CHAPTER NINE
Charlie pulled up to the Laurence cabin and saw Rafe hanging from the porch roof a good fifteen feet off the ground. Her heart leapt into her throat. Was the fool trying to kill himself?
Then she realized she was breathless for a completely different reason. The crazy man was doing pull-ups on one of the side beams supporting the porch roof. He was wearing nothing but a tee-shirt, despite the cold. And, my God, the man was ripped.
She had no idea how long she’d been sitting there watching him, but Happy was now barking to get out. Stop drooling, Charlie, and get to it. She got her things and climbed out of the car.
Rafe swung back and down to the porch deck with a thump. “’Morning,” he said.
“’Morning. Not afraid of heights, I take it.” She indicated the drop-off on the other side of the porch.
He shrugged. “Didn’t give it much thought.” He slipped a sweatshirt over his head. Thank you, God. “Why are you here? It’s Saturday, isn’t it? Or did I miss something?”
He might have been joking, but it didn’t sound much like it. There was something wrong. Even Happy had avoided him and was already with Del in front of the television.
“No, you’ve got it right. Saturday. All day.” And good morning to you, too. “You okay?”
“I’m fine. Del had a rough night last night, though. We didn’t get much sleep.” He came closer, so close she could feel his heat in the frigid morning air, catch the scent of clean sweat. He shrugged, dismissing that subject. “Was there something you wanted to talk to me about?”
She almost lost her nerve. He seemed so distant, so tightly wound this morning. And what she wanted was beyond the scope of what they’d agreed upon. But maybe Rafe needed it more than Del.
“Masey is having Winter Festival this weekend—you know, with food and crafts and music. Downtown, on Main Street. I thought maybe it would be a good idea to take Del into town for a bit, get him off this mountain and let him be around folks for a while. Maybe you’d like to join us.”
“No.” The man actually looked like he would turn and leave her standing on the porch.
She stepped quickly to block his retreat. “Can I ask why not?”
Oh, it was clear this was not the day to ask anything of Rafe Laurence. “The outside world is not a safe place for Del. He’s not good around people.”
She took a breath and let a wave of frustration sweep through her before she answered. Rafe surely had his reasons for thinking his father was an ogre. Family caregivers often got burned out and stuck in their relationships with their charges. But this isolation was no good for either of them, and it was her job to break them out of it.
“Is it that the world is not a safe place, or that he perceives it to be unsafe?” Rafe’s frown only grew more intimidating, but she pushed on. “We’ve given him a good base of routine and grounding here in his home over the last few weeks. But if Del is going to retain his social skills, he needs to be in social settings, at least sometimes. This is a small-town gathering. He’ll see a few dozen folks at most—friendly ones. It’s a good place to practice being with people. He’ll never do that sitting here all day.” I could say the same for you, Mr. Strong Silent Type.
Rafe took a step toward her, and suddenly he seemed so much bigger. Stronger. More. It took everything she had to stand her ground.
“You think he can handle it, but you haven’t seen him when he’s at his worst.” There was hurt behind all that anger, she could see it in Rafe’s eyes, though his expression showed nothing but a smoldering control. “He has fits—complete nitro-brain meltdowns, where he doesn’t know who or where he is. How friendly will all your townfolk be when they see that?” He stopped, took a breath, and started to turn away again. “And the world is a more dangerous place than you know.”
Nitro-brain? “Rafe. My close friend’s husband died from complications of Alzheimer’s just a year ago. At least four families in town are dealing with a family member with dementia right now. Another two families have children with mental disabilities. Several have family members with emotional problems severe enough to need ongoing treatment. I think it’s fair to say that even if Del lost it in the middle of the street, folks wouldn’t freak out. There would be a lot of sympathy for your father—and for you, if you’d only take it.” She watched his reaction, which was to clench his jaw. Stiff-necked as they come!
Since he didn’t say anything, she went on. “But I don’t think Del is going to melt down. I think he’ll be fine. I’ll be there, and so will Happy. We’ll let him rest this morning, and only go for a little while this afternoon. If you go, too, it will be even better.”
“Tell me again why you think it’s a good idea to take a frail old man out of his safe zone into a street full of noisy strangers where you can’t protect him.” Rafe had his hands on his hips and one booted foot up on the threshold of the sliding glass door, a pose that should have seemed casual, but instead held a tight twist of tension. And his speech was full of the language of war. What was he so afraid of?
“Well, that is exactly my point, Rafe,” Charlie said. “If he were to get out a little bit, they wouldn’t be strangers. And there’s no need for me—for us—to protect him in this situation. These are my friends and neighbors we’re talking about.” She grasped for an analogy that might make sense to him. “No warrior fights alone, right? He has allies. These could be yours.”
Rafe dropped his head and stared at the decking, considering. She had time to notice how his dark hair had a tendency to curl where it was longer on the top of his head, how the scruff of a beard had shaded his jaw ahead of his razor this morning, how the sweatshirt he’d thrown on only accentuated the muscles underneath.
Then he looked up, and there was something in his sharp gray gaze she couldn’t interpret. “Okay. But only for an hour, and we all go. If I see anything I don’t like, we’re out of there, no arguments, understand?”
No arguments? I’ll give you an argument, you arrogant ass! She could feel her face heating as she fought to keep that thought—and the unaccustomed anger it reflected—to herself. His observant eyes caught that detail before she could hide it. One corner of his mouth lifted in a smirk.
She straightened her spine. “Fine. You won’t see anything you won’t like, I’m sure.” Unless it’s me ready to give you a full McIntyre beat-down. “We’ll leave after lunch.”
He grunted. “Fine.”
“Good.” She turned and went into the cabin ahead of him before she said something she would regret.
“What the hell are we doin’ here anyhow?” Sonny scowled at the sidewalks lined with booths, at the banner running from one side of the street to the other announcing “Second Annual Winter Festival,” at the throngs of people holding cups of last fall’s cider or freshly made hot chocolate. He glanced at his partner and shook his head. “Not like the boss needs a bodyguard in this crowd.”
The boss was busy playing doctor at the Masey Pain Clinic booth, taking folks’ blood pressure for free and passing out brochures. He was always hungry for new business, new scripts to write, new cases of chronic back pain or arthritis or workman’s comp. Just as long as he could skim a little off the top—or maybe a lot off the top—and sell it on the side. Doc Rainey was a master of insurance manipulation and the free market.
“We’re supposed to be watchin’ the crowd for fresh meat,” his companion said. “Doc says people come out for these things that don’t show for much else. So keep your eyes peeled and if you see somebody, send ’em his way.”
Sonny blew out a breath. Must be half the county here, packed into the narrow Main Street, even though the day had turned cloudy and blustery. How was he supposed to know who was a potential patient or not? Besides, that wasn’t what he’d signed on for. Bust a few heads, yeah, he could do that. Maybe even break into a house or a pharmacy once in a while. But rope someone into the death spiral he found himself in, hooked on Doc’s oxy? Left a bad taste in his mouth.
His partner elbowed him in the ribs. “Like that one there. See? Looks like your ex has a new client. Go pay her a visit and send her to see the doc.”
He followed the man’s nod and saw Charlie McIntyre strolling through the crowd on the other side of the street. She was pushing an old man in a wheelchair who looked pretty far gone—yep, he’d be a ripe one for Doc—but she had the dog with her. And that guy he’d met on the mountain. Sonofabitch!
He felt a shove. “What’re you waitin’ for, boy?” his partner said. “Go do your job!”
Sonny cursed and stepped off the sidewalk. It would do no good to tell the man Charlie absolutely refused to let her clients have anything to do with Doc Rainey. He’d tried before to push her in Doc’s direction and had his ass handed to him for it. But, okay, he’d give it another try, if only because Doc Rainey was no one to fool with either.
The little group was headed back toward the town parking lot; he had to hustle to catch up with them. “Hey, Charlie!” He put on his best Sunday smile.
She turned at the sound of his voice, and her expression was cold, controlled. Despite the set of her shoulders and the defiant lift of her chin, fear still lingered in her eyes. He’d put it there, he knew that. He hadn’t meant to, but things hadn’t been easy when he’d come back from deployment. He thought they would get better, but they only got worse. Charlie had been a convenient target—okay, hell, sometimes she just made him lose his mind—and there wasn’t any way to fix what went wrong between them.
“We’re on our way home, Sonny.” She started to push off down the sidewalk. “My client needs his rest.” True enough, the old man was nodding off in his wheelchair under a blanket.
Still, Sonny ignored all that, stepped into her path and addressed the man with her. “Well, hey, neighbor. I looked you up. Name’s Laurence, isn’t it?”
Her friend looked like he was chewing on a mouthful of nails. “Milsap.”
Charlie was glaring at him, her gaze full of fire. “You always seem to be in my way, Sonny. What is it you want?” Beside her, the dog stood rigid and quivering, staring at him like he might like to rip Sonny’s throat out.
He shrugged. “Boss sent me over with an invite. Thought your client might want a free blood pressure check.”
“He oughta know by now I don’t send any clients to his oxy mill.” She tossed her deep red hair over her shoulder. Sonny loved it when she did that. “I’ve told him often enough, you’d think he’d get the message.”
“Just doin’ my job, Charlie.”
“Told you before, you need a better job.”
Suddenly angry, he took another step closer,despite the dog’s deep growl. “You’re so damned high and mighty, never suffered a day in your life!”
Laurence stepped in before he could say or do anything else, grabbing him in a vise grip around the bicep to haul him away from her. “Maybe you ought to watch your tone.”
He shook the man’s hand off, his gaze still on Charlie. “I wish for just one day you could live the life I’m living, Charlie!”
Charlie pursued him, her face contorted with her own rage. “I did live the life you’re living, Sonny Milsap! Day after miserable day for four long years before I finally picked myself up out of the gutter you’d put me in. I didn’t have to be doing the drugs to be suffering the pain.”
She stopped, took a breath, gathered herself. She put a hand on the dog’s head, reassuring herself or the animal, Sonny couldn’t tell. She looked around, but there was no one on the street with them. People were congregated further down at the festival. But it was just like Charlie to worry about who was observing their little spat. She was shaking. Damned if fucking Laurence didn’t move closer and close a hand around her arm. Protecting her. Who was he to protect her?
“I can’t keep having this argument with you, Sonny,” she said. “I’m done. If you see me on the street from now on, don’t speak. If you do, I’ll take out that restraining order, for sure.”
She stood there, her nose in the air, and any regrets he might have had about the way things had gone between the two of them were forgotten in a flash of rage. All his emotions—his anger and jealousy, his envy and resentment, his longing and despair—burned white-hot in the center of his chest. He wanted to scream at her. He wanted to grab her and shake her to make her hear him. But he crammed everything down into the pit of his stomach and covered it over.
And grinned at her instead. “Oh, don’t worry, darlin’. Next time you won’t see me comin’.”
At 1600 meters below the surface of whatever godforsaken planet they’d been consigned to, the heat was a heavy, suffocating blanket you carried with every breath, with every step. Machines churned through the last few hundred meters of dense rock, down into the cauldron of the earth. Del and his fellow slaves followed behind the behemoth augers, loading the pulverized stone into haulers to be ferried to the surface, choking in the dust, flayed by flying debris.
One morning, the big machines were silent when the workers came to the rock face. The smallest of the slaves were dragged out of line and forced to crawl along cracks in the earth to place charges. Small, mostly controlled explosions chipped away at the margins of the tunnel they’d dug in the earth. And as Del and the others rushed in to clear the fallen rock and shore up the newly opened space, what they were creating gradually took shape: this was the “chamber” the Felinor had been brought in to engineer.
When the chamber was almost complete, the Felinor ordered construction of a system of pipes near one end of the dome-shaped opening in the earth, where heated water seeped from the walls and steam rose from tiny cracks in the floor: a geothermal capture system.
“Can you tell me why you’d want to build all this to get more heat when the place is hot as fucking hell already?” Shef said as he picked up one end of a bundle of rigid piping from the hauler.
Del caught the other end and started moving toward the construction area. “Kwai says they want to regulate the heat. They’ll use the thermal energy to run a cooling system.”
“How the hell do you do that?”
They dumped the pipes near where others were working with a laser drill to tap the trapped hot water and steam in the chamber wall. “It’s complicated. I’m not sure I understand it myself.” The more important question was why. Why were they going to all this trouble?
The sound level in the chamber dropped as the ungodly whine of the big laser drill cut off. Del turned to see what had stopped the work, and took note of the crew around the drill site, the Felinor standing off to the side to direct the next task. A crew brought up a heavy hydraulic drill to replace the laser that had been rolled away from the wall. One man—it was a Resistant named Morgan—positioned the point of the drill on the crack the laser had opened, and Del saw that it was armed not with a drill bit, but a length of durasteel pipe. The engineer meant to break through the rock and cap the steam source all at once.
Morgan retreated behind the machine and adjusted the controls. He glanced at the engineer, who nodded. He put his shoulders to the vertical stocks in the back of the machine and his hands on the twin joysticks that would allow him to guide it. Then he switched it on.
The massive drill howled and shook with each earth-shattering thud as the pipe slammed into the wall over and over. Del could see Morgan, as big as he was, gritting his teeth just to hold the beast in place. Everyone in the chamber had stopped to watch, even the guards. No one was wielding a whip-stick to get them back to work.
Kwai suddenly appeared at his side and grabbed his sleeve. “Come away. Now!”
He had hold of Shef, too, who protested, “But it’s just getting interesting!”
“You must come away!” Kwai’s usual calm demeanor had been replaced with a fierce intensity. “Your lives depend on it.”
They had just turned to follow him when they heard—when they felt—the deep groan in the earth. Beneath the thud—thud—thud of the drill the groan grew into a rumble, and Kwai
began to run. Shef, with his military training, followed him without hesitation. But Del lingered long enough to look over his shoulder.
A last thrust of the drill, and the wall erupted in a furious blast of superheated steam. The geyser obliterated the drill and scalded Morgan to death in a nanosecond. Boiling water and steam struck down all the men within four meters of the hole, their screams echoing in the domed chamber. And it was only when the steam filled the chamber and seared his throat that Del finally began to run.
CHAPTER TEN
Whatever response Rafe might have had to Sonny Milsap’s ominous comment went unsaid when Del started screaming in the street. This time it was something about men being boiled like lobsters, that his throat was on fire and he couldn’t breathe, but did it really matter what the words were? The Old Man was flailing around in his chair like he’d seen demons on Main Street, and even the people down at the festival were turning in their direction.
“What the hell’s wrong with Grandpa?” Sonny said, laughing.
“Get. Out.” Rafe had plenty of resentment to work out today; he’d love to make Sonny his punching bag.
Sonny glared at him, venom in his gaze, but he wasn’t ready for what Rafe was prepared to dish out. “Should keep that crazy old dude at home,” he said with a sneer, walking away before Rafe could grab him. The Old Man was still yelling, the dog was whining and circling his chair and Charlie was kneeling beside him, talking in a low voice to try and get him to calm down. Calm down! When he was in one of these fits there was no calming him down, Rafe could have told her that.
He got behind the wheelchair. “Let’s go.”
Charlie looked up at him. “Don’t you think . . .”
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