“So have you. And you hurt one of my friends,” she snapped back.
“I haven’t hurt anyone. Yet.”
“You don’t know who you’re fucking with,” Jem said, and she turned to see him several feet from her. He’d obviously just woken up and his eyes were dark with anger.
“I think it’s a guy who’s all tied up and should be shutting his mouth,” another broad man said. He was shorter than the guy in front of her, but no less intimidating. Obviously, not to Jem, the way he goaded the man.
“Nice anchor, Popeye.”
Popeye. Navy. Gunner. Okay. She blew out a breath. Maybe this could still be okay.
Maybe. “You know Gunner.”
“Why are you asking questions about him?”
Oddly protective. And Avery suddenly knew who these men had lost.
“The story’s true, isn’t it? Your daughter was married to . . . James.”
“Why does this interest you?”
There were so many things she could say, professional things. What came out was “I love him.”
The men looked at her. Jem groaned and then suddenly he was free and slamming one of the men to the desk, pointing a gun at the other one. “Untie her.”
“Do it, Mike,” the man on the desk grunted. Mike moved forward and undid the bindings on her wrists and then her ankles. Jem didn’t take the gun off the guy on the table, told Mike, “Move to the corner and sit your ass down. I’m asking questions now.”
Avery stood and Jem motioned for her to grab a weapon. She did, but kept the gun down at her side. “We love Gunner. He left without warning and I think he’s doing something bad. Billie said you were asking about me . . . and then an hour later, someone nearly killed her.”
Mike shook his head and Andy cursed softly, then said, “It wasn’t us. James was our family.”
Mike looked at Andy and smiled and Avery knew two things then—these men loved each other, and they’d welcomed Gunner into their home, despite everything. Despite everything, they still wanted to protect him.
Mike cleared his throat and looked at her. “Josie was my daughter. Her mom, Amie, was my best friend. I grew up here.”
“And I grew up in Texas,” Andy said, his drawl thick and definitely not from Louisiana. His head was still pressed to the table by Jem, who was intent on listening.
“Amie wanted a baby, but she’d been pretty burned in the past by love. She decided she could raise a baby herself, asked me if I was okay with that. I knew I’d be away a lot with the Navy, and I knew she’d be a damned good mom. So I was always a part of Josie’s life—she grew up knowing I was her dad and that I was gay and everything was fine. But then Amie got cancer—damn, it was so quick. And rather than relocate Josie, who was twelve at the time, or make her travel with me and Andy, which would’ve been damned near impossible with our jobs as SEALs, we moved here. I was willing to come alone, but Andy wouldn’t let me.”
“Best decision I ever made,” Andy said. “We don’t typically trade information on family, but you seem to want to help him, not use him. And you seem like you’re in as much danger as Billie.”
“Why’d you go to see her?” Avery asked.
“I wanted to talk to you,” Mike said. “I knew James—Gunner—left New Orleans last month. What I don’t know is why. Or at least I didn’t. Now I think I know.”
“He’s in a bad place, isn’t he?” she whispered.
“If he’s back doing what I think he’s doing, yes.” Mike sighed, stared at the ceiling. “He’s been in close proximity for years, but he never got in touch. For our safety, more so than his. He’s got to be ruthless about cutting ties to his past.”
Avery rubbed her wrists where the rope bit into them.
“Sorry about that. We’re suspicious types.”
“Jem, you could probably let Andy up now,” Avery said.
Jem grumbled but did so. Andy got up slowly, moved away from Gunner. Avery put the gun back into its case then and Mike motioned for all of them to follow him farther into the deceptively worn house.
It was obvious these two men had a more than fleeting concern for security and privacy, especially once they were led through the living room, with the TV and the old couch into a room behind a locked door.
Andy sat in front of the large computer and began typing.
“Please, sit,” Mike told them. There were several comfortable chairs and Jem collapsed into one while Avery stayed on the edge of her own leather recliner. Accepted a soda and turned it in her hands until they went numb from the cold and then the drink got warm, all in the space of the five minutes it took Andy and Mike to confer, wordlessly, about something on the iPad.
The men started slow, waiting to see if they could trust Avery and Jem. She appreciated that, even though she was frustrated with the pace.
They’d handed her and Jem a file folder marked CIA and confidential and branded with a red stamp that stated .
“Someone didn’t do their job,” Jem muttered. He opened the file, since he was the best one to interpret the legalese and covertness of the CIA’s writings.
He explained that, according to the agents who were working this case—one of whom had been Richard Powell himself—James Connor had fallen off the map completely at the age of nineteen. From the ages of sixteen until nineteen, he had a long list of crimes that he was implicated in but never captured for.
He appeared to have been working for a mysterious smuggler known only by the initials DL. The CIA had been watching him for ten years and only had a trail of bodies, explosions and money.
“James Connor is Gunner,” Jem said. Because Dare told them that Powell used the name James when he’d greeted Gunner.
“Powell thought Gunner was dead.”
“That must’ve been when he went into the Navy.”
Avery nodded, but something was bothering her. “Where was James from birth to sixteen?”
“He was with his mom until she was killed. He was twelve. And we know he was with Powell for some of that time afterward—had to be.”
“But he wasn’t there when Grace got there. Gunner would’ve been fifteen or sixteen at the time,” Andy added.
“So that’s when he fell in with this mysterious DL character,” Jem mused.
“And his own father was investigating him, not mentioning that this was his son?” Avery asked.
“Fucking bastard,” Jem muttered. “Glad he’s dead.”
“And DL is Drew Landon, infamous smuggler,” Mike added. “He’s one of the biggest moneymakers—he smuggles criminals and their families out of the country. Any country. He gets them away from marshals, feds, whoever. It’s a huge business, requires utmost secrecy. He only uses top operatives for certain parts of his business.”
Smuggling was the reason Gunner had made so many connections. He’d made friends with criminals and innocents alike, offered favors even as he was an avenging angel to the human traffickers.
“There was a string of unexplained human trafficker deaths about ten years ago, when I was first with the CIA,” Jem said. “You’re saying that was Gunner?”
“As near as we could figure out,” Mike said. “Whatever else Landon had him doing, Gunner was kicking ass.”
“So Gunner is the man who actually escorts the criminals into their new country?” Avery asked. “Wouldn’t that give him a way out of working with Landon?”
“Not if he wants to live,” Jem said.
“But he had Gunner kill human traffickers. Because they were competition? I can’t see Gunner working for someone like that, no matter what they had hanging over his head,” Avery mused.
“DL is most likely hanging you over Gunner’s head,” Mike said gently, then added, “Maybe Gunner doesn’t know. Maybe it’s what he needs to believe.”
Avery rested her forehead in her palms, blinked back tears. “I can’t believe . . . we did this to him. I did.”
She and Dare had pulled Gunner into their problems, into helping t
hem find their father. Ultimately, finding Darius meant that Gunner had to face his own father. Because of that, Landon had rediscovered Gunner. Knowing she couldn’t have predicted the consequences did nothing to assuage her guilt.
* * *
Gunner stared out at the water, a bottle of whiskey and a shot glass next to him. Landon had had someone bring them by hours earlier, and Gunner hadn’t refused them.
The guy had stared at his head, whistled and then offered to come in and share the bottle with him, after staring up and down Gunner’s naked body.
Gunner just shook his head no and the guy offered his sister. Gunner just closed the door quietly. He’d gone numb the second he’d stepped onto this island, and no amount of pleasure was going to help.
He didn’t want to close his eyes because every time he did, he saw Avery. He realized he didn’t have any pictures of her, an old habit of never leaving a trail of people you loved for criminals to latch onto.
He’d never kept any of Josie either. But he had Josie’s tattoo on his arm, the same one he pressed herbs against now. An offering, a prayer, a call for protection he knew he didn’t deserve.
All the people you’ve helped in the meantime . . .
Didn’t matter, he told himself ruthlessly. He’d wiped karma out with a single bomb on a job the night Josie was killed and he’d pay for it forever. Just the way it was meant to be.
He’d tried to be a part of the tight family circle that Gunner couldn’t believe he was lucky enough to be a part of.
And you lied to them, time after time. As much as he told himself it was for their own protection, he knew that he’d been afraid they’d tell him to go to hell.
“What happened to you, son?” Mike asked, maybe two weeks later when Gunner was starting to get back on his feet.
Gunner looked him in the eye and started to make something up. Mike would believe it—and Gunner wished he could believe it too. Instead, he told the man, “I got out of something bad the only way I knew how.”
Mike nodded.
“I’ve got to get out of here. I won’t bring anything but trouble to you and your family.”
“I don’t believe that for a second,” Mike said.
Josie continued. “Besides, that’s what the ceremony was for. It cleared away the evil that surrounded you. Purified you.”
Josie said this as though everyone knew that.
“So what, I’m like new now?”
“In a way, yes.”
He’d gotten out of bed and nearly collapsed on her. She caught him, chided, “Come on, James.”
“How’d you know that?” Because if memory served, he’d been wearing cargo pants and nothing else, had no ID or money. Nothing else when Landon’s men dumped him from the car after beating him. Almost like a reverse gang ritual. He had no doubt they’d meant to kill him in one of the most painful ways possible.
“You told me,” Josie said simply.
She sat next to him on the bed and Mike asked, “Are they going to come looking for you?”
“Considering they dumped him in the middle of the swamp, I guess they figured local wildlife would take care of the body.”
“How long have I been here?”
“Two weeks.”
“And nobody’s come asking about me?”
“We’re pretty well insulated from strangers around here. Between the geography and the Cajuns, any outsider steps foot in this parish and it’s known before your shoe hits the dirt,” Mike said. “Which is how we found you.”
Chapter Eight
When Mike and Andy told her and Jem the story of finding Gunner barely alive in the bayou, Avery gritted her teeth together so hard her head ached.
“I don’t know how he was still alive,” Mike was saying. “He was . . . Jesus, I thought he was dead when the dog found him. Petey tried to drag him up the porch and then howled when he couldn’t.”
“Petey was a good judge of character,” Andy added. “He’d bitten over half the damned parish, but with Gunner, he wouldn’t leave his side, no matter how hard we tried to get him to leave the poor guy alone.”
Avery pulled the blanket farther around her shoulders and sipped at the strong coffee Mike had made. “Did he remember anything?”
“I think he remembered everything, but he didn’t tell us. Not then. Not until he’d realized he’d fallen in love with Josie. He came clean to us about his father and Landon then,” Mike said. “He’d been through hell. But he had a drive . . . after everything happened, we tried to convince him to go right into the military. I wish we’d convinced him.”
“He didn’t want to?” Avery asked.
“Partly. And Josie didn’t help. She wanted him here, with her. They were like two kids. I think it was the first time Gunner actually had a childhood.” Mike smiled as he remembered.
“They were good together,” Andy agreed, and then looked at Avery. “Sorry, hon—does this bother you?”
“No, it doesn’t. Anything that made Gunner happy . . .” She trailed off and Jem put a hand on her shoulder.
“We’ll get him back if I have to drag him by the hair,” he assured her.
She laughed a little, then pointed to Mike’s arm. “Did Gunner do any of those tattoos?”
He pointed to one. “This was one of his first. He learned from Josie.”
“I think I really would’ve liked Josie,” she said.
“You two are very different,” Andy told her. “But I think you would’ve been tight.”
That meant a lot to her. She felt as though she needed the dead woman’s blessing to move forward with Gunner.
“Gunner was a natural with the tattooing. He’s a great artist.” Mike pointed to the wall behind her. She turned to see a charcoal drawing of a young woman, hugging a dog and smiling.
Josie. So pretty. So young.
I knew he loved you because he drew you, Billie told her in so many words. And Avery would hold on to that with everything she had.
* * *
Josie was the first person Gunner had sketched since he’d moved to Powell’s island. He couldn’t have stopped himself if he’d tried, found himself scratching the pencil on paper, watching Josie playing with Petey. She hadn’t interrupted him, not until he put the paper down and stretched his cramped hands.
He’d drawn several versions of her, because he’d been rusty—and determined to get it right.
“It’s beautiful.”
“You’re beautiful. My art needs work. Been a while.”
“Why’s that?”
He didn’t tell her that killing people and art didn’t exactly go together. “I haven’t wanted to. Not until now.”
“I can’t really draw,” she admitted. “I can freehand things when I tattoo, but it’s basic stuff. Charms and things like that. But you’ve got talent.”
She’d known some traditional tattooing methods, using sticks and ink and man, were painful but beautiful, and she was also handy with the tattoo gun. Her mother had dated a tattoo artist when Josie was small and she’d taken to it easily.
The first several weeks when Gunner was hiding and healing, she’d noticed him doodling and drawing on any scrap of paper he was near. He hadn’t noticed—it was something he hadn’t done since his mother had died. Before that, his mother used to tease him that any available space would be filled with his drawings.
When she’d died, he’d opened one of her suitcases and found a large stack of his drawings, from some of his earliest doodles to some of the most recent. He’d lost that suitcase after moving to Powell’s. He had little doubt that Powell took one look at it, dismissed it as sentimental rubbish and burned it.
Thankfully, you couldn’t burn memories as easily.
Josie had let him give her a tattoo, the first one he’d ever done. He’d been nervous, hadn’t wanted to mar her beautiful skin. Hadn’t wanted to make a mistake. But the bold, funny, raunchy woman told him that mistakes were what made life interesting.
“We can fi
x anything, James,” she’d added.
He’d used the gun, not the sticks. It took him months before he was comfortable with that method, and it still wasn’t exactly his bag. He’d let the buzz of the needle mesmerize him. She’d insisted that he use it freehand, tattoo the first thing that came to his mind.
He’d drawn a butterfly.
“I love it, James,” she’d told him.
“I don’t think you want to get involved with me.”
“Then stop thinking,” she’d said, right before she’d kissed him.
They’d made love for the first time that night. Lying on her mattress stuffed with cypress leaves and smelling like lavender and other scents that would forever remind him of Josie, he’d told her that he loved her.
Didn’t know how he was capable of that still, but he hadn’t wanted to question it.
Those were some of the good memories. The escape he’d made from the life with Landon into Josie’s arms was one he’d never chosen, but he’d been happy with it. Would he have stayed that way?
He’d never gotten the chance to know.
“Maybe your past will just let you go,” she’d said. And, for a year, it had. And then it had sunk its claws back into his life with a vicious vengeance that rocked his life to this day.
Don’t go there, he warned himself, but too much whiskey brought up too many memories, and he was in the right mood to torture himself.
Josie had been raised by two men who were both SEALs. She knew how to fight, how to use weapons. She hadn’t fought, hadn’t seen it coming. She’d never been given a chance.
He wanted to run out the door, follow a trail to her killer before it got cold. But all he could do was kneel in slow motion beside her body and gather Josie in his arms. He didn’t know how long he’d sat there holding her when he realized Andy was shaking him. Moving him aside so Mike could check the body.
“Look at me. You have to leave. James, do you understand? You have to get the hell out of here now,” Andy was saying to him. Somehow, even in his state of mourning, he heard that. Pushed himself shakily to his feet.
Unbreakable s8-2 Page 7
