Bourbon Creme Killer: Book 9 in The INNcredibly Sweet Series

by Summer Prescott

  “I’m Izzy,” she said tentatively, taking a small sip of the strong brew and loving it. The hot dark liquid felt glorious in her parched throat.

  “Norm,” he nodded at her introduction. Clearly he was a man of few words.

  “How did I get here, Norm?” she asked, not certain if she wanted to hear his answer.

  “Found ya in the woods, out cold. Thought you were dead at first. You were pretty close. Lost a lotta blood,” he recounted, flipping the sausage patties, which landed with a hiss on the skillet.

  “How long have I been here?”

  “Bout two weeks,” he shrugged.

  “Two weeks?” she was astonished.

  “Yep, you were feverish and delirious, slippin’ in and out of the real world for quite a while. I used some Native remedies on ya, and some pain relievers, burnt the infection out, and hoped for the best.”

  “Burnt the…” Izzy swallowed, turning a light shade of greenish grey.

  “Your hand, little girl,” he pointed at her left hand and she looked down. Seeing the homemade bandages on what was left of her pinky finger, she was suddenly assaulted by memories of what had happened, and her head swam a bit.

  “Easy now, hold steady girl, you’ll be all right,” Norm watched her from his spot at the stove.

  Izzy shivered and swallowed, determined not to fall apart.

  “Thank you… for helping me,” she said, suddenly embarrassed when she realized the potential extent of the things that this grizzled old man must’ve had to do for her over the course of the last two weeks.

  “You were wounded. Couldn’t just leave ya to die, wouldn’t be right,” he replied, staring intently at the pan in front of him. “Think you can eat?”

  Izzy’s stomach growled in response and she nodded.

  “Lemme git ya over to the table and you can give it a try,” Norm directed, reaching for her good hand.

  She slowly rose to her feet, her head throbbing slightly, her knees weak and threatening to buckle. Norm put his hand at the small of her back to steady her while still holding her right hand. He smelled of wood smoke and sausage, and she found that somehow comforting. They made their way to the crude, hand-hewn table and chairs and she sat, exhausted from the small effort. Norm put a plate in front of her and she saw that he’d used his spatula to mince the sausage patty into tiny pieces.

  “Hope ya ain’t a leftie,” he said, handing her a fork.

  “I’m not,” Izzy replied, spearing a tiny piece of sausage and putting it in her mouth.

  It may have been just because of extreme hunger, but the morsel of food was the best sausage she’d ever tasted, and she chewed slowly, savoring the crunchy spicy goodness of it.

  “That’s it,” Norm nodded. “Take it slow so you don’t sick it back up.”

  “Have I been… sick since I’ve been here?”

  “More than once. It happens. I had to feed you broth cuz you weren’t conscious enough to eat real food.”

  “I could’ve died,” Izzy murmured. “You saved my life.”

  “I thought you were gonna,” he nodded. “Takin’ care of ya was easier than buryin’ ya woulda been,” he cracked a smile.

  Izzy smiled back.

  “Where are we?” she asked for the second time.

  “Idaho. Part of the state called the primitive area. No cars allowed.”

  She stared at him.

  “Idaho?”

  “Yep.”

  “I’ve never heard of a primitive area.”

  “That’s kinda the point,” he blinked at her.

  “Oh. Well… how do I get out of here?”

  “Condition yer in? Ya don’t. At least not ’til yer healthy enough to hike a fair distance.”

  “How did I get here in the first place?”

  “After I found ya, I made a stretcher outta some limbs and rope and dragged ya here. Took me a coupla days.”

  “I owe you my life, thank you,” Izzy bit her lip.

  “No thanks needed. Just work on gettin’ better and stronger so we can get ya outta here before the snow flies,” he advised, shoveling bites of sausage into his mouth.

  “I will,” she promised, taking another bite and washing it down with coffee. “Where are my clothes?”

  “Yonder,” Norm pointed with his fork to a neatly folded pile sitting on a shelf over the bed. “You’ll want to get cleaned up, I imagine, so I’ll heat up some shower water after breakfast.”

  “Thank you. Thank you so much… for everything,” Izzy felt tears spring to her eyes.

  “Ain’t nothin,” he replied gruffly, taking his empty plate to the small sink and rinsing it. “You’ll have some hot water in about half an hour.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Spencer and Janssen stood behind the cover of trees and shrubs at the edge of the tree line which bordered the compound. The sight of the squat grey building provoked negative reactions in both of them, and the thought that Izzy was within its walls filled Spencer with a powerful rage that he had to stifle in order to think straight.

  “Hey, check this out,” Janssen was staring down at a particular spot on a leafy bush.

  “What?” Spencer whispered, moving closer. He looked down and saw what Janssen had discovered. “Blood trail,” he commented, his stomach dropping.

  “Yup. If we get in there and she’s not there, we’ll at least know where to pick up her trail. She’s one spunky little character if she gave Steve and his boys the slip.”

  “Yeah, she’s tough, but she’s also bleeding.”

  “You gotta focus, man. We’ve got no way of knowing that she’s the one who’s bleeding. Steve’s guys could’ve snagged a rabbit for all we know,” Janssen said in a low voice.

  Spencer gave him a look. They both knew that the likelihood of the blood trail being from Izzy was more probable.

  “Let’s wait until dark to get inside. Steve probably isn’t even here if Izzy escaped, and his guys will almost certainly be asleep.”

  From having spent time at the facility in the past, the Marines knew the coverage area of the security cameras, and planned a route to get inside without being followed by electronic eyes. They knew where the security staff worked and slept, and they knew where Steve’s private quarters were located. The plan was to incapacitate the security staff first and then descend upon Steve Arnold’s room before he knew what was happening, if he was even on the premises at all.

  To kill time until nightfall, Spencer and Janssen followed the blood trail into the woods, getting a sense of the direction that Izzy had taken.

  “Looking at the spatter patterns that she left, it looks like she was moving pretty fast,” Janssen observed.

  “She runs every morning, so she’s in good shape.”

  “That’ll help her odds of survival.”

  They came to the base of a tree where the blood was pooled a bit, and noted that several saplings had been hacked down nearby, and there were drag marks on the forest floor, leading away from the tree and ending the blood trail.

  “Well, unless your girl made a stretcher out of saplings and dragged it behind her, somebody’s got her,” Janssen mused.

  “Let’s hope it’s someone with good intentions,” Spencer’s jaw flexed. “Let’s get back to the compound to make sure she’s not there, and as soon as we’ve taken care of the guards and Steve, we’ll follow the drag marks and find her.”

  “You got it,” Janssen nodded, heading back toward the tree line at a fast clip, Spencer on his heels.

  ***

  Steve Arnold was livid. Izzy Gilmore had been his bargaining chip, the one thing that would force Spencer Bengal into accepting his assignment, which would earn Steve some much-needed brownie points with Command.

  “You had one job,” he raged, after packaging Izzy’s finger up and sending it off to Echo’s store, in the hands of a trusted employee, to make certain that it would get Spencer’s attention. “All you had to do was feed her and keep her here until my operative
arrived. How hard is that? And yet you managed to screw it up,” he screamed in the guard’s face, spittle flying.

  Steve very rarely lost his cool, and when he did, people had a habit of disappearing or dying, so the guard should have been trembling in his boots, yet he wasn’t.

  “Are you listening to me?” he raged on, red-faced, a vein on his forehead pulsing.

  “No,” the guard replied mildly. “I’m done listening to you.”

  Before Steve could react, he felt hard, cold steel against his temple and sensed, rather than heard, a finger squeezing the trigger of a handgun, millimeters from his grey matter. Another twitch and the gun would fire. Rather than replying immediately, his fury turned swiftly to cold calculation and he assessed his situation. Because his captive had been a small female, he’d only left one operative in charge of her care. Now, with the unknown gunman, there were at least two operatives on site. He was outnumbered, but he doubted seriously that he was outsmarted.

  “What do you want?” he asked coolly, every last trace of authoritarian hostility absent from his voice.

  “We want out,” the guard in front of him said, simply. “We’re done taking orders, putting our lives on the line for causes we don’t believe in, and never having anything close to what resembles a normal life. We’ve more than covered our tours of duty and we want out. New identities and a new start, non-negotiable, and we’re not going to release you until you make it happen.”

  “Command will never go for it. It’s out of my hands,” Steve replied reasonably.

  “They will if you convince them that the program isn’t effective, that you’ve failed, that they need to take a new direction.”

  “If I say anything remotely like that, they’re going to know that it’s under duress,” he snickered.

  Steve had a point, everyone who knew him knew that he had supreme self-confidence which often crossed the line into arrogance. Admitting defeat was not within his emotional framework. The gunman behind him finally spoke.

  “If you don’t convince them, the only thing left of you will be a fine pink mist,” he growled. “We’ll be out of here under a new name long before Command even realizes you’re missing. Either way, we win. You get to choose whether we win and you live, or we win and you die. I’m happy either way.”

  “Smitty… I should have known,” he remarked, recognizing the gunman’s voice. “You really think you’re going to get away with this?”

  “One way or another, yes. Absolutely, we’re going to get away with this,” the eyes of the guard in front of him were like chips of flint.

  Steve studied him for a long moment and knew that he had to buy himself some time to think.

  “I’ll need some time to come up with what I’m going to say to Command, as well as an alternate plan that I can propose to take the place of the black ops program. They would expect nothing less, and I have to sound legit if this is going to work. Give me forty-eight hours.”

  “You have twenty-four, and you’re going to spend it in solitary, with no means of communication.”

  They made Steve strip down to his skivvies and searched him for any weapons or communication devices. Finding none, they put him in the cell from which he’d extracted Izzy’s finger. There was dried blood on the lock, the bars, and the floor that no one had bothered to clean up. He couldn’t imagine the disorganized mess that black ops would become without his leadership. He knew that he had to figure out a way to neutralize these two hostile operatives, and wished that he’d known what he would be walking into when he came back.

  ***

  Wearing night vision goggles, Spencer and Janssen made their way toward the compound. They’d been observing it for several hours and had seen no one come in or out. Their best guess was that one or two operatives would be on site, and perhaps Steve Arnold as well. Whether or not Steve would care enough about Izzy to send a search team out to look for her, assuming that she actually had escaped, was anyone’s guess.

  The duo moved quickly toward their objective, hoping that the alarm code for entrances hadn’t changed. Janssen scanned the area around the door, not seeing any new hookups indicating that it was actively armed for security, he opened the door. Izzy had just happened to find the one route to safety that would allow her to exit in secrecy.

  They moved silently into the stairwell, heading downstairs toward the crew area. Slipping along the walls like mere shadows, they took off their goggles when they approached the area where any active operatives should be. The halls were lit here, and the cameras were fully functional, so they had to move fast and hope to surprise any on-site personnel before they noticed their presence.

  Janssen peered into the lounge area of the crew station and saw two operatives sitting on a couch, with their backs to the door. He looked over his shoulder at Spencer, held up two fingers and pointed at the door. Spencer nodded briefly, and signaled Janssen to move forward. Bursting through the door, the Marines surprised Smitty and the guard, incapacitating them with choke holds before they knew what hit them. With his ever-present roll of duct tape, Janssen secured both men so that they wouldn’t be a cause for concern, and he and Spencer went in search of Steve.

  They found their nemesis kicked back on the cot in his cell, looking confident and content.

  “Smitty brought you two in on this?” he asked, hands folded behind his head. “I underestimated him.”

  Spencer and Janssen exchanged a look, which Steve didn’t miss.

  “Wait a minute, you’re not in on this, are you?” he sat up, frowning.

  “You’re talking gibberish, man,” Janssen drawled, chewing on his ever-present toothpick.

  “Get me out of here, and I’ll explain,” he ordered.

  “I think I kind of like you in there,” Spencer smirked.

  “If you’d like some information about your pretty little girlfriend, you’ll be getting me out of here. The more time you waste here, the more danger she’s in. Up to you,” Steve shrugged.

  “Don’t play me,” Spencer shot back. “You don’t have any more idea of where she is than we do.”

  “So you’re not the one who rescued her,” Steve pounced on the Marine’s admission. “Good to know. Now, what are you doing in here with me, rather than out there looking for her?”

  “Bargaining,” Janssen replied.

  “What makes you think you’re in a position to bargain?” Steve snickered.

  “I ain’t the one in a cage, man,” he shrugged.

  “I’ll be out of here soon enough.”

  “Really?” Spencer raised an eyebrow.

  “It’s only a matter of time before Command sends a team to find me.”

  “Bull,” Janssen chuckled. “Command is used to you disappearing for weeks at a time. There’s no time crunch for us. You give us what we want or you can stay in that hamster cage for a good long time.”

  “You ops idiots are all beginning to sound alike,” Steve sighed. “What do you want?”

  “We’ll discuss it with you while we’re on the road. Hang tight, we’ll get you some clothes, and we’ll be out of here within the hour.”

  “On the road?” This revelation took Steve by surprise. “We’re going somewhere?”

  “Yeah, buddy, we’re going on a rescue op and you’re going to be a good boy or we’ll shoot you and leave you for the bears,” Janssen said casually, turning to go.

  “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  “Suit yourself, but we’re going to turn the heat off when we go.”

  ***

  Steve Arnold trudged along behind Janssen, knowing that if he did anything to thwart the plans of his two most dangerous operatives, Spencer would incapacitate him immediately. He’d agreed to come along after they threatened to leave him in the cell indefinitely, the look in their eyes cluing him in to the fact that they weren’t bluffing.

  The two Marines had memorized the path that the blood trail had taken through the woods, and they followed it, wearing night
vision goggles. Steve was forced to rely on keeping Janssen in his sights, unaided by goggles. When they arrived at the spot where the saplings had been cut, Janssen had to watch the ground much more carefully in order to follow the drag path, but whoever had dragged Izzy away hadn’t bothered to cover their tracks, so they made good time, arriving at Norm’s cabin just before sunrise.

  The halted in order to observe the small structure from a safe distance away, shielded by trees. When a gruff voice ordered them to put their hands up and turn around slowly, they were taken aback.

  “What do you boys think you’re doin’ here on my property?” Norm demanded, training a loaded shotgun on the trio.

  “It’s actually government property,” Steve drawled, impatient at being threatened by a civilian.

  “No worries, old timer,” Janssen replied, shooting Steve a nasty look. “We ain’t here to cause no trouble. We’re just looking for a friend of ours, Izzy Gilmore.”

  “Friend, huh?” Norm eyed them suspiciously, not lowering his weapon. “You boys the kind of friend that would cut off a ladies’ finger and leave her to fend for herself in the forest?”

  Spencer slowly turned his head to gaze at Steve, murderous rage coloring his vision.

  “No way, man. We came to rescue her from those guys and found that she’d already escaped,” Janssen answered easily.

  “What guys?” the mountain man demanded.

  “Military types. There’s some kind of facility not too far from here. That’s where she escaped from.”

  “How do I know that you’re not the ones who hurt her?”

  Janssen inclined his head toward Spencer. “Take him with you and ask her. I’ll stay here with this dirtbag and wait for you.”

  No one in Spencer’s life had ever seen Janssen in person, aside from him making an appearance as a waiter for Echo and Kel’s wedding dinner, and he wanted to keep it that way. Sending Spencer in to rescue Izzy meant that he’d be left to make certain that Steve complied with their request for freedom, and he’d use whatever means necessary. Spencer often acted as a buffer, using physical violence as a last resort. Janssen was highly skilled in the application of specific force in order to obtain objectives, and Steve knew that he wouldn’t hesitate to practice his craft.