Tricks (Take It Off #6)(5)
Author: Cambria Hebert

The man shoved me roughly and I threw my hands out to catch my balance, righting myself. But as I moved, I noticed that one of the apartment doors wasn’t latched. In their haste, someone forgot to shut their door.

“We gotta go!” the man near the stairwell yelled anxiously as the emergency responders pulled up near the building.

I dropped to the ground, pretending my foot got caught in my pants. I hit my hands and knees and kept my body rigid.

The man above me muttered some profanities and bent down to yank me up.

But I was ready.

As he bent, I threw my body up forcefully. Using my head, I plowed into his chin and jaw, snapping his head back and causing him to grunt. Pain exploded in the back of my skull and I stumbled but quickly focused and pushed away from him and ran at the open door.

Both men shouted as I threw myself inside and slammed the door. I turned the lock just as the handle began to jiggle frantically.

“Open this goddamn door!” the man outside roared.

The other guy with the accent shushed him.

I raced into the kitchen and pulled a giant knife out of the knife block on the counter. If he came in here, I was going to stab him. Then I picked up the phone on the counter and put it to my ear.

No dial tone.

I replaced the receiver and paced back to the door, brandishing the knife like I was in some kind of kitchen death match.

The door handle stopped jingling. The banging on the door went silent. The faint sound of a slamming door at the end of the hall near the stairwell was all I heard.

I gripped the knife tightly and stared at the door. My chest heaved with uneven breath, and the silk pj’s stuck to my sweat-slicked skin.

I waited. I watched.

The men had left.

They were gone.

My lungs expelled a great sigh of relief.

Several very long minutes passed until I heard the firemen sweeping through the building, looking for signs of fire.

I knew they wouldn’t find any.

Whatever the hell just happened had nothing to do with a fire.

3

Tucker

Everything I owned fit in the back of my pickup truck. The black Dodge was the first thing I bought myself after making it through training and being stationed in North Carolina when I first joined the Corps. Since then, I’d acquired more possessions, but not as many as some of the guys I worked with.

Most of them were married; some were married and divorced and working on a second marriage. Why you would get out of one bad relationship and then dive into another was beyond me. Especially when there were so many ladies out there for sampling.

I mean, I guess I understood to an extent. The Marine Corps wasn’t always easy. The hours were long, the pay wasn’t that great, and it involved a lot of moving and traveling. Some guys wanted someone to come home to, someone they knew was there waiting for them, missing them.

The problem was when you expected someone to wait and wait and worry for too long, they got tired of it. You can’t base a relationship on absence.

I learned that the hard way.

I also learned that one-night stands and quickie flings expelled a lot of loneliness and took care of plenty of my needs without the drama of trying to make sure someone else was happy.

After several years stationed at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and a yearlong deployment to a war zone under my belt, I got sent where I am now, Allentown, Pennsylvania. It was a lot quieter here than the other places I’d been, except for that whole business with my friend Nathan and his lady Honor. But that was over, Nathan moved away, and now everything I owned sat boxed in the back of my truck.

After rechecking the tie-down straps over my belongings, I yanked the keys out of my pocket and walked up the stairs to the apartment I shared with two other Marines. They were still at work; they were still enlisted.

I planned to leave the house key on the kitchen counter and then drive away without a glance in the rearview mirror. Just as I was swinging the door around, a black four-door sedan pulled haphazardly into the gravel-filled driveway, blocking in my truck.

Three men in black suits and gray ties stepped out. It reminded me of the movie Men in Black. Hell, if it wasn’t so overcast today, they would likely be wearing those black sunglasses too.

“I was just about to pull out,” I called down to them, hoping they’d get the hint and get the hell out of my way. They could hunt for aliens somewhere else.

“Are you Sergeant Tucker Patton?” one of the men asked, completely ignoring my suggestion he move.

Suspicion laced through me. Immediately I riffled through my memories of last night. Yeah, a lot of it was hazy from all the beer I ingested, but I was almost one hundred percent sure I didn’t do anything that would warrant a visit from some cops pretending to be movie stars.

“Who’s asking?” I called.

The man who was driving flashed a gold badge with the letters FBI in plain sight across the front.

What the fuck?

The three men proceeded up the steps toward me.

“What’s this about?”

“That’s him,” said one of the men on the steps, like he was somehow able to confirm my identity without me showing him my ID.

“We just need a moment of your time,” said the agent closest to me said.

I studied them a moment longer then curiosity got the best of me. It wasn’t every day the FBI came a calling. Pushing open the door once more, I motioned them inside.

After closing the door behind us all, I stood there regarding them quietly.

“I’m Agent Collier. Perhaps you should sit down,” the man who was driving the car said.

“I’m good where I am.” I wasn’t about to offer them coffee or tea. I wasn’t even going to shake their hands. In fact, the longer I stood in their presence, the more I understood this wasn’t going to be a pleasant call.

“We’re here on behalf of your brother, Maxwell Patton.”

Max was more than just my brother. He was my twin. We were born just minutes apart, me being the “younger” one, and even though we looked exactly the same, our personalities were like night and day. Mom used to joke that someone messed up when they were giving us traits because instead of each having a balanced personality, both of us were extreme.

Max got all the responsible, successful, and determination traits. And me?

I got to be the charming, irresponsible one with a girl on each arm.

It’s clear I got the better deal.

It was because of the wide gully of difference between us that Max and I weren’t as close as most twins are. I hadn’t seen Max since I joined the Corps, but even still I found it very hard—if not impossible—to believe that Max was in trouble with the law.