Terror Stash (17 page)

Montana sat on the bonnet of his car. He had never seen her so filthy and unkempt. Her hair was a witch’s nightmare of tangles and spikes and there was a streak across her cheek that looked like ashes from a fire. Her oversized sweatshirt was muddy and stained with green marks that could be grass stains, unless she was into hugging trees. There was a pink slash across one sleeve that, if he didn’t know better, he’d have said was lipstick.

The jeans were worse—ripped, frayed, discolored. They matched the sneakers beneath.

“What the hell...?” he said.

She pushed hair out of her eyes with the back of one filthy hand. The wondrous green eyes skewered him with a direct stare. “I want you to be the father of my child.”

“No problems,” he said instantly.

* * * * *

A little over fifty minutes later, Steve slid behind the wheel of his car. Tiredness was dragging at his muscles and his mind. He sat for a full minute, holding the steering wheel, trying to absorb the events of the last hour.

He burrowed into his back pocket, pulled out his wallet and dug through the musty corners at the back until he found it. He put the wallet away and turned the photo until the orange security light fell on it through the windscreen.

He touched it with his finger, thoughts bouncing around in his mind like ricochets. After a while he gently put the photo aside, started up the car and drove home. Time for sleep.

If he
could
sleep now.

* * * * *

At nine-thirty the next morning, precisely, Montana tapped on Boyd Nelson’s door. His muffled, abrupt “Come!” wasn’t a good sign. She pushed the door open.

He had his head down over a file of some sort or other, so she sat on the other side of the desk and waited, her legs crossed, her hands folded in her lap.

Finally, he lifted his head to look at her, and blinked, his eyes widening. “Good god, you’re pale as a lily!”

“I’m not feeling very well,” she admitted.

Nelson’s frown deepened. “But...Crystal said...” He shook his head. “Never mind. Perhaps you’d like to explain what happened to you yesterday?”

She bit her lip to stop it trembling. “I’m so sorry about that, Nelson. Honestly, I had the shock of my life yesterday when I went to the doctors. I...I really didn’t know what to do.” She put both hands up to her face. “I suppose I must tell you about this to explain yesterday. Oh god, Nelson, I found out that I’m pregnant.”

Nelson’s mouth opened in a slack-jawed ‘O’, his top chin doubling in length. “Pregnant,” he finally repeated, his voice flat. “You.”

She dabbed at her eyes and gave an almighty sniff. “I was so dazed when I came out of the doctor’s office that I just had to sit and consider it.”

“Hardly a surprise,” he said dryly. “Usually it’s not an employer’s place to ask, Montana, but we’re so far from home I feel I should enquire—delicately—and you can tell me to go to hell if you wish, but....”

“The father?” she asked.

“Well, yes.”

“I went to see him yesterday afternoon. That’s where I was all day. I went down to Margaret River to see him and tell him.”

“I see.” Nelson was getting over his shock now. He threaded his fingers together and leaned back. “So how do you explain the call you made to Crystal Wong yesterday?”

The phone logs. He’d checked the phone logs. She gave a tiny grimace. “I phoned to get a phone number from her. You can ask her, if you like.”

“I did.” Nelson’s voice was suddenly hard and sharp, at complete odds with his melting shape. “I asked her last night before she left her desk, just after I checked the phone log and discovered you’d called her and hadn’t had the decency to check in with me and explain your absence. She gave me the strangest story—that you’d asked for the number of the staffing desk at the Margaret River police station and that you were very upset and agitated. Something about ordering police to the hospital.”

“That’s where I was, Nelson. At the hospital. I wasn’t about to spill my guts to Crystal.” With mentally apologies to Crystal, she curled her lip a little. “She’s just a secretary. I tell her, the whole blessed office hears about it.”

“Then why were you asking her to send police to the hospital?”

“Oh, I see—you don’t get it, do you? The constable at the police station, Steve Scarborough. He’s the father and he wouldn’t take my calls. So I was trying to get him to come to me.”

Nelson sat very still for nearly a full sixty seconds, while his face grew very pink. “Montana, for goodness sake, you’re trying to tell me...I’ve never heard anything so outrageous in my life!”

“Oh god, you don’t believe me....” she whispered. “I so hoped you’d understand and support me in this, Nelson. What I’m going to have to do now...it won’t be easy, and Steve won’t...can’t.” She held her hand over her mouth, the other clutched to her stomach and staggered to her feet. “I think...” She clutched Nelson’s paper-littered desk. “...I’m going to be sick.”

And she was.

* * * * *

White and shaking, Montana stepped out into the fresh morning air along St. George’s Terrace and turned her face into the breeze. It ruffled her hair and cooled her sweaty face.

She dug into her handbag, pulled out her car keys and turned to head for the public car park where she kept her car. She’d taken only a few steps when a black Holden Rodeo pulled up sharply at the curb in front of her. The passenger door opened.

It was her car. She looked at her car keys, put them back in her bag and crossed the wide pavement to the car. She climbed up into the passenger seat.

Caden sat in the driver’s seat, in black jeans and a tee-shirt with the sleeves slashed out of it. He held out to her one of the protein shaker cups that serious gym rats used. “Knock it back. It’s protein and lots of heavyweight carbs to line your stomach and soak up the Ipecac.”

She shut the door and accepted the cup. “Did you hotwire my car, Rawn?”

“And destroy all the wiring under the dash?” He grinned and flicked the keys hanging from the ignition. They were her emergency set. “Found ‘em wired to the chassis right where I figured they’d be.”

He drove well in the heavy traffic, obeying road rules, but making the most of sudden opportunities. After watching him a minute or two, she tried to relax. It had been nearly fifteen years since she had been driven anywhere by anyone and never in her own car.

“Did they believe you?” Caden asked.

“You throw up on your boss’s desk, you tend to get taken at face value. Yeah, they believed me. But I left the phony lab results for him, too.” Caden had created them on her laptop very early that morning, as she had driven them both back to the city. His skill as a forger and his familiarity with the computer were unexpected. The sun had been rising as they’d arrived in the outskirts of the city and he pronounced the task finished.

He glanced at her. “Let me guess. You didn’t like lying to them.”

“No.”

“Get used to it, Montana.” His voice was resonant with experience. “Think of the reasons why you’re doing this and suck it up. It’s part of the territory you’re in and you don’t get to pick the terrain, just the direction.”

There was no sympathy in his voice and contrariwise, it helped. A little. So did the protein shake.

* * * * *

Reluctance weighed her down as Montana pushed open the front door of her house. Very few people had ever been inside the house and Caden’s presence, right next to her, was a stark reminder of that.

He was waiting for her to open the door, his arms weighed down with grocery bags, making the biceps and triceps bulge. His eyes behind the wrap-around sunglasses were unreadable.

She pushed the door open with a convulsive jerk and walked inside. There was no help for it now. He was here.

The house sat atop a steep drive, in the rolling foothills of Lesmurdie. The front of the house was all glass panes and glass doors to take advantage of the view. The view was worth it. It took in the whole of the city, with a tiny glimpse of ocean on the top of the horizon. She had bought the house within a month of arriving in Perth and had never regretted the decision despite the commute to the city. Surrounded by trees and non-nosey neighbors, her house had swiftly become her retreat.

The middle of the house was a big open square. A normal family would have used the area as a dining room, and placed a grand table and chairs in the middle and a sideboard or two along the walls. The ceiling soared up to a twenty-two-foot-high peak, lined with solid jarrah beams that glowed richly in the morning sun pouring through the many windows.

The kitchen shared part of the glass wall at the front of the house, directly in front of the common room and Montana led Caden there, via the common room.

But he stopped short and put the bags down, as he studied the open square. He took off the glasses for a better look and moved his head around as he deliberately examined every element—the professional treadmill in the corner, the stand of dumbbell weights, a weight bench that converted to a chair and the stands holding the bar with two twenty-five-pound plates already threaded on the ends. There was another stand holding more weight plates beside it. In the opposite corner was a cable pulley exercise system—not as extended as one in a commercial gym, but with all the essential pieces needed to work a body hard.

The carpet wasn’t really carpet. It was commercial grade rubber flooring, two inches thick, but warm underfoot and would withstand just about any impact.

Caden examined her home gym silently, absorbing it. “Not a Bowflex machine in sight. I’m impressed, Montana. Really.”

She waved him through to the kitchen impatiently. He picked up the bags again and dumped them on the kitchen counter. He glanced at the view out of the window, then through the open doorway into the lounge room with its huge fireplace.

“No chairs. Not anywhere,” he remarked. “Not even in front of a television.”

“I don’t have a television.”

“I noticed.”

“There’s a chair in front of my desks.”

“Plural. Curiouser and curiouser.”

“Said Alice. Which reminds me. There’s something I have to check.” She went back out to the common room and into the study that led from it. The study shared the other third of the front bank of windows, with the lounge room and kitchen, but in this room, the windows turned the corner and ran down the other external wall, too. Big eucalypts outside provided shade and kept the room cool.

The other two walls were taken up with specially made desks that ran the length of the walls, and a system of bookshelves and drawers that covered the walls up to a height of about ten feet. A footstool lived under one end of the desks.

Montana slid her Tablet PC into the docking station and turned everything on, while Caden wandered the room. He was sizing up again, judging.

When he got to the wall of books he systematically walked the length of each shelf, scanning the titles.

Finally, he turned and leaned one shoulder against the shelf. “So, mind here, body out there—” and he nodded towards the common room. “Where’s the soul hide out?”

“What you see is what you get.”

He gave a half smile. “Oh, I don’t think so.”

“Stop analyzing me, Rawn. I’m not nearly as interesting as you want me to be. You’ve hooked yourself up with a woman who eats to stay healthy, keeps fit and does her job. That’s it.”

“I don’t believe for a microsecond that you do this just for your job.”

“Let me guess. You don’t believe true loyalty exists.” She stabbed the keys on her keyboard to fire up her scripting program and loaded the appropriate file.

“True loyalty for a country?” Caden pulled out the steps and perched on the top one. “You’re right, I don’t think it exists.”

“Well, there’s a surprise.”

He moved so fast she didn’t see it coming, but suddenly he was behind her, with her arm was wrenched up behind her back and his big hunting knife up against her throat. “Scared?” he whispered in her ear.

“Fuck you,” she breathed back. It was the most volume she could force out of her locked throat. Her heart was thundering again.

“Think of me as Ghenghis Bob, Montana. You know some of his record, and if you’re as good as you say you are, then in a few moments you’re going to get the rest of his story. Both of us are realists. We both know what that record is going to look like. So Bob has his knife at your throat and you know damned well he’s going to slit it open if you don’t do what he says. Guess what he says?”

She licked her lips. “Betray your country or I’ll kill you.”

“Very good. Not quite as poetic as I was going to put it but it does the job. And your response would be?”

“Fuck you,” she spat.

“Exactly.”

Suddenly she was free again and he reached up behind her for the teddy bear sitting on the shelf there. He held it up and rested the knife against its throat. “Now I’ve got your child, or your mother, or your kid sister. Now what do you say?”

She looked at the teddy bear. His name was Vinnie-too and he had been hers since she was thirteen and Drusilla had placed him in her arms, to her total delight. Drusilla had had tears in her eyes as she’d smoothed the fur between the bear’s ears and told Montana that she was going to adopt her.

That day, Montana’s world had righted and begun to travel on straight tracks.

“Can I call him Vinnie, too?” she asked Drusilla. “Do you mind?”

Drusilla had burst into real tears and hugged her hard. It had been six months to the day since Vinnie had died and Montana missed him as much as his widow did.

She looked at Caden now, fighting for calm. “You touch a hair on him and I’ll...”

“That’s right, Montana. I’m Ghenghis Bob. I’ve got your baby brother Teddy here. I’m telling you to give me the secrets your country has trusted you to carry because you’re
so loyal. Give me the secrets, or Teddy here dies. Ten seconds and counting.”

“Rawn, this isn’t funny.”

“No, it’s not. It never will be. That’s the problem with people who fling words like ‘loyalty’ around. They think it’s a cutesy word, an ideal. But it’s not. It’s something in your gut. Your heart. Five seconds.”