by Amy Gamet
Selena sniveled. “I got Bill like you asked me to.”
“Shh. I know. You did good, sweetie. You did real good.” Jackie’s hands trembled as she stroked Selena’s back, her mind desperate to make some sense of what had just happened. It had been years since she’d feared for her life, but her mind went right back there as if no time had passed at all, no safety having ever been attained. Who was that man? As much as she wanted to believe it was a random act of violence that brought him here, she couldn’t allow herself the luxury of such naïveté.
No, a storm was coming, far larger than the atmospheric one raging toward them over the ocean. A different kind of storm that wouldn’t allow her such an easy escape. She could see now, the peace she’d found in Mexico was nothing more than a veil that had separated her from reality, the fabric far too easily pulled back to reveal the danger that was waiting.
There could be others lurking nearby. She shivered and hugged her daughter closer to her, taking comfort in the girl’s steady breathing and the warmth of her body. Thank God Bill was with them. He was the only other person besides her daughter Jackie considered family. He would protect them. Keep them safe.
They stayed that way for long minutes, until Selena’s tears stopped falling and her grip on Jackie’s shirt loosened. She was asleep. Jackie didn’t want to put her down, didn’t want to go into the other room, didn’t want to see the dead man and contemplate what would happen next. So she stayed where she was, listening as Bill moved around, the door opening and closing, wondering what he was doing and not really wanting to know.
She didn’t know how long it had been when Bill came back, entering with a limping gait. Sweat had soaked through his shirt at his underarms and chest, and his brows were lowered over his heavily flushed face. He laid a small photograph on the table beside her. A picture taken many years earlier, Jackie leaning back against the porch railing at the house she’d shared with Doug in San Diego, her expression carefully blank. She picked up the picture, remembering the scene well. She’d been angry with Doug over a campaign speech he’d made at the town hall meeting, the memory feeling strangely like it belonged to someone else.
“Where did you get this?” she asked, her voice barely more than a whisper.
“In the dead guy’s pack, which also has more military gear than a SEAL on a mountaintop in Kandahar. And the .45 semiautomatic on the floor.”
The noise she’d heard when she threw the chair, the weapon he’d been reaching for when Bill shot him. She’d known it already, hadn’t she? If her attacker hadn’t dropped it, should would be dead right now. She swallowed against the dryness in her throat. “He came here for me.”
“Yes.”
She stared at nothing, her pulse racing. The man who attacked her was dead, but this could only be the beginning. “What now?”
“We get rid of the body, try to buy us some time. I’ll drive it up to the cliffs and dump it into the ocean. I already got it in the back of my truck.”
No wonder he was red. “You shouldn’t be lifting so much.” Her words sounded silly, the guidelines his cardiologist had given him now seemingly irrelevant. But he didn’t look well—hadn’t looked well in weeks. “Are you having any chest pain?”
“I’m fine.” He turned to leave the room.
“How bad is it?”
He turned around with a sigh. “Let me take care of this guy, then you can worry all you want about me. But for now I’ve got to get this done.” He moved to leave the room but stopped before reaching the doorway, groaning as he grabbed his chest. “Goddamn it.” He moved to sit down, half falling onto the floor.
“Bill!” She quickly put down the sleeping Selena and crossed to him.
“Stupid ticker,” he grunted. “Goddamn it!”
“I’m calling an ambulance.”
He grabbed her shirt. “Wait. We can’t let the first responders in here! They’ll see all that blood.”
“We can’t wait to call them.” She moved for the phone.
“Help me outside. Pull my truck around back, and get that body out of here first chance you get.” He winced. “Before daybreak. Make sure nobody sees you.”
She couldn’t imagine how she would do that on her own, but it hardly seemed relevant right then. Bill was having a heart attack, his third since he’d come to live with them five years before. “Okay.”
“I already searched the grounds. No sign of anyone else.” His face contorted in pain and he cursed colorfully. “Call Mac O’Brady. The number’s in my phone. Tell him we need a couple of his best guys down here to protect you. They’re SEALs. Retired, like me, but younger. They do private security.”
She was panicked now. He was talking like he wouldn’t be here himself to do it, and she feared he would not. “You’ll call him yourself when you’re able.”
He snapped at her. “Now, Jackie! Call him now, before they realize this guy took the express train to kingdom come, and they send someone else after you.”
He was right. She nodded vigorously. “Just as soon as we get you an ambulance.”
“Then get rid of the body.”
“I will.”
He closed his eyes and she took his wrists firmly in her hands, grateful for the hardwood floors that made dragging him a possibility as her mind worked to catch up on the night’s developments. She wasn’t safe here anymore, there was a chance Bill would die, and she needed to dispose of a body.
Navy SEALs coming to her rescue.
Some guy named Mac O’Brady.
Strangers in her home.
She threw open the door. It was as if she’d opened Pandora’s box, wind whipping grains of sand at her face as thunder rolled in the distance. With a strength she didn’t know she had, she dragged Bill over the threshold and across the wooden porch, then raced back for her phone and dialed the ambulance.
4
Goddamn fucking Mexico.
The pounding rain on the windshield battled the thumping pop music that filled the taxi with Spanish lyrics. Ian “Razorback” Rhodes had been here before, the memory of his honeymoon with his ex-wife making his mouth pucker like he was sucking on a lemon.
The speeding car lurched upward, his head hitting the roof of the vehicle before the taxi crashed back to the pavement. He’d thought this country was beautiful once, but shit, he’d believed a lot of things back then that weren’t true. Life had revealed reality one agonizing flash at a time, stripping away the weak flesh of emotion until he was no more than a skeleton.
A steel skeleton, useful and strong.
It was better this way.
Hell. He was better this way.
Joining HERO Force had shown him that, the second chance to use his skills just what he needed to frame his existence in a different light. He wasn’t just a pitiful vet with a scarred-up face. He was a warrior, and he was damn good at what he did, but the roadside bomb had altered a lot more than his body. It had made him angry, even mean, and the contrast between his younger self and the reflection in the glass was as sharp as the tactical knife he carried in a sheath at his side.
He stared into the night. It figured the weather was shit. That was what it looked like on the road to hell, to warn all good people to stay the fuck away. Goddamn, he was grumpy, restless energy making his foot tap incessantly on the floor. They were on their way to protect some friend of a friend of Mac’s, the leader of HERO Force New York, after someone tried to kill her. Trouble was, the woman wasn’t exactly a font of information on exactly who she needed protection from, and Mac’s friend was in the intensive care unit. Razorback had a feeling nothing about this assignment was as straightforward as it seemed.
“This isn’t a thunderstorm,” said Sloan Dvorak, his HERO Force partner on this mission. “It’s a goddamn monsoon.” He took a hit from his inhaler.
“How the hell did you get into the SEALs with asthma?”
“Easy. I got asthma after I became a SEAL.”
Razorback wasn’t sure he liked S
loan. Wasn’t sure he disliked him, either. The guy was a joker, the one who made light of any situation, and he seemed to think Razorback and he were best friends. But Sloan was right about one thing—this storm was a bad one. It was the second system to hit this area in the past week, severe weather that bordered on tropical storm conditions. Everywhere around them were damaged trees and downed branches. “You ain’t seen nothing yet. They’re tracking three more storms approaching the Caribbean.”
“Spinny ones?”
Razorback frowned. “Seriously? Is that the meteorological term?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, but it makes you sound like an idiot.”
“I know you are, but what am I?” Sloan smiled.
“That reminds me. We’ve got to get you an I.D. 10T form to fill out before we go wheels up again.” Razorback’s phone vibrated and he peered at the screen.
Sloan cocked his head. “An ID what?”
“Just some mission paperwork Jax wants some of the guys to do for the Atlanta office. Write it down. I.D. 10T.” He answered his phone. “Hey, Mac. What’s up?”
“Bill Whitton passed away.”
“Fuck.” Razorback braced his forehead in his hand. Whitton had been Mac’s first commanding officer in the SEALs shortly after dinosaurs roamed the earth. All the Desjardins woman had to do was say Whitton’s name, and Mac had promised to send in the cavalry—in this case, Razorback and Sloan. It spoke volumes about Mac’s close-knit bond with the other man. “I’m sorry.”
Mac cleared his throat. “Which means we only have our conversation with Miss Desjardins to go on, and she’s full of shit.” Desjardins’ account of the intruder who attacked her before disappearing into the night didn’t seem quite right to any of them.
Sloan pulled out a pen and wrote on the back of his hand. ID10T. “Oh, Jesus Christ,” he grumbled, licking his thumb and attempting to rub the ink away.
“I don’t like sending you two in blind. Watch your backs. Moto’s searching for more information on this woman, but for now, see what you can find out. Explore your surroundings. I don’t trust her, so make her trust you. You’re going to have to use some charm on this one, Razorback.”
“No problem.”
“It is a problem, which is why I’m pointing it out. Don’t be an asshole. You can’t blow your way into that place with an M320 and expect her to bare her soul.”
He sighed. “I’ve got it.”
“Be nice. Or shut up and let Sloan do the talking.”
Razorback glanced at Sloan, who’d nearly rubbed the word IDIOT off the back of his hand. “I said, I’ve got it. How’d you make out at Rikers?” he asked, trying to change the subject. Mac had been looking for his estranged wife for more than a year, and had been visiting an inmate at Rikers Island Penitentiary to follow up on a potential lead.
“The FBI won’t listen to shit. Convicted felons do not make reliable witnesses. And the damn warden is making my life difficult.”
“So tell him you’re with HERO Force.”
“Yeah. I just might. Or I might take matters into my own hands.” Mac sighed. “Stay safe. I expect a sitrep at zero seven hundred hours.” He hung up.
“You should definitely let me do the talking,” said Sloan, licking the back of his hand.
“How the fuck did you hear that?”
“Your phone is loud. The driver even heard it over this god-awful music. What’s going on at Rikers?”
“He’s interviewing a serial killer about his wife.”
“Is she dead?”
“I hope not.” The driver slowed, carefully maneuvering around a felled palm tree lying across the road. Razorback frowned. “I can be nice.”
Sloan laughed. “And birds can go deep sea diving if you give them little swim fins.”
Fuck this shit.
He could be nice when he wanted to. Hell, he just didn’t want to very often. He was nice to patients, on the rare occasion he had one who wasn’t a member of HERO Force. He’d been nice to Arroyo’s girlfriend, the woman Luke had started dating when they met on a recent mission.
Razorback was a surgeon by training, choosing to serve the US Navy rather than a civilian hospital. He’d become a SEAL to test himself, push himself to his own personal limits. That was how his life had been then, selecting a challenge, rising to meet it, striking it down. Another win for the man who could do anything.
Those days were over.
“I saw an old buddy from BUD/S training at the airport,” said Sloan. “He’s working for SVX.”
“Right from the frying pan into the fire.”
“He’s a good guy.”
“Then why is he shaking his ass for the scum of the private security industry?”
“See, this is why people don’t like you,” Sloan said. “You have no filter and some pretty horrible opinions. You don’t have any firsthand knowledge about SVX. Hell, they sound a lot like HERO Force.”
“Everyone’s the good guy in their own movie, Dvorak. SVX is HERO Force’s inbred cousin. They’re no better than hit men, and if your friend is working for them, you don’t know him as well as you think you do.”
“Way to consider the other side. I’m telling you, O’Neil is one of the best.”
“The best mercenary?”
Sloan sat back in his seat. “Fuck you, mercenary. He does a job for money, just like you and me.”
“Difference being, he kills people for hire, or beats the shit out of them…”
“No.”
“…or breaks their kneecaps like freaking Tony Soprano.”
“You don’t know that.”
Razorback laughed. “Of course I do. That’s why we’re having this conversation. You’re trying to convince me it’s okay for your friend to work for the bad guys. If they’re not bad, this whole conversation is moot.”
“I knew I shouldn’t have told you. I almost didn’t.”
The driver hit the brakes hard and rounded a hairpin turn, stopping suddenly when the road was blocked by another tree, and going around it.
“Who are we to judge?” continued Sloan. “The only difference between good guys and bad is perspective.” He gestured to the road in front of them. “For all we know, this lady we’re going to babysit is one of the bad guys, not some damsel in distress truly in need of our help.”
An image of their target flashed in Ian’s mind, her Mexican driver’s license blown up on the screen at headquarters. She was pretty, with long brown hair and green eyes framed by arched brows, her shapely lips made smart by the crooked smile that played across them.
The car stopped abruptly. Two trees crisscrossed in the road. The driver launched into rapid-fire Spanish.
“You can drop us off here,” Razorback answered in the same tongue. Sloan eyed him curiously. “I’m Puerto Rican,” Razorback said. “They have black people, too.”
“I know that. Of course they do.”
Razorback shook his head.
“What?” asked Sloan. “I’m Polish. People think I’m stupid. At least people think you’ve got a big dick.”
“I do have a big dick, and so far I think you’re pretty fucking stupid. Dvorak isn’t even a Polish name.”
“Sloan Nowak-Dvorak. It’s hyphenated.”
Now Razorback laughed. “You’re shitting me.”
“Nope.”
“You’re right. You do sound like a dumb ass.”
The cab stopped. The rain was coming down so hard it was difficult to see, and Ian pulled a Knicks baseball cap from his bag to keep the water out of his eyes. The street was narrow and paved with bricks, brightly colored flags hanging from lines overhead like wet towels on a clothesline, giving the street a drowned, depressed look even in the darkness. Palm trees were broken, the awkward angles of their fronds speaking to the recent tropical storm.
A sign by the road read Pedazo de Cielo with an arrow. “A slice of heaven right here in the middle of hell,” grumbled Razorback. Jacqueline Desja
rdins owned the place, which was the second and last piece of information Moto had found on their mystery woman.
You’ll find out soon enough.
And he would have to be nice.
Fuck.
“I figure we’ve got about three miles to go,” said Razorback. What would her reaction be to him? Unease fluttered through his stomach, belying the confidence he wore like armor. All these years later, he still hadn’t gotten used to the initial reaction when people saw him. They would jerk their heads back or avert their eyes or stare without apology—then greet him across a vast river rushing with distaste.
He forced his attention to the matter at hand. The Pedazo’s website said it was a small but luxurious world-class resort. Satellite images showed a main building and five cabanas on the beach, with a couple of storage sheds, which made it difficult to believe they were world-class anything.
The men turned off the main drag and down the stone-covered road indicated by the sign. “I want to get the lay of the land before we announce our arrival. If this lady’s keeping secrets, we need to find out everything we can on our own.”
5
Jackie hadn’t meant to fall asleep.
She sat up abruptly in the darkness, the bruised muscles of her abdomen instantly reminding her of her ordeal, and the fear that had been her near constant companion returned. It was raining again with the threat of more storms, and she’d fallen into a deep and dreamless sleep beside Selena. Bill’s pistol lay nearby, its magazine fully loaded.
Bill was gone. She was alone with Selena and scared out of her mind. Last night, she’d driven a dead man to the top of the cliffs overlooking the ocean and pushed his body over the edge. She had cried in frustration as she pushed and pulled and dragged his muscular frame to the edge, then over, and she’d cried long and hard when it was done.
She’d stared at the deep water in the moonlight, waves crashing against menacing boulders, and prayed the ocean creatures would take care of her secret. The irony wasn’t lost on her. This journey had started when she herself went over a cliff into the ocean; now she was disposing of a body in the same way.