Page 53 of Renegade

“Do you think we woke them up?” he asked quietly.

I turned to look at him and shook my head. “No, but if I don’t clean the door and Dolly wanders in here for any reason, there might be some questions I don’t want to answer.”

He chuckled as I grabbed some tissues and walked over to the door to clean up after myself on unsteady legs. By the time I’d finished and turned around, I noticed he’d picked up our clothes and draped them over a chair in the corner. “I hope they throw those into a laundry bag as soon as we return them,” he said.

I smiled at him, walking back over. “Those suits have seen a lot of action.”

He reached for me, pulling me up against his body for a deep kiss. We were both sweaty. Apparently, it took a lot of work to fuck against a door. When we finally broke apart, I took his hand and tugged him toward the bathroom.

“What’re you doing?”

“I’m not getting into our clean bed without a shower, and we both stink to high heaven.”

His answering chuckle made me smile.

Chapter Seventeen

MIGUEL

Raven slipped into a deep sleep shortly after we’d showered and climbed into bed together. I watched him for a while, letting the palm of my hand trace slowly down his smooth back. He was so beautiful and had been so brave when faced with the truth about what was happening to us although we still knew very little. We were closer to figuring it all out, but we weren’t there yet. I lay awake staring at the bedroom ceiling for a while, hands crossed behind my head, trying to piece it all together.

Raven had suggested that John may have been seeing someone else in the camp and the more I thought about it, the angrier I got. It had nothing to do with the very real fact that we’d been together, or at least I thought we’d been, in the days leading up to his disappearance. If he’d formed an attachment with someone else, and the rogue faction of the CIA had found out about it, they’d have used it against him. I was now pretty suresomeonehad been up to no good out there in the desert, but that still didn’t answer the questions as to who…and why. Had John seen something out there and not told any of us?

The most likely thing was the one we’d discussed…that rogue operatives were secretly smuggling precious gems—and probably gold—out of the country and had somehow become separated from the booty they’d looted. Afghanistan wasn’t a wealthy country, made up of mostly nomadic tribes headed by warlords. It was primarily desert, mostly mountainous, unlike Iraq where Saddam Hussein had vast sums of money, gold,precious objects and jewels, wealth he’d siphoned from oil profits in his country.

Afghanistan did have something else, though. It shared a very long border with Iran, an oil rich country which had once been a small piece of King Darius’s massive Persian Empire. Then again, so had parts of modern-day Turkey, Pakistan, the Balkan Peninsula, and Egypt, stretching into Asia and India. The Persian Empire had been the cradle of civilization.

Though billions of Iran’s oil revenues had been frozen by the U.S. in the late 1970s, I knew the black market flourished to this day, right under the noses of the evilmullahswho’d taken power after the Shah and his family fled. Ayatollah Khomeini’s rabid followers had thrown thousands of its citizens in jail after the Iranian revolution, claiming that they were the antithesis of Islam. They’d confiscated the wealthy’s vast properties, their textiles in the form of priceless Persian rugs, but most lucrative of all, Iran’s marketplaces where jewelers and money lenders had flourished during the Shah’s regime.

And much of that wealth was still being smuggled out of Iran through Turkey on the way to the West whenever possible. Beginning in the 1980s some wealthy refugees had crossed into Afghanistan over the mountains to get to Turkey, and then on to freedom in Europe. Many refugees of Iranian-Jewish descent who had a controlling interest in thebazarshad fled with what they could carry on their backs. There was a strong possibility that many of the riches they carried with them in the form of jewels had ended up in the hands of greedy Afghani warlords who were now friendly with the Taliban.

Perhaps a rogue CIA faction had ambushed a small Taliban outpost and gotten hold of a cache of jewels…or had obtained them in some other way. There were a million possibilities. I sighed, rolling over in bed with my back to Raven as hecontinued to sleep. I wouldn’t find the answers I so desperately sought in the middle of the night and silently got out of bed to pull on a T-shirt, socks, and sleeping pants. I picked up my tablet to bury myself in a book, before creeping out of the room and shutting the door so I wouldn’t disturb the sleeping form of my lover.

The house was dark, and I padded silently along the polished hardwood floors to the living room, looking out of the vast windows where French doors led out to the gorgeous, landscaped garden and the view of Los Angeles. Lights from the city below twinkled in an almost identical fashion as earlier in the evening, when I’d been staring at an eerily similar view. I set down my iPad and opened one of the French doors, stepping out onto the patio, breathing in the cool, late winter air filled with the scent of Angelica’s early spring paperwhites. The mild weather let me know spring was approaching. I listened to the distant hum of traffic from the streets below, wondering what the hell I was going to do. Raven was in danger and in my heart, I didn’t know how I was going to protect him.

I decided to call Mark Evans first thing in the morning. We had to meet so that I could give him Rosina Cassanova’s name. There was a strong possibility the name was fake, but the woman herself sure hadn’t been. The description of a tall, beautiful woman, natural redhead or not, working with the man we’d seen in the stairwell, might jog Mark’s memory or even Jarrett’s for that matter. I had a strong suspicion the Marine Corps sniper and I had worked in the same theater during the war, so he might even know her if Mark didn’t.

I walked to the edge of the patio, looking around and keeping alert, all throwbacks from a time when standing guard duty was a matter of life and death. And just recently with the fires. We’d been lucky where we were. I didn’t get a tingling feeling as if asniper rifle was pointed at my head, I’d be able to feel it just as I knew I was safe in my own backyard, at least for now.

Though I was unsettled by the very real possibility that the man in the stairwell and Cassanova might know where we lived. If they were operatives of any sort with access to intelligence, finding our address would be child’s play. The one comfort I possessed was knowing that they probably wouldn’t try to do us harm until they had the Mulberry diamond and the Flores ruby in hand. After that, they’ll eliminate witnesses. If they’d wanted to kill us, they would have done it earlier, at the Getty, but Raven and I were still targets, and I hated the very idea of it.

I needed to figure out who these people were, if John was truly acting in concert with them, and take them out…John included, if it came down to it.

For the time being, I needed trained backup. I knew just who to call and swallowed hard at the very thought of it. I took one last breath of the crisp night air, wrapped my arms around my chilled midsection, and went back into the house, locking up. I started to grab the iPad, when something occurred to me.

“Better safe than sorry,” I muttered to myself before detouring to the garage where some of my things were still stored. I dug through a box, finding what I’d been looking for, and swept the house with a bug detector. When I’d assured myself no one had gotten inside the main part of the house to plant any listening devices, I replaced the box, made myself a cup of coffee, and sat in the kitchen nook with my tablet, scrolling my bookshelves for a while. When nothing grabbed my attention, I logged into Nightcrawler’s blog, smiling to myself when I saw one I hadn’t read.

Book title: The Legend of Sloppy Hollow

Author: Dennis Simon

Publisher: Self-published

Genre: Small Town Horror/Fiction

Review/rating by Nightcrawler: DNF <2 stars

Synopsis:

---