The Shack series

Chapter 32

Needles is cool with this, right?"

"Ummm, yeahhh...sure."

Mooky suddenly looked far more frightened than when he thought his biggest problem was the FBI kicking in his door for accessory to murder and treason. "Aww, dude, tell me he's good with this."

Delaney shrugged. "I'll tell him I made you do it."

He weakly grabbed at the countertop, missed and slid down to sit on the floor. "He doesn't know?!"

Delaney gave a "mea culpa" shrug with a half-smile and shook her head.

He buried his face in his hands. "This isn't happening."

"This isn't your fault. I know he talked to you about not getting me involved in stuff, but..."

"Talk? Talk is kind of a two-way thing. Needles pinning me up against a wall threatening to kill me is not talking." Mooky rubbed his eyes for a second. "I'll be lucky if the dude just shoots me."

Delaney held her hands up helplessly. "You didn't do anything. I showed up here. He'd be a lot more pissed off if you didn't help me."

"You are NOT making things better."

"Look, this is gonna take a few days, but I'll try to get her out of here as soon as I can. You'll want to be out of here sometimes. Some guy is going to drop by to try to figure out how to help her, but I don't know when."

Mooky looked up at her for a second. "I'm working all the time right now. Chris' brother opened a surf shop in Florida, and he moved there to help."

He stared through the wall for a minute. "My uncle needs me to work extra shifts until he can hire more help."

Delaney looked a little relieved. "As soon as I find out, I'll let you know when to be out of here."

"Yeah. I can't take any more guys like Needles in my life. It's, like, way too intense."

After several more minutes of discussion, Mooky eventually headed into wherever he worked, clutching a garish shirt and hat combo as he walked out.

After he left, Delaney carefully checked my dressing, tubing and the water bottle, snapping pictures on a cheap phone. "Still looks good. I'm sending pics to Tiffany. I left her a burner phone when we left."

"So you think Mooky is safe? He won't talk?"

Delaney shook her head. "He won't say a word. He kinda owes me, and besides..."

She paused as she looked over a response on her phone. She sent another flurry of texts and looked over the answers.

"He doesn't want to piss off Needles, right?" I watched her reaction to the texts she'd received.

She shrugged. "That's just common sense. Like not stepping in front of a train...Tiffany's a little pissed off at me for leaving, but she says the wound looks good, and she told me how to take the tube out." She looked at it again. "She even sent a video. Cool."

"So when does the tube come out?"

"Three days or so depends on if your breathing is still good and nothing else has gone wrong. We pull half the tube one day, the other half the next."

I looked at her. A fifteen-year-old talking about field surgery like it ranked with fixing a sandwich. "Maybe we should go back to let her take it out."

She shook her head. "No. I can't do that. We're staying away from her. Besides, I can do simple medical stuff; I help Needles at the clinic all the time."

I didn't have many options, and Tiffany seemed like she thought Delaney was pretty competent. And she'd said something about advanced first aid training.

Delaney pulled up another text and looked at it, her eyes widening suddenly. "Do you like vodka? I need to see if Mooky can get us some vodka or something."

"Why?" I had a bad feeling I knew what she was going to say.

"Cause Tiffany says this is gonna 'hurt like a motherfucker' and she doesn't ever say things like that."

I decided Delaney was a bad influence on me. Foul language just isn't my thing, but... "Fuck."

*****

I watched through the window as Delaney pulled up in yet another non-descript compact car. She seemed to have an endless supply of them. She'd apparently shelved the armored powerhouse she'd originally picked me up in.

She walked in scowling. "They aren't planning to extract you when they get here. My K2 contact said the problem is a lot bigger than just you. They need some time."

"How long?"

"Maybe ten, twelve days." She frowned. "I want to get you out of here before Needles and Sheree get back."

"When is that?"

"A couple weeks, right before Christmas. They had a reservation for a place on the beach in Mexico earlier this year, but Needles sort of... got hurt. They delayed it as long as they could without losing the deposit so he could enjoy it."

She gave a slight smile. "They normally time the vacations with my trips to Texas."

I took a stab. "For training."

She gave a slight shake of her head and a sardonic twitch of a smile. "If you hadn't worked that out by now, I'd be real f*****g worried about the FBI."

"They've put a lot of work into training you."

She ignored that probe. "What do we have to work with?"

"Not much. Michael said he left files for me where we first met."

"That's it?"

"That's it. But knowing Michael, it's significant."

"You know where it is?"

I sighed. "Yes, I do. That is the problem. It's a park bench on the Smithsonian Mall, just a few blocks south of the Hoover Building."

"The FBI?"

"Yes. The FBI. If I were them, I'd be watching the FBI."

"We'll just have to get in and get out before they catch on. After you heal enough."

*****

The second half of the tube coming out hurt like hell, but it was easier on Mooky than the first half. I drank a lot more vodka, and Delaney tied my hands to the chair before doing the second one.

I wasn't sure what Mooky would tell people about how he got the black eye when she pulled the first half out. He pretty much refused to talk to me for a couple of days.

He was still eyeing me suspiciously whenever I moved around the trailer. Delaney was out again; she was in and out more than I'd have expected. I was concerned until I realized she was spreading out her communications patterns, changing cars constantly. Fifteen or not, she'd had some serious training.

Either way, Mooky was always nervous whenever it was just the two of us in the trailer, and I didn't need him completely losing it, so I decided to try to get him to relax. "You could really make your lighting more efficient if you could get several old mirrors. You're losing a lot of light here. You can use mirrors to reflect your lost light back onto the plants."

He looked startled, but I was starting to suspect that he usually looked like that. "Really?"

"We did a study on grow houses, and that was one of the things we learned. You can reduce your electrical use a bit, get stronger growth and bud production, and keep the plants from getting leggy on you."

He perked up. "Did you guys try LED lights?"

"We did, but it's touchier than you think. You have to get the spectrum just right; LEDs aren't like HPS or some of the others, so you have to use a mix and get it just right, but it will cut down on your electric. But LEDs also reduces heat, so in winter here, that could be a problem."

Mooky nodded. "That's what I heard. I'm going to try it someday."

"They're starting to make them commercially. You might want to ask someone who has tried them and see what they think."

He looked down glumly. "I don't know anybody using them right now."

I pulled myself out of the chair, wincing at the pain. "Your water system, though. I know how to make that a lot better."

*****

Delaney stared at us with a frankly confused look. "Are you two going into business together or something?"

"We pulled about twenty-five feet of pipe out of his watering system." I gestured to the stack of Pvc pipe in the corner. "Shortening it keeps the pressure higher, and we get a more even distribution of water."

Mooky, his face pretty much covered in dirt, stuck his head out from behind the racks. "Dude, she knows, like, everything about this stuff. Did you get my message?"

She looked suspiciously between us and settled on me. "You do remember you work for the FBI, right?"

I shrugged, then winced in pain. "I'm not exactly worried about it. Assuming I survive being taken into custody, which is pretty unlikely, I suspect this wouldn't even make the charge list."

She closed her eyes and sighed. "I don't need you to kill yourself trying to do stuff either."

"I just told him what to do and stood back."

"She even drew this cool diagram; it's like professional-level stuff." Mooky waved it around.

"Jesus. It's drawn on a f*****g napkin." The pained disbelief on her face gave way to pained acceptance. "f**k it. You guys go ahead and do your ownBreaking Weird thing. Whatever. I got your message, and I brought something like twenty of those plastic bathroom door mirrors they use in hotels. We had a stack of them from when they renovated the no-tell motel out on Caper Road."

Mooky stood up. "Cool! I'll go bring them in."

Delaney watched him walk out. "K2 says they have someone coming by tomorrow evening. It's not really one of their assets, but they'll bring some legal help and try to see what else can be done."

I was relieved. I didn't have any doubt that Delaney was competent and well trained, but relying on someone, a teenager, who might think of the whole thing as a game worried me.

At least I was certain that, in trusting Mooky, Delaney had made a good choice. I'd been worried that she had been just coercing him to cooperate, and coercion isn't as reliable as most people think. As we talked, though, I realized that the ties between him and Delaney were more like close family ties than anything else. And more than that, he had faith in her. He trusted that whatever the hell Delaney was doing was "righteous", no matter how it looked to anyone else.

He was also a lot deeper than I'd thought. He saw m*******a as a real miracle d**g, and I found out many of his trips were to a nearby retirement home, where he felt his "product" could really help. Maybe it wouldn't always cure, but it could at least ease the pain and make life easier.