Hangman (Jason Trapp: Origin Story Book 1) Read online

  10

  The executive office was situated in the newest section of Odysseus Private Security’s campus in California’s Mojave Desert. Five years earlier, the spot the gleaming glass and steel structure stood upon was an abandoned US Army training camp that dated back to the Second World War.

  Most of the wooden barracks, desiccated and half-collapsed from the relentless desert sunshine, were already bulldozed, with prefabricated buildings erected in their wake.

  For CEO Jeffrey Banks, however, nothing but the best would do.

  He stood in front of the mirror in the private bathroom attached to his office, mouth stretched open in a distended grimace as he studied his teeth. He needed to remind Sandy to book him in for another whitening, he thought. It had been what, two months now?

  Too long, at any rate.

  He pulled the mirror back and retrieved a length of dental floss from the cupboard that sat behind it, stringing it between his hands like a garrotte, and worked it between his canines and incisors, ignoring anything that sat just a couple of inches farther back.

  Once finished, he left the bloodied white string on the sink’s porcelain surface for somebody else to deal with.

  It took three attempts before his tie was knotted to his satisfaction, thick and wide at the top before tapering to a vicious point. He patted it down and scanned his appearance one last time before turning on his heel and retrieving his navy suit jacket from the back of the bathroom’s door on the way out.

  The tan needs some work, he thought.

  His personal assistant, Sandra, was waiting just outside the door, with a cup of freshly brewed Colombian coffee in her hand, which he accepted without a word of thanks. She was blond, about 5 foot three, though 4-inch stilettos meant that she almost matched his stature. He didn’t mind, not because he was relaxed about being upstaged by his employees, but because they showed off her calf muscles, which were delightfully toned. On her top half was a pressed white shirt, open a single button lower than tradition demanded, but high enough to provide a fig leaf for her modesty. That was tucked into a pencil skirt that clung tightly to her midriff.

  “Are you a swimmer, Sandy?” Jeffrey asked. “You look like a swimmer.”

  She twirled slowly in place, allowing him to admire her chiseled frame, and stretched out her arm in the direction of one of the mountainous outcroppings that jutted forth from the floor of the Mojave. The morning sun was just breaking at the very top, casting a corona around the peak that hinted at the fierce heat of the day to come.

  “Do you see any water?” she asked mischievously.

  “Well,” Jeffrey said, sipping at his coffee as he stood beside her, admiring the view, “we are building a pool for the new trainees. But I’ve got a better idea…”

  “Oh?”

  “How about we go down to Tahoe? I’ve got a nice place on the lakeshore. Nothing better than taking out the boat on a day like this.”

  Sandy bit her lip as she responded. He suspected that she knew exactly the impact she had on him, but he didn’t mind. “Oh, I’d like that very much.”

  She took a step closer to him and plucked the bottom of his tie with her thumb and forefinger before trailing her fingers up the fabric. The back of her hand brushed his chest, sending a shiver of excitement through his body. Warm breath kissed his face as she unnecessarily tightened his tie knot, a welcome contrast from the cool air of the air conditioning.

  Jeffrey cleared his throat as she stepped away, noting with irritation the weakness in his voice. “Anything else on my agenda after the board meeting?”

  “Yes, sir. Eric Finch wants to see you. He didn’t say what it was about…”

  Sandy wrinkled her nose with distaste, an action that caused her cheeks to dimple in a most pleasing fashion.

  “All right. I’ll pencil him in over lunch. Let him know, will you?”

  “Of course,” she replied, pulling a thin notepad from—well, he wasn’t entirely sure, since there didn’t appear to be a whole lot of real estate in her outfit—and making a note of the instruction. “He scares me, you know.”

  Jeffrey drained the rest of his coffee cup and handed it back to her without a second’s thought. A patronizing smile crossed his face. “We employ a lot of dangerous men, Sandy. It kinda goes with the territory. And it’s a very profitable one right now.”

  If you want the lake house, he didn’t say, you can’t turn your nose up at men like Eric Finch.

  “Not the rest of them,” she said quietly. “Just Finch. My dad’s a cop. My brother served in the 101st Airborne. I’m no shrinking violet; I’ve been around a lot of military people, and not just since I started here. But he gives me the creeps, that’s all.”

  Jeffrey smiled blandly. It’s people like him who allow me to pay you a sixty grand salary for a twenty grand result.

  Of course, he didn’t say that out loud, either.

  The board meeting went well, though that was no surprise. Revenue was up 20 percent quarter on quarter, and 100 percent year over year. He had good news to report on half a dozen prospective Defense Department contracts, and the expansion into the Mexican market was going extraordinarily well.

  Then again, the board members knew better than to probe too deeply into the company’s affairs. They were paid—and paid well—to be the company’s approachable face in the media and on Wall Street. In truth, that was Jeffrey’s role also. He had the Ivy League MBA on his resume, all the right connections, and knew how to wear a suit.

  He couldn’t say the same of many of the trigger pullers under his employ.

  As he exited the executive office compound, he saw Eric Finch leaning against a tan Humvee, the man’s tattooed arms crossed over a chest that attested to innumerable hours spent pumping iron. As usual, his thick, long red beard was tied at the bottom, and provided an amusing counterpoint to his shaved head.

  The vehicle’s doors had been removed so that it more resembled a Malibu surfer’s Jeep than a weapon of war, though a fifty cal machine gun was mounted on top, which Jeffrey assumed was loaded with blanks. “Climb in, boss,” Finch grunted, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.

  Jeffrey didn’t say a word until both men were inside the vehicle, and the noise produced by the Humvee’s oil-guzzling engine was sufficient to render any listening device inoperable. Finch drove in circles around the desert training camp as they spoke, the vehicle kicking up a plume of dust behind it that must have choked a few of the units doing PT drill up and down the facility’s roads.

  “I’m taking another order down south tonight,” Finch finally elucidated. “Ninety million.”

  Jeffrey nodded. “What price are they offering us?”

  “Eighty cents on the dollar.”

  He whistled in surprise. The Sinaloa Cartel were usually harder nosed negotiators than that. “Why so generous?”

  Finch shifted gear and pressed down on the accelerator. “We’ll be picking a shipment of their cash up on the way. If we get it over the border for them, they are prepared to pay a bonus.”

  Jeffrey looked across sharply. Eighty cents was a decent premium on the usual price that the cartel offered in return for dirty dollars, but there was a reason that he was willing to accept the lower price—it came with commensurately lesser risk. “You sure that’s wise?”

  Finch scratched his beard, visibly irritated at being challenged. “Everything’s arranged. I’ve spoken with my contact, and they’ll wave us through the border. No checks. But I’m planning on moving the consignment across in our usual shipment to the Mexican army. Our guys never check stuff going south across the border, and the Mexicans know better than to ask any questions. So yeah, boss, I think it’s a good idea.”

  “I don’t know about this.”

  “Fine,” Jeffrey said gruffly, aware that the reality was that he had little choice in the matter. Finch knew that he was an irreplaceable cog in the machine that made Odysseus run. “What about security? If something happens, I don’t like the idea
of you losing the cartel’s cash. If they come after us, they’ll be looking for more than that pound of flesh.”

  “I ain’t losing shit,” Finch said, slamming his open palm down on the steering wheel with an audible slap. The mercenary took a second to compose himself before speaking again. When he did, he deliberately aped the Ivy League mannerisms of his CEO. “But I understand your concern, boss. I’m taking a new kid with me. Marcel Hawkins. I guess you could call him my protégé. I trust him.”

  He pulled the Humvee to a halt in front of a row of about twenty ammunition bunkers that had long lain empty after the US Army abandoned the Copper City training facility in the early 1960s. They had arched steel roofs, and were half submerged into the desert terrain, and were being restored one by one. The job was about halfway done, and a posse of construction equipment sat idling near the latest in line.

  Finch leapt out of the vehicle and landed on the uneven desert terrain in an athletic crouch. Jeffrey followed, noting with irritation that his black leather Oxfords were much less suited to the dusty ground than Finch’s tan desert boots. He suspected that the choice of location was no accident. Finch had a habit of playing what he thought of as unnecessary power games.

  “Okay, I trust your judgment,” Jeffrey said once they had stopped outside the front of the first ammunition bunker to be renovated, almost two years earlier. It was also the only one he had ever entered. “Do what you think is necessary. Just don’t get caught.”

  Finch threw his head back and laughed. It was a chilling sound to Jeffrey’s ears, as discordant as a hyena’s coughing chuckle, and as so often, he was thankful for the fact that they were both on the same side. Eric Finch wasn’t the kind of man you wanted to make an enemy of. It wasn’t that he would kill you; it was that he would take pleasure in doing so—and probably stretch your last moments out until you were begging for the release of death.

  “This ain’t my first rodeo, boss,” he said once he was done laughing, the sound dying away as suddenly as it had started.

  “I know,” Jeffrey replied, thankfully turning his gaze away from his employee and studying the gleaming bunker in front of the two men. “How much do we have left?”

  “A little short of a half.”

  That was good. When Finch had started ferrying truckloads of shrink-wrapped dollar bills across the Mexican border, they had nearly $2 billion stored in that bunker. Every single one bore the serial number of the notes issued by the US Treasury in the first few chaotic weeks after the fall of Saddam’s government. If the feds ever caught wind of what Odysseus had done, the company would be hit by a wave of criminal and congressional investigations from under which it would be impossible to right itself.

  And more pertinently, both he and Finch would spend the rest of their lives in jail.

  Jeffrey shivered, even through the beating heat of the midday sun. “How long until it’s all washed?”

  “Another three or four months.”

  “Okay, good.” He turned back to Finch. “You have my account number still?”

  “Don’t worry,” Finch sneered. “You’ll get your share.”

  “It’s not my share I’m worried about,” Banks bit back, though in truth it wasn’t an insignificant consideration. “Washington’s pulling the trigger on $5 billion of reconstruction contracts next month. Our guy’s going to make sure we get more than our fair share. But we can’t afford any heat right now, is that clear?”

  “Yeah, boss,” Finch said, putting up a mouthful of saliva and releasing it to the ground. “Crystal.”

  11

  The next day was a good one, and not just because Trapp woke without so heavy a burden on his shoulders. The remainder of his sleep wasn’t dreamless, nor perhaps would it ever be, but he felt a step removed from the immediacy of his memories. He hoped it was just the start.

  “Do you own anything except white T-shirts and those nasty jeans?” Shea asked as he stepped into the kitchen, following his nose to the source of frying bacon that was sizzling on a cast-iron skillet.

  Trapp thought that he could say the same about her cut-off denim shorts, and a tight white tank top that didn’t leave much to the imagination, but he held his tongue. He sensed from the wicked smile dancing on Shea’s lips that she knew what he was thinking, but the sheriff was sitting behind his paper, and even before last night, Trapp would have respected him too much regardless.

  “What’s wrong with my T-shirt?” he objected instead. “It’s clean, isn’t it? And it fits.”

  “Just about,” she replied, wrinkling her nose. “And I guess you’ve got the frame for it. Still–”

  “Ignore my daughter, Jason,” Sarah cut in. She was holding a pot of coffee, which she waggled a little under his nose. “She always did have a mouth on her. Can I get you a cup?”

  “You sure know the way to a man’s heart, Sarah.” Trapp grinned.

  “Don’t I know it!” the sheriff boomed. He dropped his paper a few inches and peered out from behind it. “That’s how they get you, son. A plate of crispy bacon and a cup of steaming coffee, and the next thing you know you’ve got a ring on your finger and a kid on the way.”

  “And grateful for it,” Sarah insisted, ushering Trapp to a seat. “Aren’t you, Ron?”

  The sheriff held out his mug.

  “About the coffee? Yes.” He looked over at Shea and winked heartily. “About the kid? Not so much…”

  “Cool it, Dad,” Shea warned, holding up the tongs for the bacon like a weapon. “You know you couldn’t live without me.”

  The old man raised his cup in salute. “And ain’t that the truth.”

  Trapp watched it all and said nothing. It wasn’t just that he didn’t know what to say; it was that he didn’t want to spoil the scene. Somehow he had been offered the opportunity to vicariously experience another family’s life, and he didn’t want to blow it. It was a world that was at once entirely alien and completely familiar—if only in the way they had adopted him as if he was their own.

  “Jason—?”

  He blinked. “Yeah, Mrs. Grayson—I mean Sarah?”

  “I asked if you wanted coffee.”

  “I’m sorry. I was in my own world. I’d love some.”

  The bacon came next, and eggs and toast, and shortly after he was indeed a happy man—and a full one. It wasn’t so different in the Army, Trapp knew. A soldier with an empty belly will gripe and groan but fill it and they’ll fight from dusk to dawn.

  “So what’s the plan today, Shea?” Sarah asked, grabbing a sheet of the newspaper from her husband as she spoke. It was the crossword section, Trapp saw.

  “Work, I guess,” Shea replied, tapping her lips with a napkin.

  “You need a lift?”

  “I thought Jason could give me one.” She smiled sweetly at him.

  “On the bike?” the sheriff said instantly, dropping the newspaper flat against the dining table. “No way.”

  “Don’t be such a killjoy, Dad. He’ll be careful. Won’t you, Jason?”

  Now why did you have to go and do that?

  Trapp looked from father to daughter, and then back again. When her old man had pulled him over, he sure never expected to find himself in a situation like this. He’d passed the last few days helping the sheriff fix up the yard, when he wasn’t on duty anyway, and doing what he could in the house. It had been like a vacation from the hard-driving, hard drinking experience of the last few months, and he already sensed that it was doing his body a world of good.

  It wasn’t just keeping away from the bottle, either, nor that special kind of ache in his muscles that came from splitting logs and hauling dirt. Trapp was a man who wasn’t much past a boy in age, and not far shy of a retiree in life experience.

  But only a certain kind of life. The scrappy, hard-fought, hard-bitten kind.

  He was grown from a type of soil that was fertile ground for criminals and brawlers and drinkers and degenerates. The kind of ground that produces soldiers, not stockbroke
rs. In fact, Trapp often thought that his entire life had been predetermined by an accident of his birth. That his father had been a drinker and a hater of women had built him into a fighter and the protector of the innocent.

  That’s what I tried to be, anyway.

  Shea clicked her fingers. “You still with us, Jason?”

  He faked a laugh. “Sorry. Still sleepy, I guess.”

  She looked doubtful but didn’t press the issue. “So you’ll drive me?”

  “I’ll leave this one up to your dad,” Trapp replied with a wry smile. “His house, his rules.”

  Shea groaned and tipped her head back. “Why is it that men are always so damn spineless?”

  “Cut that out,” the sheriff snapped.

  Trapp’s head whipped around, though he attempted to disguise it. He hadn’t heard the old man so much as raise his voice to his daughter this whole time.

  So why now?

  Apparently, it stunned Shea just as much. The sheriff’s expression was dark, a single muscle in his cheek twitching to a metronomic beat. Trapp noticed that the man’s fist was clenched around his newspaper, scrunching the side into an untidy ball.

  Trapp raised his palms. “I didn’t mean to cause—”

  “You didn’t,” came the pointed reply.

  It was funny, a distracted part of Trapp’s mind thought as he glanced at Shea, that she could at once appear as an incandescently beautiful woman and a sulking child. Right now, her arms were interlaced across her chest, and she was leaning back against her chair.

  “It was a joke, Dad,” she hissed. “No need to take it so serious.”

  Sarah interjected, in that way that Trapp supposed mothers always did. Even his own had tried, though the force of the rage that woman encountered was far greater. First, she shot Trapp a look of deep understanding that made him wonder how much her husband had told her about the night before.

  Or perhaps she was just good at reading people.