Suzanne Brockmann - Team Ten 09 - Get Lucky

by Suzanne Brockmann -

  Chapter

  Syd paced.

  And when she looked at the clock again, it was only six minutes past one—just two minutes later than it had been the last time she'd looked.

  Luke's house was so silent.

  Except, that is, for the booming sound of her pounding heart.

  This must be the way it felt to be a worm, stuck on the end of a fishing hook. Or a mouse slipped into a snake trap.

  Of course, Luke and Bobby and Thomas and Rio and Mike were hidden in the yard. They were watching all sides of the house, and listening in via strategically placed microphones.

  "Damn," she said aloud. "I wish these mikes were two-way. I could use a little heated debate right about now, guys. Fight, flee or surrender. I realized there was an option we haven't discussed—hide. Anyone for hide? I'm telling you, those are some really tough choices. Right now it's

  all I can do to choose between Rocky Road or Fudge Rip-ple."

  The phone rang.

  Syd swore. "All right," she said as it rang again. "I know." She wasn't supposed to watch TV or listen to music. Or talk. They couldn't hear potential sounds of forced entry if she was talking. "Roger that, Lieutenant O'Donlon. I'll behave, I promise."

  The phone stopped right in the middle of the third ring.

  And Syd was alone once again with the silence.

  The past few days had been crazy. Luke had worked around the clock to set up a safe house for the wives of the SEALs who were out of town. He and PJ Becker had organized teams of security guards and drivers who would take the women to and from the hospital and wherever else they needed to go. After Syd's little speech at the hospital, no one was complaining.

  Luke also rode the police and FInCOM, trying to get them to work faster in picking up the men who were on the likely suspects list Lucy had helped compile. So far, they'd only picked up six of the men on the list—most of whom had had strong alibis for a good number of the attacks. The others had willingly volunteered to submit DNA samples, and so far, none had matched.

  Luke also gave interviews to TV reporters, looking splendid in his gleaming white Navy Ken uniform, saying things guaranteed to enrage—or at least annoy—the man they were after. Come and get me, he all but said. Just try to come and get me or mine.

  He sat by Lucy's bed and held her hand, hoping that Blue would be found soon, and praying with the rest of them that that single hand-squeeze hadn't been just a muscle spasm—the explanation the doctors had offered.

  At night, he'd kiss Syd goodbye with real trepidation in his eyes and he'd leave her alone, pretending to help with BUD/S training, but in truth sneaking back to help guard

  her as she sat here in silence and alone—as serial rapist bait.

  At : or : a.m., he'd return through the front door and fell into bed, completely exhausted.

  But never too exhausted to make exquisite love to her.

  The phone rang. Syd nearly jumped through the roof, then instantly berated herself. It wasn't as if the San Felipe Rapist were going to call her on the phone, was it?

  She glanced again at the clock. It was quarter after one in the morning. It had to be Lucky. Or Bobby. Or maybe it was Veronica, calling from the hospital with news about Lucy.

  Please, God, let it be good news.

  It rang again, and she picked it up. "Hello?"

  “Syd." The voice was low and male and unrecognizable.

  "I'm sorry," she said briskly. "Who's—"

  "Is Lucky there?"

  The hair on the back of her neck went up. Dear God, what if it were the rapist, calling to make sure she was alone?

  "No, sorry." She kept her voice steady. "He's teaching tonight. Who's calling?"

  "It's Wes."

  Chief Wes Skelly. That information didn't make her feel any better. In fact, it made her even more tense. Wes— who smelled just like the man who'd nearly run her down on the stairs after brutally attacking Gina. Wes—who had the same hair, same build, same accentless voice. Wes, who was—according to Bobby—having a rough year.

  How rough, exactly?

  Rough enough to completely lose it? Rough enough to turn into a homicidal maniac?

  "Are you safe there, all by yourself?" Wes asked. He sounded odd, possibly drunk.

  "I don't know," she said. "Maybe you should tell me."

  "No," he said. "No, you're not safe. Why don't you go to this safe house thing and stay with Ronnie and Melody?"

  "I think you probably know why I'm not there." Syd's heart was pounding again. She knew Luke didn't believe Wes could be the attacker, but she didn't have years of camaraderie to go on. Frankly, Wes Skelly spooked her, with his barbed-wire tattoo and his crew-cut hair. Whenever she saw him, he was grimly quiet, always watching, rarely smiling.

  "What?" he said. "You wanna go one on one with this guy?" He laughed. "Figures a woman who thinks she's going to get any kind of commitment from Lucky O'Donlon's a little wacky in the head."

  "Hey," she said indignantly. "I resent that—"

  He hung up abruptly, and she swore. So much for keeping her cool, keeping him talking, for coaxing a confession out of him.

  "Luke, that was Wes on the phone," she told the listening microphones as she dropped the receiver into the cradle on the wall. "He was looking for you, and he sounded really strange."

  Silence.

  The entire house was silent.

  The phone didn't ring again, nothing moved, nothing made a sound.

  If this were a movie, Syd thought, the camera would cut to the outside of the house, to the places where Luke and Bobby and the SEAL candidates were completely hidden, And the camera would reveal their unconscious faces and the ropes that bound them—that would keep them from coming to her rescue when she needed them.

  And she would need them.

  The camera would pull back to show the shadowy shape of a very muscular man with Wes's short hair, with Wes's wide shoulders, creeping across the yard, toward the house,

  Bad image. Bad image. Syd shook her head, cleared her throat. "Um, Luke, I'm a little spooked, will you please call me?"

  Silence.

  The phone didn't ring. She stared at it, and it still didn't ring.

  "Luke, I'm sorry about this, but I'm serious," Syd said. "I just need to know that you're out there and—"

  She heard it. A scuffling noise out back.

  Flee.

  The urge to run was intense, and she scurried for the living room. But the front door was bolted shut—for her own protection—and she didn't have the key. Last night that bolt had made her feel safe. Now it didn't. Now she was trapped.

  "I hear a noise outside, guys," she said, praying that she was wrong, that Luke was still listening in. "Out back. Please be listening."

  The front windows were painted shut, and the glass looked impossibly thick. How had Lucy managed to break through her bedroom window?

  She heard the noise again, closer to the back door this time. "Someone's definitely out there."

  Fight.

  She turned around in a full circle, looking for something, anything with which to arm herself. Luke didn't have a fireplace, so there were no fireplace pokers. There was nothing, nothing. Only a newspaper she could roll up. Perfect—provided the attacker was a bad dog.

  "Any time, Luke," she said. "Please."

  Baseball bat. Luke had told her he'd played in high school, that he still sometimes went over to the batting cages on the west side of San Felipe.

  He didn't have a garage, didn't have a basement. Where would a guy without those things keep a baseball bat?

  Front closet.

  Syd scrambled for the closet, threw open the door.

  It was filled with U.S. Navy-issue overcoats of all weights and sizes. She pushed through to the back and found...

  Fishing poles.

  And lacrosse sticks.

  A set of lawn darts.

  And three different baseball bats.

  She grabbed one as she heard the kitchen
door creak open.

  Hide.

  Hiding suddenly seemed the most intelligent option, and she slipped into the closet, silently closing the door behind her.

  Her palms were sweating, and her mouth was dry, and her heart was beating so loudly she couldn't hear anything else.

  She gripped the baseball bat as tightly as she could and prayed. Please God, whatever happened to her, don't let Luke be badly hurt. Don't let them find him hidden in the backyard, with his throat slit, staring sightlessly up at the sky and...

  Whoever was inside the house wasn't trying to be quiet anymore. Footsteps went down the hall toward the bedroom, and then faster, heading back. She heard the bathroom door slam open, heard, "Syd? Syd!"

  It was Luke. That was Luke's voice. Relief made her knees give out, and she sat down hard, right there in the closet, knocking over fishing poles and lacrosse sticks and God knows what else.

  The closet door was yanked open and there was Luke. The panic in his eyes would have been sweet if her relief hadn't morphed instantly into anger.

  "What the hell did you think you were doing?" She nearly came out of the closet swinging that bat. “You damn near scared me to death!"

  "I scared you?" He was just as mad as she was. "God, Syd, I came in here and you were gone! I thought—"

  "You should have called me, told me you would be here early," she said accusingly.

  "It's not that early," he countered. "It's nearly oh-one-thirty. What's early about that?"

  It was. The clock on the VCR said :.

  "But..." Syd regrouped, thinking fast. Why had she been so frightened? She pointed toward the kitchen. "You came in through the back door. You always come in through the front—which was locked with a deadbolt, you genius! If you had been the San Felipe Rapist, I would have been trapped!"

  She had him with that one. It stopped him cold and doused his anger. He looked at the lock on the door and then at her. She could see him absorbing the baseball bat that still dangled from her hand. She watched him notice the fact that she was still shaking, notice the tears that were threatening to spill from her eyes.

  Damn it, she wasn't going to cry in front of him.

  "My God," he said. "You don't have a key? Why the hell don't you have a key?"

  Syd shook her head, unable to say anything, using all her energy to keep from crying.

  Luke wasn't lying dead in the backyard. Thank God.

  Frowning, he looked down at his belt, and pulled his cell phone free. It was shaking silently. He flipped it open, switched it on. "O'Donlon." He listened then said, "Yeah. We're both okay. She got..." He looked at her.

  "Scared," Syd said, shakily lowering herself onto the couch. "I was scared. You can say it. I admit it."

  "She didn't know it was me coming in," Luke said into his phone, "and she opted for the hide solution to the nightmare scenario." He looked at the baseball bat. "With maybe a little fight thrown in." He took a deep breath, running his other hand back through his hair, making it

  '

  stand on end. "I came in, couldn't find her and—" He froze. He stood absolutely, completely still. "It's not?"

  Syd's pulse was just starting to drop below one hundred, but something in his voice made it kick into higher gear again. "What's not?" she asked.

  Luke turned to look at her. “Thomas says he heard your requests for a phone call, but that he couldn't get through. He said he called twice before he realized he couldn't hear the phone ringing over the microphones. Something's wrong with the phone."

  Syd stared at him. "I got a phone call just a few minutes ago. Wes called, looking for you."

  "Wes called here?"

  "Yeah," Syd said. "Didn't you hear at least my side of the conversation?"

  "I must've been already circling back," he said, "driving home—pretending I was coming from the base." He held out his hand to her. "Come here. I want you near me until we check this out."

  Syd took his hand and he pulled her up from the couch as he spoke to Thomas once again. "Stay in position. Full alert. I want eyes open and brains working."

  "This is probably nothing," he said to Syd, but she knew he didn't believe that.

  The lights were still on in the kitchen. Everything looked completely normal. There were a few dirty dishes in the sink, a newspaper open to the sports page on the kitchen table.

  As Syd watched, Luke picked up the telephone and put the receiver to his ear.

  He looked at Syd as he hung it up, as he spoke once more to Thomas over his cell phone. "Phone's dead. Stay in position. I'm calling for backup."

  A clean cut.

  Probably with a knife, possibly with a scissors.

  Lucky sat on his living-room sofa, trying to rub away his massive headache by massaging his forehead.

  It wasn't working.

  Somehow, someone had gotten close enough to the house tonight to cut the phone wire. Somehow, the son of a bitch had gotten past two experienced Navy SEALs and three bright, young SEAL candidates who had been looking for him.

  He hadn't gone inside, but his message had been clear.

  He could have.

  He'd been right there, just on the other side of a wall from Sydney. If he'd wanted to, he could've gone in, used that knife to kill her as dead as the phone and been gone before Lucky had ever reached the back door.

  The thought made him sick to his stomach.

  As the FInCOM and police members of the task force filtered through his house, Lucky sat with Syd on the couch, his arm securely around her shoulder—he didn't give a damn who saw.

  "I'm sorry," he told her for the fourteenth time. "I've been trying to figure out how he got past us."

  "It's all right," she said.

  "No, it's not." He shook his head. "We were distracted pretty much all night. It started around oh-dark-fifty when Bobby got a page from Lana Quinn. She sent him an urgent code, so he called her back. The rest of us were watching the house—it should have been no big deal. So Bob calls Lana, who tells him that Wes just came by her place, completely skunked. Wes told her he needed to talk, but then left without saying anything. She managed to get his keys away from him, but he walked to a nearby bar—a place called Dandelion's. She followed because she was worried, and sure enough, as soon as he got there, he tried to start a bar fight. She stepped in and he backed down, but he wouldn't leave with her. So she called Bobby."

  Lucky sighed. "Bobby called Frisco, but he's got Mia

  and Tasha to worry about, he can't just leave them home alone. Meanwhile, it's getting later and later. Lana's paging Bobby again, telling him she lost Wes in the crowd at Dandelion's, and now she's not sure where he's gone and—"

  "Wait a minute," Syd said. "Lana lost Wes?"

  "Well, no, not really," Lucky told her. "She thought she'd lost him for about twenty minutes, but he was only in the men's."

  "He was in the men's room for twenty minutes?"

  Lucky bristled. "No," he said. "I know what you're implying and no."

  She held his gaze. "Dandelion's is only about a four-minute drive from here."

  "Wes is not a suspect."

  "I'm sorry, Luke, but he's still on my list."

  "Lana took the keys to his bike."

  "A clever move," she countered. "Particularly if he wanted to establish an alibi and convince everyone that he'd actually been in the men's room for all that time— instead of here at your house, at the exact time your phone wire was cut during a distraction that he knew about."

  Lucky shook his head. "No," he said. "Syd, you've got to go with me on this one. It's not Wes. It can't be. You've got to trust me."

  She gazed at him, looking into his eyes. She'd been scared tonight, badly. When she'd come out of that closet, that was the closest Lucky had ever seen her come to losing it. She was tough, she was strong, she was smart and she was as afraid of all this as he was. And that made her desire to catch this bastard that much crazier. Crazier and completely admirable.

  She nodde
d. "Okay," she said. "If you're that certain...he's off my list. It's not Wes."

  She wasn't humoring him, wasn't being patronizing. She was accepting—on faith—something that he believed in ab-

  solutely. She trusted him that much. It was a remarkably good feeling. Remarkably good.

  Lucky kissed her. Right in front of the task force, in front of Chief Zale.

  "Tomorrow," he said, "I'll talk to Wes. See if he wouldn't mind voluntarily giving us a DNA sample, just so we can run it by the lab and then officially take him off the suspect list."

  "I don't need you to do that," she said.

  "I know." He kissed her again, trying to make light of it despite the tight feeling that was filling his chest from the inside out. "Pissing off Wes Skelly while he's got a killer hangover isn't my idea of fun. But hey, I don't have anything else to do tomorrow."

  "Tomorrow," Syd reminded him, "your sister's getting married."

  Chapter

  Luke O'Donlon cried at his little sister's wedding.

  It wasn't a surprise to Syd. In fact, she would have been surprised if he hadn't cried.

  He looked incredible in his dress uniform—nearly as good, in fact, as he looked naked.

  Ellen, his sister, was as dramatically gorgeous as he was, except while he was golden, she was dark-haired and mocha-skinned. Her new husband, Gregory Price, however, was completely average looking, completely normal—right down to his slightly thinning hair and the glasses.

  Syd stood at the edge of the restaurant dance floor, one of a very small number of relatives and intimate friends of the bride and groom, and watched as the newlyweds danced.

  Greg made Syd feel slightly better about herself. If he could dare to marry Ellen, then Syd—also extremely average looking—could certainly have a fling with Luke.

  "Have I told you how incredibly beautiful you look tonight?"

  Syd turned around to give Luke an arched eyebrow. “That's slinging it a little thick, don't you think?"