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Authors: Mary Calmes

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Tied Up in Knots (23 page)

BOOK: Tied Up in Knots
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“Jones?”

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine. I just wanted to tell you that Cochran and his partner are both being loaned out to a DEA task force in Plano for the next month.”

“Where is that?”

He squinted at me. “That’s in Texas, Jones.” The way he said it, like I was just too stupid for words, was not nice. “So do you want to be reassigned to another city due to Hartley’s escape?”

I shook my head. “No thank you, sir. It didn’t work that well the last time.” And I didn’t want to go anywhere without Ian being there to discuss it with. If he got home and I was gone…. “If he wants me, he’ll find me, but maybe this time he’ll actually stay away. He might be ready to get back to something other than revenge.”

“Is that what you think it is?”

“Sir?”

“You do realize that Hartley has never come after you for revenge.”

“I’m sorry?”

“He admires you, Jones. You caught him, and then you saved his life. He worships you.”

“It’s not that I doubt you, sir, but he keeps trying to kill me.”

“And you keep eluding him. Again there’s a lot to admire there.”

“I don’t think so.”

“In his own sick, twisted way, he might even love you.”

“Where are you getting this?”

He shrugged. “If he wanted you dead, couldn’t he simply have shot you?”

That was true.

“Instead he took a rib from you. He needed something from inside your body, that’s how much he needed to have a part of you.”

“He’s a psychopath. Nothing he does makes any sense.”

“Yes, it does,” he argued, straightening a bit as Iris walked over with filled paper plates and napkins and delivered one to Kage and the other to me.

“I’ll grab the coffee,” she said, kissing him on the cheek. “And Dad says that the lure he wants is on sale at Park, and you better get over there soon.”

He cleared his throat. “You tell your father that it’ll be a cold day in hell before I replace that lure.”

She giggled. “Seriously. What was it, like, six bucks?”

“So not the point, little girl.”

Shaking her head, she left to get us the coffee.

“That girl is your niece, sir?”

“She’s my buddy Pat’s oldest. She just graduated from college and already she owns four of these things. She started it with her boyfriend when they were freshmen, and they added a truck a year.”

“Holy crap.”

“I know. She’s an entrepreneur at twenty-two.”

“Can she cook?”

He tipped his head at me, and I took a bite of the messy sandwich and found out quickly that yes, God, she certainly could.

“That’s amazing.”

“That’s her mother’s hot and spicy chorizo recipe, with a fried egg and enough cheddar cheese on it to stop your heart.”

It was heaven on a plate.

“Her mother must be an amazing cook.”

Kage nodded as he ate, and Iris brought us two large clear cups with lids, filled with coffee mixed with milk, but it wasn’t a latte. It was different.

“It’s a dark-roast coffee poured on top of sweetened condensed milk,” Kage explained. “That’s why it tastes that way.”

“It’s good.”

“Eat your sandwich.”

“Yessir.”

Chapter 13

 

 

I WAS
exhausted. I hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours in the past forty or so, but I got my second wind after I ate and even remembered to bring back a sandwich and coffee for Josue. He was very appreciative of the food but made sure Dorsey knew he was still listening attentively to all the facets of witness relocation he was going over for him.

Social Security card, driver’s license, school enrollment—which Josue was certain he wanted no part of—and job placement.

“We’ll be here every step of the way,” Dorsey assured him.

Josue would go from being Hess to Morant, and we had new documents ready to go. It made him sad to give up his name; I could tell from the quick inhale of breath and the bite down on his bottom lip.

“It’s not forever,” I reminded him. “Really.”

He nodded instead of crying.

“It’s only for a while, and whatever you do as Morant will be reinstated to Hess as soon as you’re out of the program. Or you could fall in love with Morant because it’s all yours and keep it forever. It’s up to you.”

Another quick nod as he wiped under both eyes.

“But whatever you want.”

“Okay.”

Dorsey went on to explain about the furnished apartment he’d be living in until we found him a permanent one that would be his to do with as he saw fit.

“You’re starting a brand new life, and that takes a fuckton of stuff,” I said, interrupting for maybe the tenth time.

“Do you wanna do this?” Dorsey groused.

I shut up because reading through the titanic document, pointing out where to sign, and giving the whole spiel was not something I was up for at the moment.

It took another two hours, and then Sharpe and White went with me to show Josue where he’d be living in the interim.

The federal safe house we took him to was a suite in a high-rise downtown close to our office, in a scary security building with a guard at the door and another behind the front desk. Sharpe gave Josue the key fob that gave him access to the elevator, showed him how to use it, and White gave him the laminated instructions Josue would need once we got up to the suite. White watched him change the key code for the floor, as well as the one to get into the apartment. It was a whole ordeal of punching in digits and then using the lock on the door, which also had one of those special computer keys that couldn’t be copied at Walmart or wherever. It was all state-of-the-art crap that, as far as I knew, no one had ever tried to bypass.

Josue was not a high-threat target; he was a low-risk one. High-risk assets were not kept downtown close to the federal building like he would be. They were not kept in cabins in the middle of nowhere like on TV, or in quaint little beach towns. They were kept in bunkers underground or in prison. Informing on the mob or our government or a foreign power was not at all glamorous, and that kind of security was suffocating. Regular people, like Josue, were normal everyday people who if, and only if, they were geographically accessible, would get capped. But once we moved them out of state, gave them new lives and new identities, the possibility of someone finding and killing them dwindled down to zero. As far as I knew, no one in the protective custody of the marshal service had ever been harmed.

Josue would be heavily guarded when he was being escorted to pretrial meetings or trial itself or during any other court-related appearances, but that would be the only time. The rest of his life was his own. We checked in after all court appearances had concluded and during the asset’s entire time in WITSEC. Some of us even after the witness left the program. But for Josue, as it had been for Drake and Cabot, the threat was tiny, so what we were doing at the moment was overkill. Still, I watched him pick codes for the alarms and tried not to yawn.

“Won’t you need a code, Miro?” He was worried about this.

“I have an override, kid,” I told him.

Once he was in and his stuff was on the bed, we left again because I had to take him back to the office to fill out bank account information that could only be done after the witness was shown his domicile. Normally, because I was a little lazy, I would take the daily fund allotment out in cash and give it to the witness and tell them to go wild. The thing was that I had not placed anyone alone in years. Josue needed friends, and at the moment I was it, so based on how I would have wanted things to work, I was getting him as set up as possible. His questions were killing me, though.

“But I don’t get it. How do I get money to buy stuff? I mean—I should make something and bring it with me for dinner, right?”

“No. Don’t bring anything but yourself.” We were sitting at my desk forty minutes later with White, who was typing because I couldn’t get my eyes to focus anymore. I needed to sleep. So did Josue. He didn’t have that much more rest than I did, but I guessed newness and adrenaline were powering him.

“Hey.”

Turning, I looked at Sharpe.

“Come here.”

I rolled away from White’s desk and over to his. “What?”

“My buddies in Jersey got back to me on that guy Ian needed checked out.”

“Oh, okay. And?”

“He committed suicide like a month or so after he got back home from that tour four years ago.”

It was sad and scary at the same time because Kerry Lochlyn had been dead a long time, and if he wasn’t the one getting revenge on the other men in his unit, who was? “What about his family?” I asked.

“His parents were killed a year ago in a car accident,” Sharpe said, reading the information on his computer screen. “There’s only his sister and brother now.”

“Where’s the brother live?”

“That they don’t know. He’s estranged from the family and has been since Kerry’s death.”

“How estranged?”

“Like changed his name, never heard from him again estranged.”

“Why?”

“According to Kramer, who talked to the sister who lives in Albuquerque now—he never forgave his folks for his brother’s suicide. He thought they drove him to it.”

“Jesus.”

He shrugged. “Family’ll make you put a gun to your head faster than anything else.”

I would have to take his word for it, as I had none.

“Jones,” White barked over at me, and I realized that while Sharpe and I were talking, he had Josue’s total 110 percent focus on him and only him, and the questions were still coming fast and furious.

Ten minutes later, with all the information he needed for the following day—who to see at the bank, for instance, to claim bankcards—I had Josue back at my desk.

“But how do I get to see this”—he pulled the business card I’d given him and read the name off it—“Lillian Doss tomorrow if I don’t have cab fare to get there?”

“That’s why I said that there will be a marshal there in the morning to take you. There’s a whole checklist in that packet you got, along with the laminated cards in case of emergency and the app that only works with your fingerprint on the new phone we just gave you.”

“Yeah,” he said in a very small voice, and then he lifted his big dark eyes to me. “Are you gonna pick me up?”

“Yes.”

“Then why don’t you just sleep over and we’ll wake up early, have breakfast, and then you don’t have to drive.”

“Listen, it’s—”

“Or I can go home with you, and the same plan applies.”

I shook my head.

“Why?” His comical silent scream, with his head back, eyes closed, hands curled into rigor was funny, and he got a smile out of me, but we were not going to be girlfriends.

“Because with me hanging around, you’re never gonna fit in.”

He made a noise like I was just so irritating.

“You have to give this a try, starting now.”

“No, you know, I really think I should stay with you because you’re the one I trust, and trust goes a long way, and… yeah,” he said, deciding something, getting worked up, nodding a lot. “Yeah… yeah, I think so. I’m sticking with you.”

I took a deep breath. “Hold on, kid.”

“Oh man,” he whimpered. “Maybe this was a mistake.”

“That’s not what the cards said,” I reminded him as I took hold of his shoulder, not hard, but firm, keeping him with me as I found the contact I needed on my phone. “You just need a little support.”

“I think I should live with you.”

He was
so
not living with me.

“Hey,” I huffed, talking to one person while I concentrated on the guy in front of me having a nervous breakdown. “I need a favor.”

“Anything” was the answer from the other end.

Since Drake and Cabot were now officially out of the program, I could treat them like lackeys and no one could say a word to me. And they both knew all about WITSEC, and even though it was not protocol… I did it anyway because it was in the best interest of my witness.

The boys were in my office an hour later, both with visitor badges on, smiling and ready to help. By then I’d fed Josue again, explained how things worked—again—and realized that even though he was way more together than Cabot and Drake had been, he was still very young and very alone, and when I presented myself as a life raft, I had to be prepared for people to climb on and never want to leave. Sometimes I forgot the choices weren’t mine. They belonged to those I was trying to help. No one could tell you to walk; you did it when you were ready. I needed to make Josue ready, which meant the allure to jump had to be greater than the safety net I was offering.

I saw the boys come in and told Josue his new friends had just shown up.

He looked up and saw them crossing the floor, and Drake smiled and Cabot waved, and I saw Josue breathe like maybe everything was going to be all right.

“Hi,” he sighed when Cabot walked right up and gave him a big hug.

“Hey,” Drake greeted him happily, hugging him the second Cabot let go. “Did Miro adopt you too?”

Josue nodded, and I rolled my eyes because they were all annoying, but it was good. They started talking about the shirt Josue was wearing that was from some band they all liked.

I wasn’t listening. I didn’t care.

“Hey, Miro, Josue draws a webcomic, isn’t that awesome?”

“Not anymore, he doesn’t,” I informed them, because his online presence had been deleted. He had no links to digital portfolios, no Facebook account, no Twitter, nothing. He was gone from any and all social media.

“Well, yeah, no, but Cab’s working on starting one, so maybe they could do it together,” Drake said, all excited.

“Great, fabulous, go away now,” I commanded, using my hands to motion them toward the elevator. “I’ll see all you all on Thursday.”

They were talking again and I was thankfully forgotten as they walked slowly, noisily out of the bullpen and toward the hall. I went around them to go get a bottle of water out of the fridge in the break room. By the time I got back, they were gone.

When I sat down, I had a moment of bliss because it was quiet and still, and then I got a weird feeling, like something was off, hinky, and when I looked up, all eyes were on me.

BOOK: Tied Up in Knots
4.06Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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