Fair Trade Read online

  Fair Trade

  My Mira, Book Three

  Dustin Stevens

  Fair Trade

  My Mira: Book Three

  Copyright © 2018, T.R. Kohler

  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

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Sneak Peek

  Thank You

  Free Book

  Bookshelf

  About the Author

  Catch on fire and people will

  come for miles to see you burn.

  —John Wesley

  Prologue

  I smell it long before I see it. Whether it is a real scent or simply a figment of my mind, a psychosomatic response to the phone call a few minutes before, I have no idea.

  What I know for sure is the smell of smoke is in the air. It seems to settle around me, thick as a fog. Every inhalation burns my nostrils, sliding into my lungs. My eyes are rimmed with moisture.

  But again, I have no way of knowing if any of this is real. Or even a response to what I was just told.

  As little as a few days ago, I might have considered this a good thing. I may have taken a step back, thought of everything we’d already been through, and decided to just let it go.

  The instant I answered the phone though, such thoughts evaporated forever, as ethereal as morning fog, vaporized by the rising sun. And just like those bright early rays, what was left behind was so clear it was almost blinding. So obvious, I felt foolish for having not seen it sooner.

  The red needle of the speedometer is pinned at a one-hundred-degree angle on the dash before me. Much faster than I have any business driving on the 805, I can’t bring myself to slow down. I don’t even acknowledge the other drivers around me with their honks and glares and middle fingers, my focus locked straight ahead.

  A flick of my gaze to the dashboard shows it has been just three minutes since the call came in. So little by most any measurable standard, it now seems like an eternity, the full destructive power of one hundred and eighty seconds flashing through my mind.

  One time after another, behind each blink of my eyes, conjured images come to mind. Snapshots of things I’d rather not even consider. Of deeds that cannot be undone.

  Things that might very well snap the tenuous grasp on reality I’ve been clinging to for a solid week.

  The front faceplate of my phone springs to life beside me, the light bright in the front cab of the car. Casting my gaze that direction, I recognize the name being displayed back at me, though I make no effort to answer.

  Not now.

  Right now, all I can focus on is my destination. On what might happen if I arrive to find everything I fear has actually come to pass.

  Chapter One

  Few places are ever truly doing business around the clock. Regardless if an establishment advertises itself as being available twenty-four hours or not, rare can it be said that the place is actually making transactions at anywhere near that pace.

  Just drive past a 7-11 at three in the morning sometime. You’ll see a vagrant asleep on the sidewalk outside, a poor immigrant working the graveyard shift to try and help make ends meet, and a whole lot of neon and halogen doing little more than wasting electricity.

  Despite their radically different purposes, the same can be said for the Paradise Valley Hospital.

  The place was picked for two simple reasons. It has an emergency department, and it is geographically the closest to the Chula Vista suburb of San Diego. If given the time or the inclination, there are a good handful of other places we definitely would have rather gone, but having the luxury of neither, this is where we ended up.

  Six hours earlier, my brother-in-law Hiram and I had made the drive in from La Mesa – another suburb, this one on the eastern edge of the city sprawl. The trip was made with the simple goal in mind of having a conversation, of getting to sit down with the last unknown entry listed in my wife’s date book before her senseless murder almost a week ago.

  And, like damn near everything else that has transpired in the days since, the meeting turned out to be anything but what we expected.

  My jaw aches slightly and a wicked headache is sitting just behind my left eye as I walk through the halls of Paradise Valley. Beside me is my diminutive mother-in-law, her steps short and choppy as we both make our way forward, headed toward the cafeteria.

  I don’t bother looking over at her as we march on, both of us locked in our own heads, trying to make sense of so damn much disparate information. Tonight was supposed to have finally started to crack open the tight package that everything seemed to be wrapped in, though at the moment, all I can conjure are more questions.

  And a whole lot of anger.

  The lights above have been dimmed to a third of their usual strength. With most of the patients asleep for the night and the staff reduced to a skeleton crew, there is no need for the extra expense, nobody around to use the illumination even if it was on. Long shadows fall across the tile floor as we walk, the low and even purr of a janitor running a buffer serving as background noise.

  Coming up on a hallway crossing, I glance to the wall just long enough to check the signage. “To the left,” I whisper, my mother-in-law responding with a light grunt.

  Together, we make the turn and head over, finally coming to our destination a full five minutes after rising from the chairs outside Hiram’s room. Neither of us have slept at all this evening, barely more than that in the preceding week, but it doesn’t matter. We are both too locked in now to think of doing anything else.

  Pushing straight through the double doors into the cafeteria, we find the space just as deserted as the rest of the hospital. Even fewer bulbs are burning along the ceiling, most of the light in the place coming from the residual glow of vending machines.

  As we enter, the lone troupe of people inside turn our direction. Tucked away into the back corner, they represent one of the oddest assortments I imagine the room has ever housed, all with their mouths drawn into tight lines, staring intently back at us.

  From what I can tell, nobody was saying a word before our arrival, everybody waiting for us, not bothering to go through the motions of getting acquainted.

  Split into pairs, on the right are my friends Jeff Swinger and Emily Stapleton. Both people I first en
countered in my time with the Navy, Jeff is a Chief Petty Officer, someone that I met in my first days of SEAL training and have been with ever since. Standing a few inches above six feet in height, he is heavily muscled, a poster child for the lucky bastards that seem to get ripped through little more than walking past a gym a couple times a week.

  His dark hair is cut short with a few days of growth on his face. Since we’re not the Army and don’t care near as much about such things, I know in a few days it’ll likely be back to a full beard, the look one that has come and gone too many times to count over the years. Dressed in gym shorts and a hoodie, the sleeves of it have been pushed up to mid-forearm, revealing bright tattoos along his left arm.

  Standing, he has one foot on a chair. His forearms are crossed over the raised knee, his weight leaning forward, as if he is a sprinter about to spring forth out of the blocks.

  Or as I know to be much closer to the truth, like a man that just needs to be pointed in the right direction before he explodes forward and starts kicking some serious ass.

  Him and me both.

  Sitting beside him is Emily Stapleton, an ensign that helps with logistics for our unit and a number of others working out of nearby Coronado. A year younger than me, she is just past thirty, with bright auburn hair pulled into a ponytail and a pale complexion. With a frame that suggests she too could be active duty, she is several inches taller than Mira had been, her shoulders square.

  Dressed in yoga pants and a sweatshirt, I can see circles under her eyes. No doubt they are a result of me and this damnable situation, a fact I can’t pretend doesn’t press a pang deep into my core.

  Never will she say a word about it, just as I would do the same in her position, but that doesn’t stop the guilt from seeping in anyway.

  Sitting opposite them are the two women that Hiram and I were intending to meet with hours before. Bearing little resemblance to each other beyond the dark hue of their skin, I know them to be Valerie Ogo and her grandmother Fran, though beyond that I admit to clutching at straws.

  Who they are, why Mira was set to meet with them, why men immediately showed up and attacked us as soon as we arrived – all things I hope to begin answering in the coming moments.

  “Is Hiram okay?” Stapleton asks, the words sounding abnormally loud in the quiet of the room.

  I flick a glance to my mother-in-law, seeing she has no intention of saying anything just yet. Pulling my gaze back, I reply, “He will be. Acute anxiety attack from what happened.”

  “Which was what?” Swinger asks. The words aren’t hostile, but there’s a charge there I recognize instantly. Both from years of working with him, and from hearing the same sound in my own voice just hours before.

  “Are you okay?” Stapleton adds no more than a split second later, seeing the effects of the unexpected shot I had taken earlier splayed across my cheek.

  Opening my mouth to respond, I pull up short. There will be time to get into all of this, but right now I need to seize control of the narrative. What happened earlier shouldn’t be the focus. Why it occurred has to be, at least initially.

  Holding up a single finger, I force my focus away from my friends to the opposite side of the table. There, both women stare up at me, their eyes wide.

  “Ladies, like I said earlier, my name is Kyle Clady. I am – was – Mira Clady’s husband.” Using the same finger, I point to my mother-in-law beside me. “And this is her mother, Angelique.”

  I pause a moment, waiting as they both look between us, before adding, “Now, again I ask, who the hell are you two?”

  Chapter Two

  When Hiram and I showed up earlier in the evening, my goal was to have a conversation. I’d seen the listing in my wife’s work datebook, called and asked to sit down for a few minutes. The idea was that I would explain who I was, ask who they were, see if there was any reason to think they might be connected to her death.

  I admit, it was a stretch. But days of digging through everything I had wasn’t turning up a damn thing. No unexplained pieces of mail, no random messages jotted down anywhere.

  My wife might not have been a saint, but she was one of the closest people I’d ever met to one. She didn’t believe in grudges, had never had a mortal enemy. Not once had I ever heard her say a cross thing about a coworker or even the rude barista at the coffee shop she liked to go to.

  The woman was the daughter of immigrants. She’d put herself through college on a racquetball scholarship, a game she’d picked up while spending time from an early age at the health club where her mother worked as a janitor.

  Of the two of us, I was the one that had enemies. Maybe not by name or someone I might run into on the street, but the better part of a decade as a SEAL had put me into some of the worst sewers on the planet. And had caused me to do some things I would rather my mother never found out about.

  If somebody was going to get shot down in a park, it should have been me. After it happened, that was my original thought even, that someone had been targeting me, had gotten nervous and missed at the worst possible moment.

  A day later, I had tracked down the man that did it and taken him out into the desert, intent to make him pay for his mistake. And it was there, with his dying breaths, that I found out he hit exactly where he was aiming.

  The why was the part I had spent every moment since trying to parse out.

  Despite my original plan to sit down with the women and have a calm and reasonable discussion, what little patience I might have was obliterated by the scene a few hours prior. With my ear ringing and the dull throbbing in my cheek feeling like it might force my eyeball from its socket, I can already feel the agitation pulsating through me.

  The best I can hope for is it to keep it somewhat intact throughout the course of this interaction.

  The women both look scared as they stare up at me. Sitting closest is the older of the two. Wrapped in a fuzzy coat over sweatpants and a sweater, her hair is completely silver, her skin lined from years of sun exposure. Despite that, her gaze is clear, her energy strong.

  Behind her sits a woman thirty or forty years her junior. Appearing in her late-twenties, she has long dark hair and dark eyes, her expression tinged with annoyance as she stares back at me.

  “Like I told you back at home,” she says, “my name is Valerie Ogo, and this is my grandmother Fran.”

  At the sound of her name, the old woman nods, though remains silent.

  Returning the gesture, I motion with the top of my head toward the opposite side of the table. “And this Jeff and Emily. They are both in the Navy with me, were friends with my wife.”

  Valerie gives them no more than a quick glance before looking back my way. Her eyes narrowed slightly, she says, “That’s twice now you’ve referred to Mira in the past tense. What the hell is going on here? And what was all that about earlier?”

  A couple of times over the years, I’ve been in the unenviable position of having to interrogate someone. While we have specialists trained in such things, that only works when you have plenty of time and the right surroundings. Otherwise, you make do with what you have, extracting information on the fly and hoping for the best.

  Again, enemies scattered throughout my past.

  Never have I gone anywhere near what one might find going on in Guantanamo Bay, but I have had enough experience to at the very least know when someone is lying to me. And from what I can tell, Valerie Ogo is confused, she’s pissed, she’s worried, but she isn’t lying.

  Flicking my gaze to Swinger, I raise my eyebrows just slightly, an unspoken question passing between us. A quick shake of his head shows he is getting the same read, each of us turning our attention back to the far side of the table.

  Like so many times in the preceding days, questions come flying to mind. Arriving from every angle, they pour in thick and furious, too many to be addressed in any kind of order.

  Turning to the side, I grab the back of the nearest chair. Twisting it around, I slide it up behind
Angelique. “Here, this could take a while.”

  Accepting with a silent nod, she lowers herself into it as I spread my feet, folding my arms across my chest. No amount of fatigue can offset the nervous energy passing through me, tiny bits of adrenaline from earlier in the night still lingering in my system.

  “Last Thursday night, my wife and I were walking through Balboa Park,” I say. “We’d had dinner with Jeff and Emily and another friend of ours and then went for a walk.”

  Pausing, I turn my head to the side, pulling in a deep breath through my nose. With it comes the three millionth viewing of the incident in my mind, the man’s face still so clear, his words ringing in my mind.

  “Where a man shot and killed her. Point blank, in cold blood.”

  I decide to leave out the parts about us later tracking the man down and ending his life in a most severe and painful way. Such details aren’t at all relevant to what I need right now.

  “Oh my God,” Valerie says, the previous angst disappearing from her face. Her features fall flat as she raises a hand to her chest, her mouth sagging slightly. “I’m so sorry.”

  Brushing past her condolences, I continue, “And as he was fleeing, he made a statement to the effect of, it was intentional.”