White Hot Page 38
The camera swung wildly to the right to a woman advancing toward the warehouse. She had gone to ground by the oak, hidden by the low stone wall bordering the tree.
“I’m death. I’m a ghost. I’ll find you. You can run, you can hide, you can beg, but none of it will help you. I’ll come for you in the darkness like a lithe panther with velvet paws and steel claws and . . . wait, brains, wait, where are you going? Why are you all leaking out of my head? Don’t leave me!”
I put my hand over my eyes.
“Oh no, look—my feet are twitching. That’s so undignified.”
I would kill Bern for letting him do this. And then I would have a serious talk with Leon.
“Your cousin has an interesting sense of humor,” Cornelius noted.
“I’m Mr. Ripped,” the computer announced in Leon’s voice. I didn’t even want to look anymore. “I live in the gym. My teeth have biceps and my biceps have teeth. I chew up weights and shit out lead bricks.”
Rogan’s face turned speculative.
“Don’t,” I told him.
“In about three years or so, I could use him. He’s demonstrating a very specific moral flexibility . . .”
“I’ll shoot you myself,” I told him.
Grandma Frida tore into the motor pool from the street, followed by an Asian woman in her late twenties. The woman wore Rogan’s team’s tactical gear. My grandma wore her “talk to the hand” face. She also carried a can of spray paint in her hand.
“What is it, Hanh?” Rogan asked.
“She marked all of the ATVs with her initials!” Hanh declared.
“Because they’re mine,” Grandma Frida growled.
“She doesn’t get all the ATVs.”
Rogan’s face took on a very patient look.
“Yes, I do. I tagged them, they’re mine.”
“Just because you tagged them doesn’t mean they’re yours. I can walk into this motor pool and start tagging things left and right. That doesn’t make them mine.”
“Aha.” My grandma picked up a huge wrench and casually leaned it on her shoulder. “How are you going to tag things with broken arms?”
“Don’t threaten me.” Hanh turned to Rogan. “She can’t have all of them.”
“Yes, I can,” Grandma Frida put in before Rogan could open his mouth. “The enemy attacked our position; it’s an emergency, and since I’m the acting platoon sergeant for this family, I’m requisitioning my Class VII supplies. They’re on our land.”
“Those three ATVs are on your land. The one down on the access road is on our land,” Hanh said.
“Nguyen, let her have the ATVs,” Rogan said.
Hanh opened her mouth to argue and clamped it shut.
“Ha!” Grandma Frida pointed her wrench at Hanh.
“Grandma . . .” I started. “If that other vehicle is on their land . . .”
Wait a minute.
I pivoted toward Rogan. “What does she mean that ATV is on your land?”
Hanh froze.
Rogan looked like he wanted to strangle somebody.
“Rogan?”
He was thinking of a clever way to phrase his answer.
“Did you buy property adjacent to this warehouse?”
He closed his eyes for a second, then looked at me, and said, “Yes.”
“How much property did you buy?”
“Some.”
I stared at him. “Could you be more specific?”
“Everything between Gessner, Clay, Blalock, and Hempstead.”
Dear God. That was almost two square miles of industrial real estate and our warehouse was sitting smack in the middle of his land. Every day I drove past these businesses and nothing seemed different.
“When did you buy this land?”
“I started the day Adam Pierce was arrested.”
“Why would you do this?”
“Because you live in the middle of an industrial jungle, Nevada.” His face was hard. “You have a number of small roads, you have industrial traffic going through here, and there are about a thousand places one could hide a strike team. I bought it because there is no way to effectively secure this location.”
“And you’ve secured it?” I had diagnosed him as a control freak long ago, but this was going too far.
“Yes. Now this area is patrolled, equipped with structure defenses, and secured by armed personnel.”
“No, Rogan. Just no.”
“The only reason these people came in on that particular road was because I allowed it. I shut down all nonessential roads at night. I made sure that stealth wasn’t an option. They were forced to punch through and come in hot, rather than use covert tactics and slit your throats while you slept. Even so, an assault of this scale is difficult to control. That’s why I stood there and presented a convenient target. Now we have a solid lead.”
So that’s where the spiked barricades came from. I should’ve known. When you worked for Rogan, he made sure you were defended. He went so far as to make you immune to financial pressure from outside sources: his companies provided your car loan, your kids’ college loans, your mortgage . . .
Oh no. No, he wouldn’t.
My voice could’ve frozen the air in the warehouse. “Rogan, do you own my mortgage?”
“Not personally.”
“Damn it!” He couldn’t have touched our business. Augustine would never sell, so he went after my home instead.
“Nevada, it’s in a trust. I don’t personally own it. One of my companies owns it. I can’t foreclose on it and I can’t sell it. The terms remained exactly the same.”
“You had no right to buy my mortgage!”
“I had every right. It was right there. Anybody could’ve bought it and used it as leverage.”
“You and I’ll never be financially equal; I get that. But you can’t just buy up chunks of my life. For anything between us to work, I have to be able to say no to you. If you own my house, I lose that ability. I lose my independence.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“There is no such thing as a simple meeting now. Any communication from you will be an invitation from a man who owns my house.”
“Have I used it as leverage? Have I mentioned it? Did I wrap it up with a pretty ribbon and offer it to you on a silver platter and said, ‘Here is your mortgage, sleep with me?’”
“You didn’t have to. It’s enough I know you could.”
“So now you’re blaming me for the things I could theoretically do?”
“I’m blaming you for the thing you already did. You bought every business around me and then you bought my mortgage. For any kind of relationship to work, I have to have a choice to walk away from it. You’re taking that ability away from me. You know I would do anything to keep the roof over my family’s head.”
“That’s not even logical,” he said, his voice precise and sharp.
“Oh? Then why didn’t you tell me about it?”
“I did tell you when you asked.”
“Let’s look at the sequence of events: you proposition me, I tell you no, you buy my mortgage. The fact that you don’t tell me about it just reinforces the fact that you may have used it as leverage. Because you would, Rogan. You will use every resource at your disposal to win.”
“I don’t want to win.” He locked his jaw. “This isn’t some idiotic competition between you and me to see if I can wear you down. I didn’t tell you because I knew you would react just like this.”
“You knew it was the wrong move.”
“Wake up,” he growled. “Tonight sixteen trained killers came here to murder you. They had military-grade weapons and equipment. They would’ve driven a tanker truck into this place, detonated the charges, and shot all of you as you ran out with your skin on fire. Do you honestly think that your seventy-three-year-old grandmother in an aging tank, your mother with a permanent injury and a sniper rifle, and a cage full of guns can protect you? This is House warfare. You were vulnerable. You were vulnerable physically and financially. I eliminated those vulnerabilities.”