Page 22 of Velvet and Valor (Platinum Security: Shadows of LA #4)

“A little waterlogged, but alive,” I say. June smacks me on the arm playfully. “Listen, we need someone to come and pick us up.”

“Did you wreck that shit-suspension adolescent mistake you consider your ‘ride?’” Dane asks.

“I kind of like you, Dane,” I say. “That’s why I’m not going to kill you for insulting my muscle car. Those are like the apex of the motoring world.”

“The Apex of the motoring world is an Alfa Romero.”

“Alfa Romero? Are you kidding me? Are you in love with sitting on the side of the road trying to get your engine to turn over? Might as well drive a Lotus,” I say.

“What’s wrong with Lotus?” Dane counters.

“Nothing,” I say, “they look great, except that Lotus is an acronym that stands for Lots of Trouble, Usually Serious—”

“Ahem,” June says.

“Oh, right, can you come and get us.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay. Where are you at.”

“Ah, funny story,” I say.

It takes some friend finder app wizardry, but we manage to tell Dane where we are. There’s a ranger station a couple miles down the road, so we plan to meet Dane there.

“Give me ninety minutes on the low end,” Dane says. “Oh, and when I arrive, it will be in a proper vehicle that can actually handle those mountain roads.”

“What's it going to be, a Dacia Sandero?”

“You want to be rescued or not?”

The call ends, and I hand the phone back to June. She gives me a look.

“Is that all you guys do is play pool and argue about who has the worst taste in cars?”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” I reply.

“Oh, you’re too late for this shtick, Axel,” she says with a chuckle.

“What?”

“Don’t play innocent. You might want to pretend that you’re just a shallow, beer swilling dude bro but you’re a lot deeper than you let on, Axel.” She puts her hand on her hip, standing like a teacher dressing down a student she sort of likes, even if they’ve been bad.

“I am not,” I say in sincere protest. “I swear, what you see is what you get.”

“Uh-uh,” she closes her eyes and shakes her head. “You don’t get the level of ennui you’ve espoused without having some depth. It takes depth to hold all the darkness.”

I lapse into silence as we hike down the road toward the ranger’s station. I want to deny that I’m a dark, depressive type, but I guess the shoe kinda fits.

“I don’t want to be,” I say at last.

“What, deep?” she asks with a giggle.

“No, dark. Depressing. Enya eyed, like you said.”

“Ennui, not…never mind.” She puts a hand on my shoulder and smiles. “Axel, it hurts because you care, and you care because you are a good man.”

“It doesn’t come naturally.”

She lets out a bark of laughter.

“You think it comes naturally for anyone?”

“It doesn’t?”

“Nooooo,” she says, her mouth forming an O.

“Oh no, I have to fight off dark impulses of my own. True, they aren't violent impulses, but…if you’re pinned down at a premiere party by the world’s most boring film critic, sometimes you feel tempted to say a few words in the right ear and destroy his career. ”

“Oh, I get it. I’m like one of those redneck serial killers who taxidermies his victims, while you’re more of a sophisticated serial killer, like Saw Man.”

She stops laughing and gives me an exasperated look.

“Saw man?”

“From those movies with the deathtraps—”

“Jigsaw,” she says, leaning against me and sighing. “Jigsaw, you big idiot. What am I going to do with you?”

I chuckle softly.

“Well, I can think of a few things,” I say, slipping my arm around her shoulders. “Hey, does this count as a date? Being kidnapped together, I mean?”

“Oh no, any day where I almost drown is most emphatically not a date,” she says firmly.

“Hey, I think I see the ranger station,” I say, pointing at a wooden tower peeking out from behind the verdant green.

“Thank God. I hope there’s something to drink, I need to get the taste of puke and river water out of my mouth.”

“Geez, sorry, next time I’ll use a breath mint.”

She slaps me on my ass as we reach the steps winding up the side of the tower. It must be more than fifty feet high.

“It doesn’t look like anyone is home,” she says.

“Yeah, but there might be someone up top. Let’s go check it out.”

The top is just as abandoned as the bottom. She puts her nose against the glass and peers inside.

“Man, I wish the doors weren’t chained shut,” she says. “I can see a whole pallet of bottled water.”

“Oh, you mean this chain?” I grab a metal tent spike laying discarded on the deck and shove it through one of the chain links. One, two, three twists later, the chain snaps. It was never meant to keep out serious invasion attempts.

“This is breaking and entering,” she says.

“We’re in a crisis situation, we can take some supplies,” I say. “Besides, our tax money paid for this station, and it’s sitting around empty. We basically have a human right to do this.”

“Hmm. I dunno. How about you exercise your human rights to find us something to eat, too?”

I nod and start to explore the station while she makes a beeline for the water. I pause and look back at June.

“June?”

“Yeah?” she says, unscrewing a cap and draining the bottle in about eight seconds.

“About before…I’m sorry I upset you. I wasn’t trying to ruin your day.”

“I know.” She smiles. “Maybe we can find ways for you to deal with your dark thoughts that don’t involve going on depressive rants, though.”

I laugh. “Maybe.”

Then I cross the floor in two steps, as the nearly empty bottle falls from her fingers. We come together in a torrid, all-encompassing kiss.

Any day where I get to kiss June, is a good one.

Duty calls, otherwise I’d just keep kissing her. I poke around in the ranger station some more and find a landline phone in a tiny office that probably started life as a broom closet. I use it to call the Platinum Security office. The connection is fuzzy but at least we can hear each other talk.

Jax is happy that I’ve kept the client alive.

Not so happy about the big mess I made doing it.

But sometimes in life you have to improvise.

Jax doesn’t much care for that line of reasoning.

In fact, he insists that June and I remain right where we are until Dane picks us up.

Thank goodness for Jax’s contact on the police force or we’d have a lot of clean up to do. Hiding bodies is hard work.

Dane rolls up in one of the fleet SUVs. The Platinum Security Logo is supposed to look like a gemstone.

To me it looks like a starfish, and not the kind you find in the ocean.

As Dane parks the SUV on the side of the road, June pulls away from me.

Like she’s afraid to be seen being too affectionate with me or something.

I’ll admit, it stings a little. I thought we’d reached some kind of understanding. But maybe she’s just not into PDA? I don’t know what to make of it.

“Have your client sit in the back,” Dane says by way of greeting. His strong jaw and piercing gaze make him look like an action hero or something. He gets in the occasional wry joke like the rest of us, though.

“Why?” I ask.

“Because the passenger seat is known as the Death Seat,” Dane insists. “Statistically, it’s the seat where you’re most likely to be killed in a car accident or roadside incident.”

“It’s fine,” June says, climbing into the back. “I don’t mind.”

I decide to sit back there with her, which makes Dane roll his eyes. He looks at the carnage on the road and clucks his tongue.

“Jax said you made a mess, but this is worse than I imagined.”

“Oh really?” I say with a sneer. “How about your handiwork? Are you really going to compare your levels of property damage to mine?”

“I can’t believe you guys are making this into a contest, of all things,” June mutters.

“It’s not a contest, he has me beat in spades,” I say. “Dane originated the whole shoot first, think never philosophy before I even joined up with Platinum Security.”

June gives him a look.

Dane shrugs.

“He shot the people that needed shooting, is what he means by that shrug,” I add.

“Does anyone really need shooting, though?” June asks.

“Yes,” Dane and I answer in unison, which is annoying as hell.

“Jinx,” I say to him.

“I mean, I know people like Moorcrock need to be put in prison or otherwise removed from society,” June says. “But is killing them really the solution?”

Dane shrugs. I decide to be a little more articulate.

“I know it sounds like macho posturing, but if a certain person is causing a problem, then removing them also removes the problem…sometimes.” I sigh.

“We’re not indiscriminate, bloodthirsty goons, though.

When I was in the army, we were told to be careful who we pulled the trigger on.

Because killing the bad guy doesn’t always put an end to the misery they spread. ”

June cocks an eyebrow at me.

“Is that so?”

“Yeah. You see, bad guys aren’t like comic book villains.

They have families, friends, parents, and so forth.

Even if someone was a bad guy who did bad things, there might just be someone around who is willing to kill to avenge them.

” I sigh. “Then you’re just stuck in a cycle of killing.

I mean, yeah, some dudes need to be shot, but that doesn’t mean we kill indiscriminately. ”

June gives me a long look.

“What’s that for?” I ask.

“You’re always surprising me, Axel.” She shakes her head, lips drawn into a line. “I can’t figure out if you’re really deep and just pretending to be an airhead most of the time, or if it’s the other way around.”

“Oh, it’s the other way around, let me save you some confusion,” I say.

June laughs. Dane grunts. I’m not sure if that’s because he finds my quip funny, or he just agrees with my assessment.

“I’m supposed to take you back to the beach house,” Dane says.

“We’ve got something more pressing than that,” I counter. “We need to find out what these guys want with June, once and for all. I’m tired of hiding away playing defense.”

Dane looks puzzled.