Ships Passing Read online

  Ships Passing

  My Mira, Book Four

  Dustin Stevens

  Spare Change

  My Mira: Book One

  Copyright © 2018, Dustin Stevens

  Cover Art and Design: Paramita Bhattacharjee, www.creativeparamita.com

  Warning: All rights reserved. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work, in whole or part, in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, is illegal and forbidden, without the written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, settings, names, and occurrences are a product of the author’s imagination and bear no resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, places or settings, and/or occurrences. Any incidences of resemblance are purely coincidental.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Sneak Peek

  Thank You

  Free Book

  Bookshelf

  About the Author

  The most difficult thing is the decision

  to act, the rest is merely tenacity.

  —Amelia Earhart

  Destiny means there are opportunities

  to turn left or right, but fate is a

  one-way street.

  —Paulo Coelho

  Prologue

  I’m not sure if making the call was the right move, but after the last week, any concept of right or wrong is virtually irrelevant. Gone are any of the traditionally associated notions, replaced by the most basic of all evoked responses.

  Move and react. Survive and advance.

  Get through one moment before worrying about the next.

  The night air is chilly against my skin as it blows in through the open window on the passenger side of Swinger’s truck. Hours after the sun has fled the sky, the temperature has dropped into the upper fifties, the coolest Southern California has seen since last spring.

  A welcome respite from the interminable heat and sun of the last six months, it helps to lower my body temperature, slowing the pulse thrumming through my temples. It manages to keep the scents of smoke and sweat and blood from my nostrils, swirling them through the cab of the truck and out into the night.

  Maybe best of all, it provides enough background noise to keep conversation at bay, allowing me to get lost in my thoughts.

  To try and make sense of all that just happened, how it ties into the events of the previous days.

  What surely awaits in the ones before me.

  It was obvious that the person on the other end of the line wasn’t expecting to hear from me. The name they used in answering was enough to indicate as much. The slow response to hearing my voice confirmed it.

  In total, a shock that lasted only moments before being shoved aside, controlled fury flooding in.

  A response I know all too well at this point.

  Staring out the windows, watching the assorted lights of the eastern suburbs of San Diego whiz past outside, I sit and replay the conversation time and again in my head. I parse through each exchange, try to coax deeper meaning from every word shared.

  But like so much that has transpired, there doesn’t seem to be a point. No bigger lesson, no deeper meaning. Nothing but unending insanity, people reduced to their animal instincts, lashing out until only one of us is left standing.

  A scenario I find myself become increasingly at ease.

  An hour has passed since making the call, and still I have no clue if it was the right thing to do. If it bettered my cause in any way or if it was merely in service of my ego or my anger or some other foolish emotion that I should be better trained to handle.

  All I do seem to know is that at this point, I’d be lying if I said I even care.

  Chapter One

  Hours have passed since I first showed up to see my home standing as a fiery pyre, oversized fingers of orange and yellow reaching ever higher into the night sky. In the time since, most of the commotion that was present when I first arrived has subsided.

  Many of the first responders have now come and gone, nothing more than a pair of police cruisers sitting at either end of the street. To my right, a couple of officers lean against the front hood, glancing between the house and the adjoining thoroughfares, waving off the occasional rubbernecker on their way to work.

  At the opposite end, the assigned pair has given up the task, instead retreating into their vehicle, heads silhouetted behind the windshield.

  Not that I harbor any ill will toward them. They are right. There isn’t anything more they can do.

  Between the two cruisers, the quartet of fire engines that first showed up has shrunk to a single unit. A small cluster of men in oversized fire-retardant pants and suspenders stand near the back end of it, their bare arms and faces smudged with soot. Spooled out alongside them is enough hose to ensure that the last dying gasps of the home don’t somehow spring back to life, but it is clear at a glance that they expect nothing of the sort.

  At this point, the battle has been fought and lost.

  Just as has almost every earthly possession that remained of my Mira.

  When the sun last set, it did so on the definition of a bucolic suburban Southern California neighborhood. Single family dwellings butted up tight to one another, both sides of the street filled with lots of equal size. Containing all the usual trappings, each had front lawns, side garages, a car or two parked outside.

  A few had pets. A smaller handful even had the mythical white picket fence.

  Only a matter of hours has passed since then, but already the sun is beginning to rise on a much different scene. No longer does the street look like it once did, an enormous black divot gouged into the center of it.

  What was once my home, the first house my wife and I owned together, the place where we were seriously considering expanding our family, is now nothing but a pile of cinders, each passing moment further reducing all that remains.

  By noon, I suspect it will be nothing more than ash, the Santa Ana winds carrying it into the distance.

  I can feel the concrete curb beneath me biting into my tailbone as I sit on the opposite side of the street and stare. Disbelief, terror, shock, nostalgia, all run through my mind in equal measure. All so fierce, all so palpable, I don’t know which to seize on first, my body numb.

  For only the second time in my life – both coming in the last week - I have no idea how to process something.

  “Here,” a voice says, arriving a split second before a foil package taps against my shoulder. On contact, I can smell sausage and cheese, my hand reaching up to accept the intrusion without my mind truly grasping what it is.

  “Breakfast burrito,” Wendell Ross says, lowering himself onto the curb beside me.

  A fellow Petty Officer, Ross has been by my side since we first went into SEAL training almost a decade before. A bit shorter than me, he is cut from corded muscle and sinew, his arms and chest broad plates achieved t
hrough hours of bodyweight calisthenics.

  Dressed in gym shorts and a long-sleeve neoprene shirt, he places a brown paper bag between his feet as he settles in, though makes no move to open it.

  Where he went or how long he’s been gone, I can only guess at, the last several hours a menagerie of sights and sounds and thoughts, all of it contorted into one unending nightmare.

  Just as the last week since my wife’s death has been.

  “You should eat something,” Ross says, his voice low and composed. He doesn’t bother looking my way as he says it, both of us staring at the shattered remnants of the last tangible vestige I had of my marriage.

  Of course, he is right. Just as he has been a dozen times before over the years when we were together out in the shit. Moments when he would ensure the rest of us got the food or rest we needed.

  A direct result of being one of the few among us that was also a father, the paternal instinct ingrained.

  “Thanks,” I manage, not knowing what else to say at the moment.

  I do need food. And water. And sleep.

  I need to push rewind, and go back to sitting in the corner booth at The Cartwright with Mira and Ross and our friends Emily Stapleton and Jeff Swinger. I need to take her directly home afterward, avoiding Balboa Park and the Wolves and anything else that might endanger her.

  I need a lot of things right now. But just like every last one of them, I’m not sure my body can even handle the thought of eating at the moment.

  “Jeff and Emily take off?” I whisper.

  “Yeah,” Ross replies. “They were both going to call in today, but I told them to go on. There’s nothing more they can do here.”

  Again, he is right. There is nothing anybody can do here. In a couple of hours, the fire department will determine that there is no risk of reignition and the police will string crime scene tape across the front. Tomorrow, or the next day, an arson investigator will come out and take a look.

  Not that I need to wait that long to know what happened here.

  “Sonsabitches,” I mutter.

  Beside me, Ross grunts slightly. “Wolves?”

  Just hearing the name draws my hand up into a fist. My jaw clenches as I stare straight ahead, the burning in my eyes becoming more pronounced.

  “Who else?” I whisper.

  This time, he doesn’t bother to respond. There is no need to. We both know who is behind this, the bigger question being the one I’ve spent much of the last week trying to determine.

  Why? Why had one of their members killed my wife in cold blood? Why were they targeting Fran Ogo and her granddaughter Valerie? Why did they search my house six days ago only to come back and burn the place to the ground now?

  Why?

  The smell of wood char hangs heavy in the air, overpowering even the breakfast in my hand. I haven’t caught a glimpse of myself in hours, though I can only imagine how I must appear with ash and soot staining my cheeks, rivulets streaming vertically through it, revealing where my tears have fallen.

  Almost certainly my eyes and nostrils are both red-rimmed, stinging in the aftermath of the fire.

  At this point, I am well past caring.

  “What are you thinking?” he asks.

  He doesn’t expound further, though I know exactly what he is trying to say. He wants to know the plan I’m putting together, wants to make sure I’m not about to do something incredibly stupid.

  What he can’t possibly understand is, I haven’t even made it that far yet, my focus still on the remnants of my home before us.

  “I have to go in this morning,” I reply. “Another one of those damn sessions with the doc.”

  Pausing, I smirk slightly, the fact that every last thing I have to wear just burned up occurring to me. “Think she’ll write me up for appearing out of uniform?”

  Chapter Two

  Elsa Teller is not in the mood. Not for the nineteen-year-old barista at Starbucks that acted too busy with her text conversation to actually put together what was ordered. Not for the burly tattooed man that thought he owned the road on her way here, almost running her into the berm and having the audacity to wave a middle finger at her as he blew past. Not for the receptionist in the lobby that tried to slow her down, thinking he was anything more than window dressing as she strode by.

  And definitely not for this entire ordeal, things having descended from a curiosity to a situation to a shitshow in record time.

  Which is why she’s now sitting where she is, an office that unofficially pays her salary, adding on a few dollars each month to make sure the two sides never actually meet.

  Conveying exactly that same sentiment, Senator Carter Flynn sits across from her. Leaning forward, his elbows rest on the front edge of the desk. The pads of all eight fingers tap lightly against each other, a habit that tends to mean he is annoyed at something.

  Teller knows the feeling.

  Despite the rest of the business world not making it into the office for another few hours, Flynn is already dressed and ready for the new day. His silver mane is combed straight back and gelled into submission, revealing a hairline that is both too thick and too straight on a man his age to be natural.

  Much the same as the skin on his forehead and around his eyes is pulled taut, the effects of the work blended slightly by self-tanner and a healthy dollop of California sun.

  “I won’t lie,” Flynn says, the bombastic timbre he uses in front of the cameras dropped in favor of his more natural tone. Like an aging singer, years of performing having turned it to gravel. “When I got your message, I wasn’t exactly pleased.”

  Dozens of retorts spring to Teller’s mind, each packed with more venom than the one before. If she was sitting in front of Ringer, or Myles Morgan, or most anybody else, she would likely let a few of them fly.

  Indulging such thoughts here, though, would be a faux pas she wouldn’t soon recover from.

  “I know,” Teller says, dipping the top of her head slightly, “and I apologize for reaching out the way I did, but we have a situation developing.”

  The words taste like acid on her tongue, almost forcing bile up the back of her throat. It takes complete focus for her to maintain a straight face, sitting and watching the man process what was said, connecting the dots of her deliberately vague statement for himself.

  As he does so, he maintains his pose across from her, as clear a power posture as exists.

  Not that anything about the man intimidates Teller in the slightest. Or even impresses her, for that matter.

  The only thing that does is the office she now sits in, both the freedom it affords her and the salary it provides in the process.

  “Local?” he asks.

  Again, Teller dips the top of her head forward, this time choosing to remain silent.

  “Topic?”

  “COFA.”

  Teller isn’t naïve enough to believe she is the only fixer in the employ of one of the ranking senators in the United States. Of them, her particular specialty lies in Southern California, relying on a combination of skills and contacts it has taken her years to cultivate.

  Still, the list of things she covers in her tiny corner of the country is extensive.

  And COFA is nowhere near the top.

  “Seriously?” he asks, his eyebrows rising slightly.

  “Seriously,” she replies. “There’s been a small influx lately.”

  Pausing a moment, allowing for her to continue, Flynn prompts, “And?”

  “And some have gotten quite - shall we say - bold since arriving.”

  The lower half of Flynn’s face contorts into a sour look, the parts of his features that haven’t been frozen in place relaying his displeasure at what he hears. Pushing back from the front edge of the desk, he leans away from her, his chair reclining without a sound.

  Allowing him a moment to work past his internal tantrum, Teller draws her attention away, panning over the office, the place exactly the same as it appeared the last time sh
e was present.

  Now more than a year and a half in the past.

  Shifting her gaze to the bank of windows along their right side, she can see a faint glow starting to paint the top of the incoming curl along the La Jolla coast. Light orange in color, it hints at another bright day ahead, no doubt bringing intense heat with it.

  A mirrored copy to nine months of the year in the bottom corner of the country.

  “How bad?” Flynn asks.

  Flicking her gaze back to him, Teller replies, “So far, only a single body, but things are beginning to mushroom.”

  Narrowing his eyes slightly, Flynn remains silent, instead motioning with a hand for her to continue.

  “The woman was the wife of a Navy SEAL, who has chosen to go to war with the organization that performed the killing.”

  “So?” Flynn replied. “Isn’t that a good thing? Makes the whole thing look like a personal grudge?”

  “Yes,” Teller concedes, “if his wife was the only person on the list.”

  Once more, she chooses to fall short. Making the trip here is one of the last things on earth she wanted to do. The rare reminder that her tether isn’t quite as long or as invisible as she would prefer, it always carries with it the feeling of a child being sent to the principal’s office.

  She was hired because she is a woman that gets things done. Having strictures in place only limits that. It makes her far less effective at her job, ebbing away at her credibility.