Tragic Desires (5 page)

“Don’t be so damn
naïve, Colt. You remember how we operated. They have AK-47s. We carried those too.”

“You’re not thinking
…”

“
All I’m saying is don’t rule anything out. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it doesn’t always have to be a duck.”

“I got it.” He’s frustrated. “Why would a hit team be after her? And why not just take her out with a sniper?”

“Dude, you’ve been institutionalized too long. They don’t want her dead, fool. They want
her
… or rather somebody else does.”

“Then the real question is, why?”

“That’s what we need to find out. I’m gonna grab some sleep. She’s down for the count. I’ll cuff her to the bed in case she wakes up, but I need to crash so I’m fresh when things heat up with her.”

“You’ve got her then, yeah?”

“Yep. And thanks for bailing my ass out of there.”

“Well, I should be kicking your ass.”

“No, there’s something going on with her. We’ll find out what it is.” As soon as the words leave my mouth, I hope they’re correct. Because some big bad guys are after Onyx Eyes and I’m curious as hell to find out why.

T
he first thing
I notice is that my mouth is like a desert. When I try to roll over, my arm prevents me from doing so. The room is so bright, I scream. The skull-splitter is back. A pillow! I need a pillow to block the light. My hand reaches for one, but it comes up empty. My right wrist is latched to the bed by something, but I don’t dare open my eyes to see what. Oh God, what is happening?

“What’s the matter?”
a deep voice asks, but I can barely breathe, much less answer him. My hand covers the left side of my face, trying to block the light as I cry out in pain. Whoever is in the room pulls my hand away and then I’m faced with my worst nightmare—blaring sun in my eyes.

“No, no, no, no, no
…” I repeat.

A hand
grasps mine and squeezes it so tightly that pain shoots up my arm. Ironically, I’m relieved for a bit because it takes my mind off the axe man … but only for a moment. The torturer, in his usual way, swings his blade at me again with all his might and forces me to focus back on him. He leaves me with no choice. I’m convulsing now. My brain erupts in flashes of brilliant fireworks and I have to find a way to tell this person to shut the damn curtains, but I’m not sure I can.

My jaws are clenched so I do my best. “Curtains
… c-c-close.”

“What?”
He growls as he clamps down on my hand again. I’m sure the bones will snap.

By now, water is gushing
down my cheeks and I want to die. “Sh-shut c-c-c-curtains!” The words burst forth in a scream and suddenly the room darkens. It helps but my pain is too far down the path of agony. I writhe, and the only thing I want to do is to curl up under the bed. But I can’t because my wrist is tethered. I am a prisoner.

“Tell me what’s wrong,” the
mystery voice demands.

The words penetrate and under other circumstance
s, I might laugh. But I can’t now because the only thing that’s possible for me to do is roll from side to side.

“Shoot me,” I mutter. Death
would be a welcome sweetness … the absence of pain.

Maybe he
’s planning on doing that anyway. If I ask him, perhaps he’ll get it over with quickly. My thoughts are so scrambled, though, I’m not sure if I even said those words out loud.

He lets out a short laugh. “You want me to
shoot you?” Even though my mind is distorted with pain, I can see he’s not going to help me. “That’s a good one.”

“Please.”

“Why?”

Why does he have to ask so many damn questions?
Can’t he see I’m not fucking coherent? “Pain.”

“What hurts?”

My finger points to the great offender. “Migraine.” My voice is barely a whisper now. But only a little bit of time passes before I feel a cool cloth across my forehead. Again I want to laugh, knowing it won’t help. But just a bit later I feel something else, and I recognize the cold of a cloth wrapped in ice across my forehead. My hand latches onto it like it’s gold and I move it over my left eye, the same one the axe man is hacking into.

“Need meds.”
I lick my lips, or try to anyway.

“Where are they?”

“Home.”

“What do you need?”

My mouth is so dry, it’s difficult to talk. My tongue works around the inside trying to stir up some saliva. “Maxalt. Tramadol. Lortab.”

“Not sure I can help you with those.”

The pain comes in waves and it’s on the increase again. My breathing is erratic and if I don’t get something in me, I’ll go insane. The only thing I know to do is to make something else hurt worse than my head. So I jerk my wrist against whatever it is hooking me to the bed.

“Stop it. You’ll hurt yourself.”

My mind processes that he’s angry with me. I don’t care. That’s the idea, I want to say. But I’m at the point where I can’t speak again. The only thing I focus on is making something else hurt worse than my skull. But I don’t succeed because he grabs and holds my arm before I can do any real damage. My loose hand fists his shirt and I try to pull him to me, but I’m so weak with pain, I fail. How can I make him understand how badly I hurt?

He must understand that I need to tell him something because he
leans close to me. “Do something … anything,” I groan in his ear. “If I can’t get my pills, I want to die. Please.”

“Christ. What the hell is wrong with you?” he asks. Then he pushes me away. This is the mother of all
migraines. They’ve been bad before, but I’ve always been able to medicate. I won’t make it if I can’t get something in me.

His fingers touch my neck and he says, “Damn, your heart rate is through the roof.” He gets up and I assume he makes a phone call because I can hear him talking to
someone.

Rolling to my side I
try to look where he’s gone. I see a handgun on the small table about five feet from me. If I can get to it, I can end all of this. Right here and now. The pain will be gone forever. I don’t think twice before I try to sit up and reach for it. There’s one problem: I’m so wobbly, weak, and dizzy that my equilibrium is sketchy. Standing will be a huge issue. But I go for it. Jackpot. As my fingers wrap around the beautiful, cold metal, I pick it up. But I’m so shaky, it may be a problem for me to fire it. I’m still going to try.

I turn it toward me and take aim and as I squeeze, he yells, “
Noooo!”

N
othing happens. I squeeze harder, but by that time, he slams my hand against the headboard and knocks the gun away. It skids across the bed and thumps to the floor, shattering my last hope for relief. That slight bit of work has zapped me so I collapse on the bed, thinking how my big chance at ending my pain has slipped through my fingers because I was too weak to pull the gun’s trigger. How pathetic is that? I can’t even kill myself.

“What the hell are you doing?” he asks
. He grabs me by the neck and forces me to look at him.

“You don’t understand,” I whisper as I reach
for my head again with my free hand. “I can’t do this … anymore.” And the writhing takes over.

My mom… somehow, thoughts of her soothe me. I try to focus on when I was young and we’d do fun things together. Once she took me to the county fair and we rode the merry-go-round. Afterward she bought me cotton candy. And she laughed at me because I had sticky stuff everywhere. When she grabbed my hand to hold it, we stuck together like glue. She told me how she didn’t have to worry about losing me ever again, since we were permanently attached. For a while, I believed her. That is until we got to the car.

But as quickly as that memory fades, the pain rips into me again. My body jerks off the bed and I crash against the headboard, feeling pain sear my arm. I’m momentarily grateful for it, but it doesn’t last nearly long enough. The pain in my head overrides it and it’s all I can feel again.

The door opens and closes and men are talking, but I can’t hear what they’re saying through my agony. I’m caught in the vise of it and I can’t concentrate. Maybe they’re discussing what to do with me. Maybe they’ll kill me. I wish they’d be quick about it.

Then I hear, “Fuck. Colt, we have to do something here. She’s in so much pain, she tried to shoot herself.”

“
Let me see what I can do, Drex.”

“Well
, make it fast. You have the names of her medications. Have one of the guys slip into her place and get them.”

“Drex, you know
…”

“Goddammit, then I’ll do it. I’ll take responsibility. Have you gotten that rusty?”

Their words don’t make sense to me other than one of them wants to help me. That’s more than anyone’s done in a while. Well, that’s not really fair. People
have
tried to help. My case just seems resistant to treatment, they say.

“Get one of your men in here on watch. I need to pull up the data on her apartment.”

And then it’s quiet for a bit. The jackhammer pounds away, the axe man still splitting my skull. I lie still on the bed, my hand gripping my head, my heart praying for relief.

N
ever in my
life have I seen someone suffer like that from a headache. Torture, yes. But not a damn headache. What the hell happened to her? After I make a thorough check of her apartment complex using Colt’s computer, I figure out the best way in and out. Since I have her keys, getting in won’t be a problem. My worry is that the place is being watched, and I don’t want to alert them to my presence.

“I need a long-haired blond wig.
A hat and some sunglasses. Get me some ratty jeans and some boots with three-inch lifts in them. And I want a tattoo on my arm of a scorpion.”

Colt shakes his head. “Anything else?”

“Yeah, fake teeth. Big ones that are brownish-yellow. Something someone would remember if asked. Oh, and a bushy mustache.”

“You got it. Give me
thirty.”

I didn’t think any of it would be a problem
, other than the teeth. But they use the new dental impressions now and can make them in no time at all. And I won’t need the kind I can eat with, only the kind for show.

A
bout a half hour later, the guys return with the disguise. It takes the tattoo dude about ten minutes too long to get the scorpion on my arm, but when he does, it’s big, red, and perfect. Anyone would remember it if they saw it.

“How long
will this stay on?”

“You can wash it off when you get back.”

When I’m decked out, I check myself in the mirror. I swear if my mother saw me, she wouldn’t recognize me.

“
See you in an hour. If you don’t hear from me in two, send in the posse.”

“Wolfe, be careful.”

“Always am, Colt.”

I drive around
her building a few times before I park. Sure enough, her place is being watched. One car with two men inside. As I make a phone call, I video and photograph the car so the guys back at the hotel can see them. I get in and out without a problem. Apparently my getup works because no one stops me, but when I’m driving back to the hotel, I pick up a tail. It’s a different car than the one at the apartment. They must’ve had her place bugged.

I call Colt. “Hey, I’m being tailed.”

“No surprise there. What do you want?”

“A freight train. Can you get me one?”

Colt laughs. “Doubtful. I can detain them for a bit, though.”

“Better than a freight train. Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Um, because I’m so fucking creative.”

“Oh, right,
smart-ass. Where do you want me to go?”

“For a joyride. I need a few
… maybe five. And then head over to I-35 south. Can you do that?”

“Got it.” I make all kinds of turns and eventually head to
I-35 where the blue lights pull my tail over. I drive back to the hotel.

When I get to the room, Onyx Eyes
—or Gemini, based on her ID—is still a wreck.

She sees me and shakes her head.

“It’s only me. It’s a disguise,” I say as I pull off the hat and wig and spit out the nasty teeth. I fill a glass with water and take her some pills.

She grabs my hand
, greedily takes what’s in it and guzzles the water, spilling the rest all over herself. “I need another Lortab,” she says as she wipes the water off her lips.

“Give it a chance to work.”

She shakes her head and without hesitation says, “I’m a drug abuser. One’s not enough.”

Well
, what do you know. I hand her another one and she downs it with more water and falls back on the bed.

“Do you want water?”

She shakes her head no. Eventually, her breathing evens out and she falls asleep. The drugs must be doing their job. That lets me breathe a bit easier, but I still wonder what the devil makes her head hurt so fiercely.

The skin on my arm is raw when I finish scrubbing
clean the scorpion. In my former profession, having any kind of permanent identifying marks was considered dangerous, so I never got any ink. But recently I’ve entertained the idea. The scorpion looked great, but if I ever did anything, I would put it on my chest.

When I’m satisfied the ink is gone
, I peel off my grubby clothes and jump in the shower. I’m drenched from the July Austin heat and wearing that wig was no picnic. The cool water feels great as it washes away the sweat.

Since all my clothes are in the other room, I wrap a towel around my waist. She’s still asleep, so I take my time getting dressed. This gives me a chance to think about what I saw in her apartment, which was a whole lot of nothing.
A couch, a chair, one coffee table, a bed, and a nightstand. No pictures on the walls, no photographs, no dining table and chairs, very little to indicate she had much of a life at all. No wonder she’d been targeted by the traffickers, but why was she living like this? When I searched her closet, I did find a few items of clothing, not anything like most girls her age would have, but there was a broken-up bike helmet. It must have some significance or it wouldn’t have been there. And why is her background so blank?

My phone rings
. Colt.

“What’s up?”

“Those guys who were tailing you are Afghani.”

“What?”

“We think they’re attached to one of the suspected terror cells here in the southwest.”

“Christ. Who the fuck is this girl?”

“That’s what we want to know. Her ID shows her as Gemini Sheridan, right? And we have a last known addy in Boulder, Colorado. She graduated from CU Boulder last year. But here’s where it gets sticky. She has a dummy Social Security number. Her permanent address is listed as San Angelo, Texas. When we checked it out, apparently that house was ransacked two days ago. The local police have been trying to find her since then.”

“What the hell is going on, Colt?”

“Whatever it is has nothing to do with human trafficking. We just stumbled onto this thing by accident. She may be part of Aali Imaam.”

“You’re kidding
. As in Aali Imaam, the terrorist group? And you think there is a local cell here trying to bring her in?”

“We don’t know. But somebody wants her and is going to extremes to get her. Think about it.
Her info isn’t solid. No one seems to know her. She has no known living relatives. Her creds don’t add up. The only thing of note we could find was that she was in some kind of biking accident last fall and sustained a head injury.”

“The headaches.”

“Most likely.”

“Boulder PD just told us they found a body yesterday
—it was her former boyfriend. Shot, execution style. Back of the head. They found him in a ditch on the side of a country road.”

“Shit. This is deep, Colt. CIA or Homeland Security deep.”

“I’m getting ready to make that call.”

“Wait.”

“Why?”

Something
doesn’t add up here. And when I smell a rat, I’m usually right. “A hunch. That’s all. Let me talk with her when she wakes up.”

“Drex, I need to get back to the issue at hand here, man. I’ve got girls disappearing.”

“Think about it. Those dudes know we’re onto them. They’ll lie low for a while. But something’s rotten in the woodpile where she’s concerned. What if her life’s at stake here? With all due respect, I can’t, in good conscience, leave her when I don’t have all the facts.”

“Drex
…”

“I know what you’re thinking and I’m no longer Black Ops
. Things are different now.
I’m
different. I’ll send two other guys from my company down to help in my place.”

“Dude, sometimes that heart of yours gets you in way too deep.”

“Not true. I was trained to save lives, when possible. That’s what I’m trying to do. My heart fucked me up one time and I won’t let it do that again.”

If he were standing in front of me, he would be giving me one of his
trademark looks. “You have forty eight hours. That’s it. Give me something or I’m shutting you down.”

“Thanks
, man.” I make the call to get two more men down here to give Colt a hand.

She stir
s. There’s
nothing I want more than for her to wake the hell up so I can find out what’s going on. Is she a terrorist? What is her involvement, if any? How aggressive should I get with her? The fact that she’s beautiful weighs heavy on me, but I’m going to have to pull my mind out of the sex gutter and stay focused on the
main task here. The camera I’ve set up is running so everything she says and does will be recorded for later analysis.

One thing is certain
—that headache wasn’t an act. She was in major pain. No one can put on like that, the way her body contorted and the look on her face.

My chair is next to the bed so when
she awakens, she looks directly at me. I hand her some water and another pill. If she’s an addict, she’ll take it without any questions. If she’s not, she won’t want it. She’s shaking and wolfish as she grabs it, so I have my answer.

“Are you hungry?”

Her eyes narrow a tiny bit and she nods.

“Can you eat?”

Again, she nods. I dial room service and order a couple of sandwiches and fries. After the order is placed, I lean back in the chair, cross my arms, and begin.

“Who are you?”

“I might ask the same of you,” she says. Her voice is hoarse which leads me to believe she needs hydration.

“You might, but then you’re not the one in charge here.
Drink.” I hand her another glass of water.

My observational skills are at work.
She guzzles the water, then rolls to her side and pulls her knees to her chest. I want to see her face because every human emotion is expressed there. Yes, you can detect emotions from body language, but the face shows everything. “Gemini Sheridan.”

“I know that. What I don’t know is
who you work for. Roll on your back and look at me when I speak to you.”

She does as I ask
. “I’m unemployed. My migraines have knocked me out of having any kind of job.”

She must think
I’m all sorts of stupid. I sneer, but before I can say anything else, she asks, “What happened? How did I end up here? And where am I? Why do you have me handcuffed? What do you want from me? Are you going to kill me? I remember you. You’re the guy from the bar, aren’t you?” She rubs her eyes with her free hand, and for a moment, the innocence written all over her face makes me almost fall for it.

S
he sits up and scrutinizes me. And once again, I find myself beginning to get pulled in. Fuck. Me.

Knowing that I can’t afford to lose myself to
those kinds of thoughts, I say, “Damn, you’re really good. Anything else?”

Her face screws up in confusion.
If her dark eyes weren’t so damn difficult to read, I might be able to cut through the bullshit a lot quicker. If the light’s not just so, it’s impossible to distinguish pupil from iris. That puts me at a huge disadvantage because I can’t tell if she’s lying.

“Good?”

“Come on, Gemini. You know damn well that diversion tactic’s not going to work.”

“Huh?”

“Just tell me who you work for. Are you a courier? Or are you in deeper?”

“
You’re not making any sense. I told you I don’t have a job. I was disabled from a mountain biking accident and now I suffer from severe post-concussion syndrome. You saw me in the glorious throes of a migraine. Did I look like someone who can hold down a job? I won’t even drive a car, for Pete’s sake.”

She rubs her temples and
forehead. I take a good hard look at her and wonder if she could possibly be telling the truth. How could she perform in any capacity if one of those headaches hit?

“Okay, so how often do you get the
se headaches?”

“Every single day.”

“And they can’t be controlled?”