Gone Duck

by L. L. Muir

  She headed back to the hangar they’d been so relieved to leave behind. Every ten seconds or so, she glanced back at the plane to make sure Shawn wasn’t boarding without her. But the only reasonable place he could be was inside the little building.

  The hangar’s big doors were now closed, but there was light coming through the window of the man door. She peeked inside and started screaming before she got through the door.

  “Nooo!”

  Dave’s gun was pressed against Shawn’s temple. Two of the Canadian security guys held his arms behind him, presumably binding his hands together. Dave glanced her way, but quickly returned his attention to Shawn.

  “Aw, babe. Why couldn’t you just stay on the plane?”

  “Don’t shoot him, Dave! Please! I’ll do whatever you ask. Just please, don’t. You would never forgive yourself. Whatever you guys are fighting over—”

  “He’s working for Lacrosse,” Shawn growled.

  Macey hid her shock. “Then you were right. I can’t believe it.”

  “I have no choice,” Dave said softly. “He has Allison.”

  Shawn looked sharply at him, past the gun.

  “Who’s Allison?” she asked.

  “My half-sister.” Dave still didn’t dare take his eyes off Shawn. “She’s all I have. You’ll just have to understand.”

  “Let him go,” she said.

  “That’s what I’m trying to do.”

  “Then I’ll help. I’ll stay with him—”

  “No, you won’t. Lacrosse wants you too. And besides, Dorothy needs you to help keep her calm. If she gets too upset, the adrenaline will affect the microchip. Now they’re saying too much excitement may kill her.”

  Shawn’s brows knit together. “That’s why Lacrosse never came barging through the door. He didn’t want to shock her.”

  Dave nodded and took a step back, though his gun remained aimed at Shawn’s head. It was the scene in the hotel room all over again, but the roles were reversed.

  “It’s why he released me. To bring you in and bring Dorothy back without upsetting her. The doctors won’t be able to salvage anything if she dies first.”

  Shawn shook his head gently. “You’ve been under his thumb this whole time?”

  “Until about a month ago. He resurrected me so I could help hunt you down.” Dave sounded tired, sad. “I told them to bug Linda Lyman’s line. I was sure you would try to contact her at some point. Imagine our surprise when Dorothy called all by herself.”

  “Your idea?” Macey’s heart hurt. “Dave! How could you?”

  He cleared his throat. “Get back on the plane, babe.” The emotion was gone.

  She wanted to deck him for calling her babe a hundred times too many, but she wanted one more favor.

  “Can I at least say goodbye?”

  He smirked. “Sure. You got him?”

  The officers nodded.

  She walked the ten feet that separated her from Shawn, then stood between him and the gun. Dave moved to the left and tsk’d. “I’m doing you a favor, babe. Don’t be clever.”

  She ignored him and looked into Shawn’s eyes. “See? We knew it was too good to be true.”

  He chuckled. “So we’re prepared for this. It’s easier that way.”

  She nudged his knee with the backpack. She glanced down at it.

  Shawn nodded once. “Kiss me.”

  She did. And though she tried, she was unable to communicate anything but her worry. Finally, she stopped trying. “Don’t try to come after me or Dorothy Jean. Just run. Find a place where Lacrosse can’t find you. If I can get away, I’ll do the same. Hopefully, no one will find me, either.”

  He rolled his eyes. “You give up too easily, Mace. You remember that ace in the hole and you play it when you need to, okay?”

  “Even if I leave it with you?”

  “For safe keeping,” he whispered. “Now start to walk away.”

  She pecked him once more on the lips, then did as he said.

  “Wait!”

  She turned back, confused.

  “Let me keep those panties, would you?”

  Dave grunted. “Gross.”

  She ignored him and stepped back to set the backpack at his feet. “Only if you promise to wash them.”

  “Yeah,” Shawn said. “If I get the chance.”

  She inhaled deeply, hoping a little oxygen would help her keep it together. She was leaving him money, a gun, and the duck. One duck more than Jason Bourne had. He was going to be fine.

  “Come on, babe. Get on the plane. I’m doing him a favor here. Lacrosse wanted his head. And I’m risking pissing off the devil to let him go.”

  “Then why are you?”

  “Because. We were partners once. And it’s just too hard to kill a partner. At least it is for me.”

  ***

  At the hangar door, Macey turned back, hoping for one more silent communication with Shawn, but all she got was a glimpse of him struggling against the hold of the Canadians before Dave pulled her away. She prayed for a miracle with each step she took toward the waiting jet, with every stair she climbed, but nothing happened.

  “I’ve got injectable tranquilizers for Dorothy,” Dave said, “in case she gets too worked up about any of this. We’re lucky she’s survived the day as it is.”

  He led her to a seat. “Strap in.” Then he turned suddenly to Kofford, across the aisle, and shoved the tip of his gun against the man’s chest, over his heart. He pressed a finger to his lips and nodded toward the door, where one of the pilots prepared to seal it shut.

  “All in?” the man asked.

  “Yeah. This is it,” Dave said over his shoulder.

  Kofford gave him a black look while the pilot returned to the cockpit. “Where’s Parker?”

  Dave exhaled in a huff. “Dead…in a couple of minutes.”

  Macey gasped. Dave ignored her. She looked out the little window next to her, but there was nothing to see. The man door of the hangar was closed. The two black security SUVs hadn’t moved. She scrambled across the aisle and flipped up the blind, but the angle was wrong. No security guards. No movement. No Shawn.

  She lunged at Dave. “You bastard! You said you couldn’t kill a partner.” She tried to reach his face, to make sure the man never smiled again, but he held her wrists. The butt of his gun ground into her flesh but she didn’t care. She just wanted to hurt him until he took the words back, until he told her he’d lied, that Shawn was going to be fine.

  Dave shrugged. “I couldn’t kill my partner. But I’m sure those Canadians won’t have a problem with it.”

  She shrieked and tried to wrench her wrist free so she could try to take his gun, but it was no use. Dave’s hands held her as easily as if she were a child throwing a tantrum. Kofford’s arms came around her and pulled her backward and Dave finally released her.

  “Get her into a seatbelt,” he said, gesturing with his weapon, “but don’t hurt her.”

  “Bastard!” she hissed.

  Kofford set her in front of a seat, then pressed her down into it with a hand on her chest. “Stay.” The seatbelt light came on and the plane started to move. He bent over her and locked her seatbelt across her lap. “I mean it. Stay. There’s nothing you can do now except hurt yourself, do you understand?”

  She glared into his face and said nothing.

  He stepped toward the seat that faced her, but must have thought better of it and moved back to the seat he’d been in. “Lacrosse will kill your sister for this,” he snarled at Dave. “He wanted Parker alive.”

  Dave snorted. “So he could have a taste of Lacrosse’s hospitality? He’s better off dead.” He backed into a seat on the other side of the aisle and kept the gun trained on Kofford. “Lacrosse will just have to settle for the two I’m bringing back.”

  He looked at her then, regret written all over his face. Then, in a blink, it was gone. When the plane abruptly gathered speed, he finally lowered the weapon, tipped it down into a drink holder
, and put on his own seatbelt.

  Her mind was so focused on what might be happening back in the hanger that she hardly noticed the thrill of take-off. But her stomach noticed, so she grabbed a sick bag and prepared to hurl.

  You always say you’re going to be sick, but you never are, she could hear Shawn say. And he would have been right. She flattened the sack and slid it back in its pocket. Who are you now? At this minute, Macey, who are you?

  The question made her smile, but the answer broke her heart. She was just her. Not Morty, not Keefer, just her. And she was completely alone, except for the echo of Shawn’s voice in her head.

  Tears gathered behind her eyeballs and she couldn’t stop them from coming. She sobbed silently, refusing to give her enemies the satisfaction of knowing how badly she hurt. She prayed too, promising God he could take anything else away from her, that she’d willingly trade places with Dave’s sister, if he’d just make it not be true, if he’d let Shawn get away from the Canadians.

  Out of everything she’d lost, and of all the things Lacrosse might have in store for her, none of it mattered if Shawn was dead.

  Half an hour later, her eyes and throat burned from all the salt wrenched out of her body and consolidated into her tears. She felt like a hollow shell ready to crumble into a pile of sand if anyone so much as looked her way.

  It couldn’t be true. It just couldn’t.

  Another memory echoed in her head again and her heart tripped.

  If they tell you I’m dead, don’t believe them.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Macey sat in her butter-soft leather seat, flying better than first class for once in her life, and couldn’t appreciate it. She’d been given an expiration date, of sorts. Whether or not Shawn had been able to slip away from the Canadians, he was hundreds of miles behind her. So if anyone was going to save Dorothy Jean’s butt, and her own, it would have to be her.

  Since Dave wouldn’t have divulged their real destination to Shawn, there was no way they were headed to Belgium. But wherever their true destination, he’d made it clear that she was to be handed over to Lacrosse, a guy who was apparently so unpleasant Dave had once asked Shawn to kill him rather than let Lacrosse get his hands on him.

  Great.

  Now the monster had Dave’s half-sister, and Dave was so motivated by what he knew would be happening to her, he was willing to betray anyone in order to save her.

  Oh, yeah. Dave had a savior complex, all right. Only it was selective. Save his sister, spare his partner—maybe—but anyone further down on his friends and family list were expendable.

  Realistically, she should be falling to pieces anticipating Lacrosse’s favorite methods of torture, but she’d faced the man before and survived. She set aside the fact that she’d escaped only because Shawn had come to her rescue—she wanted to keep the facts simple. She’d survived him before. She could survive him again.

  What she needed were more positive thoughts to keep her from worrying about Shawn.

  There were some things she knew, and some things she hoped, but together they made a nice little pile. It was a fact, she was lucky to have survived as long as she had, considering everything they’d been through since Shawn had blown through the wall between their apartments. “A day above ground is a good day” was a philosophy straight from the book of Dorothy Jean Lyman, a woman who was also living on borrowed time and did not bitch about it.

  Another plus in her eclectic arsenal of positives was something engrained in her psyche from all the novels she’d written. When all else was lost, if the hero dug deep, he’d find a way to save himself. It was only a rule of fiction, true, but she wasn’t going to be nit-picky.

  She also knew who the enemy was. A day ago, she didn’t. Now she knew never to turn her back on Dave again. Getting Dorothy Jean to do the same would be tricky without telling her the truth, that Dave had been working for Lacrosse all along. Of course it was dangerous to upset the woman, but she was going to catch on when the plane landed and they whisked her off to the same research facility she’d broken out of. Lacrosse wouldn’t waste any time. There would probably be an ambulance waiting…

  That meant they were headed for Virginia!

  Another positive—she knew where the enemy camp was. And it was an easy guess that Shawn would have figured it out too. Unless they could pick up a team of researchers and move them, along with their equipment, to wherever they wanted them…

  No. It would make much more sense to take Dorothy Jean to them.

  Macey wished she could just call Shawn and talk to him, but that wasn’t possible. Shawn might not even exist anymore. He had a gun and enough money to bribe a dozen officials, but he’d also had his hands tied behind his back by men who may or may not have been paid to shoot him.

  She forced back her tears and held onto the hope that Dave had only been trying to appease Kofford when he’d said the Canadians would kill Shawn. Maybe he’d honestly intended to have Shawn released, but couldn’t let Kofford know, for fear the guy would send off a text to tattle on him. Once it was too late for Kofford to find Shawn and drag him onto the plane, Dave had stopped pointing his gun on the bigger man, so that had to mean something. She just didn’t know what.

  But she couldn’t count on Shawn getting away. And the cold truth was, she’d be better off if she could stop thinking about Hot Neighbor and start focusing on a plan.

  In the war of McDaniels vs. Lacrosse, she’d lost a man. It didn’t mean that he was dead, just removed from the board. And at the moment, what she really needed, was an army.

  ***

  It took her twenty minutes to come up with a plan. It was pretty out there, but she wasn’t going to waste time coming up with a new one. She guessed it would take another three or four hours to reach Virginia since the jet would fly much faster than a 747, but since there was always a chance they would land somewhere else, and sooner, she couldn’t afford to wait.

  First, Dorothy Jean.

  Dorothy Jean Lyman was tough. How many times had she already proven it? How much adrenaline had pumped through those old veins and not killed her? Maybe the doctors were wrong. Maybe another ace in the hole was the fact that Dorothy Jean could handle a little excitement when the enemy believed otherwise.

  Shawn had moved the woman in the middle of the night, and she was no worse for wear. She’d escaped the Boob Center and evaded a bunch of librarians to be locked inside the Rexburg Library late at night. She’d been right by Shawn’s side when he’d broken into a cabin, stolen a truck, and been pulled over at the roadblock at the Washington State Line. She’d hidden at IHOP and survived to find herself under house arrest, basically, at the Davenport. And as her memories came back to her, even heartbreaking ones, she’d held up just fine.

  And finally, they’d gotten in and out of Calgary by the skin of their teeth, and Dorothy Jean had been just as nervous as the rest of them. She was no dummy. She knew they might have ended up behind bars, if only for the bogus passports—even carrying them was probably a Federal offense—and all the woman needed was a nap afterward.

  But was the old bird tough enough to handle hearing that Shawn had been left behind and her beloved David, who had just returned from the dead, was now on the wrong side?

  Macey looked at Dave, dozing in his seat at the front of the opposite aisle, facing her. She hoped he never got another good night’s rest knowing there was a slim chance Shawn might be out there looking for him. She leaned to her left and watched Kofford unlock his phone for the hundredth time since they’d taken off. Too bad she hadn’t been able to get away from him in the beginning. If she’d run fast enough, she might have never known Dave was in the van.

  But what got her moving this time was the image of Lacrosse’s disturbing smile when he was told that Dave had accomplished his goal. Dorothy Jean and Macey, at least, were about to be served up on a platter.

  She couldn’t wait to wipe that look off his face.

  She released her seatbelt a
nd stepped into the aisle, then stretched. Dave’s eyes popped open, but he said nothing, just watched her like he had every right to watch her. She narrowed her eyes at him until he looked away.

  She used the restroom in the narrow hallway, and when she emerged, she turned to the left, toward the private cabin, instead of heading back to her seat.

  Dave was behind her immediately. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “To check on Dorothy Jean.” When she took another step, he shadowed her.

  She couldn’t let him follow.

  “Sometimes she is…incontinent…and needs help getting cleaned up. But if you want to…” She shrugged. “I mean, you looked after her for five months, right? She’s comfortable having your assistance…”

  “Five and a half,” he said. “But I’m sure she’d rather have a woman help her. Just…be careful what you say about Shawn,” he whispered. “If you have to tell her we left him behind, say he’s going to meet up with us, to throw off Lacrosse. Anything more might upset her. And we can’t risk that.”

  She sighed. “I don’t know. She’s a pretty clever woman. And she knows when she’s being lied to.”

  His eyes flared and something foreign looked back at her. It was gone just as fast, not a trace of it left in his eyes. “Then you’d better be a good actress. Lacrosse won’t be pleased if we show up with a dead woman. And pleasing that man is about to become your number one goal in life.”

  He looked away like he was suddenly sick to his stomach. They hit a patch of turbulence and he headed back to his seat, grasping chairs and bumping back and forth as he went.

  Macey watched him go, replaying that look on his face—the one she hadn’t recognized. But now she knew it had been terror. Dave was terrified of facing Lacrosse again, and in spite of it, he’d left Shawn behind, knowing his boss would be pissed.

  With her next breath, her heart lightened. If Dave was willing to see Shawn dead, he would have handed his body over to Lacrosse, hoping to appease him. So he had to have intended to let him go!