Military Man

by Marie Ferrarella

  Lucy knew that if she was going to become a doctor worth her salt, she was going to have to get over that initial queasiness that struck every time she was faced with the prospect of looking at a dead body being dissected. There wasn’t too much she could do about the queasiness, but she knew she could control her outer reaction to it.

  Because she was so good at masking her emotions, no one ever had a clue as to what she was actually feeling, but that didn’t negate the fact that it felt as if a tidal wave had suddenly been created within her stomach and was wrecking havoc on the coastline.

  Dr. Daniels parked the gurney under the overhead lights. He was a big man, brawny and bald, more apt to be mistaken for a professional wrestler than a dedicated doctor bent on uncovering the mysteries of death.

  “You know,” he said, “every other student we’ve had here has always spent the first couple of weeks of their stay flinching every time they heard one of the gurneys approaching.” He chuckled, the deep sound echoing in the Spartan-like chamber. “Hell, we had a big burly guy pass out three times before he finally requested a transfer. But you—” there was admiration in his eyes as Lucy felt them pass over her “you’re something else again.”

  Lucy took that as a high compliment. She’d heard that Daniels was not free with them. Her mouth curved ever so slightly.

  Something else again.

  That was the way her father had described her, more than once, always marveling at such stoicism in one so young.

  What he hadn’t known, what no one seemed to even guess at, was that her particular brand of stoicism had been put in place to keep back an ocean of tears. If she had permitted herself even the display of a single tear, Lucy knew in her heart she wouldn’t be able to stop crying. Perhaps ever.

  At least that was the way she’d felt for a very long time. As the only child of two parents who’d proudly served in the military, her whole life had been a series of leavings and of battling the feeling that she was being abandoned by one or the other of her parents. Sometimes both. When their tours of duty had conflicted with parenting, she’d been shipped off to her grandparents. She’d been a world traveler whose home was anywhere her suitcase went.

  The nomadic lifestyle she’d been forced to lead had taught her at a very early age that she could not keep her parents at her side, nor could she remain where newly formed friendships had begun to push tender shoots through the earth and flourish. She certainly could not remain complacent or feel remotely secure because of any outer trappings.

  She’d come to the realization early on that if she wanted security, she was going to have to look inward. The same was true of complacency. That only came from depending solely on herself, so that no matter where in the world she woke up or whom she found herself speaking to, she was her own person, secure and confident that she could go on despite whatever curves life suddenly threw her.

  Damn but it was wearying at times to know that she was all there was.

  Oh, there was her father and now that he had retired and moved close to her, that was a good thing. But strictly speaking, it almost felt as if it was too late. Lucy dearly loved Retired Lieutenant John Gatling, but she wasn’t the little girl she knew he was hoping to resume a relationship with. There was no going back and picking up where they had left off. Those years had long gone. She was a woman now, had become one long before her time.

  And she had become so self-reliant that no one had seen her cry when she’d been told of her mother’s mysterious death halfway around the world. All she’d been told, by the military and by her father, who she suspected had no more information than she did, was that her mother had died “in the line of duty.”

  In the line of duty. It was a phrase that was supposed to cover a myriad of things and explain everything. It covered little and explained nothing, but she’d ceased asking for answers.

  At least, answers that had to do with the military. Answers that had to do with medicine and life in general as seen through a microscope were another matter. Her naturally inquisitive mind, her desire to do good, to help, had made her turn to medicine in hopes of allowing her to act upon her good intentions. At least in the field of medicine she had a fighting chance to solve a few of the mysteries, answer a few of the questions.

  Maybe, if she was very lucky, they would be the ones that counted.

  Now she moved out of the doctor’s way, eager to learn whatever it was that this newest victim had to silently teach her.

  “What’s his story?” she asked Dr. Daniels as she glanced down at the corpse. Before the medical examiner could tell her, Lucy answered her own question. “Hey, wait, isn’t that one of the guards who was involved in that prisoner getaway?” She looked at the Y incision that ran the length of his torso. “Didn’t you already do him?”

  Looking down at the still face, she recognized the man from the front page of the newspaper. Death had taken away his color and left a pasty gray in its place, but the man’s features had struck her initially because his face was almost a perfect square. Cruel though it was, that was something death hadn’t altered.

  “We lost the paperwork. Don’t ask,” Daniels said. Then his brown eyes grew serious. “We might be getting his friend down here any day now. They’re keeping him alive at County, but who knows how long he’s going to hang on?”

  She caught an undercurrent in the physician’s voice. Because of the nature of her childhood, she’d learned how to make quick assessments of the people around her. “You really like this job, don’t you?”

  He looked surprised that she would make the comment. After all, she was the student, he the teacher. After a moment of stony silence, his rounded cheeks widened in a smile.

  “Yes, I do. Dead people don’t talk back. They don’t make comments about how little money you have or how inferior they think you are.”

  Given his size and appearance, it wasn’t a stretch for her to visualize him as an adolescent who’d spent his time on the outside of the inner circle. “The right living people don’t, either.”

  There was a warm light in his eyes as he looked at her. “You’d be surprised, Lucy. Not everyone has your keen insight.”

  She shrugged carelessly. Personal attention always made her uncomfortable. Unlike what she imagined the doctor had been at her age, she liked being the one on the outside. “I’m not that unique.”

  “I think you are.”

  She raised her eyes to his. For a split second their roles were reversed. “Dr. Daniels—”

  He laughed, shaking his head. If he’d entertained any serious thoughts about her at a given point, Lucy knew she’d squelched them by now. “Yes, I know. You don’t go out with people you work with.” He paused before donning his surgical rubber gloves. “Tell me, I’m curious. How are you going to ever find yourself a husband if you keep ruling people out like that?”

  Her voice was crisp. It was a question she’d answered before. “I’m not looking for a husband. I’m looking to finish my schooling and then start my career. After that’s established, then I might think about a relationship.”

  It was a lie. She wasn’t planning on ever looking into forming a lasting relationship, certainly not the romantic one Daniels was inquiring about. Romantic relationships resided in the land of uncertainty. Math and science were where all the answers were. And forensic medicine, her ultimate field of expertise, dealt in facts once they’d been uncovered.

  Relationships, she had learned, both through her parents—who were not stationed in the same state, sometimes not even the same country, for months at a time—and through Jeffrey Underhill, the one boy she’d allowed herself to fall in love with at the tender age of seventeen, were far from certain or even vaguely predictable.

  She liked sticking with a sure thing.

  “Shall we?” Daniels asked as he slipped on his rubber gloves.

  Following his example, Lucy put on her own set. It was time to find out if the guard’s body contained any secrets for them.

&nbs
p; Two

  Far from being a demonstrative person, Emmett Jamison usually kept his feelings bottled up inside. Very little made him smile or show any sort of outward reaction other than a frown. At best, there were patient expressions. Even so, when he opened his hotel room door and saw Collin, his eyes seemed to light up. Without apparently stopping to think, Emmett threw his arms around him and hugged. Hard.

  Surprised to say the least, Collin returned the embrace.

  Taking a breath, Emmett stepped back, as if to bring himself under control. “Thanks for coming.”

  Collin could hear the barely bridled emotion vibrating in Emmett’s voice.

  “How could I not come?” They weren’t just cousins, they were friends. Even when Emmett had gone off to disappear into the bottom of a bottle, from time to time he would make an effort to remain in touch. “Like you said in your phone call, you don’t ask for many favors.” His cousin looked wan, Collin thought, like a man coming out of a cave after a prolonged period of time, which, in a way, he supposed Emmett was. “As a matter of fact, I can’t recall a single time that you ever did.”

  Leaning slightly to the side to see around his taller cousin, Collin peered into the room Emmett was occupying. “Still Spartan as ever, I see.” He grinned. “You can take the man out of the hermit, but you can’t take the hermit out of the man.”

  Emmett shrugged. “It’s just a room. It suits my purposes.”

  Collin nodded. Unlike Jason, Emmett had never been one for creature comforts. He’d never required much. From the time he was old enough to purchase them himself, he owned only a sparse number of things; they never owned him.

  Collin set down the single suitcase he’d brought. “I’ll just leave my things here until I get a room of my own.”

  He’d come to the hotel in Red Rock straight from the airport. It had taken surprisingly little effort to get here. Tentatively, when he’d gone to his C.O., he’d asked for a two-week leave of absence. Colonel Eagleton had been more than happy to grant it to him.

  “I was beginning to think you didn’t have a life outside of the job,” his C.O. had said.

  It was very nearly true. His work had become his life and vice versa. There was no time, no room, for anything else. By design.

  It wasn’t just that the nature of his work took him away from the place where he hung his uniform—a place very much like the one that Emmett was currently in. Collin, like his father before him, had the gift to delve into another person’s mind, to take that person apart, bit by bit and to figure out what made that person act the way he did. Yet Collin had no such gift when it came to himself. Or, more to the point, to the women he interacted with.

  Collin had no doubts that if one of the women he dealt with on a day-to-day basis were to show up on the other side of a Wanted poster or an assignment sheet, he would be able figure out her next move with more than some degree of certainty. However, he also knew that if that same woman were sitting at a restaurant table directly opposite him, she’d leave him clueless.

  He’d long ago come to the conclusion that he had no knack for personal male-female relationships.

  If he’d had, Paula would have stayed.

  Hell, he thought as he watched his cousin put his suitcase inside the closet, Paula would have been his wife by now. He would have known enough to make her his wife instead of remaining engaged for six years and somehow just allowing the status quo to continue unchallenged.

  But maybe there was a reason for that.

  There was so much turmoil packed into his active life that when it came to the personal side of him, he craved peace. Contentment. Something to count on. He supposed wanting that made him seem dull.

  And maybe he was.

  The thought caused his mouth to quirk in a semi-smile. It always did. Anyone knowing the kind of life he led, a life that took him into unfriendly territory on a regular basis, always walking a tightrope and laboring beneath the constant risk of death, wouldn’t have said that he had a dull bone in his body. But he did, if wanting the kind of peace and quiet he only knew secondhand made him dull. The kind of life his parents had led.

  Paula would have given him that kind of life. He’d known that, felt it in his bones. But he’d allowed her to slip right through his fingers.

  Not that the slippage was swift. Paula had been nothing if not patient, determined, he now realized, to wait him out. He’d certainly had a lot of time to make known his feelings about their future. The trouble was, it was always something that he’d figured would keep.

  For them, he’d felt, there was always tomorrow. Except that when tomorrow finally arrived, it saw her on the arm of his best friend. Saying her vows.

  He’d attended the ceremony, wished them both well with all the sincerity he could muster—and then closed up the remaining exposed portion of his heart, mentally declaring himself a failure when it came to relationships.

  He didn’t blame Paula. He put the blame squarely where it belonged. On his own shoulders.

  And he missed Paula like hell, even years after she’d become Mrs. William Pollack.

  Collin roused himself. He had no idea why thoughts of Paula, of their life together before she’d had her fill of empty dreams, was preying on his mind today. It had been a while since he’d thought about her. Not since her anniversary had gone by last month. He supposed maybe it had to do with seeing Emmett again, because Emmett belonged to those days. Days when he had been a lot younger and a lot more hopeful.

  And foolish.

  “So, where do we start?” he asked as he preceded Emmett into the hallway and his cousin closed and locked the hotel room door behind them, slipping the rectangular key card into his pocket. “Do we check in with the locals?”

  Emmett knew that he was referring to the local police and not just the people who might have possibly witnessed something. He shook his dark head. “Not until it’s absolutely necessary.”

  Collin understood perfectly. “Meaning, not until they stumble over us.”

  “Something like that.” A hint of a smile crossed Emmett’s lips, but then it was gone the very next moment. He led the way out into the parking lot and his car, a beat-up old Chevy that traveled as much on faith as it did on gasoline. “I thought we might go see Ryan Fortune. I want you to meet him. I’ll bring you up to speed on what I know on the way.”

  Collin nodded, folding his six-foot frame into the passenger side. “Sounds like the start of a plan.”

  The headaches were blinding now.

  So much so that Ryan Fortune had been forced to finally admit to Lily that he was going to be felled by a death sentence.

  His death sentence.

  There’d been no getting around it. His darling Lily was far too much of a loving wife not to notice that something was horribly wrong and had been getting more so now for months. At first she’d suspected that all this secrecy had to do with another woman’s designs on his affections. When he’d discovered that, he’d known it was time to tell her the truth.

  So he’d sat her down, taken her hands in his and finally told her, as gently as possible, about the inoperable brain tumor that was stealing him away from his family years before he was ready to go.

  They’d held each other and cried. There was nothing else to be done.

  Sixty was old when you were in your twenties. But from where he was standing, it was way too young to call it a day. Or a life.

  But Ryan had no power, no say in the matter. He could only make what was left of it as meaningful as was humanly possible. For himself and, far more importantly, for those he loved.

  The irony of it made him smile.

  He’d stand a lot better chance of succeeding in his goal if these damn headaches didn’t keep insisting on interfering. Of course, if there had been no headaches, there would have been no tumor and no need to press on with such fervor to see that certain things were completed before his end. Such as his charity work.

  And so he pushed on, taking life on like a c
ontender and trying to make it all seem as if it was business as usual. Which meant not putting anything off until tomorrow, because tomorrow, for him, might not even exist.

  It was a bitter pill to swallow. Daily.

  Thinking himself past the pain, Ryan tried valiantly to concentrate on what Emmett Jamison was asking him. He’d only known the young man a short time, but was extremely impressed with Emmett, not to mention extremely grateful. It was Emmett who had put his life on the line, saving Lily from what he now knew had to have been certain death. His Lily had been kidnapped not for money, but to torment him. And the ultimate torment would have meant losing her forever. He might have done just that, if it hadn’t been for Emmett. He owed the man a great deal. More than he could ever hope to repay. He wished he could do something to help Emmett find his remaining brother and bring him to justice. But there wasn’t much he could do.

  “I really don’t know what more I can tell you, Emmett. I never knew Christopher, couldn’t even help to identify his body when they dragged it from Lake Mondo.”

  He addressed his words to both Emmett and the cousin he’d brought with him. The latter was a tall, muscular young man of about thirty-five or so, if he was any judge. The man’s weather-roughened face only added to his rugged appearance.

  Ryan hadn’t been surprised when Emmett told him that his cousin was a career military man. Collin looked the type. It took very little imagination to envision him sliding down a rope out of the sky like some sort of commando.

  He was familiar with the bearing. The young man was quiet, polite, but there was an air of immortality about him. Navy SEALs, the Rangers, all those Special Ops people had the same air. They had to. If they began to believe in their own mortality, in their own demise, they couldn’t accomplish the incredible missions they undertook or face death the way they did, with bravado and a go-to-hell attitude.