Jake (In the Company of Snipers Book 16)

by Irish Winters

  Down he went, jolting his shoulder sockets when he hit the end of the rope yet one more time.

  Typical for December, it started to snow. Nothing of blizzard proportions, just enough to coat anyone dumb enough to be outside in the blustery weather. Jake shook the flakes out of his hair and spit, intent on surprising Poindexter by surviving. But icy rain came with the snow, turning the metal slab into a frozen slip and slide. His socks failed in their most important mission.

  Zack’s comforting voice in Jake’s head had grown silent when he needed it most. Jake was running on empty. Shivering had become the only thing he could do well. Shivering and thinking about Lacy. She deserved better. She always would deserve better than him, but damn, he loved her, and the only legacy he’d leave her now would be a gruesome picture of his dead corpse.

  Like hell. Marines. Do. Not. Quit. They kept trying until they dropped dead.

  Lifting his weary face from the metal wall, with knees bent between him and the damned frozen iron, he braced his body to do his will one last time. But it had grown colder and now the wind kicked up. His knees complained as they ground against pitted weathered metal on their way upward. No doubt they were bleeding too. Well, so what? Skin and muscle could heal later.

  Jake climbed for all he was worth. Slowly. Cautiously. Balancing his weight against the metal, he crept upward on his knees, keeping his center of gravity close to the iron. This was a better plan. Don’t use your feet, just crawl. Keep the rope tight, then pull yourself up. You can do it this time. You’re a winner. It’s just a few feet. Go, Jake. Go.

  Slushy snow pelted his back. Ice water trickled out of his hair and down between his shoulder blades. It could freeze for all he cared.

  You’re almost there. Focus. Hang on. No slack. Just muscle. Just will power. Just—

  “Son-of-a-bitch!!” He hit the same slippery spot every time and dropped flat to his belly. Why wasn’t the whole damned slab pitted? Wasn’t that how rust worked? He needed traction, not an ice skating rink!

  “I’m coming, Lacy,” he told the metal wall once again at the end of his bleeding nose, shivering so damned hard his forehead bumped the unforgiving iron. “Don’t give up on me. I promise. I’m coming.”

  But that last drop took a different kind of toll on Jake. Numbness crept up from his freezing feet and down his already numbed hands and arms. He looked skyward, resting his chin on the iron. Every muscle and bone ached from the extreme pull-ups he’d demanded of his body. To no avail. God, he hurt.

  “Lacy,” he said to the flakes swirling around him on the bitter December breeze. “Keep painting your heart out, baby. Keep strong. I’m coming.”

  A gust of winter’s bite blasted the side of his face, but he smiled anyway. Lacy had already proved everyone wrong. Her stupid doctor. Her misguided parents. Even him. Lacy was stronger than she knew. She would survive, if only because she already had.

  The shivers ceased. Jake hung as still as death while he contemplated a different strategy. There had to be a way off this hook. He just hadn’t thought of it yet. Licking his lips, he fought to keep them from freezing while he brainstormed. His cheeks felt stiff, like maybe Jack Frost had already painted icy feathers and paisley swirls on them. For all he knew, he might be decorated like the windowpanes in his grandfather’s unheated attic outside Little Rock, Arkansas.

  “Grandpa,” he whispered, “I miss you and Grandma. I miss sleeping in your granary and picking up chicken eggs every morning.” I miss everything.

  Jake had worked his grandfather Elias’s farm the summer before he’d shipped off to join the Corps. Why that memory surfaced, he didn’t know, but thinking of Elias and Jane Weylin and their farm in the country, brought a momentary wave of warmth to his chilly predicament. “I should’ve told you I’m home, but… I’m broken, Grandpa. Least I was. Couldn’t decide where I was some days; if I was back there or over here, and I didn’t want you to see me like that. But I’m better now. Except I’m dying. Maybe.”

  There was no visit or apparition of the silvery-haired gent who raised chickens and battled notorious red foxes in the thick hardwood forests around his one-acre farm. No message from the grave, either, but Jake knew it then. He had to check in with his folks and his grandparents once he got out of this mess. They needed to know where he was, and what he’d been doing since he’d come home. They’d always loved him; he knew damned well they did. It was time to man up and reconnect. He breathed another shivering puff. “I promise I’ll be a better son and grandson. A better man.”

  Only the whine of the wind rippling over the sheer metal wall replied. No brainstorm and no brilliant other options presented themselves.

  His mind wandered, and he was okay with that. It might as well wander. He wasn’t going anywhere. Funny. By the time he got out of here—if he got out of here—he’d be a freaking work of art, all covered in frost flowers and feather frost like he’d seen in the dead of winter once in the extreme north of Canada. All of those decorations might ease the sight of Lacy seeing him dead. It might even make her smile to know that Mother Nature had painted him first.

  “Uncle Jake?” LiLi’s honey-sweet voice drifted through the flakes of white. “Uncle Jake!”

  “Huh?” he mumbled. How could Zack’s little girl be out here in the storm? “Wh… where you at?”

  “Uncle Jake!” she squealed as she barreled into him and wrapped her arms around him. “Let’s go inside. I’m cold.”

  “M-m-me too,” he sputtered, damned thankful for the warmth of her tiny body. His chin dropped to the top of her head. The silly girl hugged him tight like he was someone worth hugging, but when she lifted her face, it wasn’t LiLi’s dark brown, almond shaped eyes peering up at him. It was Fantine, come to him in her bedraggled, bareheaded disgrace.

  “We are the same,” she cried. “Both born for greater things, now reduced to grovel for our souls.”

  I’m not groveling.

  She whined like the wind, her breath as cold on his lips. “Kiss me then, and let us die together.”

  Uh-uh. Never. He twisted his mouth away from the ill-fated wraith as much as his stiff neck allowed. The only woman he was dying with or for was Lacy. “Why are you here?” he had to ask. The big ugly guy with the black robes and scythe he’d expected, not this pale ghost. “Why didn’t you seek out Jean Valjean sooner?” Why weren’t you smarter than me?

  “Jake! Jake!” He opened his eyes as one ghost transformed into another, this one with vivid green eyes. “I love you, Jake,” it whispered.

  “L-lacy. S-s-sorry,” he hissed, wishing she wasn’t there. No woman ought to witness her man’s death, not like this. He tried to swallow, but snowmen couldn’t do what humans could. The saliva wouldn’t come. A hard lump caught in his throat, burning him with the only hot spot on his entire body. He licked his lips instead, no longer sure of who or what he was. Man or frozen beast.

  “Don’t die on me, Jake. You are my heart,” Lacy said, her fingers as cold as ice where they cupped his chin. She pressed cold lips to his mouth and kissed him with frozen vapor instead of sweet warm breath.

  He closed his eyes to relish the apparition. Maybe she was real. Maybe she wasn’t. He didn’t know any more. “Hang onto me,” he said, his voice filled with angst at what was to come. “Don’t let go. I’ll save you.” Please don’t let this be an illusion.

  “You’ve already saved me,” she breathed, easing away from him and his icy slab. Like a ghost, Lacy slipped out of and beyond his reach. His lovely dream evaporated over the choppy, gray Potomac.

  Damn it, she wasn’t real either. The only thing Jake could do was hunker into his icy pyre and cry. One. Frozen. Tear.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Lacy strode forth with a little less enthusiasm than she would’ve liked. By the time the heavy glass entry door at Poindexter RE opened at her arrival, she felt shaky and weak. Zack might be right. She wasn’t fit for duty, but since when did that stop a Marine? Not today.

  Th
e hefty armed man at the entry sported a bright yellow FBI SWAT across his navy blue jacket. He put out a hand to hold them back, but Zack flashed a badge out of his inside jacket pocket. Instantly, the man nodded once and allowed them inside. The place looked empty except for a row of professionally dressed men and women on fold-up chairs with more FBI agents taking notes and asking questions. Those must be the agents who worked for Rafe.

  “He’s down here,” Zack said as he pressed a hand to Lacy’s lower back and ushered her past a bank of elevator doors. The hallway was clear until they came to Poindexter’s office where another army of FBI had taken up residence. One man in a tan linen business suit was face down on the floor, his hands cuffed behind his back.

  Zack didn’t slow down to enter. Instead they walked past the office, turned a right corner at the end of the hall and immediately opened the door to a stairwell. Three flights down they came to an exit door, but by then Lacy was in trouble. Black spots danced in and out of her vision, threatening to knock her down if she couldn’t keep up. If not for Zack’s steady hand at her elbow, she would have fallen more than once. He seemed to understand that her need to find Jake was more important than her health.

  “Copy that,” he said softly.

  She looked over her shoulder at that unexpected comment. Oh. Zack was wired. He had an earpiece. He must have been relaying information all along.

  “Who… who are you talking to?” she asked breathlessly, her heart on definite overload. The air had grown increasingly thick as they’d descended. Lacy didn’t care. She had to find Jake. Then she could breathe again.

  “My boss,” Zack answered, his hand on the doorknob, but not turning it to let her pass. “I want you to think twice before we take one more step. You won’t like what you’ll see, so don’t look. Focus on the guy standing in the tunnel at your far left. Go straight to him. I’m right behind you.”

  He opened the door ,only it wasn’t the normal hall or an underground parking garage she’d expected. It was more like the tunnel in a mineshaft. The concrete pad she stepped onto butted against a stone floor and dirt walls. Wooden pillars braced an earthen ceiling. Electrical wires lined the floor of the corridor and portable lights were stationed every fifty feet or so.

  “What is this place?” she asked.

  “Tunnels. Poindexter’s idea of a getaway. It’s not on any city schematics and it wasn’t here when the building was built. Keep moving.”

  But the smell. The sickeningly sweet odor of decay on the draft hit her nostrils. She looked at the angry guy in the tunnel to her left. Instead of wearing a helmet like the other guys, he wore a baseball cap with bright yellow USMC screaming his allegiance to the Corps. That—helped.

  Lacy took a step in his direction. The man stood in the earthen corridor, his body angled to the right, urging her forward with sharp, impatient flicks of his hand. Zack’s fingers at her shoulder kept her moving, but now she knew where her friends from the clinic were. Poindexter had murdered them. Right here. The only reason he’d brought them here was crystal clear. He must have tortured some of them, maybe all of them, first.

  Oh God, oh God, oh God. This can’t be happening in America. But it had. Lacy swallowed hard as her poor heart kicked up another notch, closing her airway. Every bit of her wanted to run from the bodies tossed in a pile in the dark at her right.

  Zack’s gentle palm at her shoulder kept her moving. “Don’t look,” he reminded her.

  How could she not? “Is Jamaal—”

  “We won’t know until the FBI’s finished processing the scene.” Zack answered. “Keep walking.”

  “How many?”

  “Six.”

  She couldn’t reach the man in the baseball cap soon enough. Five of those bodies were her friends from the clinic. Jamaal might make six. Oh God, oh God, oh God.

  “Miss Wright.” The man in the USMC cap nodded an acknowledgment before he bit her head off. “Why the hell are you down here?”

  Great. Another damned Marine.

  “Alex, this is Lacy Wright,” Zack interrupted. “Lacy, my boss, Alex Stewart. He’s in charge of this op.”

  Him? Not the FBI? Lacy stopped trying to understand this incredibly dangerous op she and Jake had stumbled into like a couple idiots out to save the world. How did a civilian contractor merit control over the FBI?

  Alex held out a hand to her, and she took it, rather her knees buckled and she nearly fell into him. He steadied her with an arm around her waist and crouched to see past her hair that had fallen over her face. “Are you okay?” he asked more gently, his other hand to her shoulder.

  “I’m fine,” she whispered, and extended her hand for a hearty handshake to prove it. Too bad it shook like a leaf.

  “No, she’s not,” Zack spoke up from her six. “She should be in a hospital, but she insisted.”

  Alex offered a perfunctory shake, but he didn’t look happy to see her.

  “Where is he?” she asked before this Alex guy had the chance to chew on her some more.

  “We haven’t found Poindexter yet. The FBI has search and rescue dogs in two of the three tunnels we’ve located,” Alex answered, pointing toward a lighted tunnel farther down the corridor to his right. “I was twenty feet into the third tunnel when you decided to play hero and join us,” he snapped.

  Damn, the man was abrasive.

  “I meant Jake. USMC Sergeant Jake Weylin, damn you,” she snapped back. She’d learned early. Meet a bully head on and he backed off. Sometimes. “I don’t give a shit about Poindexter. Where are my friends?”

  Alex glared over her head at Zack, but he didn’t argue. “Get her a damned helmet.”

  Zack reached around her, a safety helmet already in his hand. He was the efficient one, and already had two, the other for himself. Seemed he thought he was going along with her. She strapped the helmet on, her fingers trembling and her legs about to give up again. She’d never felt so weak. What was happening to her body?

  Hopefully, Alex didn’t notice. How could he? He’d already turned his back on her and Zack, and stalked toward the third tunnel. The man was built more like Jake instead of husky like Zack, only he was in much better condition. Not as gaunt. Not as twitchy. He stood erect and one hundred percent in charge. Power seemed to shimmer around him like a fiery halo of ‘fuck with me and you’ll die’.

  Either that or she was seeing things that weren’t there, and she was on the verge of passing out. The way her body was acting, it could’ve been either.

  The bulk beneath Alex’s lightweight, dark-colored jacket didn’t escape her notice. He was carrying, two if she guessed right. One beneath each arm. He shot her a scant glance over his shoulder. “Keep up.”

  She intended to. Zack’s boss led her to the edge of a cliff where the FBI’s best dogs had converged. This tunnel ended on an outcropping of stone at the edge of the Potomac River. An engine hoist stood anchored to a concrete slab with its heavy metal chain dangling over the edge.

  “Sorry ma’am,” one of the FBI agents told her. “Jake Weylin isn’t here now, but he was. These dogs would know. They followed his scent to this point.”

  “What scent?” she asked. “How could they?”

  He waved an evidence bag with Jake’s suit jacket and dress shoes. “These dogs know what they’re doing. If he isn’t here, he either walked or flew away.”

  She choked back a scream. The evidence was clear. The Bureau’s finest canine officers tracked Jake through to this narrow ledge, where a hoist had been left to freeze and rust in the weather.

  When Alex pulled the chain up, along with it came bloodied nylon bindings that further validated what the dogs found. Jake had been bound and dropped over the side. Judging by the copious amounts of blood on the thick piece of metal below, he’d struggled desperately to free himself.

  His shoes had been located in the shallows below. They’d not floated away because they couldn’t. The river’s shoreline was nearly frozen, thick with slush and ice. So where was
he? Where was his body? She needed to see it before she’d believe he was gone.

  “These ropes look like he worked himself free, ma’am. Look. They’re worn through,” the same agent said. “He probably rubbed them against the hook until they broke, then dropped to the shore. That was the last location the dogs picked up his scent. Looks like he didn’t walk away, though. I’m sure sorry. He might have been hypothermic at that point and went straight into the river. People do that. They get confused, and once he got wet—”

  “No,” she whimpered. “Not Jake. He’s not dead. He can’t be.”

  Zack waited patiently at her side, but even he was having a hard time dealing with the sad discovery. He stared at the icy river, his jaw clenched as tight as his fists. Alex hadn’t said a word yet, just stood on the ledge, his hands on his hips and studying the murder scene. His hard gaze was barely visible beneath the snow covered brim of his hat.

  “The snow’s obliterated all the evidence,” Zack growled, “and that son-of-a-bitch Poindexter will get away with this.”

  Alex nodded. “Maybe.”

  An FBI agent bagged the bindings that had held Jake while other canine officers patrolled the shore. Lacy couldn’t—wouldn’t—believe that the man she’d given her heart to was gone so quickly. They’d just had a Starbuck’s coffee with Jamaal. They’d had a good plan to bring Poindexter down. It almost worked. Only now...

  Lacy dropped to her knees, her palms in the dirty snow. Her heart no longer pounded as loudly nor as fast. The cadence had slowed. But if Jake were gone, she didn’t want it to beat at all. She couldn’t bear it. “Jake,” she said quietly to the wind whirling around her. “Please talk to me.”

  Alex dropped with her, one knee in the cold snow. “You shouldn’t be here,” he said gently as his hand and arm slid around her waist.

  “I can’t leave,” she breathed. “I have to find him.”

  Zack stood at her other side in silent solemnity.

  “Help me,” she begged. “Zack. Alex. Please h-help me find him.” She choked, her cheeks raw from tears and freezing wind. Her chest heaved. Alex pulled her against his side. He was big and solid and warm, but her body was cold and her heart was fading fast. And she wanted it to.