J.M.J.
Author's note: Thank you for continuing to read! Thank you especially to MargaretA66 and max2013 for your reviews on the previous chapter and everyone who has followed and/or favorite! God bless!
Chapter X
Living in a constant state of vigilance was nothing new for the Hardys, but it was tiring all the same. Frank and Fenton had the burden of watching over their shoulders any time they went out, and Frank had the added burden of having to slip into the character of Joe every time. Every action and—harder still—every reaction had to be filtered through the question of "What would Joe do?"
Still, it might have been worse for Laura and Callie. They stayed in the hotel rooms nearly all the time and after about the first twenty-four hours, they were both ready to start climbing the walls. The more boredom and cabin fever took hold of them, the more irritable they started to get. Of course, whenever one or the other of them would say something snappish, she would instantly feel bad, which ultimately only made them both more annoyed and more desperate to get out of there and be out of danger and go home and have their normal lives and their respective husbands back. The only relief they had was darting across the street a couple times a day to get food from one of the restaurants. If they wanted any food from a grocery store, Fenton insisted on getting it, since there weren't any within a block. They also had to keep persuading Gertrude to stay in Bayport whenever she called for updates, which was frequent.
Yet it was worst of all for Joe. He wasn't permitted to leave the room at all. He felt like he was under constant guard, and he knew that he was missing all the action. His wound really was slight, and within a few days, he was feeling almost completely recovered, but all he could do was pace the room and grill his dad on any progress whenever he came back to the hotel, which wasn't on a regular schedule.
As for any progress, there was nothing to report. As soon as Mario Beretta heard that his brother was probably in California and up to no good, he booked the first flight out. He met with Fenton once and was constantly in touch with both him and Frank, but otherwise, he was doing his own investigating. Sam Radley arrived a few days later and joined in the search, and naturally, the entire police department was keeping an eye out for Angelo. No one could find him. No one could find anyone who had seen or even heard of him. If Angelo had ever been in the area, it appeared he had vanished completely, but most of the police were starting to think that Joe had been mistaken in his identification of his assailant.
Ten days had gone by like this. There had been a lot of days that had gone by slowly in his life, Joe reflected, as he sat on his bed on the tenth day, his chin resting on his palm and his eyes fixed on the opposite wall, although his attention was so focused on his own thoughts, his sense of sight didn't even register. Yes, there had been a lot of slow days in his life, but none could top these last ten.
Right now, his mom was in the next room and Callie had gone across the street to get some food, so Joe was as close to being alone as he had been since the attack. For once, he really could just think without any danger of someone trying to start a conversation and interrupting his thoughts. The trouble was that he didn't know what to think about. Working at the mystery seemed like a good option, but he didn't have any way to access new information and he had had no luck in figuring anything out from the old.
There was a knock on the door and then it started to open. Joe instantly sat up, alert. He thought of the gun in the nightstand drawer, but he made no move toward it. He knew he wouldn't be able to use it, even if he had to, and having a gun that he wasn't willing to use was worse than being unarmed. Then he relaxed as he saw who was entering.
"Hi, Dad. Frank, what are you doing here? Good to see you, Sam," he greeted each of the three men as they entered. Frank, he noted, had washed his hair and let it return to its natural color. That was an encouraging sign. If Frank's masquerade was over, maybe Joe was about to be paroled.
"We got a new lead," Fenton announced.
Joe sat up eagerly at this. "You found Angelo?"
"Possibly," Fenton said. "You remember Edmund Wight?"
"That British intelligence agent, sure," Joe replied. "What's he got to do with this?"
"He's been investigating Black Rose a long time. One of his contacts may have spotted Angelo in Miami."
"Miami?" Joe repeated. "That's on the other side of the country."
"Thanks for pointing that out, Joe," Frank teased him. He sat on the other bed with his arms crossed. "I don't know, Dad. There's something about this I don't like. It doesn't make sense that Angelo would attack Joe, threaten him, and then take off to Florida."
"Angelo attacking Joe and threatening him in the first place doesn't make a lot of sense," Sam commented. "I think it was a distraction. They get all of us out here, and then we're not looking when Black Rose pulls something else in another place."
"Are we really that big of a deal that they'd go to that much trouble?" Frank asked.
"You three caused their operation in Asia to fold," Sam said. "You just might be. But it's more likely that they're planning something in Bayport or around there and they want to make sure we're all out of the way."
"It would be a lot easier for them if they'd just leave Bayport alone," Joe commented. "What are they trying to gain there?"
"That's not a bad question, either," Sam said. "In any case, it doesn't seem too hard to figure out what we should do. We each have a theory, so we should each work on our theory and cover more ground that way. Frank thinks Angelo might still be here, so he can stay here and keep looking for him. Fenton thinks he might be in Miami, so he can look there, and I think there's something going on in Bayport, so I can work on the case from there."
Fenton frowned slightly. "I don't know. Splitting up doesn't usually work out very well."
There was a lengthy debate after this. Joe didn't take part in it, other than to insist at every opportunity that he just wanted to go home to his apartment. It was becoming painfully obvious that none of them were thinking of him as a detective anymore and so he sulkily assumed they wouldn't want his opinion anyway.
Laura heard the voices and came in right in the middle of the debate. She seemed to be torn between staying with Joe and just going home, since she wasn't doing anything useful, anyway. She tried to persuade Joe to go home to Bayport, but he stubbornly refused.
In the end, they agreed to Sam's plan. Laura decided in the end that she would go with Fenton. Frank would have liked Callie to do the same, but when she heard the plan, she refused to go.
The most important thing, in Joe's opinion, was that everyone finally agreed he could just go back to his apartment. If there was anyone looking for him, they would have figured out where he was by now, anyway. There was no point in hiding if his hiding place had been revealed. The only stipulation was that Fenton insisted that Joe take the gun with him and never let it out of reach. Joe wasn't happy about it, but since it was the only way to get back to the apartment, he agreed to it.
Frank and Callie drove Joe back, while Fenton and Laura checked out of one hotel room. They would keep the other for Frank and Callie. It was a strange car ride, Joe reflected. Ordinarily, he and Frank would have been talking about the case or at least bantering about something, but Callie was the only one who made a real attempt to talk. It was painful, but Joe realized that there was something different between him and Frank since he had moved, some bond that had been broken. He decided that perhaps it was that they weren't a team anymore.
Nevertheless, Joe was able to breathe a sigh of relief as he stood at his own front door. "Free at last!" he declared as he threw the door open and stepped inside. The first thing he noticed was that it was a lot cleaner than he remembered. "I can tell you've been staying here," he commented to Frank.
Frank chuckled slightly, but it almost sounded forced. "It never killed anyone to use a broom once in a while."
The main room was deserted, but the door to one of the bedrooms opened and Tony came out. Axel rushed past him and bounded to Joe, jumping up with his paws on his shoulder and licking his face.
Joe tried to hold him off as he squeezed his eyes shut from the sudden onslaught of dog slobber. "All right, boy, I'm glad to see you, too."
"Axel, down. Let him breathe," Tony told the dog, which immediately obeyed. He grinned. "I guess even he thought you were never going to come back."
"He wasn't the only one," Joe declared as he flopped into a chair. "Where're Phil and Shaun?"
"Phil's at work, of course, and who knows where Shaun's at? He's been gone since yesterday afternoon," Tony replied.
"Work," Joe repeated. "I suppose the boss isn't too happy about me being out for so long."
Tony shook his head. "Not at all. You haven't been there long enough to get sick days and he told me to let you know that if you don't come in by the end of this week, you're not going to have to bother coming in again at all."
"Oh, great," Joe replied.
"Can't he understand what's going on?" Callie objected. "It's not like Joe's just been out playing hooky."
Tony shrugged. "Understanding isn't really his strong point."
"I'm sure you could find one of any number of dozens of other jobs just like it," Frank commented more dryly than he meant to.
Joe tried to ignore the sting from the words. "The job market isn't too great out here. Lucky for me, I will be back to work before the end of the week, so I won't have to look for another job."
There was a lot Frank wanted to say in reply to that, but this time he managed to bite his tongue. He wanted to tell Joe that he could do so much better than just barely scraping out an existence with a minimum-wage job. He just didn't understand how Joe could be happy here at all, how he wasn't bored to death and how he didn't see that he was wasting his talents and his life. But now wasn't the time or the place, not with Callie and Tony there and Joe acting miffed about something. He would just have to bide his time.
HBHBHBHBHB
It was one of those days when Phil was having a hard time focusing on work. He found himself leaning an elbow on his desk and resting his cheek on his fist as he stared uncomprehendingly at the code on the screen in front of him. Ordinarily, he knew, this wouldn't seem like such a herculean task. He knew what the codes meant, but somehow he couldn't seem to process what he needed to do about them. It was probably just because he was tired. He'd been up practically all night the night before, wondering where on earth Shaun was. He had texted him, but he had never replied. Phil had even tried calling him, but there was no answer there. Tony had been unconcerned, and under ordinary circumstances, Phil would have been, too. Shaun was never one to tell anyone his plans and he had stayed out all night plenty of times before. The difference now was that there was an assassin running around who might decide that Joe's roommates were a good way to get at him. If only Frank had stayed last night, he would have known what to do and whether they should do anything, but he had gone back to the hotel to spend the night.
"Hey, Phil, are you okay?"
He turned to look at the speaker, dropping his elbow from the desk as he did so. It was Carol, the woman who worked in the cubicle next to him. She was about ten years older than him and suffered from a severe mother hen syndrome.
"Yeah, I'm fine," Phil told her. "Just a little tired."
Carol clicked her tongue as she looked him over. "If you're sure…You don't look so good. If you change your mind and want to go home, just say so."
"Sure. I will."
Phil turned back to his computer, slightly woken up by the exchange. The lines of coding didn't look quite so daunting now. He put his hands on the keyboard and started typing.
Scarcely five minutes later, his phone buzzed. His company's policy was that employees could keep their personal phones on them in case of emergency, but they weren't supposed to use them for any other reason. Typically, Phil kept his phone on silent so that he wouldn't be tempted to look when a text came in, but ever since all this trouble started, he had kept it on vibrate and pounced on it the second anything came through.
As soon as he saw the message, he wished he had been sticking to his usual plan. At least then he wouldn't have seen this until after work. Instead, he realized that he had just subjected himself to turning these words over in his head throughout the rest of the day: This is Darcy. Please call me, Phil. I have to talk to you.
He shoved the phone away from him to the farthest corner of the cubicle, as if it had been contaminated by the text. Then he pulled his glasses off so he could rub his temples.
Why? It just didn't make sense. He had gone out with Darcy for about a week. She had moved away from Bayport not long after he broke up with her. Since then, he had never heard a word from her. He had practically forgotten about her. She was only dredged up into his conscious memory every now and again, when some incident or comment reminded him, and then Phil would be stuck with thinking about her for the next day or two. The only word Phil could come up to describe his feelings on those occasions was "icky." That wasn't quite strong or serious enough, but everything stronger or more serious was too much so.
Then she'd come barreling back into his life, and worse still, she insisted she still had feelings for him. Phil wouldn't dignify those feelings by calling them "love." Darcy had demonstrated quite plainly all those years ago that she didn't understand what love was, and from the way she was acting, nothing had changed there.
Phil just didn't understand it. If they had been going together for a longer period of time than just a week, he could maybe understand it a little more, but they had barely gotten past the stage of acquaintances. Once they had gotten past that, they had quickly realized that their goals and worldviews were incompatible. There was no reason for Darcy to still be obsessed with him.
The only thing that could explain this at all was Tony's theory that she was Black Rose. That still left a few things to be explained—such as what she was trying to accomplish either time—but at least it gave her some kind of motive for her otherwise inexplicable actions.
"Phil, I really think you should go home," Carol's voice broke into his thoughts once again.
Once more, Phil had a sensation of being woken up, and one glance at the clock in the corner of his computer screen told him that he had been daydreaming for close to fifteen minutes. At this rate, he wasn't going to get any work done at all.
"You know what?" he replied. "I think you're right. In fact, I'm starting to feel kind of sick to my stomach. Could you let the supe know?"
"Sure thing."
HBHBHBHBHB
There was nothing quite like coming back to his own room, Joe thought as he stepped through the door and closed it behind him. Frank, Callie, and Tony were still talking on the other side, and he could hear the entire conversation plainly. Even so, it was the most privacy Joe had felt like he'd had in a week and a half.
Then Joe looked around the room and some of the relief he had felt melted away. It just wasn't the sort of room that could ever feel like home. Part of that was Shaun having half the room, leaving Joe with just enough space for his stuff. It was crowded and the only way to make everything fit was to put it away strategically, but that took so long that everything wound up in disorganized piles. At least Frank had left those piles alone. He hadn't done any cleaning in here. Joe appreciated that, especially since he knew that sleeping in the midst of such a mess must have been hard for Frank.
It must have especially been hard with that package that was lying in the middle of the bed. It was just a padded envelope, so at first Joe thought it was something he had ordered and that had been delivered while he was away. Then he saw that there was no actual address on it. His name was simply scribbled in a handwriting he didn't recognize.
Suspicion entered the back of his mind. There was an assassin out after him, after all. It would be overly dramatic, but what if the assassin had planted a bomb? It wouldn't be the first time Black Rose had done something as extravagant as that.
Cautiously, Joe reached out and touched the envelope. It was too thin to be any kind of bomb he had seen before, but that didn't necessarily mean anything. He put his hand in his pocket to retrieve his pocketknife, but then he found it wasn't there. It was sitting on the nightstand, where it had been this whole time. Moving as slowly as if a hard step could trigger the bomb, Joe went to the nightstand and retrieved the knife. Then, with even greater caution, he slit the envelope open and peered inside.
There was an electronic device in there, sure enough, but it wasn't a bomb. There was also a note. Joe pulled them both out.
The electronic device was his missing cell phone. Or, at least, what was left of it. It looked like someone had smashed it with a hammer. Joe unfolded the note and read it:
Looking for this? You'll end up in the same shape if you contact your family again. Now that they're finally gone, we can work out the details of our arrangement. Meet me at two tomorrow morning at pier 7. If you don't come alone, I'll make sure you leave alone. Cooperate, and everyone benefits. Angelo
