“Where to?” Marta asked.
Crusher pulled his satellite phone from his pocket and texted Royce.
Crusher: Safehouse compromised. Security detail dead
Royce: The only people who knew about it were you, Devon, and me
Crusher: Is Devon compromised?
Royce: Unknown. For now, I’m your one and only.
Crusher: Roger
Royce sent him coordinates through text.
Royce: KTP and CTS
Crusher recognized the acronyms SOS had come up with for 'Kill the Phone' and 'Coordinate Through Swede,' their technical liaison with their partner organization, the Brotherhood Protectors. When they’d left the government umbrella, Hank Patterson had offered to take them into his fold and provide some of the support they needed in the way of computers, internet, communications, and security. For all things technical, Swede and his network of computer geeks were their go-to guys.
Crusher: Roger
He entered the coordinates into his GPS. At the fourth stop from that point, Crusher and Marta left the bus and entered a less commercial, seedier section of the city, where shuttered businesses and dilapidated homes were scattered, some occupied but in need of maintenance.
“Is it safe here?” Marta asked.
“I don’t think we’re safe anywhere,” he answered. “We sure as hell weren’t safe in the more upscale area.”
“You have a point,” she said and slipped her hand into his.
He liked holding her hand. It was small but strong. Like her.
When they arrived at the coordinates, Crusher turned off the satellite phone. He glanced around and frowned. The building had seen better days. Paint peeled from the eaves, there were cracks in the brick façade, running from the ground to the roof, and an official-looking notice had been tacked to the front door.
“I might be wrong, but this building appears to have been condemned,” Marta said.
A young man with long, brown, lanky hair and brown eyes, wearing his jeans hitched to the middle of his ass, his boxer shorts on full display, passed them. He stopped and pretended to tie the laces on his battered tennis shoes. “Did Royce send you?” he asked without looking up or moving his lips.
Crusher diverted his attention to the condemned building, keeping the guy in his peripheral vision. “Yes.”
“Follow me,” he whispered. When he straightened, he took off, walking faster than when he’d passed them.
Crusher hooked Marta’s arm and kept pace with the guy, but leaving a distance between them, while praying he was one of Royce’s contacts and not leading them into a trap.
Chapter 6
Marta didn’t know if the man they were following was one of the good guys or another one of Vasquez’s henchmen. Was he bent on recapturing her to haul her back to the compound to complete the job Vasquez had forced her into? And why was Crusher following him blindly? Didn’t he know people weren’t always what they seemed?
Crusher planted his body between the droopy-drawered young man and her as they blindly followed the stranger to another dilapidated house further down the street. When he turned into the yard, he didn’t march up the steps of the home with faded paint and a listing awning over the porch. Instead, he led them around the side of the house to a set of stairs leading down into a basement.
Marta tugged Crusher to a stop. “You trust him?” she asked.
“He asked about Royce. This has to be another one of his contacts,” Crusher said. “But maybe you should remain above ground while I check him out.”
Marta shook her head. “No way. You might need backup.”
He didn’t remind her that he was the one trained in combat but took her hand and held it all the way down the narrow stairs to a black door at the bottom with a skeleton skull staring up at them.
The young man fiddled with a key, inserted it into a lock and pushed the door open.
