KILLER DATE (SCANDALS) (21 page)

“How’s Christopher?”

“Christopher?  What do you mean?”

“You know…you guys have to split the agency with him and all.”

“He seems okay with it.  If he and Harlan hadn’t bothered finding us, we’d never have known anything about any of it, and he’d have had the whole enchilada.”  I shrugged.  “But then he and Killeen hit it off, so I guess he was the winner after all.”

“She’s pretty hot.”
  Nick glanced over at me to see how I responded to that.

“Yeah, for being
prego, I guess.”

“
So, she
is
pregnant,” Jenny said.  “I thought so.”

“Christopher’s?
” Nick asked.

“No way.
  Some deadbeat boyfriend from Arizona State.  He walked out on her when he found out, then tried to get on her good side when he heard she had an inheritance.  What an ass.”

“Not your style?”  Nick asked
, but likely he just beat Jenny to that question.

“If you’re asking if I want kids
, well sure…maybe.  I don’t know.  I’d have to be sure I could provide a stable life for them.  Vegas isn’t the place to raise kids, but now it looks like I might be an Austin resident indefinitely.”  I glanced over at Jenny to see if she was listening.  She wasn’t looking at me, but I saw the slight twitch of a smile.  “Does the agency move you around a lot?” I asked Nick.

He
had taken a stick and was drawing random symbols in the rocky dirt in front of him.  He made four vertical lines and one cross diagonal line three times as if counting.  “The first ten years or so, they had me in all the hotspots.  Why?”

“Just wondered.
  You have a family?”

Nick
straightened, then leaned back against the tree.  His hand opened and the stick fell forgotten to the ground.  He stared straight ahead as his head shook slowly and he exhaled heavily.  “Yeah…I suppose I do.  I haven’t seen my twin boys for three years.  They’re in first grade, I think.”

“Really.
  I bet you miss them.”

“I don’t let myself do that.  What happened was my fault.”

“So you’re punishing them?” I commented bitterly.  “Kids without fathers can get pretty fucked up.”

“You’re right…I
just don’t know how to fix it.  It was all my fault.”

“How so?
” Jenny asked.

“Well, not that this makes any sense now but my older brother had won a full scholarship to Harvard
, and my parents were so proud.  He was always the over achiever, and I was always trying to catch up…so I applied to dozens of colleges, but barely made it in to a state school.  That’s where I met Sandy…my wife…ex-wife.  I was a junior when 9-11 happened.  Without even talking to her, I joined the Marines and was recruited into Special Ops.  A week after our honeymoon, I volunteered for a covert operation…and virtually disappeared.”

“How long was the mission?”
Jenny asked.

“Schedule
d or reality?”

“I guess reality is all that matters. 
Right?”

“Yeah right.
  I was gone without any contact with her for six months.  When I got home, we screwed like bunnies.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” I commented.

“The next mission lasted a year. And the next almost as long. Every time I got home, we had less and less in common.  After ten years, I’d had enough, so I transferred to the DEA. I thought that would help, but it didn’t.  With all the drug trafficking, I was still away from home a lot.”

“
I can see how that would be hard on a relationship,” I empathized.

“Hard!  That’s a fucking understatement
.  I had gotten back a few days early and had stopped by and bought her some roses and butter pecan ice cream.  She was six months pregnant with the twins, and I thought it would be a nice surprise.  Yeah…well, it was a surprise alright. I found her…giant belly and all, kneeling on the floor in front of a dude with his pants around his ankles.  Fuck, his bare ass was on my La-Z-boy recliner.”

“
Oh God, Nick.  What did you do?”  Jenny asked.

“I threw that chair off the second floor balcony
.  That little shit had the good sense to pull his pants up and run out.  He would have been next.”

“And your wife?”

“Sandy?  She left with him, and I didn’t hear from her until she served my ass for child support the month after my boys were born.”

I really had no idea what to say and was surprised he
’d opened up to us.  It had to be the darkness that made it all seem somehow anonymous and secret.  I stuffed our trash back in the pack and tossed Jenny and Nick a small bag of peanut M&Ms and kept one for myself.

“So you’re the pretty boy
who always had everything handed to him,” Nick accused, only half-joking.  “I bet your life was more like my brother’s than mine.”

“
That’s a bet you’d lose.  What do you want to know?”

“Let’s start with
, why a magician?”

“I was in my first grade
Christmas show.  I knew I wanted to be a performer the first time I stepped on stage and saw my mom watching me and smiling.”

“
Don’t tell me…were you a tree or a snowman?”  Nick laughed…a rare event.

“Fuck no. 
I played Sebastian…the foreman of all the elves in Santa’s workshop.”

“Santa’s shop wasn’t unionized.”

I chuckled.  “I was too young to know that.  Looking back on it, Mrs. Gamble, my first grade teacher, was married to a union president, so there could have been a little indoctrination going on.  I don’t remember what my lines were, but I do know that when everyone laughed, I was hooked.”

“So you moved to Vegas
because of a part in a Christmas play?”

It struck me as ironic that
I was sitting in a dried-up river bed with killer drug cartel gang members only a few hundred feet away, spilling my guts to two virtual strangers.  But it felt strangely right.

“
Much later, of course, but it was the first time I’d felt like I was doing something that made people happy.  Every time I looked out at my mom and step-dad, they were smiling.  Or at least my mom was.”

“
And then?” Jenny prompted.

“Then came act two.
  When the curtain opened, their chairs were empty.  And they didn’t come back.  After the play, all the parents and grandparents packed the little space backstage hugging and kissing and taking pictures of all my schoolmates.  But no one was there for me.” 

“What did you do?”
  Jenny put her hand on my arm. 

I felt surprisingly moved, so, of course, I resorted to humor. 
“What all first grade trained actors do…I started to cry.  Then I was embarrassed, so I ran out the back door into the parking lot where no one could see me.”

“Where were your parents?”
she asked gently.

I actually felt surprisingly close to tears. 
“I walked around the front of the school, and my mom was sitting in our car waiting.  I ran over and jumped in the back seat.  Then I noticed my step-dad wasn’t there.  I asked her if we were waiting for him, and she said that he’d left and we’d never see him again.  Not that he and I were very close but he was the only semi-father I’d ever known.”

“
Where did he go?”

I shrugged. 
“On the way home as we passed under the street lights I could see that the right side of her face was swollen and bruised.  You can figure a lot out even in first grade.  My step-dad was an iron worker with muscles on top of muscles, and he was left-handed.  I remember I asked to stop for ice cream on the way home, and she said not tonight because she had a headache.”

“Did you ever see him again?”

“Never.  He may be dead. I don’t know, and I don’t care.”

“And your mom.
  Is she still back in Reno?” Jenny probed gently.

“
Don’t know about that either.  I hit the road the same night I graduated from high school.  I haven’t been back since.”

“But why magic? 
Why not an actor or a professional poker player?”  Nick asked, clearly trying to shift the conversation to something less touchy-feely.

Ever since I had seen a magic kit in Wal-Mart when I was just eight years old, I had been hooked.  When I sat on Santa’s lap, that kit had been all I had asked for.  My mom must have been paying attention…it was during one of her few sober periods…and the kit was under the tree.  As I grew up, the passion for magic had stuck with me until I had moved to Vegas after my high school graduation with the hope that I could learn from the masters.
  But I knew that was too hokey for Nick, so I skipped to the end game.

“When I was in middle school, a teacher hooked me up with a drama club. 
I would ride my bike to a local actors’ studio.  When things were bad at home, I would spend the night with some of the kids I met there.  One lived with his father who was a magician at a hotel downtown.  He taught me some tricks, and when he saw that I was truly interested, he’d take me to the shows any time someone famous like Copperfield would come to town.  I had all their autographs until my underground Las Vegas days.”  I shrugged.  “Copperfield will never know, but he paid for my first Salvation Army suit.”

“So
you left after graduation?” Jenny leaned toward me as if anxious for me to continue with my story.

“
I went out celebrating with some friends, then when I got home and found my mother passed out on the couch, I knew I had to get away before I got sucked into that lifestyle.  I took her car and all the money I had earned working after school which was about two hundred thirty dollars and left.  Her car ran out of gas at Walker Lake, Nevada, so I parked it, gave the keys to the gas station guy along with her phone number and hitched the rest of the way to Vegas.”

“And never looked back?”
  Nick’s question was more of a statement.

“And never looked back,
” I confirmed.

“Where did you stay?”
  Jenny obviously knew I’d survived, but her limited life experiences probably made her wonder how.

“I
ran into some kids who lived with the tunnel people under Las Vegas.  After a couple weeks of doing any odd job I could find, I got work as a stage hand. Eventually, I got a shot as a magician’s assistant downtown and then on the strip.”

“
Lots of hot women there,” Nick murmured.

“
And most of them are wishing they were somewhere else.”

Suddenly, the music shut off.  We could hear the murmur of conversation, then silence…total silence.

Nick lifted his hand to remind us to be quiet, and then he motioned to our throat mics which we turned on.

Now that we couldn’t chat, the time crawled by. Every
once in a while we could hear the guards at the gate talking and laughing, then shuffling around.  But the rest of the compound seemed to have finally settled in for the night.  Nick kept glancing at his watch, and I knew he was getting nervous about beating the sun. The party had gone on much longer than we had expected.

Finally, when I thought the silence pounding in my ears was going to drive me crazy, Nick eased to his feet and motioned us to follow him.

CHAPTER TWELVE

T
here was no moon to light our movement, but the floodlights around the compound lit up the area as if it was high noon, so once we got out of the deep cover of the trees, we would be able to see our way.  Conversely, it would also make us easier to be seen.

I pulled Jenny to her feet, and we set off behind Nick.  We paused at the last group of trees, hesitant to plunge out into no-man’
s land and to take one more look at what we were up against.

One guard lounged near the main gate and another sat on the front seat of a Jeep, his head leaning forward on his chest as he caught a tequila-fueled nap.  They were clearly not expecting visitors.

We half-crouched, half-ran as far to the right as we could, hugging the base of the mountain to make us less visible should someone glance our way.  To my ears, our steps were loud and clumsy, but the guard had his back to us and never turned around.

We paused for a moment before we made the last move toward the fence.  We
had made it around the corner and were behind the little shed we assumed Angie was in. There was no sign of the guard outside her building, but the shadows were deep around it, and he could easily be out of our sight. 

Now that we were closer to the buildings, the smells were overwhelming.  I loved Mexican food, but the pungent smell of
stale oil and onions hung heavy in the air.  Add in the horse, chicken and other assorted animal manure along with a sharp smell that I recognized as blood, and my stomach rolled.  God, don’t let me lose my M&Ms in front of Jenny and Nick.

Nick grabbed
our arms and whispered, “Jenny, you stay here while…”

“I’m not staying ou
t here alone,” Jenny hissed.  “I’m going with you.”

Nick looked like he wanted to argue, but knew he’d lose, so he shrugged.  “Okay, then we
stay together as long as we can.  If anything goes wrong just run your asses off and never look back.  Understand?”  He turned away as if he didn’t expect anything but agreement.

Nick
bent over and ran, and we followed. He pointed to the spot where he wanted me to cut, and I dropped to my knees, my wire cutter in my hand.  While I snipped one side of a three-foot square hole, he snipped the other.  Then we carefully lifted it, trying to keep the fence from squeaking or moving.  Nick motioned for Jenny and she slipped through.  I followed and Nick came through behind me.

Taking advantage of the
shed’s shadow, we ran quickly to the back of the building.  We tried looking through several holes in the vertical wooden planks that formed the exterior to see if Angela was actually in there.  A single light bulb hung from the ceiling and its dim light showed that the back wall was lined with shelves loaded with what appeared to be bags of chemicals and cardboard boxes, their contents unknown.

“What do you think?”
I whispered.

“
Can’t see shit,” Nick muttered.

“
I think she’s in there.”  Jenny’s voice was excited.  “It looks like someone’s on the floor under a blanket over along the right wall.” 

I dropped to the ground and examined the lowest two to three f
eet of the boards.

“What the fuck are you doing?”
Nick asked.

I stood back up.  “
There’s a small area under the shelves that isn’t blocked.  It’s about two feet tall and the boards are pretty shot.  We could just rip them off.”

“
I said we’re going around the front and through the door.  Let’s go.”

Nick
didn’t wait for my response, but slithered along the side of the wood shack.  Jenny and I were left with no choice but to follow.  At least he had a gun should he stumble upon the guard that had been in front.  At the corner he held his arm out to signal we were stopping.  He slowly scanned the compound, and satisfied that all was still quiet, he waved his hand forward.

In a few cautious steps, w
e were at the front door.  There was a heavy padlock hanging from the hasp. 

Nick
took out his wire cutter and tried to snap the shackle, but it was too thick.  His shoulders dropped as he tried to think of another way to get inside. 

“Move over,” I whispered.  I
looked around until I found a small piece of wire on the ground.  I picked it up, straightened it out and with a few practiced twists, the lock popped opened.

“That’s not an approved investigation tool
, is it?” For the first time, Nick’s expression showed he was impressed.

“And we’re not really
here, are we?”  I smiled.  I removed the lock and dropped it in my pocket.  Jenny crowded against me as I slowly eased the door open, hoping the hinges didn’t creak.

We entered the tiny shed and Nick pu
shed the door closed behind us. On the floor the blanket heaved up and down with each deep breath.  We still couldn’t tell if it was Angie or even if it was a woman.  For all we knew, it might be one of the cartel members who was being punished, and this was his jail.

We
removed our night vision goggles and approached the body.  Jenny started to rush forward, but Nick held her back and shook his head.  He kneeled next to the sleeping figure and placed his hand firmly on what appeared to be a shoulder.  “Angie, Angie,” he whispered as he shook her shoulder.  “Angie, Jen’s here.”

The person bolted to a sitting position and
it was only Nick’s quick movements to cover her mouth that kept her screams from being heard.

Wide, terrified green eyes stared at us.  Her hair was a tangled mess and her face was peeling from
a bad sunburn, but it was clearly the girl in the picture.  We had found Angie.

Jenny dropped to her knees in front of her sister.  “Angie, we’ve come to save you.”

She must have stopped trying to scream because Nick relaxed his grip on her mouth.

“Who are y
ou?” she asked in what I thought was a very loud voice.  “
What
are you?”

“
Shhh, whisper,” Nick said.

“Angie, it’s me,” Jenny said, confused by her sister’s reaction.  Had she been tortured?  Did she have amnesia?

It dawned on me that we were still dressed all in black, complete with black makeup.  I figured the necessity for hiding in the dark had probably passed, so I pulled off my skull cap.  Jenny saw me and pulled hers off, too.

The fear was quickly replaced by hope and joy as Angie realized we weren’t some kind of crazy terrorists.  She flung her arms around Jenny’s neck and sobbed, “Thank God you’re here.  I thought I was going to die.”

“Yeah, well that still might happen,” Nick commented.  “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“
My name is Reno and the blunt guy is Nick.  He’s a heck of a boy scout, but he has no people skills.”

“Angie, are you okay?” Jenny asked.  “Did they…uh…hurt you?”

“It’s not an all-inclusive I’d recommend to anyone, but they haven’t been too horrible.  They kept me tied up for a few days, bounced me around in the back of a truck and made me sleep on this horrible floor, but so far, they didn’t rape me.  How’s Miguel?  Is he…?”

“He’s in the hospital, but he’s going to make it.  I knew you were in trouble when he showed up on my doorstep,” Jenny explained.

“Reunion’s over.  You two can catch up while we run back to the Land Rover,” Nick interrupted.

“We’re going back out the front door and sneak around behind the shack where there’s a hole in the fence,” I told her.

Angie blinked and frowned at me. 
“Who are you again?”

“Reno…Jenny
and I are…friends…and she hired us to rescue you.”

“
Which we need to get on with,” Nick prompted and was heading toward the door when it opened so abruptly that it slapped against the wall. 

Two rumpled Mexicans, with rifles slung over their shoulders stumbled in.  One had an almost empty tequila bottle in his hand, and they were both very drunk. 
It took a moment for their blurry eyes to register that Angie wasn’t alone.

The tequila bottle dropped to the hard dirt floor and
rolled across the room, the remainder of its contents pouring out.  The men scrambled for their guns.  Nick pulled his gun out of his shoulder holster, but before he could fire, one of the men swung his rifle around and knocked Nick’s gun out of his hand. 

I reached in my pocket, hoping I had remembered to bring my pocket knife, but all I had there was the open lock
, my lucky lighter, a couple flash-bangs and a deck of cards.  Ever since I had first moved to Vegas, I always had a deck of cards with me so if I had a few minutes or hours to kill, I would practice my sleight-of-hand tricks.

I had no weapons, but maybe I could be a distraction and buy us some time until Nick figured out what to do to get us out of here.  I took out the cards, and did a smooth one-handed shuffle.

The man shouted something at us, but I ignored him and shifted the cards to my left hand.  I held out my right hand, palm up to show it was empty, then I turned it over and started flipping cards into the air.  It was a simple trick with an unseen transfer and some palming, but it could be pretty impressive if done properly.  And right now, I was giving them the show of a lifetime.

The rifles wavered as both men’s attention shifted to the cards that I was tossing up.  I glanced out of the corner of my eye at Nick who was edging closer to his gun.  Suddenly, he lunged for it.  Both Mexicans’ attention snapped back to him, and they lifted their rifles.  Without pausing to think, I stopped flipping the cards and sent one flying straight at the front guy
.

It was a trick I had mastered
a couple years ago and had made it a part of my act. I could imbed a common playing card in a piece of wood or cut carrots in half.  The proper flick of a wrist could send a card flying at over a hundred miles an hour, and, if it struck at the right angle, it could penetrate almost anything.

The card flew fast and true and buried itself in the man’s throat.  Blood spurted out, and he dropped the rifle and grabbed his throat as he fell to the floor. The other guy stared, in horror, momentarily forgetting about Nick who had grabbed his gun and taken a quick shot.  The man collapsed into a heap on top of his
amigo
. 

We exchanged horrified glances. 
The sound had been deafening inside the small room, and it was highly unlikely that no one outside had heard it.

“Really, Nick?” I asked.  “You picked up a poisonous snake with a stick, but you had to shoot this guy?”

Nick gave a sheepish shrug.  “Reflex,” he offered.

“What happened to your silencer?”

“It’s in my pocket.”

“Great place for it,” I muttered.

Another man ran into the room.  He was much younger than the other two and wasn’t carrying a gun…at least not where we could see it. 

Nick lifted his gun, but Angie jumped to her feet and ran forward, flinging her arms around the young man. 

“Don’t shoot,” she cried.  “He’s my friend.”

Nick didn’t lower his weapon, but he didn’t pull the trigger either.

“They’re coming,” the man told us in accented but very clear English.  “You’ve got to get out of here.”  He shoved one of the Mexican’s body out of the way enough to shut the door, then pushed it against the bottom of the thick wooden door which would slow down anyone else who tried to enter. 

“
I guess we go with your plan,” Nick said to me.  “Start breaking out those boards while I put together a farmer’s helper.”

I dropped to the floor and started kicking out the rotten wooden planks.  I didn’t want to struggle with the shelves that appeared to be nailed to the walls, so I focused on the two-foot tall area under the bottom shelf.  The boards splintered and broke away in jagged pieces, so I had to keep kicking to knock off the sharp points so no one would get hurt.  “What’s a farmer’s helper?” I managed to ask between kicks.

Nick was pulling bags of fertilizer off the shelves and piling them near the door.  “Ammonium nitrate plus a little gasoline will blow up stumps or boulders…or block this doorway so we can get out the back.”  He began tearing and ripping Angie’s ragged blanket into strips.  He then picked up a can of gas and doused the fertilizer and the cloth strips. “Got something to light it with?” 

I shook my head as the smell
became overwhelming.  I cleared the hole and motioned for the girls to crawl through.

Jenny went first, slipping
through easily.  Angie was next.  She stretched out on the floor, flat on her stomach and started crawling through the hole.  She was halfway out when she stuck.

Her voice was muffled.  “It’s not big enough.”

“What?” I asked.

“The hole,” she answered impatiently.  “I can’t move forward, and I can’t move backward.”

“Get her the fuck out,” Nick shouted, no longer concerned with keeping our mission covert.  “Shove her, kick out more boards, kick her in the ass…I don’t care how you do it, but make it happen.”