Feeling more in control, she shed her clothes, stepped into the shower and attempted to wash away the violence and ugliness of the last hours. When she finally lay down in the king-sized bed, she expected to fall asleep within minutes, but sleep did not come easily, and when it did, it was punctuated with nightmares. She thrust them away until one grabbed hold and refused to give up its grip on her.
She awoke screaming.
Something wet laved her face. She sat up with a start, hand groping for her weapon, before realizing that it was Sammy.
“Sorry, boy,” she said. “I was screaming, wasn’t I?”
Gun in hand, Mace burst into the room, his eyes darting about. “What is it?” His jeans and shirt were obviously pulled on quickly, his hair sleep mussed.
“Nothing.” At his look of disbelief, she added, “Except a nightmare.” No sense in pretending otherwise. “The IED.” Five seconds that had changed her life forever.
For the first few weeks following the explosion, she’d woken in the same way, always with a scream. The nightmares had stopped, for the most part, but the events of the last two days had triggered another one.
Shards of memory wrapped their way around her, jagged edges pricking her from all sides. She breathed deeply, a vain attempt to dislodge the hold they had on her.
Sammy whimpered softly, a sound that managed to be both inquiring and comforting at the same time.
Looking around the hotel room, she anchored herself there, in Atlanta.
The Army shrink she’d been ordered to see had said that stress was her enemy. She gave a short laugh. All she had to do to de-stress her life was take down the Collective, find a way to tell Shelley and Jake that they had a sister and get her shoulder to heal.
No problem.
No problem at all.
Mace tucked his weapon into the waistband of his jeans. “You gonna be okay?”
“Yeah.” That was a lie. But a girl had her pride. And right now that was the only thing keeping her going.
“You want to talk about it?”
Did she? Did talking about the nightmares imbue them with more power? She didn’t know.
She checked the time on her cell—nearly 5:30 a.m. She wouldn’t be going back to sleep. Maybe she did need to talk to someone, someone other than an overworked shrink who had too many patients and not enough time.
“How about breakfast in thirty?” she asked.
Mace nodded. “Sounds good. Meet you in the dining room.”
Exactly twenty-five minutes later, freshly showered to wash away the sweat of the nightmare, she sat across the table from Mace in the small dining room of the hotel. She’d noticed Mace had conducted a grid search of it. She’d done the same and deemed it safe.
“On time was considered late in my unit,” she said by way of explanation.
He nodded. “Same here. My sergeant used to say that if you only wanted to be on time, join the navy.”
Laurel laughed, feeling the release of tension. “I hear you.”
He placed his big square hand over hers and squeezed it.
The contact was minimal, but she felt the warmth seep into her, a quiet knowledge that she wasn’t alone. So startled was she by the unexpected gesture that she looked at their linked hands to confirm it. She kept looking at them for longer than was warranted, noting the contrast in size, the texture and color of skin, the pressure of his fingers against hers.
All made her intensely aware of his strength. Of him.
She couldn’t help comparing him to Jeffrey, the man she’d believed she might someday marry. Jeffrey had always needed to make himself seem bigger, better, smarter than he actually was, a futile attempt to make up for what was lacking inside.
Mace had no need to puff himself up. He was comfortable in his own skin and didn’t need to rely on outward trappings as Jeffrey had.
After their break-up, she’d wondered what she’d seen in him and concluded that she was so eager to find love that she’d been blinded by the image he presented. She was grateful she’d seen through his false persona before she’d taken the next step with him.
Sammy, who had waited patiently at her side for his food, gave a gentle woof. “Sorry, boy,” she said. She dug his bowl from her backpack, filled it with a bag of food she also kept there and said, “Mind your manners. We’re in a hotel.”
Sammy looked at her in reproach, as though he already understood that he was in a hotel and would use his best manners, so why was she reminding him of it in the first place?
“He’s a winner,” Mace said.
“He is that. I’m fortunate that I could adopt him. Sammy wants to be needed and he knew that I needed him.”
“You two make a good team.”
“The best.” She went quiet, thinking of how Sammy had come into her life at just the right time.
As though sensing her reflective mood, Mace said, “Your unit saw some action in the Stand.”
“Yeah. We did.”
Her commanding officer had said that the Stand separated soldiers from wannabes. He hadn’t dismissed her with a wink and a smirk as did some of the officers. There is no gender in Rangers, he’d said. There are only those willing to serve and even to lay down their own lives in defense of their country.
The missions had been rough, and her last one had cost three men in her unit their lives, Sammy his leg, and Laurel the use of her shoulder. When this thing with the Collective was over and if she was still standing, she intended on visiting the families of those men. Those mothers and fathers, wives and children deserved to hear firsthand how their sons, husbands, and fathers had died fighting for something they believed in.
She’d held her own and had come away with a medal and the respect of the men she’d served with. Medals weren’t important. The respect of her fellow soldiers was. It was that to which she’d clung during the long weeks in the hospital and the longer weeks in rehab.
Memories assailed her with the same piercing heat now.
Weeks of rehab followed the surgery to remove the shrapnel. She’d approached rehab as she would a mission: tough her way through no matter the cost.
She didn’t realize how long the silence had stretched until Mace said, “About last night—”
“When you ditched me and went out on your own?”
“I should have told you what I was doing. You’re right. From now on, we work together.”
Surprise rippled through her. “Thank you. I’m sorry about your truck.”
He made a gesture of dismissal. “The truck’s toast. S&J has leased one until I get around to buying a new one.” A pause. “Want to tell me about the nightmare? I’m a good listener,” he prompted.
Image after image flashed through her mind with relentless clarity. Darkness followed by blinding light. Deafening noise. A high-pitched wail that seemed to last forever.
Why wouldn’t it stop?
Shrapnel of nails, screws and razors exploded all around her. Torn flesh. The acrid odor of explosive materials. Blood had dripped from her uniform—hers and that of a buddy. Automatically, she pressed her hands to the gaping wound in his gut.
Dark blood continued to spurt. She recognized death blood. Still, she kept up the pressure, willing the young soldier who’d pushed her out of the way to live. It wasn’t enough. He’d died in her arms.
Before she realized it, she was talking, a spit of rapid-fire words. “I’d seen men die before,” she concluded, “but this was different. He gripped my arm so hard I thought he might break it. I kept telling him that help was coming, that he’d be all right.” She stopped, momentarily ambushed by memories of the unspeakable waste that was war.
“He wasn’t. I must have passed out. I don’t remember being carried out of the school. I woke up four days later in a hospital at Ramstein,” she said, naming the air base in Germany.
Mace didn’t offer sympathy, only a nod of acceptance.
“Thanks for listening. Maybe I can put it away.”
They both knew it was a lie.
SIX
Mace understood Laurel’s reluctance to talk about the explosion that had wounded her and taken a comrade’s life. He rarely shared his own experiences of the war. Too much pain. Too much ugliness. Too much disillusionment.
When he’d returned to the States, he’d resolved to put away that part of his life. His lips twisted. He hadn’t been any more successful than Laurel had sounded.
The desperate look in her eyes told him she wanted to drop the subject. He was happy to comply. Anything to wipe away the shadows under her eyes. Though she’d slept, she didn’t look rested.
“I have something to show you.” Laurel pulled her laptop from her backpack, inserted the thumb drive and handed the computer to Mace.
He skimmed the file, his face darkening. It outlined the Collective’s activities in the Southeast over the last five years. The organization had its hands in every type of crime, from money laundering to human trafficking to selling illegal weapons and dealing in drugs.
“Where did you get this?”
“I have a contact in the DOJ. I reached out to him on my way to meet you. He sent me some intel. The FBI has the goods on the Collective. Why isn’t it doing something?”
The frustration in her voice echoed his own, but Mace knew how things worked, knew that the Collective had tentacles that found their way into every sphere, including law enforcement itself. No one was beyond its reach.
There was an additional reason the Bureau had been slow to act. “With a dozen new hot spots popping up all over the world every day, unless you can connect something to a terror nexus, it gets shifted to the bottom of the pile.”
“That’s just it.” She clenched her hands, unclenched them. “This is connected. Along with selling illegal weapons in America, the Collective is branching out to selling stolen weapons to arms dealers who aren’t picky about whom they sell to.”
“Like terrorist cells.”
Her nod was short, her voice clipped. “Just like.”
Abruptly, he switched subjects. “Tell me about you and your mother. I notice you refer to her as Bernice. Any special reason why?”
Laurel folded her napkin and set it on the plate. “I hadn’t seen her in over a decade.”
“Why?”
Now Laurel pushed back from the table. “She didn’t want me. She told me that from the minute I was old enough to understand. I was a nuisance. I always wondered why she kept me around. Later, I realized she could just use me for welfare money.”
Mace didn’t rush to offer sympathy or to dismiss her feelings. Instead, he said only, “That must have been rough.”
“You could say that.” Pain shadowed her eyes. “Why do you do what you do, first the Rangers and now working for S&J?”
It was a question few people had asked, one he rarely asked himself.
He could give the easy answer: that he was protecting a way of life, the one that politicians idealized and poets immortalized. But it went deeper than that.
When he’d started high school, a boy several years older than him had been in his grade. It hadn’t been hard to understand why the older boy, who must have been sixteen or more, was in the same grade with a bunch of fourteen-year-olds. He became the butt of bad jokes and cruel comments.
Mace did his best to stand up for Roy, even taking on bigger boys who persisted in taunting the boy. With that, Mace became Roy’s protector. Mace had brought trouble on himself, but he’d refused to back down. His father had supported him, giving Mace one of his infrequent words of praise when he’d received a black eye defending Roy from two bullies.
When Mace’s father had been killed in a factory accident, Mace had taken on the role of head of the family, though he’d been only sixteen. He’d managed to hold down two jobs while still maintaining a 4.0 GPA. At eighteen, he’d enlisted in the Army, eventually joining the Rangers.
“You were going to tell me why,” Laurel said.
“I don’t like bullies. Doesn’t matter where they are or who they are, I can’t abide them. What’s going on in the world comes down to some people bullying others.”
She nodded. “I get it.”
“I wanted to make a difference in the world. Fighting America’s enemies seemed like the way to do it. I spent some time in a POW camp, came away with a bum leg. It’s mostly okay now, but I knew I couldn’t go back to the Rangers.” He thought of her injured shoulder and tipped his chin at it. “Do you ever regret it?”
“Not for a minute. How about you? Do you regret it?”
“Not for a minute.”
In accord, they finished their breakfast.
Mace pushed back from the table and stood. “I want to check in with Shelley and Jake, fill them in on what happened last night.”
Laurel stood as well. “Sounds good.”
Outside, they found a truck waiting, courtesy of Shelley’s efficiency. He’d called her last night and explained about his truck. He hadn’t gone into details, only to say that the vehicle was inoperable. Shelley had messengered keys to him.
He took the loss philosophically. It wasn’t the first truck he’d sacrificed while on the job; it probably wouldn’t be the last.
Fifteen minutes later, Mace was sitting in Shelley’s office. Laurel had taken Sammy outside, so Mace and Shelley were alone. The once efficiently streamlined office now resembled a nursery with riding toys, stuffed animals and a high chair fitted among the filing cabinets and desk.
Mace smiled at the picture of Chloe that sat prominently on Shelley’s desk. “Chloe looks more like you with every day.”
“And I think she looks like Caleb. He spoils her ridiculously. The other day he took her and one of her little friends to the park. I warned him what he was in for. When they came home, he looked shell-shocked and said he’d been on missions that were less hairy.”
Mace’s smile stretched wider at the thought of former Delta Caleb Judd now a doting father taking his tiny daughter and friend to the park. “I’d have liked to have seen that.”
At one time, Mace had wanted his own share of the American Dream, a wife, family and home. When he’d considered the realities of that dream, though, he wondered about the consequences. He thrived on the thrill of a mission successfully executed. Would knowing that a family was waiting for him cause him to temper the risk taking that made him such a good operator?
The answer was simple: of course. Could that get him or one of his buddies killed? Maybe.
It was an idea he had relegated to cold storage, rarely taking it out to examine. In Jalal-Abad, a woman had tempted him to believe he could make his dream a reality...before he’d discovered her duplicity. Fortunately for him, no woman since had found her way into his life.
He filled in Shelley on last night’s adventure. “If only we could have taken him alive,” he said, referring to the man who had been shot.
“I know how you feel. But even if you’d taken him alive, it might not have done any good. The Collective has its foot soldiers acting independently of each other. They’re operating like terror cells. No one group knows more than it has to. Makes it real hard to trace things up the food chain.”
Mace acknowledged that with a dip of his head. Shelley was right. Maybe he wouldn’t have learned anything from the man, but he’d have liked to have given it a shot.
“What do you think of our newest client?” she asked, switching subjects abruptly. Though S&J believed in hiring topflight people and then staying out of their way so they could do their jobs, Shelley ran a tight ship and knew the names and details of every client, every job.
“She’s the real deal, handles herself like a pro and keeps her head when the bad guys are closing in.”
“But...” Shelley prompted.
“She doesn’t give much away,” he said evasively.
“Come on. I know you have an opinion.”
“She has a lot of broken spots inside of her. The problem is, that’s where she thinks they should stay.”
Shelley’s lips quirked. “Pot and kettle, Mace?”
He felt a slight smile pull at his own lips. “Maybe. A little. And maybe that’s why I can recognize it in somebody else.”
“You’ve got a point.” Shelley’s expression sobered. “I like Laurel. But you’re right. She has broken pieces, like most of us. And she’s holding something back. Something important.”
Holding things back could cause problems if it had to do with the job. Holding things back could get you killed.
* * *
Laurel looked from Mace to Shelley and back. They’d been talking about her. She was certain of it. Maybe it was time to come clean. When Jake walked in, she made up her mind. Quietly, she told them of finding the picture and the news clippings about S&J along with the ledger and the money.
Laurel passed the items to Shelley. “I’m not asking you to believe me on face value. Just that you listen and then check it out.”
Gazing at the first picture, Shelley clapped a hand to her mouth, then turned to Jake. “It’s us. You and me. I remember that dress I was wearing. It had little ducks embroidered on it.” Her voice grew husky. “How old would we have been here? I look about seven. That would have made you fourteen, right?” Shelley gazed at the second picture, where Bernice stood alone. “That’s her. Our mother.” Her lips twisted on the last two words.
“Even after all these years, I recognize her.” Shelley tapped the photos. “She left not long after these were taken.” She turned to Jake. “Do you remember? She told us she was going to the store and never came back.”
Jake’s nod was grim. “I remember. She’d borrowed money from a loan shark and couldn’t pay it back. He came looking for her.”
Laurel watched the exchange with growing empathy for Shelley and Jake.
“Jake fought tooth and nail when they wanted to split us up in foster care,” Shelley said.
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