Unbreakable_A Section 8 Novel

by Stephanie Tyler

  The outside of the envelope read I thought you could use an outlet for your aggression.

  Gunner ripped it open and found his plane tickets that had him leaving in the morning, plus the new job. He read the missive, then lit it on fire. He continued holding the papers in his hand until the flames rose and they burned down to nothing between his fingers.

  Chapter Seven

  “This is a bad idea,” Jem told her, five hours later as they traveled through the backwoods of the bayou in an old pickup truck he’d acquired.

  Avery didn’t ask from where. “So why agree to it?”

  “Never met a bad idea I didn’t like,” he retorted with a grin. He sobered immediately when he said, “You know how goddamned lucky you are to be sitting here right now?”

  “I know,” she said quietly. “Billie Jean’s out of surgery, but she’s still critical. I don’t know the names of the other exes to contact them.”

  “I’ve got a few searches going on that,” he said. But that wouldn’t help to warn those women anytime soon. “Suppose this guy who came in to ask about you is the one who tried to kill you?”

  “Then at least we’ll know,” she countered.

  “And if he’s not, we’re still screwed. But we’ll hunt his ass down.”

  The great thing about Jem was he was crazy enough to try what most people wouldn’t. His logic was different from other people’s and he took risks because he could.

  Jem truly lived. And that’s all Avery wanted to learn to do. She’d already learned the lesson that life was too short.

  The bayou was all narrow paths and missteps. Some of the paths were meant to purposely throw strangers off. It was easy to get lost here.

  She and Jem both quieted when they reached the bridge that took them past Grace’s old house and then farther along the old swamps, through roads that didn’t seem as though they should be drivable at all. And they were barely so. It was only Jem’s skill that kept them from rutting out or going into the bayou itself.

  After another half an hour, Jem turned the headlights down. “We’re close.”

  “And you know that how?” she asked.

  “Bayou numbers are hard to find. You’ve got to just count from the start of the road, and sometimes that doesn’t even make sense. But I know this house.” He’d pulled over, cut the engine and pointed now to one they could barely see through the mist and the cypress trees that provided protection and coverage.

  “How?”

  “Old girlfriend used to live there. I snuck into her window more times than I could count, until her daddy caught me.” He pointed. “Window’s still there, but the tree’s been pruned away from it.”

  “What if this guy’s the father of the old girlfriend?”

  “He owes me an ass full of buckshot. Let’s move.” He was out of the car, moving around the back of the house in a wide enough arc to not get spotted. She followed closely, her own weapon drawn. Her adrenaline raced again, although her entire body suffered from the fatigue of the day’s earlier events.

  It was so dark out here. She didn’t dare look away from Jem for fear of losing him. He walked carefully, exaggerating each step. He’d warned her of the possibility of tripwires.

  She was slightly more worried about snakes.

  When she got close enough to be able to see the outline of the porch clearly through the low-lying fog, she paused. Took another couple of steps and realized she’d lost track of Jem. She couldn’t call for him, so instead kept going forward.

  Minutes later, someone wrapped a strong arm around her neck. Her arms were pinned in place before she could do anything. The grip was python-strong. She wanted to call out for Jem, but a rag was stuffed into her mouth. A pinch on her neck and everything went black.

  When she woke, she stared drowsily at the man standing in front of her. He was massive—at least six foot six and broad as a door.

  He didn’t look happy to see her awake in the least.

  She swallowed around the gag and he said, “I’ll give you a sip of water. Don’t make a goddamned sound. We’ve got your friend here, so there’s no one coming to save you.”

  She nodded. Let him take the gag out and took a sip of water and then gulped it while he held the bottle. Whatever he’d shot her up with was wearing off and she hoped there was nothing in the water. But she couldn’t have stopped herself from drinking it.

  After a few minutes and more water, her head cleared considerably. “Who are you?”

  He laughed, but there was no mirth there. “You come sneaking around my house with guns and you want to know who I am? Who the fuck are you?”

  He leaned into her and his military roots were definitely showing. Just being around Key, Dare and Gunner gave her insight into what to look for. “I heard you were looking for me earlier—at Dove’s bar.”

  His brows rose. He muttered something to himself and then stared at the ceiling. When he looked back at her, he said, “You’ve been asking questions you shouldn’t be asking.”

  “So have you. And you hurt one of my friends,” she snapped back.

  “I haven’t hurt anyone. Yet.”

  “You don’t know who you’re fucking with,” Jem said, and she turned to see him several feet from her. He’d obviously just woken up and his eyes were dark with anger.

  “I think it’s a guy who’s all tied up and should be shutting his mouth,” another broad man said. He was shorter than the guy in front of her, but no less intimidating. Obviously, not to Jem, the way he goaded the man.

  “Nice anchor, Popeye.”

  Popeye. Navy. Gunner. Okay. She blew out a breath. Maybe this could still be okay.

  Maybe. “You know Gunner.”

  “Why are you asking questions about him?”

  Oddly protective. And Avery suddenly knew who these men had lost.

  “The story’s true, isn’t it? Your daughter was married to . . . James.”

  “Why does this interest you?”

  There were so many things she could say, professional things. What came out was “I love him.”

  The men looked at her. Jem groaned and then suddenly he was free and slamming one of the men to the desk, pointing a gun at the other one. “Untie her.”

  “Do it, Mike,” the man on the desk grunted. Mike moved forward and undid the bindings on her wrists and then her ankles. Jem didn’t take the gun off the guy on the table, told Mike, “Move to the corner and sit your ass down. I’m asking questions now.”

  Avery stood and Jem motioned for her to grab a weapon. She did, but kept the gun down at her side. “We love Gunner. He left without warning and I think he’s doing something bad. Billie said you were asking about me . . . and then an hour later, someone nearly killed her.”

  Mike shook his head and Andy cursed softly, then said, “It wasn’t us. James was our family.”

  Mike looked at Andy and smiled and Avery knew two things then—these men loved each other, and they’d welcomed Gunner into their home, despite everything. Despite everything, they still wanted to protect him.

  Mike cleared his throat and looked at her. “Josie was my daughter. Her mom, Amie, was my best friend. I grew up here.”

  “And I grew up in Texas,” Andy said, his drawl thick and definitely not from Louisiana. His head was still pressed to the table by Jem, who was intent on listening.

  “Amie wanted a baby, but she’d been pretty burned in the past by love. She decided she could raise a baby herself, asked me if I was okay with that. I knew I’d be away a lot with the Navy, and I knew she’d be a damned good mom. So I was always a part of Josie’s life—she grew up knowing I was her dad and that I was gay and everything was fine. But then Amie got cancer—damn, it was so quick. And rather than relocate Josie, who was twelve at the time, or make her travel with me and Andy, which would’ve been damned near impossibl
e with our jobs as SEALs, we moved here. I was willing to come alone, but Andy wouldn’t let me.”

  “Best decision I ever made,” Andy said. “We don’t typically trade information on family, but you seem to want to help him, not use him. And you seem like you’re in as much danger as Billie.”

  “Why’d you go to see her?” Avery asked.

  “I wanted to talk to you,” Mike said. “I knew James—Gunner—left New Orleans last month. What I don’t know is why. Or at least I didn’t. Now I think I know.”

  “He’s in a bad place, isn’t he?” she whispered.

  “If he’s back doing what I think he’s doing, yes.” Mike sighed, stared at the ceiling. “He’s been in close proximity for years, but he never got in touch. For our safety, more so than his. He’s got to be ruthless about cutting ties to his past.”

  Avery rubbed her wrists where the rope bit into them.

  “Sorry about that. We’re suspicious types.”

  “Jem, you could probably let Andy up now,” Avery said.

  Jem grumbled but did so. Andy got up slowly, moved away from Gunner. Avery put the gun back into its case then and Mike motioned for all of them to follow him farther into the deceptively worn house.

  It was obvious these two men had a more than fleeting concern for security and privacy, especially once they were led through the living room, with the TV and the old couch into a room behind a locked door.

  Andy sat in front of the large computer and began typing.

  “Please, sit,” Mike told them. There were several comfortable chairs and Jem collapsed into one while Avery stayed on the edge of her own leather recliner. Accepted a soda and turned it in her hands until they went numb from the cold and then the drink got warm, all in the space of the five minutes it took Andy and Mike to confer, wordlessly, about something on the iPad.

  The men started slow, waiting to see if they could trust Avery and Jem. She appreciated that, even though she was frustrated with the pace.

  They’d handed her and Jem a file folder marked CIA and confidential and branded with a red stamp that stated .

  “Someone didn’t do their job,” Jem muttered. He opened the file, since he was the best one to interpret the legalese and covertness of the CIA’s writings.

  He explained that, according to the agents who were working this case—one of whom had been Richard Powell himself—James Connor had fallen off the map completely at the age of nineteen. From the ages of sixteen until nineteen, he had a long list of crimes that he was implicated in but never captured for.

  He appeared to have been working for a mysterious smuggler known only by the initials DL. The CIA had been watching him for ten years and only had a trail of bodies, explosions and money.

  “James Connor is Gunner,” Jem said. Because Dare told them that Powell used the name James when he’d greeted Gunner.

  “Powell thought Gunner was dead.”

  “That must’ve been when he went into the Navy.”

  Avery nodded, but something was bothering her. “Where was James from birth to sixteen?”

  “He was with his mom until she was killed. He was twelve. And we know he was with Powell for some of that time afterward—had to be.”

  “But he wasn’t there when Grace got there. Gunner would’ve been fifteen or sixteen at the time,” Andy added.

  “So that’s when he fell in with this mysterious DL character,” Jem mused.

  “And his own father was investigating him, not mentioning that this was his son?” Avery asked.

  “Fucking bastard,” Jem muttered. “Glad he’s dead.”

  “And DL is Drew Landon, infamous smuggler,” Mike added. “He’s one of the biggest moneymakers—he smuggles criminals and their families out of the country. Any country. He gets them away from marshals, feds, whoever. It’s a huge business, requires utmost secrecy. He only uses top operatives for certain parts of his business.”

  Smuggling was the reason Gunner had made so many connections. He’d made friends with criminals and innocents alike, offered favors even as he was an avenging angel to the human traffickers.

  “There was a string of unexplained human trafficker deaths about ten years ago, when I was first with the CIA,” Jem said. “You’re saying that was Gunner?”

  “As near as we could figure out,” Mike said. “Whatever else Landon had him doing, Gunner was kicking ass.”

  “So Gunner is the man who actually escorts the criminals into their new country?” Avery asked. “Wouldn’t that give him a way out of working with Landon?”

  “Not if he wants to live,” Jem said.

  “But he had Gunner kill human traffickers. Because they were competition? I can’t see Gunner working for someone like that, no matter what they had hanging over his head,” Avery mused.

  “DL is most likely hanging you over Gunner’s head,” Mike said gently, then added, “Maybe Gunner doesn’t know. Maybe it’s what he needs to believe.”

  Avery rested her forehead in her palms, blinked back tears. “I can’t believe . . . we did this to him. I did.”

  She and Dare had pulled Gunner into their problems, into helping them find their father. Ultimately, finding Darius meant that Gunner had to face his own father. Because of that, Landon had rediscovered Gunner. Knowing she couldn’t have predicted the consequences did nothing to assuage her guilt.

  • • •

  Gunner stared out at the water, a bottle of whiskey and a shot glass next to him. Landon had had someone bring them by hours earlier, and Gunner hadn’t refused them.

  The guy had stared at his head, whistled and then offered to come in and share the bottle with him, after staring up and down Gunner’s naked body.

  Gunner just shook his head no and the guy offered his sister. Gunner just closed the door quietly. He’d gone numb the second he’d stepped onto this island, and no amount of pleasure was going to help.

  He didn’t want to close his eyes because every time he did, he saw Avery. He realized he didn’t have any pictures of her, an old habit of never leaving a trail of people you loved for criminals to latch onto.

  He’d never kept any of Josie either. But he had Josie’s tattoo on his arm, the same one he pressed herbs against now. An offering, a prayer, a call for protection he knew he didn’t deserve.

  All the people you’ve helped in the meantime . . .

  Didn’t matter, he told himself ruthlessly. He’d wiped karma out with a single bomb on a job the night Josie was killed and he’d pay for it forever. Just the way it was meant to be.

  He’d tried to be a part of the tight family circle that Gunner couldn’t believe he was lucky enough to be a part of.

  And you lied to them, time after time. As much as he told himself it was for their own protection, he knew that he’d been afraid they’d tell him to go to hell.

  “What happened to you, son?” Mike asked, maybe two weeks later when Gunner was starting to get back on his feet.

  Gunner looked him in the eye and started to make something up. Mike would believe it—and Gunner wished he could believe it too. Instead, he told the man, “I got out of something bad the only way I knew how.”

  Mike nodded.

  “I’ve got to get out of here. I won’t bring anything but trouble to you and your family.”

  “I don’t believe that for a second,” Mike said.

  Josie continued. “Besides, that’s what the ceremony was for. It cleared away the evil that surrounded you. Purified you.”

  Josie said this as though everyone knew that.

  “So what, I’m like new now?”

  “In a way, yes.”

  He’d gotten out of bed and nearly collapsed on her. She caught him, chided, “Come on, James.”

  “How’d you know that?” Because if memory served, he’d been wearing cargo pants and nothing els
e, had no ID or money. Nothing else when Landon’s men dumped him from the car after beating him. Almost like a reverse gang ritual. He had no doubt they’d meant to kill him in one of the most painful ways possible.

  “You told me,” Josie said simply.

  She sat next to him on the bed and Mike asked, “Are they going to come looking for you?”

  “Considering they dumped him in the middle of the swamp, I guess they figured local wildlife would take care of the body.”

  “How long have I been here?”

  “Two weeks.”

  “And nobody’s come asking about me?”

  “We’re pretty well insulated from strangers around here. Between the geography and the Cajuns, any outsider steps foot in this parish and it’s known before your shoe hits the dirt,” Mike said. “Which is how we found you.”

  Chapter Eight

  When Mike and Andy told her and Jem the story of finding Gunner barely alive in the bayou, Avery gritted her teeth together so hard her head ached.

  “I don’t know how he was still alive,” Mike was saying. “He was . . . Jesus, I thought he was dead when the dog found him. Petey tried to drag him up the porch and then howled when he couldn’t.”

  “Petey was a good judge of character,” Andy added. “He’d bitten over half the damned parish, but with Gunner, he wouldn’t leave his side, no matter how hard we tried to get him to leave the poor guy alone.”

  Avery pulled the blanket farther around her shoulders and sipped at the strong coffee Mike had made. “Did he remember anything?”

  “I think he remembered everything, but he didn’t tell us. Not then. Not until he’d realized he’d fallen in love with Josie. He came clean to us about his father and Landon then,” Mike said. “He’d been through hell. But he had a drive . . . after everything happened, we tried to convince him to go right into the military. I wish we’d convinced him.”

  “He didn’t want to?” Avery asked.

  “Partly. And Josie didn’t help. She wanted him here, with her. They were like two kids. I think it was the first time Gunner actually had a childhood.” Mike smiled as he remembered.