Delta Force Defender

by Megan Crane

  Isaac flicked a look over to Caradine, who was staring at the car radio as if it had sprouted tentacles.

  “We’re going in,” Isaac said, and switched off his comm unit.

  “Was that Jonas?” Caradine asked.

  Isaac didn’t touch her. He didn’t yell at her about the things she wasn’t telling him, because he didn’t yell. And she wouldn’t tell him anyway.

  “One of Jonas’s best characters is a drunken sports fan,” he said instead. “Nobody pays any attention to a drunken sports fan. He can be in any bar at any time, ranting and belligerent, and when he leaves people will describe his team spirit, never him.”

  Caradine shifted against her seat, probably because her wire was making her back itchy and not because she felt anything. No matter what he might have preferred. “I had no idea Jonas could string that many words together.”

  “He sings, too,” Isaac informed her as he put the SUV into gear. “With perfect pitch or egregiously off-key, depending on the situation.”

  He let her sit with that visual as he drove through the streets of South Boston and acknowledged that he was pissed at her. Pissed, but also still fighting those persistent alarms inside him. The ones that had saved his life more times than he could count.

  What worried him was that he couldn’t tell the difference today. Were they personal? Or did they have to do with this particular mission?

  This was why he had never let anything get personal before.

  He pulled over again a couple of blocks away from Sharkey’s, where they’d all agreed Caradine would get out and walk.

  “Caradine—”

  Her eye roll was more implied than actual, but it still packed a punch. “Don’t you dare say anything nice to me. The world could end.”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” he told her, pinning her there for a moment with his gaze alone. “You and I are overdue for a discussion about our lives.”

  Once again, there was that flash of something on her face that he really didn’t like. “Can’t wait.”

  In her usual, snarky, I would rather die tone, which should have comforted him. But it didn’t. Not today.

  Then she swung out of the car, slammed the door, and walked off.

  She didn’t look back.

  Isaac found himself rubbing at his chest as if he could calm those alarms still kicking up a fuss inside him.

  He tried to tell himself it was anticipation, the way it usually was as a mission commenced. But he couldn’t fool himself.

  “She’s walking,” he said into the comm unit.

  Isaac watched Caradine walk down one block, then into the next. He would know her walk anywhere. No matter what name she used. Or how she colored her hair. He would know that lazy amble that hinted at the toughness underneath. The long, muscled legs that had been wrapped around his waist last night. And the way she tipped her chin up as she walked, daring the people passing by to look at her.

  Some did. Some didn’t. But Isaac confirmed that he was the only one on the street who didn’t look away.

  Inside the bar, Jonas was drunkenly overexplaining the intricacies of football in a belligerent tone, growing ever more agitated. Isaac had seen this show before. Jonas, usually so still and watchful, vibrated with wild, erratic gestures, and he never stood still. He rocked this way and that, as if at any moment he might tip himself off his feet altogether.

  People who’d stood next to him in his drunken state usually failed to recognize him when he came around later, no longer in character, and asked them questions about what had occurred in his usual stark, cold way.

  “I have eyes on the prize,” Blue said. “She’ll be at the door in approximately two minutes.”

  Templeton laughed uproariously, which was his affirmative.

  “Moving into position,” Isaac replied.

  He pulled away from the curb, headed around to the back of the bar. Despite the flashes of gentrification he’d seen during their initial canvas, this particular block might as well have been stuck in the ’70s. This was a stretch of chain-link fences and cracked sidewalks, not a place where tourists came to wax rhapsodic about the rich tapestry of American history. There were the typical Beantown bricks here, too, but they were old and weathered and crumbling in places. No one had bothered to restore them.

  Sharkey’s stood like a beacon to a very specific Southie past. Back when this neighborhood had been nothing but working-class Irish Catholics and the people who preyed upon them. The myth of Sharkey’s was that it was a safe space for Boston’s tough guys to interact, though the truth had usually been far more bloody.

  Isaac had studied city-planning drawings of the bar itself and knew its layout backward and forward. Thanks to several stings over the years, and Oz’s ability to help himself to all kinds of files that shouldn’t have been accessible, he even knew a great many of the regulars without having to set foot inside. The current owner was an innocuous man called Peter Mullen, who was almost certainly a front. Or a patsy.

  When Caradine had done no more than call this place, there’d been a thug tailing her within hours. Now she was walking inside and announcing her true identity.

  His gut didn’t like any part of this. If he’d had all these alarms going off in him at any other time, Isaac would have called a stop to this op before it started.

  But for the first time in as long as he could remember, he wasn’t certain about what call to make here. He honestly couldn’t tell if it was emotion or experience that was causing the commotion inside him.

  He figured he could blame her for that, too. And would, once they survived this.

  “She’s walking through the door,” Blue reported.

  Isaac found his vantage spot exactly where he’d expected it, again thanks to Oz’s preliminary work from Fool’s Cove. He pulled the SUV in behind a Dumpster and left the engine running. He switched the comm unit from the car speakers to his headset and then held his phone up to his ear in case anyone happened by. Since a dodgy alley behind a notorious bar was really not the place a random, well-intentioned person was likely to sit around in for the hell of it, he should probably look like he had a reason to have pulled over here.

  He didn’t hold his breath, because he was a freaking professional, but part of him expected something terrible to happen. Right now. Caradine to disappear, maybe, somewhere between the street and the door to the bar.

  Jonas was halfway through a dissertation on the Patriots, slurring wildly.

  “She’s in,” Templeton said in a low voice.

  Isaac knew he would have done that while lifting his drink to his mouth. If anyone was watching him, it would look like he was muttering at his drunk friend.

  “Hi there,” Caradine said brightly into her own mic, and everything in Isaac tensed further. Because she sounded different again. Not as edgy. As if she were trying to sound brave when she wasn’t. Julia, something in him whispered. She was trying to sound like Julia. “I’m hoping you can help me.”

  “I think you walked in the wrong bar, girl,” came a thick, rough, unfriendly voice that sounded like too many cigarettes and the worst of South Boston. “I was you, I’d walk back out.”

  “This is definitely the right bar,” she replied, sounding wholly unfazed. And Isaac could almost see the way he knew she would be standing. Her hands on her hips, her head tilted to the angle that made her look the most unbothered, her blue eyes bright with amusement. “I’m Julia Sheeran. And I have a message for whoever came after my father in Maine a couple of weeks ago.”

  There was a snort. “Do I look like your voice mail?”

  “Maybe you’ve heard of my father,” she said brightly. “Mickey Sheeran.”

  “I heard of Mickey Sheeran,” the bartender replied. He coughed. “Mostly I heard that he was dead.”

  “I was dead, too,” Caradine said. “But look at tha
t. Here I am anyway.”

  “Are you going to buy a drink or not?” came the belligerent response.

  Caradine ordered whiskey. Neat.

  And they waited.

  Templeton muttered updates. Jonas moved on from football to baseball. Blue told stories purely to irritate the rest of the team—like the time Templeton had gone to rescue Kate and she’d announced, very audibly over his comm unit, that she’d had to rescue herself again—and Caradine sat at the bar.

  No one came near her.

  After a while, the bartender pulled out his phone and typed into it.

  Everyone got ready, assuming whatever text he’d sent would bring the people they were waiting for into play. But nothing happened.

  And Isaac, who had made stillness an art form and himself a master, found it almost impossible to keep his agitation at bay.

  Jonas was soundly abusing the Yankees, and anyone listening to him would have been surprised to learn that when in New York, he could be just as comprehensively insulting about the Red Sox. Templeton was joining in now and again, mostly to laugh and plant a few seeds about how maybe the two of them were construction workers.

  Blue was making note of any cars that slowed down out front.

  Isaac was going slowly insane.

  “She’s hitting the head,” Templeton reported in a mutter.

  And the agitation inside Isaac—all those alarms and gut-level warnings—exploded.

  He thought about Caradine, who had trained herself to climb out of a second-story window in Grizzly Harbor, steal a boat, and change her appearance to get out of Alaska. Caradine, who carried three tiers of weapons on her at all times.

  Would she really wander off in the middle of this thing to use the bathroom?

  He heard an odd, scraping sound.

  It all flashed through him then. The schematics of the bar he’d studied. This was Boston, an old, historic city, where history asserted itself by building on top of what had come before. Especially in this part of town, where no one was overly concerned with the historic register, because it usually had something to do with Old World criminal organizations.

  He thought of that look on her face from the passenger seat, the speech she’d tried to make.

  And he knew.

  “She’s not going to the bathroom,” he bit out. “She’s making a move.”

  But he was already out of the SUV. At a dead run toward the back door no one had tried to go in or out of. No one would, he understood then.

  If this was happening, it wasn’t happening here. Not as planned.

  Four flat-out seconds later he threw open the back door to Sharkey’s and found himself in a small, shabby hallway that smelled like stale cigarettes and old beer. He scanned it, finding two empty bathrooms, one utility closet, and two locked reinforced steel doors that didn’t budge when he tried them.

  The only other thing in the hallway, tossed to one side, was the wire he’d carefully attached to Caradine’s back.

  The one he’d heard her scrape off her back only seconds ago.

  “There’s no one outside,” Blue reported, his voice terse. “No one’s gone in or out in over fifteen minutes. There are minimal pedestrians, and cars haven’t even slowed down out front.”

  “Put the bar on lockdown,” Isaac gritted out.

  In the hall, he bent and picked up the wire with the tape still attached. He could see the plans Oz had sent them in his head. More than that, he could see Caradine on the plane next to him, pointing at the buildings across the street and across the alley. He could hear her talking about that long two-block walk she would have to take, and what if there were spies in all the windows?

  She’d been diverting his attention.

  Something he should have recognized, but she’d planned for that, hadn’t she? She’d softened him up at that waterfall.

  Deliberately.

  And he’d fallen for it. Hook, line, and sinker.

  The way he always did with her. Only with her.

  The comm unit was quiet. Jonas had stopped performing, and the profound silence suggested that he and Templeton had already completed their task. There were two of them, after all—meaning it wasn’t a fair fight for the rest of the patrons. Anyone who tried to go against them would find that out, and fast.

  “There’s nothing written on her napkin,” Templeton said over the comm unit, but in his normal speaking voice. Confirming that he and Jonas had silently taken control of Sharkey’s. “There is, however, the impression of a key.”

  Isaac shoved the wire in his pocket, then pushed into the main part of the bar. He took in the situation with a glance. Jonas stood near the front door, still and deadly again. He had a gun in his hand, though it pointed down to the floor. The three regulars Templeton had counted earlier were lying down on the ground, faces pressed against the sticky floor. They weren’t even grumbling, suggesting that any tough-guy fronting had already been dealt with.

  Brutally.

  Templeton stood behind the bar. The bartender stood in front of him, with his hands resting on the top of his head. The 9 mm on the sticky, scarred wood in front of them wasn’t Templeton’s, indicating that he’d relieved the bartender of it.

  Painfully, Isaac hoped.

  “Where did she go?” Isaac asked the bartender softly.

  Very, very softly.

  The bartender bared his teeth. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  Templeton laughed in that booming, unsettling way of his. “Oh, buddy. You’re reading this situation the wrong way.”

  “Who did he text?” Isaac asked.

  Templeton tossed the bartender’s phone onto the bar, letting it clatter as it slid, then stop in a puddle. “A number. No name. All it says is, Package in the hall.”

  Isaac got good and still.

  She’d been saying good-bye to him. She’d known exactly what was going to happen, set it up, and she’d been trying to clear her slate before she did it.

  Caradine had played him. Deliberately.

  He was going to find her, save her if necessary, and then kill her himself.

  But right now he concentrated on the smirking bartender with every bit of temper and adrenaline inside him.

  “You’re making a mistake,” the bartender snarled.

  “Good,” Isaac told the man, doing absolutely nothing to contain the rage inside of him. He didn’t even keep it out of his voice, and he ignored Templeton’s startled look. “Then let’s make sure it’s a big one.”

  Twenty-two

  The last time Caradine had been in these tunnels she’d been about twenty. She and Lindsay had been sent here by their mother on a summer’s night because their brother Danny had needed collecting. Again. He’d been passed out after a spot of belligerence, embarrassing the family the way he always did.

  You don’t want your father having to deal with him, their mother had said sharply when they’d been slow to get up from the television to do her bidding. Or your brother Jimmy.

  That had been back in the days when her mother had still believed that Danny could be saved.

  Or maybe not, Caradine reflected as she made it to the bottom of the stairs that led down to the cellar. She heard a slam from up above and winced, certain she knew exactly who that was. Isaac, slamming his way into the building. She pushed on, moving more quickly than she might have otherwise down the dim hallway that opened up in front of her.

  And as she moved, she thought about her mother and that long-ago night. Maybe Donna hadn’t thought she could save anyone. Maybe she’d used Danny as a way to poke at her husband—not wanting to save him so much as wanting to keep Mickey from handling him the way he liked.

  Either way, Caradine and Lindsay had been met at the back door by the usual flat-eyed goon, shoved roughly down these same stairs, and told to drag their wasted broth
er out to the car they’d parked on the next block before someone took him out with the trash.

  For good, was the implication.

  Neither one of them had wanted that on their conscience, no matter how unpleasant Danny was when he’d gotten himself into this state.

  The place still smelled the same. It was dank and shadowy. There was the scent of decay in the air and the creepy echoing sound of leaking pipes.

  It was easier to walk down this hall—this narrow tunnel—without dragging the dead weight of a fully grown man between her and her frail sister, but that didn’t make what Caradine was doing any easier.

  There was not one part of her that wanted to do this. She preferred Isaac’s plan to this, a thousand times over.

  But this time she intended to keep the promise she’d made to her sister. Not the old promise, but the new one. That Lindsay had died out there on the run. That she was out of this, no matter what.

  She wanted to make it clear to whomever waited for her that she was the only survivor of that bomb ten years ago. So no one would bother looking for anyone else.

  And if no one was looking for Lindsay, no one here would discover Luana’s existence. Ever.

  She wanted to run again. She’d trained to defend herself when attacked, not throw herself into a fight she might not win. She wanted to find a way out of this—or a way out of Boston again. She could turn beige before she got west of Worcester, then disappear for good.

  But she kept going, because she was done running. There was more to think about here than her feelings. Or her panic. Or what she might lose.

  And besides, she knew—she hoped—she only had limited time. If she knew anything about Isaac, it was that he’d come after her. And soon.

  She had work to do first.

  It was a long walk even without dragging Danny, who had stunk of booze and uglier things and had kept insisting he was fine and should be left alone. The walls were uneven and too close. Nothing smelled good or clean.

  Caradine didn’t really want to think about all the terrible things that had happened down here over the years. The things her father and men like him had done here. The deals they’d cut, the betrayals they’d enacted, the revenges they’d indulged. She was afraid that if she breathed in too deep, she would get all that violence, all that despair, into her own lungs. Like some kind of tuberculosis.