Seventy

Ben dialed Reese’s cell number and listened to it ring. He’d been calling him every fifteen minutes ever since he’d hung up with Sabrina’s sexy doctor friend, and he was going to keep calling until that son of a bitch answered.

He wanted his goddamned plane back.

Again, the pilot’s voicemail took over and he disconnected the call without leaving a message, dropping his phone on the counter. Beside him, Avasa whined, pressing her head into his knee, and he dropped his hand to give her head an absentminded pat. “Don’t worry, girl. Sabrina’s gonna be okay. They both will.”

“You talk to dogs. Is that a perk of being raised by wolves?”

He turned toward the doorway connecting the dining room and kitchen to see Mandy Black.

“One of many,” he said, picking up his phone and slipping it into his pocket. “Thanks for coming.”

She shrugged. “I didn’t do it for you,” she said, entering the room. “Besides, I’m not sure what I can do to help.”

“My team consists of a three-and-a-half-foot-tall Russian kidnapping victim, a worried dog, a woman who’s probably been roofied, and a baby,” he said. “Right now, you’re my star player.”

Mandy sank into one of the kitchen chairs, gnawing on her bottom lip. “Where’s Strickland? Or Nickels? Since it was his wife who was roofied, he should be here, don’t you think?”

Ben leaned against the counter, rubbing a thumb across his forehead in an attempt to chase away the headache that was threatening to settle in. “I don’t know.”

“Then that’s what I can do,” she said, pulling out her phone.

“What’s that?”

She gave him a halfhearted smile while dialing her phone. “Recruit better players.”

Within twenty minutes, the kitchen door banged open, Nickels rushing through it, followed by Sabrina’s partner. “Where is she? Where’s my wife? Lucy?” Nickels demanded, eyes wheeling from face to face.

Mandy stood. “She’s upstairs and she’s fine. They both are. They’re sleeping.”

“Vaughn?” Strickland bounced a look between Ben and Mandy. “Where is she?”

Ben took a moment to quiet the emotion that the cop’s question brought to the surface. “I’m not a hundred percent sure, but if I had to take a guess—Colombia.”

“Colombia?” Strickland’s glare zeroed in on him. “Reyes took her?” He looked at Mandy. “Is that what happened?”

Took her? No, my father delivered her like a fucking pizza … “Pretty much,” he said. “I’m working to get a bead on her location. We should know within the hour.” Another lie, but he just threw it onto the pile along with the other ones he’d told.

“Where’s O’Shea?” Nickels said, jaw locked at a dangerous angle.

“Gone.”

“Gone … ” Nickels turned toward Strickland, a harsh bark of laughter ripped out of his throat. “What did I tell you?” He swung his glare back around to settle it on Ben. “I guess his work here was done, huh?”

“Careful, cop.” Ben stood up from the table, leaning across it. “This is your fault, not his.”

Nickels’s jaw slammed shut, and it took him a second to recover. “What did you just say?”

“Oh, I think you heard me—he told you to get them out of here pronto, and yet here you all are.” Ben skirted his way around the table until he was nearly nose to nose with cop. “If you’d done what he’d told you to do, your wife and child wouldn’t have been available to be used as leverage against Sabrina to get her to leave,” he said, thumping Nickels in the chest with his pointer finger. “This isn’t on Michael. This is on you.”

For just a second, it looked like the cop was going to take a swing at him but in the end his shoulders slumped, the fight suddenly gone. “What can I do now?”

Ben took a step back. “Nothing. The damage is already done. Go be with your wife and stay the fuck outta my way.” His phone rang, letting out the first few notes of “Fly Me to the Moon” by Sinatra. He moved into the dining room without excusing himself so he could answer it.

“That kooky bitch better have a gun to your head, Harrison,” he all but growled into the phone. “Because that’s the only acceptable excuse for bouncing my calls into voicemail for nearly two hours straight.”

“Look, I’m sorry—”

“You allowed my father’s minion to hijack my plane. We passed sorry a long time ago.”

Harrison sighed. “It was a direct order from your father, Ben. What did you want me to do?”

He was right. Ben took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Just tell me she’s okay,” he said. They both knew he wasn’t talking about his plane.

“Last I saw her, she was fine.”

“Okay. Great. Fuel up and come get me,” Ben said but his order was met with silence. “Reese.”

“Yeah. Still here.”

“I want my plane back,” he said through clenched teeth.

A shifting. An uncomfortable, almost restless sound. “I can’t.”

Not the words he wanted to hear. “What do you mean, you can’t?”

“I mean, I can’t. You know how you said earlier that the only acceptable excuse for ignoring your calls was if that kooky bitch had a gun to my head?”

Ben sighed. “Yes.”

“Well, it’s not pointed at my head. It’s pointed at my johnson. You’re going to have to find your own ride here, because she says we’re not going anywhere.”

“Where is here?”

“An airfield just east of El Valle, Colombia,” Reese said, rambling off coordinates.

“Have you seen Michael? Is he there yet?”

Another round of silence, like he was waiting for permission to answer. Church was listening in. “He’s not here yet. There were other things he needed to do before your father would clear him to go after Reyes.”

He drew a blank for a few seconds before it hit him. “Pia Cordova.”

Reese didn’t answer. “The kooky bitch says to hurry. We don’t have much time.”

And then the line went dead.

Ben tightened his fist around his cell for a moment before dialing a different number. His father wasn’t the only one who had sleepers.

“I need you to find out where they’re holding Pia Cordova, and then I need you to put a bullet in her skull,” he said, waiting only long enough to get confirmation before hanging up again. He turned, intent on leaving. He had to find a plane to take him to—

Mandy stood in the doorway. The look on her face said she’d heard the order he’d given and for a moment, he was sorry for it.

So naturally, he snapped at her. “No one likes a snoop, Doc.”

She didn’t even try to deny it. “You weren’t raised by wolves. You were raised by sociopaths,” she said, shrinking away from him as he approached. For some reason, he was sorry for that too. And it made him angry.

“Truer words, Doc. Truer words,” he said as he pushed his way past her and out the door.