Outside the Lines (10 page)

The receptionist bounds out of her seat. “Sir! You can't—”

“Buchanan!” I call, cutting her off.

A guy about my age with a
GQ
complex pokes his head into the hall from a door three up from where I'm standing—the same guy who met us at the airport when we arrived. I stride that direction as the receptionist chases me up the hall.

“We need to talk,” I say as I push past him into the small office.

“It's okay, Linda,” the guy says, waving off the charging receptionist. “Have a seat, Mr. Davidson.”

I drop into the leather armchair nearest me, swallowing the urge to rip him to shreds for calling me that.

He moves to the other side of a cluttered desk and lowers himself into his ergonomic desk chair. “I trust your family is getting settled?”

“Not by a long shot.”

“You're staying out of trouble, I hope,” he says, gesturing at my black eye.

“Not possible.”

He gives me a skeptical look over his tented fingers. “What is it you need?”

“A phone that can't be traced.”

He leans his elbows onto his desk, looks at me like I have three brain cells. “You understand contacting anyone from your previous life breaches your WITSEC memorandum.”

“It's an emergency. I just need to make one phone call. If I can find a secure line without a Florida area code, he won't know where I am, so it won't compromise our security.”

He shakes his head. “I'm sorry, Mr. Davidson but—”

“Mr.
Delgado
,” I cut in.

He gives me a hard look. “Not anymore. If you expect our protection, there are some basic rules. Rules you agreed to when we brought you here. This program is one hundred percent voluntary, so if that arrangement isn't working for you anymore, you and your family are free to return to Chicago anytime you choose.”

That's what I'm trying to do, but on
my
terms.

I yank my phone out of my pocket, slam it on his desk. “If I make this call from my phone, they'll see the area code and know where I am. You'll have to move us again.”

“If you make that call from your phone, we'll have no obligation to you whatsoever, Mr.
Davidson
.”

I want to put my fist through this useless bureaucrat worm's face, but that's not going to help my family. Instead, I spin out of my chair and slam out the door.

I check in with the brunette at the security desk on my way out. She slips me her card. “You ever feel like a night out, give me a call.”

“Sure,” I say, then toss the card in the trash can outside the front door as I stride to my car.

I stop by the address for Spencer Security that Adri gave me on my way home, just to see what it is. I don't know what I'm expecting, but the GPS leads me to an industrial area off a small corporate airstrip most of the way back to Port St. Mary.

I step inside the door and find Spencer Security takes up the entire inside of a steel warehouse that has to span an acre. To the right at the near end, there is a cluster of offices partitioned off with portable walls. At the far end, I can see what looks like a soundproofed area that spans the entire back of the warehouse. A series of pops echo through the cavernous space from that direction. An indoor shooting range, most likely, which intrigues me almost as much as the private jet positioned next to a roll-up door in the airstrip side of the building. To my left is a row of half a dozen limos of all shapes and sizes, from Town Cars to Escalades, standard to stretch. Across from the jet, behind the offices, are a regulation boxing ring and two martial arts mats.

“Can I help you?” a smoky female voice asks. I turn to see a stunning woman in her forties strutting toward me.

“I was told to stop in about a job.”

She raises her eyebrows. “By who?”

I look her over. She doesn't look like someone who messes around, and I'd bet my left nut she'll be running a background check on me if she's hiring for any kind of security. I know Robert Davidson should come up clean, but it still feels like a risk to have a professional digging around.

“Sorry,” I say, holding up my hands and backing toward the door. “My mistake.”

“Robert Davidson,” she says. It's not a question.

I stop and lower my hands.

She folds her arms over her chest. “Chuck Murdock gave me your name. Said you were a friend of a friend and you'd be stopping by.”

“What is it you're hiring for?” I ask.

“We're having trouble holding on to qualified bodyguards.”

I bark out a laugh. “You want me to be a bodyguard? Seriously?”

“It's good pay and only one or two evenings a week, though there are occasional clients who need short-term round-the-clock service.”

I move back to where she stands. “And what makes you think I'm qualified?”

“I was told you're ex-military.”

“You were told wrong,” I say, holding her gaze and waiting for the reaction.

She arches an eyebrow at me. “Then you tell me. Are you qualified?”

“Probably. What's qualified?”

“Someone proficient in firearms and hand to hand, who can carry himself in a highly professional manner and keep his head under pressure.”

“That sounds like my life,” I mutter.

“Doing?”

I give her a cynical smile. “I could tell you, but then I'll have to kill you.”

Her smile is just as cynical. “Not if I kill you first.”

This woman is a firecracker. “Who are you?”

“How rude of me,” she says, pressing a hand to her chest in an I'm-so-shocked gesture. She holds it out to me. “Elaine Spencer.”

“Who flies the jet?” I ask, shaking her hand.

She gives me a sideways smile. “My pilot . . . unless that's a skill set you possess as well.”

There's a pang in my chest as I think about Sherm. He wants to be a pilot when he's older . . . or at least he did, before all this started. “Who are your clients?”

She slicks back a strand of her long, black hair. “Celebrities and wannabes mostly, and the occasional politician or businessman.”

“You've got yourself a bodyguard.”

“Why don't we start with the application first.” She turns for the offices. “Follow me.”

I follow her into the first door and find a sofa along the back wall pointing at a flat-screen TV. There is a rack of DVDs on the table under the TV. I move to the stack and look at some of the names scrawled across the cases in sharpie.

“Wow. You weren't kidding about celebrities.” I turn to look at Elaine. “What are these DVDs of?”

“We run through itineraries a week before the event for security issues that need to be addressed prior to a client's arrival. We keep the tapes for training purposes.”

“Thorough,” I say, picking up a case dated last week and labeled
Tiger Woods
.

“Have a seat. I'll be right back.”

She disappears through a door in the back of the room as I settle into the sofa. When she comes back a few minutes later, she's got some papers on a clipboard. “This is our basic employment application, and a psychological screening.”

I'm reaching for the clipboard and yank my hand back. “Whoa, back up a second. Psychological screening?”

“Some of our applicants are a little too high-strung. We need to be sure you'll be able to handle yourself in pressure situations with lives potentially on the line.”

Been there, done that. It didn't end well.

The look on my face must stay it all, because she tips her head at me. “Is that going to be a problem?”

I take the board from her hand. “No.”

“There's also a drug screening.”

“Can't guarantee I'm going to pass that,” I say, flipping through the papers on the clipboard.

“You a user?”

I shrug up at her. “Recreational.”

“We use a urine test, so if you've been clean for a few weeks you should be okay. But be warned, I withhold the right to test randomly. It's in your employment contract. So if you give me any reason to think there's an issue, you better believe I'll have you peeing in a cup before you can say ‘cut me a line.'” A slightly nefarious smile curves her lips. I decide I like her. “Coffee?”

“Sure.”

I start on my paperwork.

A minute later, she's back with a steaming mug in her hand. “I forgot to ask if you wanted cream or sugar.”

“Black is great,” I say.

She hands me the mug. “I'll leave you alone. Just find me at the end of the hall when you're done.”

I down the coffee in a few gulps and work on the application. When I get to the psych questions, I laugh out loud more than once. I mean, are they serious when they ask shit like:
Do you believe you have more difficulty with relationships than the average person your age?

Let's see . . . I'm twenty-five. I've dated models and movie stars, but I've never had a serious relationship. I've been hiding from a backwater schoolmarm for two weeks because she's one of the very few things on this planet that scare she living shit out of me.

. . . But let's say no to that one.

Next we have:
Do you have difficulty trusting people?
Only when I don't know if it's the good guys or the bad guys who are trying to kill me. Then there's:
Do you prefer to be alone rather than in the company of others?
Definitely.
If you answered yes to the previous question, is it because you feel very anxious in social situations, or because you are suspicious of their motives?
Me, suspicious? Hell no.

I roll my eyes and wonder if anyone answers these fucking questions honestly.

When I'm done lying my ass off so I don't sound like a paranoid schizophrenic, I take my paperwork to the end of the hall. The door is open. I step inside. Elaine's got her bare feet up on the desk in front of her, pecking away on a laptop.

“Done,” I say, holding up the clipboard.

She rolls her chair back, slides her heels on. “You've handled a gun?”

I'm not sure what the right answer is, so I decide in this instance to be honest. “Yeah.”

“You own one?” she asks.

I reach behind me and pull my Glock out from under my shirt.

She puckers her glossed lips and her eyes widen. “Nice. You keep it handy.”

“When I can.”

“You have a concealed weapons permit for that?” she asks with a quirk of one eyebrow.

That's one thing the Feds didn't supply me with. Don't think they'd be thrilled to know I carry it around with me. “No, ma'am.”

“Ma'am,” she laughs under her breath. But then her expression goes serious. “You're not a convicted felon, are you?”

“No.” The Feds had never been able to pin anything on my family until the raid. And even then, they only got Pop on white-collar stuff—money laundering and tax evasion.

“Good. Provided you clear the background check and we bring you on, we can supply you the competency paperwork. We have an arrangement with the local sheriff's office for prints.” She stands and thumbs through a file cabinet in the corner, coming out with a form. “Fill this out and we should be all set. Takes a while to process, so get it done now.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

She smiles, shakes her head. “This way, cowboy.”

I follow her up the hall into the warehouse. Her heels clack off the cement floor as we pass between the jet and wrestling mats on our way to the door to the soundproofed room in back. She hands me a pair of bright yellow ear covers hanging on a rack near the door and puts a pair on herself. We step inside. Even with the ear protection, the faint pops I heard out in the warehouse are louder.

A guy with salt-and-pepper hair and a curvy redhead stand at two of the seven stalls, shooting handguns at targets on the wall in front of them.

She directs me to the stall on the end, where the targets are set at only fifteen yards. “See what you can do with that target,” she says with a nod at the fresh target clipped on the wire in front of me.

I nod and reel off five shots into the center of the target. I turn to her and lift her ear cover. “Are we ready to get serious now?”

A slow smile creeps across her face, and she pulls back one of my ear covers. “Twenty? Or twenty-five?”

“I'd do fifty if you had it, but I guess I'll have to settle for twenty-five.”

We drop each other's protective gear back into place and she sends the target back up the wire to the end. She nods and I empty the rest of the clip into dead center.

“So we're good with the firearms section of the application,” she says with a lift of her brows. She struts toward the guy up the row and taps his arm, then steps two stalls down and does the same to the woman. They stop shooting and we all pull off our headgear.

“Steve Spencer, Danni Bates, this is Robert Davidson.”

“Rob,” I correct, shaking their outstretched hands in turn.

“Provided everything checks out,” Elaine continues, “he'll be working with the team once we get him on board with protocol.”

“Welcome to the jungle,” the redhead says.

“Danni is one of our best,” Elaine explains with a nod at her. “She'll be working with you over the next few weeks to get you up to speed. And Steve is our pilot, so you might get the opportunity to work with him down the road. We pay two hundred a day during training, and if you don't kill yourself in the process, you'll get your first assignment when Danni clears you. Once you're in the field, pay is per assignment and varies from two grand for an evening, to ten for round-the-clock.”

I whistle through my teeth. We never paid anywhere near that for our muscle.

“Don't let my wife scare you away,” Salt-and-Pepper says, looping his arm around Elaine's waist. “Her bark is worse than her bite.”