The Shack: An Unstoppable Man

"Well, one or the other."

By the time I finished explaining, Sheree was smiling from ear to ear. "She is a lot like you. I think that might work."

*****

Tea Parties and Consequences

*****

"Wooo-Eeee, now that's a sweet ride!" Billy stopped following me to peer through the open roller door at Delaney's project car.

We were headed to the office to figure up the parts he'd pulled for his employer.

Delaney stuck her head out from under the car, annoyance fighting with pride for a moment, but pride won. "Damn thing's a lot of work."

"She's a '58 Fury, right? Really rare, if I remember right."

Delaney gave a smug smile. "Yeah, I looked it up. They only made about fifty-three hundred or so. There are a lot more of the Belvederes and Savoys, so some of the parts aren't as hard to get as you'd think."

"Got her painted up like Christine. Damn, I remember that movie." He grimaced. "Scared the pure shit outta me. I had nightmares that one a these cars was gonna hunt me down and kill me someday." He studied it for a moment longer. "You do all this yourself?"

Delaney nodded and relaxed a little. "Mostly. I have to pay people to re-chrome and do the paint, but I did all the mechanical work." She frowned. "And Needles got me the engine, traded a wrecked Porsche for it, but I'm working it off. Kinda pissed me off; I wanted to buy it myself."

The engine's source was still a bit of a sore spot for her, but the Golden Commando 350 engines didn't come up on the market often enough for me to risk passing it up. Even so, she'd had to put in a huge amount of work rebuilding the engine.

Billy pursed his lips. "That's fair. That's sorta how you'd a got it anyways, right? Work for the money, then buy it?"

"I guess." Delaney shrugged.

"You just got the engine first, and now yer paying off, like buyin' a car on payments. People do it all the time."

She thought on it a bit. "Yeah, I guess it is." She glanced at me with a little bit of embarrassment. "I hadn't thought of it like that."

I kept my mouth shut, but Billy had just earned himself a discount. I could explain that to Delaney all I wanted, but coming from someone else, it was just easier to accept.

Billy squatted down and looked over the grill. "Damn. Hell on wheels."

Delaney gave a very satisfied smile.

Billy and I headed on up to the office. "She's a good kid, Doc. Really smart."

"She is, a helluva lot smarter than she thinks she is."

"Ain't that the way of it, Doc."

We settled up, he paid with grimy twenties, as usual. "Catch ya' later, Doc."

As he headed out, I looked at the time. Before I could even call out to Delaney, she was trudging up to the office, face grim.

"I thought you forgot."

She shook her head. "I wish."

"Tara will be by to pick you up in about forty minutes."

Her head dropped. "I'm going to get cleaned up."

"The bathroom window is too small to escape through, you know."

"Maybe Tara will forget to lock the car doors."

"Good luck with that. I think she's starting to understand you."

"Sucks." She stopped. "What do you think Mother would do if I ordered a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?"

"She'd probably tell everyone you've become a socially conscious vegan."

"Ugh." She winced, then plodded down the hall.

Tara arrived before Delaney was done and came on in, a little self-consciously smoothing her expensive dress. "She try to sneak out yet?"

"Nope. Be sure to lock the doors on your car."

"They automatically lock as soon as I roll." Tara made a brave attempt to keep a straight face. "This probably won't be so bad."

I snickered. Tara tried not to, but in a few seconds, her face was buried in her hands. "I can't believe I managed to say that out loud."

We were still laughing when Delaney walked out, glaring at us.

I pulled myself together quickly and pretended to look her over. "That works. I think Sheree did a good job picking that out."

Tara caught my serious tone and nodded. "She did. It looks good on you."

Delaney took a deep breath. "Yeah. I'm okay with this." She paused. "I'll have to wear my work boots with it. I forgot the shoes."

I didn't laugh. Sheree had warned me. I shook my head. "They wouldn't really go with that dress."

I reached over and pulled her pumps off the counter. "Sheree dropped these off while you were working on your car. You accidentally left them at the cabin."

A very uncomfortable look settled on Delaney's face; she knew as well as I did that it was no accident, but I didn't let her get going. I pulled a small purse off the counter and held it up. "I asked her to pick this up."

Delaney curled her lip. "I don't need a purse."

I shrugged. "Up to you." I popped open the purse. "But where else would you hide the Stun gun?"

The crackle of the Stun gun made Tara jump, but Delaney's eyes lit up. "Really?"

"Just figured if you can't have steel toes, maybe a million volts would make you a little more comfortable."

Delaney looked her new toy over and stepped almost absentmindedly into her pumps. "It's fully charged, right?"

"Yep."

Delaney grinned. "Cool!"

I caught Tara as they started out the door. "Just a second. I need you to check the prospectus on a possible expansion."

She nodded, catching my expression. Delaney shrugged and headed on down, still looking over her new toy. "See you in the car."

I waited a second. Tara looked at me. "A Stun gun?"

"You want to get her into that place, in a dress, with Charlotte; she needs something to hold on to."

"You make it sound like..." She stopped. "Shit."

I nodded. "She's tough as they come, but Sheree is right; Delaney's work clothes, tools and boots are her armor. She feels vulnerable without them. She's got serious trust issues."

"She needs therapy."

"What she needs is to go a whole goddamn year without someone trying to kill her. She's not paranoid. She's being realistic. Like it or not, she sees Charlotte as part of all that shit, so her trust level is pretty low."

"I'll keep an eye on her."

"You should probably keep an eye on Charlotte."

Tara's mouth set in a grim line. "I do that all the time."

*****

When I got back to the cabin, Sheree was already there.

"Did'ya give Delaney her shoes?"

"That, and her new Stun gun."

She nodded. "That help?"

"Just like we figured it would."

"It was your idea. I just thought it was a good one. She has a hard time dealing with Charlotte..."

"That's tough on both of us."

She smiled a genuinely sympathetic smile. "I know."

"How's Shelly?"

"She's sticking to her story. Says she wasn't using nothing."

"They test her?"

"They treated her with Narcan, but they didn't test her. Nurse says can't nobody get her medical records, so she'll be okay for now. I just had her lawyer tell the judge she was hospitalized, so she's got some time." Sheree stared through the wall for a few heartbeats. "Dunno if I'm doing her any good or just makin' things worse."

"You still think she's telling the truth?"

"I know it doesn't make any sense, but it just feels different this time." She frowned.

I didn't have an answer to that. We talked about the wedding and fixed dinner while we waited for Delaney to get back.

*****

Delaney walked in the door wordlessly, leaving it hanging open and went straight to the refrigerator. She poured herself a tall glass of tea. Tiffany and Tara walked into the cabin, somewhere between "tense" and "brace for impact."

Sheree gave me a side glance and decided to pitch in. "How did it go, baby?"

Delaney downed the tea in one long drink and poured another. "The tea there sucked. And Mother is turning into a fucking fish."

"A fish?"

"Her lips are all, like, HUGE." Delaney pursed her lips in a mockery of a fish. Or maybe a duck.

Tiffany suppressed a smile. "She may have had lip injections."

"She looks like a cartoon fish. A FROZEN cartoon fish, because her face..." Holding her eyes wide open, Delaney waved her hands frantically in front of her face. "It...doesn't...move."

"Botox." Tiffany and Sheree exchanged amused glances.

Tara held up a hand in supplication. "Mother has had some...work done."

"Some work done?" Delaney gulped the second glass of tea. "She's a major construction zone. They had to get state permits for that!"

"A tummy tuck, some liposuction...implants." Tiffany glanced at Sheree involuntarily at the word implants.

Sheree managed to keep a straight look on her face and still radiate smug satisfaction without saying a single word.

"Implants? What did they plant, cantaloupes? I mean, damn..." Delaney ranted on.

Tiffany sat on one of the barstools. "Maybe they're not as...proportional as they probably should have been..."

"Two silicone olives on a toothpick." Tara looked annoyed at the thought. "It's malpractice."

"If she feels better with a little more 'up top,' we can't hardly criticize her for that. As long as she's doin' it for herself." Sheree said it so smoothly and reasonably that the implied pity for Charlotte barely registered.

"Easy for you to say." Tara chuckled. "You're the illustration for what women want to get with those but never do."

I watched the corner of Sheree's mouth twitch as she stifled a smile. "Either way, Charlotte's choices are hers to make."

Tara shrugged. "At least we know what this is all about. She wants 'a say' in Tiffany's wedding. She wants this to be the social event of the year."

"You should see her guest list." Tiffany shook her head. "She wants to invite nearly 300 people, mostly people Eric and I don't even know."

"A lot of politicians and some people from the firm." Tara almost sneered her distaste. "She should know better. She really doesn't want me in a fucking room with those assholes."

Delaney blinked and stared at her. Tara and Tiffany never used foul language, and the venom in Tara's voice was blistering.

Tiffany grabbed Tara's hand. "I know. I get the last say on this, and I'm not going to let her invite any of them, okay?"

Tara nodded stiffly, directing her glare at the floor. "Fuck them."

Delaney shot me a questioning look. She might not have been exactly reading on-level, but her survival instincts were state of the art. I gave her a short head shake to warn her off.

"Besides, I'm not going to let Mom try to bankrupt Dad with three hundred five-star meals."

I snorted. "You invite who you want; we'll make it happen."

"Dad, she wants to invite the governor and half the legislature. She even invited Judge Knowlton."

"That's an interesting choice. He managed to put me in jail to help Stein, but Stein tried to kill Charlotte. Wonder if she thought that through?"

Tara nodded slowly. "That is pretty weird. I mean, he does have a lot of political pull, but you'd think mother would have some hard feelings about it."

"He must have something she wants." Tiffany looked down at the floor, thinking. "Either way, she's wanting way too much."

"It's okay. We'll figure it out, there's some money put aside for this that your mother missed in the divorce, and I added to it over the years."

Tara pulled herself out of her reverie and looked at me suspiciously. "It looked like they did a pretty good job of looting you from what I saw in the divorce papers."

"When we found out we were having twins and that you were both girls, Charlotte made some joke about how expensive the weddings would be. So when I set up your education savings accounts, I also set up a wedding account for each of you. They're technically in your name; I couldn't pull anything out of them, and we'd both signed the paperwork. That's probably why Charlotte's lawyer didn't argue about them. When you graduated, and Charlotte closed out the education accounts, the allotments from my retired pay automatically went into the wedding accounts."

They both looked at me as if I'd suddenly started speaking Greek, then shot looks at each other. Tara cocked her head. "You paid for the education accounts?"

"Since before you were born. I was getting jump pay, then HALO pay, dive pay, and I was usually getting either imminent danger pay or hostile fire pay, so we could put back more than most. It was with MNC Investments."

Tara's face tightened. "That complete..."

"...asshole." A grim-faced Tiffany finished her sentence without missing a beat. I hadn't seen them do that since before the divorce.

"Charles said that was a high school graduation gift from him and Mother." Tara was trying to keep herself calm. Her hatred of Charles was probably deeper than mine, if not as long-running. She'd only found out about his plans for her at the end, but she'd taken it hard.

Sheree glanced at me before taking Tara's hand. "The important part is that you got the money for your schooling, right?"

Tiffany shifted her gaze to me, then guiltily at the floor. "But we thought...God..."

I could feel the waves of shame and guilt off of both girls. Jesus. Charlotte really did have an endless ability to fuck up my relationship with my daughters. "Sheree's right. You got the money for college, that's what's important. That was the reason for it."

Tara grimaced. "Charles was a..." She shook her head, at a loss for words.

"Shitweasel." Delaney sat up. "A complete fucking shitweasel."

"I think I was going to say 'piece of work' or something like that, but you're right, he was a shitweasel." Tara twisted her hands together before looking over at Delaney.

A smile picked at the corner of Tiffany's mouth. "A real shitweasel."

All three of them looked at each other with a kind of shared smile. For once, I could see all three of them as real sisters.

"You two should probably leave that kind of language to me. I have the knack for it." Delaney leaned forward and grinned broadly.

Tara and Tiffany gave her weak, matching smiles.

"Hold on." I got up and walked over to the massive built-in that served as a combination china cabinet and work desk. It took me a minute, but I found the portfolios and gave them to Tara and Tiffany. "Here. You'll have to call the finance company to get the current total."

Tiffany looked in the portfolio and pulled out the last statement, and blinked. "You never stopped putting money in..."

I shrugged. "It's out of my Army retirement pay. Half of anything I stopped paying in would have gone to Charlotte. Couldn't have that."

She smiled softly and didn't even pretend to believe me. "Sure. So what are you going to do when we close these?"

Tara had been reading through the packet quietly. "We shouldn't close these; this is a good reliable firm. But you should stop..." She stopped and looked at something, then eyed me suspiciously. "You've already thought of that, didn't you?"

Tiffany looked over at her. "What do you mean?"

"The contribution dropped. If you added ours together, then split it three ways... He made another account." She looked over at Delaney then at me.

I nodded. "Seemed fair."

Tiffany looked it over. "You did it about two weeks after she came to live with you."

I saw Delaney catch her breath and choke back a response.

"Hey, I gotta keep Charlotte from getting the money, right?"

Delaney flushed and looked down. Sheree just gave me the same warm look she'd given me when I'd first told her about setting up an account for Delaney.

"Those accounts will get you started, but I have some other assets to cover this. This will drive Charlotte crazy."

*****

On Being Downrange

*****

Delaney dragged the surplus artillery round transport tube out of the hide and pulled it out to the side with the others we'd selected, taking a second to brush the dirt off her face. Which, of course, just smeared it. "That's ten of the fifteen good ones."

She popped the latches on the final tube and slid the last Steyr AUG out so I could look it over and run it through a function check. Things go wrong in storage, no matter how careful you are. The assault rifle looked fine though.

Delaney checked each one over as well, for practice, and in case I missed anything.

After we put them back in the hide, I slid the heavy cover back on. We took a couple of minutes to make sure it was invisible to the naked eye. "That's all we'll need."

We'd recovered eighteen of the AUGs from the wreckage of Jason Bradly Calloway, Esquire and his security team. Three of the weapons would need some repair to be functional again, but the others were pretty much in near-perfect condition. I'd mostly decided to take them to prevent the FBI and BATF from taking an interest in his death; the fewer federal agencies looking into our little problem, the better off we were.

Weapons are worth money, though; sometimes a lot of money. Well made, Austrian-engineered military-grade fully automatic weapons in near pristine condition are worth ridiculous amounts of money if you can find a way to sell them.

It turns out that some fourteen-year-old girls have contacts in the black market weapons arena. Technically, they were my contacts first, but Delaney had the secure email. It was pretty simple to figure out what to do. Kurt and Katie at K2 Security - Delaney's "summer camp" - walked a lot of grey areas and had the contacts to find buyers and sell the weapons, and we had the huge advantage of knowing we could trust each other. After a series of extremely cautious, very-carefully worded emails over Delaney's encrypted email account, Kurt agreed to facilitate a sale for us. They'd also apparently weighed in on our side with whoever was buying since our end was a lot higher than I'd expected.

The black market for full-auto weapons is always a little unpredictable, and as an outsider, I'd expected to get gouged hard. I figured a final price of thirty thousand for each of the weapons would be reasonable, but I'd thought we'd probably clear around ten thousand dollars per if we were lucky.

Kurt and Katie had managed to get us twenty-five thousand per weapon, and I had a suspicion Katie did it to avoid alienating Delaney and her friends. I was pretty sure she was setting the stage to get the "Camp Mayhem Girls" lined up for future employment. Shipping and payment were simple. The next of our usual shipments of beater cars to K2, supplies for their driving courses, would have hides built into them. Payment would be handed over by the truck driver before he left.

Delaney snickered. "Mother is going to be in shock when you just pay the caterer with a suitcase full of cash." Even Charlotte's extravagant "needs" for Tiffany's wedding couldn't keep pace with the black-market weapons money.

"I was thinking of using a blood-soaked duffle bag."

"Oooh. I like that. Or maybe we can get a box like the case in Pulp Fiction."

"I doubt Charlotte would get the joke." I shook my head and closed up the bed of the truck.

"What about the box in Seven. Could we get one of those?"

"The box with his wife's head in it? Way too tempting."

Delaney choked down a barking laugh. "Oh yeah. That'd be bad. Really don't need to be giving you ideas."

"Wait, when did you see Seven?"

"Ummmm...summer camp?"

"I probably need to talk to Kurt about what he's letting you guys watch."

She scrunched her nose in surprise. "Really?"

"Yeah. Too much violence in some of those..." I couldn't do it; I started laughing.

Delaney snorted. "Oh yeah. I could start having nightmares because Brad Pitt pretends to freak out about a box..." She had to sit down and catch her breath. "Jesus. Katie only lets us watch the stuff cut for broadcast anyway. I never even got to see the head in the box."

"They never show it. Everybody thinks they saw it. They'll swear on a stack of bibles that they saw it, but they never show it in the movie."

She blinked. "Seriously?"