Laughter floated up from a group on the second one past the end of the verandah. Most were astonishingly tall and handsome black men. A group of four white women sat close together—chatting happily away like close friends. She could hear snatches of English and French and some language she’d never heard before, but couldn’t make out any of their words from this distance. Their easy way with each other calmed her nerves better than a good belt of scotch—which truthfully just tended to make her sleepy.
Zoe wondered what it would be like to just stand up, descend the stairs, and join them. They were her age, dressed in jeans, flip-flops, and long-sleeved shirts open over t-shirts. They had no particular style, no overt fashion among them. They were…so much themselves.
She would be embarrassed to wear her clothes among them, though they didn’t look like the sort to care. She didn’t like the feeling but couldn’t seem to look away. She made sense in her own world. But her “sense” seemed uncomfortably senseless in theirs.
As she, Christian, and Luke were served with their main courses—hers was seafood carbonara—the group below was also served by someone who had been cooking out of sight under the thatched roof. Great round platters like giant pizza tins were set out. Rice, dark brown with sauce, had been spread in an even layer with a small fish and some vegetables in the center. Everyone gathered around the platters with a spoon and set in to eating, some kneeling on the sand, others sitting cross-legged.
“Watch them,” Christian said softly—the first time he’d spoken in less than a merry bellow all afternoon. “They will only eat what of the ceebu jen—it means fish and rice and is the national dish—is in the triangular area in front of them, like a slice of pizza.”
“But the fish lies in the exact middle.” Even as she spoke, someone dug into the fish with his spoon and pried loose some meat. He nudged some into the triangles adjoining his before pulling some in front of himself.
“Everything in this culture is shared. It is called teranga. A rough translation is: ‘the more you share, the more plentiful your bowl will be’.”
Zoe looked back at their own table. They each had their own section of table, their own napkin, silverware, glass of wine, and white plate of food.
The silent meal continued below them. “They don’t have much to say to each other.”
“The Senegalese believe that you should do one thing at a time to improve your enjoyment of it. Eat, talk, play music, make love. These are all separate.”
Rather than looking at Christian, she caught herself watching Luke, who was already well started on his spaghetti and meatballs.
“Your assistant never talks, so for him it is not a problem,” Christian announced smugly before cutting into his eggplant parmigiana.
A wave of sadness washed over her. An old familiar cloak that she had spent a lifetime fighting against with bright colors and outrageous looks.
Why was that simple action of the group below affecting her so?
She had friends. No, they had friends. She had…fans.
Zoe had Sofia—who was her commander.
Nikita was a friend. As much as the lone female SEAL had female friends. She spoke almost as rarely as Luke, which probably explained part of why she fit into the team so well. Though they rarely saw each other outside the start or end of a mission, she supposed that Nikita was her best friend. She’d certainly told Nikita things she’d never told anyone else and knew that Nikita had done the same. But perhaps Nikita was also her only friend, and that was a very sad thought.
There were the other women of the 5E—who Zoe liked and respected—but she was “other.” Peggy, her best friend in high school, had explained “otherness” to Zoe. She had a nurse mom and a cop dad. Zoe’s own parents, with their “normal” occupations of secretary and car mechanic, didn’t stand out. But Peggy talked about how people always treated her parents as if they never belonged. People lowered their beers at a party when her dad showed up—as if drinking was bad even with friends when you weren’t driving. Others set down their greasy burgers and over-dressed potato salad when her mom sat with them, even if her plate held the same.
Zoe was “other.” She flew with the 5E, except they flew helicopters into foreign countries and she flew an RPA jet sixty thousand feet above them from a box in Alabama. They constantly risked their lives beyond the front lines and she risked getting a sore butt from too many hours in the coffin’s command chair. They didn’t treat her differently, but she was and knew it. They told tales of wild countries and wilder missions. She watched them from her eye in the sky.
Or maybe Zoe had no one she could just let her hair down with because she was broken inside. She knew that, but it was completely out her control to fix. That internal breakage they each possessed had created the bond between her and Nikita.
She was so sick of being “other.” Of being broken. Of being…
So sick of herself.
Teranga? She’d show them goddamn teranga.
She jabbed her fork into one of Luke’s meatballs and hacked off a whole chunk.
He stopped his own fork with a large twirl of spaghetti halfway to his mouth and watched her, hawk-eyed.
She made a deliberate show of stuffing the whole piece into her mouth and chewing.
Luke made no other action except to watch her as his spaghetti slowly unraveled back into his bowl—his expression as unreadable as the moment she’d thrown him her purse and he’d caught it.
Fine! Whatev! She sipped some wine to clear her mouth and spun some of her own pasta onto her fork.
Still Luke didn’t move or look away. What did those trained eyes see? What thoughts did that bland expression mask? Not even the hints that most men gave as they told her all about themselves. Luke revealed nothing. He was seriously smart—they didn’t forge Team 6 SEALs from dumb jocks—but there was no way to read what was going on in that head of his. Not that she wanted to know.
Zoe sighed and turned her focus back to Christian, pasting on her best smile.
6
Luke decided to grind out another five klicks. The sun was just cracking over the sprawling city and the dawn temperatures were running about seventy Fahrenheit—fifty above the chilly midnight mission in Hathyaron’s Pakistani compound. A welcome respite. It wouldn’t become too hot and humid for running here until May or June.
But it felt like he was part of some damned cross country team. Nothing organized, but there were a lot of guys and a few women out for a run in twos and threes. He’d never been in a country so filled with runners—no one jogged here, they ran.
Then between one heartbeat and the next he was running alone.
The muezzins’ call echoing from the minarets of the mosques cleared the streets. On the next arm swing, he tapped his fingertips against his SIG Sauer P239 compact 9mm handgun just to make sure it was still in his waistband.
It was hard to believe the low religious violence stats for Dakar. Ninety-five percent Muslim, but if they decided to marry a Christian, it wasn’t much of an issue. Highly tolerant. At least some damn place on this planet was—he’d fought in enough of the others. He’d grown up in a deeply bigoted household, which was crazy in Maine because the state was far more Christian white than Dakar was Muslim black. So who had Dad and his buddies been fighting against?
People from away?
Maine was so insular that someone was called a Person From Away if they’d been born “over the line” in a New Hampshire hospital, even if they’d lived the next ninety years without ever leaving Penobscot Bay.
His old man was cracked in the head. Too bad he’d survived whatever it was that had done that to him.
Luke kept pounding along the road, which was giving it the benefit of the name. There were only four or five paved roads in the Ouakam neighborhood where Christian Vehrs lived. Christian was really starting to piss him off, even more than DeMille—which was saying something.
He sure couldn’t wipe out the memory of that brilliant laugh
in her blue eyes as she’d stabbed up a piece of his meatball. She’d done it as if challenging him. The last fool to challenge him had been a recruit six years ago and Luke’d made the guy eat dirt for being an asshole.
DeMille had taken some of his food without his permission and he hadn’t known how to respond. Still didn’t. Take some of hers? Stab her hand with his fork? What?
And the smile on that woman. Half the time it made her look like a sixteen-year-old imp up to no good. The other half it made him want to do things so that he’d see it again, because when the cute rubbed off, there was a woman in there somewhere. A woman that a part of him recognized, and he wasn’t thinking about his dick. Okay, he wasn’t only thinking about that.
She did something to him. He could pal around with his team just fine. Knew how to flirt with women. Except DeMille.
Shit! He was starting to babble like an ensign after his first actual combat mission, which was beyond sad. Like DeMille had planted a hex on him.
Focus on the run.
There were a few sidewalks, but it was safer to run on the verge of the road. The sand was often several inches deep with low drifts of plastic garbage and concrete rubble at the crossroads, but the sidewalks were inconsistent with gaps and shifting surfaces. As the morning traffic built, his route was more and more pushed onto the backroads. They were all deep, gritty sand and tougher running. He didn’t mind the sand—just made for a better workout—but the twists and turns, with streets ending abruptly or running into a blank wall without warning, made it harder to sustain momentum.
Everywhere there was evidence of the good and bad. New building projects marked every street, backed by another road-ending open sewage ditch or a load of deep red sand someone had dumped in the middle of the road by a construction site. It was so fine that it left a taste of iron rust thick on the air for a dozen meters around. The bootstraps that the city was hauling itself up by were plain to see.
Most of the residences were walled, making it hard to tell what was really going on inside—but there was definitely more than met the eye.
Christian Vehrs’ place last night had been a shocker. He lived behind a random steel door in a white concrete block wall that looked no different from any other on the quiet back one-lane. The door had required a sharp kick to open after it had been unlocked, the hinges squealing with grinding sand.
Despite the low theft statistics, a second house door with another lock stood just inside. It opened onto a large room with cool marble floors and Western furnishings. A sectional couch wrapped around a monster big-screen TV that was set to a moderate blare of a soccer game. An inner courtyard thick with trees and bushes was open to the sky. Between a banana and several mango trees, a twenty-foot swimming pool had been sunk into the ground. On three sides, Christian’s two-story home wrapped around the courtyard.
Were their private oases and family areas hidden away behind all of Dakar’s sterile concrete walls?
The fourth side of Christian’s home was a large blank wall with no windows and only a small door.
“Ah,” Christian had said. “That is for tomorrow. Tonight is for relaxing and drinking.”
Nothing he or DeMille had said swayed that determination. And Zoe still hadn’t offered a single clue as to why they were here. No, she had. She’d gotten Christian talking about the Dakar Rally…briefly. But he’d ever-so-smoothly changed the subject before it went far. She’d said they had to come here after she saw the poster for The Dakar. And Christian had raced The Dakar—nine times.
And Zoe had put that together how fast? Under twenty seconds. Perhaps under ten.
Did he trust her? As much as any woman. Which wasn’t saying much except for Nikita. And yet Nikita trusted her. Friend of a friend was one thing. Trust? That belonged only to his own action team. He didn’t even like integrating with other ST6 squads on a mission and he understood them a whole hell of a lot better than he understood Zoe DeMille.
Luke turned the corner at a European-style bakery that offered a glass display case filled with French pastries and a sign offering pizzas that he’d have to remember how to find later. A cinnamon roll sounded good, but he opted for another lap up and over the Two Breasts.
Christian’s wife, Leola, definitely had a pair of those—custom-designed to satisfy a T&A man. Pretty and half her husband’s age. Her frank looks had made it clear that he was welcome to come find her if Christian was out.
He didn’t know if it was for his own protection or DeMille’s that he chose to stretch out on the cool marble outside Zoe’s door last night. He’d slept in far less comfortable places, so that was fine.
In the middle of the night, he’d heard the soft pad of feet slapping on the cool marble. He prepared to roll away from the door so that DeMille didn’t trip over him. But the footsteps weren’t coming from the crack under DeMille’s door, rather from the direction of Christian Vehrs’ room.
Luke had pretended he was still asleep.
Christian had almost stepped on him before stumbling to a halt. His curse in French didn’t sound polite, even if Luke didn’t understand it. He’d stood over Luke for long enough that he was mere seconds from earning a hard upward fist in the nuts before he finally turned around and returned to his wife.
How naive and trusting was DeMille that she’d landed them here? Luke was far bigger than Christian, but the man could overwhelm a woman of DeMille’s size easily.
Luke was again blocked off the sidewalk and onto the street by a roadside nursery of hundreds, maybe thousands of small tropical plants and a few man-tall trees. It was just a fifty-meter stretch along the road and a few meters wide, but the pots were all touching so there were a huge number of plants. No gardens on the outside of homes, so his guess must be right about there being a lot more courtyards like Christian’s inside the city’s unrevealing white walls.
A taxi carwash was a hose at the side of the road. For a brief instant, each small Toyota or Ford was its proper color again—two men with whisk brooms cleaned sand out of the inside. By the time one rolled past him a hundred meters later, its color was already hazing with the sticky dust.
He entered the roadway up to the Mamelles lighthouse. It wound a full time around the hill in a steady climb, just like tracing a finger so slowly around a woman’s breast, starting at the ribs and spiraling up to…
Too long in the field. Way too long in the field when he realized he was picturing that glimpse of DeMille’s breast. First, they were kinda minimal issue. Second, she was…something. Irritating? Yeah, that was it. Just like watching too many Tweety and Sylvester cartoons in a row.
His Maine sense of humor kicked in and made him feel better.
A tourist asks: How can you tell if a boy moose is attracted to a girl moose?
Cain’t say, but wouldn’t want to be gettin’ in his way.
Imagining tiny Zoe DeMille with a moose-sized rack of horns at full charge could almost make him laugh. Thinking about being the man doing the charging at DeMille…
He kicked harder on the climb. The circle of the two-lane paved road was just tight enough that he could actually lean into the curve. At the top of the hill, he slapped a hand on the old lighthouse that towered a half dozen stories above him. On his way back down, he forgot to account for the thin coating of sand over pavement and almost flew off the trail into a nasty looking tangle of thorny acacia bushes all snarled with wind-blown plastic.
That would teach him to think about DeMille’s breasts. Or DeMille.
Twelve hours in Dakar and he’d had enough of this shit. It was time to get something moving if he had to pin Christian to a wall and beat on him to get it. He blew off the end of his run and turned to cross straight over the second breast beneath the African Renaissance Monument to return to Christian’s home.
Time to make sure DeMille hadn’t gotten herself into trouble in the hour he’d been gone. If she was even awake yet.
Then to find out what trouble she’d gotten him into.
If one more Dakari man tried to stop her and convince her that she should marry him, Zoe was going to murder him. It was as if they couldn’t help themselves.
Oh look. Pretty white girl. She must be rich. I must flirt.
At least she hoped it was just flirting, but she’d grown sick of it in the first hundred meters of her run and that had been five kilometers ago.
She’d pulled on a wedding ring for her morning run…which seemed to make no difference at all. At least they weren’t aggressive—confrontational but not threatening. But they kept getting in her way.
Asking Leola if there was a gym nearby had earned her a disinterested, “Not at this hour.” Zoe wondered if Leola’s expression was unreadable because of cultural differences or if Leola just didn’t care. It didn’t seem like anger. Or curiosity. It certainly wasn’t the fandom that Christian had claimed on her behalf.
Zoe needed Christian, but she wasn’t dumb enough to trust him. He could just be a superfan who didn’t want to admit it. Or was he something worse—something she’d had far too much experience with? It was the first time her professional career had needed her public image and she didn’t like the feeling in the least. Lines that should never have been blurred were actively converging—the story of her life.
Last night she’d slipped the carbon fiber knife out of her suitcase and kept it beneath her pillow—it wouldn’t pass an x-ray machine, but metal detectors didn’t see it. Self-defense rule: don’t brandish it unless you’re going to use it. Twice pulled, twice bloodied. Not wanting a third episode, she’d also rigged a primitive alarm system using two chairs on either side of her bedroom door. She’d linked them together with three of her belts so anyone opening the inward-swinging door would snag the belts and drag the chairs noisily across the marble floor.
The only sound had been someone moving very close by her door just at dawn. She didn’t hear the person arrive, but she heard them depart without knocking or trying the door. By the time she’d ventured from her room, she could feel the absolute stillness of the house. Which had sent her back for a quick change and a run.
Target of One's Own Page 5
