I glanced at my new ruby ring, still finding it hard to believe Donovan had thought to buy it for me, and my heart filled with a jumble of conflicting emotions. I made myself promise that my whimsical romantic scenarios would be contained to the night. That I wouldn’t entertain any such girlish silliness come morning.
But making vows was easy. Keeping them had always been much trickier.
IT HAD been forty-eight hours since we’d ridden in the Trans Am. Both of us knew we were taking a chance by pulling it out of the garage and driving in the open again.
As forcefully as I’d once worked to keep Donovan heading west down Route 66, I was now doing everything in my power to get him to abandon it. Problem was, the stubborn man just wasn’t listening to me. Not about that. Not about anything.
“Donovan,” I began, as he jingled his car keys impatiently in our room, motioning for me to hurry up so we could leave. “Are you sure you don’t want to take the bus to the church?”
He shook his head. “The next one that stops near there isn’t for three hours. I read the schedule. Besides, I had enough of the bus yesterday. I want my own wheels.”
“But your ‘own wheels’ are really recognizable.” Not to mention that the car now had a busted driver’s side window, a number of bullet holes and a huge crack in the windshield.
“I’m not the only person in town driving a red Trans Am, Aurora.” He rolled his eyes. “Not even a damaged one. It’s been two days. Anyone following us would have thought we’d traveled on by now.”
“That’s right. It’s already Tuesday, and we’ve been gone from home for so long. I realize it might be too dangerous, with Officer James there, for us to go back yet—or for our families—but why don’t we check out of the motor lodge, make a quick stop at St. Christopher’s and then go just a little further north?”
Donovan didn’t immediately answer, so I made yet another plea for Colorado. “It’s not that far, but it’s at least away from here and the roads they might expect to find us on. If someone like Sebastian or those bikers are still searching for us in Albuquerque—or if they have people on the lookout for your car—they wouldn’t be as likely to spot us there.”
But what seemed to me to be a perfectly logical and utterly responsible compromise had no sway with him.
“We’re driving the half hour to this place, walking the grounds once and then picking up some lunch. I’m sick of crackers,” he informed me. “If anyone wants to find us that bad, they can damn well do it. Now, let’s go.”
As we slid into the Trans Am, I was reminded that Donovan had taken a different approach to all of this from the beginning. When it was still possible to ignore thinking about Jeremy and Gideon’s choices and their fate, he did. Back then, he felt he couldn’t do anything about it, so he just avoided it all. But when that changed—when the situation became real, present and tangibly dangerous to us—he had a lower tolerance than most for burying his head in the sand.
If I didn’t think I knew better, I would have suspected him of calling out “yoo-hoo” to our enemies. He’d had time at the motor lodge to mentally regroup. He seemed ready and refreshed. And, now, it was almost as if he was trying to flush the bad guys out of the desert shadows and into the light. Hoping to engage them in battle somehow. Clearly choosing fight over flight.
This worried me.
St. Christopher’s was a tiny Catholic church, much like the thousands of singular little chapels along America’s roadsides. Not really belonging to one community or another but, somehow, accessible to the residents of all of them. To anyone, really who was willing to make the drive.
Being just off the fairly busy I-25 had to have helped the parish in drawing the interest of strangers. They did, at least, have the benefit of drive-by traffic, I thought, as Donovan took us down the long gravel driveway and parked in the nearly abandoned back lot, away from the Interstate. Cars, trucks and buses could be heard zipping by but, as we walked around the old, small but well-constructed building to the cemetery behind the church, it felt plenty secluded to me.
As far as I could tell, there wasn’t a mass in session then and we saw no parishioners strolling the grounds. Donovan and I each wandered around independently, reading the names on the tombstones and trying to figure out if any of them looked like something that might be Jeremy’s final resting place. I hadn’t thought much about it, since neither Donovan nor Jeremy spoke much about religion, but their family was Catholic. My brother would have remembered something like that.
“There’s an unmarked section over here,” Donovan said, his voice more tense than it had been a few minutes earlier. “They’ve got a bunch of graves with no names. Just metal crosses.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat as I walked to where he was standing. There was no way to know if our hunch was right and this was where Gideon brought Jeremy. No way to guess in which grave Donovan’s brother might be, even if we were correct. So, I did the only two things I could: I said a prayer under my breath for Jeremy and for all of the unknown souls resting there, and I reached out to Donovan and put my hand on his shoulder, so he’d know he wasn’t alone.
We stood there for a long while, not saying anything. Finally, he took a step away, breaking our connection.
“So...what are you in the mood to have for lunch?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I’m not really hungry.”
“Me, neither,” he admitted. “Although, if we were anywhere near Johansen’s Diner, I could probably go for some Sandvik’s stew.”
I chuckled a little, remembering our meal there before we drove to Crescent Cove. It seemed like a lifetime ago. “Yet another reason to start heading toward home.”
“Should’ve guessed you’d say that.”
“Donovan, it’s not that I want us to just slip back in to our old lives and forget all of this ever happened. I know I never could, even if it were totally safe to go back. But I’m starting to think we’ve reached the end of the line. That there might be more to discover but, maybe, we just weren’t meant to discover it.”
The two of us started walking back toward the parking lot.
“I’m convinced my brother is alive, but he’s a ghost. He’s had a hundred chances to cross paths with us, but he doesn’t want to be found. And, while I’m sure there’s an excellent reason for that, it doesn’t change the fact that he’s...lost to me.”
I inhaled deeply. The pain of this loss was still so strong sometimes that it blocked my ability to breathe.
“I don’t want to give up searching for our brothers or looking for the answers to our questions,” I said. “But, if Gideon wants to be off the grid, and if Jeremy’s really...gone, then we can’t do much for either of them. We can only help the people we love at home who are left.”
He nodded. “I know. I just—I guess I hadn’t realized how much I hadn’t wanted to let my brother go.”
“Yeah.” I bowed my head. “That’s the part that’s hardest for me, too. That, somehow, we have to move on, even though we don’t have all the answers. That we won’t get the neat and tidy ending where the puzzle is solved. Where everything is clear and it all makes sense.”
I never thought I’d reach a point where I’d even think something like this but, after everything Donovan and I had been through, it was true.
“Would’ve been nice, though.” He smiled at me. “Hey, how about we just go back to the motor lodge and talk about our options. Maybe there’s something we can do that we’re overlooking. I just think—”
Suddenly, he stopped walking, grabbed me and shoved me behind him.
Standing half a parking lot away from us was one of the bikers that had followed us from Amarillo. The African-American one. We hadn’t seen him drive up. Hadn’t heard his motorcycle. But there it was, about four feet from the Trans Am, and he was standing—helmet off, legs crossed, arms taut and holding a gun in each hand—in front of Donovan’s car.
“You two are gonna want to stay right there,” the lea
ther-clad biker warned, an unmistakable edge to his deep voice, as we all watched an unmarked, beige sedan pull into the lot and park. Sebastian James stepped out of it.
“Oh, shit,” Donovan muttered.
Sebastian, out of police uniform but still managing to look officious and menacing, lifted his palm in a wave to the biker. “Thanks for the alert,” he called to the other guy. Then he turned his attention to us. “Convenient of you to come to a cemetery,” he sneered. “Ain’t that just perfect…did you two pick out your plots already?”
Donovan tensed, but I could tell he was preoccupied with thinking through possible escape routes. He motioned for me to stay behind him and a little to the right. As far out of direct range as I could get from the two other men.
Before either of us could answer, we heard the sound of a motorcycle coming down the drive. The second biker. This guy, the Caucasian one, didn’t even bother to take off his helmet. He just jumped off his bike, nodded in acknowledgment to Sebastian, then to the other biker, who handed him one of his guns. The white biker then took his place in the triangle of evil that surrounded us. Three against two. And all three of them were armed.
Sebastian grinned at those odds. “You’re not going to get away from us this time,” he said, taking a couple of steps forward. “Too bad these fine men and I didn’t know we were all on the same team back in Amarillo. We could’ve gotten rid of you there.”
Both bikers laughed at this, and the white one seemed especially mirthful. He slapped his black-leathered knee and, in the same motion, swiftly raised his weapon at us. Some kind of revolver with an extra-long barrel.
Under his breath, I heard Donovan murmur, “He’s got a silencer.”
The black biker pointed his gun in our direction, too, and then all of the men took several steps forward, closing in on us from three sides.
I reached ahead of me and grasped ahold of Donovan, putting my hands around his waist and, despite his resistance, pulling myself forward so we were standing side by side.
“Get back behind me, Aurora,” he whispered, his voice urgent but too low for the others to hear. “I’ll distract them. You run.”
The men stepped closer.
“No,” I said. “I’m staying with you.”
He gazed at me worriedly, an expression that held more than a touch of affection and infinite sadness wrapped up in it. Then he put his arm around me and hugged me close, still trying to shield my body with his.
The two bikers shared a glance. The black guy nodded at the white one, who finally spoke. “I’ve been waiting a long time for this,” the white biker said to us with a heavy Southern drawl. It struck a familiar chord. I knew I’d heard it recently, but I was too scared to place it.
His biker buddy nodded in agreement, and Sebastian, who’d pulled out his weapon and had it aimed it at us, chuckled and said, “Me, too.”
I took a deep breath, certain it was one of my last, as the helmeted biker cocked his revolver. But then, in a movement even swifter than his earlier one, he swung the gun so the barrel pointed at Sebastian, and he fired twice.
The smile disappeared from Sebastian’s face. He fell to the ground like an extinguished cigarette butt—almost as soundlessly as the muted bullets that had been shot at him. No doubt about it, he was dead.
Very much dead.
Donovan and I stood motionless, our mouths open, as the white biker returned the gun to the biking pal who’d given it to him. “Meet you back at the station,” he said to his friend, saluted us and then strode over to his motorcycle. He hopped on it and promptly drove away.
The black biker that remained behind held his hand up at us in a gesture of peace. “Aurora Gray and Donovan McCafferty,” he said, taking a few steps toward the fallen cop and studying the body from a couple of angles. “I’m sorry I was unable to introduce myself earlier. I’m Albuquerque police detective Billy Neville. My undercover partner and I have been monitoring your movements and trying to protect you two ever since we’d gotten word of your arrival in Amarillo. But I’m afraid we’d underestimated Sebastian James when we were there. We didn’t think he’d make his move so fast.” He paused. “This time, we made sure we had home court advantage, though. Glad we were able to stop him.”
I had no words in response to this.
It was all I could do just to try to comprehend the little information he’d given us as he began to lug Sebastian’s dead body toward the parking lot, muttering, “There’s gonna be a lot of paperwork to do on this one...”
So, he was Billy Neville? My brother’s “007” from his journal? His name had been on Treak’s list, too, and no one on that list had been good news.
Donovan’s thoughts must have been hovering in the same vicinity as mine because the tension in his torso didn’t diminish at Billy’s introduction. Still, he cleared his throat and was able to accomplish what I hadn’t been able to do: Ask a direct question.
“The biker who just shot Sebastian,” Donovan began slowly, “and who tailed us from Texas to New Mexico alongside of you—he was your undercover partner?”
“Yep,” Billy said. “But, in a way, you already know him.” He beamed a brief grin at us. “His name’s Andy Reggio.”
Albuquerque, New Mexico ~ Thursday, June 29
THE NEXT couple of days were a hazy, disorienting blur on one level but, simultaneously, they brought more clarity and enlightenment to our brothers’ disappearance than Donovan and I had ever hoped to expect.
And, for the first time since our road-trip adventure began, we felt we’d finally found an ally.
In the forty-eight hours following the shooting, we were under Billy Neville’s constant protective care and, as such, treated like royalty when it came to our safety and wellbeing. At the police station, where we spent the majority of those hours volleying questions and responses back and forth, we were made more comfortable and secure than if we’d been visiting dignitaries.
Not that Donovan and I weren’t both extremely suspicious at first.
“How did Andy Reggio start working with you?” Donovan asked Billy that first afternoon, distrust cutting sharp edges into his tone. “No one, including him, ever said anything about him being a cop. Just that he’d worked in that motorcycle shop and had an elderly mother in Shamrock.”
I nodded and crossed my arms, agreeing emphatically with Donovan’s skepticism. “And why did he leave after he shot Sebastian? Why didn’t he stay and help you with the body?”
Billy had used Sebastian’s own car keys to open the back of that beige sedan and, with Donovan’s reluctant help, tossed Sebastian’s body into the trunk before anyone at the church could come out and ask questions.
The forty-something Albuquerque police detective didn’t get flustered or defensive during our inquisition, though. He just took a deep breath and said, “There’s a good reason for all of this, and I’ll explain everything I know. Afterward, if you’re able to answer some of my questions, too, I’d really appreciate it.”
We agreed, though it was with a heavy dose of caution.
“To start with,” Billy said, “Andy Reggio isn’t a cop, but he’s a man with many talents. After I met Gideon, I brought Andy into this case as a civilian to do undercover work. He has a way with people and is capable of getting information from some sectors of the population that I cannot. Since I’m stationed out here in New Mexico, I can only travel so far, but Andy’s much more mobile, and he was willing to move around—”
“You talked to my brother?” I asked. “When? Why?”
“I only talked to Gideon in person one time, Aurora, and I’ll get to the details of that in a bit. Andy has been the liaison between me and Gideon ever since then, whereas I’ve been the one who’s primarily in contact with the FBI. I’ve got a couple of good friends there. The case they needed help with involved a major operation that had crossed a number of state lines but had begun in the Midwest. Specifically, in Chicago. There are a handful of bad seeds in the police department th
ere with mob ties and, also, in a few places across the country. The Feds have wanted to put a stop to them for a long time.”
“There are a lot of bad seeds, not just a handful,” I said, unwilling to be fully trusting of the man, despite the fact that every vibe I’d gotten from the officer sitting in front of us had been consistently genuine.
Again, he didn’t get mad or become aggressive. Instead, he said gently, “Aurora, not all of us cops are bad. Most of us are not. But, yes, there are some—certainly more than we’d like—who are motivated to do illegal things by greed, ambition, excitement or sometimes fear. They get caught up in dangerous, unethical ventures, and they either can’t or won’t get themselves out of it. For me, helping protect the innocent in these circumstances was where I knew I could be of service to my country.”
I tried to remain unmoved by this declaration. “When and why did you meet my brother?” I asked again.
“We met after Sebastian James shot him,” Billy replied. “I’d heard about the truck explosion in Amarillo and, from my underground sources, figured out someone had escaped from the scene, what kind of car the man was driving and which direction he was headed—turned out to be right into Albuquerque. I waited at the eastern edge of the city and then cornered Gideon as he came into town. His car had a couple of hastily patched-up tires, he was bleeding out of his right side and, in the backseat—” He shot a sad, apologetic look at Donovan. “In the backseat was Jeremy’s body. It took some convincing, but I eventually persuaded Gideon that I was one of the good guys.”
Donovan, who had learned his lesson about believing the words of shifty cops, continued to appear indifferent to Billy’s thoughtful statements. But I could tell by his posture and by the pained look in his eyes that he wished he could take the police detective at his word. I could also sense that some part of him had still been holding out a tiny bit of hope that Sebastian had lied about killing Jeremy. Donovan didn’t welcome Billy’s confirmation of this bad news.
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