Melanie understood why Tammy felt the need to go back to St. Louis and talk to Brandon and her parents about Annie’s behavior. But Melanie also agreed with Tony that he should go with her, for her own safety. Tammy wondered if Tony being there would only make things more awkward, though at the end of the day Tony had put his foot down. He was coming whether she wanted him to or not. The three of them knew what happened last time Annie was left to her own devices: she nearly killed Tammy, and Tony could have been killed too.

  Melanie felt a pang of loneliness as she waved them into the cab that morning, but knew they needed to sort things out in St. Louis once and for all. She just wanted them both back in one piece, the sooner the better.

  To his credit, Darcy was not overly upset when Melanie called him to explain what was going on with the two T’s.

  Melanie told him they felt awful about pulling out of the space flight scheduled for that night, and that they’d offered to pay him back for the cost of the tickets.

  Darcy told Melanie that was the least of his concerns. He was more worried about them.

  Todd had contacted Jason the night before, and in an exchange of text messages, Jason had agreed to meet him for lunch. Todd told him that afterwards, he’d take him somewhere to buy him some new clothes. Jason felt he didn’t need to do this, but Todd insisted. In the end, Jason agreed—there was no point arguing with Todd. So far, his older half-brother had been very good to him.

  Todd had decided to do this as a way to butter him up before talking him into going to his parents’ house to confront Andrew.

  And for the first time in his life, Jason felt like someone out there actually cared about him.

  Todd would later realize that by making contact with his half-brother, he’d helped Jason out of a horrible life on the streets, where drugs and crime were his only friends. Jason knew plenty of people on the streets, but they were not friends. They’d betray him in a heartbeat for a hit or something of value.

  “I have a really bad feeling about this,” Emily told him as they said their goodbyes just after midday, at her home in Redondo Beach.

  “You worry way too much, my darling.” Todd gave her another kiss, hoping it would make her feel better.

  “You can kiss me like that twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, honey, but it isn’t going to make me any less worried,” Emily said.

  “I’m a big boy, and I promise you I’ll take care of myself. I’ll be back here tonight when it’s all done.”

  As Emily watched him reverse out of her driveway and he waved one more time, she prayed to God his assurance he’d be back tonight would hold true.

  Tim ate his breakfast after a surprisingly good night’s sleep. Jenny and Ben were engrossed in their phones while they ate.

  What seemed a little odd to Tim was that they kept swapping their handsets every few moments. Both of them were tapping away feverishly on the screens.

  Back and forth, back and forth they went. After Tim finished his coffee, he was about to say something, but Ben and Jenny suddenly looked at each other and then over to Tim.

  “Glasses,” Ben said to his father, who then realized what Ben meant was—put your reading glasses on.

  Tim did what Ben had told him as Ben tapped on his screen some more, then handed his phone over.

  When Tim took the handset from Ben, his son indicated he should look at the screen.

  As Tim read the words, it dawned on him what Ben and Jenny had been doing.

  This facility has more bugs than a Florida swamp, Pop. This is the only way we can communicate without them knowing what we’re saying. Obviously, we can’t send the messages to each other. They’re recorded. We type, read, then delete.

  Tim handed the handset back, to his credit keeping his mouth tightly shut.

  Jenny studied her father-in-law. She had always been fond of Ben’s father. The guy was made of the right stuff.

  Ben turned to Jenny and then back to Tim.

  He typed away madly on his handset and then handed it to Tim.

  Jenny and I are just running through the final plans for what is going to go down today. Sorry, we don’t mean to make you feel left out.

  Tim read the message and decided to type one back to Ben.

  I hope you both know what you are doing. I hope you know they may try and kill you if they work out you are letting him escape.

  Ben read the message before handing his phone to Jenny. After she read it, she deleted it from the screen.

  She reached over and placed her hand over her husband’s. “Today is going to be a very exciting day,” she said aloud, smiling at them both. “It’s going to be a day to remember.”

  Tim met her smile with his own. “I hope today goes as well as you both hope it will,” he said.

  The Erwins—Tim, Ben, and Jenny—being twenty-five stories under the softball pitch at Homey, did not witness the spectacular arrival of Vernon to the secret base.

  He was transported from the other facility in a special pod that shielded him from the outside world. It was climate-controlled and very comfortable, and he spent most of the trip dozing in and out of his version of sleep and contemplating the feeling of returning home after all this time. The pod was placed inside another contraption, which meant no one except a few knew what they were actually transporting.

  Steve King, along with two specially trained guards from the main facility, accompanied the pod every step of the way.

  A specially built Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit, known more commonly as a Stealth Bomber, converted for the transport of very special and sensitive payloads, carried them for almost three-quarters of the trip. At a cruising altitude of over fifty thousand feet, it made the trip from São Paulo, Brazil, to Homey Airport, Nevada, in under nine hours.

  When the B-2 Spirit entered US airspace, it was escorted all the way to Homey Airport by no less than eight fighter jets. All eight were then replaced with a rolling patrol of fighter jets from Edwards Air Force Base, until they were instructed to return for the night.

  When Vernon eventually made it down to the Majestic VA6 facility, he was led slowly through the base until he arrived at the cordoned-off area.

  When he and Steve came through the access doors, Ben, Jenny, and Tim were there to meet him.

  He greeted them all in his own unique way, smiling mildly at them all and saying “hello” in a calm voice. He studied the replica craft, and Tim could have sworn he appeared to nod. Vernon then turned to Ben and Jenny, and said, “You have made a true copy of my ship. Well done.”

  “Steve,” he said. “I will go and have a look inside. You would be okay with that, yes?”

  Steve could feel the tension in his throat. He wanted to say no, but knew this would not sit well with his guest. Vernon had agreed to show them how to operate the craft to fly beyond light speed, after all, so he needed to show him trust in return.

  “Please,” Steve said, struggling not to grit his teeth.

  Vernon looked over to the others in the room, and Tim was sure he spotted a tiny smile appearing on his small mouth.

  Tim smiled faintly back. That toupee was just hilarious.

  Vernon walked over to the craft as if he were a Teletubby. Small, slow steps. When he reached the door, it opened silently. He stepped in and disappeared from view.

  Steve felt the urge to dive head first for the open door. Something didn’t feel right.

  Suddenly, everyone standing in front of the craft went silent.

  The door closed.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Tammy had called ahead, so Lee knew she was coming. She told her Tony would be with her. Lee, to Tammy’s surprise, said she would happily take them straight to her parents’ house. Tammy thought she would opt out for fear of Annie and her apparent death threat only the day before. Lee said she wouldn’t come in, but would just be on standby nearby when they needed to be picked up. She was sure she would be okay.

  Tammy had called her father, too, and told him they wanted to talk to him and her mom about Annie.

  Tammy knew the risks, but she had to try. She prayed her parents wouldn’t tell Annie she was coming.

  To her complete amazement, her father had agreed.

  When Lee’s car pulled up out the front of the Sanders home, Tammy reached over and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “You have no idea what it means to have a reliable friend like you,” she said.

  “You just take care of yourself, both of you,” Lee said.

  And as Lee reached the end of the Sanders’ street, she didn’t even notice the person who’d dipped her head below the window line of her car, parked nearby.

  When Tammy had called her father, he’d thought their conversation was private. As he’d told her, he was in his shed when she called. But what he didn’t know was that his wife was standing right outside the door. She called Annie thirty seconds later.

  She’d later realize it was a fatal mistake.

  “Here he is.” Todd’s usual greeting to Jason always brought a little smirk to the young guy’s face.

  “Hey, Todd.” Jason seemed upbeat and positive today.

  “You hungry, dude?” Todd found himself always wanting to use the word dude in these parts of Central LA. He had no idea why; it just seemed come to him the minute he crossed over into the inner city.

  Todd had a phone in each back pocket of his jeans. He still had the burner, and had put credit on it just in case Michelle needed to call him. He’d decided the little stunt of pulling out his sim and turning off his phone the other day had been a little paranoid. The way he was feeling today, if his old man wanted to track him, he could goddamn track him.

  Andrew was tracking him.

  But not from his phone.

  Todd had swept his car for tracking devices a couple of times, but there was an inherent issue with automobiles. With the onset of technology, tracking devices were as small as a quarter. This meant there were almost more places to hide a tracking device than one could look.

  Johnny the Mac had felt sick when Andrew ordered him to hide a tracking device in Todd’s car, and told him that if Todd found it, it would be on the Mac.

  And today, under Andrew’s instructions, Johnny was spending his day off doing the last thing on earth he wanted to do—following Todd and his half-brother.

  He wondered what the endgame was for Andrew. He wondered if he wanted the kid dead, or otherwise. Following them around seemed like a complete waste of time.

  Two and a half hours after watching them eat lunch, then watching them from afar shopping for what appeared to be clothes for the punk, the Mac started to wonder if losing his job would have been a better option than ending up like this. But he turned to his phone and touched the power button. The screen lit up with a stunning photo of his Portuguese wife, her belly full of his first child. And it brought him crashing back to reality. If he lost his job under these circumstances, he’d lose her and his first kid. He’d become just another deadbeat ex-cop, single and spending every second weekend seeing his kid, who would end up hating him for what he did to his mother. Glory days.

  He parked his car close enough to Todd’s to watch him, but far enough away not to be noticed.

  “No fucking way, Todd. I can’t do it.”

  Todd stared out through his windscreen and felt his patience waning. It was overcast in Los Angeles, and it looked as if the clouds wanted to take a big leak over the city.

  Jason looked out through the passenger-side window of Todd’s car and said, “That’s why you bought me all the clothes, right? So you could bribe me into going to your house and helping you get back at Dad for how he’s been treating you.”

  Todd shook his head. “He wiped you, Jason. He needs to be held accountable for that. Come on, let’s do that together.”

  Jason was clearly upset. But Todd misread how he was feeling.

  The kid was angry.

  He felt as if Todd had taken him for a ride, to use him as some sort of weapon against his old man.

  For all of Jason’s shortcomings, there was one thing about that thought.

  He was right.

  “Fuck you. I’m done with you and all this shit.” Jason’s anger exploded out of nowhere.

  He unclipped his seatbelt and a moment later flung open the passenger-side door, nearly taking out a guy riding past on a bike.

  “Watch it, moron!” the guy said, swerving just in time to avoid hitting the door straight on.

  “Fuck off,” Jason snarled.

  He darted across the busy street.

  Todd was already out of the car and shouting out to him. “Jason, wait! Can we just talk about this? Jason!”

  From his vantage point, the Mac saw Jason shouting to the rider and then waltzing across the road. “What the hell?” he said to himself.

  And then he cursed. “Damn it, I’m done with recon on foot.”

  As he pulled the key out of the ignition, he watched Todd close the passenger-side door and run across the road in the direction of where Jason was going.

  “Shit, the Skid,” the Mac swore as he slipped his handgun underneath his jacket and waited for a couple of cars to pass him before he followed.

  Skid Row wasn’t the sort of place he liked spending any time in.

  Annie watched Lee’s car turn the corner of her parents’ street and disappear from view. She’d deal with her later. It wouldn’t end well for Lee, Annie decided. She’d make her pay for her involvement in this little drama.

  Annie had figured out how to slip in and out of her parents’ home by her early teens. She could get in and out without having to go near the front or back door. The spare-room window lock had been broken for as long as she could remember. Her father probably to this day still had no idea it was broken. Stupid man, Annie thought. The guy was a dumb as a piece of wood, and had spent nearly half his life in that stupid shed of his. Although she hadn’t been in there for a long time, she assumed there’d be one of the world’s biggest porn collections hidden in there somewhere.

  She was half right.

  There was a huge collection of magazines hidden there, but not of people doing the business. We’ll park that for now.

  By the time Annie slipped into the spare-room window, the conversation was well underway in the living room.

  “Brandon, I’d like you to meet Tony.” Tammy had recovered from the shock of Brandon sitting silently in her parents’ living room when they entered. She had no idea he was going to be there. But in the end, she realized it was not a bad thing. She needed to convince him too.

  “Brandon,” Tony said, shaking his girlfriend’s ex-husband’s hand, “it’s good to meet you.”

  The two men stared at each other awkwardly for a moment before Brandon retreated to where he’d been sitting when the two T’s had entered the room.

  Tammy’s mother seemed palpably out of sorts, as if she was done with it all.

  “So, let’s get down to business here,” Patricia said a moment later.

  Tony and Tammy went over to the nearby couch and sat down.

  “Where’s Dad?” Tammy said. She turned to her mother and then toward the hallway.

  “Here I am,” Bart said as he walked in and over to Tony. “Hello, I am Bartholomew Sanders, Tammy’s father,” he said. Before he could ask Tony who he was, Tony introduced himself, reached up, and shook his hand.

  “Hello, Tammy,” her father said, bending down and giving her a kiss on the forehead. Only Brandon would notice that he’d bent in a strange way, as if he’d put his back out.

  Bart sat on the sofa next to Brandon.

  Tammy took a deep breath and came straight out with it.

  “I want to take the children to California, to live. With me.”

  As Brandon nearly fell off the sofa, Tammy decided the time of keeping secrets was over.

  “I am with Tony, and we are in love,” she said seriously.

  Her parents looked at each other and her mother said, “But you only just met a few months ago. Isn’t it a bit soon to be talking about love?”

  Tammy shook her head, looking quite offended.

  “You and Dad were engaged within three months. Mom, wasn’t that a bit soon?” she said.

  Patricia scoffed and barked, “When it’s in the eyes of the Lord, no—it wasn’t too soon.”

  Tammy rolled her eyes and turned to Brandon, still reeling from the shock of seeing his dream shot to flames.

  She stared at her father and wanted to bitch-slap him. Why he ever agreed to marry her mother, she would never understand.

  “Well, I’ve been chatting to JC,” Tammy said sarcastically, “and he said me taking Beth and Noah back to California is okay with him.”

  Her Mother sprang to her feet and pointed at Tammy as if she had slapped her in the face. “Don’t you ever speak of the Lord’s son like that again, or you will never set foot in this house again.”

  Tammy shot to her feet. Her frustration with all her mother’s years of Bible-bashing bullshit was about to come to a head.

  “You and I know Annie is not right in the head, Mom. Look what she did to Brandon.” Brandon looked like he wanted to crawl up into the nearest corner.

  “Stop it!” Tammy’s mom barked. “It was an accident.”

  “Oh shit,” Tony gasped.

  “Darling, no!” Patricia Sanders screamed.

  “What the he…” Tammy realized what Tony and her mother were referring to.

  Her sister was standing at the entrance to the living room.

  Tammy had never seen an angrier look on her sister’s face.

  And the pistol in Annie’s right hand was pointing directly at her.

  “Jason, just stop.” Todd was now nearly running at full tilt.

  His half-brother was running right through the heart of Skid Row. Homeless people looked up for a moment and wondered what all the commotion was. A moment later, they went back to whatever they were doing.

 

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