Dark Sky

by Carla Neggers

  “I can handle whatever Tatro throws my way. Including himself.”

  The bartender skewered them with a suspicious, unfriendly glare. Ethan figured he and Juliet looked intense, wired tight and far from upscale. Perhaps they even looked a bit dangerous.

  “Is he still out of the country?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What about the hostage you rescued? Does he know?”

  “There’s your assumptions again. ‘Hostage.’ I never said my guy was held hostage.”

  “Okay, we won’t go there. I told you I’d heard that Tatro got mixed up with vigilante mercenaries. That true?”

  He shook his head. “Another place I can’t go.”

  That obviously didn’t sit well with her. “No promises I’ll be keeping any of what you tell me to myself this time.”

  “There were no promises last time.”

  “What else, Ethan? You aren’t here unshaved and unwashed to tell me that Bobby Tatro might be mad at me. He’s been mad at me for four years.”

  “It’s not important,” Ethan said, suddenly regretting the whole trip. “Forget it. Go eat vegan food with your niece.”

  “Ethan—”

  “I shouldn’t have come here. Just watch your back for Tatro.”

  Juliet sat back, studying him. “You didn’t need to come to New York to tell me that. Where do you go from here? Back home to Texas to play rich rancher?”

  “I’m a soldier. My father and brother are the ranchers.”

  “Bet you’re in the will.”

  “I’ve never asked.”

  Ethan eased off the stool and pulled out his wallet, laying a few bills on the counter to cover the beer and the water. He left a reasonable tip. If he lived in the neighborhood, he’d want a suspicious bartender.

  Juliet touched his upper arm, but he couldn’t feel her fingertips through the leather of his jacket and found himself wishing he could. Her eyes had softened. Not much, but enough for now. “Get some rest, Ethan. Don’t worry about me.”

  “I’m sorry we couldn’t grab Tatro. It wasn’t that other priorities prevented it. He just wasn’t there.”

  “I want to be able to reach you.”

  He plucked a pen from a cup on the counter, jotted his cell-phone number on a paper cocktail napkin and handed it to her. “Call anytime. Day or night.”

  The napkin disappeared into her jacket pocket. “I’d invite you up for leftover vegan Thai food—”

  “Nice try, Longstreet. You’re on your own with the weepy niece.”

  “She’s a great kid.”

  “Looks it.”

  “Your bosses—will they object to what little you’ve told me?”

  He grinned at her. “I’ve never been much of an ass-kisser.”

  “Much?”

  “See you around, Deputy.” He resisted an urge to kiss her and totally spoil her chances of becoming a regular at the cute neighborhood restaurant. But as she started out the glass door, Ethan grabbed her arm, tucking an envelope into her pocket. “Don’t open it in front of your niece.”

  “What?”

  “Or here.”

  She thumped his chest. “Be where I can find you.”

  He waited until he saw her walk past the restaurant windows on the corner, toward her apartment, before he headed outside.

  Bobby Tatro had been a busy boy in the past few weeks. He’d gone from federal prison to snatching an American contractor—an unlikely covert agent—in Colombia. Tatro had left a photograph of Juliet behind in the bleak Colombian shack where he’d held Ham Carhill. Ethan had spotted the picture and grabbed it, as if it were a warning of some kind—an omen.

  When Juliet opened the envelope and saw the photo, she’d understand why he hadn’t taken the time for a decent shower and shave, never mind to decompress from his mission, before getting on a plane to New York and finding her.

  The night air had turned downright cold, and the city lights obliterated any sign of the stars and moon. As Ethan stepped off the curb to hail a cab, he tried to remember when he’d last seen the big west Texas sky. A long time ago.

  You should go home.

  Instead, he was taking an evening shuttle to Washington, D.C.

  It took Ethan several tries before he could get a cab. Halfway to LaGuardia, his cell phone rang.

  “You didn’t add the horns and the blood-dripping eyes yourself, did you, Brooker?” Juliet asked dryly.

  She’d opened the envelope. She’d seen the photo, a digital shot of herself coming out of her apartment building. Bobby Tatro added his own sick, childish artwork.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “I didn’t think so. Tatro. You want to tell me how a picture of me came into his possession?”

  “If I knew, I’d tell you.”

  “I’m not so sure about that.”

  She hung up, and Ethan wished he could press some kind of rewind button that would take him back in time. He could arrive at Tatro’s camp an hour earlier and capture him, shove his grotesque photo of Juliet down his throat—demand answers. Where did he get the photo? Had he taken the picture himself? If so, when—how? If not, who had?

  He’d find out why Tatro was bugging out of his camp and leaving his hostage behind—he’d find out who’d tipped Mia O’Farrell off that Ham was being held by a blond female marshal.

  Then, Ethan thought, he wouldn’t have the painful feeling in his gut that he did right now, that he’d missed something—just as he’d missed something, everything, with Char when she’d told him she was going to Amsterdam on “holiday.”

  A few days later, his wife had turned up in a Dutch morgue.

  Ethan hadn’t had a painful feeling in his gut then. He’d been totally oblivious that Char was on the trail of a dangerous and violent international fugitive, a man who’d ordered her murder. If anything, news of her Dutch vacation had been a relief. She was having a good time without him. They’d had separate careers, separate lives, for so long. In the two years before her death, they’d been together all of twenty-one days.

  Guilt, he thought. That was why he was overreacting to the cracked and dog-eared picture of Juliet Longstreet he’d found in Bobby Tatro’s cinder-block Colombian hut.

  When he arrived at LaGuardia, Ethan had just enough time to get through security and on to his flight to Washington. He had clothes waiting for him at his hotel.

  He’d left no detail to chance—except the whereabouts of Bobby Tatro.

  Mia O’Farrell collapsed onto her four-poster bed without so much as kicking off her shoes. She stared, unblinking, at the plaster ceiling, wishing for nothing more complicated than a hot bath and a tall glass of cold milk. But she didn’t have the energy to move. It was after ten, the end of a very long, upsetting day—no matter how many times she reminded herself that Hamilton Carhill was home in Texas, recuperating from his ordeal after providing actionable intelligence that had saved innocent lives. His secrets were safe. He was safe.

  That she’d taken risks to make it happen—that she didn’t have all the answers she wanted—was a problem. But initially, when word had first reached her that Ham had been kidnapped, she hadn’t believed he’d get out of Colombia alive. He was being held by brutal criminals on a remote Andean mountainside, and no one even knew what in blazes he looked like.

  Mia lifted her head onto a pillow, to keep the stomach acid from crawling up her throat. She’d fought indigestion since she woke that day. Smarter, she thought, to wait and have her milk after her bath. Having it beforehand would only make her stomach worse.

  Her ceiling fan whirred steadily in the quiet night. She wasn’t a hardened Special Forces officer like Brooker or an eccentric genius like Carhill. She wasn’t experienced in power plays and political machinations like President Poe. She was just a smart kid from South Boston.

  “Not so smart.”

  She didn’t like the note of self-pity in her tone. But if she was so damn smart, why was she lying in bed at ten o’clock w
ith indigestion? Why hadn’t she realized she was being played?

  Carhill hadn’t provided many details of his kidnapping and incarceration. He’d said he was too traumatized and needed time. His kidnapping struck Mia and the experts—the very few who knew about it—as a reasonably well but not exactingly planned mission. A forty-eight-hour plan versus a one-month-in-the-making plan.

  Her assumption had been that profit was the motive. Greed, not power and secrets. Except Mia wasn’t so sure about that anymore, either.

  A profit motive she could understand. As a Texas Carhill, Ham had to have been a prime target for kidnappers-for-ransom in the wild circles in which he operated. He didn’t advertise his background, but if someone shady—someone like Bobby Tatro—did happen to find out about Carhill’s extreme wealth, then it made sense; snatch him, demand a ransom, get paid a fortune and either let him go or kill him. It was straightforward.

  But Tatro, only recently out of federal prison, hadn’t had much time to pull off such a complex mission. Someone else must have pointed him to Ham Carhill, helped him put together his team, lured him with the promise of a big payday—except there hadn’t been a ransom. Again, Mia stumbled on that one.

  Therein lay the little wrinkle she’d discussed with the president. Bobby Tatro couldn’t have masterminded the kidnapping on his own.

  She hadn’t mentioned to John Wesley Poe her fear—her near certainty—that she’d been played by some vigilante psycho.

  In some ways, Mia thought, it would have been simpler if they’d all been killed. Tatro and his men. Even Brooker, Carhill. Just close the book on the mission and walk away. No one would expect answers with so many key players dead. But she squeezed her eyes shut, appalled at her thinking. She could never allow herself to become that cold and analytical. That self-serving. Never, never, never.

  Hot tears dripped down her temples onto her pillow.

  You’re only as good as your last mistake.

  She opened her eyes and rolled onto her side. She’d lived in her apartment for more than two years, but it still didn’t feel like home. It was charming, with traditional furnishings, fireplaces in the bedroom and living room, wainscoting in the kitchen, a chandelier in the dining room. It had its own courtyard, lush with ivy and always cheerful, somehow, with its splash of morning sun. She could walk to the shops on M Street and the fancier houses—the places she couldn’t afford—with their carefully designed window treatments that looked so welcoming and yet, artfully but deliberately, obstructed prying eyes.

  Mia Frances O’Farrell wasn’t someone who made mistakes. She’d always earned good grades, from kindergarten through graduate school. She’d risen fast in the competitive, high-stakes world of national security, where mistakes didn’t get you a failing grade—they got people killed.

  The safe return of Ham Carhill had been the clear-cut objective of the mission.

  It had been a success. Not a mistake, not a failure, she reminded herself.

  The telephone rang, startling her. She reached for the extension on her bedside table without sitting up, her stomach churning.

  “I’ll expose you for the traitor and fraud you are.”

  Mia bolted upright, bile rising in her throat. She thought she recognized the voice on the other end but couldn’t be sure, didn’t dare commit herself. “Who is this?”

  “If you’re the wolf guarding the henhouse, I’ll find out. Mark my words.”

  “Excuse me—”

  “You have very little time to make things right.”

  Click.

  Mia dropped the phone onto the floor and half fell, half rolled, off the bed and ran into the bathroom, dry heaving as she leaned over the toilet. Nothing came up. Finally, she placed her forearm on the cool tile wall and leaned her forehead against it, trying to clear her mind, soothe her thoughts.

  She had enemies. More than one no doubt thought her a fraud and even a traitor. But a wolf guarding the henhouse? Her?

  She returned to the bedroom, kicking off her heels and kneeling on the fuzzy rug on her narrow-board floor, feeling under her bed for the phone.

  Her caller ID registered only Private Name, Private Number.

  She climbed back onto her bed, sitting cross-legged in the middle of her pale blue chenille coverlet, no thought now of a hot bath and cold milk.

  Major Brooker should have arrived in Washington by this time for their morning meeting. But he had no reason to make such a call. Technically, he’d volunteered for the Carhill rescue mission. He’d been asked to volunteer, but he could have refused. President Poe had involved himself—Mia suspected he had his own agenda with Brooker.

  Poe hadn’t asked her how she’d figured out that the Brookers and the Carhills were neighbors and that Ethan would recognize Ham, which made him perfect for the rescue job. The president had stayed away from details. Something about the army major, who’d had an awful year by anyone’s standards, seemed to have resonated with Poe—he was totally untroubled by any of Ethan’s exploits since his wife’s death.

  Subtext. Connections. Mia had pushed them aside and focused on getting Ham Carhill to safety—nothing else.

  “You want your guy. You need to send Ethan Brooker….”

  A voice on the other end of a telephone. A confidence. A hope, she had thought, pushing back the memory of just how easily she’d succumbed to that hope.

  Every time, it was the same. Male, sincere, urgent and anonymous.

  “Your guy’s being held by some ex-con who has a thing for a blond, female marshal.”

  The same voice. The same sincerity and urgency.

  The man on the other end had first called her over the summer, providing her with information that had led to the arrest in Miami of illegal arms-traffickers with Colombian ties. Then he’d put her in touch with Ham Carhill as a potential informant. But Ham had proved to be so much more, a true genius at clandestine work.

  In retrospect, Mia knew she should have flown to Bogotá herself and met Ham in person, or had him fly to Washington. Smarter yet, she should have asked for help from people better suited to handle operatives.

  But she’d continued to take the anonymous calls, and now she had to pay whatever the consequences might be.

  She crawled stiffly out of bed and turned on the tub in the small, adorable bathroom, scooping out lavender salts and sprinkling them under the hot running water. She’d postpone her meeting with Ethan in the morning and see if she could find out more about what really happened down in Colombia.

  In the meantime, she’d have her bath, after all.

  Wendy seemed to put all her concentration into choosing a Lake Champlain Chocolates truffle from the box she’d brought with her, stuffed at the bottom of her tote bag, but Juliet knew her feelings were hurt. Her niece was sitting cross-legged on the rug in front of the futon couch, the television off, the street sounds—traffic, the occasional siren—the only real distraction.

  “I’m saving the coffee-flavored ones for you, Aunt Juliet.” Wendy managed a halfhearted smile. “Dad says you drink more coffee than all your brothers combined.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me if I did. I need to cut back.”

  She picked a truffle and handed the box up to Juliet. “Your turn. I’ve got a raspberry one. You can tell by the marks on the tops.”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  “You just reminded me—I didn’t check the ingredients. Actually, I’m scared to. I mean, if truffles aren’t vegan, what do I do then?”

  Juliet smiled. “We all have our sins.” But she grew more serious. “Wendy—”

  “It’s okay. I should have called. I was so into the idea of going to New York on my own—” She bit just the top off the small truffle, savoring it as she leaned back against the futon. “I should have gone to college this year instead of waiting. I want to be more independent than Dad or Grandma and Grandpa are willing to let me be. I decided—I don’t know, I just decided to do it. Be independent. Not ask permission.”
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  “That’ll be easier for them to swallow when you’re eighteen,” Juliet said, plucking what she thought was a vanilla malt truffle from the tempting lineup in the box. “Six months to go. Right now, you’re still a minor.”

  She sighed, taking another tiny bite of her truffle. “I know. It stinks.”

  “But I promise, Wendy. I’ll get you down here for a few days before I have to vacate the premises. We’ll go to museums, visit the park. I’m looking forward to it. It’s just that right now, I’ve got some loose ends I need to tie up.”

  “Do they have to do with what was in that envelope?”

  Juliet hadn’t shown Wendy the photograph of her on the steps of her building, on her way to work on a relatively recent morning—she was in the jeans she’d bought in late August, the same day as her leather jacket. The blood-dripping eyes and horns made her skin crawl. But the idea that Bobby Tatro had taken a picture of her at her home without her even being aware of it had her wanting, at the very least, to get her niece safely back home. He’d crossed the line.

  “Yes,” she said, “they do.”

  “Marshal business?”

  Juliet nodded. “There’s a chance a fugitive I took into custody wants revenge now that he’s out of prison.”

  “Has he threatened you?”

  “Not directly, no.”

  Wendy bent her head back so that it was resting on the cushion next to where Juliet was sitting. “I’m glad you like your job, Aunt Juliet, because I sure don’t want to be in law enforcement. I don’t want to be a landscaper, either, although I think I like it better than all that cop stuff.”

  “You want to go to med school, right?”

  She sat up straight, finishing off her truffle. “If I ever write the stupid essays for my applications.”

  “You’ve got time,” Juliet said. “Take a break.”

  She shook her head. “Mom wants me to apply early decision. I need to get them done. I should have stayed home this weekend and worked on them, so I guess it’s just as well—” She broke off, heaving another sigh. “I’ll take the train back in the morning.”