Ryland’s Reach (Bullard's Battle Book 1)

by Dale Mayer

  “Maybe.” He grabbed the notepad beside him and wrote down names and dates.

  “Is this all about the same father?”

  “And another case,” he said, “which just might dovetail. I’m not sure.”

  She gave him some time and space. So she searched the web on her phone, then checked her emails, basically looking for anything to keep her mind occupied, while she tried to figure out what she would do now. When a knock came on the door, she froze and looked at him.

  He’d already stood, heading toward the door. When he got to the door, he made an odd sound. Another odd sound came from the other side. Immediately he opened the door, and a big cart was pushed in. She looked at him in surprise. The guy never said a word, then turned and walked back out again. As soon as he was gone, Ryland walked to the bathroom door and called out to Cain, “Food’s here.”

  “I’m done,” Cain said, as he opened the door and stepped out. His hair was wet, and he was obviously clean-shaven. He looked like he felt better, at least for the moment. He smiled when he saw the trolley. “Good,” he said. “Let’s see if we can clear some space.”

  There were only two chairs, so she said, “I can sit on the bed.”

  “We’ll see,” he said, as they lifted the lids. Indeed, there was a steak for each man, but when the third dome came off, she laughed to see spaghetti and meatballs. He held it out to her with a fork, and she smiled in joy.

  “You were serious, weren’t you?” she said.

  “Never more so,” he said. “I told you that you can have pretty well anything.”

  She rearranged the pillows and scooched up against the headboard. She sat with her plate of spaghetti on her lap. It was piping hot and delicious. It was so good. She could only eat slowly because it was so hot, whereas the men attacked their meals with vigor. She said to Cain, “Ryland’s wondering about a couple cases.”

  Cain looked at Ryland, who shrugged and said, “Just thinking about that job we did in South Africa. You know? For the father whose daughter died?”

  “I wondered about him too,” Cain said. “Although that’s almost, like, too easy.”

  “I know. I was thinking that too. It’s, like, he’s the obvious culprit that we’ll think about immediately,” Ryland said. “But then there was that other one,” Ryland said, as he tapped the notepad. “I was wondering if they dovetailed together somehow.”

  “That was a friend of his, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. And remember? We had two of the father’s henchmen come and work for us. Then they went back and worked for him again afterward.”

  “Meaning, that maybe they were still working for the father the whole time they were working for you,” she suggested curiously.

  “Yeah, that’s something that came up in one of our meetings.”

  “You haven’t had time for any meetings,” she said in exasperation.

  “We have meetings constantly on the phone or the laptop,” he said. “We’re going through as many files as we can, trying to see who would bear that kind of a grudge.”

  “Or multiple grudges,” she said. “Maybe it’s somebody who just had a small grudge but figures that other people have been slighted or wronged, and you need to be taken out collectively.”

  “That’s pretty big thinking,” Cain said. “I can’t imagine it. I suspect this is a very small, fairly intimate group.”

  “Blowing up a plane,” she snapped, “is not intimate. Watching somebody die as you strangle the life out of them? That’s intimate.”

  Both men looked at her in surprise.

  “I’m a surgical nurse. Remember? I’ve seen plenty of what people do to each other,” she said. “There’s a lot of differences in the way people kill and maim those who they supposedly love.”

  “That’s very true,” Cain said. “Well, at least now we might have something to go on.”

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “We took a photo of the message in your bathroom. We looked at the handwriting, and one of the guys recognized something. Along with the photo we have from the video camera, we’ve narrowed down your intruder. It looks like it’s a local merchant whose services are widely for sale,” he said. “We’ll have a talk with him tonight.”

  “Good,” she said. “Let’s hope he has something to offer.”

  Ryland looked at her and gave her a wolfish smile and said, “He will.”

  She glared at him. “You guys going to torture him for what he knows?”

  “If need be, yes,” Cain said smoothly. “What would you like us to do? Give him a key to your next place of residence?”

  “Understood.” She buried her fork in the spaghetti, eating, as she pondered what this next stage of her life would mean. She’d always been nonviolent, believing in peace, but what do you do when the war comes to your front doorstep? Do you fight back? Or did you let the war run over you? Because she didn’t see that she had a whole lot of choice at this point. Apparently she was in this do-or-die scenario, and choices had to be made, but they needed to be made at once.

  When she was done with her spaghetti, she returned her plate to the cart, looking to see that the men were all done too. She removed their plates and stacked them all up.

  “Wait. What’s the rest of this under here?” She lifted it up, found an apple pie and several small plates. “Are you kidding?” she said. “Not slices of pie, but a whole pie.”

  “Pie makes me think,” Ryland said, with a laugh.

  Cain looked at the trolley and said, “Bet there’s coffee underneath too.”

  She lifted the white tablecloth that went over the trolley surface and, sure enough, found a coffee service underneath. She poured coffee for everyone and cut the pie. She took a good-size piece for herself, as the men came over to help themselves, and she watched as they took a full one-quarter each. She was left gasping at the amount. “You can’t be hungry, surely?”

  “There’s always room for pie,” they said, nearly in unison. Just then both of their phones buzzed, and both men immediately snatched theirs up.

  Cain looked at his and frowned, then said, “Ice, what’s up?”

  Tabi lost track of his response, distracted when she heard Ryland, saying, “Dr. Stevenson, what’s up?”

  He got up and walked toward her to move away from Cain’s conversation. “What kind of change?” He frowned at her and asked the doc, “Is it serious?” He paused. “Right, okay.” When he hung up, he frowned and said, “So they’ve decided to go in and relieve some pressure on the brain after all,” he said. “Is that good or bad?”

  “Both,” she said. “Bad, in the sense that they feel the pressure is building inside the skull to the point that they need to do something about it, and good that they’re going in to do it. Because that will hopefully stop any brain damage, helping Garret to recover faster.”

  “Okay,” Ryland said, relief crossing his face.

  She smiled. “They are looking after him, you know?”

  “They better be.”

  *

  Just seeing Dr. Stevenson’s name on his phone had been enough to make Ryland’s heart slam against his chest. If anything happened to Garret, Ryland didn’t know what he would do. Garret was the younger of them, the one Ryland had taken under his wing. He felt half responsible for him, even though he had turned out to be a hell of a man all on his own. And he was an equal partner in all this. Garret would also be damn pissed to hear Ryland making any comments that made him sound like he was somehow less than others on the team. But Garret was a good guy, and to have this happening to him was just shitty.

  As Ryland sat here thinking of Garret, he flashed on something he had seen back in Texas. He focused on it, trying to bring the memory closer, but it wouldn’t come. He thought something was there, somebody talking to Bullard before they got on the plane at Houston. Who the hell was that? He frowned, reached for his phone, and called Eton. “Hey, can you backtrack to the cameras of the Houston airport? My brain’s a little on
the wonky side still, and my memories aren’t all filled in yet, but I have a vision of Bullard talking to somebody on the tarmac before we took off. I don’t remember much, but it was just that sense of somebody being there.”

  “The camera feeds are really terrible,” Eton said, “but we’ll give it a go.”

  “Do that,” Ryland said and hung up the phone. He found himself still trying to pull the memory forward, when Cain put his phone down. Ryland turned to look at Cain.

  “The meeting is set for an hour from now.”

  “Meeting?” she asked.

  Cain smiled. “Let’s just say, our local merchant for sale, he’ll be at his favorite pub tonight, so we’ll find him there.”

  “Great, where will we take him on?” Ryland asked.

  “How about the back alleyway?” Cain said, with a laugh.

  “If it’s private, then yes,” he said. “Otherwise we could pick him up at home.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Depends on if he shows up at the pub on time or not.”

  Tabi looked into her coffee and then back at the men. “Am I coming?”

  Both turned and said, “No.”

  Nodding, she settled back and said, “Good. In that case I’ll watch some TV. I hope you don’t mind.” She grabbed the remote and turned it on. The two men looked at each other, smiled, and sat back down. Ryland knew what she was doing; she was trying to forget about everything that was going on and about the upcoming meeting. In this case, the term meeting was a bit of a euphemism. What they really planned to do was ambush and isolate the man and have a little talk with him. A very serious talk. They needed answers fast.

  Ryland returned to his search on the laptop, just as a chat box opened up with Eton on the other side.

  Here’s the Houston video feeds, he wrote. Take a look and tell us what you’re looking for.

  Ryland quickly went through it, trying to bring it back to where he had approached the plane. He’d gotten on earlier with Garret, and Bullard had come on behind them. Ryland remembered hearing voices, but he couldn’t see anybody. He looked and watched the video, but nothing was recognizable. He saw just the heads from the back on this feed. Any cameras on the other side?

  Eton replied, No cameras on the other side, so this is all we’ve got.

  I can hear the voices in my head and was thinking that something was slightly familiar about it but never could place it with all the surrounding noise. It could be my imagination. Looking for something where there’s nothing.

  Well, Ryland, a little more info would help, he wrote. We’re running out of time.

  I know. But it’s back in Houston, so check the other camera feeds. We’re looking for somebody we already know.

  We’re on it, he typed. It’s just hard to look for something in the middle of nothing.

  I know. I get it, Ryland wrote. I’ll let you know if anything rings a bell. And he closed the chat box.

  Cain stared at him. “Somebody Bullard was talking to?”

  “Yes, I was inside the plane, talking with Garret, as we were waiting for Bullard,” he said. “Then it occurred to me that he was out there, talking to somebody. I thought it was just small-talk, you know? Thanking the ground crew or something, but I remember thinking, something was very familiar about that voice.”

  “What’ll it take to bring that forward?”

  “I have no clue,” he said, “Quite possibly nothing. I hate to say it but it wasn’t clear enough to do anything with at this point.”

  Chapter 9

  “While you’re out tonight,” Tabi said, in a sarcastic tone, “why don’t you just make sure to get hit over the head again?” He shot her a sharp look, and she shrugged her shoulders at him. “What? How do you expect your brain to heal when you haven’t given it a chance? It’s not like you’re giving it any time or rest for that matter. Look at you. You have more fractures and stitches in you than most of the surgical patients in the hospital … combined.”

  “I don’t have time,” he said.

  “I get that,” she said, softening her tone a little. “So have a little understanding when your body needs a little bit of time to bring back certain memories.”

  He grimaced at her, as he stood, then looked at Cain. “You ready?”

  Cain stepped away from the table, snagged his jacket from the back of his chair, and slipped it on. “Absolutely.”

  As the two men walked toward the door, she felt something inside her shrinking. It was one thing to be here with them; it was another thing entirely to be alone. “How long will you be?” she asked, trying desperately to keep her voice on an even keel, but it didn’t work.

  Ryland walked back to her, reached down, and gave her a quick hug and a kiss on the forehead, as if something more were between them than actually was. “We’ll be fine.”

  She nodded, and her bottom lip trembled. Then he hooked her chin with his finger and gave her a hard kiss. “Honest, we’ll be fine.”

  “Sure you will,” she said. “Your plane got blown up, and we all nearly drowned, and my place got destroyed, and, for the last twenty-four hours, we’ve been all over the planet.”

  “Yeah, but look how far we’ve come,” he said with a chuckle. “You’ve got my number in your phone.”

  “I do. However, I won’t call you, if you’re in the middle of interrogating somebody with your fists.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t call us right away anyhow,” Cain said, from the doorway. “We don’t want our phones to alert anyone that we’re there.”

  “Great,” she said. “So how do I order, like, a pot tea and a cookie or something to make me feel better?”

  “Comfort eating?” Ryland asked.

  “If it works,” she said with a sniff.

  “We’ll order you up something as we leave,” he said. He turned and looked at her and said, “Don’t wait up for us. If you’re tired, you just need to sleep.” And, with that, he walked out.

  His last remark enraged her. “Like I could sleep now,” she snapped. “How is that even possible?”

  It’s one thing, if they were all flopped here, and she could have the peace and comfort of knowing that she wasn’t alone. But, as soon as that door closed, there was something insanely silent about the large space she was in. In a matter of moments, everything—the entire predicament of her world—all came crashing in on her. She was sharing a room in an unknown hotel—that didn’t even look like a hotel—with two men who didn’t look like they were normal average citizens either.

  And now they were off on some secret mission to interrogate a potential suspect, and she didn’t even want to know the details of what that meant. Her beloved boat was gone; she’d been rescued and brought in on a navy destroyer or some such ship, and here she was, with another four or five days left of her holiday. Some vacation.

  As she sat here, mulling over the changes in her circumstances, she felt a chill encroaching. Grabbing a blanket from the bottom of the bed, she wrapped it around her shoulders and flipped through the TV channels aimlessly, looking for something to distract her, anything. About ten minutes later, a knock came on the door.

  She froze, got up cautiously, and called out, “Yes?”

  “We have tea for you. I’ll leave it outside the door, as requested.”

  “Thank you.”

  She was at the door, her ear against it, but she didn’t hear any sounds. She hesitated to open it, but the men had ordered her tea, and, damn it, she really wanted a hot cup. But then, was it anything more than a carrot, dangling in front of her, that made people make the stupidest mistakes? Still, she was supposed to be safe here, and she had to put her trust in the men. If she couldn’t trust them, who could she trust?

  She opened the door, and, sure enough, a much smaller trolley was here than last time, but definitely a trolley heaped with something. She poked her head down the hallway and took a look around but saw no sign of anyone. She pulled the trolley in, then quickly closed and locked the door. Lifti
ng the lids, she smiled to see a selection of tea cakes on one serving dish and, on the other one, an array of cheese and crackers.

  “Oh, yum,” she said, as she pushed the cart toward her bed in delight. On the second shelf, she found a silver tea service, one of the long-handled, long-spouted things that she’d often seen at high-end restaurants but had never actually had for herself. Also fresh milk, lemon, and honey. Well, she only liked milk in her tea, but she appreciated the options. She crawled back onto the bed, wrapped herself up, and, with the trolley right beside her, poured herself a cup of tea. Then studied the plate of confections, everything from little tea cakes to meringues to even pieces of pie and cake, but everything was small. The trouble was, if the men would be gone for hours, chances are, she’d eat everything on the plate. Then again, weight wasn’t an issue for her, and, right now, anything she could do to make herself feel better was good with her.

  She chose one tea cake, put it on a smaller plate, and settled against the headboard to watch a good mystery. Just as she finished the first show in the series, she looked down at her watch to realize her attention has been captured for the whole forty-five minutes. As she studied her phone, it buzzed, and then it rang. It was her girlfriend from Sydney, who was holding the rest of her clothes for her. “Hello, Maureen. How are you doing?”

  “More to the point, how are you doing?” she asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure?” There was an odd note in her voice.

  “Sure. Why?”

  “I have a confession to make,” Maureen said. “After you crashed the boat and were picked up by the navy ship and everything, I was out at the bar, and some guy, well, I let him pick me up, and I spent the night with him at a hotel.”

  “Which isn’t really unusual for you, so why the confession?”

  “No, what I didn’t realize until later was that he was asking a lot of questions, about my friends, where I used to work, things like that. And I ended up telling him about you. He got really interested in what had happened, so I was explaining how you were a nurse in Perth and all …” Her voice trailed off.