by Sharon Sala
The fact that she’d been completely silent since he’d left Missouri had been worrisome, but she’d warned him that she was going to leave him, so he assumed it had finally happened. In a way, he surprised himself by feeling glad she’d finally given up staying earthbound and gone on to her glory. It was easier on his conscience and his ears.
A week later he was in recovery and coming out from under anesthesia. The doctor was standing nearby, and there was a nurse on either side of the bed. When the doctor saw his patient’s eyes opening, he smiled.
“Hello, Mr. Leibowitz! Your surgery is over, and I am pleased with how everything went. Once the bandages come off and the swelling subsides, I think you will be very happy with the results.”
Hershel nodded and drifted back to sleep. As long as the scars were gone, or at least minimized, and his face looked different, the rest of his life should be a piece of cake.
* * *
Two months later a crazy weather pattern spawned tornadoes across the Upper Midwest. When it did, the team back in D.C. held their breaths, waiting for a text that never came. And while there were deaths from some of the storms, none were attributed to anything but Mother Nature.
A month later, an unusual amount of rainfall in Georgia caused flooding all along the Chattahoochee River. People were stranded in their houses, and some of those living along the river drowned when their houses fell into the flood as the banks washed out from under them.
Again they waited, but the text didn’t come and none of the deaths turned out to be murder. They began to believe the ordeal was finally over.
“Do you think he’s dead?” Jo asked one night at dinner.
Wade shrugged. “No way to know, but we can hope. In the meantime, would you please pass the scalloped potatoes? They’re so good I could eat the whole thing.”
She smiled as she watched him dig in and thought about how close she’d come to losing all this.
Reston, Virginia
A few weeks later Jo and Wade were watching television when the Stormchaser case came up on an unsolved-mysteries show.
Wade promptly flipped the channel.
Jo eyed the look on his face. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“It’s a sore subject,” he said. “I’d like to think the bastard died and is rotting in a cemetery under one of his damn aliases.”
“But you don’t think so?”
“Until I know for sure, I won’t feel settled about this.”
She threw a pillow at him, then laughed when he growled and pulled her down onto the floor, where they promptly made love.
The one positive about all of Jo’s narrow escapes was that she took nothing for granted. Every day with Wade was a gift, and finding the way through a new relationship was easy, once you knew the route.
It was simple actually, all about trust, an abiding love, and always giving Wade the last cookie.
Epilogue
Lake Chapala, Mexico
Hershel had settled in quite nicely at Lake Chapala, and once he’d finished his weight-loss project and had the extra skin removed from his cheeks and neck, he was a completely different man. In fact, he’d gotten so immersed in his new identity that there were days when the bad parts of his past seemed as if they had happened to another man.
But there was an anniversary coming up that meant a brief return to the States. Louise had died on August 31, 2005, and he hadn’t missed a year since of putting flowers on her grave. Despite his reluctance to set foot back on United States soil, he felt it would be bad luck to miss what had become a tradition.
So, two days before the date, he packed up his carry-on with a change of clothes and a couple of his favorite hats, loaded it into his little Volkswagen and drove into nearby Guadalajara. He caught a flight north to New Orleans, which was just a direct hop across the Gulf of Mexico, and got a room for the night in one of the local hotels.
Within hours of his arrival the familiar sounds of the city, the scent of pralines cooking in the French Quarter and the aromas of Cajun cuisine wafting out of the nearby restaurants made him homesick. He tasted the food, drank the wine and ate a solitary dinner.
When he saw a couple he recognized, his heart skipped a beat, but they only looked at him as if he was a stranger and kept walking. That was when he knew he was safe.
The next morning was the day. August 31. He dressed in a pair of pale blue slacks and a blue and white floral shirt, and walked to a nearby florist to get the flowers before hailing a cab to take him to the cemetery.
As they drove through the gates, Hershel pointed to a road leading off to the left.
“Take that road, and then take the third right. After that, I’ll tell you where to stop.”
“Yes, sir,” the driver said, and drove slowly past the tombstones and mausoleums.
A few minutes later Hershel leaned forward. “Stop at this corner. I’ll walk from here.”
The driver stopped. “I’ll be waiting right here for you, sir, when you’re ready to leave.”
Hershel nodded, got out with the flowers and started walking.
I almost didn’t recognize you.
He stumbled, then looked around nervously as he lowered his voice.
“Louise?”
Who else did you think it would be? Of course it’s me.
“What are you doing here? I thought you were gone,” he said.
I was thinking the same exact thing of you. You shouldn’t be here. You need to go back to Lake Chapala.
“I will as soon as I put these flowers on your grave.” He reached the gravesite and then quickly put them down in front of the aboveground tomb.
I remember flowers. I wish I could smell stuff down here again.
Hershel frowned. “You can’t smell?”
It doesn’t matter. Go home, Hershel. Go home…home…home…
He turned around and headed back to the cab, and the closer he got, the faster he went. By the time he got inside, he was breathless. “Take me back to the Marriott.”
“Yes, sir. Right away, sir,” the driver said.
Once back at the hotel, Hershel began to pack. He had an early morning flight tomorrow and didn’t want to be late. When he eventually went down to dinner, instead of choosing one of the hot spots he knew so well, he ate in the hotel, picked up a half-dozen newspapers from different parts of the country and headed back to his room. It would be a treat to read a larger variety of American papers for a change.
He skimmed through a local paper and then the New York Times before he picked up the Washington Journal. He was already yawning and about ready to call it a night when he turned a page and realized it was the society section. The photo of the little blonde looked familiar, and he stopped to read the story below it.
He quickly realized it was Laura Doyle, the Red Cross woman he’d worked for during the floods. It appeared she was going to be married, and he kicked back to read further. When he read the name of her fiancé, he gasped.
“What the fuck?”
Cameron Winger? The third fed. The one he’d cracked on the head when he’d kidnapped Nola Landry. He wasn’t dead? Why wasn’t he dead?
Hershel sat up to keep reading. The notice mentioned a wedding shower being given by Jolene Luckett and Nola Landry. That damn female agent hadn’t died, either?
“Son of a bitch,” Hershel muttered, and then grabbed his iPad out of his luggage and began running a search of death certificates for Tate Benton and Wade Luckett. He couldn’t find either one. “They’re alive. They’re all alive. Why didn’t they die? I thought it was over. I thought I’d won.”
He was sick to his stomach as he crawled into bed, and then, when he finally fell asleep, his dreams were filled with long-buried memories of times he’d tried to forget.
When
he woke up the next morning he dressed without thought for how he looked, wanting only to get home. He caught a cab to the airport and arrived in plenty of time, but as he was walking to the gate he began seeing Louise. Everywhere he looked she was just walking past his line of sight, or disappearing into the women’s bathroom or down a ramp to get on a plane.
“What’s going on?” he muttered, but she didn’t answer. “What does this mean? If I’m seeing you, does this mean I’m going to die?”
He sat down near his gate, his hands shaking and his heart hammering in a jerky rhythm against his rib cage. Everything had been fine until he’d come back to the States.
Go home. I told you to go home.
“Then why am I seeing you?” he whispered.
If you don’t go home, then you will die. This is the last warning you are going to get.
“But they aren’t dead. They were supposed to be dead.”
She didn’t answer, and all of a sudden they were calling his flight.
He stood up, grabbed his carry-on and started walking…past the gate, then through the airport until he got to ground transportation and rented himself a car. By the time his plane was in the air, he was in a car driving north.
He knew it was a bad idea, but the worm in his brain was already at work, telling him what to do and how to do it.
Before he left this earth, he needed at least one of those men to know the pain of his loss. Since Nola Landry and Jolene Luckett had already blown past his fruitless attempts to end their lives, it now appeared there was one more lady who’d moved to center stage.
Laura Doyle was set to become a bride, but not if he could help it.
* * * * *
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ISBN-13: 9781460325308
GOING TWICE
Copyright © 2014 by Sharon Sala
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