by Jen Blood
He rubbed the towel up and down my arms while I pulled a clean pair of underpants, long johns, and jeans up my still-damp legs. Diggs eyed my frozen, naked breasts for just a second before I shot him a withering glare and grabbed a clean sweatshirt—one of his, of course—from the pile.
“Sex in the freezing cold isn’t sexy,” I said.
“I’m not arguing,” he said. “It’s not great for the ego, either. Shrinkage is too much of a factor.”
He took the sweatshirt from me and pulled it over my head. He kept hold of the fabric afterward and pulled me closer. I looked up at him.
“We should go in,” I said.
“We will.”
Instead, he leaned down and kissed me. His mouth tasted like cinnamon and ice water—in a good way—but my hair was literally freezing and I was still shivering. I kissed him back anyway. It’s easy to forget the elements when you lock lips with a man like Diggs.
“I don’t like this business where I can’t just ravage you whenever I feel like it,” he said when we parted. I tried to come up with a pithy response, but my brain was partially frozen. He laughed. “All right, come on. Back inside. You want me to carry you?”
“I think I’ll make it.” We started back to the house. With Diggs’ hand in mine, I scanned the night in search of Allie Tate or Mitch Cameron or any of the nameless, faceless monsters who wanted Diggs and me dead. All I saw were trees, frozen ground, and darkness.
“Have you heard anything from Juarez yet?” Diggs asked me when we were almost to the front doorstep.
“No. He’s still MIA. I asked Jamie earlier—she hasn’t heard any word, either.”
Diggs squeezed my hand. “I don’t like it. If we’re doing this, I’d feel a lot better about it if he was with us.”
“I’ll keep trying,” I said.
We hadn’t heard from Jack Juarez for about four months, when we risked a phone call from Tasmania because we’d heard through the grapevine that he wasn’t doing so well. According to our sources, he’d been suspended from the FBI after the whole shit-storm in Mexico, and was getting more and more obsessed with unlocking memories of his childhood that he was convinced would lead him to the men who’d murdered his wife six years ago.
The fact that Jack had fallen completely off the radar since then had been keeping both Diggs and me up at night, worrying about what could have happened.
Diggs stopped walking a few feet from the front door. The walk and the six layers of clothes were starting to work their magic, and I’d warmed up marginally; I could even feel my toes. I looked at Diggs.
“Why are we not moving?”
“I just want to make sure you’re sure,” he said. “Because if we start doing this tonight…”
“I know,” I said. “J. could find out. They could find us. But I can’t sit back anymore—we’ve talked about this.”
“We talked about it when we were ten thousand miles from all this shit. It’s different when we’re just a boat ride away from possible catastrophe.”
“I told you, I can do it alone.” That earned a glare. Diggs isn’t a big fan of that argument. “I’m not saying that to guilt you into something—you know that. But I can’t let any more time pass, knowing J. is out there. That they’re continuing to kill, and I’m not doing a damned thing about it.”
The number of times we’d had the exact same argument must have been approaching triple digits. Diggs looked as tired of it as I was. He nodded.
“Yeah, I know. I just wanted to make sure you hadn’t changed your mind. If that’s the case, let’s grab some grub and get to work.” He draped his arm around my shoulders and drew me closer. “You’ll give me a shout if you come to your senses?”
“You’ll be the first to know.”
Having dinner with Jamie and her clan, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were suiting up for some kind of cable reality show. In addition to Monty, Carl, Jamie, Bear, and the dogs, we had Urenna—Carl’s daughter, a gorgeous, dark-skinned teen probably close to Bear’s age, with a quick smile and intelligent eyes,—Diggs and me, and three heavily tattooed women who worked with the dogs. I recognized one of them—Cheyenne—from the year before, but the others weren’t familiar.
We sat around the picnic tables with the fire roaring, the smell of Indian spices thick in the air as Carl and Urenna served up some kind of potato vegetarian thing and a thick lamb stew that tasted better than pretty much anything I’d tasted in the past nine months. The dogs sprawled in front of the fire while the crew debriefed their day. There was a lot of laughter mixed in with talk of the business and the dogs and the dog business. Before long, I found myself drifting.
I thought of Allie again, and tried to remember community dinners with my father and other members of the Payson Church. We would have sat right here for a lot of those dinners. There would have been a prayer to kick things off—Isaac Payson at the head of the table, our heads bowed. Close your eyes, Allie hissed at me. He’ll catch you otherwise. I jerked my head up sharply at the voice—one real enough that it could have come from anyone seated at the table around me. Allie was nowhere to be found, though.
I realized Bear was watching me with the intensity of a serial creeper. He looked away when our eyes met.
I tried to get back to my memories of the Payson Church. Everything surrounding my childhood was hazy—especially anything having to do with Allie. We’d been best friends growing up. It was only last year that I’d remembered the truth about her death, or at least flashes of it. Allie had died a couple of years before the Payson fire, killed by Isaac himself. Or at least that’s what I thought had happened—the whole incident was fractured, coming to me in fits and starts that sometimes made no sense at all. The only things I knew for sure were that Allie hadn’t died in the fire, Isaac had been responsible for her death, and my father had used some kind of J.-created psychological warfare to erase the memory from my mind—the way he’d apparently erased anything else that might have been deemed disturbing about Isaac Payson and the congregation he led out here.
“Solomon,” Diggs said.
I looked up, snapping back to reality again. “Yeah—sorry. Daydreaming…”
“We should probably get going.”
“Right.” Only Jamie, Bear, Carl, and Urenna remained at the table with Diggs and me. “Do you need help with cleanup?” I asked them. “Diggs slings a dishcloth like a pro.”
“That’s all right,” Urenna said. Unlike her father, she had no accent. “Bear and I can do it.” She looked at Bear. “Right?”
“Sure, no problem,” he agreed. I got the feeling she could have suggested they dip themselves in honey and roll in a nest of fire ants and he would have had the same response. They got up. Urenna took a few dishes; Bear took a few more. On his way into the kitchen, though, I sensed him watching me again.
When he came back for the last of the dishes a minute later, Carl, Jamie, and Diggs were talking. Bear came round to my side of the table. I handed him my plate. He hesitated before he took it.
“She won’t hurt you, you know,” he said.
That cold chill I’d felt earlier came gusting back. “Who won’t?”
He just smiled at that. “You don’t have to worry about her. Whoever blew out that window, it wasn’t the girl.”
The others at the table had fallen silent. Diggs looked at me curiously.
“Go on in and help Urenna, please,” Jamie said to Bear. I wasn’t sure whether there was a warning in her voice or I was hearing things. And seeing things—apparently, things that Bear also heard and saw. This just got better and better.
Diggs continued to watch me after Bear was gone. “What was that about?”
“Uh…nothing, really,” I said. I shook my head and forced some certainty into my quaking voice. “Seriously, it was nothing.” I got up from the table. “We should really get going before it gets any later.”
“Right,” Diggs said, still watching. Still wary. I went upstairs to grab my gear and hoped to God I di
dn’t run into any other ghostly visions along the way.
Chapter Two
The seas were quiet and the sky was dark when Diggs and I set out at a little past seven that night. Diggs hadn’t asked me again about my exchange with Bear, but I knew that didn’t mean he’d forgotten about it—just that he was biding his time before he brought it up again. We drove a little fishing boat of Jamie’s with Flint K-9 written on the sides. Diggs and I were both dressed in deep blue, flannel-lined coveralls with Jamie’s logo emblazoned on the front. Matching baseball hats pulled the ensemble together. When I was a kid envisioning my future life of intrigue, I’d imagined disguises with a little more va-va-voom. These would do in a pinch, though.
It was eight o’clock by the time we reached town. Littlehope is a working fishing village of just under fifteen hundred people, many of whom still make their living on the sea. That means even in December, there are usually still a few boats in the harbor. Thanks to the impending storm, however, it looked like even the heartiest Mainers had pulled up anchor and dry docked until the weather cleared.
Diggs pulled up to the town wharf and tied the boat off while I grabbed our backpacks. It was cold by Australian standards, but not by Maine’s—above freezing was my guess, though probably only by a couple of degrees. The air tasted clean. Salty. I’d never been a fan of Littlehope when I was growing up, but I was finally starting to see the charm. It was less charming given J.’s propensity for trying to kill everyone we cared about whenever we hit town, of course, but for the normals out there who just hit Route 97 intent on a summer of fishing and cold beer, I could definitely understand the appeal.
We transferred our gear from the boat to the Taurus Diggs had rented—under an assumed name, of course—in Portland, and hit the road.
It was weird being back. Diggs drove slowly through town while I took it all in. Nothing had really changed—Wallace’s General Store was right where we’d left it, though it looked like they’d gotten a new sign up front, maybe added a few lobster buoys to the clusters that hung from the sides of the building. There was a single light on in my mother’s medical clinic, and I wondered if Maya—Kat’s former girlfriend—was still working there. I hadn’t talked to her since we’d left; hadn’t talked to Kat for nearly as long. I wasn’t sure which of the two I missed more, but the fact that it was even a debate spoke to the changes in my worldview over the past year.
I set thoughts of family and near-family aside, and took in the rest of the scene. Someone had written “Don’t” at the top of the STOP sign on the corner, and “Dancing” below it. It looked like it had been that way for a while. A cluster of reporters stood smoking outside the Downeast Daily Tribune, where Diggs and I used to spend our days. I caught Diggs watching them. Not far down the street, a few pickups were parked in the lot at Bennett’s Lobster Shanty. There was a dusting of hardened snow on the ground, but not much more than that. Around town, houses were still lit with Christmas lights and inflatable Santas.
“Have you missed it?” I asked Diggs. The Trib was in the rearview by the time he answered me.
“In some ways. I’ve missed the people. Wallace’s pizza. Trivia and pool nights at the Shanty. Late nights riding a deadline at the Trib.”
I was surprised. We hadn’t talked much about Littlehope while we were gone. “That would be a yes, then.” He still didn’t look so sure. “It’s not a crime if you have, you know. I won’t hold it against you. I never really belonged here—you did. People look at me and all they see is the creepy sole survivor of the Payson fire. Daughter of the town drunk. They look at you, and they see the favorite son.”
He glanced at me, though I couldn’t see his expression in the darkness. “I don’t think you have a clue what people see when they look at you, kid.”
His intensity got me flustered, which is usually what Diggs’ intensity does—either that or it turns me on. Either way, it’s not helpful. I changed the subject.
“So, where are we headed first? I know you want to check out your place, but it’s getting late—if we’re gonna talk to this guy, it’s probably better we don’t do it in the middle of the night, right?”
“That’s my thought,” he agreed.
Mention of the mission changed things between us—the air got heavier, the silence thicker. I persevered.
“And your source is sure this is the guy, right? It’s definitely his social security number on the list?”
“He hasn’t been wrong yet, has he?”
He hadn’t.
Mitch Cameron had compiled the list I was referring to, though we’d gotten it in as roundabout way as possible when Diggs pried a computer chip from the cold dead hand of a professor in Kentucky. Cameron was a former J. operative who had recently been proven to be a possible/probable ally—though I totally wasn’t ready to write his name in ink on the good guys’ jerseys just yet. The list itself was a coded series of entries with the details of J. operations dating all the way back to 1951. Every entry included geographic coordinates, the social security number of the J. operative working the mission, the month and year the mission took place, and the J. team leader overseeing the whole thing. When you forgot about the part where every entry represented weird mental manipulation and gruesome death, decoding the thing was actually kind of fun. The fact that the list included things like Jonestown, the Manson family killings, the Oklahoma City bombing, Ruby Ridge, and Columbine, made it a lot harder to forget that, though.
What was worse was the fact that the list wasn’t just about the past—the dates extended all the way to 2018, four years from now. While we’d been in Australia, Diggs and I had watched from half a world away as several of J.’s plans became reality. It’s not like we didn’t try to do something, but there were some issues that made it next to impossible to sound anything but completely freaking nuts every time we tried to bring the cops in on things.
For one thing, the coordinates were anything but specific, giving only the whole degree in latitude and longitude—which meant we were looking at about three thousand square miles, minimum, in which each mysterious event could take place. We didn’t have a day, either, just the month. The only hard fact we had in the entries was the social security number of the J. operative. That alone was indisputable. And even that had its issues.
But, the social security numbers—one in particular—were precisely why we were back in Littlehope now.
About ten minutes outside town, Diggs turned left onto a darkened, dirt fire road. He stopped the car, put it in park, and turned off the lights no more than fifty feet in.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I just wanted to check, one more time,” he said.
“Jesus, Diggs. I’m sure. I’m absolutely, positively, one hundred percent clear on this.”
“Because I could drive us out of here right now. Head back to Portland. We could catch the first flight out of Maine, and not look back. Go back to Australia—or go somewhere else. The Caribbean, maybe. Dance all night, make love while the sun rises the next morning…”
“We did that once, Diggs. It’s not like we’ve spent the past nine months dancing and screwing.”
“We did our fair share, though,” he said. “Maybe not the dancing…” My cheeks warmed. Diggs turned toward me, more serious now. “This isn’t your fault. Whatever J.’s doing—it’s not up to you to stop them.”
“Remind me again what the next entry is on that list,” I said, because I was so not having this argument again. “When does it take place?”
He didn’t answer. I waited him out until he finally relented. “April.”
“Four months from now,” I said. “And what are the coordinates, again?”
Another second of hesitation. He cleared his throat. “I don’t remember.”
“Bullshit. Forty-three north, sixty-nine west.” The numbers were branded on my brain. “Which lands us right here—right along the coast of Maine. And this guy we’re about to see is the one who’ll pull the
trigger when the time comes; the social security number on that list led us to his front door. We’ve got it in black and white.” I shook my head. “There’s no way I’m running from that. And you’re not the man I thought you were, if you could.”
“If it meant keeping you safe—keeping us together and breathing? Trust me, Sol. I could run.”
He was full of shit, but I wasn’t going to fight him on it. We’d both watched people die over the past nine months: a bombing in Vancouver; a school shooting in Texas; a mother in Nebraska who poisoned her three kids before shooting her husband and then slitting her own wrists… Diggs might not have said anything about it, but I wasn’t the only one who lost something every time one of J.’s forecasted events made headlines.
“I told you before,” I said. “I’m doing this. All we’ll do is take a look around. See what we can figure out, and go from there.”
“Right. Go from there.” I expected him to get sulky, but after a second he took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and rallied. “All right. We’re here; we’re apparently doing this, so let’s get on with it. Prepare to meet Mike Reynolds—meth cooker, meth smoker, modern militia enthusiast, and proponent of a greener tomorrow. You ready for this?”
I leaned across the console, grabbed him by his shirtfront, and pulled him in for a quick kiss. “You know I love you, right?”
He held me there when I tried to get away, and deepened the kiss. Diggs isn’t really a big fan of quick…anything. “You’d better, woman,” he said when we parted. He pulled back, but didn’t go far. “We do this my way, right? Let me take the lead. He’s got kids in there—we figure out how many there are. Where they are. What Mike’s state of mind is. If I give the signal, we leave. No questions asked, no starting something.”
“I know,” I agreed. I started to go for the door, but he pulled me back.
“I’m serious,” he said.
I looked at him. For the past nine months, it had been just the two of us—twenty-four/seven, he’d been there for my moods, my nightmares, every twist and turn. There had been parts of these past months that had been damned near idyllic. Others, however…not so much. I knew it had taken its toll, his constant worry over my well-being. I held his gaze. “I know, Diggs. You’ve more than met me halfway here… We do it your way.”