Dieter glanced at the navigation app running on his phone. “Six thirty-three.”
“Hold for one moment.” A rustling filled Dieter’s black SUV, and the mumbling was muffled by a hand over the other phone. “All right. We’ll have the necessities here soon. Tell me what you need for the agency for the next week.”
Dieter sighed, and his hands loosened on the steering wheel.
Reason finally coalesced in his head.
He reached over to the passenger seat, pulling a baby bottle of juice that his neighbor Lupe had given him out of the diaper bag and dangled it into the back seat. Tiny hands grabbed it out of his fingers, and noisy sucking replaced the wails. “It’s mostly money,Durchlaucht.I need to pay my staff this Friday, plus the mortgage on the office and the warehouse.”
“I’ll take care of that. Anything else?”
“I don’t know what will become of my daughter without a mother. Gretchen’s note said that she wanted nothing more to do with either of us, that she needed to be free to live her own life.”
“We’ll contact a lawyer tomorrow to establish separation and sole custody, and I know some things about raising a child without a mother. It’s difficult, but Flicka turned out all right.”
Dieter said, “That’s true.”
Over the SUV’s speakers, Wulfram said, “We’ll make it all right, Dieter. Where are you now?”
A long, iron gate crossed the road. Dieter parked the SUV in front of it and flipped his wallet open to his driver’s license. A guard ambled out of the air-conditioned shack toward his vehicle. “I’m at the development’s gate. I’ll be inside in a few minutes.”
As soon as Dieter rolled his darkly tinted window down, the guard grinned at him and flicked his hand at the gate, retreating quickly into the guard shack. Heat rained down all around them, blowing into the SUV through the open window, and it was far too hot to stand on the asphalt for any length of time.
Wulfram said as clearly as if he were sitting in the passenger seat, “Friedhelm will meet you at our gate to escort you up the driveway. What else do you need tonight?”
“Just someplace to rest,Durchlaucht.”
“You have that.”
Dieter turned the SUV around a corner. A second gate slid smoothly away from the road. Another black SUV idled, waiting for him.
As Dieter followed the other SUV up the long driveway to Wulfram’s house, the air conditioners seemed to blow colder air, cooling his face.
He and Wulfram had had each other’s backs ever since that long night in the Swiss Army barracks. Dieter had been blindsided by the end of his first disastrous love affair, and Wulfram had listened to him talk that night, all night, rather than leave him when he might have done something very foolish. They had agreed that Dieter had terrible taste in women, for he had been drawn to Ira’s wildness and abandon, and they had agreed that Dieter fell in love too fast and too hard, leaving nothing of himself behind.
This evening already felt like a horrible replay of that night.
The liquor would probably be better than that rotgut Finnish vodka Dieter had smuggled into the Swiss barracks so many years ago.
Dieter and Wulfram shared a long friendship, over twelve years now. They had stared down rifles at the same targets and seen those targets aiming back at them. After they had mustered out of the Swiss Army together, Dieter had headed Wulf’s security detail for a decade, and Dieter had been excruciatingly aware that he had held Wulf’s life in his hands every day. Wulfram had been Dieter’s best man when he had married Gretchen two years ago. To save Rae’s life, they had killed two men, sniping them from a high hill using those Swiss Army skills, and they had gotten drunk a few nights later and dealt with those demons together, too. Dieter had stood up with Wulfram when he had legally married Rae in Paris a few months ago and would be best man at his religious wedding when it happened, if it happened.
Nothing could break their deep bond.
Well, almost nothing.
Math
Flicka von Hannover
When I did the math,
I knew.
Wulf strode out of his bedroom, sweeping Flicka and Yoshi ahead of him. Flicka slid her hand down the oak banister and, because she was wearing heels, was the last down the stairs.
She was on the last step when Wulf opened the front doors. Sunlight poured in. Desert heat roared in, shoving the air-conditioned coolness aside.
Dieter stomped in, followed by Friedhelm, who closed the doors behind them.
