Society Rules (34 page)

“You
really
don’t have to hold me at gun point . . . not if you don’t want to.” Jackson spoke with a wry laziness that Will found instantly infuriating.

“Well you know what, I’m kinda gettin’ off on it right now, so I think we’ll keep things as they are.” He gestured with the handgun in an up and down appraising manner. “So this . . .
this
is what my wife found so appealing? I don’t get it. You look like a punk. I didn’t realize she was so into little boys!”

Jackson cooled his own fury at the insults directed toward Indie with agonizing effort. He didn’t care what Will said about him, but putting down his love was a hazardous sport, and Will seemed up for the game. He tried to remember that Will was rightfully hurt and angry, and that he was even one of the Population he was charged with protecting. This helped just enough so that he could speak without gagging on his rage.

He crossed his arms and stared back at Will coolly.

“I think I can handle the fact that
you
don’t find me attractive.” He shrugged slightly before adding vindictively.

“As long as Indie does.”

He winced as the unaccustomed nastiness tainted his mouth like poison.

Will’s finger twitched on the trigger. “What are you doing here at my house again, you fucker?” His voice was now deadly cold.

“You kiss your kids with that mouth, William?” Jackson grimaced and shook his head.

This was
so
not part of the plan. He needed to get out of here before he was forced to engage with this man, and he truly . . .
truly
did not want to do that.

Not really.

“Look, I only came to make sure that the boy delivered the papers to you. I didn’t want a confrontation.”

“I’ll bet you didn’t,” Will threw back at him with a sneer. “So what did you
really
want, oh high Society Member? Did you come for pointers on how to pleasure my wife? I can give you a few tips on the likes and dislikes if you want.”

Oh
my
God.
I
am
going
to
kill
him.
Keep
it
together
 . . .

Jackson worked valiantly to avoid launching himself at the man’s throat. “Actually, William . . .”

“Stop saying my name, God damn it!” Will interrupted with a bark. “Okay. Actually . . .
Agent,
I’m willing to lay down odds that I already know more about that subject than you do.”

“Fuck
you!”
Will all but screamed.

“Fuck
you
.” Jackson returned evenly.

“You kiss my wife with that mouth?”

Jackson’s stomach burned. The whole exchange was like nothing he’d ever participated in before, and it was making him physically sick. The flow of negative energy pouring out of him now was almost
visible
to his eyes.

But he couldn’t seem to cap off the anger and jealously that kept him here, playing this ridiculous game of “tit-for-tat” with Will.

“She’s . . . no longer yours . . .” Jackson whispered, taking deep breaths to contain his urge to either vomit, or kill this man. These two things were demanding that he surrender to the impulse to do one or the other, and damn soon.

Will heaved a deep gulping breath as well, that caught in a near sob at the end. It made an odd, almost heart wrenching sound, and Jackson’s fury left him, instantly.

This man was really hurting.

More than that. Jackson could read from him that Will was distraught beyond measure, and on the edge of a desperation he had never encountered in a human before. And, somehow, it didn’t seem to be precisely
all
about Indie, although losing her had been the tipping point.

He could now taste the bitter sting of bile on his tongue, as sympathy for the man’s pain caused his inclination to want to kill him, to tilt suddenly and violently in the opposite direction, which meant he was now in danger of soiling the front of his favorite t-shirt.

Shifting slightly to the right, Jackson decided that enough was enough. He was getting the hell out of here.

Somehow, his desire to hurt the man with either words or actions, had dissolved like flesh dropped in acid. As if sensing his thoughts, Will snapped the muzzle of the handgun upward.

“You aren’t going anywhere. You know that, right? Actually, I’m surprised that it was this easy.”

“I beg your pardon?” Jackson looked genuinely offended. “Did you think that you . . .
had
me?”

“Well, let’s see. Here’s
me
, holding a
gun
 . . . pointed at
you
 . . . .” Will looked around briefly. “Yeah, I’m thinking I have the upper hand here, you’d have to . . .”

Will was suddenly talking to no one. He’d seen the man move, but before he could conceivably even think about reacting, the guy was simply . . . gone.

He looked around frantically, and thought he may have heard the crashing of underbrush as something tore through the woods at top speed. But he could sight nothing, and swore in frustration.

“Shit. Just . . .
shit!”

The alcohol in his system must be clouding him, just a little, he had to admit. He’d rolled up into a very professional-looking crouch, from his seated position at the end of his driveway, and now, he sat for a moment, adrift in his thoughts.

Divorce papers?

An opportunity to bag the bastard who stole Indie from him, missed. Having to look into the face of the . . . the
thing
that was now probably happily banging her. Well, it was simply too much.

Hate, anger and jealousy obliterated Will’s normal capacity for calm, cool function, and penchant for thinking through any and all actions, before actually taking them.

Resolutely, Will jumped to his feet, and jogged back up the steps and into his house. He kept going until he could launch himself onto the bed and lie face down in the soft, dove-gray comforter.

It smelled like Indie.

He lay without moving for a good hour, his mind swirling with images and decisions to be made. Abruptly, he flipped over onto his back. Hurt and rage ignited in his head, turning everything inside William Taylor’s mind smoldering black in a flash.

His eyes were narrowing, as he drew close to forming his thoughts. Suddenly, the decision clicked into place in his head. Will’s eyes had the cold, calculating look of a hunter closing in on his prey, as he slowly reached out his hand to pick up the phone next to the bed. He dialed with one hand, using his thumb and lifted the receiver to his ear.

“Shawn Baker,” he stated softly into the phone, and waited as his call was transferred.

“Baker,” announced the somewhat flippant voice on the other end of the line.

“Baker, its Taylor. I need your help!”

“What the Hell’s going on, Taylor?” he asked, instantly on edge. “Is everything okay?”

“No, it is not.” Will began. “How fast can you get here?”

There was the sound of paper shuffling in the background. “Are you at home?”

“Yeah.”

“Give me an hour, okay?”

“One hour. Got it. See you then.” Will hung up the phone thoughtfully, unsure of where to take the idea he was pulling together.

Will did not believe Baker was any true friend to him, exactly. Truth be told, he had no special love for the guy either, although they had hung out once or twice. Baker always seemed just a little too eager for the wrong kind of action.

Nevertheless, he owed Will.

During one of their missions to question a local man, tucked into the wilderness of Cabot, Will just happened to save Baker’s life.

The man was someone claiming quite publicly to have been “abducted by aliens”. It so happened, he also had a few warrants out for his arrest. The guy had not come quietly, and only Will’s keen eye, catching the slight movement of the blanket that the man had hung for curtains, had saved Baker’s ass when Will threw him to the ground.

A shot echoed through the mountains, and a nice chunk was missing from the tree behind them where only seconds before, Baker’s head had been.

Will had brushed off his gratitude, saying brusquely, “hey, it’s my job, right? We’re supposed to look out for each other.” Will hoped that Baker’s debt to him would encourage a little loyalty tonight.

He stood and began pacing as he refined what needed to be done.
Okay,
Jackson
Allen
 . . .
you
want
to
play?
I’m
ready
 . . .
I
hope
you
are!
Will shivered a little as he planned how to present this to Baker. He had to be very careful, if he wanted to protect Indie.

He was beginning to regret all of those extra beers, needing a perfectly clear head. “Maybe some coffee will help,” he thought distractedly.

His thoughts went back to
Jackson
, and his stomach contracted. The name was poisonous to him. This creature was going to pay.

Big time.

And Indie was going to have nowhere to run . . . except back into this house. Yes, he decided. He was going to get her back.

His rage had centered on the man who had so boldly come into his home, and as good as kidnapped his wife. All with some kind of hypnotic mind trick, for all he knew. The beings had all the earmarks of some sort of sinister cult.

Will managed to conveniently brush aside the fact that he had practically thrown Indie out into the street himself.

Her
Equal!
He thought, scathingly.

It wasn’t Indie’s fault, he reasoned. It was all the
Society
Member
. Get him out of the picture, and maybe life could go back to normal.

Well, not just like before.

He would try to be a better man for her. Yes, he just needed the chance, and the only way that was going to happen, was to eliminate the obstacle in his path.

And that obstacle was Jackson.

Will’s eyes caressed the revolver as he placed it on his desk.

“Yes,” Will whispered. “Enjoy her while you can,
Jackson
!”

Will went to the refrigerator and helped himself to another beer, cracking it open furiously, quite forgetting, for the moment, his thoughts of needing a sober outlook on things. He then moved into his office and set to work while he awaited the arrival of his partner.

Chapter 17

A Friend in Need

“Betrayal. Next to suicide and the wasting of good chocolate, the
most
unforgivable of the unforgivable sins.”

Katherine Whitley

Twenty-six year old Shawn Baker was a company man; career focused to the extreme, and he enjoyed his job immensely.

All parts of it.

He even liked the boring parts, when nothing new or exciting came his way for weeks. Computer games or simple internet surfing placated his restless mind when those times hit.

The way Homeland Security worked in his particular division, was lots of busy work, which involved gathering intelligence on persons of interest, and following up on leads and tips.

Then, there was his favorite part; the excitement of a confrontation with someone who needed convincing that they simply had an over-active imagination, and had
not
had any close encounters that they originally may have
thought
they’d had.

The job was punctuated by short spurts of intense action, and separated by intervals of zero activity. Shawn had seen his share of excitement, so downtime was cool by him, although he lived for challenges thrown in his path.

And the harder the better.

He, like Will, was a proud graduate of many of the Gryphon Group’s toughest combative courses, completing his last class in the Melbourne Florida location, just prior to accepting his current position here in Vermont.

Although not thrilled to relocate to what amounted to Hooterville, from the Green Acres series, in his opinion, he decided that the nice fat promotion and raise that it earned him would allow him to someday return to his native California a pretty wealthy guy.

He dreamed of retiring young and early to a cool bachelor pad in L.A., because he sure as hell was not returning to the Napa Valley where he was born. That place was a snore.

A snore and a bore.

Besides, he had walked away from that life of white-collar Hell, hadn’t he?

Every now and then, he allowed himself an uncomfortable bout of missing his mother. It was amazing how love mixed splendidly with hate sometimes. And yes, his mother loved him, he knew, but never enough to make up for her uncanny talent for marrying exactly the same asshole over and over again.

The name and the person changed, but the character always remained the same, like a nightmarish version of Darren Stevens, from “
Bewitched
”. Except in Shawn’s personal show, the guys all seemed to enjoy using small things as punching bags.

Usually, one of those small things turned out to be Shawn.

From his earliest memory, his only recollection of the men in his mother’s life, were measured by how hard they hit.

He wondered sometimes, if his real father had been violent toward him. He could only assume so, but the guy had taken off when he was six weeks old, so it was just a guess.

At first, he was sure that his mother must be unaware of these ugly character flaws in her favorite brand of “man”. But when Shawn eventually found the courage to tell her, after a particularly brutal round with her latest fiancé, he was horrified to find her continuing on with her wedding plans, pretending nothing was amiss.

It was a lot to come to terms with for a twelve year old, especially since he had been suffering along in silence from the age of three, and had thought that spilling his guts to her would mean liberation from the abuse.

Unfortunately, it had meant no such thing, and Shawn developed ulcers at this very tender age from the near constant stress of trying to either avoid or recover from the latest pounding.

His mother apparently thought that the way to make it up to him was to indulge Shawn in every material thing she could purchase. There was never a shortage of money, which a now older Shawn strongly suspected was the motivation behind his mother’s ability to turn a blind eye from the fact that all of the men in her life were using her kid as a living kickboxing target.

Well, at least he could credit her for exposing him to all of the finer things in life. She definitely enabled his brand name lust. When he and his mother went shopping together, at least he didn’t have to worry about receiving a surprise and totally random clock to the melon.

As things happen, boys grow taller . . . and stronger, until one typically bright and sunny California afternoon that Shawn remembered as clearly as if it happened yesterday, his mother’s latest husband had drunkenly challenged him to “take the first swing” at him.

This was one of Bobby Tilman’s favorite intros to an ass-whipping, only this time, seventeen-year-old Shawn decided that today, it would be just too rude not to accept the invitation.

He’d grabbed the man’s half-empty beer bottle and used it to racquetball Daddy Dearest across the face. It didn’t take Mr. Tilman long to recover from his shock, and just before being carted off to the ER for some very necessary stitches by his hysterical wife, he had engaged Shawn in one hell of a battle.

At least this time, Shawn felt pretty good about the fact that he had given just as well as he’d received.

After all, it’s only the courteous thing to do.

In spite of the short-lived joy this had given him, Shawn decided that the camel’s back had been officially nuked, and so he laced up his “
fuck
-
you
” boots, and burned pavement down to the Army recruiter’s office.

He filled out every paper he could that didn’t require a legal guardian’s autograph, and put himself in the delayed entry program. He slept at friend’s houses, sneaking back home to round up enough belongings to get by for the three months before he became legal.

Shawn decided bright and early on enlistment day that he was going to be a professional badass, and the baddest dudes he could think of, were Army Rangers.

He told his recruiter he wanted in the 75th Ranger Regiment, and almost immediately following Basic Training, moved out for Airborne training. He was then assigned to the Regiment, and had the pleasure of completing the Ranger Indoctrination Program.

It was during this time that he discovered his mother’s men had actually done him one really big favor; Shawn could take a punch.

A whole hell of a lot of them, as a matter of fact, and just keep on ticking.

It was just home, sweet home to him, after all.

Taking on a fight became somewhat of a specialty for Shawn, and it didn’t take long for people to learn not to fall into this kind of pointless venture with him.

It wasn’t that his fighting skills were any better than the other guys’; it was the fact that Shawn was damn near impossible to take down. Many had tried, and been driven to near madness by his resilience.

After fiercely kicking his way through all of the required training schools, Shawn was sent to Headquarters, where he served with obsessive devotion until the day a mysterious visitor came to speak to him personally.

A visitor with more security clearance than Shawn had ever seen bestowed on any one individual. At least anyone he had met personally.

This visitor told Shawn that he had been watching him, and that he had a job offer. Shawn had been both intrigued and uneasy at the idea of people “watching” him, but the man had made him a career offer he couldn’t refuse.

It had everything. Money, power and the feeling of belonging to an elite group of individuals that had drawn him into seeking a Ranger position in the first place.

One honorable discharge later, Shawn Baker was on his way. Nothing remained of the seventeen year old who had endured a lifetime of abuse at the hands of others. The only remaining scars were internal; cynicism and an inability to get emotionally close to women. Physically close, absolutely, and as often as possible.

But he couldn’t trust them . . . no way.

He kept track of his mother, but not in touch, only sending her official forms so that she would know he was alive, and that she was his beneficiary. It surprised him that she was now single. The divorce was no shocker, but that fact that she had not immediately moved on to the next jackass was puzzling.

Oh well. Maybe since she no longer had a sacrificial lamb to offer, the kind of guys she went for just weren’t interested any longer.

Yeah, that really sucked for her.

Shawn ignored all communication attempts from the woman who gave him life, and then allowed that life to become hell. The part of him that still loved her, wanted to protect her from the larger part that hated her, and would probably say or do something very hurtful, so it was best for all parties if he stayed out of her reach.

For now, anyway.

There was always room for the tearful reunions down the road, but this was definitely not the time.

As an official member of the badass society, Shawn felt he had finally arrived. He was now Secret Service certified and as dangerous as they came.

He had worked with Will for the last two years, and respected him as much as he could respect anyone. Hell, he even owed him his life, but Will had downplayed his role in the official report. Shawn went right along with Will’s story that they had both simply hit the deck to avoid the shot some dumb fugitive had taken at him, mortified that Will had been more on the ball than he, himself was.

It didn’t flow with Shawn’s self-image, to be shown up by someone he considered somewhat of a middle-aged has-been.

Not that he didn’t
like
Taylor. He really did, for the most part. Shawn was simply suffering from the smug superiority complex that so often dwells in the minds of the young and powerful.

He played his part as a team member well, but really, these days it was
all
about Baker. He did not attempt to hide his Machiavellian beliefs, and spoke confidently about the righteousness of the end justifying any means.

Whatever it takes, to get the job done.

And Shawn Baker always got the job done.

“So,” he wondered to himself, “just what could possibly rattle our little William’s cage?” Will was usually so collected that it was just too unnerving at times. “Wife troubles, maybe?” Shawn speculated. Will had called out of work today for “personal” issues. If that were the case, what could he possibly need
his
help for, Baker wondered.

“It’s not like I’m an expert in
that
field,” he thought with a sharp laugh, having three broken engagements under his belt already. This was impressive, for his young age.

There was no doubt; he had serious trouble in the fidelity department. On the subject of getting up close to the fairer sex, too much was never enough, in Shawn’s humble opinion. Temptation was everywhere, and he was not accustomed to denying himself a little pleasure now and again.

He seemed unable to stop himself from succumbing to the abundant female attention he attracted, and it was much worse in this area, where the pickings were mighty slim for both the ladies and the men.

But Shawn always had a shot at the best available.

This was spurred by the fact that he still had his basic training six-pack, and wore his golden brown hair a little longer that the upper management cared to look at. He loved to work out and it showed, earning the sarcastically respectful title of “PT Stud” from his co-workers. It secretly got him off whenever he heard it.

The man had also retained his penchant for fashion, and loved to look the part of a classic “Fed”.

Growing up, he’d had a super-sized man-crush on the fictional character of James Bond, and modeled himself quite deliberately after 007; his closets full of black Tom Ford and Brioni suits, with narrow ties, topped off with his ever present Tom Ford single-bridge aviators, that he had picked up for a cool three-hundred and thirty dollars.

Perhaps this enhanced his womanizing ways as well. After all, Bond was a ladies’ man, was he not?

Off duty, he was a brand-name junkie as well. Nothing but the best would do. Only a lack of funds kept him from tooling around town in an Aston Martin DBS 1. This was still slightly out of his reach, but he was saving up. For now, he suffered along with a candy-apple red, Nissan Sentra.

Oh well. One can’t have everything.

But he was getting there. The personal weapon he carried was the 7.65mm Walther PPK. Something he had decided was necessary after seeing “Dr. No” for the first time. Shawn Baker was very detail oriented, and this acquisition was one that he was particularly proud of. No one was allowed to touch his gun.

No. One. Period.

His mind focused again on the ridiculous notion of Will asking him for relationship help. Will
had
to know better.

Obviously, Shawn had no problem attracting the females of the species. Keeping them was the one challenge that he apparently was not even really interested in meeting. No, he could not fathom Will looking to him for any kind of advice on that subject. Well, he would find out what the problem was soon enough.