Hell on Wheels (9 page)

He’d been there more than a time or two himself. She needed to get some sleep and soon. But first they needed some answers, because she’d come into their shop so wired he was surprised her underwear wasn’t picking up signals from the Hubble Space Telescope.

“Why don’t you give us a try,” he told her. “We specialize in paranoid and crazy.”

She tried to laugh, but the strain she’d been under, combined with her lack of sleep, made the effort fall flat. Rolling in her lips, she looked around the table as if she’d suddenly lost her nerve, then, “It all started about a week after we found out about Grigg.”

Everyone at the table, including him, shifted uncomfortably.

She continued, unconsciously flicking at the tab on her soda with her thumbnail. The hollow metallic pinging was particularly loud in the strained silence of the conference room. “I came home from work one day and just
knew
someone had been in my condo.”

“Was anything missing? Moved?” Ozzie asked, leaning back in his chair and running a hand though his mad scientist hair. The kid might have terrible taste in music and T-shirts, but he had an IQ off the fucking charts.

“No, everything was just how I’d left it, but there was this…this feeling. It sounds dumb, I know��”

“Not as dumb as you’d think,” Frank assured her. “Intuition is a powerful tool. One each of us sitting around this table has learned to credit. Plus, given the level of technology you’ve been wearing beneath your clothes, I’d say your paranoia was on the money.”

Ali flashed him a grateful smile.

I’m just racking up the hero points with you today, aren’t I, sweetheart?
Right, if she knew of the wild fantasies he was entertaining about Becky, she would surely be wearing a totally different expression. The kind someone might don after catching the neighborhood weirdo garbed in nothing but a trench coat in the middle of July while walking by a playground full of kids—which was exactly how he felt when it came to Rebecca Reichert. Like a dirty old man.

Shit.

“Thanks,” Ali said, dragging his attention back to the subject at hand. “That makes me feel better. I really thought I was going nutso there for a while. And this is probably going to sound strange, but I’m kinda glad you guys found all those bugs on me. Now I know I’m not losing my mind.”

“So you get home from work and you know someone’s been in your place,” Ozzie prodded. Like usual, the kid’s brain was flying about ten steps ahead, gathering information and cataloging it into recognizable patterns. “What happened next?”

“Nothing,” Ali lifted a shoulder and unconsciously slid a little farther down in her seat. The woman was on the short path to going horizontal. “For a few days, that is. I thought maybe I was just being paranoid, thought maybe my personal radar was going haywire because of Grigg’s passing.”

Passing.

Frank hated the euphemisms people used while talking about death. What was so wrong with that word? Death. Dead. Die. It was direct, simple, so much more succinct than, say, giving up the ghost or kicking the bucket, or, his personal favorite, pushing up daisies. Though technically more accurate than the previous two, that last one sounded far too happy and sunny in his opinion. Maybe it was because he’d dealt in and with death for most of his adult life, but he preferred to call a spade a spade.

Grigg was dead. It was as simple and as complicated as that.

“But about a week later,” Ali continued, “I walked into my classroom early one morning and…same thing. That feeling like someone had been there. But this time I had proof. When I went back through the history on my computer, I saw someone had logged on to my machine around midnight the night before.”

“Could you see what they were looking for? What files they accessed?” Ozzie asked.

“No…I, uh, I’m not that tech-savvy. And I guess, looking back, perhaps I should’ve called in one of those companies…the Geek Squad or whatever, to see if they could figure out what’d been done to my PC, but then school let out for summer break and I started to see him and I completely forgot about my computer.”

“
See
him
?” Dan “The Man” Currington asked the question they were all thinking.

“Yes,” she made a helpless gesture, “sort of.”

“Any way to clarify that?” Dan pressed.

Ali took another deep breath and slipped a little farther down in her seat. She rested her head on the back and blinked rapidly at the ceiling, then she suddenly pulled herself upright again.

That-a-girl, just keep it together a little while longer.

“Okay, again, you have to understand I thought I was going crazy, but I kept seeing this guy out of the corner of my eye. Never full on. Just a glimpse here or there. In the parking lot at the grocery store, a few cars behind me at a red light, walking into the ice cream shop across from the place I always get coffee. It’s like I’d catch a glimpse…then he’d be gone. But yesterday, right after some big brute of a guy tried to mug me,” she waved everyone off when they started making noises of concern. “Don’t worry. I wasn’t hurt, and the big jerk didn’t get my purse, thanks to the help of a giant bumblebee and a loaf of French bread.” Again, she sliced her hand through the air. “Long story for another time.
Anyway
, so right after my mugger ran off, I see the guy who’s been following me for months come out of the deli across the street.

“Now, my adrenaline was pretty high because of the mugging, so I call to him and guess what he does?”

“What?” Becky asked, eyes bright with excitement. The damned woman loved trouble, lived for it and, much to Frank’s chagrin, too often found it.

“He took off!” Ali exclaimed. “Just jumped in his SUV and burned rubber. Headed in the same direction as my mugger, mind you. I started after him—”

There was a collective gasp heard around the table.

“Yes, yes,” she rolled her eyes and pressed forward before anyone could throw in their two cents about what a colossally dumbass move that had been. “I know. Stupid, right? But I was so sick of feeling like I was going crazy. Don’t worry, though. One of the guys who helped me fight off the mugger kept me from following.”

Ozzie whipped open a paper-thin laptop, tense fingers poised above the keys like a snake getting ready to strike. “Vehicle make, color, model?”

Young Einstein had dropped his charmingly affable facade. Now he was all business. This was
his
specialty. Give the kid a few scant bits of information, and he could use his crazy-mad computer skills to find you the remaining pieces of the puzzle because, according to Ozzie,
everything
could be accessed through the World Wide Web and the lightning-fast fingers of a clever hacker. And Ozzie was as clever as they came.

“Sorry,” Ali shook her head. “I’m about as good with cars as I am with computers. It was black, I can tell you that much. Black and big. Like a Ford Explorer or a Chevy Tahoe.”

“So it was a domestically made SUV?” Ozzie asked, already typing away on the keyboard while his eyes remained glued to Ali’s face.

Mad
skills.

Frank congratulated himself for about the thousandth time over his decision to recruit Ethan Sykes away from the Navy.

Again Ali shook her head. “I’m not sure. But I did get a picture of the license plate.”

Ozzie instantly stopped typing. In the resounding silence of the room, you could’ve heard the proverbial pin drop.

Becky was the one to break it.
Of
course
.

“Kick
ass
, sista. Way to keep your head about you.”

Ali blushed prettily and bit her lip. Out of the corner of Frank’s eye, he thought he saw Ghost’s jaw twitch.

“Thanks.” Ali smiled. “But before you congratulate me too much, I’m not sure it’ll be that much help. It’s fuzzy.” She pulled her BlackBerry from the back pocket of her jeans and punched a few buttons. “By the time I grabbed my phone, the vehicle was pretty far away, and I had to zoom way in…”

“Did you give the photo to the Jacksonville Police?” Frank asked, wondering what the local PD had to say about the incident.

“I did.” She made a sound of disgust. “And when I laid out my theory linking the guy who’s been following me and the mugger, they paid me some pretty nice lip service. Secretly, I think they went in the other room and swirled their fingers around their temples. Look, I know the story is crazy, but I’m convinced I’m right. Those two men are linked. Everything that’s been happening is linked.”

She handed her phone to Ozzie who glanced at the screen before his fingers started flying over the keyboard again.

“It’s North Carolina plates. That last digit there,” she tapped her phone with one fingernail, “it looks like either a B or an R…or maybe a 3.”

“Doesn’t matter,” the kid said. “I can work with it.”

“You can?” Ali’s eyes brightened. “The Jacksonville police said it was too blurry to do anything with.”

“The Jacksonville police don’t have my image enhancement software,” Ozzie boasted, the excitement on his face making him look about twelve years old, which made Frank’s trick shoulder start to ache.

Thirty-nine certainly wasn’t headed for the rocking chair, but with the kind of life he’d led, closing out his fourth decade meant that there were aches…and pops…and shit that just didn’t work right anymore. His trick shoulder being the most annoying of all his current ailments.

He reached for the bottle of ibuprofen he kept in his hip pocket and quickly swallowed a couple of tablets without benefit of water before shoving the Dum Dum back in his mouth.

“Good job, by the way, “ Ozzie added.

“Thanks,” Ali accepted his offhand compliment and watched him jump up from the conference table with the same energy a child jumps out of bed on Christmas morning. The kid snagged his laptop along with her phone and scurried over to his domain. Pulling a long cord from a drawer, he attached it to the phone before jacking it into one of the main computers.

“Anyway,” Ali turned her attention back to the group at the conference table, “the whole incident spooked me, especially when the police didn’t believe me. And since I didn’t want to end up strapped to a wheelchair with my eyelids taped open, pumped full of drugs and falling down a staircase while screaming, “He’s flying!,” I immediately hopped in my car and drove straight here.”

“Be still my heart,” Ozzie swiveled in his desk chair, clutching his chest. “Marry me, Ali. Marry me right now.”

“What am I missing?” Dan asked.

“Come on, man. Mel Gibson?
Conspiracy Theory
? Do you
ever
go to the movies?”

“Ha!” Dan laughed, cocking his head and smoothing his tightly trimmed goatee. “Unlike some people I know, I haven’t spent the last ten years with my head buried in electronics. I’ve been busting my hump doing man’s work and—”

“Spare me one of your speeches,” Ozzie waved a dismissive hand. “I’ve heard them all before. And I don’t know why you’re always trying to shut me down, anyway. ‘Nobody puts baby in the corner.’”

Ozzie waited a beat and when Dan only raised a skeptical brow, he threw his hands in the air. “You’ve got to be kidding me!
Dirty
Dancing
? How can you never have seen
Dirty
Dancing
? It’s a classic!”

“Yeah,” Dan snorted, “a classic piece of shit.”

“Them’s fightin’ words, mister!” Ozzie howled, jumping up to dance from side to side like a boxer.

Dan snorted so loudly, Frank thought the guy might’ve swallowed his tongue which, considering Dan’s propensity toward slinging bullshit and provoking Ozzie, might not be such a bad thing.

The ex-SEALs on the team, Ozzie and Dan Man included, considered themselves to be the best of the best—which made them all cocky as hell. Of course, truth be told, each member of Black Knights Inc., ex-SEAL or not, was on the team because they were at the very tip-tipity top of their game.

Black Knights Inc. had nine guys—soon to be twelve, with the addition of the Mossad agent and the prospective helo pilot and communications specialist—who could go in, finish the job, and make tracks without a whiff of Uncle’s involvement.

The powers-that-be in the monster otherwise known as the U.S. government absolutely
loved
all those intricate little layers of plausible deniability. Didn’t matter that each man on the Black Knights’ payroll ultimately reported back to the Grand-Poobah himself,
El Jefe,
the good ol’ commander in chief. What mattered was that, should any of their missions be discovered, there was no way to trace that mission’s origination to anyone in the U.S. government—which was just fine by Frank. After the clusterfuck that prompted his decision to part ways with the Navy SEALs, he preferred to run his own show.

Then again, by running his own show without the benefit of military hierarchy and the inherent discipline therein, it meant he very often had to put up with these kinds of antics.