Page 30 of Magnum, Volume 2

“What about getting your own place, and having a screened-in porch you can sleep in when you need to be outside?”

“Yeah, my therapist has suggested that, too. I’m actually making pretty good money right now, and I’m saving a ton of it. In another year and a half, I should be able to buy a couple of acres of land and build a small house on it. Like, eight hundred square feet of house with a four hundred square foot porch – half screened and half not.”

“That sounds like a really good plan,” I told him.

“I have another offer, kind of a job offer, and it would include room and board. I’m considering it, but…” A shrug. “Maybe. I don’t know.” He shook his head and abruptly changed the subject. “My brother tells me he’s pretty sure you’re in a power exchange relationship with Magnum?”

I work hard to report on stories and not be the story, and that means I don’t discuss my private life with anyone except friends.

“Is there a reason you feel my sex life should be part of our talk?”

He stared at me a few long seconds. He sat back, leaned forward, and sat back again.

“Forget I asked. Change of topic. I’m on a quest to fix my karma. To do good things that will balance out all the bad I’ve done. I learned things about my captors that I don’t think you’ve figured out. Things that will make the public even more outraged, probably.”

He pulled a USB drive from his pocket and put it on the table. “You’re welcome to share anything on that drive in any way you wish, but I want you to call me Robert and say I was taken from New York, simply because they took more men from there than any other place. Statistically, it’ll be harder for them to focus on any one person. I’ve put as much as I can remember about the way they broke me at the start in narrative form on the drive, as well as facts I learned by overhearing conversations and by just… I mean, I’m a good judge of character. Being in lots of life-and-death situations teaches you how to read people like nothing else.”

“I’d really like your version of… a day in the life, right? From waking one morning until waking the next. And, if I can get it, a normal day when not at the fight property, and then how an entire fight weekend, from arrival to leaving would go, if it isn’t too much to ask, and it might be, asking you to remember it in enough detail to write down.”

“You have the fight weekend breakdown. Give me a week or two, and I’ll send you the other, through my brother.”

“Thank you. Can you give me some time to consider your offer? There are times I walk into sketchy situations. I carry pepper spray and a nine millimeter, so I have both a lethal and non-lethal option. I’m also pretty good at physical self-defense. I like to think I can take care of myself, and so far, I’ve managed okay. Still, you aren’t just offering safety, but help in gaining information through sneaky means.”

“I have some knowledge of Redstone Arsenal,” he said, his diction slower than it’d been at any time in the conversation. “Classified stuff I don’t feel comfortable sharing for reasons of actual national security, and yet, if I was with you and could see a reason for you to know something specific, I could find a way to guide you to the right people or buildings or… whatever.”

“If you go with me as my security or assistant, it’ll be common knowledge you helped. You run the risk of getting into trouble for helping me, if you’re walking around with me.”

He smiled. “The angle you’re using? Just wanting to know the facts of this woman’s disappearance? If they bring me into that, in any way, and that includes disappearing me, they risk way more information about her coming to light than they’ll be comfortable with. You may not want to bank on them avoiding the prison thing with you, but I’ll bank on this for me, any day of any week.”

“I could never get a good handle on your military career,” I noted. “Most of it’s classified.”

He nodded. “Yep.”

Later in the day, I had to get a tissue to blow my nose and wipe my tears while reading through his experience. I’d be able to publish it in my book, but I literally couldn’t report most of it on YouTube, because they’d made Mason into a sexual submissive — specific, tear-him-down-and-recreate-him training to turn him into exactly what they wanted and needed him to be, and I wished I hadn’t shut him down when he’d asked about power exchange.

Shit.

Over dinner, I had a long conversation with Magnum about my talk with Mason, and a sketch of the things on the USB he’d handed me, without getting into much of the sexual stuff.

“I like the idea of you taking him on as an assistant,” he said. “But that’s purely from the perspective of someone who loves you and wants to keep you safe. Whether it’d be a bonus or a problem in the way you work? It might go either way. Still, since he knows specifically about the place you’re trying to investigate, it might be a good test case.”

I nodded. “Kind of what I was thinking, but I still worry about getting him in trouble for leaking classified information. I’m good at keeping contacts safe, but that’s because I can keep them secret. Can’t do that when he’s walking onto the property with me.”

“Maybe you let him work to balance his karma in the ways he feels are important, and trust him to judge his personal risks?”

Chapter 14

Magnum

The next two weeks went by way too fast, but three days before what I thought would be Storm’s last day with me for this trip, she asked if we could go out on the boat.

It was late October and chilly, but I’m nearly always up for going out on the lake. She brought beer, potato chips, and homemade dip.

“Since I’ve been here,” she started, once we were anchored and sitting across a small table from each other, “on top of the main missing person rabbit hole I’m currently lost in, I’ve covered two smaller stories in Atlanta, one in Mobile, and another in Nashville.”

I nodded. I was well aware of all of that. She’d also met with Sloan and Ember before she’d put together a video about how to hide from law enforcement. They’d helped her hide from the fight ring by telling her a few things the public isn’t supposed to know, and she was following through with her promise that she wouldn’t make them regret helping her. I was beyond proud of her for that, too.

“It occurs to me,” Storm told me, “that I may not need to go to New York and DC as often as I was. There are stories all over the place. I was focused on those cities because I was close to them.”