She drained her glass and set it down a tad too hard. “Where’s Peter?” she demanded more quietly. “Is he all right? Did he send me that card?”
“I suppose he did send it in a manner of speaking,” McQuade answered cryptically.
“What does that mean? Where is he?”
“Do you ever ask just one question at a time?” her companion asked dryly.
She scowled, and he responded, “Peter said you were impatient. If you’ll just hold your horses, ma’am, I’ll try to answer all your questions. But I think it would be best if I start at the beginning.”
“What beginning?” This man was speaking as if Peter was definitely alive! A glimmer of excitement bubbled up in her chest.
A smile danced at the corner of his mouth for a moment as if he found her impatience amusing. Peter used to half smile at her just like that, too. Something…odd…skated through her. It felt like walking over someone’s grave.
“As I said, my name’s Colt McQuade. I’m from Oklahoma originally. I joined the army thirteen years ago. Most recently, I worked with a Special Forces unit. We got deployed to Kyrgyzstan last year. On Valentine’s Day.”
That was it. Kyrgyzstan. The place where Peter had died. McQuade’s tea arrived and he was silent while the waiter poured it for him. She wouldn’t have pegged G.I. Joe for a tea drinker. Maybe he’d picked up the habit in Central Asia. McQuade fiddled with his teabag until it looked for all the world like he was stalling.
She prompted, “Kyrgyzstan?”
A dark shadow passed through his eyes. “Right. Kyrgyzstan. I can’t go into the details of the mission, but suffice it to say things didn’t go well. I got captured.”
“By whom?” she asked, startled.
“Local crime boss. Name’s not important. He tossed me into a hole and left me to rot. It was some sort of underground cellar. At any rate, there was this guy already down there before me.”
Layla leaned forward. “Peter?”
“Yeah. Peter Morrison.”
The waiter interrupted again, this time to hand them menus. It took Colt about five seconds perusing the veggie menu to grimace. Must be a hardcore carnivore. They ordered, and then Layla prodded McQuade to continue. “You were in a cellar. With Peter.”
“Right. He was in rough shape.”
“Translation?” she asked grimly.
“Physically, he was pretty beat-up. Mentally, he was losing his grip on reality. He and I talked a lot. I don’t know if it helped him or not. In the end, they pushed him too far.” McQuade added reluctantly, “Translation—he couldn’t take what they dished out.”
McQuade said no more. He merely stared blankly into his teacup. He might as well be a thousand miles away. “Then what?” she asked quietly.
He looked up sharply, startled. “What?”
“What happened to Pete?”
“Oh. Right.”
Speaking of lost marbles, she was beginning to have her doubts about this guy having all of his. Maybe coming to this dinner had been a bad idea. “Well?” she asked.
A shrug. “He died from his injuries.”
Layla’s hopes fell off a cliff and dashed to pieces on the rocky shores of reality. Peter was really dead, then? “But the card… That was his handwriting. I’m sure of it!”
“You’re right. He told me he’d written you a Valentine’s card but didn’t get to send it before he left for Kyrgyzstan. He expected to mail it when he got home. I took the liberty of going over to his place and finding it. I mailed it to you.”
“You shouldn’t have sent it to me,” she said low and furious. “You got my hopes up for nothing. It was a cruel joke.”
McQuade blinked a few times and then the skin around his eyes tightened grimly. “Believe me, ma’am. This is no joke. I had to be sure you’d come tonight and talk to me.”
“Why? What could be so important that you had to drag me through the emotional wringer like this?”
McQuade leaned forward and, matching her intensity, replied, “If it makes you feel better, it was Peter who sent me to you. And it’s a matter of national security for you and me to figure out why.”
She stared. “What on God’s green earth are you talking about?”
“If you’ll let me continue, that’s what I’m trying to explain.”
She pursed her lips. “Then, by all means, continue.”
It was his turn to scowl. “Peter and I spent a lot of time together. When our captors weren’t busy interrogating or torturing one of us, of course. Toward the end things got really bad, and that was when Peter did something to me.”
She stared at the powerful man before her and recalled her scrawny, uncoordinated friend. Surely Peter couldn’t have dented this guy, let alone hurt him.
McQuade was speaking again. “I don’t know what he did. Some sort of hypnosis. But whatever he did, I’m hauling around a piece of him inside me, now.”
Layla stared. And then she laughed in disbelief. “Are you talking about a Vulcan mind-meld?”
It was McQuade’s turn to stare. And then he spoke very slowly, as if to a child. “You do know Vulcans aren’t real, right?”
“Yeah, I got that memo,” she retorted. “More’s the pity. Vulcans are emotionally stable, predictable, so much easier to deal with than human men.”
McQuade just shook his head.
Exasperated at his inability to maintain a thread of conversation, she said, “So Peter did his hoojey-moojey on you. Then what?”
“The torture got worse. He couldn’t take it anymore. His body gave way under the pressure. He lost his will to live.”
Pain speared through her. It was one thing to suspect that Peter’s death had been awful. It was another to learn for certain that she’d been correct. At least Peter hadn’t been alone at the end. He’d had this grouchy soldier with him. It was better than nothing, she supposed. Silence fell between them. She picked at the excellent dinner, but her heart wasn’t in the meal. Poor Peter. His life might have been troubled, but he didn’t deserve such a tragic end.
Her dinner companion wasn’t faring much better with his meal, either. Eventually, she pushed back her plate and asked soberly, “What possessed you to send me that Valentine’s Day card? How did you know I’d show up?”
McQuade shrugged. “We had a lot of time on our hands. Peter told me pretty much everything about his life. And you were a very large part of it. He said you’re the curious sort. Can’t resist a good mystery.”
Layla blinked, alarmed. How much did this man know about her? She’d confided everything in Peter. He’d known about or participated in pretty much all of her most private and personal secrets. Surely Peter hadn’t shared all of those with this complete stranger. He’d better not have or she’d kill him—oh, wait. Peter was already dead. Her indignation broke on a wave of grief.
A large, hard hand closed over hers on the table. Her fingers suddenly felt small and girly by comparison. McQuade murmured, “I’m sorry for your loss. Peter had a good heart. He loved you more than anyone else in the whole world.”
She didn’t need this soldier boy to tell her that! She jerked her hand away from the disturbing contact. She would get up and leave right now except this man knew everything about Peter’s final days. A compulsion to know all the details of her friend’s end held her reluctantly in her seat.
He said wryly, “Would it make you feel better to curse a few of the blissfully happy couples around us to have terrible relationship troubles this coming year?”
She smiled, but it didn’t dry the tears in her heart. “No. That’s okay. I think my Valentine’s Day is going to suck enough this year to make up for all the happy couples here.”
McQuade said quietly, “I know the feeling. I’ve been dreaming about Peter. And it’s getting worse. It’s as if he’s trying to tell me something.”
“Peter’s trying to tell you something?” She echoed. “Dead Peter? He’s talking to you from beyond the grave? Like a ghost?” She was st
unned that this soldier believed something like that. Even she had a hard time believing it, and she was the new-age hippie of the two of them.
McQuade huffed. “I don’t know what’s going on. That’s why I need your help.”
“Why me?” she retorted. “I’m no expert in possession or communication with the dead.”
“But you are an expert on Peter Morrison, and I need you to help me unlock whatever Peter hid inside my head.”
“And you think it’s a matter of national security?” she asked skeptically. “Why?”
“That’s classified. Need to know only.”
Whatever the heck that meant. Apparently the military jargon translated into a big, fat, not-gonna-tell-ya.
“I really don’t see how I can be of any assistance to you, Mr. McQuade—”
“Please,” he interrupted. “I’m desperate.”
Him? Desperate? He looked totally calm, cool and collected. “Look. This has been a fascinating meal and thank you for filling in the details of Peter’s last days. But I really don’t think I can help you. Have a nice life, Mr. McQuade.”
Under normal circumstances she’d have insisted on paying her half of the bill for dinner, but these were hardly normal circumstances. She got up from the table and headed for the exit, shamelessly sticking him with the tab. But hey. He’d tricked her into coming here in the first place. He could pay for dinner.
She hurried out of the restaurant. She wanted to be well away from here before McQuade came out. She headed for the nearest trolley stop, which was several blocks from the restaurant. It was a dark, misty evening and she huddled deeper into her coat as tendrils of fog reached out with cold fingers to caress her cheeks.
A shadow moved just ahead of her and she’d started, alarmed, before she realized it was just a man. He turned to walk in the same direction she was going. No big deal.
She thought she heard a new noise and glanced over her shoulder. In the dark and fog she couldn’t make out anything more than a pair of distant shapes. Just two more people hurrying to their warm, dry homes on a cold, miserable evening.
But then out of nowhere a figure barreled at her out of an alley to her left. In the blink of an eye, the other three pedestrians had closed in on her and the attacker, forming a terrifying phalanx around her. Panic clenched her throat so tightly no sound came out when she tried to scream.
Abruptly, a male voice echoed weirdly out of the fog from behind them all. “Get away from her! It’s me you want!”
Her assailants released her abruptly and spun toward Colt McQuade sweeping down upon them like an avenging angel out of the night…or, maybe more accurately, like a fullback charging a wall of defensive linemen. The effect of the collision between him and the four men was about the same as at a professional football game. With a tremendous crash, bodies went flying and grunts accompanied men being flung every which way.
A powerful hand gripped her upper arm. “Let’s go, Layla,” McQuade bit out.
“Who—”
“Later.”
McQuade ducked into the alley her first attacker had come from and sprinted like the hounds of hell were after them, dragging her along beside him. Who were those men? And why had they jumped her? They hadn’t reached for her purse or mauled her in any way. What had they wanted?
Footsteps pounded behind them.
They reached the end of the alley and McQuade yanked her left, racing down the next block so fast she barely stayed on her feet. Another turn, a suicidal dash across the street through oncoming traffic, one more block, and then McQuade was tearing open a car door and shoving her inside. He raced around to the driver’s side, leaped in and peeled away from the curb.
She tried to catch her breath while McQuade drove like a stunt man, weaving through traffic at high speed and scaring her nearly as much as those four men had. Finally he slowed, and just like that, they blended into the Oakland-bound traffic, just another blue Prius on a Friday night.
“What. Was that. About?” she panted.
He glanced over at her grimly. “Believe me now when I say I need your help?”
“The way you took out those guys, it didn’t look you needed much help to me,” she replied sourly. “Who are they?”
“I don’t know. But I think Peter knows.”
“Peter’s dead,” she snapped.
“Not all of him. A piece of him is still in here.” McQuade tapped his head. “And that piece might know.”
“Then why not ask him?”
“Like a séance?” He made a scoffing noise.
“So you’re going to channel him directly then?”
“I highly doubt that. I was thinking more in terms of you figuring out what the trigger is to release the memory or whatever it is Peter stuck in my mind.”
She shook her head. “This is too weird for me.”
McQuade laughed, but the sound was devoid of any humor. “Hell, you ought to try living with a time bomb ticking inside your head. Sometimes I think I’m going crazy.”
Sometimes? She was pretty darned sure the guy was fully there. “Can’t the government help you? They’ve got doctors—specialists—who could handle something like this.”
He sighed. “TV shows with far-out science in secret government labs aren’t real.”
“I know that,” she groused. “But surely they’ve got shrinks who can deal with hypnotic suggestion or whatever this is.”
“I’ve already talked to those guys. They think it’s more akin to a post-traumatic stress reaction and will pass with time.”
She exhaled hard in relief. “Well, there you have it. Go sit on a beach for a few months until your fantasies of Peter in your noggin go away.”
“Been there, done that. Didn’t work.”
“Try harder,” she suggested.
He threw her a withering look. “Trust me. You’re my last resort.”
Colt glanced across the car at the woman beside him. Peter hadn’t been wrong about one thing. Layla Freeman was a hell of a looker. Those big blue eyes of hers went right through a guy, and all that creamy skin and swirling honey hair begged a man to touch them. Of course, she was every bit as stubborn as Peter had said, too. And that was a problem.
He seriously did need her help, and he was desperate enough to force her to do it. But he sensed that the harder he pushed her, the harder she would push back.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“At the moment, away from where our pursuers will look for us.”
“Us?” she squawked. “Why are those guys looking for me all of a sudden?”
“Because they saw you with me,” he replied grimly.
“Surely you’re exaggerating. Maybe along with your post-traumatic stress you’re experiencing a teensy bit of paranoia?”
It would be so much easier if that were true. But he’d been dodging this team of men for nearly a week now. It was their relentless pursuit that had finally driven him to seek Layla’s help in solving the mystery of whatever the hell Peter had planted in his head. If Colt had doubted the importance of whatever it was before, the fact that those men tonight had been willing to assault an innocent woman over it spoke volumes about how important it was. What the hell did you do to me, Pete?
“Colt, I want no part of this. Take me home.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he replied on a sigh.
“And I don’t think it’s your call to make,” she snapped.
He really didn’t want to kidnap her, but it might come down to that if he couldn’t talk her into helping him voluntarily. “Fine,” he replied reluctantly.
He guided the car toward her apartment, and thankfully, she didn’t freak out that he knew where she lived. Maybe she remembered that he’d mailed the Valentine’s card to her and seen her address on it.
As they neared her place, he slowed down and turned off his headlights. The Prius shifted fully to its electric power train and rolled forward in near-total silence.
He murmured, “Indulge me. I’d like to watch your place for a few minutes before you go in. Just a precaution, you understand.” Although he full well expected it was no precaution at all. He’d spent long enough barely staying one step ahead of his pursuers to know they were very, very good. He had complete confidence they had already identified Layla and were at her place learning everything they could about her.
She harrumphed but didn’t protest. Maybe she had more sense than he gave her credit for. He found a parking space across the street and pulled into it. Silence fell in the car.
“What are we looking for?” she murmured eventually.
“Any sign that someone’s inside your place. A light. A shadow passing in front of a window.”
Abrupt fear rolled off her. He sighed. “Look. I’m sorry I dragged you into this. I tried to stay away from you. Keep you out of it. Out of respect for Peter’s feelings for you.”
“What, exactly, did he tell you of his feelings for me?” she asked tartly.
He winced. He’d been hoping this particular subject wouldn’t come up between them. “You have to understand. We were stressed and isolated and didn’t have another human being to talk to for months.”
“What did he tell you?” she asked again with a note of alarm in her voice now.
“Everything,” he answered simply.
Her luminous eyes went wide with horror. And with good cause. He knew every intimate, embarrassing, silly, sweet thing Peter could recall of her entire life. And Pete and Layla had been best friends since first grade. Peter had known all the dirt on her. In fact, meeting Layla tonight had been damned strange. It was as if he’d known her for years, and yet it was the first time he’d ever laid eyes on her.
“It’s a darn good thing that rat fink is already dead,” Layla mumbled in a strangled voice.
“I swear I’ll take it all to my grave if that makes you feel any better,” he said sincerely.
“This is shaping up to be the worst Valentine’s Day ever,” she grumbled mostly to herself.
He opened his mouth to speak, but then a movement caught his eye.
“Did you see that?” she gasped.
“Yes.” That had definitely been a silhouette passing in front of her living-room window. Inside her apartment. A light went on in what was probably her bedroom and she gasped again. “We’ve got to call the police! I’m being robbed.”
Deadly Valentine Page 9