“Hey Cap, we’re in for cards. You in?” That was Okada. Lilli smiled but shook her head. “Tempting, but I’ll pass tonight.” This close to the front, fraternization rules were looser; camaraderie, trust, and morale were paramount. So she could certainly go hang with the enlisted men of her squad if she wanted. But tonight, she wanted some quiet. She nodded to Mendez, her co-pilot, indicating that she had the debrief, and he was off the clock.
She reported in to Col. Corbett, the battalion Commanding Officer. Corbett had been one she’d had to work to win over. But after scores of successful missions and few casualties—and no troop losses—and after comporting herself solidly in her supervisory position, and proving physically capable, as well—even equal to, if not more capable than, many men in camp—ol’ Corby had warmed up to her.
It didn’t hurt that she was on her third straight long rotation in camp; with nothing and no one in the States to draw her interest, and loving her job like a calling, she was perfectly content to stay put where she was useful and needed. When she’d requested a third rotation, sitting across from Corby at his insufficient camp desk, he’d contemplated her closely for a long, uncomfortable time, his eyebrows raised. Then, he’d nodded. Since that day, he’d been in her pocket. She was going for a below-zone promotion to Major in a few months; she was fairly certain Corby would do what he could to see that she got it.
She’d earned it. She worked hard, she led well, she was smart, and she didn’t back down. But below-zone promotions were rare. She knew her shot was better because she was a female in combat, and there would be good press if she got another early promotion. She wasn’t averse to accepting an advantage. Her sex worked against her 99.99% of the time in her chosen career. If there was a chance for that scale to tip slightly in the other direction, she’d take it.
When she was done with her debrief with Corby, she came out of the command tent and ran headlong into Captain Ray Hobson. He shoved her off and sneered at her. Hobson had a massive pole up his ass over Lilli. He hated women in camp, he hated women in command, and he damn sure hated a woman several years his junior, in the same rank and doing the same job as he. He hated her with a bitter fire she’d at first found bewildering. Now she hated him right back with an even hotter fire. He was a misogynistic asshole who found every opportunity to try to make her feel small and threatened. Time was, he’d succeeded. Now, Lilli was just waiting for him to touch her. Just once, so she could put the bastard on the ground.
“Sucking up again, Hot Lips? You were in there awhile. Musta been sucking something. I’m up for nexts.” He grabbed his crotch.
Lilli’s gorge rose at her inability to take him down for that. But she couldn’t go at him physically, not first. And she wouldn’t report him. With one piece of paper, she’d undo all her hard work. No matter how unjust it was, reporting harassment would lose her the respect of just about everyone in camp. Hell, just about everyone in the Army. She would not give this amoeba the satisfaction.
Instead, she sneered right back at him and said, “That’s comedy gold, Hobs. You must’ve kept the boys in the frat house howling. One way or another.”
His voice low, he hissed, “You’re nothin’ but a cunt, Accardo. Never be more than that.”
She brushed past him and crossed the dusty camp to the mess. She needed to get out of her flight suit, which was blazing hot in the 120F heat, but she was starving. And frankly, right at that moment, she wasn’t feeling like stripping down to take a shower. Privacy was at a premium on a Forward Operating Base, and she felt exposed. It burned her that Hobson could still do that to her, but he could. So she went into the mess, got herself a tasteless chicken sandwich, some chips, and a soda, and sat alone, sweltering and fuming.
She was about halfway through her meal, such as it was, when Lopez, her crew chief, sat down across from her. She looked up, chewing.
“Permission to speak plainly, Cap?”
Lilli nodded.
He leaned in close. “There’s some guys around here, their dicks shrink right up around a woman like you. Some, they just about turn inside out. Gives ‘em a second asshole where their dick should be.”
Well, that was colorful. And he must have seen her confrontation with Hobson, which sucked. Bad enough she had to deal with it; she didn’t relish anyone knowing about it. “Your point?”
“Just don’t let the assholes get you down, Cap. We got your back. You should come play cards. Sitting here alone is just… sad. Miller’s wifey sent everybody a personal fan, so it’s only, like, a hundred in our hut.” He lowered his voice even more. “There’s local beer, too. Okada scraped it up.”
“You know I can’t drink with you, Sarge.” Alcohol was supposed to be banned on base, but Corby didn’t enforce that rule, as long as the troops maintained some control over themselves. These troops saw a lot of action, and he reasoned they needed some ease. Grateful for the privilege, few got drunk. Still, Lilli didn’t want to end up in a bad position. It was entirely possible that she could get called upon to fly unexpectedly, and she wouldn’t risk her men. Plus, she was in charge. Wouldn’t do to get loose and flirty around these guys. She’d worked hard to get them to see her otherwise.
“I know. But we’ll be extra entertaining tonight. C’mon. What else are you gonna do?”
With a sigh and a smile she said, “Gimme 15 for a shower and a change.”
“Excellent! Bring lots of cash for us to take from you!” He put up his fist, and she bumped it.
“Dream on, Lopez. I’ll try to leave you milk money when I’m done.”
After her shower, wearing desert fatigue pants and a loose t-shirt, her hair braided and coiled again on the back of her head, Lilli joined the poker game. As soon as she came into the hut, the guys made way for her. They dealt her in on the next hand. Several guys had bottles of beer, a kind Lilli didn’t recognize. Others had what would look to a layperson like bottles of regular Listerine. Except the mouthwash had been replaced with whiskey, scotch, or gold tequila and sent over in care packages from home. Contraband, but everybody looked the other way.
Okada waved a brown bottle in her direction and said, “Wanna brewski, Cap? It’s warm and tastes like cat piss, but it gets the job done.”
Seriously. He said brewski. He talked like that all the time, like he was an extra in Animal House or something. Lilli thought it was charmingly dorky. “As delightful as that sounds, Okada, I’m gonna let you boys enjoy that on your own.”
Lopez tossed her a bottled water, and they got back to the game, which was competitive as hell but not serious at all. The guys trash talked and made sophomoric jokes. They also gossiped like they were at a quilting bee. Always remembering her role, Lilli still found a way to be in the mix with the rest of them.
This is what Lilli loved. She loved flying, she loved the adrenaline, the challenge of her job. She loved being good at it. Her job fulfilled her. But this, these guys, this bond—she didn’t need any family but this. She would die for any one of them; she’d do it without a second thought.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Lilli hiked back the seven miles to the Camaro. She threw her pack in the trunk and got in behind the wheel. She sat there, not noticing the heat in the black interior on this sweltering mid-July day, trying not to despair.
She hadn’t seen her target in almost two weeks. She was beginning to think her window had slammed shut on her while she wasn’t looking. Rick had no new intel for her, either. By the time he’d had confirmation for her, the target seemed to have disappeared.
Fuck, fuck, fuck!
Now Rick was in heavy search mode, trying to get a read on the new location—which meant that Lilli might be leaving Signal Bend. If things worked out according to plan, she would stay put for months, minimally, to avoid suspicious movements around the time of the kill—if, in fact, there was an investigation. But if the target had moved far, then she would have to follow.
She didn’t want to go. With every passing day, she and Isaac w
ere getting more wrapped up together. If things worked according to plan, there was no reason Lilli would have to leave Signal Bend at all if she didn’t want to. She could do her actual job from anywhere, and a remote location was preferred. Although she’d only known Isaac a few weeks, Lilli understood that she’d stay if she could. She felt a bond with him that she had not felt before, not with someone who wasn’t blood.
Lilli had a fairly extensive sexual past, but she didn’t have a lot of experience with matters of the heart. She’d had a couple of steady boyfriends in high school, and she’d ended her virginity with the second, but she’d never thought she was in love with either. Living the cliché, she’d gotten experimental and adventurous in college and had slept with rather a lot of people for a while, until she’d met Peter, a grad student. They’d been serious. She’d thought she loved Peter. But when he’d gotten a job at a college in New Mexico and moved away, she hadn’t even considered continuing the relationship long-distance. Within a couple of months, she’d more or less stopped thinking of him. So she’d been wrong—not love. Once she joined the service, her opportunities for romance dwindled markedly. She’d had a couple of entirely physical arrangements with other officers while she was in Afghanistan, meeting for righteous, rowdy fucks when they could get R&R time together. But she’d never truly bonded with anyone.
What she felt with Isaac was something different. It reached a different place in her. She’d thought it was just something elementally physical, like their bodies were somehow more in sync than others, because she was drawn to him in ways that freaked her out a little. If they were in any kind of physical proximity, she found it very difficult not to be touching him. And maybe that was a lot of it, especially at first. But in these last couple of weeks they’d talked—not banter, but real talking—and she’d told him things she’d never told anyone. Things about her family, her mom. About her love for her father and how she missed him. Even some things about the Army.
She’d never talked about any of that with anyone, because she’d never had anyone to talk to before, no one she trusted to have that kind of power over her. But she did trust Isaac. She didn’t know what he’d done to earn trust she’d never given before, but he had it.
She hadn’t given him any more information about her target or why she meant to kill him, but she’d been tempted once or twice. She didn’t because to disclose would be to extend the risk to him. And to his credit, he’d only asked one more time, and when she’d refused, he’d let it drop. He trusted her, too.
She was in love with him. She hadn’t said it; she didn’t know if she could say it, but she was coming to understand the truth of it nonetheless. For the first time in the ten years since her father had died, Lilli felt like she could have a home.
Leaving Signal Bend would hurt.
Finally becoming aware of the heat in the car, her hair soaked and her t-shirt plastered to her dripping body, Lilli started the engine and drove back to Signal Bend, a despondent weight heavy in her chest.
~oOo~
She showered when she got home and dressed in black spandex shorts and a running top. She’d hiked 14 miles already so had no plans to run, but it was too hot for more clothes than these. Plus, she thought she might get in some yoga toward evening. One of the biggest challenges she’d faced being out in the country was the lack of a good gym. She was using yoga for all her muscle work. She’d found she enjoyed going outside with her mat as the sun was slanting low in the west, just as the cicadas were starting to sing, and finding some focus. She needed focus.
But at the moment, she needed to get online. She had three projects on deck, one of which was a very big deal, and she wanted to see if Rick had anything new on her target.
No, he didn’t. They were both puzzled—no gas receipts, no hotel, no airfare, no credit card purchases of any kind, and no withdrawals from his bank accounts in eleven days—and that last was only $100. It was like the man had been sucked up into the sky—or, more likely, down into hell. It was like he knew someone was after him. If you want to disappear in the 21st century, you go off the grid. That’s what her target had done.
Reading over Rick’s coded message, Lilli realized she was feeling something like relief. If the target couldn’t be found, she wouldn’t have to go. That was bad. People had put their necks on the line to get her into a position to deal with this. She couldn’t lose sight of the objective because she’d found Isaac. She needed to keep her priorities straight.
She hadn’t told him yet that she might be leaving. She wasn’t sure she was. Until she had more information, she couldn’t plan one way or the other. And things with him were good. She didn’t want that to change, not yet, not unless it had to. It felt wrong to let what was happening between them deepen, but she couldn’t let it not. She was letting herself get caught up, too, even knowing what she did. She knew that every day they spent together would make a separation all the harder, and she didn’t care. She’d never had this before, and she wanted it.
She finished the two smaller projects that afternoon, encrypted them, and sent them back. She had a new message regarding the larger, more important project, shortening the deadline. Great. This one was so sensitive they’d broken it into decontextualized segments and passed them out among a few contractors like her, because they didn’t want the whole content known to any of them. That was great, very secure, but what she did was translation and decryption, which made context highly important. Doing what she did out of context was like solving a random section of a 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle without edge pieces or the picture on the box for reference. And now they wanted her segment in three days. Lovely.
She worked on it for the rest of the afternoon. Around dusk, she shut everything down and locked up. She was experiencing a jolly case of “tech neck.” She had excellent posture naturally, but tended to shrug when she worked on a computer. Rolling her neck, she went out to the living room, grabbed her mat, and headed outside.
The evening was muggy and still, but much cooler than it had been earlier, and she did love the sounds of night animals beginning to stir. Her favorites, when they came out after dark, were the whippoorwills. Even on a warm, thick night, she’d leave a window open so that birdsong could lull her to sleep. She went down to a nice, level grassy spot in her yard and rolled out her mat.
Well into the asanas, she heard a bike coming up the road. She wasn’t expecting to see Isaac today; he’d had some kind of club business in Joplin and expected to be back late. She didn’t pry into any of that. She had her secrets, so she left him to his. He knew she was interested in whatever he wanted to tell her.
The landline hadn’t rung, so she assumed she’d find a missed call on her cell. Since she’d asked, he’d made a habit of calling first, but he had not bothered with the detail of getting her okay to come over. He called. As far as he was concerned, if she didn’t pick up, that was her problem, not his. Since things had changed between them, she didn’t actually mind as much his coming by unexpectedly, so she’d let him slide. Now, she unwound herself from Ashtavakrasana and rolled up her mat as he parked the bike and swung off. She slid her little flip flops on and walked toward him.
Even through his sunglasses, Lilli could see his eyes sparkle with the intent to say something smartass. She stopped at her deck and waited for him to reach her. She knew she was a sweaty mess; she also knew that’s how he liked her.
“Hey, Sport. What the hell were you over there doin?” He hooked his sunglasses into his kutte pocket and pulled her close.
“Yoga. Gotta do something to stay strong. Not exactly a Gold’s Gym on every corner around here.”
“Well, that thing you were doing just now, that was fuckin’ sexy. No wonder we can do what we do. But we have a weight room and some other shit at the clubhouse. Might be time to bring you into the inner sanctum.” With a wink, he leaned down and kissed her.
That was Lilli’s one reserve. She didn’t want to go to the clubhouse, because she wasn’t s
ure she was staying, and she thought Isaac would feel even more betrayed if he let her all the way in and then she left. If he knew she might be leaving soon, she didn’t think he’d want her at the clubhouse.
A voice in her head told her that he had to know she hadn’t been planning to be here permanently. They hadn’t talked about it at all, but he knew she came with almost nothing. He knew she’d rented a furnished house. He knew why she was here. He had to know she might not stay. She wasn’t being dishonest by not talking about it now. Was she?
“Lilli? You just went far away. What’s up?” He put his fist under her chin and raised her head a little.
She refocused and smiled. “Sorry. Just thinking about getting naked with you. How was Joplin?”
He chuckled. “Those two sentences right next to each other just had a wreck in my head. Joplin was complicated. Let’s get naked. You’re all sweaty and hot, and I want to peel those tiny little clothes off you.” He slid his hand into the back of her shorts and squeezed her ass.
“Sounds like a plan.” She started up the deck steps, his hand still in her shorts, but he grabbed the spandex and pulled her back.
“Uh-uh. Out here. Let’s put that little mat thing you got there to some good use.”
She turned back to see that mischievous gleam in his green eyes. The benefit of living out in the country: everywhere was private. She backed down the steps, and he pulled the mat out from under her arm. Taking her hand, he walked down the length of the house back to a large elm tree. In the few weeks she’d lived here, Lilli had not been back this far. The property she’d rented was on almost ten acres, but she didn’t think in terms of acres. She’d been raised in a subdivision, in a smallish city. She’d gone to college in a big city. She’d spent years in the desert. She understood blocks, and she understood miles. Kilometers, too. But acres meant little to her. She’d done a lot of hiking while she worked, but had never explored this little corner that was ostensibly hers.
Move the Sun (Signal Bend Series) Page 14
