Blood Money Page 14

  Jessica had dropped her gaze and was shaking her head.

  “It was the only way I could cope,” Kelton said, feeling the sudden urge to defend his actions. “I figured it was either start over completely, or stumble through life chronically depressed, always worried about whether or not I was going to have a relapse, like some damn alcoholic. I couldn’t live like that. No way. It would have driven me crazy. I knew I had to either move on completely, or give up. There was no middle ground. And just to make sure I didn’t accidentally trigger a relapse, I swore off letting myself get involved with someone ever again.”

  “That’s one hell of a difficult way to live,” Jessica said.

  Kelton shrugged. “Maybe so, but it’s the only choice I had. I least, that’s what I thought. And then I met you.”

  Jessica looked at him, her face a conflicting storm of emotions. Then she stood up, walked towards him, leaned down, grasped him by the neck, and gave him a hug.

  Kelton returned the embrace, whispered to her, “I don’t know where this leaves us.”

  “Don’t worry about that now,” Jessica replied, her voice as soft as his but laced with an undercurrent of regret. “If you want to talk about it later, we can. But right now, I think it’s best if I give you a little space, let you have some time to yourself. I’m going to take a shower, and when I get out, we can decide where to go from there.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Jessica had just climbed into the shower when the cell phone Willis had left in the car started to ring.

  Kelton shoved the newly reawakened emotions back to their hiding place and picked the phone up off the counter, flipped it open, and brought it to his ear. “Talk to me, bro.”

  “It’s no good,” Willis said.

  Kelton’s heart sank into his stomach. “They’re still onto us?”

  “Like glue,” Willis said. “Three cars arrived in town shortly after you did. One is disguised as a locksmith van. It’s sitting in the parking lot of the restaurant across the street from the hotel. The other two are Crown Vics strategically placed at both ends of town. They can both see the main road but aren’t quite visible from it, unless you know where to look.”

  “Are you positive they’re Feds?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  “Dammit,” Kelton said. “And you’re still certain we made the entire trip out here on our own?”

  “Absolutely,” Willis said. “You were alone the whole drive out.”

  “Which means at some point we lost them—”

  “And then they were able to pick you up again after you arrived at your destination.”

  Kelton closed his eyes, took a deep breath. “So then the question becomes; how?”

  “I’ve given that a little thought,” Willis said.

  “And what did you come up with?”

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On whether or not you’re positive the transmitter was planted in Jessica’s shoe.”

  Kelton thought about this for a moment, then said, “We just assumed it was because there wasn’t any other place it could be. Her shoes were the only thing that had been with us the whole time.”

  “So you never actually scanned for bugs.”

  “We never had the opportunity,” Kelton said. “But it doesn’t matter. We ditched absolutely everything before we started on this latest trek. So even if they had planted the transmitter somewhere else, we would have left it back at the hospital.”

  “Not necessarily,” Willis said.

  “What do you mean?”

  A brief pause, then Willis said, “Have you ever heard of Lojack?”

  “The vehicle recovery system?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course,” Kelton said. “Why? Don’t tell me the car that you hooked us up with had it installed.”

  “Not exactly,” Willis said.

  “Then why did you bring it up?”

  Willis told him.

  Kelton listened to Willis’s explanation, paused a moment to let the implications of it sink in, then said, “You’re kidding me, right?” even though he already knew the answer to his query.

  “I wish I was,” Willis said.

  “All right then,” Kelton said. “I guess I’ll take it from here. Talk to you later amigo. And thanks.”

  “No problem, I just wish I could have done more.”

  Kelton closed the phone, set it on the table, and made his way over to the bathroom. The shower had stopped while he was talking to Willis.

  He knocked on the door and pushed it open a few inches. From his angle, he could see Jessica standing in front of the mirror, drying her hair, her body otherwise exposed. “Do you mind if I come in?”

  “I guess that depends,” she said.

  “On what?”

  “On whether or not you mind seeing me naked.”

  “Actually, that’s exactly how I want to see you,” Kelton said.

  She turned towards the door, a confused half-smile on her face. “Then I guess you can come on in.”

  Kelton opened the door, stepped into the bathroom, and looked her exquisite body over from head to toe, then back up again, pausing three quarters of the way up.

  “Is everything all right?” Jessica said, her head tilted at a questioning angle, her smile fading.

  Kelton didn’t answer. He was too busy staring at the three inch, stitched-up gash on the back of her arm and wondering if Willis was right. It didn’t seem possible, but there wasn’t any other plausible explanation.

  “What?” Jessica said, her grin now completely gone.

  Kelton pointed at the stitches. “You said you cut your arm when they chased you down in the desert, right?”

  “Yeah,” she said, her eyes narrowing. “I crashed my car trying to get away from them.”

  “And when you woke up in their custody, your arm was already stitched up?”

  “That’s right,” Jessica said. “Along with the cut over my nose. Why?”

  Kelton cleared his throat, locked eyes with her. “I think they stuck something in you before they stitched you up.”

  Jessica looked at him as though he had a third ear growing from the center of his forehead. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “A transmitter,” Kelton said. “In your arm. Under your skin.”

  Jessica’s mouth started to twitch, as though she was debating whether to smile or frown. “You’re just messing with me again, right?”

  “I wish I was.”

  She continued to stare at him for a few moments before finally coming to the realization that he was telling the truth. Fear began to creep into her eyes and her voice dropped to little more than a whisper. “That’s not even possible, is it?”

  “Apparently it is. According to Willis, the program is nicknamed Lojack. It’s an internal transmitter system, hooked up to a series of dedicated satellites.”

  Jessica’s brow was raised and her eyes open wide. “And you’re saying this transmitter is inside my body?”

  Kelton nodded.

  “But you said the bug was in my shoe,” Jessica said in a desperate, if not quite pleading, tone.

  “I assumed it was, but since we ditched the shoes and they’re still on to us, obviously I was wrong.”

  She threw up her right hand, palm out. “Back up a minute. They’re still on to us?”

  Kelton nodded. “Willis spotted three cars within the town limits, all occupied.”

  “And he’s sure they’re Feds?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about the phone?” Jessica said, the words hurtling out of her. “Suppose they were listening all along, and they knew where we were meeting Willis, and they got to the hospital before us, saw what car we took, and followed us out here?”

  Kelton was shaking his head.

  “Why not? You said yourself that you didn’t trust it. Why couldn’t they have been listening the whole time?”

  “Because they wouldn�
��t have let us take things as far as we did,” Kelton said. “If they were listening to the phone from the beginning, they would have stepped in the moment they knew we were aware of their involvement. Besides, we were alone the whole drive over. Never once was there someone following us. But after we arrived here, they picked up our trail again. If their only source of information was the phone, they only would have been able to track us to the hospital, not all the way here. And they certainly wouldn’t have been able to pick us up after we’d lost them.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “There are no buts,” Kelton said. “They only way they could have picked us up after they’d lost us is if they had us bugged. But we ditched everything at the hospital. Which means that their bug had to be somewhere else. And there’s really only one place it could be.”

  “Inside me,” Jessica said in a resigned tone.

  Kelton nodded.

  She sat down on the toilet and dropped her head into her hands. When she looked up a few seconds later, Kelton was slightly surprised to see her eyes filled with rage instead of fear. “What the fuck is going on here?” she said.

  “I have no idea,” Kelton replied. “But we’re sure as hell going to find out.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Fifteen minutes later Jessica was sitting on a chair in the bathroom, facing the mirror. Her right arm was lying on the countertop, situated so that her tricep was hovering over the sink.

  On the counter to her right was a bottle of Jack Daniels, a roll of gauze, a tube of Neosporin, a pair of tweezers, a needle and some string, a pair of scissors, a bucket of ice, and a small container of ibuprofen. They’d purchased everything at the little store in the lobby. Kelton would have liked to have real surgical equipment to operate with, but knew that was an impossibility in this little town, especially with eyes watching them for anything out of the ordinary.

  Kelton looked at Jessica in the mirror and nodded his head once. “Are you ready to do this?”

  “No,” she said. “But we have no choice, right?”

  “Not really.”

  Jessica threw a couple of the ibuprofen in her mouth, picked up the bottle of Jack, and took a swig, shuddering slightly as it went down. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Then let’s get it over with.”

  Kelton grabbed a towel from the wall, folded it over a couple of times, and told Jessica to open her mouth. He put the towel between her teeth and told her to bite down when the pain was too much to bear. He grabbed a cube of ice and rubbed it along the stitches on back of her arm, causing them to puff up a bit. He picked up the scissors, held them over the sink, and poured some of the whiskey over them. Then he snipped at the string near the edge of the wound. He grabbed the end of the string with the tweezers and pulled. The stitches came right out.

  Jessica never made a sound, not even when Kelton pulled the threads of the transmitter from her muscle fibers. At the end though, her face was beet red and her breath came in ragged gasps.

  Kelton re-stitched the wound, took the towel from her mouth and shook it out. He then spread antiseptic on the wound and bound it in gauze. “Are you doing all right?”

  Jessica nodded but didn’t say anything. Then she pushed Kelton out of the way, shuffled forward, fell to her knees and threw up into the toilet.

  “That was sexy,” Kelton said.

  “Tasted good too,” Jessica replied with a grim smile. “Come over here and give me a kiss me so I can prove it to you.”

  “Thanks for the offer, but I think I’ll pass.”

  She shrugged. “Suit yourself. But you don’t know what you’re missing.”

  Kelton couldn’t help but smile. “It’s good to see you still have your sense of humor. You must not be feeling too bad.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” Jessica said. She flushed the toilet and climbed to her feet. Stepping past Kelton, she made her way to the sink and turned on the faucet. She rinsed out her mouth and splashed some water on her face.

  After drying off, she spotted the small piece of metal he’d pulled out of her sitting on the counter. Her hand was shaking as she picked it up. It looked like a small watch battery.

  “So this is it, huh?” Jessica said. “Tiny little sucker, isn’t it?”

  Kelton nodded and finished wiping the rest of her blood off the counter with a wet Kleenex.

  Jessica shook her head and set the transmitter back on the counter, walked out of the bathroom and plopped herself down on the bed. “I can’t believe they put this damn thing inside of me. I mean, what the hell? Who do these people think they are?”

  “That’s a good question, actually.”

  She straightened up and looked at him. “What do you mean?”

  “Exactly what it sounds like,” Kelton said. He pulled the chair away from the desk, dragged it over towards the bed, and sat down. “Who are the people behind this thing? Really?”

  “I thought you said they were FBI?”

  “That’s what Walter told me, and that’s what they wanted us to think, but obviously, something other than what we thought is going on here, which means there’s no reason to believe that the FBI is really behind this operation. Especially with this latest development. There’s no way the FBI would plant a bug inside you like that. It’s just too risky. They don’t operate like that, at least, not anymore.”

  “But who else could it be?”

  Kelton shrugged. “Homeland Security. CIA. ICE. Or some other obscure agency.”

  “It sounds like you’re venturing into some muddy water,” Jessica said. “You know how Earl feels about conspiracy theories.”

  “It’s not conspiracy, it’s fact,” Kelton said. “There are twice as many agencies operating now than there were before 9/11. And that only includes ones operating on an official level. Who knows how many more work behind the scenes, away from the public eye?”

  Jessica grimaced slightly, shook her head. “I don’t know . . .”

  “I don’t either,” Kelton said. “And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that one of these shadowy agencies is definitely behind this thing. What I am saying is that so far, everything we’ve thought to be the truth has been wrong. Which means that the only thing we truly know at this point is that we know absolutely nothing. And maybe it doesn’t bother you much, but being completely in the dark makes me mighty uncomfortable. Especially with so much on the line.”

  “And I suppose you want to do something about that?”

  Kelton nodded.

  “Might I ask what?”

  “You can ask.”

  “But you won’t tell me?”

  “I’ll tell you,” Kelton said. “But I don’t think you’re going to like what you hear.”

  “Oh, just spit it out already.”

  Kelton flashed a tight smile. “We’re going to turn ourselves in.”

  Jessica snorted through her nose, offered a slight shake of her head. “You’re right,” she said. “I don’t like it. Not one bit.”

  “I figured you wouldn’t, but we’re going to do it anyway.”

  “What about the agreement we made back at Disneyland?”

  “What about it?”

  “Doesn’t it mean anything to you?”

  “Of course it does,” Kelton said.

  “It sure doesn’t seem like it.”

  He narrowed his brow. “What makes you say that?”

  “You mean, besides you still making all the decisions without consulting me first?”

  “I agreed to tell you what we were going to do before we did it,” Kelton said. “Nothing more. I never agreed to let you have a say in what we were going to do.”

  “I thought that was implied,” Jessica said.

  He shrugged. “I’m sorry that you thought that, but I never viewed things that way.”

  “So we’re going to do this thing, no matter how stupid I think it is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I at least argue with you about it?”


  “If it makes you feel better, go right ahead.”

  Jessica looked out the window for a moment before returning her gaze to Kelton. “Walter doesn’t want you doing this, right?”

  “He doesn’t know about it.”

  “But if he did, he wouldn’t like it.”

  “I’m sure he wouldn’t,” Kelton said. “He told me to lose the tail and give him a call to set up the next meeting point. Nothing more.”

  “But you want to do this instead.”

  “I sure as hell don’t want to do it,” Kelton said. “But I need to do it. I can’t run around blindly like this anymore, especially with the situation changing every time we turn around. I need to know what’s going on.”

  “And you think that turning ourselves in to the people who are following us around is the solution?”

  “It may not be the solution, but it’s the only thing that makes sense. Plus, it may be the only way to save our own asses.”

  “But what if they just decide to lock us up and throw away the key.”

  “They won’t,” Kelton said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because they’ve invested way too much into this chase to give it up now.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Hell yes,” Kelton said. “The way this thing has played out, these guys are casting for a big fish. And we’re nothing but the bait.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  They drove through the desert for half an hour before Kelton found an unpaved road that looked like it would serve their purpose. He turned onto it and drove further out into the sand, only the occasional shrub brush and cacti breaking the monotony of the wasteland before them.

  Jessica looked at him with a hint of concern. “Is this really a good idea? There’s nothing out here.”

  “That’s the point,” Kelton said. “No place to run, no place to hide. And once we destroy the transmitter that was in your arm, our pursuers will know the jig is up, and they’ll come down on us hard. And when they do, we’ll let them know we want to turn ourselves in.”