Take Over at Midnight (The Night Stalkers)

by Buchman, M. L.

  She lay in silence now as Tim stroked his hand up and down her bare back. She’d never lain naked with a man when it wasn’t about sex; either the sex that had just happened or the sex that was about to. But for this instant, for this precious moment, they simply lay together in companionship. In comfort.

  He twisted his head enough to lay his lips on her hair. Tim was the perfect gentle lover, the considerate man, the good son.

  “How, Tim? How is it that you ever left your family?”

  She could feel the lips against her hair shift into a smile. She’d bet if she could see, it would be a sad one. The sigh that rippled across his chest beneath her spread hand and draped arm confirmed her guess.

  “It’ll sound stupid.”

  “Good, that way I won’t be the only one.”

  She could feel him trying to look at her. “You’re not stupid.”

  “You have no idea. Now give. Henderson’s dad was a SEAL. Beale’s such a goddamn overachiever that she couldn’t help herself. Connie was born to it. Kee will fight anything she meets to the death. What is someone like you doing as a lifer in the Army?”

  Tim relaxed back against his pillow, probably contemplating the dark ceiling barely lit by the alley’s light shining up through a narrow opening in the window curtain.

  “I had this great childhood. I was a cutup, the class clown, and I was good at it. Got jazzed up on the attention, I guess. I occasionally feel bad that Mrs. Wilson retired unexpectedly at the end of my fifth-grade year. I think it might have been because I automated her desk. Silent remote-control motors. I could open or close the drawers when her back was turned. Make her chair wander away. Once I got it out the open door and a dozen yards down the hall before she noticed.”

  Lola giggled against his chest, feeling a bit guilty about laughing at a woman she didn’t know.

  “Once I got a taste of it, I couldn’t stop. I reprogrammed the school’s master clock to play AC/DC’s ‘Back in Black’ each time it was supposed to ring the bell for class change. I rebuilt my uncle’s transmission linkage, installing a reverser gear in the drive train so that he had three reverse gears and one forward one. That car could go really fast, backwards.”

  That got her to laugh.

  “Then I started getting stupid.”

  His suddenly serious voice sobered her instantly. She might have tried to raise herself to look at him, but his hand no longer stroked her back. Instead it clamped tight across her shoulders as if holding on.

  “Worked my way up into a chop shop for a while. I’m a damn good mechanic, and I learned a lot taking cars apart and putting them back together so that they didn’t look stolen. I made good money, too good for a teenager, but thankfully, other than a few drunken escapades, I didn’t get too stupid with all that cash. It was the cars I liked. The mechanicking. I did a lot of stupid shit. Even stole and striped a cop car once, as if that wasn’t about the dumbest thing you could do.”

  His body was rigid with memory.

  “I’d go home, come here to the kitchen, and Ma would know. Maybe not exactly what, but I could feel her shame of me. Which only pushed me further. To this day I don’t know what I was rebelling against. As far as I can recall, I didn’t know then, either.”

  He took a deep breath, raising her head as his chest filled with air that he then released in an exasperated puff.

  “I still don’t know. I was just stupid. Right until the day I saw that jet airliner fly into the side of the Pentagon carrying a bellyful of helpless passengers. That was the moment I woke up. That’s the day I understood that the world was way bigger than what shit I could spread around on it. My parents love me the way they do because they know what I crawled out of.”

  Tim wasn’t just a good man, he was a good man by conscious choice. That in some ways made him an even better man than she’d already thought he was. And made her feel even less that she deserved to be with him.

  “They loved you anyway. You just gave them a reason to be proud.”

  “Maybe. I guess.”

  Lola could feel the tension remaining in him like hot steel.

  “Never told anyone any of that. Not Ma. Not John.”

  Trust. He treated her with such absolute trust. She didn’t deserve such a thing, such a gift.

  “So you really are ‘Crazy Tim.’ Dumb enough to trust a Creole bitch.” Her mind latched on to a joke and spit it out before her thoughts could go any deeper. Before they could lead somewhere she didn’t want to go.

  “Yep.” The soft chuckle rippled across his pecs. “I guess I earned that one fair and square. Earned it long before I was tagged with it, if they only knew.”

  But Lola’s thoughts continued despite her best attempt to sidetrack them.

  “Your parents love the man you’ve become.”

  He shrugged. “I guess. Maybe for the man they think I can be. I haven’t been tossed in lockup for a couple years, not since before I made SOAR. But they saw plenty of the bad years. I don’t think they trust those are really gone.”

  “Are they?”

  He released his tight grip on her shoulder and started toying with her hair. It seemed to hold endless fascination for him. He was always combing his hand through it, twirling a bit around his finger. A dozen, a hundred little tugs on her scalp like a gentle massage.

  “I don’t know. The Majors sure put up with enough crap from me. Now I just do the practical jokes on Rangers, which nobody seems to really mind except the Rangers.” His tone clearly indicating that their opinion didn’t matter in the slightest.

  “I usually manage to make it look as if another Ranger did it. Like the guy I sewed into his bunk while he was sleeping. I used the suture line from a half-dozen med kits that I lifted from his squadmates and just happened to leave lying about where he could see them. They had to cut him out of the bed. It was especially funny because he kicked and screamed every time one of them came near him with a knife because he was sure they were the ones who’d sewed him in.”

  He tugged at another little clump of her hair.

  “My parents always wanted me to be a better man, didn’t help much. The Majors definitely did. I think it’s you that I really want to be the best for. I feel different around you. As if I’m the one that’s important, not who I’m supposed to be. Not who my parents think I’m supposed to be. Just me, as I am.”

  They lay together with Tim’s absolute honesty between them. Lola couldn’t turn away from that. She wanted to use sex, wash away the moment, but that wasn’t honest either.

  “That’s my dad.”

  “What is?”

  Lola hadn’t meant to say anything, but Tim had given her such a gift that she had to return it in kind.

  “The way I use sex. Used sex. Or don’t use it. I don’t seem to do it with you, though I’ll be damned if I know why.” Or maybe she did, but it was not something she’d ever admit out loud.

  “Sex is power. Dad taught me that.”

  “He didn’t?” Tim jerked half upright.

  “No.” Lola patted his chest to ease him back into place. “He was an abuser, just not a physical one. He absolutely controlled me by proving just how thoroughly he could ignore me. I was never good enough, always a disappointment, didn’t meet standards. When he had a woman, he made sure they were loud, usually right in the living room so I couldn’t even escape my room. Sex is power.”

  She pushed herself up on one elbow to look down at him. Just the least hint of light brushing Tim’s beautiful face.

  “You may be the first man I’ve ever been with where sex wasn’t some weapon to wield, some way to distract myself so that I can fly under the radar and avoid how screwed up my past is. To dodge what a mess I am. How screwed up my family is.”

  “Is? You have family? I thought your parents were dead.”

  “No.” Her voice was the barest w
hisper. “No, I just wish he was.”

  ***

  Tim pulled her back down to his chest. He could feel her blinking hard, fighting against the tears he could hear in her voice but she was too stubborn to release.

  “He? Your dad? The one you said was run over by the beer truck while lying drunk in a tavern parking lot?”

  “Yes. That one.” Her voice was a small, distant thing as if she weren’t just flying under the radar but was falling off its most distant edge.

  He stared up at the ceiling, considering if he should be offended by the lie, but he wasn’t. He knew the self-protection of a lie. But he was learning from Lola that it wasn’t necessarily the best protection. Telling her the truth, he’d surprised himself. He really was his best self around her. Something about her made him want to be the strong, solid, reliable person that he’d only pretended to be before.

  “Tell me about him.” He felt the shiver run up her spine, but no tears splashed onto his chest and her head didn’t turn into his shoulder to avoid the question. She simply lay in silence and Tim let her.

  “Ricky LaRue.” Her voice little more than a whisper. “Deputy Sheriff of New Orleans Richard LaRue. Used to say he always wanted to be a cop so that he could lock others up for the shit he did. Never wanted to be sheriff, ‘because those idiots get elected, then thrown back out.’ He just wanted the power, didn’t care about the title. He ran a bunch of brothels, a couple drug rings, had three or four street gangs that reported to him. Who knows. Some corrupt judges, which the Big Easy is known for, he has his hands into several of those as well.”

  “How did you get away from that?” Lola might project wild, but she was forthright and had apparently become best friends with Emily Beale almost overnight, which was high praise indeed. Lola was a woman of such integrity that it was impossible to reconcile that with such a past.

  “Mama Raci.” Her voice sounded solid for the first time. “Old crone who ran a brothel not under my father’s sway. She’d started in the front of the house as a child prostitute. Ended up working in the place and, sixty years or more later, ran the house from the kitchen with an iron fist. Found me bruised, battered, and bloody in the back alley at twelve. Couple of my dad’s criminal buddies went after me and he did nothing to stop them. Said he owed them or some such crap. I beat them off, cut one up pretty good, and got away.”

  Tim held her tighter, could feel the rage building inside him. No child deserved that kind of past. Lola lay against him totally passive, as if she were talking about the day’s news of some far-off place.

  “Mama Raci took me in but never let me into the front of the house. I worked in the kitchen with her. Ran errands. I guess I’m the one she decided to save. Got me to go back to school, let me sleep in the kitchen as long as I did my homework. Always made sure I was safe and fed.”

  She let out a long, slow breath. “Already told you the rest.”

  Yes, the same thing that had happened to him. She wasn’t kidding when she said she’d been born on September 11th, 2001. They both had.

  The woman she’d become was a magnificent statement of her strength of will. Made him feel humble and stupid. He’d struggled against a great family and barely found the fortitude to crawl out of it. Lola strode out of Hell with the power of a goddess of old.

  Now she did turn her face into his shoulder, and sniffled.

  Tim held her tight and rocked her back and forth. Lola’s voice, so carefully flat, clearly hid a tidal wave of pain and anger and old scar tissue.

  He knew about old scar tissue. Could feel himself shedding the last of it as they lay there.

  He hoped there was some way he could return the favor.

  Chapter 44

  Lola checked over the Huey UH-1M helicopter.

  Tim was preflighting the exterior under Anacostia’s helipad lights.

  Lola was going down the checklist, powering up the different systems, checking fuel, making calibrations, and tuning radios as she went.

  They’d been trying to figure out how not to go insane while awaiting orders when Tim remembered that he had to requalify. Each year, everyone in SOAR had to requalify for their seat, and Tim’s renewal cycle was coming up. Deployments didn’t count, combat gave practice but didn’t require standards of excellence.

  On only an hour or two of sleep they’d driven up to the Aberdeen Proving Ground range. Lola ran through the target and free range, sharpshooter, and kill-house trials to keep Tim company and keep a bit of edge on. She’d always thought herself good, but Tim was clearly in a whole other league, easily outshooting her scores. Didn’t worry her too much, she was a flier first and they each were there to do what they were good at.

  It was only on the range debrief that she realized two things. First, shooting beside Tim had made her top any prior score she’d ever achieved. And second, what Tim was doing. He wasn’t just trying to requal; he was trying to bust Kee Stevenson’s record scores. He was close, damn close.

  It would all depend on the night-flight tests.

  He didn’t match Kee’s sniper skills, but on the heavy guns he was a damned artist. He shredded pop-up targets almost before they flipped into position and didn’t lose a single point for a “friendly” kill.

  The range officer was pretty psyched about the scores. He was so cheerful that Tim didn’t think to do anything evil until they’d already gotten back on the road and it was too late.

  They’d caught a dinner of blue crab at a dive along the Baltimore waterfront while waiting for sunset. Tim swung by the family restaurant and prepared a huge picnic basket. Clearly he had some other plans for after the night-range flight and she was good with that.

  Now they were prepping to fly out of Anacostia.

  Tim shoved the picnic basket in the back of the Huey and strapped it down out of the way.

  Lola switched over to the right seat for this flight. It only took one pilot to fly a Huey, and it was nice to sit pilot’s side again. For the test, General Arnson had arranged for a minigun rig in the center of the cargo bay door and a shooter’s seat set up exactly as a Black Hawk’s would be.

  Now it was up to Tim to show what he could do.

  Lola glanced up as he climbed aboard and strapped in. He pulled on his helmet and turned on the intercom.

  “Good to go.”

  In answer Lola fired up the turbine.

  And it was up to her to make sure he had a challenging flight.

  That was gonna be fun.

  ***

  Tim knew he was in the groove. He’d often hit high score records in one of the tests, sometimes two, but never six on the same day. Right now the only place Kee still outranked him was fixed and moving targets at five-hundred-plus yards. And the only one she was out of the ballpark on was the two-thousand-meter bench-rest range. Since she was currently the U.S. Army’s number one ranked at that range, he didn’t feel too bad. Damn, he could barely see the target. How did the woman bull’s-eye it?

  He rubbed his hands together as Lola flew them down to the Wallops Island Navy range. Not that his hands were cold; D.C. April nights were rarely cold.

  It was that the scores were so close he could feel the magic buzzing in his hands.

  “Coming up.”

  Tim kicked on the power to his night-vision goggles and double-checked his seat harness.

  “Do me proud, Chief Warrant.” A slack flight would downgrade his score even if he shot dead on.

  “Roger that.” He heard the excitement in her voice easily matching his. For half a second he wondered if he should be worried, but he’d trust Lola over any pilot other than Major Beale. He dismissed the itch between his shoulder blades.

  They crossed over Wallops Island and the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge. Yeah, couple of things down there he wanted to show Lola, but he couldn’t think about that right now.

  F
ocus, dude. Be loose and focus.

  They flew another mile or so out to sea and the offshore target area.

  “Range, this is Marine thirty-four thirty.” Their tail number to identify their flight. “Ready for Qual Run.” Lola let the range controller know they were ready.

  Tim flexed his fingers again, made sure the cartridge belt lay clean from can to feeder, and flicked on the power switch. The minigun’s six barrels spun to life with a high whine and the familiarity of an old friend. He set the selector for the low-rate of three thousand rounds per minute. At fifty rounds a second, he had to be careful not to destroy a target past any ability to score it.

  “Marine, this is range. Range is clear. You may commence your run.”

  And the helicopter tumbled toward the ocean.

  Tim hung on to the handles of the gun to keep himself stable.

  “Lola!” he cried out. She was going to die. They’d both be…

  Nothing was making sense.

  The engine sounded normal.

  But they were falling like—

  Tim saw a clear target, marked by bright infrared beacons, bobbing on the waves. Without thought, he jerked the trigger for a half second. The gun burped and threw twenty-five rounds at three times the speed of sound. Every fifth round was an infrared tracer streaking bright green across his night-vision goggles.

  He dead-centered it. How?

  Lola had flattened the flight at the perfect instant, a wholly unexpected attack from an unusual angle.

  She spiraled upward and a half-dozen remote-control drone weather balloons with tiny engines floated across the night sky. Friendlies had star markers, enemies big X’s. Each dangled a target barely five feet square; at a hundred miles per hour, that was pretty damn small. Goal was to dead-center the X targets without bursting their balloons. Killing their drones always pissed off the range guys.

  Lola was weaving like a mad woman, and it was all he could do to separate and nail targets. One would be a dozen rotors out and the next one so close that the IR markers were blindingly bright.