Sam fought to suppress a surge of frustration and anger. Getting angry at Mary Lou only made things worse. She'd start to cry and it would be twenty minutes instead of five before he was back upstairs. "This is about Alyssa, right? Well, stop right there, because she doesn't have anything to do with the reason we're going wheels up—"
"No," she said. "It's not—"
He plowed right over her as he held open the door that led outside to the parking lot. "The FBI isn't part of this operation, so you can sleep a little easier—never mind the fact that I've told you, I've given you my fucking word, at least two million times that I haven't so much as touched her since we were married. So just go home, Mary Lou. Go the hell home and get over it."
Her cheeks flushed. "This isn't about her. I'm not going to fight with you about her anymore. I'm not."
"Then what did you come here to fight with me about?" Sam spotted her car over by Muldoon's truck near the building's entrance.
"I didn't come here to fight with you at all. I came to tell you that the lock on my trunk is broken. Anyone can get in there any time they want."
Sam clenched his teeth against a stream of foul language. He was going to have to endure one of Lieutenant Jacquette's lectures because the fucking lock on the fucking trunk of her fucking car was fucking broken. A lock that had been broken long before Mary Lou's sister Janine had given her the car.
The muscle in his jaw was surely jumping, but Mary Lou didn't appear to notice. She was busy opening her trunk.
"I came here to tell you that I don't want you leaving things in my car," Mary Lou told him, chin held high for a change. As much as she was pissing him off right now, it was refreshing to see her show some backbone after spending the past few months with the Stepford Wife clone. "And especially not this" She gestured to the trunk behind her.
Sam knew he was supposed to look inside, so he did. "I thought you wanted jumper cables in there, in case you needed them again."
"Look beneath them," she ordered tightly.
Sam looked. He even picked up the cables and shook them. "Trunk's empty, hon," he told her.
"What?" She turned with a gasp, and then started searching the wheel well. "No, it was just here..."
"I don't know what you thought you saw in here," Sam told her as she even looked beneath the spare, letting it fall back into place because—surprise, surprise—nothing whatsoever of his was in there. "But if I'm going to have any hope at all of getting promoted, from now on in you're going to have to wait to have your hallucinations after I come home at night."
And that was cruel.
Mary Lou's eyes filled with tears, but her chin stayed high as she dug through her purse for her keys. Without another word to Sam, she took the jumper cables from him, tossed them back in, and slammed the trunk closed, leaning on it to make it latch. She marched around and climbed into the car, slamming that door behind her, too, and starting her piece-of-shit-on-wheels with a roar.
Ah, fuck.
Sam knocked on the window, and she rolled it down a meager half inch so she could hear him.
"Look, why don't you take my truck home." He held out his keys. "I know a guy—Al Speroni, remember him? He owns that body shop next to the video store. I'll give him a call, ask him to come pick up your car and either fix the lock or replace the entire trunk lid—he owes me a big enough favor. You can drive my truck until I get home. How's that sound?"
Apparently it sounded good enough to Mary Lou, who turned off her car and rolled the window down a little farther so that she could take his keys.
"Leave your keys under the mat," he told her. "Just the car key, not the house key, okay?"
She nodded.
"I've got to run," he said. "Give Haley a kiss for me."
She turned to look up at him. "I wasn't hallucinating, Sam."
He was already backing away. No way was he going to talk about this anymore right now. He was already screwed as it was. "I have to go. You take care, all right? One day at a time. I'll see you in a few days."
Sam ran for the building, free for the next forty-eight hours.
The feeling was a good one, despite the reaming he'd yet to receive from Lieutenant Jacquette.
Jesus, maybe he should put in for a transfer to another team—something that would put him in some hot spot on the other side of the world, where Mary Lou couldn't come with him.
Shit, she'd probably be happier with that arrangement, too. She'd get her superhero without having to clean up his all-too-human mess day after day.
He'd miss Haley, though. And the guys in Team Sixteen.
And Alyssa Locke, a little voice—persistent fucker— inside of him chimed in.
He was as pathetic as Mary Lou—still in love with his fantasy of Alyssa, despite finding out that she was someone else entirely.
Sam went inside and took the stairs two at a time, and went directly to Lieutenant Jacquette's office, knocking on the open door. "Sir. Got a sec?"
Jazz Jacquette looked up from his desk. His default grim expression got even darker when he saw that it was Sam.
"Sir, she doesn't get how the military operates," Sam told him. "I assure you that I've tried and tried to explain that—"
"I'm sure you have." The XO sat back in his chair, shaking his head slightly as he looked up at Sam. "It's a shame she won't listen, because it is hurting you, Lieutenant."
Sam nodded. "I know that, sir. I'm thinking about asking for a transfer. I think it might be a good idea if I went overseas."
The expression in Jacquette's eyes was impossible to read. "That would be a serious loss to this team."
"Thank you, sir, but I don't know what else to do."
"I've heard the rumors, but ..." Jazz cleared his throat. "You married her because she was pregnant, is that correct?"
Sam laughed, but there was no humor in it. "Gee, I thought that went from rumor to verified fact a long time ago. Yes, sir, it is correct."
Jazz nodded solemnly. "Sam, I'm speaking to you not as your XO right now, but as your friend. You married the girl because she was pregnant, but she's not pregnant now, is she?"
Sam understood the implication. As unsavory as it was, the possibility of divorce had popped into his thoughts way more than a time or two. But, "Am I supposed to just ignore Haley? She exists. I'm her father. If I divorce Mary Lou, I'll be divorcing her, too. There're no two ways around it."
Jazz bounced the eraser end of a pencil on the file on his desk. "You know, from the way I hear it, you already are pretty much ignoring Haley. Of course, that could just be a rumor, too."
Sam clenched his teeth over a completely inappropriate reply to an executive officer.
Another deep sigh from Jazz. "Sam, these past six months now, your head has been somewhere else. I don't know where you've gone or, really, what's going on with you, but I do know this. I don't want you transferring out of this team. I want you back. I want my best officer back to giving a hundred and ten percent, not this half-assed fifty or sixty that you've been delivering lately."
His best officer. Holy fuck. Lieutenant Jacquette didn't use words like best. Ever. Sam didn't know whether to shit or go blind. So he just stood there.
"Tell her to stay away, Lieutenant," Jacquette said. "Next time I see your wife in this building, I will call the shore patrol and they will physically remove her and charge her with trespassing. You might want to warn her about that, because it will not be fun for her."
Jesus. "I'll tell her that, sir."
"Good." Jazz was already once more buried in his files.
"By the way, if you tell anyone that I called you my best officer, I will deny it completely."
Sam had to smile. "If I told anyone, sir, trust me, they wouldn't believe me."
"Depends on whether or not they knew you, Lieutenant," Jazz said. "If they've served with you, they'd believe it." He looked up. "Don't you have things to do?"
"Yeah," Sam said. "I'm just temporarily overcome by a case of the warm f
uzzies. I thought I'd bask in the warmth of your love a little bit longer, sir."
Jazz didn't smile. In fact, his legendary glare was pretty damn daunting. "Let me put it into language that I know you can understand. Get the fuck out of here, Starrett."
"Aye, aye, sir." Sam got. But as he walked away, he could have sworn he heard Jazz Jacquette laugh.
Chapter 12
Charlie sat in the lounge chair on Donny's screened-in porch.
She and Vince had bought this furniture for their grandson several years back, and at the time, she'd protested. When would he ever use it? The porch was off-limits to him because, although there was a ceiling and roof overhead, apparently aliens were capable of squeezing their way through the tiny holes in the screens.
But Vince had just smiled the same way he'd always just smiled all those decades they'd been married. "The chairs are for us, Charles," he'd said.
And, indeed, she'd spent quite a bit of time sitting out here since then.
Inside the house, Donny was still sleeping, and Vince was still standing guard, as he'd promised.
Of course, aliens could attack and Vince would never hear them coming. Unless they brought a marching band with a big bass drum with their assault team.
She should talk. Her own ears weren't what they used to be, either.
Sixty years ago, she could hear every word spoken—no, whispered—from well down the hall.
"I, well, I just wanted to come over here to thank you for what you did last night—you know, coming to my rescue like that."
Charlotte had been lying down in that spare bedroom, in that apartment she'd once shared with James, exhausted from the explosive events of the night before, when the sound of quiet voices awakened her.
It was no wonder she was so tired—she'd sat with Sally until the police arrived, and then she'd brought Vince back to bed and cleaned and bandaged his feet, cut from the window glass he'd shattered to get inside Sally's apartment.
Then, before she went back to her own bed, she'd insisted he show her his wounds. She wanted to see with her own eyes that his trips up and down the stairs hadn't torn out his stitches.
It had taken her bursting into tears to get him to comply— an outburst that had been as completely unexpected to her as it was to him. She was not prone to such emotional demonstrations. In fact, she hadn't even cried—not noisily like this—when that telegram about James arrived.
Idiotically, she cried again from relief when she saw that Vince had, indeed, not injured himself any further.
He'd reached for her then. Somehow he knew to say nothing, just to hold her and stroke her hair.
And when she was done crying, Charlotte lay there, on her bed, wrapped in the arms of a man that James wouldn't've given a second glance. An enlisted Marine, without a college education. A lobsterman from Cape Cod, with the kind of name—DaCosta—that wouldn't go far in the political arena to which James had always aspired.
Charlotte lay for hours in Vince's arms, staring out the window at the night, listening to him breathe.
Exhausted himself, he'd finally fallen asleep, and when he did, he pulled her closer to him. As much of a gentleman as he was in the daytime, in sleep his body betrayed him, reacting unmistakably to her nearness.
Dear Lord Almighty, give her strength. It was all she could do to keep herself from reaching for him, the way she'd reached for James when she'd awakened in the night to find him wanting her.
Although maybe she should just fall asleep, too, and let their two desperate bodies do their will, because, oh, James, forgive her, she wanted to lie with this man. If she hadn't before tonight, well, seeing him charge up those stairs to come to Sally's aid with such little regard for his own health and safety had clinched it.
Hearing Vince's words of warning, his quiet, almost matter-of-fact threat that revealed that the worst of his wounds from Tarawa were not wounds to the flesh but rather wounds to the soul, cemented her longing.
She wanted to share the same sweet intimacies with him that she'd shared with her husband. She wanted the laughter that came with it, and the hope and promise and the joy of giving and taking. The connection of hearts, the touching of souls.
She wanted something she couldn't have, because how, how, how could she ever laugh like that again while knowing that James was lying cold in his grave a half a world away?
Charlotte started to cry, deep welling sobs of a grief that she'd held in for much too long, and Vince woke up, holding her even closer, trying to comfort her. "I'm sorry," he whispered. "Charlie, I'm so sorry."
"Help me," she sobbed. "Please..."
"I will," he said. "I want to. Just... tell me how. Tell me what to do. What can I get you? How can I help?"
But there was nothing he could do. Nothing anyone could do. "I don't want to live without him," she wept. "I'm so tired of living without him."
"Oh, Charlotte, don't say that." He tried to hold her more tightly, but she suddenly couldn't stand to feel his arms around her and she struggled to get away from him, pulling so hard that she tumbled off the bed and onto the floor. She hit with a jarring thud, but it didn't matter. Nothing mattered anymore.
"Charlotte." Vince followed her to the floor, but she swatted at his hands.
"Don't touch me! Just go away!"
He went, but the light went on in the hall, and he came back a few moments later with Edna Fletcher.
"Oh, dear. I knew sooner or later it would all have to come out. She was so stoic when we got the news." Her mother-in-law's hands were warm against her back. "Just cry, sweetie, just go ahead and cry," she crooned. "That's a good girl."
Somehow, sometime last night, Charlotte had made it back into the narrow little bed in the spare room. She woke up in the morning feeling horribly hung-over from her tears, but she forced herself to dress and go in to work. Her job for the senator was an important one.
But by lunchtime it was clear that she was doing no one any good, so she returned home, crawled into her bed, and slept deeply and dreamlessly.
Until a voice woke her. A female voice. Sally's, from upstairs.
"I also wanted to let you know that Morton's wallet was found," she was telling Vince. She was here with him. In his bedroom. Charlotte's bedroom. "That was his name. Lt. Morton Peterson from St. Louis, Missouri. The police called to tell me they found it outside of the Golden Goose bar. That's where we met—he must've dropped it before we left. You can call the police, if you want, to verify that I didn't—
"I know you didn't steal anything," Vince interrupted. He sounded both so matter-of-fact and so quietly certain. Charlotte could picture his gentle, reassuring smile. "I don't need to call anyone."
"Well," Sally said. She cleared her throat. "That's ... refreshing."
"You need to be more careful in choosing the company you keep," he said, again without a trace of judgment or disapproval in his voice, as if he harbored not even one negative thought about the woman. How did he do that?
Last night, even as Charlotte was helping Sally put ice on a very painful-looking and swollen eye, she had found herself thinking, You reap what you sow.
"I ... I know," Sally said now. "I will. I just ..." She laughed. Or maybe she was starting to cry. Charlotte couldn't quite tell. "And so I tell myself the very same thing every day. But then I get out of work, and the evening stretches out ahead of me, like the entire rest of my pathetic, lonely, miserable life and ..." She was definitely crying now. "I can't help it."
"Hey," Vince said. "Shhh. It's okay."
He was comforting Sally, no doubt holding her the way he'd held Charlotte just last night.
"I'm sorry," she said. Apparently it was the refrain of war widows all across the country.
"It's all right," Vince said. He should go into business, charge a fee for the comfort of his arms. "Where'd he die?" he asked her gently. "Your husband."
"He was in the Merchant Marine," Sally told him between snuffles. "His ship went down in the Atlantic, torpedoed
by a U-boat." She made a sound that might've passed for laughter if Charlotte didn't know just what she was feeling. "No one ever asks about him, you know. Sometimes it feels like I imagined him. Like he was never really real."
"What was his name?" Vince asked.
"Frankie," she told him. "Not Frank, Frankie—isn't that a hoot? He had all these tattoos—such a big, burly man—and he insisted on being called Frankie because that's what his mother called him right up to the day she died. Oh, he loved his mother, my Frankie did."
"I'd bet a year's pay that he really loved you, too," Vince said.
She laughed. This tune it was definitely a laugh. "Sugar darling, you'd win that bet. He was the sweetest man." She was silent for a moment. "An awful lot like you, you know— although you are a young one, aren't you?"
"No one's young anymore," Vince said quietly.
"It's a crying shame. The only boys who stay young are the ones who come home in a box. And they never grow another day older, do they?" She was silent for a moment, then she laughed. It was forced, ringing with the same kind of false merriment Charlotte recognized from all those nights she'd entertained upstairs. "Well, there's a reason, if I ever heard one, to live for today. What do you think about that, sugar darling?"
Vince laughed, too. It wasn't forced, but it was definitely odd. Embarrassed, maybe. "Well, I—
There was silence then. But not quite total silence.
Charlotte sat up in her bed. Was he ... ? Were they ... ? Dear God, was she going to have to sit here and listen to Sally and Vince... ?
But then Vince spoke. "Wait," he said breathlessly. "Whoa. Whoa. Hold on."
"Shhh," Sally said. "Just relax, hon. I'll make you feel good."
He laughed again. "You know, actually, I'm feeling just fine already today as it is, so—"
"Yeah, I can see how fine you're feeling, big boy. How long's it been since you... ?"
Vince laughed again, even more uncomfortably this time. "Look, Sally, I appreciate the thought, I really do, but—
"Oh, my goodness gracious," she said. "You've never..." Her laughter was incredulous now. "You haven't, have you?"
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