Baton Rouge Bingo (9 page)

“Oh, Scotty.” She gave me a big hug. She shuddered. “What are we going to do?”

“Don’t worry,” I whispered. “Frank and I will find Dad.”

And I pity the bastards who took him.

I managed to make it to the bottom of the stairs before I lost it.

I sat down hard on the steps and buried my face in my hands.

My mind was spiraling out of control, but I knew better than to try to stop it. That was futile and a waste of energy. Instead, I gave in to it, allowing my fears and worries to take over. I leaned down with my head between my knees and took deep breaths. My eyes overflowed and the sobs racked my body as my brain raced from thought to thought, each one a little bit scarier and worse than the one before.

After what seemed like forever, my mind calmed down. I wiped my face off with my T-shirt and stood up. I took a few more deep breaths before opening the door and stepping out onto the sidewalk.

Dad would be fine. We’d find what the kidnappers wanted or we’d find him.

I started walking back to my apartment.

The sky had clouded over a bit while I was at Mom’s, so it wasn’t as bright out as I hurried down Royal Street, dodging around window shoppers and other pedestrians. The air felt like a hot wet cloth, and sweat ran down the sides of my face. It felt like it was going to rain at any moment. Every once in a while my mind started going to the bad place again, but I quickly pushed those thoughts out of my head.
Everything will be fine
,
I would remind myself.

But I still couldn’t wrap my mind around Dad being kidnapped.

My father was one of the kindest, gentlest people on the planet.

I’d been kidnapped a couple of times. It’s really not a pleasant experience, to say the least. I could easily go the rest of my life without it ever happening again. Both times it worked out for the best—well, I’m still alive, at any rate—and as worried as I was about Dad, I felt pretty damned confident we’d be able to find and rescue him. It’s not like we were your typical kidnap victim’s family—if there is such a thing. Frank was a retired FBI special agent, and we were both licensed private investigators. And I had the perspective of someone who’d been kidnapped before. However, I was really sorry Colin was out of the country on a job. His access to Blackledge assets and their sophisticated technology would be a huge help to us.

I wiped sweat off my forehead as I unlocked the gate and slipped through, pulling it shut behind me. As I climbed the back steps to my apartment, I wondered if the mysterious Angela Blackledge would help us—or could somehow get a message to Colin.

Not likely
,
I thought as I opened my apartment door.
She wouldn’t want him to get distracted.

“Distractions can get you killed,” Colin had told us once when I’d asked about getting in touch with him when he was on a job. “So there’s no telling when Angela would get the message to me.”

Needless to say, the last thing I would ever do is distract him from the job at hand. His work was too dangerous—he needed to be able to focus on what he was doing.

But I couldn’t help but feel he’d want to know about Dad.

“Frank?” I called as I walked in the door. I could hear the television in the living room, but the entire apartment was dark. The shower in the master bathroom was running, and I walked down the dark hallway to the living room.
What the hell?
I thought as I recognized the sounds coming from the television as grunts and groans—and finally a male voice was saying, “Oh, yeah, baby, that’s what I like—”

I flipped the light switch and the chandelier flooded the room with light.

There’s nothing like coming home worrying about your kidnapped father and walking in on a gay teenager pleasuring himself to
The Squirt Locker.

The absurdity of it all!

“You’re watching
porn
?”
I gasped out as Taylor leaped up, pulling up his shorts and underwear while I looked away, trying hard not to laugh.

Taylor’s face was beet red as he fumbled with the DVD player’s remote and the television screen returned to
Judge Judy.
“I—uh—”

I knew I had to handle this the proper way—I didn’t want to scar him or make him feel unwelcome or uncomfortable in our home. I also knew laughing was one of the worst things I could do, so I did everything I could to control it—to no avail. I doubled over and gave in to it, managing to hold the sound in while my entire body rocked with it. After a few moments, I got myself back under control and took some deep breaths, straightening up and forcing myself to look him squarely in the face.

“I’m sorry, really, I am, but when I was going through the DVDs I found some porn and I—” He broke off, sounding completely mortified and embarrassed. He was staring at the floor, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “Uncle Frank was taking a shower, so I figured…”

I took a deep breath and walked into the living room, gesturing for him to sit back down.
He’s just a kid
,
I reminded myself,
and remember what you were like at eighteen? You were a walking, talking hard-on, that’s what you were.

“Seriously, Taylor, it’s okay,” I said, managing to keep my voice even. “It was a bit of a shock, you know? I just wasn’t expecting to walk in on that, you know.” I smiled. “You weren’t doing anything wrong, so don’t be embarrassed. It’s normal, and it’s healthy—believe it or not, I was your age once, and I can remember what it was like. But in the future, let’s just try to make sure that when you’re, um, pleasuring yourself, no one is going to walk in on you, okay? Make sure you have some privacy. I hope I didn’t embarrass you too badly.” Looking at his face, I could tell it was going to be a long time before he got over this mortification. So I brightly added, “Did you get all settled upstairs?”

He nodded, his face still red.

I heard the shower water stop running. “Okay, then. Do you mind running upstairs? I need to talk to your uncle Frank privately.”

“You’re not going to mention
this
?”
His voice cracked.

“Of course not.” I patted him on the leg. “We’ll just keep this between us, okay?”

He nodded and fled down the hall. I heard the door slam behind him, then his running footsteps going up the back stairs. I rubbed my eyes. Having an eighteen-year-old around was going to take some getting used to, apparently.

I reached under the couch and retrieved the worn cigar box where I kept my old deck of tarot cards. I opened it and caressed the deck.

The cards had been a gift from a friend of my mother’s when I was a teenager. Madame Xena, a friend of my parents’ who was a psychic, had given them to me. She’d come to dinner one night and when she met me, her eyes got really wide and she proclaimed, “But, Cecile, he has the gift!” I didn’t know what she was talking about at first, but a few days later the cards arrived with a note from her. She told me that I was a psychic, just as she was, and she had found when she was first trying to master her own gift that she used the tarot cards to focus and refine it. I just thought they were cool—I’d never seen a deck of them before. Mom bought me a copy of Eden Gray’s book
Mastering the Tarot
,
and I started studying the cards, learning the different layouts for readings and practicing. I got pretty good at it pretty fast, and I also began communing with the Goddess.

I wasn’t sure who the Goddess really was, I just knew the entity who sometimes spoke to me in dreams and visions was a strong feminine force.

I held the deck in my hands and closed my eyes, focusing on the question,
Who has my father, and will we be able to save him?

I shuffled the deck, spread the cards out, and peered at them.

A dangerous man from your past.

Growth through effort and hard work.

New conditions confront the seeker, courage and hard work are required to meet these new conditions.

Unforeseen perils, deception.

Love is always stronger than hate.

I stared at the cards for another few moments. It wasn’t completely clear—it never really was, and sometimes it took the benefit of hindsight to understand the readings, but this seemed like a good one to me. Basically, the cards were telling me that as long as we met the challenge with courage, we would be able to overcome it.

Feeling better, I swept them back into a pile, carefully wrapped them up in their blue silk, and slid the box back under the couch.

I went into the kitchen and poured a glass of iced tea before walking back into the master bedroom. Frank was toweling off in the bathroom and smiled at me when I sat down on the edge of the bed. “Taylor’s a good kid, isn’t he?” Frank slid his underwear on and hung the towel over the shower curtain rod to dry. “I think it’s going to be good for him to be around us, don’t you?”

You have no idea
,
I thought.

“I didn’t tell him about Dad,” Frank went on. “I figured that could wait. What exactly happened?”

I took a deep breath and filled him in on everything. The smile faded from his face as I spoke, and that muscle in his jaw started twitching the way it always did when Frank got angry.

“We’re not going to sit still for this, are we?” Frank said, his voice disturbingly even—never a good sign. Frank always sounds calmer as he gets angrier.

“Of course not—but we have to be careful,” I cautioned as Frank pulled on a pair of cargo shorts. Once he zipped them up and fastened them they slid down a bit so the waistband and about an inch of underwear showed. He pulled on a dark-green
Archer
T-shirt. “We don’t know who these people are, or how many of them there are.” I rubbed my eyes, suddenly very tired. “We don’t even know why they think we have this deduct box or can find it.”

“You think they might have bugged the apartment, or Mom’s?” He sat down next to me and kissed me on the cheek, putting a strong arm around my shoulders. “They had plenty of time to get in here. Maybe we should get the scanner?”

I knew immediately what he meant. Colin, being an international agent for hire, kept a shitload of what I always referred to as “superspy equipment” in one of the closets in the upstairs apartment. One of the first things he did when he got home from a job was use the scanner to check both apartments for listening devices—and he always checked every few days when he was here. I always thought it was a bit paranoid, but better safe than sorry. “Oh my God.” I stared at Frank. “We sent Taylor up there—”

Frank shook his head. “He wouldn’t know what any of that stuff is, even if he finds it,” he pointed out. “And we keep the guns down here.” They were locked away in our bedroom closet.

“Well, the scanner should be in the spare bedroom closet upstairs with everything else,” I said, keeping my voice down just in case the place was bugged. I stood up. “You finish getting dressed. I’ll go have a look.”

I kissed the top of his head before heading up the stairs.

Going up to the top floor of our building has never been one of my favorite things to do. I get vertigo sometimes—it’s nothing bad, and I have to be pretty high up for it to kick in. Usually when I climb the stairs up to our floor, I stick close to the inside railing and don’t look out much at the landings. They also aren’t out in the open—the only place where you can see out is at each floor. There’s a big landing outside each apartment door, and the wall is open at the end opposite the doors.

But the steps up from our apartment to the top floor are completely open air. And no matter how many times I do it, I can’t help but glance out at the dizzying drop down to the courtyard below. There’s also a pretty great view out there of the Quarter—Colin and Frank both absolutely love to sit on the steps, smoking a joint and enjoying the view. Not me—I am safely inside our apartment on the third floor, more than happy to wait for them to stop being bored and come on down. Once you get up to the landing on the fourth floor, there’s also an iron ladder attached to the wall so you can climb up to the roof—something I’ve done only when forced, and I still sometimes have nightmares about the damned thing. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, my hand firmly on the inside rail as I climbed up. The weather had changed in the short time I’d been inside, the way it is wont to do in the late spring in New Orleans—the wind was picking up, dark clouds were coming in, and there was a damp chill to the air that meant a thunderstorm was going to hit at any moment. I hurried up the last few steps, not wanting to be outside when the sky opened.

The door was unlocked—we always leave the door to the upper apartment unlocked—and I stepped in just as there was a crack of thunder in the distance and some raindrops started coming down. It was getting darker, and there were no lights on in the apartment. I didn’t hear anything, either, which was weird. “Taylor?” I called out tentatively, wondering where he was.

I walked down the hall and was just outside the master bedroom when I heard the unmistakable sounds of a porn video coming from the television set inside the spare bedroom.

Great
, I thought,
I’m going to interrupt him watching porn twice in less than an hour?

I cleared my throat and called out, “Taylor? Everything okay?”

The sound stopped in mid-moan, and I heard some thumping around in the spare bedroom while I waited patiently in the hallway. After a few moments, he stuck his reddened face out of the door. “Hey,” he said, his voice cracking nervously.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I exhaled. “We’re going to have to come up with some protocols around here to protect your privacy, I think.” I gave him a halfhearted smile. “We’re used to running back and forth between the two apartments—but you need some privacy. You’ll have to forgive me, I’m not used to having you around yet.”

“Do you want me to go?” His voice was so miserable that my heart broke just a little bit.

He had his shirt off, and his shorts were hanging down low enough for me to tell he hadn’t bothered to put his underwear back on. His hair was messy, and his skin had that rosy glow I remembered from when I was his age (and liked to think mine still had). He was lean and defined, just like his uncle, but his muscles weren’t as thick and developed as Frank’s. There was a patch of dark blond hair in the center of his chest, and wiry hairs leading from his navel down to the thicker patch the low-slung shorts didn’t cover. He avoided my eyes as I walked into the bedroom, pulled out the rolling desk chair, and plopped down in it. I gestured for him to have a seat on the bed.