He’s grounding,she thought. Grounding is a technique taught to people who had panic attacks or anxiety. You pick out five things you can see, three things you can hear, and one thing you can smell or taste to ground you in the present, not wherever your terror is.
She backed up and held his hands in hers. “The sunlight coming in the windows. The curtains blowing in the breeze. Me, holding your hands.”
He nodded. His breathing was slower. “I’m okay.”
“You did so well,” she told him. “You knocked out three guys and fought off two more. Did you take karate or something?”
“Everything. I took years of Krav Maga, Tae Kwon Do, boxing, other things. I think I have black belts in three different disciplines, but it wasn’t enough.”
“It was enough. We’re okay. You saved yourself and me.” She sneaked a finger onto his wrist. His pulse was down to under a hundred and slowing. “It was just a panic attack. It’s over. You’re okay.”
He ran his hands through his hair. “It only happens when someone tries to kidnap me.”
“So, almost never,” she said.
Augustine studied her for a second. “Right. Almost never.”
She stroked his hard calluses on his palms, just touching him to ground him more. “You don’t seem the type to have farming calluses like this. I mean, I do. They’re left over from chores when I was growing up.” She showed him the thick skin on her palms and fingerpads. “Mostly from mucking out the pens, shoveling sheep shit.”
He laughed. “I’ve had an interesting life. I’ve been blessed to do some things that were important to me.”
“So, all those phone calls,” Dree said, curling her callused hands back up. “What did you find out?
He exhaled a long breath. “I may have mentioned that an old friend of mine needed help leaving her husband?”
Dree nodded. “It’s come up.”
“Those goons seem to have been Estebe’s, the Mafia husband. Simone thinks they were because Estebe was seen to be strutting around this morning and hinting that something would happen. She said that she would call Estebe and threaten him with a brutal and public divorce if he didn’t call them off, which has perhaps a fifty percent chance of working.”
“Wow, and I thought my break-up was bad.”
Augustine shrugged. “I knew Estebe back in school, too. He holds a grudge. I’m surprised he did something so bold in broad daylight, though.” He looked at the ceiling, musing. “If this had gone badly, Estebe has no official contacts. He might have people on his payroll, but nothing official. Usually, an attempt at abduction in broad daylight takes a national intelligence service because their problems can be sorted out and hushed up. Just from the boldness of it, I suspected my brother or my uncle.”
“Uncles are always the assholes when there are inheritance problems. Uncle Marny was a giant dickweed.”
Augustine nodded. “My uncle Jules is, indeed, a giant dickweed. I like that. I think I’ll tell him he’s a giant dickweed next time I see him.”
“If the weed fits,” Dree agreed.
“My uncle Jules has always been bitter about being born the third son of my grandparents. Every time my parents or Alexandre’s parents had another child, thus knocking him further down the list, the rumor was that he raged for days and was photographed in casinos doing inadvisable things. My grandparents were distraught about what to do with him. He has a problem with zero-sum thinking. If someone else gets something, that means that he didn’t get it and so he gets angry about it.”
“Wow,” Dree said. “He is a giant dickweed.”
“Indeed,” Augustine said. “A giant, verdant dickweed, and he’s the type who would go after someone to remove them from an inheritance. I’m in his way. I wouldn’t be surprised if Jules was behind either that surveillance team when we went to the Eiffel Tower or these people who tried to kidnap one or both of us.”
“They could have been after me,” Dree said. “I could have international assassins after me, too. You’re not the only one who’s important enough to have people trying to kill you.”
“Could you?” Augustine asked, brightening, obviously thinking she was joking.
“My ex is a drug dealer,” she reminded him. “And I think he roped me into it without my knowing. So, yeah. His head honchos might be after me.”
“Oh.” Augustine seemed more concerned than before. “I don’t like the thought of people going after you at all.”
She shrugged. “Guess we should have made better life choices, huh?”
“And you’re going back to Phoenix where these drug dealer ‘head honchos’ are located?”
When he tried to talk Western with that British accent, it was funny. “I don’t know if I am. I’m talking to people. I’m thinking that maybe I’ll go back to New Mexico or something. I could just lay low for a few years. They’ll forget about me. I’m nobody.”
