One-Eyed Jack (The Deuces Wild Series Book 3)

by Irish Winters

  Jack glanced over his shoulder as if he couldn’t wait to get back to his family. “That woman cheated on her husband with his father? She… she did that to her own daughter? Damn, she’s evil. She told me I could have Darrin once I proved Chester Bratton was dead. I didn’t know what to do, I mean, she’s had my boy for ten years, damn her, and not once has she let me close enough to… to…” A shudder rattled his chest. “This is the first time I’ve touched him. He’s a good kid, I can tell, but I couldn’t murder a guy, not even for my… my son.”

  Roxy had to know. “How’d you and she ever hook up?”

  “Snowstorm hit Boston hard one January night,” he said as he hung his head. “I’d just locked up when she pounded on my window. Said her car broke down. I’m stupid, she was good-looking, so I let her in. Thought a cup of coffee couldn’t hurt while we waited for the tow truck she’d supposedly called. One thing led to another and…” His hand raked over his head again. “Anyway… after she left I realized she’d taken my deposit for the day. Everything. The money was gone and so was she. Why the hell didn’t her husband divorce her? I would have.”

  “Because he still loves her,” Roxy answered, shrugging her shoulders at the stupidity of the situation. Love certainly made the world go around, but it could just as easily knock the planet off its axis and drive a person crazy. Her traitorous eyes lifted automatically to Isaiah. Like me.

  Isaiah stuck a hand to Jack’s shoulder. “Forget about Candace Bratton, Jack. She can’t hurt anyone anymore, but if you ever need anything, just ask. Roxy and I are here for you. Now go home with your family.”

  The big guy brushed a hand over his face, but couldn’t seem to look Isaiah in the eye. He stared at the floor, his shoulders heaving. “You have no idea what that means to me. H-h-home. Yeah. I’m taking my kids and…” He looked up through bleary green eyes. “We’re finally going home.”

  And that was that.

  While Cathleen and Jack drew the kids’ attention, Isaiah steered Roxy out of the building to the FBI SUV waiting in the No-Parking zone at the curb. Damned if Tucker wasn’t at the wheel. Hiding behind darker than dark, “Men in Black” glasses, it was difficult to get a reading on the big guy. For once he kept his mouth shut when Roxy climbed in the back seat. Isaiah followed, but didn’t fasten his seat belt, just tucked her under his arm and asked, “Where to now, Boss?”

  “Counterfeit ring over in Arlington. Three suspects. Armed and dangerous. Metro’s already on site, but there’s a problem.”

  Swallowing her heart, Roxy forced her eyeballs away from Family Services’ front door. She’d never felt more like crying. Those were her kids in there and they had a new home now, but leaving them behind was the hardest thing she’d ever done. She steeled her nerve and faced those dark glasses staring at her in the rear view. “Let me guess. It’s risky as hell. Someone might die before we’re through, and you need us to save the world.”

  Tucker’s brows cocked above the rim of his glasses. “You might say that, Officer Thurston.”

  “Just another day in paradise,” Isaiah murmured in her ear.

  Roxy turned in his arms, and looked up into his steady blue eyes. The bitch inside of her was now broken, its ego tamed and her passionate heart subdued. Tears she tried to hide sprang too easily to the surface. She found herself longing for more than just another day of fighting bad guys and patrolling the streets. In so many ways, she’d been just like her mother, looking for trouble. Finding it.

  Things had to change. Roxy wanted to live forever in the paradise she’d found inside Isaiah’s arms. She just didn’t know how to get there.

  All she could tell him now was, “Well, okay then.”

  Chapter Forty

  Isaiah stood in workout pants at his darkened bedroom window looking down on the quiet streets of Crystal City, his arms crossed over his bare chest and the weekend looming ahead. For once, he had two days off in a row. The ordeal at Family Services was three days behind him and things were looking up.

  Garrett Randall had lawyered up until his attorney-in-law, Sylvia Delgado, showed. After speaking with her, he’d changed his plea and sang like a lark. Everything out of his mouth confirmed what Bob Bratton had already verbosely declared. Jack Fillion’s statement ended up being icing on Candace Bratton’s go-straight-to-jail cake.

  Kitty and Darrin were finally in a good home. Nugget too. Roxy was now Mrs. Isaiah Zaroyin. He should be happy. But he couldn’t sleep.

  His lofty home-away-from-home sat high enough above the surrounding office buildings that he could see across the dark expanse of the mighty Potomac to the nation’s Capitol. Oftentimes, the view offered more of fog than of the Camelot the District could be. On those days and nights, the outlines of the many monuments barely showed through the mist.

  But tonight, the epicenter of the world, the idyllic symbol that millions had died for since mankind crawled out of the primordial ooze, beckoned to brave men and women everywhere like the rare and precious jewel it was. Freedom.

  Unfortunately, the priceless gift came with the messy business of a republic hard at work, the backstabbing, muckraking, and the burdensome processes of democratic rule. It came with the blood of patriots and right along with it, the disdain for those patriots by Freedom’s worst critics. It came with looting and riots when people chose to be offended instead of compromise. Aside from the warmongering dictatorships spread across the globe, democracy had proven to be the world’s least ineffective style of government and it appeared doomed to fail. It was sloppy and disorganized, mayhem at its best. Yet it had persevered. More than that, democracy flourished. Still, it challenged the common man to think better. To strive higher. To rise above the grimy, big city alleys rife with poverty and crime. To be all that he—and she—could be.

  The ghost of a smile breached Isaiah’s lips as he stared at the city he loved. His strange and relentless brain always turned the feelings of his heart into ARMY/NAVY/AF/USMC recruiting slogans.

  Be all you can be.

  Ready to Lead. Ready to Follow. Never Quit.

  The only easy day was yesterday.

  Aim High.

  The few. The Proud.

  His all-time favorite: Semper Fi. Always faithful.

  He understood why his unique brain translated the emotions of his heart into ideals the way it did. Because this crazy busy, crazy courageous, polarizing land that he loved, had once been his to destroy—or to save.

  It all started the day he’d opened the front door of his parents’ home to a stranger, the day Cassandra Bick’s goons abducted him. His mother had been dead nine years by then. His father was never home. Isaiah had just signed on with a computer software company. The hours were good, the pay reasonable, but the job was brain numbingly stale. It was just him and his cat—until he’d opened the door and let the worst kind of evil in.

  Only by the grace of God had he lived through the following months of torture at the diabolical Bicks’ hands. It was then he’d first tasted, truly tasted, hungered for and understood Freedom. The universe brought it to him one day with the sweet touch of Eden’s delicate fingertips fluttering over his feverish psyche. She’d called him Black Eyes back then, because, well, his eyes were as black as sin during that time in Hell. No hint of white rimmed his pupils. Just the futility of utter despair as he worked the dark commands of a truly wicked woman.

  His powerful psychic channels had been forced wide open at the command of Cassandra Bick’s rapacious razor blades for too long. Day after day. Week after week. She’d kept him weak and on edge. At first, when his conscience still ruled, he’d appeased her with false information, rather than search out and destroy the individuals she’d ordered him to locate. She was no psychic. She had no way to prove whether he’d lied or not.

  But one week into the agony, she’d brought some squared-jawed, bright-eyed, ex-military hulk to the game. McCluskey. A big, broad wall of a man, he’d started simply by questioning Isaia
h about those targets he couldn’t seem to locate, but he ended beating a younger guy, one who’d avoided sports in lieu of chess most of his life, damned near to death. Oddly, Cassandra stepped in and stopped her trained guard dog before Isaiah passed out. She must’ve gotten tired sitting on her stool and watching. By then, Isaiah knew. She’d acquired another Level Ten to validate what he told her. There was no choice but to comply.

  He swallowed hard remembering those long, hard days, but yeah. A tortured man will do and say anything—ANYTHING—if it garnered even a minute’s relief from the razor. By the time Eden arrived, he’d been held captive three days short of five months in the Bicks’ concrete warehouse. He’d been starved, beaten, left alone in the cold for days on end, and he’d been forced to do despicable things.

  He’d influenced the national budget process in favor of Senator Bick. He’d garnered Congressional support for Senator Bick’s election campaign. He’d swayed the movers and the shakers in America to believe in, and to back the conspiracy Senator Bick and his wife touted as sound business practice. But worst of all, and the thing that haunted Isaiah still—he’d hunted Eden, first to California, then onto Hawaii and Alaska. To kill her.

  Bile lifted up his throat at how close he’d come to killing her. Everything zeroed back to Abraham Zaroyin and those damnable three Gs: Gain. Glory. Greed.

  The Bicks never would’ve latched onto their insane plan for world domination if Abraham hadn’t bragged about his son’s unique psychic powers to Senator Bick, and how those powers could be put to good use. A mind like Isaiah’s could be used to control soldiers during combat. Think of it! One Level Ten psychic could change the face of war for all time.

  But controlling the fog of war wasn’t part of their plan. Instead the Bicks set out to control every Level Ten on the planet. They wanted the world. When that wasn’t enough for their greedy appetites, they ventured into cryo-technology, thinking that if they bred two Level Tens, they could create their own master race via IVF, Invitro Fertilization, and an army of surrogate mothers. To produce that army, they only needed one male Level Ten, one young enough to milk sperm from for as long as he lived. Level Ten female psychics were throwaway commodities. Unlike male bodies, which replaced sperm indefinitely over a lifetime, females came with a limited number of eggs at birth. There was no need to keep a female alive longer than the time it took to harvest her eggs and cryo-freeze them to be fertilized at a later date.

  Isaiah hadn’t known it at the time, but by then, Abraham Zaroyin was into the Bicks as deeply as he was. While Isaiah hunted Eden, the elder Zaroyin had also hunted her. After Abraham drove her from the safety of her FBI friends in Alaska, Cassandra had forced Isaiah to synchronize the crash of Eden’s Cessna with the arrival of two of his father’s FBI drones. He’d killed an innocent FBI Agent, Charles Sweets, in the middle of the bleak Canadian winter. At the time Isaiah didn’t know Charlie was an undercover agent monitoring Dr. Zaroyin’s laboratory in the middle of Ontario, Canada.

  So yeah, some nights, Isaiah couldn’t sleep.

  Eden could’ve died in that crash. Ky Winchester and Tate Higgins, Special Agents Sam Becker and Tucker Chase could’ve died on their mission to rescue her. Yet not once had any of them held Isaiah’s crimes against him. They’d simply stormed Bicks’ warehouse and rescued him. Eden and Ky gave him a warm place to stay once the hospital released him. They gave him a family and a warm place to lick his wounds. It was Eden’s faith in him and her unconditional love for him, that still today maintained a barrier between him and the world that called him a pariah.

  Then Tucker Chase adopted him, more or less. Told him ‘Things happen, kid. Get over it” in his brash, Navy SEAL way. Taught him how to flip naysayers off. Gave him the job he’d truly hungered for. Gave him his pride back, too.

  Little did Eden know it then, but much like she’d done with Ky on their first encounter, she’d given Isaiah just enough hope to hang onto with her first psychic touch. The closer she’d drawn to him in that morgue of a warehouse that final day, the more hope had flared like a beacon in the night. It was then that Isaiah knew he’d connected with someone who not only cared about him, but who was intent of saving him at all cost.

  Eden hadn’t known him then. She certainly didn’t have to risk her life rescuing him. She could’ve dismissed him as just the son of a madman. Most of American had. But not Eden. He determined then, because of Eden, to fight Cassandra Bick, simply by taking… One. More. Breath.

  In truth, Abraham Zaroyin had come to his son’s rescue with Eden that same day. It was his change of heart that had enabled her to subdue McCluskey, and together they’d infiltrated the Bicks’ lair, and rescued—me.

  Isaiah knew for a fact she still visited his father regularly. He’d seen her at the prison during his weekly visits. Abraham Zaroyin wasn’t evil in the way of the Bicks. He’d just dreamed a dream that ended up being an out of control nightmare. He’d lost his way and his vision the moment he’d put that dream ahead of his wife and son, the moment he’d sold his soul to the Devil called Glory. The second he’d placed that single call for funding to the conniving Senator Bick.

  Because of what he’d been forced to do, Isaiah had vowed never to read any person’s mind unless they were in mortal danger or in dire need of his help. Cassandra Bick might have proven how easy it was to influence others, but Isaiah chose to honor his sister and his friend, Ky Winchester’s sweet wife. It would never be enough, but it was—something.

  Pressing both palms to his biceps, he hugged himself like he used to do in the hospital after his rescue. Eventually, he’d masked the worst of his scars with plastic surgery, but the least of them, he’d let be. They served a purpose Cassandra Bick never could’ve imagined when she’d started her foul game. In the end, her exquisitely painful methods of enlightenment became a crucible, a furnace of sorts, wherein Isaiah’s heart had been purified by blood and fire.

  The scars were in no way mementos of her. Oh, hell no. Instead, they were badges of fortitude forged in the worst of times. Each lined welt on his arms, shoulders, thighs, and ribs, proved that his fight had been real and deadly. They proved he’d overcome formidable odds, and that he could do it again if he had to. That good did triumph over evil, and yeah, it might sound corny, but each one of them proved that time heals. They proved the love of a true friend.

  Lastly, they proved how desperately mankind craved Freedom. It wasn’t simply an inalienable right or a millennial privilege. It certainly wasn’t an entitlement. To a man who’d survived his own private holocaust, Freedom was—everything.

  The breath he’d been holding escaped, fogging the window. He should’ve been snuggled against Roxy’s warm backside, and yet he lingered where he stood. His greatest adventure, serving the lovely lady wrapped in his sheets, now lay ahead. But that lady’s heart was full of sadness and unrealized expectations tonight. She missed her kids.

  Roxy’d tried to hide her disappointment. She’d bucked up like the trooper she was at the crime scene in Arlington, which ended up being nothing more than a bunch of teenagers acting out some movie scene about counterfeiting. They’d bragged they had plates to print millions of counterfeit bills, a weak boast to begin with. A real counterfeiter would’ve known that plates went the way of dinosaurs. Guess someone forgot to tell those kids the movie was a hit long before the digital age.

  The guns in their hands made them dangerous and stupid, but once FBI SWAT rolled on scene, they’d morphed into meek little lambs, bleating for their mamas and crying, “Don’t shoot!” They had no plates, no paper, and no brains, just an antsy local police force that had erred on the side of public safety when they’d called in the FBI.

  Isaiah arched his back and stretched. As a kid, he’d wanted what all kids want, to be rich and famous. Popular. Of course, he’d wanted to be Superman and Ironman, too. His childish dreams were set pretty low back then. Yet from the moment FBI Agent Eden had saved him, he’d known he’d found his nic
he in life, to use that amazing Level Ten gift to give back to the world. Hence, his new mission: to serve and protect, to please and love the restless woman asleep in the king-sized bed behind him.

  The events of the last week had changed Roxy. The gusto she’d lived with had dimmed. Her nerves were frayed, and she’d lost the children she would’ve gladly given her life for. Roxy had put on her happy face once the operation ended, but Isaiah knew better. At the end of the day, his streetwise, bust-’em-up and knock-’em-down Metro police officer’s heart was broken. All because of the love of a child.

  The words she’d uttered on the curb that day, the bleakness in her eyes when she’d said “Well, okay then,” had very nearly done Isaiah in. Darrin had said the exact same thing when Isaiah’d been forced to leave him behind. The sheer resignation contained in those four syllables cried out a wretched plea for forgiveness that neither Roxy nor Darrin needed. They’d done nothing wrong.

  Yet for ten years, Darrin had blamed himself for his father’s desertion. Thank God, the little boy’s real father had custody of him now. But Roxy? As happy as she was that her kids were where they belonged, she blamed herself for not being good enough to right the wrongs committed against them. She hurt for them—like any good mother would.

  What’s a man supposed to do with that? Knock her up? It seemed the perfect solution, and they had made love like bunny rabbits in springtime. But she was on birth control, and even if it failed, even if she were with his child right now, it’d still take nine long months to put that baby in her arms. She’d head for the precinct come morning. He’d kiss her goodbye and catch the blue-line into the District and the J. Edgar Hoover building on Pennsylvania Ave. They’d spend their day doing what they were good at until their allotted shifts ended, and they were free to do what they were best at—loving each other.

  You’d think a Level Ten would know how to best comfort his woman, but Isaiah simply... Did. Not. So he did what he could. Stealthily, he tugged the big, red Nats bag from beneath his side of the bed. During his lunch break, he’d bought ball caps, baseball shirts, and home game tickets to an upcoming Nats game, but he couldn’t wait. She needed to smile now.