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“You were there. ”
“Accidentally. ” She shook her head at the futility of her own argument. “Money’s involved, right?
They won’t just kill me. ”
“No. They’ll torture you first. ” He nodded with mock sobriety. “They’ll tie you down, cut you a little, let you bleed some. Rape you, most likely. ” His gaze flickered over her with a flare of inner rage.
“And when they realize you don’t know anything, they’ll really start having fun. You’ll pray to die before they finish. Is that what you want?”
She was shaking by the time he finished, knowing he was right, knowing her life had just taken a very serious turn for the worse.
She breathed out wearily. “I don’t have furniture. Just some clothes. ” And not a lot, at that. Most of her stuff she was still waiting for. Mark and Ty had been good enough to hold it for her until she had a place for it. She just hadn’t found a place yet.
The same furniture and small items that she thought had been waiting for her at that warehouse.
They hadn’t been there. Her earlier call to Mark had confirmed that he hadn’t sent anything.
A year.
Had a year really gone by since she left Virginia?
A year that she had been steeped in the memories she had deliberately pushed behind her when she left home. Memories that had the power to break her if she didn’t get a handle on them. Getting a handle on them hadn’t been easy.
He nodded abruptly. “Get your shower and get dressed. We’ll pack the rest of your stuff and bring it here. You can keep your car in the private marina parking that Uncle Ray lets us use. ”
“I still need a job. ” Her chin lifted defiantly.
“I can put you to work at the lumber store. ” He shrugged. “I hear you’re pretty slick in the office. ”
Crista’s eyes narrowed. “I applied there months ago. There were no openings. ”
“I’m the boss; I’ll make an opening,” he gritted out.
“And you couldn’t make one before I had to take that job at the diner?”
He grinned, devilry glittering in his gaze then. “I didn’t have enough incentive then. Maybe I do now. ”
If she had something to throw at him, she would have given a pitch worthy of a baseball player at that moment, just to wipe the smirk off his face.
“You’re a real ass, Dawg,” she sneered instead.
“So I keep hearing, fancy-face. So I keep hearing. ”
NINE
Aaron Grael was dead, and no one else was talking. As far as the thieves and the buyers were concerned, there was no one missing from either little group. And that was bullshit. They already knew that, a million of the two million dollar price tag on the missiles had been paid to a middleman, or woman as the case may be. And Dawg knew Grael had been convinced Crista was that woman two seconds before Dawg killed him.
Dawg’s report was turned in. He had seen Grael firing at the team; he had wounded several of them. Dawg had made the shot and taken him out. It wasn’t exactly a lie, of course, but it wasn’t the truth, either.
Now they had to figure out where the missing middle person was, where the money was, and how it affected the case.
The four experimental, newly designed Sidewinders could be launched from greater distances and carried an explosive weight nearly double their predecessors. And they could be nuclear-armed.
They were built with detonation chips, a safeguard that disabled the missiles entirely and effectively halted any chance of detonation or guidance of the weapon without them. They were to have been transported to Fort Knox without those chips before heading to another base. But, somehow, the Army fucked up. The missiles were shipped with their safety chips, and the shipment was hijacked.
Fortunately for the task force, it seemed the hijacking was done by a group with little or no experience in the stealing and selling of the Sidewinder missiles.
A Swedish mercenary had negotiated the buy for a Middle Eastern terrorist with fingers in damned near every conflict in the world. The Swede, alias Akron Svengaurrd, had contacted Aaron Grael for the exchange of half the money down and two of the safety and guidance chips. The rest of the money would come once the chips were authenticated—and the Army had made certain they were authenticated—and the missiles were in place for the Swede’s team to pick up.
