Why was it FBI agents didn’t just say car?
Mary Lou had met the woman only a few times. Alyssa Locke was unbelievably beautiful with flawless brown skin and slender hips and big green eyes and sleek, dark hair with reddish tints that just had to come from a bottle. Either that or God deserved to be bitch-slapped for His almighty unfairness to all other women on earth.
It was bad enough that Alyssa had that mouth, with the kind of lush, full lips that white women everywhere tried to copy by getting collagen injections.
And yet Alyssa walked around dressed like a man saying things like “motor vehicle.”
Mary Lou had to wonder if Alyssa’s entire cool, reserved, professional demeanor was some kind of twisted turn-on for Sam. She’d spent a lot of sleepless nights wondering about that, jealous as hell.
She’d even found out Alyssa’s cell phone number, but she’d never gotten up the nerve to call her.
Until today.
Who would’ve thought, even just six or seven months ago, that she’d ever call up Alyssa Locke to ask for her help?
There was probably only one person in the world who could’ve talked her into doing that. And she was sitting here, holding his hand, watching Whitney read another chapter of Alice to Haley and Amanda.
Talk about Wonderland …
“It’s going to be all right,” Ihbraham told her quietly.
“I’m scared they’re going to put me in jail,” she admitted. “Alyssa told me that Sam’s cousin and his wife are meeting us over here, that they’ll make sure Haley’s okay while I’m being questioned, but … Could you go with them? Be with her, too?”
His smile was apologetic. “I’m certain they will wish to question me, as well.”
Because he’d been born in Saudi Arabia. Because he looked the way a terrorist was supposed to look.
“That’s not fair. This doesn’t have anything to do with you.”
“Perhaps I can help give them a description of this man you believe is behind all this trouble. I met him once, you know.”
“I remember,” she said. “But maybe if you left now, they wouldn’t—”
“I’m happy to stay right here,” he said. “More than happy.”
Mary Lou leaned against him. He smelled so good—spicy and warm. “I missed you so much.”
He put his arm around her. “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to get here faster. All those months in the hospital, I lost clients and it’s taken longer than I’d hoped to get my business back up to speed. I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t even have enough room on my credit card to get a plane ticket.”
“I can’t believe you drove all that way.”
“I’m pretty tired.” His fingers were in her hair. His touch was gentle but extremely sensuous. “I find I’m most eager to retire tonight.”
She looked up at him, and although he was smiling, the look in his eyes told her that she’d read his innuendo quite correctly.
“Unless you’d prefer we wait for our first night together until after we’re married,” he murmured.
After …? Mary Lou’s heart nearly stopped. “Did you just ask me to marry you?”
He laughed, but his eyes were so serious. “I thought I wouldn’t ask—just tell. I thought perhaps if I didn’t give you a choice, you wouldn’t think about all your reasons not to marry me. Wherever I go, if there’s trouble, people will look to me.”
Mary Lou felt her eyes fill with tears. “Because they’ll say, Look at that man with his incredibly beautiful wife. Trouble must just follow them around.”
“Did you just tell me yes?”
She nodded.
And the lights went out.
“Hey!” Whitney said. It wasn’t dark in there by any means, because sunlight was still coming in from behind the blinds, but she was trying to read.
There was a sound in the distance, like ripping fabric, that Mary Lou had heard before. It was a sound a person could hear only once but then never forget.
“Those are gunshots,” Whitney said, her eyes wide.
The phone rang, lighting up the button that was a direct line to the guardhouse at the gate.
Whitney lunged for it. “Jim! What was that?” She listened. “Who is this? Where’s Jim?” Her face contorted. “Oh, shit.” She held the phone out to Mary Lou. “He says Jim’s dead. He wants to talk to you.”
Mary Lou stood up. Took the phone. “Who is this?” she asked, even though she already knew. It was the man she knew as Bob Schwegel.
“Well, hello, Mary Lou,” he said in his slightly nasal voice.
It was the man who had smuggled guns into the Coronado naval base in the trunk of her car, the man who had murdered her sister.
Mary Lou hung up the phone, punched an outside line, and dialed 911.
“Check the map, would you?” Sam asked Alyssa as they continued to drive along side roads. “Make sure we’re not going too far east.”
“No, we’re okay,” she said, head bent over the map.
She had said exactly nothing in response to his declaration of love.
Sam took it as a good sign, even though “I love you, too,” had been noticeably absent. Truth was, he hadn’t really expected to hear her say that. The real thrill came from the fact that he’d said “love” and she hadn’t said “No way.” She hadn’t accused him of misinterpreting what this was he was feeling.
And she was the one who was talking about Haley as if the three of them would be spending lots of time together.
Alyssa looked up from the map. “You know, it just occurred to me that I never told you that I got my period this morning. We started talking about having a choice and … But that’s what I needed to pick up from the drug store. Tampons. Not that prescription.”
What? “But you said you were right at the point in your cycle—”
“I am,” she said. “I was. But I started bleeding, so—”
Holy fuck. But it was fear that gripped him, not relief. “Are you all right? I didn’t, like, hurt you or something, did I?”
“No.” Alyssa smiled, as if there was something funny about the idea that he might’ve been too rough. “God, no. This actually happened to me before. I go a real long time without having sex, then I have a lot of sex, and my cycle gets all out of whack. I think it’s the result of a hormone overload.” She laughed. “You know, I’ve always kind of thought of you as a hormone overload.”
He wasn’t sure, but it was possible she’d just insulted him. Except her smile was very warm, and that look in her eyes … “Wow,” Sam said. “I’m … man, that’s, um …”
“An enormous relief,” she filled in for him.
But his fear had turned into something else entirely and it wasn’t relief. He glanced at her. “Is it?”
She looked away first, no longer laughing. “Sam, you’re insane if you—”
Her cell phone rang.
“If I what?” he asked.
She shook her head as she answered her phone. “Locke.” She sat forward, her body language shifting to high tension as she listened intently.
“No,” she said, “but call me right back.” She closed her phone, but opened it right away. “We’re getting reports of shots fired in the vicinity of the Turlington estate, and the local police have gotten notification from the security company. Someone inside the house has triggered a silent alarm.”
Fuck! Sam floored it as Alyssa dialed the phone number Mary Lou had given her.
“How could you lose your cell phone?” Mary Lou asked Whitney. She couldn’t believe this was happening.
All of the phone lines from the house had been cut—with exception of the line to the front gate, which was ringing and ringing and ringing.
She’d run down to the front door and pushed the panic button on the alarm system the way Mrs. Downs had shown her when she’d first arrived. The housekeeper had said in her know-it-all manner, “Here’s something that you need to know, but you’ll never need to use.”
Mrs. Down
s apparently didn’t know everything.
“I didn’t lose it,” Whitney said. “It’s somewhere in my room. It doesn’t work half the time anyway. Cell service out here sucks dick.”
“Find it anyway!” Mary Lou said. Ihbraham had brought Haley and Amanda into the bathroom, where whatever he was doing was keeping them giggling. Mary Lou had sent them in there. She’d read lots of books where the characters climbed into the bathtub for protection when the shooting started.
When the shooting started …
Lord, that incessantly ringing phone was starting to drive her mad.
Whitney went into Mary Lou’s bedroom instead of down the hall to her own.
“You need to find that phone!” Mary Lou followed her. “If we don’t call and warn them, Alyssa and Sam are going to drive right up to the gate and then they’re going to be just as dead as Jim Potter and—What are you doing?”
Whitney dumped the guns and ammunition from Mary Lou’s beach bag onto the bed. She was lining them up and …
Loading them?
“I’m not going to let terrorists walk in here and just shoot us,” the girl said.
“You know how to use those things?”
Whitney gave Mary Lou a teenager’s “shit, you’re stupid” look as she attached one of those clips to a very deadly looking, very large weapon.
“Daddy took me to his firing range for the first time when I was five. I qualified as an expert marksman when I was eleven. In case you haven’t exactly noticed, in this house we worship at the altar of Smith and Wesson.”
“Keep those things away from the girls,” Mary Lou ordered. “But show Ihbraham how to use one. I’ll be back in a sec.”
She was going to find Whitney’s phone if it was the last thing she did.
Noah looked at Claire. “You know, I’m not jealous of Ringo.”
“Really?” she asked. “Not even the ten-year-old in you?”
“Really,” he said. “I wanted to be a SEAL more than anything in the world—right up until the moment I walked into Mrs. Fucci’s English class and started listening to you arguing with her about the importance of rap music in the American cultural experience.”
She laughed, her face lighting up. “You remember that?”
“Yeah. You and Calvin Graham got up and did that rap version of that scene from Romeo and Juliet that was, um—”
“It was pretty awful.”
“No,” he said. “I went home and read the play that night, and I got to the part where Romeo sees Juliet for the first time, and I’m sitting there thinking, Damn. I’ve got the same affliction Romeo’s got. And what am I going to do about this Calvin guy?”
“He was so gay.”
“I didn’t know that then.” It had been Noah’s first day in a new school—his first day in years that Ringo hadn’t been by his side. He’d spent a lot of time those first few weeks worrying about Ringo alone back in Texas, without Noah, without Dot and Walt.
Please God, don’t let Ringo get blindsided by the loss of his family. Don’t let him let Lyle Morgan piss him off. Don’t let him kill Lyle and spend the rest of his life in jail.…
Noah should have had more faith. Just the fact that Ringo had opted to remain behind with his mother was proof he was capable of thinking things through and not always reaching for the easiest, most instantly gratifying solution.
He hadn’t realized just how difficult a sacrifice it had been for Ringo to stay in Texas until the summer he came down to visit.
Ringo had hitchhiked the entire way because his father not only wouldn’t give him the money for a bus ticket, but he also wouldn’t let him touch the money Ringo himself had earned, loading trucks after school. That money was for college, or so Roger Senior had insisted.
So Ringo had packed a duffel and walked to the truck stop off Route 20, with only seven dollars in his pocket.
Every year after, Walt sent him the money for a bus ticket. Ringo pretended he took the bus, but Noah knew he still hitched. He used the money to buy presents for them, because he hated showing up empty-handed.
That summer had been wonderful. It was Ringo who had walked up to Claire and said, “My cousin Noah, here, thinks you’re incredibly hot. He’s too much of a fuckhead to tell you that himself. Want to help me drive him crazy and go to a movie with me?”
Noah was standing there, embarrassed as hell, ready to drag Ringo off and beat the crap out of him—right after he cleared up a thing or two. “I didn’t say you were hot,” he told her.
Claire looked at him, her eyebrows raised, like, no?
“I said you were beautiful and smart and funny,” he said, going into freefall just from looking into her eyes, part of himself completely unable to believe he was standing there and talking to her, let alone saying what he was saying, “… and hot.”
Claire didn’t look away from Noah as she’d answered Ringo’s question. “I think I’d rather drive him crazy in other ways.”
Instant hard-on. Of course, he’d been sixteen and it didn’t take much. Still, it was something of a miracle that he and Claire had kept their clothes on—at least most of them—for a full year.
By the end of that first summer Noah was so wrapped up in Claire, he almost didn’t notice when Ringo left.
Except for the fact that Ringo got really quiet those last few days of his visit.
And when Walt and Noah took him to the bus station, he broke down and cried.
All three of them did. People gave them a wide berth—three guys all well over six feet tall, weeping like babies.
“Do you think Ringo and Mary Lou will get back together after this?” Claire asked. “That happens sometimes. People go through a traumatic experience and they try again.”
Noah glanced at her. “You know, I might be tempted to agree, but … I didn’t tell you this before, but this woman—an FBI agent—a sister—she showed up after you left Janine’s house. Alyssa Locke. Ringo introduced her to me as a friend. I almost told her, ‘My cousin thinks you’re hot.’ ”
Claire laughed. “ ‘But he’s too much of a fuckhead to tell you that himself’?”
“Yeah. You should have seen the way he looked at her,” Noah said, pulling up to a stop sign at the end of the road. “And she was looking back at him, too. Do I go right or left here?”
Claire studied the map. “Left. If we’re where I think we are.” She looked up. “Either way, I don’t think it’s too much farther.”
“Mary Lou’s not answering,” Alyssa reported.
“Dial it again,” Sam said.
She did. “Still nothing.
“What’s the status of those choppers? What’s Max’s ETA? What’s our ETA?”
“I’m working on reaching Max,” she reported, juggling the phone and the map. “We’ve got another ten minutes as far as I can tell.”
“Shit-fuck! Noah! Use my cell and call him,” Sam ordered her. “Now, Alyssa, please!” The way he was driving, it was good he was keeping both hands on the wheel. “Tell him not to approach the gate. Jesus, Jesus …”
She took his cell phone from between his legs and hit Redial. Come on, Noah. “Sam, he’s not picking up.” She looked at the phone. “Oh, shit …”
“No,” Sam said. “Don’t say that.”
Alyssa tried her own phone. It, too, was giving her an out-of-range signal.
Sam glanced at her, and she shook her head. “We’ve lost our cell phones.”
“This is Max Bhagat. Connect me to the President.”
“I’m sorry, sir—”
“Wrong answer.” Max didn’t have time for this. He had more than twenty agents—himself included—driving like bats out of hell for the address Alyssa had given them, and another twenty heading toward MacDill Air Force Base, up in Tampa, ETA two minutes, where there were three Navy Seahawks waiting to take them the forty miles they needed to go in about fifteen minutes.
Provided they had the President’s permission to assist in this FBI operation.
> “He’s in a meeting with the—”
“Do you know who I am?”
“I’m sorry, I’m new. This is my first day, sir. I’m trying—”
“Connect me to someone who is not new, right now,” Max said, “or this will be your last day.” On earth.
Someone else picked up. “Peterson.”
“This is Max Bhagat—”
“I’ll connect you to the President right away, sir.”
Two seconds, maybe even less, and Allen Bryant picked up. “Max. What’s going on?”
“Sir. I need three Seahawks at MacDill—”
His cell phone beeped and died.
No signal.
Perfect. He’d just hung up on the President of the United States.
Max reached for the radio even as he hit the brakes and skidded to a stop. “This is Max Bhagat. I need trucks with satellite towers moved into this area immediately, over!”
He put his car into reverse and drove backward as fast as he could, engine whining, while he watched his phone, waiting for the signal to return.
“Sir.” Laronda’s voice came over the radio. “We just got a call from Deb Peterson at the White House. Three Seahawk helicopters are standing by, at our disposal.”
Max hit the brakes again, and shifted back into drive. He’d worked hard to establish that kind of trust with the country’s commander in chief. It was gratifying to know all he had to say was “I need …” and President Bryant would deliver.
“We’re working on setting up a direct connection between you and the Army commander,” she continued. “Until we do, do you have any orders for me to relay? Come back.”
“Yeah, tell them to haul ass. And get communications up and working. Alyssa Locke is at least twenty minutes in front of all of us, but that won’t do us any good if she can’t talk to us, over.”
“She’s in a rental car, no radio,” Laronda came back. “We’ve ordered local police to set up roadblocks in the area, but otherwise to wait for us to arrive. I’ll get an unmarked car with a police radio into the vicinity, over.”
“Locke needs to be told to do surveillance, to report, and then to wait for backup. Repeat, tell her to wait for backup. Over.”
Gone Too Far Page 47