Blood Money (18 page)

Kelton shrugged. “Maybe so, but it’s the
only choice I had. I least, that’s what I thought. And then I met
you.”

Jessica looked at him, her face a
conflicting storm of emotions. Then she stood up, walked towards
him, leaned down, grasped him by the neck, and gave him a hug.

Kelton returned the embrace, whispered to
her, “I don’t know where this leaves us.”

“Don’t worry about that now,” Jessica
replied, her voice as soft as his but laced with an undercurrent of
regret. “If you want to talk about it later, we can. But right now,
I think it’s best if I give you a little space, let you have some
time to yourself. I’m going to take a shower, and when I get out,
we can decide where to go from there.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Jessica had just climbed into the shower
when the cell phone Willis had left in the car started to ring.

Kelton shoved the newly reawakened emotions
back to their hiding place and picked the phone up off the counter,
flipped it open, and brought it to his ear. “Talk to me, bro.”

“It’s no good,” Willis said.

Kelton’s heart sank into his stomach.
“They’re still onto us?”

“Like glue,” Willis said. “Three cars
arrived in town shortly after you did. One is disguised as a
locksmith van. It’s sitting in the parking lot of the restaurant
across the street from the hotel. The other two are Crown Vics
strategically placed at both ends of town. They can both see the
main road but aren’t quite visible from it, unless you know where
to look.”

“Are you positive they’re Feds?”

“One hundred percent.”

“Dammit,” Kelton said. “And you’re still
certain we made the entire trip out here on our own?”

“Absolutely,” Willis said. “You were alone
the whole drive out.”

“Which means at some point we lost
them—”

“And then they were able to pick you up
again after you arrived at your destination.”

Kelton closed his eyes, took a deep breath.
“So then the question becomes; how?”

“I’ve given that a little thought,” Willis
said.

“And what did you come up with?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether or not you’re positive the
transmitter was planted in Jessica’s shoe.”

Kelton thought about this for a moment, then
said, “We just assumed it was because there wasn’t any other place
it could be. Her shoes were the only thing that had been with us
the whole time.”

“So you never actually scanned for
bugs.”

“We never had the opportunity,” Kelton said.
“But it doesn’t matter. We ditched absolutely everything before we
started on this latest trek. So even if they had planted the
transmitter somewhere else, we would have left it back at the
hospital.”

“Not necessarily,” Willis said.

“What do you mean?”

A brief pause, then Willis said, “Have you
ever heard of Lojack?”

“The vehicle recovery system?”

“Yes.”

“Of course,” Kelton said. “Why? Don’t tell
me the car that you hooked us up with had it installed.”

“Not exactly,” Willis said.

“Then why did you bring it up?”

Willis told him.

Kelton listened to Willis’s explanation,
paused a moment to let the implications of it sink in, then said,
“You’re kidding me, right?” even though he already knew the answer
to his query.

“I wish I was,” Willis said.

“All right then,” Kelton said. “I guess I’ll
take it from here. Talk to you later amigo. And thanks.”

“No problem, I just wish I could have done
more.”

Kelton closed the phone, set it on the
table, and made his way over to the bathroom. The shower had
stopped while he was talking to Willis.

He knocked on the door and pushed it open a
few inches. From his angle, he could see Jessica standing in front
of the mirror, drying her hair, her body otherwise exposed. “Do you
mind if I come in?”

“I guess that depends,” she said.

“On what?”

“On whether or not you mind seeing me
naked.”

“Actually, that’s exactly how I want to see
you,” Kelton said.

She turned towards the door, a confused
half-smile on her face. “Then I guess you can come on in.”

Kelton opened the door, stepped into the
bathroom, and looked her exquisite body over from head to toe, then
back up again, pausing three quarters of the way up.

“Is everything all right?” Jessica said, her
head tilted at a questioning angle, her smile fading.

Kelton didn’t answer. He was too busy
staring at the three inch, stitched-up gash on the back of her arm
and wondering if Willis was right. It didn’t seem possible, but
there wasn’t any other plausible explanation.

“What?” Jessica said, her grin now
completely gone.

Kelton pointed at the stitches. “You said
you cut your arm when they chased you down in the desert,
right?”

“Yeah,” she said, her eyes narrowing. “I
crashed my car trying to get away from them.”

“And when you woke up in their custody, your
arm was already stitched up?”

“That’s right,” Jessica said. “Along with
the cut over my nose. Why?”

Kelton cleared his throat, locked eyes with
her. “I think they stuck something in you before they stitched you
up.”

Jessica looked at him as though he had a
third ear growing from the center of his forehead. “What the hell
are you talking about?”

“A transmitter,” Kelton said. “In your arm.
Under your skin.”

Jessica’s mouth started to twitch, as though
she was debating whether to smile or frown. “You’re just messing
with me again, right?”

“I wish I was.”

She continued to stare at him for a few
moments before finally coming to the realization that he was
telling the truth. Fear began to creep into her eyes and her voice
dropped to little more than a whisper. “That’s not even possible,
is it?”

“Apparently it is. According to Willis, the
program is nicknamed Lojack. It’s an internal transmitter system,
hooked up to a series of dedicated satellites.”

Jessica’s brow was raised and her eyes open
wide. “And you’re saying this transmitter is inside my body?”

Kelton nodded.

“But you said the bug was in my shoe,”
Jessica said in a desperate, if not quite pleading, tone.

“I assumed it was, but since we ditched the
shoes and they’re still on to us, obviously I was wrong.”

She threw up her right hand, palm out. “Back
up a minute. They’re still on to us?”

Kelton nodded. “Willis spotted three cars
within the town limits, all occupied.”

“And he’s sure they’re Feds?”

“Yeah.”

“What about the phone?” Jessica said, the
words hurtling out of her. “Suppose they were listening all along,
and they knew where we were meeting Willis, and they got to the
hospital before us, saw what car we took, and followed us out
here?”

Kelton was shaking his head.

“Why not? You said yourself that you didn’t
trust it. Why couldn’t they have been listening the whole
time?”

“Because they wouldn’t have let us take
things as far as we did,” Kelton said. “If they were listening to
the phone from the beginning, they would have stepped in the moment
they knew we were aware of their involvement. Besides, we were
alone the whole drive over. Never once was there someone following
us. But after we arrived here, they picked up our trail again. If
their only source of information was the phone, they only would
have been able to track us to the hospital, not all the way here.
And they certainly wouldn’t have been able to pick us up after we’d
lost them.”

“Yeah, but—”

“There are no buts,” Kelton said. “They only
way they could have picked us up after they’d lost us is if they
had us bugged. But we ditched everything at the hospital. Which
means that their bug had to be somewhere else. And there’s really
only one place it could be.”

“Inside me,” Jessica said in a resigned
tone.

Kelton nodded.

She sat down on the toilet and dropped her
head into her hands. When she looked up a few seconds later, Kelton
was slightly surprised to see her eyes filled with rage instead of
fear. “What the fuck is going on here?” she said.

“I have no idea,” Kelton replied. “But we’re
sure as hell going to find out.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Fifteen minutes later Jessica was sitting on
a chair in the bathroom, facing the mirror. Her right arm was lying
on the countertop, situated so that her tricep was hovering over
the sink.

On the counter to her right was a bottle of
Jack Daniels, a roll of gauze, a tube of Neosporin, a pair of
tweezers, a needle and some string, a pair of scissors, a bucket of
ice, and a small container of ibuprofen. They’d purchased
everything at the little store in the lobby. Kelton would have
liked to have real surgical equipment to operate with, but knew
that was an impossibility in this little town, especially with eyes
watching them for anything out of the ordinary.

Kelton looked at Jessica in the mirror and
nodded his head once. “Are you ready to do this?”

“No,” she said. “But we have no choice,
right?”

“Not really.”

Jessica threw a couple of the ibuprofen in
her mouth, picked up the bottle of Jack, and took a swig,
shuddering slightly as it went down. She closed her eyes and took a
deep breath. “Then let’s get it over with.”

Kelton grabbed a towel from the wall, folded
it over a couple of times, and told Jessica to open her mouth. He
put the towel between her teeth and told her to bite down when the
pain was too much to bear. He grabbed a cube of ice and rubbed it
along the stitches on back of her arm, causing them to puff up a
bit. He picked up the scissors, held them over the sink, and poured
some of the whiskey over them. Then he snipped at the string near
the edge of the wound. He grabbed the end of the string with the
tweezers and pulled. The stitches came right out.

Jessica never made a sound, not even when
Kelton pulled the threads of the transmitter from her muscle
fibers. At the end though, her face was beet red and her breath
came in ragged gasps.

Kelton re-stitched the wound, took the towel
from her mouth and shook it out. He then spread antiseptic on the
wound and bound it in gauze. “Are you doing all right?”

Jessica nodded but didn’t say anything. Then
she pushed Kelton out of the way, shuffled forward, fell to her
knees and threw up into the toilet.

“That was sexy,” Kelton said.

“Tasted good too,” Jessica replied with a
grim smile. “Come over here and give me a kiss me so I can prove it
to you.”

“Thanks for the offer, but I think I’ll
pass.”

She shrugged. “Suit yourself. But you don’t
know what you’re missing.”

Kelton couldn’t help but smile. “It’s good
to see you still have your sense of humor. You must not be feeling
too
bad.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Jessica said.
She flushed the toilet and climbed to her feet. Stepping past
Kelton, she made her way to the sink and turned on the faucet. She
rinsed out her mouth and splashed some water on her face.

After drying off, she spotted the small
piece of metal he’d pulled out of her sitting on the counter. Her
hand was shaking as she picked it up. It looked like a small watch
battery.

“So this is it, huh?” Jessica said. “Tiny
little sucker, isn’t it?”

Kelton nodded and finished wiping the rest
of her blood off the counter with a wet Kleenex.

Jessica shook her head and set the
transmitter back on the counter, walked out of the bathroom and
plopped herself down on the bed. “I can’t believe they put this
damn thing inside of me. I mean, what the hell? Who do these people
think they are?”

“That’s a good question, actually.”

She straightened up and looked at him. “What
do you mean?”

“Exactly what it sounds like,” Kelton said.
He pulled the chair away from the desk, dragged it over towards the
bed, and sat down. “Who are the people behind this thing?
Really?”

“I thought you said they were FBI?”

“That’s what Walter told me, and that’s what
they wanted us to think, but obviously, something other than what
we thought is going on here, which means there’s no reason to
believe that the FBI is really behind this operation. Especially
with this latest development. There’s no way the FBI would plant a
bug inside you like that. It’s just too risky. They don’t operate
like that, at least, not anymore.”

“But who else could it be?”

Kelton shrugged. “Homeland Security. CIA.
ICE. Or some other obscure agency.”

“It sounds like you’re venturing into some
muddy water,” Jessica said. “You know how Earl feels about
conspiracy theories.”

“It’s not conspiracy, it’s fact,” Kelton
said. “There are twice as many agencies operating now than there
were before 9/11. And that only includes ones operating on an
official level. Who knows how many more work behind the scenes,
away from the public eye?”

Jessica grimaced slightly, shook her head.
“I don’t know . . .”

“I don’t either,” Kelton said. “And don’t
get me wrong, I’m not saying that one of these shadowy agencies is
definitely behind this thing. What I
am
saying is that so
far, everything we’ve thought to be the truth has been wrong. Which
means that the only thing we truly know at this point is that we
know absolutely nothing. And maybe it doesn’t bother you much, but
being completely in the dark makes me mighty uncomfortable.
Especially with so much on the line.”

“And I suppose you want to do something
about that?”

Kelton nodded.

“Might I ask what?”

“You can ask.”

“But you won’t tell me?”