Which she did, making him feel like an even bigger asshole.
“I'm not angry,” he agreed as he put the truck into park. “I'm incredulous that you would have the audacity to argue with me about a relationship that you know nothing about.”
“I wasn't arguing.”
Jesus, was she really going to argue about this now, too?
She continued before he could laugh in her face. “I was challenging your version of the truth. Every story has two sides, and I'm pretty positive Emily's is different than yours. Did you love her?”
Her question again caught him by surprise. “What does that have to do with—”
Tracy cut him off. “Everything,” she said in a voice laden with an unspoken you moron. “It has everything to do with … everything.”
“Yes,” he answered her honestly, because why the hell not? “I did, okay? Very much. But not enough to throw my own self away to turn into her fucking—freaking—Stepford Husband.”
Tracy nodded. “She was wrong to want you to change. She should have loved you enough to … Well, I mean, who did she love, really? You? Or someone else—someone that she wanted you to be?”
Decker blinked at her. Neither one of them made a move to leave the truck, and they both just sat there in the flickering light from the neon sign. “So now, what? You're suddenly on my side?”
She nodded, unperturbed. “Yeah, because you were right. If she was trying to change you … ? I mean, sure, you've got a nasty streak—which, yes, is probably why I find you so attractive—but most of the time you're a pretty sweet guy. And she just throws something like that away? I'm betting she wasn't all that bright.”
“She was plenty bright,” he said. “But she didn't understand what she was getting into. And I didn't make it any easier for her. And then when—”
He stopped himself abruptly, clenched his teeth and jaw against the words that had almost come out. And then when Andy died, I checked out for a while. For too long. Hell, I left the scene permanently. Em left me, yeah, but the cold truth is, I left her first.
“When … what?” Tracy prompted, almost gently.
Decker took the keys out of the ignition and opened his door. It clunked against a blue sedan that had too many dents and dings for him to worry about one more. So he didn't. “I don't know how long Tess and I are going to be at the airport. You might be waiting here at the motel for a while. Which of your massively huge bags do you want me to bring inside for you?”
She hesitated only briefly at his pointed change of subject and ignored his dig. “I'll just take my laptop case,” she told him as she opened her door, too. “I've got some books in there. As long as I've got something to read, I'll be fine.”
“Don't sign online under any of your own e-mail accounts,” he reminded her as he got out of the truck's cab, grabbing the bag of sandwiches that they'd stopped and picked up. “Let's be extra safe.”
“You must think I'm a slow learner,” she said, slamming her door shut behind her. “I mean, we had this exact same conversation just a few hours ago.”
“Let's continue to be extra safe,” he amended.
As they met at the front of his truck, he reached to take the computer case from her, but she put the strap up over her head, so its weight was across her chest. It was a solid I don't need your effing help, loserman, so he backed off.
He wasn't surprised—he was learning that, with Tracy, there was no telling what she'd do or say next—when she looked him in the eye and said, “If you ever want to talk about it—the fact that Emily cheated on you—I've been there, done that. I walked in on Lyle and one of his bitch paralegals. Heather Something. He screwed her in our bed.” She cleared her throat. “I still feel hurt and, yeah, really angry, just thinking about it. And I really am just talking about talking. You've made it very clear that… But that doesn't mean we can't be friends.”
Friends. Decker stood there, looking into Tracy's blue eyes, trying to remember the last time he'd wanted to kiss someone as badly as he wanted to kiss her. Last woman he'd kissed had been Jo Heissman, and he really hadn't kissed her. He'd just reached out, blindly, and she'd been there on the other end of his mouth. Before that had been Caroline, Andy's twin sister. But their hookups had been few and far between. The first time had been on one of the crushingly awful anniversaries of Andy's death, right after her divorce and many months after Em had moved out. It had been about comfort in the face of that still-gaping loss—tinged with far too much sorrow ever to turn into anything real and lasting.
He'd last gone to see Caro about a year ago—his first visit post the disaster that had been his Kazbekistan encounter with Sophia. He'd gone looking for God knows what, but when he'd tried to turn her kiss hello into a trip into her bedroom, Caro had pulled back. And told him she'd been meaning to call him—that she was getting remarried, to some professor at the university, at the end of the month.
She'd told him that she'd thought long and hard about it, but had decided it would be best not to invite him, since it had been so long since they'd even so much as spoken on the phone. Subtext: You total piece of shit—using me for sex and then sending flowers, as if that would make up for the subsequent zero-contact for well over a year.
And maybe that hadn't been Caroline's subtext, but was instead the subtext Deck himself had interjected. Because, Christ, it had been a long time since he'd so much as given a single thought to her.
“Okay,” Tracy said now. “No response. So, that's a big negative on the friendship thing. Maybe I am a slow learner.” She turned to the motel—a 1950s-era two-story building that looked as if its most recent renovation was the new roof someone had slapped on, back in 1978. “Room 114 is…” She squinted at the numbered doors in the deepening twilight, and pointed past the empty swimming pool. “Looks like it's over this way.” She started down the cracked concrete path, walking with her usual attitude.
And that far end of the motel exploded in a roaring ball of heat, noise, and flames.
The force flung Decker back and he jettisoned the bag of sandwiches he was carrying in order to grab for Tracy. He tried to catch her, to take her down to the ground and cover her, to protect her against the flying debris. But as he wrapped his arms around her, her laptop bag caught him hard in the chest and he went down like a bowling pin, losing control of his feet, his head hitting the concrete with a crunch—hard enough to scramble his brain. Still, he didn't let go of her and together they bounced and scraped across the dusty yard, with him beneath her, like a human sled, even as he coldly, logically assessed the situation.
Bomb.
If they hadn't been caught in traffic, if they hadn't lingered in the truck, they'd both be dead right now.
No one in that part of the hotel—certainly no one in Room 114— could possibly have survived a blast of that magnitude.
Which meant that Tess and Jules were dead.
They'd been vaporized. Decker knew that with a stab more painful than any blistering heat could ever be. Still, he found himself turning his head as he held tightly to Tracy, as he tried to regain at least a little control, to roll with her toward the parking lot, toward his truck. He turned his head so as to best be able to gauge the height of the flames and the direction of the wind—to use his years of expertise with explosives to figure out the best way into that holocaust, so he could search for survivors.
But Deck well knew from the size of those flames, from the roiling cloud of dark smoke in the early-evening sky, even as he heard his own voice shouting—“No!”—he knew there would be no survivors. Tess and Jules were dead. And Nash, too, was as good as dead. He wouldn't— couldn't—survive losing Tess this way. It would prove to be too much, too awful. As it would be for Robin, left without Jules.
Jesus Christ.
They'd gambled and lost. Lost hard, lost big.
And even knowing all of those things, Decker dug his elbow into the ground so that they finally skidded to a stop. He made sure Tracy was conscious and
alert, pulling her chin so that he could see her face. It was smudged with dirt, but her eyes—although conveying her shock—were clear.
“Dial 9-1-1,” he shouted over the ringing in his ears, and she nodded, reaching into her handbag.
He pushed himself to his feet—Jesus, he'd rug-burned his entire upper back—and headed toward blazing rubble.
Which was when he was shot.
He felt the slap in the side of his arm, and actually saw the bullet as it left his body with a surreal, almost beautiful fountain of blood. And he turned, spinning, crouching, zig-zagging back to Tracy as he heard the retort of a sniper rifle and then another and another.
Was it one shooter or two? He couldn't tell. But the bullet that had hit him had come from behind them, probably from across the street, from the roof of the Rings of Saturn Motel, another crumbling flophouse. Unlike the Seaside Heights, it was a whopping three stories, which wasn't great, but it was far better than the ten-story Holiday Inn a quarter mile down the road. Ten stories gave a shooter a high enough altitude to pick his targets off like fish in a barrel. Three stories was the equivalent of squirrels in the backyard. Hell of a lot harder to hit. Provided the squirrels didn't do something stupid, like stand still.
Decker grabbed Tracy and dragged her to the truck as his back window shattered. He threw her inside anyway, reaching for his keys with an arm that didn't work as well as it should have. But he had two arms, and he jammed the keys into the ignition with his left hand even as he used his right knee to put the truck into reverse. He stood on the gas, all the way out to the road, shouting, “Help me. Tracy! Put it into drive when I say now— Now!”
Tracy was shouting—he could see her mouth moving—but she did exactly as he asked.
“Good girl—get down now—keep your head down!”
With a squeal of tires, as she scrambled onto the floor where Jo Heiss-man had so recently sat, Deck, too, scrunched down and rocketed east, driving hard and fast, zigging through the still-heavy traffic, taking a right turn from the left lane as the horns of disgruntled drivers blared behind them.
He sat up a little then, looking into the rearview. No one had followed them onto the side street. Still, he wasn't going to take any chances. As he took a bridge that crossed the 5, he saw that traffic was finally moving, and he took a left, heading for the nearest entrance onto the freeway.
“I can't find my phone,” Tracy was saying, her words muffled as she dug frantically through her oversized bag. “I can't find it—”
“It's okay,” he said as he got onto the 5 and NASCARed his way into the left lane. His own voice sounded distant, tinny, but his ears were surely fucked up from the blast. The world also had a weird, surreal quality to it that came from the fact that he, and he alone, knew that Tess and Jules were dead. The entire population of the planet should have been down on their knees, out in the street, screaming their outrage to the sky. But that wasn't happening. Even he himself was still driving, still talking, still moving, still living. “I was just giving you something to do,” he told Tracy.
He could feel his heartbeat pulsing in his injured arm, and it occurred to him that the strangeness he was experiencing might be due to a loss of blood.
“I have to call Tess,” Tracy told him, her head practically inside of her bag, as he steered with his knees so he could reach around to touch his upper arm.
His hand came away drenched with his blood. He wiped it on his jeans as he took hold of the wheel and exited the freeway at the last split second, again pissing off commuters who were no doubt already pissed off enough about having to work late, people who had no idea what did or didn't matter.
Tracy looked up at him. “I have to make sure she got out of—”
“She didn't,” Decker said quietly.
“Don't say that! We don't know that!”
She was fierce in her hope, so he let her keep it as he scanned for police cruisers before running the red light at the end of the ramp.
He had to get to a place where he could stop his bleeding and check Tracy—make sure she wasn't in too much shock to realize that she, too, had been shot.
“I need to find my phone,” she insisted. “You used it last and …” Her voice trailed off, and as he slowed to take a left onto a smaller, less traveled street, he glanced over and down to see her poking her finger through a hole in the top flap of her leather computer bag. “Was it possible that someone was shooting at us?”
“Me,” Decker said as he almost missed the right turn into the little residential neighborhood. Yeah, this was the right place. He hadn't been here that often, so he was feeling his way. “They were shooting at me. You just happened to be standing too close.”
Small but well-maintained houses, most of them brightly lit, lined a quiet street. No one was out—everyone was inside, eating dinner. Which was good, because a truck with its back window shot out was likely to draw a second glance, and maybe even inspire a phone call to the police. And while Decker wasn't paranoid enough to believe that any of the local officers were on the Agency's payroll, he was certain that whoever had just killed Tess and Jules had access to the SDPD's computer system.
“Oh, my God,” Tracy breathed, her search for her phone finally abandoned. “Decker, you're bleeding! Oh, my God!” He took a left as Tracy poked her head up so she could see out the windows. “Where are you going? We need to get to a hospital!”
“We can't,” he told her. “We walk into an ER, and we're as good as dead.”
“If you bleed to death,” she pointed out, “you're not just as good as dead, you actually are dead.” She moved up on the seat to get closer to him, never mind the fact that she was now sitting in a growing pool of his blood. “And I, for one, am not going to let you die.”
“Honey,” he told her, “I'm already dead. My goal right now is to keep you among the living.”
“You need to stop the truck,” she insisted as she reached to look beneath the sleeve of his overshirt. “Oh, my God, Deck. You really need to let me apply pressure.”
“Ow,” he said. “Don't! We're almost there.” And there it was.
“Isn't this … ?” Tracy peered out the window into the rapidly darkening night as he pulled into the drive.
“Sam and Alyssa's,” he told her.
“It doesn't look like they're home.”
“They're not.”
“Then why—”
“Tracy.” He cut her off. “I need you to help me. See the keypad next to the garage?”
She peered out the front windshield again at the standard two-bay garage, and he turned on the truck's brights. “Over to the right.”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“I have the alarm code.”
She understood what he needed. “Tell me and I'll do it.” She opened the door, but he stopped her.
“Wait. We need to get this truck into the garage and close the door behind us—as quickly as possible, but… We can't leave any blood on the driveway.”
She looked at him. Looked at herself. They were both a mess, but at least she wasn't bleeding—at least that he knew of. Without a word, and without his having to ask, she kicked off her sandals and unfastened her belt. “What's the code?”
He told her as she shimmied out of her bloodstained pants, giving him an eyeful of smooth, tanned thighs and panties that were gleamingly, vir-ginally white. She perched on the end of the bench seat, where his blood hadn't yet spread, as she reached again for the door handle, repeating the string of numbers he'd told her.
She did a quick check of the neighborhood, making sure no one was watching, then opened the door and crossed the driveway as quickly as possible, hopping as she stepped on a stone with her bare feet.
And okay. So much for virginal, because her panties were thongs. He lowered his brights, because it was obvious that she didn't sunbathe in the nude.
And yeah, the cure for his out-of-control libido was to witness the death of Tess Bailey, the woman his best friend loved
more than life.
He was sitting here, staring at Tracy Shapiro's near-perfect—if cave-fish white—ass, and it was his arm that was throbbing. His dick was numb. All he felt was sick with misery.
And dizzy. Jesus.
As the garage door went up, Tracy turned to give him a thumbs-up for victory, her hair and breasts bouncing like some starlet in a horror movie, and he focused hard and put the truck back in gear with his left hand.
He was in luck—he didn't have to back up. Both sides of the double bay were empty, and he could pull right in. Tracy followed as he did, and—good girl—she quickly found the button so that the door lowered behind them.
Decker cut the motor and killed the lights.
A cell phone ringtone, on a very quiet setting, ran up and down and up and down a scale. He searched for Tracy's missing phone—it had to be hers—cursing as he jarred his injured arm by reaching under the seat. Jesus, the pain almost made him black out, and as he retrieved the phone, he sat for a moment with his eyes closed, seeing stars and willing himself to remain conscious.
He had to get a message to Dave and Sophia—he wasn't going to be able to meet them at the airport. And Jesus, he had to contact Alyssa and tell her about Jules and Tess.
Tracy opened the driver's-side door, and her voice seemed to come from a long way away as she said, “That's my text message ring.”
Decker looked down at the phone in his hand and saw on its screen that Tracy had indeed received a text message.
“9-1-1.” Tracy leaned closer to read the message aloud. “Head for home STAT. Trying 2 reach U.” She laughed, taking it from him. “It's from Tess. She sent it less than a minute ago. My phone's regular ring was set on silent—I have twenty missed calls, from her and Jules both.” She looked up at him, joy on her beautiful face. “Deck—I was right. They're alive!”
Decker reached for Tracy's cell phone, no doubt needing to see Tess's text message with his own two eyes.
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