Agent for a Cause (The Agents for Good) (12 page)

The corners of her mouth turned up into one of her infectious smiles, “I would love that!” A look of sudden concern came over her features. “Is the movie something I can take Kevin to?”

“Yes it’s animated and rated PG. Nothing bad in it that I know of. The reviews say it’s pretty funny for kids and adults.”

Her face crinkled up in surprise, “You watch animated kid movies?”

Somewhat defensively I responded, “Sure, why not?”

She shook her head and looked like she was holding in laughter. She hugged me, “Will I ever understand you Tyre?”

In some ways I hoped not.

It was a very good evening. It was so nice to share something that I enjoyed with someone else. Anna had seemed to just enjoy being with me, which was hard for me to comprehend even yet. Kevin had seemed content and had been utterly engrossed with the movie.

It had kind of felt like a family outing in some ways. I had never hoped for so much. It was late when I left Anna’s apartment for mine. Tomorrow I wouldn’t be leaving. Tomorrow Anna would be mine for forever.

Chapter Ten

The End?

“I do.” It was that simple, but infinitely complex in its ramifications on how my life had just changed. I was married. I had someone I had to look out for and care for now. I had someone to live for. Those concepts were all radical changes to the routine ebb and flow of my structured and dispassionate lifestyle.

I stood outside the judge’s chambers feeling awkward and unsure of what came next. Anna was inspecting her second ring, her face content with satisfaction. In fact she looked a bit like the cat that ate the canary. She looked up at me inquiringly as to what came next.

“What would you like to do?” I asked.

Her eyebrows rose and her expression was all tease.

I closed my eyes briefly feeling my face flush, “I didn’t mean for that to sound like that! I…”

Her hand closed over my mouth and her eyes were kind. “I know. You were just trying to be sweet and romantic and make my wedding day even more eventful than it already is, but all I want right now is for you to make me your wife in truth! Think you can do that Nikolai?” She asked seductively as she pressed up against me.

A chortle of laughter escaped from her, “Oh honey you’re about to blow a blood vessel!”

“Let’s go!” I gritted out.

She mock saluted, “Yes Sir! Ready to serve you anyway I can, Sir! At your service, Sir just give the order, Sir!”

I just shook my head; the woman didn’t have a serious bone in her body. We turned to go and I felt Kevin’s hand slip into my free hand. I looked down to see him looking at me. In a way his gesture completely made my day as much as the ceremony had. The end of something old and the beginning of something new.

We left and for whatever reason I thought it would be nicer to walk then ride back to the apartment in a taxi. We ambled on and I had to admit my control was slipping a bit as we neared the street where the apartment building was.

My pace inadvertently quickened and Anna gave me a cheeky smirk. I stopped dead in my tracks and then almost as quickly as I’d halted I hustled a surprised Anna and Kevin inside a corner bistro that we were beside of. In an awful form of dawning dread, I walked past the waitress picking out menus asking us how many were to be seated. I went to the glass window painted with advertised specials and gazed across the street at the apartment complex building.

I felt Anna press up against me and in a concerned whisper she asked, “What’s wrong?”

I scanned the opposite street. There! I saw the man I had seen for just a brief second, when I had been out on the street.

My eyes drifted to the right and I found the man that I had hoped not to and then further on I found another one. Three men or perhaps more, appearing as if they were but calmly people watching. The bitter truth set in. The cartels had found me or at least knew about where to look. How much did they know?

I pulled a burner cell out of my coat pocket and called a number by memory.

“This is security how may we help you?”

“Hi this is Tyre Benning in apartment 705 I need to speak with Todd Brown.”

“One moment please.”

There was a brief pause before Todd came on the line, “Good afternoon Mister Benning. What can I do for you?”

“Have you noticed any odd occurrences on my floor today? Any strangers?”

“Not that I’m aware of, Sir. We did have the halls painted about midmorning, but you received word of that last week. The painters will be back tomorrow to finish the trim work.”

“I need you to do me a favor Todd.”

“Anything for you Mister Benning! You know that.”

“I need you to take those two keys I gave you an open apartment 703 and 705. Open 703 first. Now this is very important Todd! Do not step into the room, but instead look down at the doorjamb about knee-high just below the lock. There will be a light there. I want you to tell me whether it’s red or green.”

There was a slight pause, “I’m on my way Mister Benning.”

“Just leave the phone on Todd.”

I could hear the jumbling of his movement and sometimes his breathing. I heard the jumbling of keys and then the sound of a door opening.

“The light is green Mister Benning.”

“Okay try the other door.”

I heard the noise of the key slide into the lock. An automated voice sounded out in Spanish and I cringed inwardly at the words.

“Go back to hell death angel!”

I didn’t even have time to yell to tell Todd to run. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I watched every window on the seventh floor explode outward as balls of flame erupted through them. They must have mixed some explosive compound like thermoplasm in with the paint.

Following the initial flash of flame, eruptions sounded out and the bistro shook hard, and several glasses behind the bar fell and shattered on the floor. Bombs left in paint cans no doubt.

People were running and screaming everywhere, while others just stood still in fascinated horror, as they watch the top three floors of the building start to implode down onto the gutted out seventh floor. It was quiet inside me and I heard the storm around me as if it was a dim murmur in the background.

How had they found me? I covered and recovered my tracks so well! The simple truth of it was I had stayed in one place too long. I never did that, but I had kept coming back to Philadelphia, because of Anna.

Anna!

They couldn’t know about her yet. If they had they would have grabbed her and tortured her and made sure to let me know about it somehow. They were like that. Monsters like them always targeted and abused the things and people a person loved most.

They hadn’t thought I loved anything. So they had tried to kill me remotely instead of up close and brutally personal. I stared at the burning building before me as fire trucks began to screech to a halt outside their sirens blaring. All those innocent people dead and more of them injured just to kill me.

Had I saved even half as many people from addictive lifestyles of misery as they had just killed? Was there any point to anything I had tried to do in my private war? If this was my legacy than what point was there in continuing if I was only going to reap more destruction to innocent lives?

I killed some they killed many. I pushed back a little and they shoved back hard. What point was there to fighting this war if this was the result of doing the right thing? Why not let evil desires reign. Let the drugs pour in and wreck more lives. Perhaps fewer lives would have been lost that way. But it wouldn’t stop there and I knew that.

Evil men with great ambitions didn’t depend on a single item to be the people that they were. They existed because they made choices to be as they were regardless of whatever item they were peddling at the time.

People make choices and some of those choices are wrong and those wrong choices hurt both them and others. As long as people desired items or feelings that while alluring, but in the end were harmful, there would be those who would sell it to them. In the 20’s it was alcohol. Now it was drugs. Soon it would cycle back to slavery and in fact it already was. In a hundred years the fighting could be over something as inconsequential as strawberry flavored water or as bad as someone with the money to pay that decided the taste of a newborn human baby was a delicacy worth paying for.

You had to fight darkness wherever you found it regardless of the cost. If one gave up the fight everything of value would be taken away. If one fought, that might still happen, but as long as the fight lasted there was hope of something better. So I would fight on, but what a cost to bear. Anna was tugging on me and I looked over to her.

“I thought you said I was safe?”

From the level of misery in her eyes I could tell that she saw herself to blame for the destruction of so many taking place before us.

“They’re not after you! It’s me they want!” I glanced back at the building wreathed in flames.

Anna safe? Anna wasn’t safe!

Anna wouldn’t ever be safe as long as she was with me! I turned back to her and her eyes reflected the tears she felt for the devastation taking place outside.

“What?” She asked uncertainly as she gazed into my face.

I grasped her head and kissed her with all the impassioned bitterness and heart sickness I felt in this moment.

I let go and whispered, “I love you, but I have to go!”

I ran back towards the bistro’s kitchen avoiding her wild attempt to grab a hold of me.

Anna tugged Kevin along behind her and hit the back door of the bistro hard with the side of her body. The rusty door clanged open so hard it hit against the brick siding with a loud bang. Anna stood panting in the alleyway with Kevin, who was about to have a fit. No one was in the alley!

“Tyre!” She screamed out at the top of her lungs.

Her fist came up to her mouth and she half bit it in the anxiety of the moment.

“No!” She screamed looking down the alleyway again.

Kevin started to become uncontrolled and she sank to her knees on the dirty pavement wrapping her arms tightly around him.

“Shhh! It’s okay!” She whispered in the calming platitudes known especially by mothers.

Her words were lies though. Everything was not okay! Her dreams were shattering one by one, but for the sake of her son she fought to keep the grief she felt from coming out.

It took her three days of crying and watching the news coverage of the incident to come to a consensus of what to do. The reporters were covering it as an extreme accident caused by a heavy concentration of paint fumes, which had combusted and ignited gas lines that had caused the loud explosions.

They may have been fooling the public at large, but she doubted any investigator on the case would buy that theory. There had been fifty seven casualties and over a hundred others had been injured in and around the building as well as with the rescue operation. Anna knew why Tyre had run and she even understood his reasoning for doing so, but even then it still didn’t make it right.

She was heartbroken and angry all at the same time. When she found him she intended on giving him a real piece of her mind! After that she would never let him out of her sight again. But how was she to find someone like him? She didn’t know how to tread water in the underground of the world’s theater of intrigue. She didn’t even know if he was still in the country. Somehow she doubted it.

When it came to the man she loved and had married she knew practically nothing in terms of his history or where he might go. He was native born Russian, but Russia was a big place and she had Kevin to consider. The awful thought beckoned in her mind again to torment her, ‘She may never find him’!

She had to have more faith than that or…? Or she would really fall apart! She determined what her first step would be. She glanced down at the card in her hand. It had the contact info for the man named Flint. Tyre had said to contact this man if she was ever in need and he wasn’t available. Maybe this Flint would know where Tyre was or be able to help her find out where anyway.

She had debated calling the number several times over the past several days, but what she needed to do was better done in person. That meant she was going to Italy, which was scary for her. She’d never been in Canada or Mexico before let alone overseas, but if that was what it took than that was what she would do.

She wasn’t ready to give up on the rest of her life just yet. Yes, she had the money she needed to raise Kevin, but living life was more than just having the necessities needed for existence. In order to truly live you had to be alive inside too. Since Tyre had left it had felt like a piece of her was gone and the only solution to loving life again was to get him back.

A month went by, which was how long it took for her to get passports for her and Kevin. They’d been held over in the air waiting for the runway to clear for over an hour now and Anna was beginning to panic.

What if they ran out of fuel? Just then the plane began a gradual descent and the intercom announced they would be landing shortly, which ushered in a whole new array of panic inducing possibilities.

She was really going to give Tyre a piece of her mind after suffering through all this! It got choppy and then the tires hit pavement. When the plane came to a complete stop Anna breathed freely again for the first time in what felt like several minutes. She mopped the sweat off of her forehead and glanced at Kevin. He’d been a real trooper and hadn’t seemed to be fazed by anything, which was a miracle straight from God she firmly believed. He was looking at her in his usual way and if he could have had an expression she thought it would probably say something along the lines of ‘What’s wrong with you?’”

She smiled shakily, “We’re here honey.”

Now it was time to face yet another fear of hers, which was to find her way, alone, around in a foreign country with an autistic child that liked to wonder off. She’d watched far too many horror movies as a teen and now every half-baked corny movie plot was rising up to haunt her.