Page 90 of Gone Before Goodbye
“I’m strong enough now.”
He thinks about it. “Okay. We leave tomorrow.”
“Where are we going?”
Charles smiles. “Someplace much warmer.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Dubai
The Dubai heat starts in your lungs.
The sun is relentless, merciless. It finds you. It beats down upon you. It’s just you and the sun. You have a personal, one-on-one relationship with the sun. There is no middleman, no filter, no cloud cover, no escape. You get the purest hit of the sun. The sun love-bombs you. It’s dry and heavy and clingy. It swarms with an all-consuming furnace-like heat. It suffocates you from within and from without. It saps your energy first, then your spirit.
Maggie had experienced this kind of desert heat too often during her military service. She’d be walking on the tarmac where she could see the squiggly waves from the heat and feel it burn her feet all the way through her combat boots. She had experienced every kind of malady from this kind of heat—dehydration, rash, headache, dizziness, fatigue—during her WorldCures missions. The cold of Russia may have been deadly and awful. But this blazing sun? Maybe worse.
Fortunately, Maggie only experienced the Dubai heat for a minute, maybe two, walking from the private plane to the sleekest-looking super-fancy sports car. A man giving off serious Viking vibes—long blond hair and a beard to match—holds the door open for her.
“Welcome,” the Viking says.
The sports car only seats two, so Maggie slips into the front seat, the blast from the powerful air-conditioning more than welcome. The Viking circles around and gets low into the driver’s side.
“Is this a Bugatti?” Maggie asks.
She doesn’t know cars, never had any interest in them, never understood those fascinated by them. Cars aren’t her baby or friend; she doesn’t think they’re cool. They get her from Point A to Point B. Period, the end. She only guesses it’s a Bugatti because it just feels like money and because Charles Lockwood had told her that she’d be staying at the new ultra-exclusive Bugatti Residences by Binghatti, which is supposed to somehow combine Binghatti luxury living (whatever that means) with, well, Bugatti luxury automotive design. Didn’t make much sense to Maggie, but not much about the innovatively decadent (yet decidedly throwback) Dubai lifestyle did.
The driver answers in American English. “It’s a Bugatti Tourbillon.”
“A Tourbillon?”
“Yes.”
“It’s really called that? A Tourbillon.”
“It is.”
Maggie frowns. “Name seems a little on-the-nose, doesn’t it?”
“Billonnotbillion. It’s French for ‘whirlwind.’”
“Yeah, but still.”
“Fair point,” the Viking concedes. He adjusts his sunglasses and strokes his thick beard. He hits the gas pedal and in seconds they are traveling ninety miles an hour. “This car,” he says, “cost 4.1 million dollars.”
“No way.”
“Yes way.”
“I think your voice had a typo in it,” Maggie says. “It moved the decimal point to the right a spot or two.”
The Viking likes that. “It did not. Only two hundred fifty of them will ever be manufactured.”
“Two hundred fifty Tourbillons,” Maggie says.
“Yep.”
She’s surprised Oleg Ragoravich didn’t have one in his showroom. “How old is it?”
