The Shack: The Milk Run

He looked startled, but I was starting to suspect that he usually looked like that. "Really?"

"We did a study on grow houses, and that was one of the things we learned. You can reduce your electrical use a bit, get stronger growth and bud production, and keep the plants from getting leggy on you."

He perked up. "Did you guys try LED lights?"

"We did, but it's touchier than you think. You have to get the spectrum just right; LEDs aren't like HPS or some of the others, so you have to use a mix and get it just right, but it will cut down on your electric. But LEDs also reduces heat, so in winter here, that could be a problem."

Mooky nodded. "That's what I heard. I'm going to try it someday."

"They're starting to make them commercially. You might want to ask someone who has tried them and see what they think."

He looked down glumly. "I don't know anybody using them right now."

I pulled myself out of the chair, wincing at the pain. "Your water system, though. I know how to make that a lot better."

*****

Delaney stared at us with a frankly confused look. "Are you two going into business together or something?"

"We pulled about twenty-five feet of pipe out of his watering system." I gestured to the stack of Pvc pipe in the corner. "Shortening it keeps the pressure higher, and we get a more even distribution of water."

Mooky, his face pretty much covered in dirt, stuck his head out from behind the racks. "Dude, she knows, like, everything about this stuff. Did you get my message?"

She looked suspiciously between us and settled on me. "You do remember you work for the FBI, right?"

I shrugged, then winced in pain. "I'm not exactly worried about it. Assuming I survive being taken into custody, which is pretty unlikely, I suspect this wouldn't even make the charge list."

She closed her eyes and sighed. "I don't need you to kill yourself trying to do stuff either."

"I just told him what to do and stood back."

"She even drew this cool diagram; it's like professional-level stuff." Mooky waved it around.

"Jesus. It's drawn on a fucking napkin." The pained disbelief on her face gave way to pained acceptance. "Fuck it. You guys go ahead and do your own Breaking Weird thing. Whatever. I got your message, and I brought something like twenty of those plastic bathroom door mirrors they use in hotels. We had a stack of them from when they renovated the no-tell motel out on Caper Road."

Mooky stood up. "Cool! I'll go bring them in."

Delaney watched him walk out. "K2 says they have someone coming by tomorrow evening. It's not really one of their assets, but they'll bring some legal help and try to see what else can be done."

I was relieved. I didn't have any doubt that Delaney was competent and well trained, but relying on someone, a teenager, who might think of the whole thing as a game worried me.

At least I was certain that, in trusting Mooky, Delaney had made a good choice. I'd been worried that she had been just coercing him to cooperate, and coercion isn't as reliable as most people think. As we talked, though, I realized that the ties between him and Delaney were more like close family ties than anything else. And more than that, he had faith in her. He trusted that whatever the hell Delaney was doing was "righteous", no matter how it looked to anyone else.

He was also a lot deeper than I'd thought. He saw marijuana as a real miracle drug, and I found out many of his trips were to a nearby retirement home, where he felt his "product" could really help. Maybe it wouldn't always cure, but it could at least ease the pain and make life easier. One of the reasons he liked his job was because his uncle always gave him time off to attend the inevitable funerals and celebrations of life.

I hoped whatever happened, he didn't get burned by this.

*****

Meetings and Options

*****

Delany had pretty much pushed Mooky out the door the night before, making him promise not to come back for at least three days if she didn't contact him. She also told him to bring the sheriff if that happened.

She growled about keeping amateurs out of the way, but I knew what she was really doing; she was protecting him as best she could. Making contact with other, unknown entities is one of the most dangerous things an operative can be tasked with.

Too many unknowns. Too little certainty. And almost no trust at all.

It was just at nightfall when the car pulled up in front. Right on time, but that doesn't necessarily mean a damn thing, as my aching injury reminded me.

The door slowly opened, and I could feel relief as I saw the white-haired form of Pogo lean in. "Thank God."

He nodded to me. "Maria."

"Passphrase." Delaney's voice was flat and emotionless. I looked over at her.

She was holding the automatic she'd taken from the hitman leveled at Pogo's chest.

He rolled his eyes. "Don't be ridiculous; she obviously knows me."

"I obviously don't. What's the fucking passphrase?" The gun didn't waiver the slightest bit.

I tried to head everything off. "Delaney, I know him. If he's compromised, we're screwed no matter what."

She ignored me. "Passphrase. Asshole."

The worst thing I could think of happened.

A grin split Pogo's face. He was finding this funny, and Pogo's sense of humor was decidedly dark. "So you're seriously going to shoot me if I try to come in?"

"Step in and find out." Nothing in her voice even hinted that she might not shoot him.

I tried again. "Pogo, she's serious as hell; just give her the damn passphrase."

His grin widened. "Oh, no, this is just too funny. I'm being held at gunpoint by a munchkin."

He looked back at her. "Okay, so what's your plan? That's what...?" he paused. "A Glock 43?"

She gave an annoyed sigh. "So it's a Glock. I didn't buy the damn thing; I just took it off the last asshole who pissed me off."

Pogo laughed quietly. "Glocks are reliable as hell, and it's a more-than-decent gun for close work like this, but you've probably got six or six plus one rounds there. You might have time to get another magazine in, if you've got one, but what if I've got four more guys with me, and they have vests?"

Delaney shrugged. "That won't matter to you."

"I believe you, but I'm curious. What happens when you run out of rounds?"

"Imma pick up a fuckin' rock." She spat it out with narrowed eyes, her patience getting low.

Pogo squinted at her, then shook his head slowly. "You're Needles' kid, that's for damn sure." He suddenly seemed very serious. "Crash test dummy. Fourteen minutes 34 seconds."

"Black rum." Delaney gave what I assumed was the countersign and lowered her gun but didn't take her guard down.

Pogo stepped in, and another form filled the doorway. The man, Hawaiian or Samoan from what I could see, had to be six-and-a-half feet tall and probably weighed about as much as a small truck. A wall of muscle and odd geometric Polynesian tattoos.

Delaney looked at his enormous form and then down at the gun in her hand. "Shit. I need a bigger fucking gun."

She glared at Pogo. "How the fuck did you even fit Shrek in a car?"

Pogo just chuckled while the man-mountain did a poor imitation of looking hurt. "Hey, for your information, kids love me."

He glanced around the grow house and nodded slowly, grinning. "Nice. A pakalolo house. At least the FBI probably won't look for her here."

"Derek, get what you need and get out of here." Pogo's voice held a little gravity. He turned to me. "This is Derek Keawe; he's going to be your lawyer of record. He's covering Kim's office for a month, she said she had to leave. Some kind of emergency. Sign the forms, and give him a retainer. Attorney-client privilege, he can open a line of communication with the FBI and Justice."

I shrugged. "He'll be taking a big risk. Whoever is after me will probably try to get to me through him."

Derek shook his head. "I have a two man protective detail on me. I also have a full set of K2 phones for comms, so we should be good."

"They aren't shy about it; two men won't be enough."

Pogo shook his head. "Monster will be with him. Derek is married to his daughter."

That ended that. If Monster was watching over Derek, anyone unwise or ignorant enough to go after him would probably be dead before they even realized a fight had started.

"Jesus. They'd need a fucking elephant gun anyway." Delaney eyed Derek and gave an exasperated shake of her head.

I held my hand up. "I don't exactly have access to money right now. Kind of hard to pay a retainer."

Delaney pulled a kitchen drawer open and rummaged around for a bit. "There, seventy-three cents and a Dave & Buster token." She stopped abruptly and looked him over suspiciously. "Seriously, you're a fucking lawyer?"

Derek peered down at her. "You have a problem with that?"

She scrunched her nose. "A couple of them have tried to have me killed."

"Didn't work?" Derek gave her a slightly twisted smile.

"They're dead. I'm not." She looked steadily at him, daring him to challenge her.

"Well, I don't plan to have you killed, so we should be good."

She handed me her treasure, and I passed it on to Derek, then dutifully signed the forms.

He started to hand them to Delaney. "This would be better if it were witnessed."

I waved him off. "Derek, she's fifteen."

His eyes widened, and Delaney cut in. "Besides, I don't need to get dragged into court over any of this. I'm going to have to tell Needles about this. I won't lie to him, but I don't need to remind him a bunch of times and piss him off."

Pogo straightened up sharply. "Needles doesn't know?"

Delaney shook her head.

"Shit. I thought Kim had more goddamned sense than that. At least that explains the sudden desire to get the hell out of Virginia."

I finally had to ask. "Everybody I've run into is concerned with pissing him off. Why is everybody so worried about him?"

Pogo scratched his head for a second. "Needles..." He shook his head. "The man just has no sense of proportion. Piss him off, and the sky is the limit. Columns of fire and brimstone. Real Old Testament unto-the-seventh-generation shit."

I waited, then noticed Delaney listening with a smug pride as Pogo continued. "My team was called in to stop a massacre in Mogadishu. A small-time warlord had decided to rob a medical team."

Delaney looked at me. "Needles was a Special Forces medic."

Pogo nodded tersely. "I thought we were going to stop the warlord's gang from killing civilians. But when we showed up, there were dead bodies everywhere. Bodies of gunmen. Seems the robbery was going fine until one of the gunmen shot a pregnant woman right in front of Needles for no reason. By the time we got there, the street was empty except for bodies, a deuce-and-a-half was literally parked on top of the warlord's car, and Needles was standing there with a.45 in one hand, a hatchet in the other and a foot-long knife sticking out of his face, looking for somebody else to kill. He had three bullets in him, but he only stopped because he ran out of bad guys."

He paused and looked at Delaney. "He tell you about it?"

"Not all of it, but Sheree found his medal and pried stuff out of him, so she told me. We're tight like that."

Pogo nodded. "It was either charge him with a crime or give him a medal with a classified write up and sweep it under the rug. I recruited him to our unit as soon as he got out of the hospital."

Derek looked over his papers. "I'd better get going. I won't be doing you any good here, and it's probably best if I leave before you guys start discussing anything else I don't want to know. Officer of the court and all that."

Pogo waited until Derek left, then turned to me. "Do you know why you're being targeted? The guy that tried to take you out in the mall used to work for Reinhardt IG security. Mostly off-the-books stuff."

"I think it's something to do with Michael. When he found out he had cancer, he said he had some things he had to 'finish,' took sick leave and disappeared for almost a month. He never said what it was. I got a voicemail from him saying I had files waiting in the place we first met."

Pogo nodded. "I'm sorry to hear about Mike; he was one of the good guys."

"He was." I paused, thinking. I know a bit of sadness crept into my voice, despite every effort I made to contain it. "Maybe he would have preferred this. Dying that way. The cancer was way past any treatment, and he was in more pain every day."

I sounded cold, even to me, but I knew that was me trying to suppress and deflect my feelings. It might have been true anyway.

Pogo gave a slow nod. "I didn't know him as well as you did, Maria, but he was the real thing. A real warrior. Dying in a hospital bed, wired to a bunch of machines...he wouldn't have wanted that."

We just waited in reflective silence for a few moments, and then Pogo shook his head. "We can't help much; there's stuff going on. Maybe it's related, maybe not, but we're sure there's some surveillance in place on Evie and Howard, maybe on the rest. I was already out here on family stuff, Derek was on a business trip, and Monster was wrapping up his semester before this started, but if I delay getting back and they're watching, it will raise alarm bells. They'd start looking, and I'd be a liability. We'll just have to risk Derek and Monster. It works anyway."

I leaned back. "This is just getting better and better."

"Donna can't do anything. This is too high profile; she can't expose her organization like that."

"I figured that, but I was hoping your people might be able to help."

"Derek can help on the legal end. We're pretty sure they weren't keeping tabs on him, so we got him the K2 phones, and they're not likely to have broken that."

Delaney shook her head. "If they could break the K2 phone crypto, we'd already be dead."

Pogo looked grim. "You're going to have to depend on K2 and whatever they can put together. Maybe Wendy can extract you."

"No. I need to figure this out and try to fix it. There has to be a reason for all this. Nobody would expend this level of effort for anything minor."

"That's a big risk; you can't hide out in Virginia forever."

"Shit. I was hoping to just hand you off." Delaney gave me a decidedly less-than-happy glare. "I think K2 can send my team up, but it's going to cost you."

"That's a little mercenary."

"That's a little mercenary, or she's a little mercenary?" Pogo grinned. "Actually, I have a pretty good line on Thugbunny and her team..."

Delaney jolted at what was obviously a nickname and brought her gun back up instantly.

Holding his hands up, Pogo let his smile widen. He carefully looked over at me. "I have it on good authority the Camp Mayhem team isn't cheap, but they're worth every penny."

I caught it before Pogo did. Knowing Needles didn't grant automatic trust and immunity. Everything he knew about Needles was old information. The nickname wasn't. She was sure she'd been compromised.

Delaney's eyes shifted over him, and I had a momentary chill as I saw her eyes. She'd said it before, facetiously; her sister had even commented on it. But it was apparent now. The flippant "treat it as a game" attitude was all a mask. She'd been hunted and survived. She expected more to come, and she was willing to do whatever it took to stay alive.

Barely controlled anger radiated from her. She'd claw, fight, and bite to the bitter, bloody end.

Pogo saw the feral look and realized his use of what she considered sensitive terms had crossed a of line; she saw him as a direct threat to her survival. "Easy there. Nobody is going to get anything out of me. I know one of your trainers. Spooky told me about you."

For a fraction of a second, I wondered what kind of insanity would bring Donna's most lethal asset in to train a teenage girl. Especially this one. Maybe I would have focused on that more if I wasn't so concerned that Delaney was probably less than a hair's breadth from putting several holes in Pogo.

She cocked her head at him, eyes coldly lit. "You know her?"

"I'm married to her. We have a son."

Delaney lowered the gun again, but not all the way. A muscle twitched in her jaw as she bit back barely harnessed fury. "No one who knew her name would be stupid enough to lie about that."

Pogo looked back at her, unblinking. She was no longer amusing or funny; I could see him drop her into the 'very dangerous' category in his head. He slowly looked over at me, his movements more precise and cautious. "They do occasional work for K2. It's a small team, specialized in surveillance and infiltration, but they've done a contested extraction."

Delaney's mouth twitched in quirk of a malevolent smile. Or at least something like a smile. "Contested extraction? I like that."

Pogo nodded. "Sounds a whole lot more professional than 'smashed things and wrecked shit until we got them out,' doesn't it?"

"I'm puttin' that on my fuckin' resume. The whole 'wreck shit' thing is pretty much my usual plan." A little tension seemed to drain from her, but I already knew she had unending reserves of that tension.

"I hear it a little differently. I think the words 'unpredictable and prone to violence' are used a lot, but Spooks considers your little team to be professionals. She doesn't do that lightly."

I saw a shimmer of pride pass over Delaney's face.

He switched back to me. "What about Emma?"

Emma was my protégé, an executive assistant director, and the closest thing I had to a daughter. Unfortunately, everyone knew it. And she was married to the head of one Donna's CUMULOUS programs, the slightly more respectable GREEN program, which often worked with us, but it made this worse. "I'm sure she wouldn't buy off on the charges against me, and I am just as sure that they've got someone all over her and her husband, which is probably why Donna isn't willing to take the risk of exposure."

He glanced over at Delaney for a moment and made a helpless gesture. "Best advice I can give you is to go with her team. Spooky says she'll try to render some assistance, but her hands are mostly tied, at least in any official capacity. Unless you have something in your back pocket, I don't know about?"

I shook my head. "If I did..."

"You wouldn't be here." He looked down for a moment. "Then her team is your best bet."

We talked for a few more minutes, but it was pretty clear we had reached the end of the discussion.

*****

A Walk in the Park

*****

There was nothing for it but to try to find whatever Michael had left for me. We went over maps of the area. I was gaining strength enough to be, well, fairly mobile, if not ready to run my regular five miles.

"It'd be safer if I did it myself." Delaney was less than happy about my decision to go.

"I can't be sure which bench it is; I'll have to get eyes on it to be sure. Besides, he might have left a sign or signal specific to me that you'd never pick out." I wasn't exactly prepared to just hand off whatever it was to a mercenary who worked for a private military company. I might occasionally forget what she really was, but I made a habit to remind myself.

She frowned. "The last part is true."

A twist of a smile crossed her face. "The part about being sure it's the right bench is bullshit, though. You'd be a lousy cop if you weren't sure. Still, if I were you, I wouldn't completely trust me or K2 either. I know you can, but how would you know?"

I sighed. She'd pretty much read my mind. "I'd say you'd make a good police officer yourself, but I'd never get it out with a straight face."

She rolled her eyes. "I wouldn't last a week as a cop." She took a breath. "Alright, I figured you'd say that, so we need to make sure you can make the distance from the Metro stop to the bench and back without collapsing..."