Alpha Squad

by Suzanne Brockmann

  “I’m not sure what you want to hear about,” he said lamely.

  Lucy shifted, getting more comfortable on the hard wood of the steps. “I’ve read about something called ‘rock portage,’” she said. “Did you have to do that in basic training?”

  “Yeah. Halfway through Hell Week we had to do a nighttime coastal landing in our IBS—our rubber life raft.” Blue nodded again, glad she had given him something to talk about. Or had she? The night his BUD/S team had done rock portage was a nightmare blur. He hesitated. “I don’t remember much about it,” he admitted. “I remember wondering how the hell we were going to get safely ashore with our boat intact. The surf was rough and the coast was nothing but a jagged line of rocks. It wouldn’t take much to crush a man between the rocks and our boat.” He looked down at his hands, wondering what else he could tell her. “We were exhausted and freezing and some of our boat crew had injuries. I can’t really tell you exactly how we got ashore, just that we did.”

  Blue glanced up to find Lucy still watching him. She was listening, her dark eyes luminous and warm in the moonlight. And he knew then what he could tell her. He could tell her the truth.

  “I remember being scared to death while we were doing it,” he added quietly. “I felt like such a coward.”

  His words hung in the air. He’d never admitted that to anyone before. Not Joe Cat, not Frisco or Harvard. He’d barely even admitted it to himself. The sounds of the night surrounded him as he gazed into Lucy’s eyes, wondering what she would do with this intimate truth that he’d shared with her.

  She smiled. “You weren’t a coward,” she said. “A coward doesn’t keep on doing something that scares him to death. A coward quits. Only a very strong, very brave person perseveres in the face of fear.”

  Blue nodded, smiling back at her. “I know that now,” he said. “But I was younger then.”

  “I bet a lot of guys quit during rock portage,” Lucy said.

  “Our boat crew’s senior officer did,” Blue told her. “He took one look at those rocks and checked out of the program. We made our landing that night without a senior officer—just us grunts, getting the job done.”

  Lucy was fascinated, hanging on his every word. Blue knew that as long as he could keep talking, she’d stay there with him. And he wanted her to stay.

  “By the end of the week, only half the class was left,” he continued, the words flowing more easily now. “We were running down the beach and my entire boat crew was limping—we were a mess. Like I said, our senior officer had quit on us, and Joe Cat and me, even though we were grunts—just enlisted men—we took command. Someone had to. But by this time, Cat was really hurting. Turned out he had a stress fracture in his leg, but we didn’t know it at the time.”

  “He was running on a broken leg?”

  “Yeah.” Blue nodded, watching all of Lucy’s emotions play across her face. She gazed up into his eyes, waiting for his response, one hundred percent of her attention focused on him. He had to smile. He quite possibly had never had a woman’s total, undivided attention before—at least not while they both had all their clothes on. Maybe there was something to this storytelling thing after all.

  “Anyway, Cat was damned if he was going to get pulled because of his injury,” Blue said, “so we hid him from the instructors. We carried him when we could, surrounded him, held him up, dragged him when no one was looking. But Captain Blood finally spotted him and started in on how Cat was slowing us up, taking us down with him. He shouted into his damned bullhorn how we should ditch him, just leave him behind, toss him into the surf.”

  Blue grinned. “Well, Joe Cat and me, we’d both about had enough. This was day seven. We were sleep deprived. We were psychologically abused. We were hurting. Cat was in excruciating physical pain, and I don’t think there was a single part of me that didn’t ache or sting. We were cold and wet and hungry. And Cat, he gets really annoyed when he’s cold and wet and hungry. But I get mean. So I tell Captain Blood to go to hell, going into detail about just exactly what he should do with himself when he gets there. Then I order the rest of the boat crew to put Cat up on top of our IBS. We’d carry him on the life raft.

  “But as we’re doing that, Captain Blood realizes that Cat is hurt worse than he thought, and he orders him out of the line. He’s gonna pull him because of his injury, and he starts calling in for an ambulance. I look up at Cat, sitting on top of that raft, and he’s got this expression on his face, like his entire world has come to an end. There are five hours left in Hell Week. Five lousy hours, and he’s gonna get pulled.

  “So I get in Captain Blood’s face and I interrupt that phone call. I tell him that Joe Cat’s leg is fine—and to prove it to him, Cat will do a mile lap down the beach. The captain knows I’m full of it, but he’s into playing games, so he tells me, fine. If Cat can run a mile, he can stay in till the end.”

  The moon went behind the clouds again, plunging the porch into darkness. But Blue could hear Lucy’s quiet breathing. He heard her shift her weight, saw her shadowy form. He could feel the power of her attention as if it were a tangible thing, as if she were next to him, touching him.

  “Cat is ready to jump down off that IBS to try to do a five-minute mile right then and there,” Blue continued. “But I know he’ll never make it. Just putting his weight on his damned leg is enough to make him start to black out. So I put Joe Cat’s arm around my shoulder. I’d figured we could run down the beach together, kind of like a three-legged race, with Cat staying off his bad leg. But he was hurt worse than I thought, so I ended up picking him up and carrying him on my back.”

  Blue heard Lucy’s soft inhale. “You carried him for a mile?” she whispered.

  “We were swim buddies,” Blue said simply. “Cat is no lightweight—he’s about five inches taller than me and he’s built like a tank—so about a quarter mile in, I’m starting to move really slowly. But I’m still running, ’cause I want it badly enough, and I know Cat does, too, and I’m not gonna let him get pulled. But I start to wonder how the hell I’m going to find the strength to do this. And then I look up, and the rest of our boat crew is running right next to me. Me and Cat, we’re not alone. Our crew is with us. Crow and Harvard and all the rest of the guys. They’re all hurting, too, but they’re with us. We all took turns carrying Cat that entire mile down the beach. It was no five-minute mile—it took more like a half an hour.

  “But when we were done, Captain Blood looks at Cat and he looks at me, and then he nods and says to our boat crew, ‘You boys are secure.’ Just like that, four and a half hours early, Hell Week was over for our entire crew. We’d made it—all of us. And I swear to God, Captain Blood turned and gave us a salute. An officer, saluting a bunch of enlisted men. That was a sight to see.”

  Lucy had tears in her eyes and goose bumps on her arms. She sat hugging her knees to her chest, glad for the darkness that hid her emotional response to his soft words. It was an amazing story. And Blue had told it so matter-of-factly, as if he didn’t realize how rare and moving his loyalty to his friend truly was.

  She knew that Blue’s loyalty had to be a two-sided thing, and she knew that if this Joe Cat hadn’t been on a training mission, he would be on his way here to Hatboro Creek. Lord knows Blue could use some help. Lucy was doing the best that she could, but she knew without a doubt that her best wasn’t enough. She didn’t have the experience to pull this investigation off.

  And the one thing she did know how to do, she couldn’t. She couldn’t let herself love Blue—not on the physical level that he so desperately wanted, and not even on an emotional, spiritual level. She couldn’t fall in love with him; she couldn’t allow herself to feel more than dispassionate compassion for him.

  But she did. She felt far more than that. She ached at his pain, suffered his worries, felt the cold of his fears.

  She couldn’t fall in love with him…but that was exactly what she was beginning to do. Right here, in the darkness, with the echo of his velvet vo
ice in her ears, she was sliding deeper in love with Blue McCoy.

  It was ironic. Until this afternoon, until Blue’s outburst had jolted her, she would have labeled her feelings for Blue as a crush. It had been a very surface-level mixture of awe and admiration and lust—mere hero worship.

  But then, with his actions and his words, Blue had stripped off his superhero costume, revealing the imperfections of the flesh-and-blood man underneath.

  The hero could only be worshipped.

  But the man could be loved.

  It was crazy. Even if she succeeded in clearing his name, Blue would be gone in a matter of days, probably hours. How could she let herself fall in love with a man who would never love her in return?

  But the point was moot. She couldn’t let herself love him. She had to stop herself from falling. Because right now her hands were securely tied by her responsibility to the murder investigation.

  “Try calling Joe Cat again in the morning,” she said. Her voice was husky with emotion, and she cleared her throat. “If he’s not there, try again in the afternoon.”

  “I will,” he said. “Sooner or later he’ll be back.”

  She stood up, and she felt, more than heard, him tense.

  “Lucy,” he said softly. “Don’t go inside yet. Please?”

  She could hear loneliness in his voice and knew how much he wanted her to stay, how much it had taken him to ask her not to go.

  But she couldn’t stay. Every word he spoke brought him a little deeper into her heart. She wasn’t strong enough to resist him. Even here in the darkness, six feet apart, she found the sexual pull, the animal attraction between them, alarmingly strong. And the emotional pull that she felt was overpowering.

  But she couldn’t tell him that.

  “I’m sorry, I’m exhausted,” she said. She crossed the porch and opened the kitchen door. “I’m going up to take a shower and then go to bed.”

  She could feel his disappointment, but he didn’t try to change her mind.

  “All right,” he said quietly. “Good night.”

  The screen door closed after her, and she was halfway through the kitchen before she heard Blue’s soft voice.

  “Lucy?”

  She stopped, but she didn’t turn around. She heard him move so that he was standing on the other side of the screen.

  “Lock your door tonight,” he said quietly.

  Lucy nodded. “I will.”

  The clouds that covered last night’s moon brought a dismal, gloomy rain to the day. It was an appropriate backdrop for Gerry’s funeral.

  Most of the town had been there, many of the people slanting dark looks in Blue’s direction.

  He had sat alone in a pew toward the front of the church, wearing his gleaming white dress uniform. Only Jenny Lee Beaumont spoke to him, and just briefly, as she was led from the church, following Gerry’s gleaming white coffin out to the waiting hearse.

  This was supposed to be Lucy’s day off, but she’d gone into the police station intending to carry on with the investigation into Gerry’s murder. Except, when he saw her there, Chief Bradley had taken the liberty of temporarily assigning Lucy to the task of directing the funeral traffic. She now stood in the rain, halting traffic and giving the right-of-way to the funeral procession heading out to the cemetery.

  Blue had borrowed Lucy’s truck and he met her eyes briefly through the windshield as he pulled out of the church parking lot. Lucy had gone into the church for the ceremony and had seen that he clearly wasn’t welcome at his stepbrother’s funeral. He hadn’t been asked to carry the casket. He’d been virtually ignored. The minister of the church hadn’t even mentioned Blue in his short eulogy to Gerry’s life.

  Lucy’s heart ached for Blue. As she stood getting wetter with each drop of rain that fell, she prayed for a break in the case.

  Today wouldn’t be a good day to talk to Jenny Lee Beaumont, but maybe tomorrow Lucy could go over to the house that Jenny and Gerry had shared. If she wanted to find Gerry’s killer, maybe she should start by looking for a motive. Why would someone want Gerry dead? Did he have any enemies? Was he in the middle of any fights, any business disputes? Maybe Jenny would know.

  And if Jenny didn’t, someone in town had to know. Lucy was going to start out on Gate’s Hill Road, near where the murder had taken place, and work her way through town, knocking on doors and asking questions. Somebody saw or heard something that night. Somebody knew who really killed Gerry McCoy.

  And then there were Leroy Hurley and Matt Parker. Blue was right about them. Their story about finding the dirt bikes by the side of the road was ludicrous. Someone had paid them off to obscure those tire tracks. And it was possibly the same someone who was paying Matt Parker to say he’d seen Blue up in the woods with Gerry.

  The last of the cars pulled out of the church lot and Lucy watched their taillights vanish as they made a left at the corner of Main and Willow.

  Turning, she pushed her wet hair out of her face, adjusted her soggy hat and headed for home. It was nearly three o’clock, and she wanted to change out of her soaked uniform and have something to eat. She’d make herself a salad and actually sit down at her kitchen table to eat it. And in order not to feel as if she were wasting time, she’d take the opportunity to really read over Gerry’s autopsy reports.

  It was three-fifteen before she got home, three-thirty before she got out of the shower and nearly four o’clock before she sat down with her salad at the kitchen table. She’d pulled on a short pair of cutoff jeans and a tank top, and brushed out her wet hair.

  She skimmed through the autopsy report, then went back to read it more carefully. It wasn’t until the third time through that she saw it.

  There was almost no alcohol present in Gerry’s blood.

  No alcohol?

  She checked the numbers again, and sure enough, according to these figures, Gerry couldn’t have had more than one beer all evening long on the night he died.

  That had to be wrong.

  She’d seen Gerry’s drunken behavior with her own eyes. He had looked and acted inebriated at the party at 8:15, yet had been dead at 11:06, not quite three hours later, with only the slightest trace of alcohol in his blood.

  It didn’t make sense. Either the autopsy report was wrong…

  Or…

  Was it possible that Gerry’s drunken behavior had been an act? Had he been stone sober at the country club, only pretending to be drunk? And if so, why? What purpose could it possibly have served? He’d embarrassed himself and Blue and Jenny Lee. Why would he have done that intentionally?

  It didn’t make sense.

  Lucy had to tell someone. She had to ask questions, talk to Jenny herself, find out if Gerry had seemed sober or drunk earlier at the party. And R. W. Fisher. Blue said he’d seen his stepbrother talking to the Tobacco King right before Gerry’s outburst. Lucy had to talk to Fisher, see if he’d noticed anything odd about Gerry during their conversation.

  Lucy stood up, stuffed her feet into her running shoes and grabbed her raincoat from its hook by the kitchen door. She was out on the porch before she realized that she didn’t have her keys—or her truck.

  Okay. That was okay. She’d take a few minutes, go inside, change out of her shorts and into a pair of jeans. As hot as it was with the humidity from the rain, it wouldn’t do her any good to appear at the police station in shorts.

  Lucy took the stairs to her room two at a time and quickly kicked off her sneakers. She wriggled out of her shorts and pulled on her jeans. She fished her cowboy boots out from under her bed and pulled them on, too.

  She was reaching for the phone, about to call down to the station, looking for a ride, when she heard the kitchen door open and shut.

  Blue was back.

  Lucy clattered down the stairs and into the kitchen, stopping short when she realized that Blue was taking off his dripping clothes right there in the doorway.

  But his clothes weren’t just wet, she realized. They were also mu
ddy and torn. And smeared with blood. His blood.

  Blue had been in a fight.

  He’d taken off his jacket and the shirt he wore underneath. His arm was bleeding, his fingers dripping with blood. Lucy got a glimpse of a nasty cut across his biceps before he pressed his shirt against it, trying to stop the flow of blood.

  Fear welled up in her. He’d been out there, in town, all alone, without her. He could have been badly hurt. Or even killed. “Are you all right?”

  He met her eyes briefly as he stepped out of his muddy pants. “I could use a first-aid kit,” he said. “And I’ll need some ice for my leg.”

  Lucy saw that he had the beginnings of a truly dreadful-looking bruise on his left thigh.

  Silently she moved to the cabinet and took out her first-aid kit, with its vast array of bandages and gauze. As she set it on the kitchen table, she saw that Blue was still standing in the doorway, awkwardly holding his filthy clothes.

  “I don’t want to get your floor any dirtier,” he apologized.

  “Just put them down,” she said, hoping he wouldn’t notice how her voice was shaking. “The floor can be washed.”

  He nodded, setting his clothes on the floor.

  “What happened?” Lucy asked, since it was clear he wasn’t going to volunteer the information himself. She filled a wash basin with warm water and set it on the table next to the first-aid kit.

  “Fight,” Blue said, gingerly lowering himself onto one of the kitchen chairs.

  Lucy took a soft washcloth from the shelf, throwing him an exasperated look over her shoulder. “You want to be a little more specific there, McCoy?”

  She handed him the washcloth, then went to the freezer to get an ice pack for his leg.

  “No.”

  His knuckles and hands were torn up, and he had a scrape across his left cheekbone. It was still bleeding, and he tried futilely to blot the blood with the back of his hand.

  Lucy’s cold fear turned hot with frustration. “No,” she repeated. She wrapped the ice pack in a small towel and crossed toward him.