The Unsung Hero

by Suzanne Brockmann

His XO wasn’t fazed. “So when do you want me out there?”

  “Jazz—straightforward, no shit, I could be completely wrong about this. There’s a real chance I’ve lost touch, that this goddamned head injury has made it so I can’t tell fantasy from reality.”

  “Just give me a day or two to tie up some loose ends,” Jazz told him, “and I’ll be there. I’ll call the rest of the squad, too. See who can arrange for leave.”

  Jazz was coming to help him. The relief was so intense, Tom had to sit down. “Be up front with them,” he ordered. “If they do come, if you come, it’s completely off record, two hundred percent covert, and totally volunteer. It’s got to be on your own time as well—and I know you’ve all got better things to do while you’re on leave, so—”

  “I always wanted to meet your uncle Joe. ’Sides, isn’t there some kind of famous watercolor painting school in Baldwin’s Bridge?”

  “Since when do you paint?” Tom asked.

  “Since two or three days from now, L.T.,” Jazz told him. “Unless you think I’ll stand a better chance of blending with the white folk sunbathing on the beach?”

  “Good point.” Tom looked up to see Joe standing in the doorway. He stepped into the room and handed a piece of paper to Tom, then disappeared again. There were several lines written in Charles’s spidery, shaky-looking hand.

  “Ah, Christ,” Tom said to Jazz. “The complete security plan for the ceremony honoring the Fighting Fifty-fifth is the normal Baldwin’s Bridge PD weekday staff—five guys. Plus two local rent-a-cops for additional crowd control.”

  “In that case, we’ll definitely need help. Hang on.”

  Tom could hear Jazz rustling papers, heard him swear.

  “WildCard’s out of the picture, sir,” Jazz reported. “He’s in California on special assignment. Senior Chief Wolchonok’s having knee surgery. And O’Leary won’t be back for another few weeks. He’s at a sharpshooter’s competition in Saudi Arabia.”

  “Damn. I’m going to want a shooter of his caliber. I don’t want to assume car bomb and then have this turn out to be an assassination attempt.” He closed his eyes. Provided the Merchant was real. Provided Tom hadn’t simply imagined seeing the man who may or may not have been the terrorist. “I’m going to want a sniper of my own set up and ready, too.”

  “That’s not going to be easy, sir. This competition has drawn all the best men in all the armed forces.”

  All the best men.

  “Find out if Alyssa Locke went to this competition,” Tom ordered. SO squadmember Frank O’Leary was only the second best marksman in the U.S. Navy. Lieutenant Junior Grade Locke had outscored him every single time they’d competed. She was a robot when it came to taking out a target.

  “I know for a fact that she didn’t,” Jazz told him. “She wouldn’t have been invited. Not to Saudi Arabia. A woman? Not a chance.”

  “Call her.”

  Jazz paused delicately. “Sir. Do you think that’s . . . wise?”

  Locke was outspoken in her desire to be allowed into the male-only ranks of the SEALs. She hounded Tom—and Jazz—every opportunity she got. All she wanted, she claimed, was a chance to prove herself.

  “She’s pretty career driven,” Tom told him. “She may not want to take the leave—or the risk. Make sure she understands that this could well be a waste of time. Nothing may come of it at all. She may end up spending a few weeks at the beach, learning to paint with you.”

  “With me? Oh, joy,” Jazz said with a complete lack of enthusiasm.

  “Did you get a chance to download those files from my computer?” Tom asked.

  “It’s all there, L.T., ready and waiting for you.”

  “Look, Jacquette, I’ve got to say this again. I don’t want you to feel like I’m ordering you to—”

  “Completely understood, sir. I’ll email you with my flight and arrival time as soon as I’ve got it.” Jazz cut the connection.

  David cleared his throat. “Mind if I sit down?”

  Mallory looked up at him, hostility flaring in her light brown eyes and in the tight line of her delicate lips.

  Paoletti was her last name. She lived with her mother in a house on the other side of town. It hadn’t been hard for David to find out all about her from the kids who hung out down by the town beach.

  All about her. More, in fact, than he’d wanted to hear.

  Both she and her mother were well-known for putting out for money or drugs. They weren’t picky. They didn’t take credit cards, but a simple line of cocaine would do the trick. According to town legend, that would buy a guy a professional-quality blow job. A slightly larger amount would get that much more. Here in Baldwin’s Bridge, a man could have his pick of Paolettis—young or older. And apparently the mother was just as exotically, trashily beautiful as the daughter.

  While David was far from the most experienced man in the world, he’d been around enough to know that when rumors came in gift-wrapped packages like that, complete with a ribbon around them, it was unlikely they were true. Mallory and her mother. Highly unlikely.

  It sounded like small-town pettiness and jealousy to David. He didn’t believe a single word.

  He’d gone back to the Ice Cream Shoppe to see what time she got off work, and the manager there had told him she was doing an extra shift today. Mallory was working until eight, but right now she was taking her dinner break.

  David had known exactly where to find her, and sure enough, she was back under the tree.

  “Don’t you ever give up?” Mallory asked him. “Haven’t you gotten tired yet of me telling you to get the hell away from me?”

  He sat down in the shade about four feet away from her, pretended to think about it. “Nope.”

  She made a point of turning slightly away from him and continuing to read. She had another of those pathetic-looking, dried-up little peanut butter sandwiches for her dinner, and she ate it slowly as she devoted all her attention to the pages of her book.

  David couldn’t keep from looking at the soft curve of her cheek, her delicate nose, the slightly exotic shape of her eyes, her flawless skin, and her mouth. God, Mallory Paoletti had a perfect mouth.

  Her chin was perfect, too. She held it at a stubborn angle, unaware that the defiant pose exposed the soft, graceful lines of her throat and neck. She had a long, elegant neck, collarbones that could have inspired an entire epic poem, and truly magnificent breasts.

  She was his Nightshade, come to life. Of course, dressed the way she was in wide-legged cargo pants and a tank top, she looked more like Nightshade’s human alter ego, Nicki Sheldon.

  David pulled his day pack onto his lap, unzipping it and pulling out his own book—a copy of the same novel Mallory was reading. He’d managed to pick it up in the Super Stop & Shop at a discount.

  Four feet away, Mallory changed her position. He didn’t look up, but he heard her put her empty sandwich Baggie back into the brown bag. He heard her crinkle that bag, heard her shift her position once again.

  And then she spoke. To him. In a voice dripping with skepticism. “Oh, come on. You don’t expect me to believe you’re really reading that, do you?”

  He looked at her over the top of his book. “Of course I’m reading it. I’m more than half done.”

  The look on her face was so comical, he nearly pulled his camera out of his pack to get it down on film.

  “You’re reading a romance.” She looked around. “Out here, in front of everyone?”

  David looked around, too. There were about twenty people on the lawn in front of the hotel, more down by the marina. Not a single person was paying either of them the slightest bit of attention. He shrugged. “Yeah. You were right about it. It’s great stuff. Thanks for recommending it.”

  “You’re really reading the whole thing?” she asked suspiciously. “You’re not just flipping through and reading only the sex scenes?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because you’re a guy? . . .”
/>   “I’m really reading the whole thing.” He smiled. “But I have to confess, when I get to them, I read the sex scenes twice.”

  Her lips twitched, curving up into a very small smile. “Yeah, well, join the club,” she said. “So do I.”

  She smiled at him. She smiled at him! It was a real, genuine we-have-something-in-common smile, not an I-want-to-put-your-eye-out-with-my-finger smile.

  Mallory was nearly done with her book. “You read fast,” he said.

  She looked at his book, at the place where he was using his finger as a bookmark. “You do, too.”

  “I’ve always loved to read,” he told her. “As long as I’ve got a book, it doesn’t matter where I am. I can instantly be a million miles away, in a completely different place, on a different planet even. I can be someone else, you know? When it gets too complicated to be myself.”

  Mallory nodded, but then she looked away, as if she were afraid she’d given too much away with that one little gesture of agreement. “God, I need a cigarette,” she breathed.

  “It’s hard to quit, huh?”

  “You wouldn’t happen to have one, would you?”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  It was meant to be an insult, but David let it slide. Mallory Paoletti had created some pretty staunch defenses to keep people out of her world. If he wanted in—and he did—he was going to have to ignore the scratch of the verbal brambles and step lightly over the passive-aggressive minefields.

  He unzipped his pack again and dug into it, searching for the book he’d put in this afternoon. He found it underneath his camera, and held it out to her. But she didn’t take it, and he ended up just setting it down in front of her, an offering to the goddess.

  “I started reading this book—” He gestured to the one he was reading, the book she’d recommended. “—and it occurred to me that you might have never read anything by Heinlein. I thought you might want to borrow one of my favorites.”

  Mallory looked down at the book he’d put in front of her but she didn’t touch it. She just looked at the cover, looked back at him. “What do you want from me?”

  The question was so point-blank that David didn’t quite know how to answer it. He couldn’t answer it, not caught the way he was in the intensity of her eyes.

  “Do you really think that if you sign me up for some little private book club, I’ll let you slip me something besides a book every now and then? Is that what this is about? You want to do it with me, geek-boy?”

  Geek-boy. Ouch. But David didn’t get a chance to respond. She was spitting mad and she wasn’t done yet. He found his voice but all he could get out was “N—”

  She pushed herself to her feet, savagely kicking his book back toward him, gathering up her crumpled bag, her half-finished soda, and her own book.

  David had envisioned himself taking days, weeks even, to make friends with Mallory. And only then, after they were friends, would he tell her about Nightshade. But he realized now it wasn’t going to happen that way. It was now or never.

  And so he stood, too, fumbling in his pack for Wingmasters Two, pulling it free. “I do want something from you, Mallory. You’re right about that. But it’s not what you think. See, I want you to model for me, for my next project.”

  He held it out and she stared down at the dark colors on the cover.

  “Wingmasters Two?” she read. She looked up at him. “A comic book?”

  “It’s a graphic novel. We try to make it higher quality than a comic book. But you better believe if we got an offer from D.C. or Marvel, we’d proudly become a comic book in an instant.” He pointed to names on the front. “By Renny Shimoda and David Sullivan. Artwork by David Sullivan. That’s me.”

  She gave him a disbelieving look as she pulled the book from his hands to take a closer look.

  “Wingmasters One and Two both had limited printings—a few thousand copies each. We started our own publishing company to distribute them,” he told her as she flipped through it. “We had to pay for the printing up front, but we’ve made back most of our initial investment. Unfortunately, the series didn’t catch on quite the way we’d hoped,” he continued, “even though it’s a cult favorite.”

  She was standing there, flipping through the pages, probably only half listening.

  “For the past two months, I’ve been developing a new series. Nightshade. This one’s all mine. The story’s mine, too, not just the artwork. It’s about this high school girl, Nicki Sheldon, who realizes she has these superpowers. Kind of Buffy meets the X-Men.”

  Mallory frowned up at him. “So I’m just supposed to believe that you’re this David Sullivan. The one whose name is on the front of this thing, this graphic novel.”

  David took out his wallet, took out his driver’s license.

  She took it from him, squinted at his name and his parents’ address in Newton. “God, this picture sucks.” She looked up at him again. “Well, maybe it doesn’t.” She handed it back to him, still unconvinced. “David Sullivan’s a common enough name.”

  David knew how to prove he was who he said he was. He sat down on the grass, searching through his pack for a pencil and his sketch pad. He opened to a clean page, balanced the pad on his leg, looked up at Mallory, and started to draw.

  “Do me a favor and sit,” he ordered her. “My neck’s going to break.”

  She was watching his pencil moving across the page, and she slowly lowered herself to the ground. She sat forward, on her knees, so she could watch him draw.

  “Oh, my God,” she breathed. “That is so cool.”

  It wasn’t that good. He could do a lot better when not under so much pressure. But it wasn’t bad, either—a rough comic-book version of Mallory’s face, complete with her trademark scowl. He added a body—an exaggerated, stylized, superhero type body, in a superhero pose. Hands on hips, legs slightly spread in a powerful stance, muscles rippling, chest out.

  “Nightshade,” Mallory read aloud as he printed the name in block letters beneath his drawing. She looked at the similar drawings on the cover of Wingmasters Two, then up at him. “Holy shit, you did draw this, didn’t you?”

  He turned his notebook around so that it faced her. “What I’d like to do,” he told her, “is take photos of you. All kinds of poses, from all angles. The hardest thing is drawing realistic-looking bodies—you know, anatomically correct bodies that move and bend and flex the way real people do. I took an anatomy class in school last year, and that’s helped a lot. But getting the right perspective is hard, too. Still, if I can have a few hundred photos of you pinned up around my drawing table, it makes it that much easier.”

  She laughed as she gazed at the drawing. “That really looks like me. That’s so weird.”

  “Here,” David said, moving closer to her. “Let me show you what I mean.”

  He took his camera out of his pack and placed it gently on the grass as he dug for the pictures he’d just got back from the developers at the drugstore.

  “Oh, man, that’s one huge camera.”

  “The camera’s actually pretty small.” He picked it up again and handed it to her. “It’s the lens that’s big.” He pointed to the viewfinder. “Look through there. Check it out. And move this, here, to focus.”

  Their fingers touched, and she didn’t pull away. He was close enough to smell the sweet scent of peanut butter on her breath.

  She laughed. “This is one of those paparazzi lenses—the kind photographers from the National Enquirer use to get pictures of Fergie sunbathing topless from, like, five miles away.” She looked up from the viewfinder, and at this proximity, he could see flecks of green and gold mixed in with the light brown of her eyes. She was gorgeous from forty feet away, stunning from four feet. From four inches, she was heart stopping.

  David felt his IQ drop into the single digits as he stared into her eyes.

  “So who were you taking pictures of with this superlens?” she asked. “Prince Will
iam in town?”

  “No,” he managed to say. “No one—I mean, not yet. I mean, I was going to take some pictures later this afternoon.”

  Pictures. Right. He was going to show her his pictures. Come on, brain. Don’t fail now. She was sitting here, she was listening to him, she was interested in his project.

  She handed the camera back to him, and again their fingers touched. “I was in media club in middle school,” she told him. “I loved it—I got to borrow this really cool camera and take all these freaky black-and-white pictures. Well, I did until Mark Fritz stole the camera from my locker. He told me he took it, but then he denied it when I told Mr. Marley. It was Mark against me, and he got straight As and was captain of the middle-school tennis team, so I was blamed. I wasn’t kicked out of media club, but I wasn’t allowed to borrow the equipment anymore, so what was the point? My mother bought me some little Instamatic piece of shit to try to make me feel better. She didn’t know the difference between that and a Nikon.”

  Both Mark Fritz and Mr. Marley deserved a sound thrashing. “You can do a lot with an Instamatic,” he said. “Or even one of those disposable cameras you can pick up at the drugstore. Especially if you work with natural light. Do you still take pictures?”

  She shrugged evasively. It was hard to say whether it was a yes shrug or a no shrug. She glanced at her watch. Damn, he was losing her.

  “I have to head back to the Ice Cream Shoppe in about five minutes.”

  David found the packets of photos in the front pocket of his pack. “Here, let me just show you these really quickly.”

  Some of them were pictures he’d taken here in town. But most were from his recent photo session with Brandon.

  “I took these in my apartment,” he told her. “This is my friend Brandon Crane. He’s a lifeguard over at the hotel. Basically, what I do is have him come in, he puts on a bathing suit—”

  “Oh, is that what you call that?” Mallory asked. “It doesn’t leave a whole lot to the imagination, does it?”

  David laughed. “It’s a Speedo. It’s legal. Guys wear ’em all the time.”

  “Yeah, maybe in Provincetown.” She flipped through the photos. “God, what are you going to have me wear?”