The Love You Crave
John Locke
Prologue
When Callie Carpenter's cell phone vibrated on her nightstand a single time she leaped out of bed and threw on some clothes.
“What’re you doing?” said Gwen, her bedmate.
“I’m on alert.”
“What’s that mean?”
Callie raced to the bathroom, relieved herself, brushed her teeth, grabbed her car keys.
“It means Creed might need me. If he does, he’ll call back. If he does, he’s in trouble. If he is, I could be in trouble.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“Not on your life.”
“You can’t stop me!”
“Get real,” Callie said.
“What about me?” Gwen said, pouting.
“What about you?”
“I want to feel useful.”
Callie sighed. “Go to the guest bedroom. Set out a scarf, a vibrator, and five random items. Doesn’t matter what they are, as long as they fit on the counter.”
“Why?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
“Where are you going?”
“To the car. I need to be on the street, engine running, ready to roll.”
“Sounds like that man has you wrapped around his little finger.”
“Don’t start with me.”
1.
Here’s something you don’t see every day.
I’m jogging south on Las Vegas Boulevard, four miles south of the Strip, when a lady walks right smack into a lamp post.
She’s on Trace Street, forty yards to my right. I stop in the middle of the intersection to look and see if she’s okay. It’s 5:00 a.m., and from my angle and distance I could be wrong about what I thought I saw. She backs up a few steps and falls to a seated position on the sidewalk.
I wonder if she’s drunk.
I scan the area to see if anyone else is watching this unfold, but see no one. We’re in an industrial area, no bars nearby, and no businesses are open on Trace. I want to finish my run, but can’t leave her sitting there if she’s hurt. On the other hand, I don’t want to get shot. It was just last week a Vegas woman staggered out of a bar in the wee hours of the morning when some local thug took her for an easy mark and got killed for his miscalculation.
She’s sitting with her back to me, so all I get is the shadow view. Her handbag is lying beside her. If it contains a gun, it won’t take her long to reach it.
Thirty yards beyond the seated lady, a van slowly comes into view at the next intersection and pulls to a stop. So it’s me at this intersection, the van at the next, and a lady sitting between us, on the sidewalk. The van is white, with the passenger side facing the lady, but it’s dark and too far away for me to make out any details.
I don’t know how many people are in the van, but I’m guessing just the driver. I mean, a passenger would roll the window down and ask if she needs help, right?
The van driver seems to be doing what I’m doing, staring at the woman. But he’s got a better view, the illuminated front side of her. We’re probably both waiting to see if she’s going to stand, and we’re probably both leery about getting shot. In my case, I’m unarmed.
Well, that’s not completely true. I have my cell phone in my hand. In an emergency, I can press a button, fling it, and two seconds later it blows up.
But I don’t press that button. Instead, I press a number that rings Callie’s phone a single time. She’s now on alert.
I start walking toward the lady.
“Miss!” I yell, loud enough for her to hear. “Are you okay?”
I wonder why people always ask that. Of course she’s not okay. She just walked into a friggin’ lamp post! But that’s what people always ask. A little kid falls into a well and gets stuck twenty feet below the surface. “Are you okay?” people shout.
She’s not okay.
Before I cover ten yards, her head explodes.
I stop in my tracks and instinctively drop to the ground to make myself a smaller target. I’m so stunned I hardly notice the van slowly backing out of view. But the fact it’s backing up instead of racing forward tells me whoever’s in the van had something to do with the lady’s head exploding. And the way the street light hits the front of the van as it’s backing up shows me something I hadn’t seen before: a magnetic sign on the side, above the front wheel well. I can’t make out the wording from this distance, but it’s an orange logo of some sort, with black lettering. It’s a temporary sign, designed to cover the actual logo beneath it. I’ve seen few vans with small logos painted on the front passenger side. Ropic Industries has one. And their vans are white, also.
I look around to see if anyone’s behind me. I want to check on the lady, but the little voice in my head says, Why? To ask if she’s okay?
Then it adds, You’re alone, miles from your safe place. What if the van circles behind you?
I look at the office and industrial buildings around me, and decide to go vertical.
Running down the alley between two buildings, I spot a staircase, and take it up to the second floor landing. There’s a flat roof ten feet above me. I stand on the railing and carefully raise my arms over my head, grab the roof ledge and pull myself up to about chest height. I swing my right leg up and hook my foot over the ledge and work my way onto the roof. From there, I get a running start and jump to the next roof, then the next, and soon I’m on the rooftop of a building, looking down at the intersection where the white van had been moments earlier.
I lay flat on the roof and wait to see if anyone comes to check on the body.
While I’m doing that, the building beneath me explodes.
2.
As I jump to my feet to survey the damage below, I quickly conclude the building beneath me is collateral damage. Based on my knowledge of where the woman had been sitting moments earlier, and seeing only the remnants of her ass there now, it’s clear she’d been wired with explosives.
Which makes her a homeland terrorist.
I press the button that speed-dials Callie.
