In Love by Christmas: A Paranormal Romance Read online

  They had spent the night in a condo owned by Numenon, heading for bed the minute they arrived. The next morning, Leroy followed his nose and found himself in a very fancy living room. A compact woman in a black leather jumpsuit had a giant weapon torn apart at the far end of the dining table. Her face looked like his dad’s when he took down his hunting rifle; touching the weapon thrilled him. The woman’s face showed that joy she felt at reducing the massive apparatus to tiny pieces and reassembling them was greater than his dad’s love of his gun.

  A uniformed butler appeared and served them breakfast.

  “I didn’t know what you wanted, Leroy, so I ordered you eggs Benedict,” Doug said. “That OK?”

  He’d never heard of eggs Benedict, but they looked good. Like grits and gravy with fried eggs. That’s when Hannah laid a long, cylindrical metal object with a pointed end across the back of her hand. Somehow, it ended up stuck vertically between her pointer and middle finger. She flipped it end to end, up and down, between the digits of her hand, one hand to the other.

  “Hannah, stop that!” When Doug spoke the second time, she neatly caught the cylinder and stood it on end on the glossy tabletop.

  “You will be happy with my dexterity when I save your life.” she said. She had a heavy accent. “I practice so I can be ready. And I am ready. So are my people. They will be here when you finish your eggs Benedict.”

  Leroy frowned. How did she do that? Why did she do that? She was playing with a very large caliber shell that went to a very big gun, a gun not seen outside the military.

  “Eat! Eat your food!” she turned to Leroy. “Eggs taste terrible when they are cold.” A broiled chicken breast sat in front of her, with a tall glass of green stuff. Hannah fastened her eyes on Leroy the way Kip, his border collie, laid eyes on a sheep. Like he could control it just with eye contact. Maybe kill it, too. “I am Hannah Hehrman. No one introduced us,” she stuck out her hand and shot a dirty look at Doug. “He does not know how to live in a house.

  “I am Mr. Duane’s Chief of Security.” She kept staring at him with those laser-eyes. She was a good-looking woman, compact and tough. She had shiny black hair cut straight all around. Her black jumpsuit clung to her trim and muscular figure, making her seem like a cartoon superhero. She had red lipstick and nails. But everything about her said she was a killer.

  “Do you find me odd, Leroy?”

  “Uh. No, ma’am.” A fine strand of egg yolk dripped from his fork onto his chin.

  She laughed. “I am very odd, Leroy, even for my country. I am from Israel. Do you know where that is?” He nodded. “In my country, people need to be tough. We need to be able to defend ourselves. We must make sure that the enemy knows we will retaliate, and our retaliation will be far harsher than what they meted out. I do not come from a peaceful place and I am not a peaceful person.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He couldn’t eat. Sitting with Hannah was like hanging out with a shark and hoping it was in a good mood.

  “I was in line to be a general in my country. Did you know that?”

  “No, ma’am, though I can see how folks would want you to be a general.”

  “Here I sit, a woman raised with war all around her, whose home village had been blown to bits and all her family killed.” She swept her tough, hard hand around the luxurious room; its perfectly manicured nails were as incongruous as her precisely cut hair and tailored suit.

  Leroy’s eyes followed her gesture. The condo in Manhattan was grander than anything Leroy had seen, including the buildings in the few movies he’d attended and all the TV he’d watched. One wall was glass, looking out over a river and a torrent of cars heading over a bridge. The furniture was gleaming white leather and straight lines with bright colored pillows and rugs thrown around. The tables had shiny chrome table legs and glass tops. The paintings looked like they’d been made with spray paint and masking tape.

  “That’s a Mondrian,” Doug said, noticing Leroy gazing at one of the pieces of art. “He’s a famous painter. I don’t get him, but the experts say he’s a genius. His stuff goes with the apartment.”

  Hannah looked at her watch, a space age monster that looked like a mini-computer on her wrist. “My operatives will be here in a moment and we will get to work finding Cass. You will see why Will Duane values me so much.” A smirking smile. “If we can’t do it, it can’t be done.”

  “I don’t think I’d get too jacked up about it, Hannah,” Doug broke in. “You’ve found Cass a bunch of times before, and so have I. This time will be different because of him,” Doug indicated Leroy with his fork. “He’s the one who will straighten her out.”

  “Where is she?” Hannah asked. “Give me your ideas.” Her team had arrived, seven of them, versions of Hannah, men and women dressed in low-key combat gear that didn’t look much different than what people wore on the street. They wore the lean menace of professional killers. Hannah didn’t introduce them.

  “Yeah, where do you guys think she is?” Doug asked. They sat around the dining table sipping coffee.

  One of the operatives said, “She’s a junkie. She’ll be where the junkies are. The city parks are our best bet. That and cheap hotels.”

  Hannah abruptly sat erect, face livid. Leroy had only seen top spirit warriors project so much directed fury. “Miss Duane is not a junkie. She is an addict and she is the daughter of the man who employs you. She will not be in some park or lying in a cellar.” Her accent made her voice a growl. “Where will we find a young woman of enormous means whose father ensures that she will be ‘cared for’? That is the problem.” Hannah glared around the table.

  “She tricking?” Doug asked.

  Hannah bridled. “One would assume so, if she is well enough. She may not be presentable.”

  “She’s hidden in a high-end whorehouse where they pay the cops up the kazoozie to keep things quiet.” Doug seemed certain and almost nonchalant.

  “I would assume that would be the case.”

  “You brought the arsenal?” Doug said.

  “Yes, Doug. The whole package.”

  “They’ll have metal sensors wherever she is. If you walk in armed, they’ll kill her. We’ll have to do a no-weapons, walk-in, walk-out. All friendly.” Doug looked different to Leroy. Smarter, tougher. He’d done stuff like this before.

  “All we have to do is find an upscale cat-house in a city of seven and a half million strangers without alerting the cops or bad guys. Send the kids home, Hannah. I need to think.” Doug said. He meandered to a leather easy chair. “If I get any ideas, I’ll tell you.” He closed his eyes and appeared to sleep.

  Leroy watched him for a moment. He seemed peaceful and far away. Doug was in the place shamans went to know the truth. Was Doug a shaman? No, not yet. But he would be one.

  Hannah sent her operatives to their condo.

  Hannah and Leroy stared at each other across the table.

  “Where do you think she is?” Hannah asked him.

  “Close,” Leroy replied. “I can feel her here,” he put a hand over his heart. “She’s dried up like a dead flower before it turns to dust.”

  “I think, that, too. But how will we find her?” Hannah said. “I would normally reach out to the police, but Doug is right. This place will have purchased protection. Making an official inquiry would result in them killing her.

  “And then we have Enzo Donatore. You have heard of him?”

  “Yeah. Mr. Duane told me about him, and my grandpa told me, too. He was the one that attacked the Meeting and killed everyone.”

  “He is unstoppable, Leroy.”

  “My grandpa stopped him, the Great One and the Ancestors stopped him cold.”

  “Did your grandfather say he was stopped for good?”

  Leroy shook his head. “No, ma’am. He just ran off to lick his wounds.”

  “He is back, perhaps not full strength, but growing. I can feel it. He has powers of his own and his own legions of monsters and spies. You need to know more: he c
an see all over the world with a crystal called the ‘see-stone.’ He can see anywhere. Will’s technology can only slow him down.” Hannah looked glum. They sat silently for a while.

  Leroy didn’t know how much time had passed when Hannah got up and poured them more coffee. “Do you know anything about torture, Leroy?” she said as though talking about turning on the news.

  Leroy gulped. “Uh, no, ma’am.”

  “I know a great deal about torture, both from healing people who have been tortured, and inflicting it myself. It changes people. That is why I rebuked Charles for calling Miss Duane a junkie. She is a junkie, of course, but she is also a human being. And a torture victim. I know what she faces. Do you know what torture does, Leroy?”

  “Huh. No, ma’am. Except maybe kill you.”

  “Dying is the easy way out. Torture does far worse than kill. Can you imagine being tied up and made available to hundreds of people? Being raped until your life is a succession of ramming thrusts and pain? Being flogged and screaming, or being shocked with a cattle prod in your body’s depths and knowing that no one will ever help you? Learning tricks and ways of pleasing men that revolt you, but will buy another day’s life?

  “The mind breaks. Even if the person survives and gets away, it’s not over. What happened repeats itself inside the brain, all the time. Faces leap out of nowhere, and the body shakes with remembered pain. Terror, always. Rage that it happened, that others allowed it to happen. Having known torture, you can never know peace.

  “The survivor can look all right for a time, but then the vicious tide rises and she reacts, screaming and fighting for her life.” Hannah grimaced. “That’s what torture does, and that’s what it’s done to Cass Duane.

  “I’ve known Cass since she was a child. When I came to California, I saw a disturbed family. Cass was a little girl, ignored by everyone. Her mother was often inebriated and unable to function. I cared for Cass like she was my daughter. I kept her safe. I loved the child the way no one else did. I will get her back, Leroy, and this time she will not be stolen again.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Shit! I got it! I know how to find her.” Doug jerked erect in his chair.

  Leroy and Hannah turned to him.

  “I can find her. But what time is it?”

  “It’s four p.m.”

  “Fuck.”

  “What?”

  “It’s too early. It’s one in California. They won’t be working yet. They’ll just be getting up. Shit.” He jumped up. “Your guys need to get ready!”

  “For what?”

  “Do you have the technology to look inside buildings? To get into government files? Like city or county offices?”

  “Yes, of course. This is Numenon. We can look inside anything.”

  “Get your guys up here and ready for action. When it’s dark in California, I’m going to make some calls. And we’ll be ready.

  “This is one reason I work for Will Duane,” Hannah said, typing furiously on her keyboard. “He’s got the technology to do anything. Prototypes of inventions that no one’s even heard of.”

  She and her operatives had their laptops up on the dining room table. A screen that covered the wall had dropped from the ceiling across from the table. The agents’ computers were hooked up to it. Each laptop’s images circulated on the larger screen. A complicated metal structure like a pyramid about five feet tall was set up by the living room’s large window. Leroy thought it must be an antenna of some sort.

  It took them a long time to set it up, and more time to calibrate with their computers. The sun had fallen in the West. It was that dusky in-between time. The time of transitions and miracles.

  “We’re ready,” Hannah said.

  Doug looked at his watch. “It’s seven here, that means four p.m. in California. Maybe someone will be around. I’ll give it a try.” He went into his bedroom and picked up a secure phone’s receiver.

  “Hey, babe! How you been? It’s Doug Saunders, your old compadre. Yeah, been a while.” Doug smiled broadly, leering. “Oh, yeah. I remember those days. I’d love to come by and see you. I never could leave you ladies alone. But I’m in New York, stranded high and dry.” He lowered his voice. “Some poon would go great right now, but I don’t know where to get it.” He listened for a moment, grinning broadly.

  “You got it. You know me—I want it top of the line and squeaky-clean. I’m not going to stick my dick someplace where it will rot off …

  “If you could give me a couple of addresses in Manhattan, I’d be so grateful. You wouldn’t even believe how grateful I’ll be.” Doug wrote something down. “Ah, thanks, sugar. You are the best. Now you get ready for a present, you hear? It will come in the mail. A nice present just for you.” He dialed another number and went through the same routine.

  “We’ve got five addresses.” The minute he’d finished his calls, Doug dropped his drunken, lewd persona and went back into the main part of the condo. He pulled out his laptop, entering the addresses on a map of Manhattan. They appeared on the big wall screen. Most were close by. “Where do you think she is?”

  “Wait,” Leroy said. “What did you do? Where did you get those addresses?”

  “I called up some old friends in the business and asked for help. Ladies back in California. They know where the best cathouses are here. They’d never tell the cops, but they would tell Doug Saunders, their biggest customer ever, outside Will Duane. Will and I fucked our way through life together for a long time. I was talking to madams in California, Leroy. They spotted me the local, top-of-the-line establishments.”

  “I’ve got it,” Hannah said. “I’ll download it and then we’ll get to work.” She turned to her staff. “Keep going. Find the records for the other apartments. This may not be the one.”

  Hannah manipulated the file displayed on her screen, focusing and enlarging portions. “Leroy, this is the floor plan of the first of our potential sites. I lifted it off of the building department records. Fortunately, the building is new enough to have digital records. And now I’m going to do this.”

  The image on the screen broke into sections. One displayed the floor plan of the apartment the California madam had targeted. Four other areas showed fuzzy views from inside the apartment. Hannah manipulated the images and they became clearer. They were views of rooms taken from inside the flat.

  “This is the ultimate spy-ware,” Hannah smiled. “A simple chip inside each Numenon device and we can snoop wherever it ends up. I convinced Mr. Duane to install the chips in all Numenon products. He complained about legality, but now we’ll see how useful the chips are.”

  A fat man with a sandwich walked across the screen. “That’s probably his TV picking him up and broadcasting him.” They couldn’t hear what he said, but they could see everything in the room.

  “The chip only works if a Numenon device is in a space. If one isn’t in the room, but is in the apartment, we still can see patterns of hot and cold in the other areas.” This wasn’t the apartment where Cass was held. It was big, but there weren’t enough warm bodies in the bedrooms. The screen in the living room showed a sole occupant, the fat, middle-aged man. Whatever Doug’s contact said, this wasn’t the foyer of a house of prostitution.

  The operatives pulled down records and floor plans for the other addresses Doug had gotten.

  “It’s there,” Leroy pointed to the map. He didn’t need to look at the screen as the floor plan unfolded across it. The apartment was huge by New York standards. The plans showed at least seven bedrooms, but the patterns of warmth showed those had been bisected. The place was crawling with people.

  “They must have Numenon products all over. TVs in every room. Probably showing porn,” Hannah said. “Let’s see.” A large screen TV gave them a complete view of the living room. Another big TV on the opposite wall played a video of women doing everything. Women caressing their bared breasts. Women kissing each other. Women going down on men, and other women. Women’s butts and th
ighs. Corsets and straps digging into soft flesh. The video’s pictures intertwined and separated. New women appeared, coupled and left.

  In the room, a slender blonde bound tightly in shiny black vinyl walked toward a hallway, an overweight man following her and grabbing at her breasts. Couples sat on sofas and lounges.

  “It’s a bordello, all right,” Doug said. “Is it the right one?”

  “She’s right here,” Leroy pointed to an area on the floor plan that was slightly paler than the background. It was at the far rear of the apartment.

  “How do you know it’s her?” Hannah asked.

  “It’s her,” Doug said. “She’s dying. The color of the screen shows there’s almost no warmth.”

  “Let’s go!” Leroy cried. “We have to save her!”

  “How?” Doug said. “Way back where she is, they’ll kill her before we can get to her. We can’t shoot our way in.” He thought, stroking his chin. Doug smiled radiantly and looked the others. “We have to buy our way in.”

  “With what?”

  Doug’s lascivious grin came back. “Ourselves. You and I are going to get laid, Leroy, my man.”

  4

  Capturing the Dragon

  Hannah, Doug, Leroy and five of the operatives huddled in the van near the apartment building. The other two operatives—the driver and a medic—cruised the area slowly in a service truck outfitted as an ambulance. This was a sober, very upscale, residential neighborhood, the last place you’d expect a bordello. Leroy comprehended immediately how rich their target must be and how much its management must pay the cops to stay away. And come fast, if they needed them.

  He knew people who had been to New York City and came back to the reservation saying, “It’s great! Everything’s there! It’s so cool.” They loved it. It seemed like death to him, all moving so fast, nothing but huge buildings and machines. No life. The sun couldn’t reach the sidewalk. He couldn’t live there a day.