Irish sighed. He placed the Glock on a table. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s my boss.”
Her eyes widened, but she merely nodded as she set the groceries on the table.
Irish went over to the door, and unlocked it. He went out, closing the door behind him.
“Doug,” he acknowledged. They had been on a first-name basis since they were classmates at West Point. The fact that now Doug Fuller was a bird colonel, and Irish only a lieutenant colonel hadn’t affected that, even when Doug had become his commanding officer after Irish returned from Kosovo.
“Obviously,” Doug said, as Irish limped across the patio. “You didn’t answer your phone.”
“I’m on vacation.”
“That’s why I’m getting calls nearly every day from every law enforcement agency in the southeast?”
Irish winced. “I’m sorry about that.”
“That’s it?”
“There’s a lady in distress.”
“That I believe,” Doug Fuller said. “Now let the police handle it. It’s not your job.” He paused. “I’ve had some calls from Washington. You have a new assignment. A command position has just come open. In Hawaii,” he added with a grin.
It was one of the dream assignments in CID. At one time, he would have grabbed it. Even if it was a desk job. But now … it didn’t seem so important. There was the ranch … and Amy.
“I have more days of leave left.”
Doug stared at him as if he’d just turned purple. “It’s being canceled.”
“I can’t leave her now. It might be my fault she’s in danger. The police won’t give her protection.” He turned back and looked in the window. Amy was putting away the groceries. “There’ve been three attempts on her life.”
Doug hesitated. “I’ll ask for FBI protection.”
“There’s no evidence of a federal crime.”
“Damn it, Irish. Neither of us are being given a choice. Orders are orders. Why in the hell do you think I flew to this godforsaken place? You’ll face a court-martial if you don’t return.”
“I can’t, Doug.”
Irish could see Doug look inside the room. “She must be one hell of a.…”
“Lady,” Irish finished. “And she is. I would have been killed if she hadn’t elbowed a bad guy.”
“Gratitude, guilt, or lust?”
Irish grinned. “A little of all three.”
Doug didn’t smile. “You’re risking everything.”
“I’d rather risk my career than Amy Mallory’s life.”
“I’m going to have to meet this paragon.”
“It’s not only Miss Mallory,” Irish said, belatedly trying to be circumspect. “It’s my grandfather. His name was put into question in that report.”
“No accusations were made.”
“They were implied,” Irish said, “and I can’t help believing that what has happened to Miss Mallory stems from my inquiries. If so, someone is afraid of what further investigation might find.”
“You might find that your grandfather was responsible,” Doug said.
“Then so be it,” Irish said. “If he was, I wouldn’t protect him. But I can’t believe it. He pounded honor, duty, country into me.” He paused. “Give me a few days.”
“You know what you’re asking,” Doug said softly.
“Yes.” It was difficult for Irish to answer. They had a lot of history between them, and he didn’t like putting Doug in this position. He didn’t see another choice.
“All right. I’ll say you’ve left Georgia. I expect you to do that. God knows how they know, but headquarters heard about the killing last night.”
“By the way,” Irish said, “who called you about my transfer?”
Doug hesitated again, signed. “General Wade.”
“Kinda sudden, isn’t it?”
“I’m told Colonel Banner was in an accident.”
Irish stilled. “An accident?”
Doug nodded. “He wasn’t killed, but he’s critical.”
“Hit and run?” Irish guessed.
Doug looked at him. “How.…”
“A professor who had some of Amy Mallory’s papers was involved in a hit and run a week ago. He wasn’t so lucky.”
“Go to the feds. You can’t do anything alone.”
“I don’t trust anyone now,” Irish said. “You have to admit my reassignment is pretty surprising. Someone very high-level is making things happen.”
From the look on Doug’s face, Irish knew he thought the same thing.
Irish held out his hand. “Thanks,” he said. “I owe you.”
“It’s your ass. I didn’t see you.”
“Come in and meet Amy.…”
“I think it’s better if I don’t.”
Irish nodded. “How’s Judith?”
“Sad. Our first is off to college in eight weeks.”
Irish felt a slight ache in his heart. He’d been to dinner several times at Doug’s house. His kids were boys, twelve, fifteen, and seventeen. There had been an affection between the parents and children that had touched him, that had almost made him question his choices. Almost.
And Doug might be risking his career for him.
“I’ll be off, then,” Doug said. “Try to keep in touch and be back at the base on the twenty-first.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Take care, Irish.”
“Yes, sir.”
Amy wished she could hear from a distance. She wasn’t above snooping, but it would be pretty obvious if she opened the door, and her hearing wasn’t good enough to go through glass.
Yet she realized from Flaherty’s expression that it had gone the way he wanted it to. And what was that?
Would he stay with her?
Bo had gone over to the door, looking like a lovelorn suitor. So much for loyalty.
Amy wondered about starting to boil the shrimp. Would there be two of them? Or three?
Then she saw the man in uniform leave. Flaherty stood where he was for a moment, then opened the door and came inside.
“We have to leave tonight,” he said.
“Why?”
“I’ve just been reassigned,” he said with his lips quirking in that appealing way. “They want me immediately.”
“Then.…”
“I talked my commanding officer into giving me a few more days. But he made it clear we shouldn’t stay here.”
“A reassignment?” Amy was trying to keep up with what he was saying.
“A command post. There’s an opening because of a hit and run.”
That did soak in. “Oh, my God,” she said.
“Doug is an old friend. He won’t tell anyone he saw us. But we have to get out of here.”
“The police?”
“I’ll see about getting your laptop and boxes. There’s really no reason to hold them.”
“Supper?”
He hesitated, then shrugged. “We’ll leave immediately after.”
An icy finger ran down her back. “Why didn’t he come inside?”
Flaherty came over to her. “He didn’t want to know anything.”
“But can we leave?”
“The police, you mean?”
She nodded.
“We’ve been released. Though we’ve been warned not to leave the area, there are no charges pending. There’s really nothing they can do.”
But it would hurt his career. “He thought you should return to duty?”
“He understands why I can’t,” Flaherty said, then turned away.
Did he? Or was Irish risking his job for her? As well as his life?
Irish stifled his apprehension as he went next door. They should leave immediately. But one good meal wouldn’t hurt. And he would get everything packed while she got dinner ready.
He went outside and unlocked his rental car. He looked around, then reached in the backseat and took out the GPS device that had been planted there. He walked down the rows of cars until he fo
und one with a West Virginia plate. He looked inside the car. It was locked.
Irish continued until he found an unlocked car. Tennessee plates. Good enough. With luck, the driver would be going west toward Tennessee. Their pursuers might believe they were returning to Memphis. He looked around, then quickly opened the back door and tucked the device underneath the seat.
Then he strode to the yellow-taped room. Minutes later, he had packed Amy’s laptop and boxes in the trunk of the car. Then he went in to eat.
Irish enjoyed the shrimp, particularly after the junk food they had had for the past several days. They left the rest of the groceries in the unit. It was dusk when they went out to the car.
Irish saw her look at the ocean just before they left. Her face was strained.
He waited for a moment. Then she seemed to stiffen, leaned down and picked up Bo, and followed him out the door. “Where to?”
No complaints. No tears. No questions. She was indeed a trouper.
“Somewhere we can go over those boxes together,” he said.
“What if they find us again?”
“They won’t,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“They planted the GPS computer in my car. I planted it somewhere else.”
“How did they know you would come after me?”
“I don’t know, Amy. Maybe there was one in yours, too.”
“Could there be more of … those devices in the car?”
“I don’t think so. I’ve been all over it.”
“Where is the device now?”
“A car in the parking lot. It has Tennessee plates. It would make sense that you were returning.”
She nodded, but her face looked forlorn. He guessed what she was thinking. When was she going to be able to return?
He wanted to reassure her, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t lie to her. He still didn’t know what was happening, nor why someone was sending professional killers after a college professor. He didn’t know, but he sure as hell intended to find out.
fourteen
SOUTH CAROLINA
Irish drove for several hours up to Charleston. They stopped there at a rental car agency and traded in the car for another one. He had no choice but to use his credit card, but at least he knew there wouldn’t be any little devices planted in the new rental. He hoped the pursuers, if there were any, were concentrating on the Tennessee car rather than his credit card charges.
They bought food at a convenience mart, then ate it at a rest stop where Amy could walk Bojangles. With the dog resting between them on the front seat, they headed north along I-95. He planned to stop in Myrtle Beach. Plenty of tourists. And plenty of cheap motels, the kind that didn’t ask for identification.
Before leaving Jekyll Island, Amy had called her insurance company and arranged for her car to be picked up and repaired when the police finished with it. Since the bad guys obviously knew where she was, all subtlety went by the board.
Everyone also knew the identity she’d been using. That had been a bit of a problem with the police when they discovered she’d registered at the motel under a false name and gave a false license tag number. She had explained somewhat awkwardly that she used a friend’s name because of fear.
The police hadn’t questioned that, not with the Memphis police backing her story. But Irish had more curiosity about it. Model Citizen Amy Mallory didn’t seem the type to have false identities tucked away.
“Did that identification really belong to a friend?” he asked after they’d ridden in silence for an hour.
Amy was still for a moment, and he didn’t think she would answer. Then, very softly, she said, “It belonged to my mother. She sometimes traveled with someone wanted by the police. One of them made her this identity. It’s been … sitting in a box for years.”
“You surprise me, Dr. Mallory.”
“I learned some unusual things from her and the ‘uncles’ who came and went.”
He bet she did. He knew something about her background, but not the details. He wondered what kind of impact it had had on her. She seemed remarkably well-adjusted to him, but he wondered whether beneath that disciplined exterior there weren’t some underlying traumas.
And she wasn’t always as cool and disciplined as she liked others to believe. He’d had a brief taste of wildness, a passion that had been unbridled. What else was there under her cool exterior?
She was a contradiction. Prim and proper when he’d first met her, but willing to run away with a forged identity, apparently without any compunction. She disabled an armed gunman and cried over a dog. He saw fear in her eyes, but she had never asked him for help.
She was strong and resilient and resourceful. She was also appealingly vulnerable. Now those qualities were running together in an irresistible package.
He wanted to know more about her mother. A general’s daughter turned war protester and flower child. Arrested once for drug possession. Put on probation. Then she’d fled the state and changed her name. Her legal name of Mallory hadn’t surfaced again until she’d died. That much he knew from his own investigation.
“Tell me about your mother,” he said. She’d talked about her grandfather but had said little about her mother.
“She was very loving,” Amy said, “but not very wise in picking her friends. She often took in … protesters wanted by the police, or drug dealers who used her sympathies to get her help. She would give her last dime to someone she thought needed it more. In fact, if she saw a one-armed person, she would probably cut off her own arm and give it to them. People recognized that. And used it. But she never changed.”
“How did she support you?”
“Usually waitressing. She was also good at crafts. She made dolls and bears, and dresses for both. Happy things. She was the ultimate optimist.”
He considered all that. “And your grandfather? How did she feel about him?”
“Sad. But she didn’t trust him. She was afraid he would try to take me away from her. One time, she said it might be better for me if he did.” Her hands nervously stroked Bo. “I never thought so. I always wanted to be with her.” Her voice faded.
Irish was fascinated. There was more to the story. A lot more. “Why didn’t she trust him?”
She was silent for a moment. “She had thought she was in love. She was seventeen, and he was twenty-two and a Vietnam war protester. My grandfather had him arrested for statutory rape.”
She hadn’t told him that before when she’d talked about her grandfather. How many other secrets were there? But he’d learned that silence was the best prompter. He waited.
“The man died in jail. I never knew exactly how or why. I tried to find out. The newspaper account said he was beaten by other inmates. That’s when my mother ran away. My grandfather didn’t know, but she was pregnant then; she was afraid he would force her to get an abortion or give up the baby.”
“You were the child.”
“Yes,” she said softly. “My mother could no more kill a child of hers than accept the injustice of what happened to the man she loved. But she didn’t have good care when I was born, and she couldn’t have other children. I think that’s one reason we lived as we did, even when the antiwar movement was over and other people moved on. She always wanted to be around children. When people drifted away from communes, she usually found someone for us to bunk with, or them with us. She needed to be needed, even if sometimes she was more child than adult.”
“It takes strength to live that kind of life,” he said. “To be true to your own values.”
She looked surprised. “I suppose in some ways she was,” she said. “In other ways, very naive. She accepted anyone who had any kind of cause, and that often got her in trouble. She just wanted to see good in everyone.”
“Except your grandfather?”
“Oh, even him, I think. She didn’t tell me everything that had happened between him and my father. She told me part of the story—that my father was unjustly
imprisoned and killed, and that she left home to take care of me. My grandfather told me the rest of it; he’d never forgiven himself for what happened.”
“But she never contacted him?”
“I think she was afraid he would try to take me and raise me ‘properly.’”
“Would he have?”
“I think he would have tried at one time. He hadn’t known she was pregnant. I showed up on his doorstep as a distinct surprise.” She hesitated. “I hated him for a long time. He had a big house and a lot of money, and I remembered what a hard time my mother and I often had. I thought she would have lived longer if she’d had good medical care.
“It took me a long time to realize that it was the life she chose. And I can never say she was unhappy with it. She marched to a different drummer. She didn’t care about money or possessions. Only causes. She attended nearly every demonstration in town. I grew up carrying signs.”
“But you didn’t keep carrying them?”
“No. I suppose I had too much of my grandfather in me. Although I loved my mother, I always longed for a home and security. I wanted to be good at what I chose to do. But I have a bit of her passion for justice, even if I didn’t agree with all her causes.”
“And she’s why your field is protest movements?”
“Sometimes I knew more than I wanted to know,” she said. “But yes, I suppose I was drawn to what had drawn her.”
“How old were you when she died?”
“Fifteen. She was ill for several months. Most of her friends had disappeared or died or gone to jail. She made me promise to contact my grandfather.”
He allowed her to talk at her own speed. He had put the car on cruise control, and he stretched out his legs, trying to relax his aching body.
But she didn’t continue, and he didn’t push.
Instead she leaned against the door and looked at him. He didn’t take his eyes from the road, but he could feel the intensity of her gaze. He felt himself growing warm, but not because of lust. Instead it was the intimacy that bounced around inside the car.
Words would have shattered it. They were bound together by her earlier comments, ones he suspected she had seldom uttered before. And bound by violence and danger, and a baffling mystery.
Broken Honor Page 15