying to apprehend
me. I wasn’t sweating just yet. I’d brought both guns with me. I
hurried down the street, limping so fast that I almost knocked a
woman down.

“Hey Kegger, small world.” It was Lolita.

“I have four guys following me and I need to lose
‘em.”

She knew the back streets better than I did. She
caught a glimpse of them headed in our direction and she quickly
led me down a busy block, into a by-the-hour hotel and headed to
the back door. As soon as we were outside, she pointed to another
door across the alley.

“That will take you to 2nd Street.”

“Thanks, baby,” I said, heading toward it and she
then took another door that entered into the back of a pizza joint
I was familiar with. That’s what I liked most about Lolita; she
never asked me any questions.

After walking through the kitchen of a small Chinese
restaurant and then through the main dining area, I was out on 2nd
Street and on the light rail in two minutes, headed towards Aaron’s
shop. But now, I was worried about Aaron.

I WAS SWEATING and my adrenaline was still surging
when I made it to Aaron’s. The thought that something could happen
to him just made me want to kick myself. When I reached his shop, I
was relieved to see he was okay and hadn’t had any visitors.

He immediately knew something was wrong by the
expression on my face. He let me in through the back door of the
shop into a large room where he fixed computers and I noticed the
security system was on.

“You okay, man? You look like hell!” he said,
studying me. I was sure my face was red because I was in a lot of
pain and I wiped my forehead with my sleeve.

“Yeah, I went to meet Kye, but she never showed. Then
I had four guys following me. I wasn’t sure I was gonna lose ‘em.
And my knee is killing me.” I rubbed it and felt how swollen it
was.

Aaron bolted the door and peered through the window
as he shut off all the front lights of the store. He was closed for
business. I sat down at one of metal stools facing a workbench and
he went to the fridge in the back of the room and got two beers and
some aspirin. I downed the aspirin with one of the beers.

“You should be using your cane more, or you’re going
to undo everything the surgeries have fixed.”

He was right. I have a cane and I wished I’d brought
it into the café. If I had, I wouldn’t be in pain right now, or at
least, not horrible pain. Why didn’t I bring my cane? Oh, that’s
right. Kye was beautiful, one more reason why men do stupid
things.

“You got anything stronger?”

He opened one of the many drawers under the counter
next to the fridge, took out a little bottle and handed me a small
white pill.

“It’s not oxycontin, but it’s stronger than
aspirin.”

I swallowed it without asking or caring. The pain
shot out of my kneecap and stretched along my thigh into my hip. I
took a long deep breath as I removed my leather jacket and pointed
to the six camera screens that he had for his security system.

“Anything weird today?” I said.

“Nothing.”

“They’ve been following me, so sooner or later, they
are going to show up here,” I said.

This statement neither startled him nor interested
him, but I wish it had. He was just a kid and I regretted dragging
him into this. I should’ve handed the box over as evidence. I
should’ve used my cane tonight and I should’ve patched that hole in
the wall. And a part of me wished I could show Aaron what they did
to Richie and maybe then he would see the seriousness of the
situation.

“So who do you think they work for?”

“I don’t know, but I get the feeling they are the
same guys responsible for Richie’s death.”

“You don’t think Kye sent them?”

“I can’t be sure, but why offer me money for
something she just planned on taking? If she and those guys were
working together, I don’t think she would’ve been at Richie’s place
alone, unarmed. I’m leaning towards Marie. And I’m starting to
think that Kye might be in trouble.”

Finally, the pain started to subside a little.

“You’re always telling me what a genius you are,” I
said, taking the beer he’d gotten for himself, opening it and
downing half of the can, “tell me you got something.”

“I do not tell you I’m a genius… that is your
postulation of me. And, yes, I do have something,” he said,
smiling.

He opened a cabinet door under one of the workbenches
and it had a small safe in it, behind a false wall. This was
something I’d never noticed before. He opened the safe and took out
the box. Somehow, this made me feel better that the box was more
secure here than at my place. He placed the box in front of us on
the table. Then he flipped it open at the hidden seams that I could
still barely see and under Station 13, were the miscellaneous
numbers again.

363259149

112437387

“Well, we both think it’s a key, but to what? I
checked bank vaults, Pentagon security systems, bond deposit boxes,
custom vaults for the rich, even Fort Knox’ security system. I
couldn’t find anything that needed a key like this. Even bank
vaults with the best security are dual-combination with heat
sensors and motion sensors. The Pentagon has program-based security
badges, keypunch combinations on certain sections and a lot of
manpower. But Knox is different; up to seven people, each having
one password known only to them, which have to be entered at the
same time to open the vault. So this single little box? It’s not
logical. Too vulnerable. And I found nothing that accepts a 13-slot
plug. So we know two things. We know what it doesn’t open and we
know its custom.”

“What about missile warheads?”

“Most of them are designed to accept a code and have
a turnkey activation. But, thirteen slots? I could go on for days
about the significance of the number 13. There are 13 lunar cycles
in every solar year. In history, we have the sum of 13 recurring
endlessly. There’s the 12 disciples plus one messiah; there were 12
Knights of the Round Table plus one king. Then there’s the 20 days
in the Aztec calendar that are numbered only 1 through 13. There’s
the superstitious ‘Friday the 13
^th
,’ stemming from 1307
when King Philip the Fourth started the eradication of the Knights
Templar. But I couldn’t find anything that I could relate to this
box.”

He paused and got up to grab a beer from the fridge
and smiled.

“What?”

“Well, the whole thing doesn’t make sense. It looks
electrical, but it’s not. There are 13 slots on it, but all
receptacles work one way — there’s a hot, a neutral and a ground.
So I’m supposed to assume that it accepts six hot, six neutrals and
one ground. It’s redundant for something so small.”

“Then why are you smiling?”

“I think I figured out the numbers.”

Now he had my attention.

“I checked everything. At first, I thought it was a
cipher for a technical algorithm.”

I shook my head to let him know I wasn’t following
him.

“It’s basically a code that would reveal a set of
instructions. This wasn’t the case, but look at what’s not there in
the numbers. There’s no symbols, no negatives, no positives, no
letters, just random numbers. So it’s not a cipher. I even checked
call numbers at the Library of Congress. Then I thought to myself,
if I had something of great value and I lost it, how would I get it
returned to me?”

“I’d say put your address on it or your cell number,
but that doesn’t look like either,” I said.

Aaron smiled like I was on the right track.

“I think they are longitude and latitude. Now,
granted there are no decimals. There are no negative signs and no
way for me to know which set of numbers is longitude and which is
latitude. I plugged the numbers in, switching up north and south
and east and west several times. I ended up in an ocean or a sea.
Then, I tried switching up the degrees. I tried 3 and 36 for the
first set of numbers; we know it’s not going to be 363 because a
full rotation of the earth stops at 360 degrees. Then I changed the
degrees on the second number from 11 to 112. Assuming they are in
order, the only thing that made sense was this.”

He opened a laptop and entered in a web address and
turned the computer toward me. It was a GPS site. The numbers, once
entered, were coordinates to some place in the Grand Canyon as far
as I could tell.

“Wanna go on a trip?” Aaron said.

“This doesn’t make sense. If it’s a key, what’s it
going to open in the Grand Canyon?” I
said.             

“I don’t know. But I think it’s interesting that it’s
located in a place that will never be altered or developed by man.
And this is a restricted flight zone for some reason. Plus, you
should read some of the history behind this place about the pueblo
people and their ancestors.”

“I’ve been to Hopi Point. There’s nothing there.”

“Yep, you stood on the edge of a cliff and looked
down at it in awe. Have you been in it?”

“No.”

“The coordinates are not Hopi Point. They are the
north rim of the canyon, west of the Kaibab Trail. Not the most
visited place in the world.”

I was familiar with the Grand Canyon and if we
weren’t on the trail, it meant we were taking mules and hiking. It
was majestic, but impossible for me to hike with my bad knee.

“I can’t hike with this knee,” I said.

“No, man. We’ll take my plane.”

“You have a plane?” I was dumbfounded and he was
serious. “How come you didn’t tell me you have a plane?”

“You didn’t ask and I know you hate flying.”

“You fly planes?”

“No, I have an on-call pilot.”

“Is there anything else I forgot to ask about?” I
wasn’t sure if I wanted him to answer.

“No, not really.”

I’m sure my expression said it all, but I decided to
ask more about it later.

I looked back at the y-shaped crevice on the
satellite picture and hit the zoom. It was surrounded by rocks and
it was deep… possibly thousands of feet deep.

“You have a pilot that can land a plane in this
terrain?” I said.

“It’s a small plane and he could set it down on the
tip of a glacier if he had to.”

He laughed and I guess it made sense that he owned a
plane. He clearly had money. He’d offered to pay for my knee
surgery more than once. I didn’t know how he obtained the money,
but at this point, I didn’t care. Once, a couple years back, he
mentioned something about a business venture that had done well. It
must have done very well.

Then I thought about the plane. The thought of flying
made me a little more than uneasy. I didn’t like heights, but there
was a part of me that had to ride it out. I had to know what the
box opened.

AS AARON WAS MAKING PLANS for us to leave, I was
headed back to my place. Even though I knew it was stupid and
dangerous, I had to know if Kye had left another message and I
couldn’t leave Zero there. 

I could’ve just called Frankie, the owner of
Valentino’s and asked him to look over Zero and the apartment, but
there was a part of me that said Kye would be there.

It was almost midnight when I got there and as I
limped up the stairs to the second floor, I could already see my
door had been busted open again. This time, all three bolts were
torn through the trim and drywall. To make everything worse, I just
then remembered I took something at Aaron’s. I felt slow and a
little groggy. I pulled out the pistol from my ankle holster and
flicked the safety off.

Even with the painkiller Aaron gave me, my heart
started pounding. The apartment looked worse than last time.
Everything was pulled out of the kitchen cabinets and thrown on the
floor. There weren’t a whole lot of broken dishes, due to the fact
that I didn’t have much left to break. My papers were pushed off my
desk onto the floor and both lamps were broken. The living room was
dimly lit, but both the kitchen light and the bedroom light were
still on.