Jack walked out the front door, a piece of paper with directions to Conte's ship clasped in her hand. She'd found the location of Dom's ship at the landing yards on the net. Even after so many years, she still remembered his call sign--it didn't take a detective to track him down with it. She took her car and reached the field ten minutes later, walking boldly up to the lot she'd sought out, and pressing the button on the comm.
The young man, Vale, opened the ramp without answering. She figured he'd probably seen her on a vid screen inside.
Jack took a tentative step up the ramp, eyeing the young blond before her. He was a hair shorter than her, but his arms boasted the potential for tremendous strength. If he'd been in a military unit with Dom, he probably wasn't human. Thinking back on it, none of the people who'd visited her house that night were human either. Pace and her daughter certainly weren't.
"You here to see Kade?" Cody finally asked, moving the toothpick he chewed on from one side of his mouth to the other with his tongue.
Jack nodded once, only momentarily confused as to who he spoke of. To her dismay, Vale didn't budge. He merely squinted at her, reaching up with both hands to grab the low rafters and let some of his weight hang from them. He seemed to size her up, at last sighing and looking away. Jack judged his age at early twenties. He was a handsome youth; unlike Dom and Riddick, he still had a touch of boyish softness in his face. His physique appeared solid and firm, but without hard angles.
"Listen, Lady, part of this is my fault," he finally said, sounding airily apologetic. "I was supposed to get Dallas Prize off the lunar casino and onto this ship ten days ago, but I blew the mission. Kade acted like he didn't give a damn. I didn't know Dallas was his son before tonight, but when I saw him at the Bijou, I thought he might be."
"He looks like Dom."
"He looks like me," Cody retorted, as though stating the obvious. "If I were several inches taller, and built like a truck, we'd be twins."
After a pause, Jack bit her lip, still considering the whirling implications of Cody's words, but decided she'd better not waste any more time trying to sort it out in her mind. Dallas and Cody did share similar hair color and dark eyes, but Cody could pass for human. He had pupils, and his iris color was a deep brown, not that impossible shade of black.
"I have to speak with Dom," she said, after carefully wetting her lips with her tongue. "It's important."
Cody chuckled morbidly, shaking his head a little. "This is such bad timing. I can't believe I'm even considering it."
Jack's brow creased. "What?" she asked, confused.
His hands fell to his sides after a leisurely stretch, and then Cody Vale turned to lead her into the depths of his home. "He kills like he's got ice in his veins," he said to her over his shoulder. "But he most definitely gives a damn. I don't know what's going on with him, but he's gotten bad. Real bad."
They veered right, coming to a sealed door. Cody raised his hand as if to knock, but paused, turning to look at her over his shoulder. "You might want to stand off to the side a little," he said.
"Why?" Jack asked.
Cody's eyebrows knitted together in a morbidly sarcastic expression. "By now he's probably drunk, and who knows what else. Last time I tried to wake him up like this I came within one armor-piercing round of an early grave. When we replaced this door, he made sure the steel wasn't so thick. You know, so if someone tries to break in, he can kill them before they break the seal."
"Oh," Jack said. She cautiously moved off to the side, pressing her back against the wall.
Cody positioned himself on the other side of the door, reaching out to knock tentatively. "Yo, Kade. Jack Riddick's here to see you," he called. "You still living, man?"
After several more minutes of incessant knocking, Dom finally came to the door and opened it. He looked trashed, sick, and was only half dressed.
"What t' fuck do you want?" he asked, squinting at her while letting his weight settle heavily against the steel door frame. An empty liquor bottle slipped from his hand and crashed to the floor without catching his notice.
Jack crossed her arms over her chest, attempting to stare him down. "I've had a really hard fucking day, Conte, and I want a fucking drink. Think you can handle that?"
Dom ran one hand down his face, then back through his mussed hair. Dark circles had appeared under his eyes in the hours since he'd visited her house, and his normally pale skin had turned gray.
"You heard the woman, Vale. Get her a drink," he said at last.
"You know, we were sort of under the impression you died some time ago, Dom," Jack pointed out, taking a sip of the whiskey in front of her.
Dom shrugged, nursing his bottle. With his fast metabolism, it took a great deal of alcohol to keep sobriety away. The incredible tolerance he'd built over the past five years didn't exactly help. "I did die, for a while. Regular Marines raided the Resistance base I happened to be on. I killed maybe half a dozen before they overwhelmed me. Beat my face in, collapsed one of my lungs, partially collapsed the other, and broke every bone they could. I should've died, but they decided to rebuild me, wipe my memory clean, and use me as a killing machine in the Special Forces. That's when I met Vale."
"Why does he call you Kade?" she asked.
He could tell she'd been itching to ask that question since she showed up on his ship.
Dom shrugged, cracking his neck to one side then the other. "It was my name for two years. Sergeant Dominic Kade. Kid couldn't get used to calling me 'Conte' when we met up again. Took him a while just to drop the 'Yes, Sergeant' bullshit he kept giving me. He was eighteen when I met him—made a big impression on him, apparently. To Vale it's only been two or three years since we served together. He traveled in cryo a lot on missions, so for everyone else, it's been at least thirteen years." he said, taking another drink, and then letting the bottle come to rest on his knee.
"Were you married then?" she asked, sounding both distraught and curious. "When they captured you?" Her soft eyes stared in his direction, but Dom couldn't tell if he was the one she saw in front of her.
"Yeah," he said, absentmindedly reaching for the tags that rested on his toned, bare chest. His fingers played across the dull metal of a wedding ring hanging from his chain. "I married Pace almost a year before they caught me. I met her after I got busted at eighteen. A mob boss named Ashton bought me off a bounty hunter named Je Marshal on his way to collect the price on my head. Ol' Ash put me up in his office as a trophy, in a tank of loc gel. Pace was a thief working for the Resistance. She saw me in there while she was robbing Ashton, and she decided to save me. I'm scared to death of drowning, and for a while after she got me out I thought she must've been some sort of angel sent to watch over me. My psychosis was running out of control back then, so she's pretty lucky to be alive right now. I think she might've been fourteen. We got married some four years later, when she was legal.
"I've gotta admit, at first glance through all that loc gel, she did remind me a little of you, Jackie," he said, taking a swig and wiping his mouth on the back of his arm.
She nodded, looking perturbed.
Dom shook his head, picking up on her line of thought from her body language. Jack had interpreted his words to mean he'd become obsessed with her, and used Pace as a stand-in. "Don't get me wrong, Jack. I liked you, but you're not Pace. My head gets pretty fucked up sometimes—but she's not you, either. Pacey—she balanced me," he said, staring at the bottle sitting precariously on the tips of two of his fingers—an example of the equilibrium he referred to.
Jack drained her drink, sitting up to let her elbows rest on the table. She stuck one finger in her empty glass and let it swing around in a small circle, the condensation on the glass bottom making a clover pattern on the table. "So what about Dallas? Is he yours?"
He took a drink, chuckled morbidly, the buzz of alcohol subtly twisting his humor. "When I married Pace, there were people around me who didn't like me very much." He shot her a mischievous look. "Bet that's pretty hard for you to believe, huh?"
Jack rolled her eyes in response.
"Some of these people wanted me out of the way, but they didn't want to tangle with me. When I left on a mission they paid a pretty young woman to convince my new wife that I'd cheated on her, didn't want her, whatever. She ran. It took me three months to find her, beat to hell and pregnant in a holding facility at a lane checkpoint. They think that traumatic first trimester is the reason Dallas was born blind," he said, wondering why he'd chosen to tell her this story. It so clearly said my kid's stone blind, and I'm still busted up over it because I know it's my fault. He'd done a lot of crap in his life, but Pace running from him definitely topped the 'shit he wished he couldn't remember list.' So many other things got lost when the Army modded him. Why did that memory have to resurface with crystal clarity?
"She swore up and down the kid was mine, but I still had the doc run a paternity test." Dom didn't continue, allowing her to draw her own conclusions about the test results, and the damage he'd done by not taking Pace at her word.
Jack took a deep breath and cleared her throat, clearly pushed beyond her comfort zone by a gut-spilling, honest Dominic Conte. "Okay, so we know for sure he is yours—how exactly do you feel about the fact he could be lying in some ditch right now with his throat cut?" she asked, sitting back in her chair and staring at him.
She gave him a few minutes to think about it, but for Dom there wasn't any need. He'd forced himself to detach from the kid emotionally years ago. The image he conjured in his mind of Dallas' body didn't bring forth any particularly strong emotions. He couldn't even imagine what the kid looked like anymore.
He shrugged. "Can't really say I feel anything. I don't even know Dallas. If he's a corpse, he's a corpse just like any other I've ever seen."
"So you won't help us find him, get him back from these kidnappers?" Jack asked, sounding neither angry nor distressed.
He wondered if she knew how much she'd grown up. At seventeen she'd been strong, but not this strong.
"Never said that," he reminded, taking another swig from his bottle. "A job's a job. My sister paid an advance on Pace's behalf to find the kid. A rescue operation costs extra, but it'll be a super bargain compared to thirty million. At most I'll charge you seven to ten grand, depending on how many people I need to bribe. In the morning I'll get on analyzing the message they sent. If we're lucky, I'll pick up a trace back to where the signal originated from. In a day or two I should have a location, and then we can figure out strategy."
"You do know that in six days they're going to kill one of our kids, don't you?"
"I heard. Cameron will die first, Dallas second, Rachel third. That should create the most dramatic effect while keeping both families involved in the ransom process for as long as possible. It surprised me that..." he trailed off, and his eyes slowly glassed over. A strange feeling came over him. One that instilled a nearly forgotten sense of horror from his past.
"Dom?" Jack asked after a moment. "Hey, you with me?"
He shook his head, trying to clear it. "Did you let Pace stay in your house?" he asked, brow furrowing. A deep pounding had started at the back of his skull, and it had nothing to do with the alcohol in his system.
Jack sat up, looking baffled. "Yeah. She was so tired we thought it would be best. She fell asleep the second her head hit the pillow."
He got to his feet, knocking his chair over in the process. "Take me there, now," he ordered, walking back to his room and returning seconds later after throwing on a jacket and picking up his boots.
Jack still sat at the table, stunned. "What is it? What's wrong?"
He didn't even throw a glance back at her as he made his way to the aft ramp. "It's complicated," he shouted back.
Finally realizing she was getting left behind, he heard Jack jump to her feet and run after him.