Charged - Book One Read online

  I looked around the room and realized I was so busy thinking about Kye that I didn’t notice the two men at a corner table were out of place. They weren’t talking, they weren’t drinking their coffee and they were staring at me.

  They looked huge and they were wearing suits that didn’t quite fit their muscles. I should’ve brought Aaron with me. His orange hair would’ve been a good distraction for my getaway. But I didn’t need him getting hurt. I looked around, but I didn’t see Kye anywhere, so I finished my coffee and left.

  In the corner of my eye, I could see the men at the table also getting up. I started to head toward the truck, but there were two more men in suits standing right by it. They saw me walk across the street and now I had four guys trying to apprehend me. I wasn’t sweating just yet. I’d brought both guns with me. I hurried down the street, limping so fast that I almost knocked a woman down.

  “Hey Kegger, small world.” It was Lolita.

  “I have four guys following me and I need to lose ‘em.”

  She knew the back streets better than I did. She caught a glimpse of them headed in our direction and she quickly led me down a busy block, into a by-the-hour hotel and headed to the back door. As soon as we were outside, she pointed to another door across the alley.

  “That will take you to 2nd Street.”

  “Thanks, baby,” I said, heading toward it and she then took another door that entered into the back of a pizza joint I was familiar with. That’s what I liked most about Lolita; she never asked me any questions.

  After walking through the kitchen of a small Chinese restaurant and then through the main dining area, I was out on 2nd Street and on the light rail in two minutes, headed towards Aaron’s shop. But now, I was worried about Aaron.

  CHAPTER 12

  I WAS SWEATING and my adrenaline was still surging when I made it to Aaron’s. The thought that something could happen to him just made me want to kick myself. When I reached his shop, I was relieved to see he was okay and hadn’t had any visitors.

  He immediately knew something was wrong by the expression on my face. He let me in through the back door of the shop into a large room where he fixed computers and I noticed the security system was on.

  “You okay, man? You look like hell!” he said, studying me. I was sure my face was red because I was in a lot of pain and I wiped my forehead with my sleeve.

  “Yeah, I went to meet Kye, but she never showed. Then I had four guys following me. I wasn’t sure I was gonna lose ‘em. And my knee is killing me.” I rubbed it and felt how swollen it was.

  Aaron bolted the door and peered through the window as he shut off all the front lights of the store. He was closed for business. I sat down at one of metal stools facing a workbench and he went to the fridge in the back of the room and got two beers and some aspirin. I downed the aspirin with one of the beers.

  “You should be using your cane more, or you’re going to undo everything the surgeries have fixed.”

  He was right. I have a cane and I wished I’d brought it into the café. If I had, I wouldn’t be in pain right now, or at least, not horrible pain. Why didn’t I bring my cane? Oh, that’s right. Kye was beautiful, one more reason why men do stupid things.

  “You got anything stronger?”

  He opened one of the many drawers under the counter next to the fridge, took out a little bottle and handed me a small white pill.

  “It’s not oxycontin, but it’s stronger than aspirin.”

  I swallowed it without asking or caring. The pain shot out of my kneecap and stretched along my thigh into my hip. I took a long deep breath as I removed my leather jacket and pointed to the six camera screens that he had for his security system.

  “Anything weird today?” I said.

  “Nothing.”

  “They’ve been following me, so sooner or later, they are going to show up here,” I said.

  This statement neither startled him nor interested him, but I wish it had. He was just a kid and I regretted dragging him into this. I should’ve handed the box over as evidence. I should’ve used my cane tonight and I should’ve patched that hole in the wall. And a part of me wished I could show Aaron what they did to Richie and maybe then he would see the seriousness of the situation.

  “So who do you think they work for?”

  “I don’t know, but I get the feeling they are the same guys responsible for Richie’s death.”

  “You don’t think Kye sent them?”

  “I can’t be sure, but why offer me money for something she just planned on taking? If she and those guys were working together, I don’t think she would’ve been at Richie’s place alone, unarmed. I’m leaning towards Marie. And I’m starting to think that Kye might be in trouble.”

  Finally, the pain started to subside a little.

  “You’re always telling me what a genius you are,” I said, taking the beer he’d gotten for himself, opening it and downing half of the can, “tell me you got something.”

  “I do not tell you I’m a genius… that is your postulation of me. And, yes, I do have something,” he said, smiling.

  He opened a cabinet door under one of the workbenches and it had a small safe in it, behind a false wall. This was something I’d never noticed before. He opened the safe and took out the box. Somehow, this made me feel better that the box was more secure here than at my place. He placed the box in front of us on the table. Then he flipped it open at the hidden seams that I could still barely see and under Station 13, were the miscellaneous numbers again.

  363259149

  112437387

  “Well, we both think it’s a key, but to what? I checked bank vaults, Pentagon security systems, bond deposit boxes, custom vaults for the rich, even Fort Knox’ security system. I couldn’t find anything that needed a key like this. Even bank vaults with the best security are dual-combination with heat sensors and motion sensors. The Pentagon has program-based security badges, keypunch combinations on certain sections and a lot of manpower. But Knox is different; up to seven people, each having one password known only to them, which have to be entered at the same time to open the vault. So this single little box? It’s not logical. Too vulnerable. And I found nothing that accepts a 13-slot plug. So we know two things. We know what it doesn’t open and we know its custom.”

  “What about missile warheads?”

  “Most of them are designed to accept a code and have a turnkey activation. But, thirteen slots? I could go on for days about the significance of the number 13. There are 13 lunar cycles in every solar year. In history, we have the sum of 13 recurring endlessly. There’s the 12 disciples plus one messiah; there were 12 Knights of the Round Table plus one king. Then there’s the 20 days in the Aztec calendar that are numbered only 1 through 13. There’s the superstitious ‘Friday the 13th,’ stemming from 1307 when King Philip the Fourth started the eradication of the Knights Templar. But I couldn’t find anything that I could relate to this box.”

  He paused and got up to grab a beer from the fridge and smiled.

  “What?”

  “Well, the whole thing doesn’t make sense. It looks electrical, but it’s not. There are 13 slots on it, but all receptacles work one way — there’s a hot, a neutral and a ground. So I’m supposed to assume that it accepts six hot, six neutrals and one ground. It’s redundant for something so small.”

  “Then why are you smiling?”

  “I think I figured out the numbers.”

  Now he had my attention.

  “I checked everything. At first, I thought it was a cipher for a technical algorithm.”

  I shook my head to let him know I wasn’t following him.

  “It’s basically a code that would reveal a set of instructions. This wasn’t the case, but look at what’s not there in the numbers. There’s no symbols, no negatives, no positives, no letters, just random numbers. So it’s not a cipher. I even checked call numbers at the Library of Congress. Then I thought to myself, if I had something of grea
t value and I lost it, how would I get it returned to me?”

  “I’d say put your address on it or your cell number, but that doesn’t look like either,” I said.

  Aaron smiled like I was on the right track.

  “I think they are longitude and latitude. Now, granted there are no decimals. There are no negative signs and no way for me to know which set of numbers is longitude and which is latitude. I plugged the numbers in, switching up north and south and east and west several times. I ended up in an ocean or a sea. Then, I tried switching up the degrees. I tried 3 and 36 for the first set of numbers; we know it’s not going to be 363 because a full rotation of the earth stops at 360 degrees. Then I changed the degrees on the second number from 11 to 112. Assuming they are in order, the only thing that made sense was this.”

  He opened a laptop and entered in a web address and turned the computer toward me. It was a GPS site. The numbers, once entered, were coordinates to some place in the Grand Canyon as far as I could tell.

  “Wanna go on a trip?” Aaron said.

  “This doesn’t make sense. If it’s a key, what’s it going to open in the Grand Canyon?” I said.

  “I don’t know. But I think it’s interesting that it’s located in a place that will never be altered or developed by man. And this is a restricted flight zone for some reason. Plus, you should read some of the history behind this place about the pueblo people and their ancestors.”

  “I’ve been to Hopi Point. There’s nothing there.”

  “Yep, you stood on the edge of a cliff and looked down at it in awe. Have you been in it?”

  “No.”

  “The coordinates are not Hopi Point. They are the north rim of the canyon, west of the Kaibab Trail. Not the most visited place in the world.”

  I was familiar with the Grand Canyon and if we weren’t on the trail, it meant we were taking mules and hiking. It was majestic, but impossible for me to hike with my bad knee.

  “I can’t hike with this knee,” I said.

  “No, man. We’ll take my plane.”

  “You have a plane?” I was dumbfounded and he was serious. “How come you didn’t tell me you have a plane?”

  “You didn’t ask and I know you hate flying.”

  “You fly planes?”

  “No, I have an on-call pilot.”

  “Is there anything else I forgot to ask about?” I wasn’t sure if I wanted him to answer.

  “No, not really.”

  I’m sure my expression said it all, but I decided to ask more about it later.

  I looked back at the y-shaped crevice on the satellite picture and hit the zoom. It was surrounded by rocks and it was deep… possibly thousands of feet deep.

  “You have a pilot that can land a plane in this terrain?” I said.

  “It’s a small plane and he could set it down on the tip of a glacier if he had to.”

  He laughed and I guess it made sense that he owned a plane. He clearly had money. He’d offered to pay for my knee surgery more than once. I didn’t know how he obtained the money, but at this point, I didn’t care. Once, a couple years back, he mentioned something about a business venture that had done well. It must have done very well.

  Then I thought about the plane. The thought of flying made me a little more than uneasy. I didn’t like heights, but there was a part of me that had to ride it out. I had to know what the box opened.

  CHAPTER 13

  AS AARON WAS MAKING PLANS for us to leave, I was headed back to my place. Even though I knew it was stupid and dangerous, I had to know if Kye had left another message and I couldn’t leave Zero there.

  I could’ve just called Frankie, the owner of Valentino’s and asked him to look over Zero and the apartment, but there was a part of me that said Kye would be there.

  It was almost midnight when I got there and as I limped up the stairs to the second floor, I could already see my door had been busted open again. This time, all three bolts were torn through the trim and drywall. To make everything worse, I just then remembered I took something at Aaron’s. I felt slow and a little groggy. I pulled out the pistol from my ankle holster and flicked the safety off.

  Even with the painkiller Aaron gave me, my heart started pounding. The apartment looked worse than last time. Everything was pulled out of the kitchen cabinets and thrown on the floor. There weren’t a whole lot of broken dishes, due to the fact that I didn’t have much left to break. My papers were pushed off my desk onto the floor and both lamps were broken. The living room was dimly lit, but both the kitchen light and the bedroom light were still on.

  I slowly crept in and heard someone talking in my bedroom. I wasn’t alone. Fortunately, they hadn’t heard me come up the stairs. I tried to remember where all the creaks were in the wood flooring and I didn’t see Zero anywhere.

  They weren’t expecting me and when I got a clear view, I recognized both of them as the same two guys I saw in the café. It was unlikely I would return after the events that had occurred earlier. Or, rather I should say, it would be really dumb of me to return here.

  I took two silent steps into my apartment and I could see one of the guys was actually halfway under my bed. The other was standing over him with his back to me, laughing at him.

  “Come here, you stupid mutt!” I heard one of them say.

  Now I was pissed. Zero was a tiny dog, but he was my tiny dog. I could hear him whimpering under the bed and I gritted my teeth. Four more silent steps and I was right behind the guy that was laughing.

  I put the pistol to the back of his head and whispered, “don’t say a word.”

  He was silent and still. I checked under his arms and removed a .44 I found in his left shoulder-holster. I then checked the rest of his body for more guns in a record half a second. Silently, I placed his gun on my dresser. Using his own cuffs, I had his hands behind him and cuffed before his partner realized that there was a third pair of occupied shoes in the room.

  His partner’s gun was lying on the floor next to the nightstand, but I rushed over to it and kicked it into the living room before his hand reached it. This sent another shot of pain through my knee which I tried to conceal.

  “I’ve already got your buddy cuffed, so come out slow!”

  The man under the bed slowed his movements.

  “I wanna’ see your hands now!”

  The man moved his hands out where I could see them and cautiously scooted out from under the bed.

  “Get up!”

  The man slowly stood, keeping his hands in the air. He had to be six-foot-five. He was at least a half-foot taller than the guy I cuffed and neither of them was scrawny. When he saw my face, his expression relaxed, but I didn’t know why. He reached for something behind his back and I panicked.

  “Keep ‘em where I can see ‘em!” I said, aiming my pistol at him.

  “You’re not gonna’ shoot us, Lewis,” he said, straightening his suit. “Why don’t you check my buddy’s wallet?”

  I stepped behind the man I cuffed, so the other couldn’t see my arm moving to the dresser drawer and without looking, I took out my own cuffs.

  “Get back-to-back,” I said, but neither of them moved. I wasn’t sure what I was doing, but I felt justified. So I smacked the butt of my pistol on the cuffed man’s head. Not as hard as I could, but hard enough to make him fall to his knees.

  “How ‘bout now?” I said, to his buddy.

  The cuffed guy slowly stood up and his buddy turned his back to him. I swung around the guy I hit on the head and inter-looped the cuffs so they were pinned together. I patted the other one down and grabbed both of their wallets. When I opened the wallet, there it was. The badges looked real enough; I’d seen many of them in my career.

  FBI.

  My stomach dropped to my feet and my heart was now in my throat. Even the slightly grogginess I felt was now completely gone. I just committed assault against not one, but two federal agents. I tried to hide the shock and up until this point, my door was bu
sted open and it looked like they were gonna kill my dog and then me. The same two guys that had chased me — a disabled cop — without identifying themselves as the FBI. My place was trashed, so my assumptions were completely accurate and my actions acceptable, up until now. Except for that part about stealing evidence from Richie’s place and hitting the one agent over the head.

  “You don’t want to do this, Lewis,” the tall one said.

  Assuming the place was bugged, I only had seconds to get out. I called for Zero, who would’ve normally jumped into my arms, but now came slowly limping out from under the bed. My heart sank at the sight of him. Agents always did whatever they wanted. I looked quickly in their pockets for a warrant and found nothing.

  “I don’t see a warrant here,” I said, letting them know I knew procedure.

  “The door was busted open when we got here.”

  “Sure it was,” I said, my voice full of cynicism.

  “That box doesn’t belong to you and you’re going to jail for interfering with a federal investigation! And you can tack assault on to that now!” one of them said.

  It was an intimidation tactic. Neither of them had FBI vests on and neither of them immediately disclosed they were with the FBI. They weren’t on an official investigation. I knew the box didn’t belong to them and nothing they said was going to distract me. They came here for one reason: leverage. Even if all they could find was my dog. I grabbed all the extra rounds for both guns from under the sink and, with my broken dog and my broken knee, I headed to Lolita’s place. And all I could think about was how screwed I was.

  When I reached Lolita’s, I went to the third floor, grateful her building had elevators and knocked on the door, hoping she was home. When she opened the door, she was wearing a white see-through teddy, like she was expecting a customer.

  “Kegger,” she said, surprised to see me.

  The teddy was distracting. She didn’t even try to hide it, just letting the door swing all the way open. For a second, I’d forgotten why I was there and then the dog in my arm reminded me.