His big body swallowed up most of the available space in the tiny room, but she managed to squeeze inside. Looking down at his shirt, which was transparent across his back where he’d sweated through the material, she reached for a thin washcloth with one hand and turned on the faucet with the other. She soaked the cloth with cold water, wrung it out, and formed a compress.
“Here,” she said, kneeling behind him to press it against the back of his neck. “This’ll make you feel better.” Reaching around, she fumbled to undo the buttons on his shirt.
He reared up with a jerk, which in the confined space pressed his back hard against her stomach. “What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded with unfeigned surprise. “I thought sure you’d be miles down the road by now.”
Catherine realized with an unpleasant start that it hadn’t even occurred to her to take off and leave him to his own weakened devices. Disgust for her own sentimentality and such unmerited concern for a man who’d done his utmost to make her life miserable made her voice acerbic as she lifted the compress off his neck, rewet it, and applied it to his forehead. “The day is young, McKade.”
His head sagged back against the bolstering fullness of her breasts. “I s’pose it is at that.”
She had just peeled him out of his soaked shirt when the next wave of sickness hit him. For the next hour and a half she watched the muscles in his bare back heave violently beneath his skin as he bent over the bowl. One bout followed hard on the heels of the one before, with very little respite in between, and she could practically see him turning himself inside out until ultimately there was nothing left in his stomach to bring up. The last paroxysm finally faded and he slumped back against her. She wiped him down once again with the cool rag.
“We should probably get you to a hospital.”
“No.” His head rolled side to side in denial. “Can’t afford a hospital.”
“Can you afford to die?”
A faint smile tipped up one corner of his mouth. “Not gonna die.” He tilted his head back, pressing it deeper into her cushioning breasts as he sliced a gaze up at her. ’Sides, I would’ve thought that’d make your day.”
“Oh, yeah,” she agreed sarcastically. “The idea of explaining your moldering corpse to the authorities gives me a real thrill.” She started to give him a shake, but his distressed moan and immediate loss of the little color he’d managed to retain caused her to drop her hands guiltily to her sides. “This is no time to be cheap, Sam.”
“Gotta be,” he mumbled. “’Sa only way I’ll ever get that lodge for Gary.”
Catherine’s eyebrows furrowed in her brow. “What lodge? And who the heck’s Gary?”
16
HE SETTLED IN against her. “Friend. Gary ’n me were MPs together.”
Catherine’s eyebrows shot up. “MPs? As in military police? As in the U.S. Army?”
“Yeah.”
“Sam McKade, you had a real job, and you gave it up to be a bounty hunter?”
“Had to.” His upper body slumped heavily against hers as he relinquished the last of his strength. “Gary took a bullet meant for me. Left him paraplegic. Someone had to take care of—” He broke off with a curse as a new bout of nausea sent him sitting forward to lean over the toilet bowl again, racked by convulsions that culminated in nothing.
Catherine looked at the butt of his gun sticking out of his waistband and the bulge of wallet in his back pocket. She liberated both and he was so preoccupied with his own misery he failed to even notice. Setting them aside, she rose up to freshen the washcloth with cool water. A few moments later he once again slumped back against her as if she were his own private easy chair.
She patted the cool compress against his forehead, his throat, his shoulders. “So why was the bullet that injured your friend meant for you? Did you piss somebody off?” She could easily visualize that.
“No, I was the ranking noncom in command. Shoulda had control of the situation.”
She waited, but he didn’t elaborate. “That’s it? You should have had control of a situation but you didn’t; therefore, the bullet that paralyzed your buddy ought to have hit you instead?”
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t make anybody mad, which caused them to shoot your friend by mistake when they were actually aiming for you?”
“Jesus, Red.” His tone was invested with a wealth of disgust. “No.”
“But it’s nevertheless your fault he was injured.”
“Yes!”
Feeling his agitation, she wet the cloth again and stroked it soothingly over his shoulders and along his wide collarbones. “I don’t get it. Maybe if you explained what happened.”
“See, this tanked up Spec-4 ran the base gates—”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” she interrupted. “What’s a Spec-4?”
“Specialist, fourth class. The guy’s rank, Red: more than a private, less than a sergeant.”
“And by tanked up I assume you mean—”
“Knee-walking drunk. Plus, we found out later he’d been freebasing. But all we knew at the time was that he’d run the gates and the marines on guard duty had called for the MPs—that was me ‘n’ Gary. We tracked the soldier down to the parade grounds where he’d left his Jeep. The guy was staggering all over the green, yelling and occasionally shooting off a pistol he had no business having.”
Sam closed his eyes, visualizing it as if it were yesterday. The humid night, the full moon that wheeled in and out of banked clouds. The erratically parked Jeep, with its engine still running, its lights left on, and the driver’s door hanging open. The silence when the cicadas stopped singing in the face of human disturbance. “I talked to him, trying to calm him down. At the same time we instigated a flanking maneuver.” His head rode the wave of the sharply inhaled breath that lifted Red’s breasts, and he could practically feel the question before it ever formed. A slight smile pulling at one corner of his mouth, he provided the answer without making her ask. “That’s where one party—me—moves to one side, holding the quarry’s attention, while his partner moves to the other. It makes for a smaller, or at least divided, target for the quarry to take aim at and gives the MPs more options for disarming him.”
“So, was Gary somehow forced to follow this flanking maneuver against his better judgment?”
“No, it’s standard operating procedure. And generally very effective.”
“Only this time…”
“Only this time I fucked up,” he said flatly. “I lost the Spec-4’s attention. He’d been swinging back and forth trying to cover both of us at once, but mostly it was on me where it belonged, and I thought I was making inroads at calming him. I almost had him talked into giving up his weapon. But then I did something, said something, wrong, because he suddenly went apeshit and started howling and firing off rounds. I hit the ground and came up firing.” His breathing grew labored beneath the weight of his failure. “Took him down, too, only it was too damn late. He’d already gotten Gary.”
There was a moment of silence, then Catherine asked, “So, why was it your fault?”
“Because I was the master sergeant, dammit!”
She felt his turmoil in his tensed muscles everywhere they touched. “And Gary was…?”
“Staff sergeant.”
“Not as lofty a rank, I take it.”
“It was my responsibility to secure the situation, and I lost control of it. As a result, a man who was not only under my command, but my best friend, lost the use of his legs.”
Catherine thought she was beginning to understand. “And Gary blamed you?”
His laughter was short, sharp, and unhappy. A deep desire to offer comfort, to wrap him in her arms and rock him like a baby, caught Catherine by surprise.
“For maybe six, eight months, Gary was mad at the world. He blamed the Spec-4, the marines who didn’t stop him at the gate, the U.S. Army in general. Hell, he blamed God. For some dumb reason, though, he never did blame me.” And he soun
ded as if the lack tortured him.
“Maybe that’s because he accepted it for what it was: a tragic accident.”
“No. It’s because he’s a better friend than I deserve.” It was stated flatly, in a tone proclaiming that the conversation was at an end.
Then he shifted. “I think maybe the puking’s finally stopped.” He was weak as a kitten and felt chilled to the bone—which, considering the trapped heat in here, indicated to him he was dehydrated. He nonetheless struggled out of his warm resting spot against Red’s body. It felt dangerously comfortable, and that wouldn’t do. “And this floor is sure as hell no place to be sittin’ around. Let’s get out of here.” He struggled to his feet.
Wondering where the lodge came into the story, Catherine absentmindedly picked up his wallet and gun and followed him into the unit’s main room. He was fiddling with something from his duffel bag when she walked up to him, but it wasn’t until he turned that she realized it was his handcuffs.
“I’m sorry, Red,” he said, reaching for her. “But I’m too weak to be chasing you down. I gotta do this.”
“No!” Betrayal was a knife in her heart and without thought she slammed her hands against his chest, shoving with all her might. He went down like a felled tree onto the bed behind him.
She shook as she stared at him sprawled out on the mattress. “You lousy Judas pig! I stayed and took care of you, and now you want to lock me up like a dog on a chain?” She hadn’t cried once since he’d dragged her from her home, but now tears rose in her eyes, and furiously she dashed them away. She would not let him see her reduced to this, damned if she would.
Sam struggled up on one elbow, feeling shaky and frail. Rubbing at his chest where she’d struck him, he stared up at her flushed cheeks and furious green eyes, made huge by unshed tears. Jesus, what had she hit him with, a hammer? Then he saw what was in her hand and he went very still. “Put down the gun, Red.”
“What?”
“Put. Down. The gun.”
She looked down at the weapon in her hands as if she’d never seen it before, very nearly bobbling it as shock robbed strength from her fingers. Oh, God, she’d forgotten she even held it. She’d had his comfort in mind when she’d taken it out of his waistband, nothing else.
In the face of his betrayal, however, she took a deep breath and rearranged the weapon in her hand until she had a proper hold on it. It was heavier than it looked and swayed in a wobbly figure eight as she raised it up to point at him. She brought around her other hand to lend assistance and saw that it clutched his wallet. Shaking, she tucked that into her cleavage and used the freed hand to support the weight of the gun.
“You stay right where you are, McKade.” Edging over, she grabbed her suitcase off the bed. Then she scuttled back. His golden brown eyes watched her steadily, and even though his face was pasty and he made no overt move, she didn’t trust him not to rise up off of the mattress and forcefully detain her.
“You should have left the cuffs out of it,” she said shakily. “We would have been okay if you’d just left the cuffs out of it.” She backed up to where she’d deposited her purse and stooped, keeping her eyes and the wobbling gun on him while she felt around with one hand until her fingers brushed the strap. She snagged it, swinging it up into place over her shoulder. Fishing Sam’s wallet from her scooped neckline, she dropped it in the bag, picked up her suitcase again, and backed toward the door.
“I’m going to be more humane than you and leave you free. In case you get sick again.” Opening the door, she backed through it, then hesitated a moment, staring at him. His face was leached of color but his eyes burned at her, and his naked chest, arms, and shoulders radiated a power she wouldn’t underestimate. “I’m sorry about your friend,” she whispered. “I really don’t think it was your fault.”
Then, stuffing the gun in her purse, she fled into the burning sunlight.
“Son of a bitch!” If frustration equaled volume, it would have been roared like a lion. Instead the words emerged from Sam’s throat as barely more than a croak.
He struggled to sit up, but by the time he made it to the side of the bed, he had to acknowledge to himself that his strength had been severely undermined. Chasing after her was out of the question, at least for the moment.
He swore a blue streak.
Then he forced himself to his feet. It wasn’t out of the question, dammit, and he’d better get his butt in gear or she’d be long gone.
His chance for the lodge had just sashayed out the door, and it didn’t do a thing for his sense of self to know the regret uppermost in his mind was that now he’d never get the chance to use even one of the condoms he’d been collecting from rest-room dispensers for the past couple of days. He was a real deep guy, a true professional.
Shivering, he collected a clean shirt from the duffel bag and shrugged it on. Then he sat down on the side of the bed to gather his strength. He knew he should be forcing fluids—he’d stopped sweating some time ago, and it was the dehydration more than anything that made him wobbly as a newborn colt. But when he ran water at the bathroom sink for a drink a few moments later, its slight mineral smell caused his stomach to flip-flop rebelliously, and he set the glass down untasted. He shuffled off in search of his toothbrush and toothpaste, brushed his teeth, and then tried again.
He gagged.
The hell with it. Just get going. Automatically, he reached for the small of his back to check the placement of his gun. And swore when he recalled where he’d seen it last: weaving unsteadily in Red’s hands. Damn. He could sure use a smoke right about now.
A humorless laugh escaped him. You had to give credit where credit was due, she sure as hell was some piece of work. She’d kept his attention so firmly trained on her the past few days that this was the first time in quite a while he’d even given a thought to cigarettes. Give the little lady a cigar.
But, hell, man, that was nothin’. Deflecting a craving for nicotine was chump change compared to the way she’d gotten him to spill his guts about Gary and then blithely tripped on out the door, trailing streamers of my entrails behind her.
Remembrance of the look in her eyes when she’d seen the handcuffs rose up to haunt him; it had been anything but blithe. Furiously, he shook it off. Big deal. He already knew what a dandy little actress she was.
Her last words to him, however, were not so easily dismissed.
It had flat-out knocked the pins out from under him when she’d told him Gary’s condition was not his fault before boogalooing out the door and down the highway. Sam propped himself against the wall to catch his breath for a minute.
Why would she go and say something like that? She’d had the upper hand at the moment, her shaky handle on that gun notwithstanding, so it wasn’t as if it had gained her a damn thing. Why, then, had she said it?
Man, he didn’t get her, didn’t get her at all. But come hell or high water, he was getting that goddam lodge for Gary, and for that he needed her. Therefore he would get up off his butt and go fetch her back.
In a minute. Just as soon as he regained a bit of his strength.
Jimmy Chains slumped on his tailbone on the seat of the rental car, absentmindedly rolling a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other as he watched passengers climb off the bus. He waited for Kaylee to put in an appearance. It was time to wrap things up and get back to the neighborhood.
Then, sitting up with a jerk, he spit the toothpick on the floor. The last passenger must have gotten off the vehicle, because the driver was closing the doors. What the fuck is this?
Climbing out of the car, he slammed the door and stomped across the lot to intercept the driver, who was headed for the diner. “Hey,” Chains said. “I was s’posta meet my sister here—she said she’d be on your bus. Redhead, good-looking, killer body—ya seen her?”
“Huh?” Blinking, the driver gaped at the man who’d appeared out of nowhere, then collected himself with a shake. “Oh, the redhead. Yeah, her husband got foo
d poisoning. I had to let them off at a motel.” He started to walk away.
The bounty hunter was sick? Chains mentally rubbed his hands together. This was good; it would make his job that much easier. “Wait a minute!” He took a couple huge strides to catch up with the driver. “What motel? Where?”
“I’m sorry, sir, I’m not allowed to give out that information.”
“She’s my fuckin’ sister!”
The driver stiffened, shooting him a look of distaste. “So you say,” he said stiffly, and studied Chains as if searching for the resemblance. Insincerely, he reiterated, “I’m sorry. Those are the rules.”
Chains considered kicking the information out of the little turd, but it was way too public, and the boss had said to keep a low profile. Son of a friggin’ bitch, though, now what was he supposed to do?
Well, a man had to eat, so he supposed he might as well catch a bite as long as he was here. Something would probably come to him while he was refueling the ol’ engine. He was a smart man, after all.
Kaylee said so.
Nothing shook loose while he tucked into chicken fried steak and a baked potato. He racked his brain until his head hurt but came up blank while putting away a slice of apple pie and a cup of coffee.
It was while the waitress was refilling his coffee cup that he overheard the conversation at the next table.
He’d taken only the vaguest of notice of the teenage girl who had stopped by the tiny table next to him. It was occupied by a boy maybe two or three years older than her, and the sweet young thing clearly had an urge to catch the kid’s attention. Chains could give a shit about young love, but his ears perked up when she began to speak.
“Hey,” she said shyly. “What was the deal with that man and woman who were put off the bus? I’m Belinda.” She gave the boy a slight smile and shrugged. “I figured you’d, like, probably know, ’cause I saw you talking to her earlier.”
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