by Lindsay McKenna - Course of Action: The Rescue: Jaguar NightAmazon Gold
Since Charley and Jack were off duty, they’d opted for civvies. Jack was in jeans, a misty-blue turtleneck and his leather bomber jacket. Charley had also opted for leather, but hers was a butter-soft duster in pearl gray that reached to midcalf. Her black boots had ice picks for heels, which brought her almost to eye level when she found herself surrounded by three six-foot-plus males.
They took a few moments to indulge in the usual masculine ritual of pounding each other on the back before Jack made the intros.
“Charley, this is Duke Carmichael, the target of every female over the age of consent back in West Texas. Right up until a DIA analyst who should have known better let him waltz her to the altar.”
She had no trouble seeing what had made Carmichael such a target...buzz-cut blond hair, bedroom-blue eyes and a collection of cut muscles not even his air-force BDUs could disguise.
“And this is Dan Taylor. He’s from West Texas, too, but his family moved to Hawaii after he enlisted. Now every time he goes to see them on leave, he tries to convince himself he’s a surfer dude.”
She could see Taylor on a surfboard. Very easily. He looked lean and fit under his army uniform, and the Special Forces insignia on his subdued name patch said he could hold his own on or under water.
“And this,” Duke Carmichael drawled with a heavy Texas twang Charley suspected he could turn on and off at will, “is the woman who brought iron-assed Jack Halliday to his knees.”
Shouldering Jack aside, he draped an arm around her shoulders.
“Come with us, darlin’. Let Dan and me buy you a drink and you can tell us what in God’s name you see in such a scruffy-bearded, long-haired operator.”
“Operator,” she replied with a smile, “being the key word.”
“Damn. Delta Force gets ’em every time.”
“Yeah, we do.” With cool efficiency, Jack detached his friend’s arm. “You’ve got your own woman, Carmichael. Keep your hands off mine.”
So she was already Jack’s woman? Twenty-four hours ago the fiercely independent female in Charley might have objected to being claimed so publicly and casually. Now she didn’t seem to find the label objectionable.
They managed to snag an empty table in the corner. Duke bought the first round, Dan the second. An hour slipped away, then another, as the three buddies recounted what she suspected were highly exaggerated exploits from their rowdy high-school days. They also brought each other up on what was happening in the lives of the three Sidewinders not present.
“You want to see something real sad,” Duke said, shaking his head. “You should see the way a black-haired, bubble-blowin’ one-year-old rules the roost at the Cooper homestead. What makes it worse is that Travis and Madison are already tryin’ for another.”
“Ha!” Jack turned the tables on his pal. “Seems I recall your granny delivering specific instructions at your wedding for you and Anna to get busy producing offspring.”
“We’re working on it,” Duke admitted with a wide grin.
“Josh and Aly won’t be far behind,” Dan predicted confidently. “General Landon told them he doesn’t care if they produce a boy or a girl, as long as they produce another marine.”
“So that just leaves you and Pete,” Jack said, thumping Dan on the back. “The last holdouts.”
Charley was still trying to keep all these Sidewinders straight. “Pete’s the air-force PJ, right? The one you said was in the Maldives?”
“Right.” He turned back to Dan. “What’s he doing there, anyway? Something going on in that corner of the Indian Ocean we all need to worry about?”
With that, the conversation turned from anecdotes and personalities to the life-and-death situations that too often came with their profession. Charley listened, added her perspective when asked, and soon felt as much of a bond with Jack’s friends as she did with hers. They were all in the same business. All faced the same risks and uncertainties. All shared the same pride in serving their country.
That last thought was in her head when Jack caught her eye and sent her a private smile. Right then, at that precise instant, she knew they’d make it. Whatever the obstacles, whatever the challenges, they could carve out a life together. They’d made a helluva team during those few, tense days in Peru. They’d make an even better one when they had time to work on it.
* * *
They returned to her place a few hours later, and Jack tried to earn a few extra brownie points by feeding Snowball dried banana chips. Charley curled up beside him on the sofa.
“I like your friends,” she commented.
“They like you, too,” he replied, keeping a close eye on Snowball’s sharp little teeth. “Duke told me in no uncertain terms that you’re a keeper. And Dan said I’d sure better not screw this up.”
“You’re doing okay so far.”
“We’re doing okay. Oh, hell,” he muttered as the marmoset jumped from the sofa arm to his wrist. “Here. Take the whole bag.”
Snowball didn’t need any further urging. With the chip bag clutched in his long, tactile fingers, he scampered back to his perch. His contented crunching formed a backdrop as Jack dug in the pocket of his jeans.
“I know I said I wouldn’t push...”
“Right,” Charley snorted. “Labeling me ‘your woman’ in front of your pals isn’t pushing?”
“That was just stating a fact. This is different.”
When he opened his fist, gold glinted in his palm. The band was almost an inch wide and engraved with intricately wrought Inca symbols.
“I had Sergeant Santos send it. He says a friend of his in Iquitos worked the design. But I have a sneaking suspicion the gold might have come from the stash we recovered when we shut McMasters down, so I didn’t ask for a certificate of authenticity. I did have Santos send an explanation of the symbols, though.”
He held the ring up to the light. “According to Santos, in ancient times a shaman could go into a trance and ask the gods to explain omens, either good or bad.”
He rotated the band and Charley leaned closer. The artistry of the symbols astounded her. “Is that a jaguar or panther?”
“A puma. Santos says it represents power and strength.”
“And the eagle?”
“Actually, that’s a condor, the most sacred bird of the Incas. They believed it carried messages between earth and heaven. It also carried the souls of the dead on its wings.”
“Ah, and of course there has to be a snake.”
“Of course. According to Andean tradition, the snake emerges from the earth. Thus it represents the beginning of new life.” His gaze shifted from the ring to lock with hers. “You, me, the snake, a new life. Appropriate, wouldn’t you say?”
“I would.”
She held out her hand, but when he went to slip it on her finger, he hesitated. “Sure you want me to put it on your left hand? I thought you might want to wear it on your right until we picked out a regular wedding band.”
The smile she gave him came straight from her heart.
“You, me, the snake, this Amazon gold. I can tell you now I won’t ever want anything else.”
* * * * *
Keep reading for an excerpt from UNDERCOVER IN COPPER LAKE by Marilyn Pappano.
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Chapter 1
A stiff breeze blew in off the harbor, carrying with it the smells of salt and fish and pollution, along with
a chilly hint of fall on its way. Sean Holigan stood in the shadows of two buildings, face to the water, and toyed with the cigarette he held. Though he hadn’t had a smoke in six and a half months, the temptation to light it was there, the desire no less than it had been 195 days before.
But the flare of the lighter, the glowing end of the cigarette and the acrid blue-gray smoke would be like a neon sign pointing straight at him. Not the best idea, since the last place anyone expected him to be at 3:00 a.m. on a Sunday was on the docks. If his boss or their buddies found him there, it was a sure bet he would pay the price for it. He just didn’t know how big a price that would be.
Maybe, probably, death.
Fog swirled around the two massive warehouses that shielded him and turned the cargo containers stacked between them and the water into islands of dull metal. The damp seeped into his jacket and misted across his skin. It darkened the thin paper of the cigarette wrapper and increased the stiffness in the middle three fingers of his left hand. Ever since he’d gotten them caught between an engine and a car frame three years ago, those fingers had developed an aversion to cold and damp.
He’d been waiting more than ten minutes without bothering to check his watch when he sensed rather than heard someone approaching. Like him, Alexandra Baker was always early to these meetings. Unlike him, she completed a thorough check of the area before appearing before him, tonight from around a corner, like a magician’s illusion.
She wore dark clothing, dark shoes, a dark hood covering her white-blond hair and casting her pale face in darkness. She could stand absolutely still on a night like this and blend completely into the background. The way she moved and walked and talked was unnaturally quiet, still. Illusion was a good description of her. Since she’d first approached him three months ago, she seemed about as real as a dream.
A bad dream.
“Why do you tempt yourself?” she asked, her voice quiet but not soft, her question personal but lacking curiosity.
He glanced at the cigarette, shrugged and slid it into his jacket pocket. “Why do you get me up in the middle of the night?”
“Because I know Kolinski’s tucked safely in bed.”
Craig Kolinski. His boss. His best bud for thirteen years. The man responsible for Sean’s relatively comfortable life. The man he was betraying every time he spoke to Baker.
“He’s going to ask you to look into something for him tomorrow,” she went on. “It’ll mean going out of town for a while. You’ll agree.”
Sean didn’t ask how she knew Craig’s plans. He figured his boss had more bugs than a Volkswagen plant, thanks to the Drug Enforcement Administration: his house, his cars, his office above the garage, probably even the garage bays themselves. Sean hoped whoever listened to all those hours of tapes got a headache from the constant whine of pneumatic tools.
“Where out of town?”
If it were anyone else, he would have said Baker hesitated, but since she was the calm, collected ice queen, he would call it a pause instead. “Georgia.”
A chill passed through him that had nothing to do with the temperature. He’d grown up in Georgia and had left the first chance he’d gotten, swearing he would never return. Nothing, not the family he’d left there, not even the father who’d died there eight years ago, had lured him back.
“Where in Georgia?”
Ice queen or not, this time she flat-out hesitated. She and the DEA knew damn near everything about him, including where he was from, why he’d left and why he’d go hundreds of miles out of his way to avoid the place. They knew Georgia wasn’t an acceptable answer. They’d already demanded too much from him and he’d given it, but this...
“Copper Lake,” she said with the first hint of emotion he’d ever heard from her, as if her frozen little heart knew what a huge request—order—this was. But it was just a hint. Emotion didn’t rule Alexandra Baker. She didn’t sympathize, never felt regret, never let feelings get in the way. She was committed 100 percent to her job, and by God, she would do what she had to do.
Which meant everyone around her would do what they had to do.
“No.” He never thought of the place if he could avoid it, never considered it home. Home was a place where a person belonged, where he fit in, where people wanted him around. Copper Lake was a nightmare that had taken eighteen years to escape.
Baker didn’t say anything.
“I didn’t have much of a choice in ratting out Craig.” There were limits to what he could overlook, and his boss had stomped all over them. “But I’m not doing this. I’m not going back to Copper Lake.”
“Kolinski will ask you to go, and you will. You don’t have a choice this time, either.”
The calm disinterest in her voice, as if the idea that she wouldn’t get her way had never occurred to her, got under his skin. He shoved his hand through his hair, dislodging water. “The hell I don’t. I’ve told you everything I know about Craig’s business and his personal life. But there’s no freaking way in hell that I’m going to—”
“It’s about Maggie.”
That sucked the air from his lungs. He hadn’t heard his little sister’s name in more years than he wanted to count. He tried not to think about her, either, in a situation worse all those years ago than his own. She’d cried when he left and begged him to take her with him, and, bastard that he was, he’d promised to send for her just as soon as he got settled.
Did it make any difference that part of him had wanted to take her with him and give her a better life? That he hadn’t known he would land in prison, just like every Holigan man before him?
No, no difference. Because from the time he was twelve years old, he’d intended to leave everything behind, including Maggie. He’d wanted a life with no responsibilities but himself. He’d wanted to escape the curse of his family, and how could he have done that dragging his baby sister along?
“What about Maggie?” His voice was rough, harsh, in the night air.
“Did you know she’s involved romantically with one of Kolinski’s people?” She didn’t pause long enough for him to answer. She already knew the answer. “She lived with the guy before his most recent arrest. They trust him to keep his mouth shut about the business. They don’t trust her. You know what happens to people they don’t trust.”
He’d seen it for himself once. Imagining his sister in that position, terrified, on her knees, begging for her life... Bile rose in his throat, and for one moment he thought he was going to puke right there in front of Baker. Nothing like showing weakness to someone who was as cold-blooded and single-minded as Craig was.
“He’ll call you into the garage today and tell you to go to Copper Lake. To keep an eye on Maggie. To determine whether she can hurt him. He’ll use your information to figure out the best way to deal with her.”
“Am I supposed to believe you’ll use it to keep her safe?”
Baker nodded, the action practically lost in the folds of the oversize hood.
How the hell had Maggie caught the attention of one of Craig’s dealers in the first place? And why in hell had that dealer been in Copper Lake long enough to even meet her?
Leverage, maybe. Sean had been loud in his opposition to Craig’s first expansion of the business, to the point that he’d almost walked away from the garage he’d worked his ass off to help save from bankruptcy. Craig had made a few concessions, keeping what he laughingly called his parts supply service separate from the garage and keeping the next expansion to himself.
And maybe sending someone to Copper Lake to find something to hold over Sean if it became necessary.
He shook his head slowly. “I won’t do it.” But even as he heard his own words, he recognized them for the lie they were. Maggie was the only person in the world who could make him return to the town he’d run away from.
“We’ll be in touch with you once you get there.” More sure of him than he was of himself, Baker tugged the hood forward another inch, then melted into the darkness. H
e didn’t hear her footsteps as she retreated, couldn’t even sense her presence. She stepped around the corner and was gone.
He let his head fall back until it connected with the warehouse wall with a solid thunk. How the hell had he come to this? Was this the payoff for betraying a friend? For abandoning his family as if they’d never existed?
He snorted derisively. Craig was a friend, yeah—one who’d made a fortune in stolen vehicles and drugs. What felt like a betrayal to Sean was really just the regular action any normal person would take. If Craig had dragged Maggie into this to control Sean, that was a betrayal.
Sweet damnation, all he’d wanted was a regular life: a job that didn’t make him want to shoot himself; enough money to pay his bills and have a little fun on the side; a place to live that wasn’t falling down around him. He hadn’t wanted any attachments to people, places or things. Drinking buddies, not friends. Hookups, not girlfriends. No obligations, no emotional connections, no having to think of anyone besides himself.
And he’d had that for a lot of years. Until three months ago, when he’d stopped by the garage late one night to pick up the cell phone he’d left behind and walked in on Craig shooting a man in the back of the head.
Everything had gone to hell after that.
Tomorrow he was going to another kind of hell, better known as Copper Lake. He would hate every damn second of it, but he would go and do whatever was necessary to protect Maggie. He’d let her down once before.
He wouldn’t do it again.
* * *
For Sophy Marchand’s entire life, Sunday morning had meant church, and though she’d missed the past two Sundays, she vowed that stopped today. She stood in the guest room of her second-floor apartment, one hand on her hip, watching the two little girls snuggling together in one of the twin-size beds, eyes closed, lips parted, looking angelic in sleep.
Except they weren’t asleep, and God bless them, there was absolutely nothing angelic about them.