Pet Page 7

  After pulling out the top tarp, I fold it double and lay it on the floor, then unceremoniously roll Fowler out of the cargo area. He limply lands on the floor without so much as a grunt, meaning he’s still deeply out of it.

  My luck’s still holding, apparently.

  Rolling him onto his back, I grab the top corners of the tarp and drag it and him, feet first, into the house and up the stairs to the master bathroom. This is a logistics issue I thought through on my drive here. I don’t have a basement in this house, unfortunately. There’s an old root cellar out back, just behind the house, but not connected to it. That’s not secure enough for my tastes, and would mean having more contact with him that’s avoidable, for now. There’s no window in this room, though, so that gives me a small measure of security. I’ll sleep right outside the door to hear him if he stirs.

  Once he’s stretched out on the bathroom floor, I pull the tarp out from under him and fold it so I can return it to the garage. From there I grab a length of chain that’ll work perfectly, and a couple of padlocks, along with the hood he wore earlier. I’ll have to get him some clothes, because he’s somewhat smaller than I am. Mine’ll do for now.

  Not that he’ll need them immediately.

  I tether one end of the chain around the base of the toilet, and the other I tightly secure around his waist, locking it snugly enough he can’t shimmy out of it. I’m not stupid enough to uncuff him yet, but as he is now, once he’s conscious, he’ll be able to use the toilet without my assistance, as well as drink from the sink. Maybe even wash off in the tub, if he’s careful.

  One more thing.

  I take out my knife and cut his soiled briefs off him and get my first look at him completely naked.

  Not bad. He’s kept himself in shape. I spot the ancient scars on his legs, where he took the bullet and the burns sustained when the car bomb exploded. Other scars on his torso and arms, maybe from that, but some look newer.

  Rolling him over, I see on his lower back, about where a tramp stamp would be, it looks like someone carved a triangle about three inches across. It’s old, too, and it’s too perfect to be an accidental injury.

  It gets added to my mental list of discussion topics with Fowler, once I let him wake up.

  Now, with the light on and the hood off, I can also get a better look at his face close up without him staring back at me. Despite the abuse I heaped on him, he really is handsome. The only current pictures I have of him besides his old military one are from passport and ID photos and some grainy surveillance photos that don’t do him justice. I only have the one candid picture of him in his youth, but I definitely would have done him back then.

  I put the hood on him again and lock the small chain around the neck opening so he can’t get it off yet, just in case he awakens before I’m finished. I want him off-balance and pliable, and keeping him helpless like this will help. It’ll have to come off once I start pumping an IV and more meds into him, because if he pukes I don’t want him choking on it.

  He’s also going to need to be hosed off, because he smells of piss and shit, where his bowels and bladder let loose during the drive, and that’s just gross. Fortunately, that didn’t happen until after we’d crossed the border.

  I add cleaning the back of the SUV to my mental list of tasks to perform. Fortunately, the tarp he was on in there contained it.

  The bathroom locks from the inside, unfortunately. I return to the garage, which contains some random shit from the previous tenant, and locate a barrel bolt installed on a wooden storage cabinet. It’s not much, but I remove it from its current location, scrounge up some longer screws, and take everything upstairs where I install it on the bedroom side of the door.

  It wouldn’t hold me for thirty seconds, even at my age. I could just kick the door open. But Fowler’s manacled and unconscious, and it’s the best I can do for right now. There aren’t any shops open in town this time of day, so getting something more secure will have to wait until daylight.

  I didn’t think I’d ever be bringing anyone here, obviously, or I would have gone with a house with a basement.

  I’m surprised the SUV cleanup only takes me five minutes and I bag the soiled tarps to throw away later, setting the garbage bag outside. I leave the SUV’s windows open to help air it out, too. With that handled, I take a few minutes to finally grab a shower in the other bathroom. It’s the first one I’ve had in a couple of days, and I savor the sting of hot water sluicing over my aching muscles.

  It’ll be rough going tomorrow—I will feel every day of my fifty-seven years. Throwing on jeans and a charcoal Henley, I head down to the kitchen and take a couple of ibuprofen before I make myself a sandwich. As I eat, I make a mental list.

  Medical supplies

  Groceries

  Clothes for Fowler

  I close my eyes and think for a moment. I have Fowler’s wallet and other belongings I confiscated when we captured him, including two cell phones that I pulled the batteries and SIM cards from until I can look at them in controlled conditions so they don’t ping anywhere. Depending on what happens, there might be a trip to Berlin in my future so I can go through his flat there.

  New ID for Fowler

  If I keep him alive. It’ll cost me money I’d rather not spend, but I can take it out of Fowler’s hide, one way or another.

  Wait, am I really not going to kill him?

  Sure feels like I’ve already made the decision to keep him alive.

  I guess it’ll depend on what he does next, and if I can trust him or not.

  Or if he tries to kill me.

  That won’t work out so well for him, if he does.

  But if, as I suspect, I’m onto the truth about him, it might never come to that.

  Grab some toys

  All my personal shit’s back in Paris in my flat there, including my toybag. The kitchen here is bare-bones in the way of cookware and pervertibles, like silicone spatulas and wooden spoons. I’ll pick up a few things I can use.

  Lube and condoms.

  I’m not an animal, after all. Might not end up needing them, but why not be prepared?

  Pulling out my phone, I look up several items. Amazon reaches even this little Slovakian mud puddle not too far east of Bratislava. There’s a small post office in town with delivery lockers, and I order a few things to have sent there.

  Once I finish eating, I’ll retrieve my kit from the SUV and haul it upstairs. I have several bags of IV fluids I can push into him to help with the dehydration, and enough sedatives to keep him pliant for a week or more before I’ll need to venture out for those kinds of supplies.

  Hardware store.

  Feed store, if it’s not the hardware store.

  Large-animal vet.

  They’re easily bribed to provide drugs that can be used on a human. Like Ketamine and other sedatives.

  I set my phone aside and ponder my options.

  The more I think about this entire assignment, now that I have a moment to think, the more it stinks of desperation and cleaning house. I didn’t like the feeling this assignment gave me from the start but I’m not usually one to question orders.

  It is ironic that the man I’ve been hunting from afar for years and looking for an opportunity to take down—literally, or metaphorically with his career and reputation—might be even closer now because he possibly had a hand in trying to erase his own history.

  Hopefully Carter is safe because of his visibility. I doubt the general is stupid enough to go after him when Carter is currently the governor’s chief of staff and about to transition into being Florida’s First Gentleman. Besides, Carter will have a security detail he might not otherwise have had because of the kids. And Carter is semi-famous after Susa’s miraculous rescue. The whole world saw him on TV, played on a grief-porn loop, after her plane went down. At the time, I stayed incognito and didn’t take any assignments until she was found and that resulting chaos died down.

  Fowler has to be kept alive. If I can
gain his trust—which might be difficult after beating the crap out of him while interrogating him—I might be able to find out what’s really going on here and win him over into helping me.

  One way or another, I want to learn everything about Carter’s connection to Fowler, why someone might really want Fowler dead instead of prosecuted, and ascertain if Carter’s in any danger as a result.

  If it means I can finally take out retired General Coltrane Cunningham for good in the process, all the better.

  Chapter Nine

  I’d rather sleep naked but I should be prepared in case Fowler wakes up earlier than I planned. After removing his hood and making sure he’s still breathing, I wedge a solid wooden chair from the kitchen under the doorknob of the master bathroom, check the doors and windows all around the house one last time, and settle in to sleep on top of the covers with my Glock right beside me on the bed.

  I’m fucking exhausted. I don’t sleep well to start with, obviously, given my line of work. Haven’t in too many years to remember.

  Only when I’m securely locked inside my flat in Paris do I actually sleep halfway decently. What I guess could be called my personal baseline of “sleeping well.” Even then, sleeping “well” means I only wake up a few times during the night instead of sitting up over every single sound I hear, and my dreams aren’t nightmares that sit me bolt upright and drench me in cold sweat.

  Tonight, I dream about Pete and Tom. About standing there in Dover on the tarmac in my dress uniform, next to my other brothers, my father, and my mother, as we all watch the C-130 Hercules touch down.

  It was only coincidence I was in the States at that time. Just a six-month stint there in DC for training before I was slated to return to Germany and my next assignment.

  I remember the feel of the weight of their coffins as we carried them, one at a time, my brothers and my father, along with one of the soldiers supposed to be doing this duty.

  But Dad had laid down an order we would unload them as part of the honor guard, and the unit’s CO was a friend of his and approved it.

  All of us silently crying, we carried them to the hearses awaiting to ferry them to Port Mortuary for official processing before they would be returned to us.

  There wasn’t a way to have any kind of viewing for either of them, and Dad wouldn’t let Mom or any of us even ask to see their bodies, even after they’d been…processed.

  Even though it angered me at the time, in retrospect, I’m reasonably sure that was for the best. Losing both of them nearly killed Mom. Seeing them in “disassociated” pieces might have been too much for her to bear. None of us needed to remember them like that. It was better we had the memory of the last time we were all together strong in our minds, a snapshot taken to forever cement their smiling faces in our hearts.

  It wasn’t until two weeks later, after we’d buried them both in Arlington, next to each other, that I was able to drag myself out of my grief enough to start looking into the circumstances surrounding their deaths. I didn’t tell anyone else that, either. I had a feeling Dad would shut me down, if he knew.

  Except I guess I’m not a great soldier after all. I don’t blindly accept orders without sometimes digging deeper into them.

  Like learning the CO my younger brothers served under, one Colonel Coltrane Cunningham, was a massive fuck-up. A man who, after three years in the desert, had racked up over two hundred personnel KIA under his command—the highest fatality rate of any active-duty unit—and had finally been transferred back to riding a desk in Germany, where at the time I thought he could do minimal damage. The only reason he hadn’t been booted was because apparently he held a lot of dirt on other people. I wasn’t able to get much farther than that in my quest because of his rank and status and mine.

  Meanwhile, I seethed.

  My eyes snap open in the dark and I listen for a moment, my hand already wrapped around the Glock.

  No sounds from the bathroom.

  Just to make sure, I get up and listen at the door. After a moment, I hear a soft, even rattle of breath that’s not quite a snore from the other side, meaning Fowler’s still unconscious.

  Returning to the bed, I lie on top of the covers again and stare at the ceiling. Cunningham is another reason I remained in Europe for so long. I knew if I followed him to the States immediately after he retired to Florida, I would kill him.

  There were three times I almost did it in Germany, and he had no clue I was even there. One time, he was leaving a private house sex party of some sort, but someone else exited after him and would have seen me had I scooped him up then.

  Despite my thirst for vengeance, I was smart enough to know when to walk away because I didn’t have a plan for any contingency.

  To be honest, back then at least I was smart enough to know not to be hasty and stupid. To carefully plan. And even then to pull back if in doubt because no plan survives contact with the enemy.

  Case in point is lying on the bathroom floor behind the flimsy wooden door just off the end of my bed.

  I don’t know what I’ll do with him if he refuses to give me what I want, or if I don’t like his answers.

  I guess I can always bury him in the root cellar and hang on to this house for a while longer before burning it to the ground at some future point. It’s not traceable to me.

  But the more I think about it, the more I wonder about the possibilities.

  It would be really shitty of me to play off my resemblance to my little brother to worm my way into Fowler’s mind, wouldn’t it?

  Yeah, it totally would.

  Which is why that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

  If I’m lucky, Fowler will crumble, and I’ll not only have a chance for revenge but a permanent playtoy in my bed. Fowler doesn’t have anyone in this world, so it’s not like I’m taking him away from a family.

  Yeah, I’m a bastard. I admit it.

  What’s your point?

  A little before dawn, I give up trying to sleep. When I get up, I hurt like a motherfucker, just as I expected. After downing a power bar to settle my growling stomach and swallowing a couple of Tylenol, I open the bathroom door to check on Fowler, gently prodding him with my foot.

  Fowler’s still out of it. He also fucking stinks, but I’m not doing anything about that right now.

  I retrieve a bag of IV saline and the required supplies from my kit and prep a bolus of sedation to keep him out while I run my errands. It takes me a minute to find a vein on him, because he’s so dehydrated and my field medic skills are damned rusty, but after three tries I finally get it started, tape it into place, use a bungee cord to hang the bag from the shower curtain rod, set it to a slow drip to help rehydrate him, and then push the sedation dose.

  I wait about ten minutes, checking his pulse to make sure I haven’t put him too deep and need to reverse the effects, but apparently I guessed right. Hopefully he’ll still be alive when I return.

  After killing the bathroom light, I lock him in the bathroom again and wedge the door in place with the chair. I also move one of my interior cameras to focus on the bathroom door. It has a built-in mic, so I can listen in while I’m out and about.

  It’s not much, but it’s something.

  It takes me three hours to run my errands in the SUV—which now doesn’t stink of shit and piss, fortunately—and return to the house.

  First thing, I check on him, and he’s still asleep and snoring.

  Well, if the poor bastard was sleep deprived, this’ll give him a good chance to catch up, I guess.

  Once he gets over the K-hole he’ll likely be dealing with on the other end of things, from the first dose I gave him when I moved him.

  Quickly unloading everything, I only take time to stow the perishables in the fridge and stage things I’ll need upstairs near the bathroom door. It takes me ten minutes to install the new barrel bolts and the locks on the bedroom door and window. How long it takes the man to graduate from prisoner to pet will depend on him and
his actions.

  I plan to speed that process along as quickly as possible. I need to be in Florida in a few weeks, for Susa’s inauguration. This year, that date falls on the second Tuesday of January, so the clock’s ticking. I told Carter I would be there, and I don’t want to disappoint my little brother.

  I might have an additional surprise for Carter, though.

  God, I am such a bastard.

  The last thing I do is pull on a black balaclava, because I don’t want Eddie seeing my face yet. If he does, he’ll know I’m related to Carter. The family resemblance between all of us brothers is unmistakable. It wasn’t uncommon in school for teachers who had more than one of us to accidentally call us by another brother’s name. I’m more likely to get information out of Eddie if he wholeheartedly believes I am a legitimate threat to Carter and his family. Once I have the pertinent info, then I’ll do the reveal.

  With everything ready, I turn on the bathroom lights, push a stimulant to counteract the effect of the sedative, and stand back with my gun ready to wait.

  It takes about three minutes for him to let out a groan and for his eyes to flutter open.

  I step into my full-on bastard mode, including voice, so I don’t sound so much like Carter. “Welcome back, Eddie.”

  He squints against the light, tries to lift a hand and realizes his wrists are manacled—as are his ankles now, because I’m not a fucking idiot—and he stares up at me.

  “Yes, you’re still alive. For now.”

  Either he’s still out of it, or he’s stunned silent, not sure which, but I wait him out. Those drugs are a bitch and a half on a young raver’s system. A man who’s fifty-one definitely won’t shake them off quickly.

  A couple of minutes later, he winces as he tries to sit up, processes there’s an IV in his arm, and looks at me again. “What’s going on?”