Page 148 of One Minute Out

Roxana was confused. “You don’t stay here at the property?”

Claudia shook her head. “No. I am not a part of what happens here. I am a part of the process that prepares you for it. I do not stay overnight. I will be back, and I will do what I can to help you.”

Gone was her unbridled optimism about Roxana’s time here on the West Coast. Now she seemed more sanguine, less upbeat.

Roxana decided to take a chance. “Where are we? What is this place?”

Claudia did not answer; she just stared again into the younger woman’s eyes for a long time. Eventually she said, “You should know... Jaco is onto you.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean, he knows about your sister.”

Roxana’s heart sank and she lowered onto the bed. She didn’t know what this meant for herself or for her sister, but panic welled within her.

She tried to play dumb. “What about my sister?”

But to this the psychologist just made a face of disappointment. “You should be proud of yourself for successfully pulling the wool over my eyes for a time. We’ve never had an infiltrator before, so I didn’t properly evaluate you. But now I see through you.”

“What is it that you see?”

“You don’t yet accept the fact that your fate is sealed, but you will soon, and as soon as you do, you will realize that your fate is what you make of it. Infiltrator or not, you can have a good time while you are here, if you just let it happen.”

Roxana didn’t understand this at all, but she was certain this doctor was pure evil, just as bad as the rest of them. She lay back on the bed without another word, and Claudia left the room, shutting the heavy door behind her.

•••

Fifty-six-year-old Michael “Shep” Duvall slipped his reading glasses off, then put down his Bible. Sitting up from his worn recliner, he looked around the dark living room of his North Las Vegas bungalow.

Something was wrong, but he couldn’t say what.

He scratched at his gray beard, then stood, looked at the little plastic cuckoo clock on the wall, and saw that it was twenty-two hundred hours. He hadn’t read a clock in anything other than military time since he was eighteen years old and would need a second to realize that civilians would refer to the current time as ten p.m.

The dark house was empty and still; he lived alone, so this was no surprise, but something had alerted him, he was sure of it.

He soon pinpointed the source of his disquiet.

Where the hell was his dog?

Duvall’s four-year-old lab, Monkey, had access to the fenced-in front yard facing two-lane Hickey Avenue by means of a doggie door in the kitchen. She was in and out all evening, every evening, but by this late at night she could always be found on the threadbare brown love seat next to Duvall’s reading chair, either sleeping or just looking lovingly at her master, waiting to follow him to the bedroom for the night.

But the dog wasn’t on the love seat, and she wasn’t in the living room or in the little attached kitchen by her water bowl.

“Monkey?” he called out, half expecting the big black dog to shoot through the rubber-curtained doggie door from the outside, although it would be rare for her to be out so late.

But she did not come.

Duvall put on the glasses he wore for distance, and he hefted his Wilson Combat 1911 .45 caliber pistol off the end table next to him. He was not a tall man, but he was broad-chested and possessed a dominating persona when necessary. He could intimidate now, even in his mid-fifties, and even with the paunch that had grown around his midsection since he’d left the Agency.

And the big, stainless steel .45 only added to his intimidation factor.

He called for Monkey one more time, then flipped off the light next to his recliner and stepped to his kitchen door. Quietly he opened it; the business end of the pistol led the way outside, and he carefully walked the chain-link perimeter fence of his tiny property, looking for any sign of his companion.

Monkey was nowhere to be found; the rickety driveway gate was closed and locked.

Worried, but knowing he needed to check his bedroom and his tiny home office, he headed back into the house. He’d just moved through the kitchen for the back hall, had just slipped the Wilson Combat into his drawstring warm-up pants, when the light he’d flipped off by his recliner snapped back on.

Duvall didn’t scare, and he didn’t startle. His body had been through too much to react any way but efficiently when surprised. He turned to the light and saw a man seated there in his reading chair, one leg crossed over the other.

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