by Pamela Clare
Acoustic tiles overhead flattened Bobby’s voice as he spoke. “Percocet.” He lifted a small brown bottle off the table beside him and handed it to Celina. “For pain management. One pill every six to eight hours. You can supplement Motrin in between doses if you need it.”
The afternoon had been full of the search for Emilio. Celina had used that as her pain management. It had made her feel better to be hunting Emilio, rather than waiting for him to show up.
On the endless ride back to Carlsbad, she’d felt the swelling and sharp pains in her wrist catch up with her, and had almost asked Cooper to stop at the drug store for aspirin.
“Thank you.” She took the bottle and skipped the lecture about sharing prescriptions. “Have you heard how Ronni’s doing?”
“Her condition’s improved. Before you left the Tijuana site, Coop called me and asked me to check on her. You can call her any time now. Doctor said she could talk to you.”
Bobby held up a cell phone, “And you can do it with this new phone, properly bugged and wired and encrypted so Emilio can’t locate you when you use it, but if he does, I can trace a location he’s calling from faster than with your old phone. I got most of your address book entered already.” He smiled at her. “The only thing left to do is set up your speed-dial numbers.”
Celina was touched. She slipped the flat black case into the back pocket of her jeans. “Thank you. Does Ronni remember what happened?”
Bobby shook his head. “It may be a few days or even longer before her short-term memories come back.”
He pointed at a line of Motorola two-way radios docked in separate stations. “Next, we have these babies. One for each of us. I borrowed these from my friend in the Army. Each SC700R has a range of twelve miles even in backcountry where cell phones won’t work. Rechargeable with battery backup. This call button,” he pressed a red half-moon and the other radios emitted a high-pitched squeal, “gives an emergency alarm. Trouble finds you, hit the button. The others give a readout of your GPS coordinates.”
Handing Celina and Cooper each one, Bobby stuck one on his belt buckle. The fourth, he pointed at. “I’ll give this one to Thomas when he shows up.”
“And why do we need these?” Celina asked.
“Easier and faster communication,” Cooper told her. “Ever try dialing a phone with your left hand? Even 911 is a bitch with a broken wrist. Cell phone towers go down or you’re out of their limited range, you’re in trouble. If you get into a situation, you need either one of us, hit the button. We’ll find you. Of course that is, if you’re in range.”
Celina looked back and forth between the two men in front of her. “You think Emilio and Valquis will track me here, to this house.”
“They’re getting bold,” Bobby said. “You ditched the tracking device Em had on you but he still has a lot of resources, his biggest one being Valquis. It’s too risky not to take every safety precaution.”
“The net around him is growing smaller,” Cooper added. “Should have had him today.”
“Shoulda, woulda, coulda,” Bobby chanted. “Forget it. We move forward and we do it smart.”
Cooper played with his radio. “We need to figure out how to stop them.”
“Sara showed me the tape of the hotel,” Celina said. “It was definitely Valquis and Emilio.”
Bobby backed up his wheelchair, swiveling it so he was facing a flat screen computer and keyboard. “I’ve got the video from the safe house and the hotel. Let’s watch them together and do some brainstorming.”
Cooper pulled up a chair for Celina, grabbed one for himself. The three sat in silence watching the scenes unfold. Over the next twenty minutes, they rewound, played, discussed, argued. There were moments Celina had to look away from the screen. Look away from Valquis, who still lived in her nightmares. She gingerly touched the bandage on her collarbone. Rubbed her arm.
The alarm system alerted them a car was approaching the house. “Eliza,” Bobby told Cooper. “I sent her for groceries.”
As Cooper took three environmentally friendly bags out of Eliza’s hands in the kitchen, Celina greeted her with a hug. “It’s good to see you,” Eliza said, gently squeezing Celina’s arms as she looked her over from head to toe. Her kind eyes lingered on Celina’s injuries. “How are you holding up?”
Cooper flipped a light switch and under-the-cabinet recessed lights came on. Eliza’s long hair was pulled back in her signature braid. The tiny crow’s feet in the corners of her eyes were visible even in the soft light, but Celina liked them. They reminded her of her mother, whose kind eyes and soft voice were always reassuring.
“I’ve had better days,” Celina admitted, “but I’m not complaining.”
Eliza offered another hug and Celina rested her cheek against the older woman’s shoulder. “We’re all so glad to have you back.”
If Celina had closed her eyes, she would have fallen asleep in Eliza’s embrace. She was that tired.
Eliza stepped back. “Let’s put the guys on kitchen duty and you and I will get you settled in the guest bedroom, okay?”
Celina nodded. The guest bedroom.
“Put her in my room,” Cooper said, and when everyone looked at him, he added, “The guest bedroom isn’t a bedroom anymore.” When no one moved, he said, “I’ll sleep on the couch.”
Eliza nodded, patted Celina on the shoulder, and helped her gather her camera and overnight bag, both of which Sara had returned to her. They left Cooper and Bobby in the kitchen.
Cooper’s bedroom was all straight lines and clean surfaces like the rest of the house. The bed was unmade, the black and tan comforter on the floor. Eliza picked it up, shook it out, and gave the bed a cursory glance before biting the inside of her cheek. “I’ll find some clean sheets.”
A dark-stained credenza of drawers ran underneath a bank of windows that looked out at the backyard. What yard there was, anyway. Twenty feet beyond the pool was a screen of thin-trunked trees and behind those, the cliff. Beautiful, but Celina barely registered the view.
Her gaze stayed fixed on the credenza where a framed photo was perched. A photo of a woman and a young boy.
The woman stared back at her with long sun-bleached hair and a wide smile, the boy hung over her left shoulder, his arm around her neck. He, too, was grinning at the camera. Carefree, happy. His eyes, his face, familiar. Small replicas of Cooper’s.
Celina’s legs went weak. When Eliza came back with a stack of clean bed linens, Celina sat on the bed, the photograph in her hands.
“That’s Cooper’s wife,” Eliza said, and at Celina’s horrified look, corrected herself. “Ex-wife, excuse me.” She smiled sadly, setting down the sheets. “Her name’s Melinda. Cooper never told you about her?”
Celina could no more than shake her head.
“It was a brief marriage when they were both very young. Only lasted a few years, but they had Owen. Isn’t he mischievous looking?”
Celina’s headed nodded yes of its own will.
“He’s a good boy. Misses his dad a lot.”
Celina gave her a questioning look and Eliza again smiled. “Oh, Cooper’s a good dad, don’t get me wrong. He spends as much time as he can with him, but his job…” Eliza shrugged. “It’s demanding. And dangerous. He claims he doesn’t see Owen enough because of his odd hours, but between you and me, I think Cooper worries about someone trying to get back at him by using Owen.”
Celina returned the photo to the credenza and went through the motions to help Eliza strip the sheets off Cooper’s bed and replace them with clean ones. Eliza chatted lightly about the weather, about Bobby’s vices, about Cooper’s good nature. Celina said nothing.
She’d known little about Cooper’s past until that moment. He was a secretive person. No Facebook page or other social media, and his personnel files were off limits to everyone except the upper echelons of the DEA and FBI. Celina wasn’t one to snoop anyway, and had convinced herself she didn’t care what skeletons he might have in his clo
set. Everyone had a bony secret or two to hide.
But she’d never suspected Cooper had a son. An ex-wife.
He’d never mentioned them. No one on the SCVC taskforce had either during Celina’s stint with them. Of course, her assignment with the group had lasted only a few months and most of that time was undercover, not in the office where the men and women discussed personal issues and gossiped.
When Eliza left her alone to unpack her stuff and use the master bathroom, Celina sat on the bed again and stared at the picture.
Cooper was a father. It was hard to wrap her mind around it.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Celina, standing in the open doorway, stared at the covered pool.
As Cooper walked by, he used the tongs in his hand to point at it. He was grilling dinner for them. “Do you want to swim? Or at least soak your toes?”
Winter in Southern California was balmy compared to what she’d left behind in Des Moines. The current high temperatures were record setting for this time of year. Still, the thought of stripping down and diving in, stepping out from the doorway of Cooper’s fortress and out into the early evening made her feel exposed. “Too cold,” she said, shaking her head. “And I don’t have my suit.”
“Pool’s heated,” Dyer said from behind her.
Cooper brushed by her on his way to the kitchen, stopped. “I’ve got some trunks you could use. Probably an old tank top.”
Celina glanced back and forth between the two men. They’d both been watching her intently. Too intently. “Can’t swim with this,” she said, holding up her casted wrist.
“I can wrap it.” Eliza set a stack of plates on the table. “We can put a plastic bag over it and tape the edges down to keep it dry. Might not be graceful, but you could at least get in and not worry about getting it wet.”
Celina tucked her wrist against her stomach. It felt like a brick at the end of her arm. She couldn’t stroke, that was for sure, but they were all so worried about her, so intent on helping her somehow, she felt the need to comply. She glanced back outside at the pool. Even with the cover on, it was sleek and inviting. Solar landscape lights dotted the edges of the patio. Fire leapt in the stone fireplace, the sound of sizzling meat reaching her ears as the steaks shed droplets of fat.
“You’re safe here,” Cooper said, suddenly beside her. His voice was barely above a murmur. Beyond the soft light of the pool area, the thin trees and cliff blended into a dark wall, surrounding the house.
I won’t be safe until Emilio’s dead, Celina thought. Until Valquis is dead.
“Okay,” she said, wanting to please him. “I’ll go for a swim.”
Stroke…slap…stroke…breathe. Stroke…slap…stroke…breathe.
Cooper’s pool was a standard rectangle, perfect for laps. The water rushed past Celina’s face and over her body like cold fingers. She closed her eyes and kept her pace as steady as she could with the brick on her wrist. It had taken her more than a minute to find her balance and a productive rhythm. Her heart now beat solidly in her chest and her mind cleared. For now, it was just her and the water.
Stroke…slap…stroke…breathe.
She lost track of her lap total and finally stopped when her muscles were on fire and her lungs screamed for relief. Instead of getting out, she floated on her back and stared at the sky. Flat gray clouds covering everything, threatening rain. She thought of the sky back in Des Moines where clouds like those meant snow. She thought of Forester and Sugars, who would never see clouds again. She let the tears she’d been holding back slide out the corners of her eyes and down into the chlorinated water.
Exhausted, she finally climbed out of the pool. The cool night air sent her scurrying for the stack of navy blue and white striped towels Eliza had set next to the lounge chairs. They smelled freshly washed and felt warm against her cold skin. With clumsy movements, she wrapped her hair in one and used another to dry her body. Then she grabbed two more, wrapped herself in them, and sank into the nearest lounge chair.
Cooper came out of the house carrying a platter for the meat. He moved some foil-wrapped potatoes over on the large stone grill and flipped the steaks. Then he stirred the coals underneath and flames leapt up for a moment before dying back down. He sprinkled seasoning over the steaks and took a swig from his nearby beer bottle. He swept a look at her and then disappeared into the house.
A minute later, he returned with a fresh beer and a fleece blanket. He offered her the beer, but she shook her head no. Setting it down on the nearby tabletop, he threw the blanket over her legs. It was winter white with blue polar bears. The blanket stitch around the edges matched the bears. Celina snuggled under its weight as he tucked it under her chin, over her shoulders, under her legs and around her feet. She tried to speak, to say thank you, but the words wouldn’t come. Instead, mummy-like, she watched him take the beer and walk back to the grill. Content just to watch him, she closed off thoughts about Emilio, about the men he’d had Valquis kill because of her.
Cooper’s sure movements as he cooked and replaced the pool’s cover consumed her. His stillness as he watched the quiet woods next to the house and enjoyed his beer gave her relief. A rock steadiness that was better than pills at easing her pain, better than a high-tech security system, and trained SCVC taskforce members camped around the perimeter of the house. Contemplating this, she fell asleep.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The steaks were done and Cooper was ready to eat. Celina, however, was sleeping on his lounge chair. “If I leave the meat on the grill any longer,” he said to Dyer as they watched Celina from inside, “it’ll overcook. If I pull it off the grill, I have to wake her up.”
Dyer seemed to find Cooper’s predicament amusing. A small smile danced around the edges of his mouth. “What happened when she saw her chief’s body?”
Cooper remembered the look on her face when she’d seen Forester naked and bloody. The numbness that had taken over her personality and the cold detachment she’d embraced to shut down her emotions was exactly what he’d told her to do. But it wasn’t good. “She held up pretty well initially. When Navarrette discussed cause of death, bam. It hit her.”
“What did Emilio say to her on the phone?”
Cooper felt his guts draw in. “Told her she was his and because of her betrayal she must be punished.”
“And she challenged him.”
“Yes.” Foolhardy kid. “Val could have killed her right there.”
“He could have killed her at her apartment. At the hotel.”
Dyer didn’t have to remind him. Cooper’s brain now had an endless loop of worst-case scenes in it. There was the one of him stumbling back upstairs to her apartment, thinking about waking her for a continuation of their night, only to find her blood all over the floor, the bed, and the walls. Her vacant eyes staring at him.
Or the one of him seeing a body bag on a gurney leaving the entrance to the hotel. Men in dark jumpsuits loading the body into the coroner’s van.
“Your steaks are going to be crispy,” Eliza called from the kitchen sink. She was cutting up red peppers and onions.
Cooper lifted his chin to acknowledge Eliza’s comment, lowered his voice to Dyer. “How soon until Valquis shows up here?”
Dyer shrugged. “A while. He doesn’t know where you live and the manhunt is so intense right now, he’d be smart to lay low.”
“Why is he helping Emilio? What does he get out of this?”
“Been wondering that myself. If law enforcement thought you were dead, wouldn’t you start over? Build a new empire?”
“Suckerfish.”
Dyer frowned. “What?”
Cooper pointed at his fish tank. “Suckerfish use other fish, like sharks, for food and shelter; sharks use suckerfish to stay clean. It’s symbiosis. Same thing in the world of drug empires.”
“Valquis is a suckerfish – Emilio pays him to terrorize people, which is his dream job. Emilio is the shark who doesn’t want to get his hands dirt
y.”
“Exactly.” Cooper walked out on the patio. As he stopped at the grill, he watched Celina’s eyes move under their lids, listened to her breathing. Her face was free of makeup. The towel wrapped around her hair had come undone and loose tendrils of brown tumbled around her face and down her neck. Her chest rose and fell, and he remembered her wet body climbing out of his pool, his old swim trunks sticking to her curvy legs, his white tank top melted to her breasts. He’d watched her dry the water off her legs and grown so hard he could have drilled holes in the kitchen tile. He’d gone to the fish tank and fed the fish to hide his obvious reaction.
Looking down, he suddenly realized he was growing hard again. Turning away from Dyer’s ever-watchful gaze, Cooper made a lot of work out of taking up the steaks, checking the potatoes, dousing the flames. Fat drops of rain fell and he walked over to Celina and woke her.
Groggily she gathered up her blanket and followed him into the house. The smell of the steaks and the baked potatoes was strong. She sniffed and sighed deeply. “Smells good,” she said before disappearing down the hall to the bedroom.
Cooper felt like whistling. A ridiculous reaction but there it was. When he looked up from unloading the potatoes on the four separate plates, Eliza was smiling at him. That pained smile she always got when she wanted to discuss his past life. “She knows, Cooper, honey. About Owen. And Melinda.” At Cooper’s blank stare, she added, “She saw the photo in your bedroom.”
Cooper mentally kicked himself. He’d forgotten about the photo. Forgotten in a small way about his past. He set the steaks on the table, went to the counter, and poured Celina a glass of pinot noir. Took it to her place and set it there for her. He should go talk to her right now. Some part of him told him that.
But the steaks were already overdone, and Dyer and Eliza were there, and just like the other night, the timing was all wrong. “Let’s eat.” He pulled out a chair for Celina as she entered the room.