Headed for Trouble

by Suzanne Brockmann

  She was using her former-naval-officer voice—no-nonsense with a hint of dominatrix. But then she turned and saw him, and smiled. When she spoke again, her voice was honey. “Sam. You made it.”

  “Thanks to Jules,” he said. She seemed happy to just stand there and look at him, too. He was grinning at her like an idiot.

  “He called me,” she said. “Told me all about the thong incident. Poor Chloe.”

  “Poor Chloe?” Sam protested. “What about poor me?”

  “Poor Sam, having such a trying few weeks, in the most beautiful part of Italy, with naked women throwing themselves at you.” She was trying to sound sarcastic, but her amusement bubbled through. She mocked him even more. “It must’ve been terrible, like … like … working in a Girls Gone Wild video!”

  That was it for the just-let-me-look-at-you part of their long-awaited reunion. Sam dropped his bag and went for her. She met him more than halfway. He knew she’d missed him badly, too, because she didn’t even bother to look around to see who might be watching them—they were, after all, at work. But she didn’t care.

  She just kissed him, and as he kissed the shit of her, he thought of Jules, of how lonely he was. You asked me what I want? I want what you have with Alyssa …

  It didn’t matter to Sam where they slept tonight—in their own bed, or in a five-star hotel, or even in a tent. As long as Alyssa was beside him, Sam was home.

  When Jenk, Izzy, Gillman, and Lopez Met Tony Vlachic

  2005

  This story takes place slightly before Into the Storm.

  “Weirdest lesbian encounter ever,” Izzy said as he dealt the cards around the desk that he’d helped Mark Jenkins move into the middle of the shabby motel room. “This girl comes up to me. I’m in a bar in Boulder, Colorado, and she is unbelievably beautiful. I’m talking a fifty on a scale of one to ten. Seriously Victoria’s Secret gorgeous. Long dark hair, a face like Natalie Portman, a body like a porn star.”

  Gillman rolled his eyes. “You are so full of shit.”

  They’d been garrisoned in some low-rent places before, but this one, remote and located in a town that shut down and went to bed at 2030 every night, was about as nasty as Jenk had ever seen.

  It did, however, include the essentials: a bathroom, a shower, beds to sleep in, an air conditioner that wheezed and chugged as it cooled down the room, a deck of cards, and a mini-fridge filled with beer.

  So okay, the cards were Jenk’s and the mini-fridge was Gillman’s—one of those insulated coolers you could carry in your truck and plug in when you reached your destination.

  Izzy turned to Jenk, injury in his voice and on his face. “You didn’t hear me strapping on the bullshit meter when Fishboy here was telling his lesbian supermodels-in-the-airport story, did you?”

  Jenk had just been dealt three aces—his best hand all night. There was actually a chance he’d win back the money he’d lost over the past few hours. “Let’s just play cards.”

  Now Izzy’s disgusted exhale was for Jenk.

  Jay Lopez, as usual, tried to restore harmony. “So she’s beautiful and she comes up to you, and says …?”

  “I need a huge favor. And I’m thinking, Well, it’s your lucky night, because I’ve got a huge favor,” Izzy told them. “Only I managed to not say that. Probably because she was stupifyingly beautiful. I think what I ended up saying was Durh …? And I probably enhanced it with a little drool, you know, on my chin.”

  Izzy took two cards from Lopez, dealing him two new ones. Danny Gillman took only one—which meant he either had a great hand or he was bluffing.

  Jenk stared at him, willing him to do it. Scratch his chin with the back of his hand. Gillman did it every time he bluffed—it was the most obvious tell in the history of mankind.

  But Gillman didn’t move, because at the start of the game, Izzy Zanella had let it slip that Gillman had a tell.

  In true Izzy fashion, he’d refused to share with Gillman exactly what that tell was. And no one else was going to let on that they knew, so Gillman had sat nearly stone-still for the entire game, terrified that, by moving, he’d subconscious and inadvertently activate his tell.

  He was stone-still, that is, except when Izzy pissed him off. Or when he tried to piss off Izzy in return.

  Of course, for the first time in all their years of poker playing, Gillman was winning. Big.

  “I’m doomed.” Tony Vlachic, aka Chickie, aka the New Guy, didn’t have a tell. He simply announced whenever his hand sucked. This was his first time playing poker with them, and he’d goodnaturedly put up with all of their crap. He had a Pepsi in front of him because they wouldn’t let him have a beer, insisting he was too young.

  “Maybe next year, when you turn thirteen,” Izzy had told him.

  Now Chick took another slug of his soda and traded the limit—three cards.

  “She goes, I told my brother you were my boyfriend. Will you help me fool him into thinking we’ve been together for a while?” Izzy scooped up Jenk’s two discards and gave him two replacements to go with his trio of aces and …

  A four and a seven, both hearts. Crap. Jenk kept his face carefully blank as Izzy traded three of his own cards for three new ones.

  “And that, boys and girls,” Izzy continued with his story, “was when she kissed me.”

  “Yeah, right,” Gillman scoffed.

  “She did,” Izzy countered. “Chickie was there. Tell ‘em, Chick.”

  Tony looked up from frowning at his no doubt unbelievably crappy hand. “She definitely kissed him,” he verified. “For close to three minutes, without coming up for air.”

  “And when she finally does surface,” Izzy said, “she goes, Do you have a car, because I really need a ride. So I tell her, yeah, I got a truck, is that okay? And she’s like, You really don’t mind? And something’s up—I mean, besides the obvious—because she’s got tears in her eyes and she’s kind of shaking, and that was when I knew. I mean, I’m a good kisser, but … So we go out to my truck, and she tells me she’s gay, that her parents sent her to this rehab-like place to make her straight, and she had to pretend she was ‘cured’ in order to get out. The brother follows her around, making it impossible for her to see her girlfriend, who, by the way, is also gorgeous. Long story short, I drove them both to Vegas. I get e-mail from them every now and then. But Maddy, she’s the one with the brother, right before she gets out of the car in Nevada, she goes, I’m definitely gay. Because if kissing you didn’t turn me straight, nothing will.”

  “Really,” Gillman said, clearly not believing him. “If I e-mailed her and asked, she’d tell me that wasn’t just something you made up?”

  Chick raised the bet ten dollars. Was he really going to attempt to bluff after looking at his hand as if it was something he found at the bottom of a year-old pile of dirty laundry?

  “Why would I make that up?” Izzy asked as Lopez folded. “Now if I told you that with Maddy and Peg, I’d enjoyed the best three-way I’ve had in years …”

  “Yeah, like you’ve had a lot of three-ways,” Gillman scoffed, raising the bid even higher. He didn’t look at any of them, definitely afraid his tell was something they’d see in his eyes. He looked at the pile of cash in front of him, or his cards. Nowhere else.

  “What, Gilligan, you haven’t?” Izzy countered, using Gillman’s least-hated nickname. When Izzy called the other SEAL Fishboy, that really pissed him off. “Not on the isle, with Ginger and Mary Ann?”

  “We’re not talking about me, asshole.”

  Jenk knew that the not-looking-at-anyone thing was pretty much a tell in and of itself. If Gillman had a great hand, why would he be worried about giving that away? Unless he was bluffing about bluffing, so that Jenk would see his raise and …

  “Not even with Thurston and Lovey?” Izzy just did not know when to let a subject drop. Gilligan was going to knock the table over, and they’d have to start the hand again. Of course, maybe that would be a good thing.

  “Jus
t shut up.”

  “You know, it’s okay that you haven’t—”

  Jenk cut in. “I have,” he said. “And it was kind of weird. The other guy had a really hairy back.” Yeah, that had caught their attention. Even Gillman was staring at him. Chickie was the only one who didn’t look up. “I’m kidding,” he told them.

  “You scared me for a second there, M.” Izzy tossed his cards down. “I’m out. Too rich for my blood,” he told Gillman, adding, “Even though it’s obvious as shit that you’re bluffing.”

  Gillman refused to take that particular bait, his eyes solidly back on his cards.

  It was down to Jenk and Chickie, and it was Jenk’s turn to play. See Gillman’s bid, raise Gillman’s bid, or fold …

  Chick’s phone must’ve vibrated. “Shit, sorry, I gotta take this call,” he announced, standing up and going out onto the motel driveway, which was fine with Jenk. It gave him a little extra stall-time to try to psych Gillman out.

  Jenk leaned back in his chair. With enough time and a little effort—keep talking on the phone, Vlachic—maybe he could get Gillman to forget about the poker game. “My weirdest lesbian encounter was when I spent Christmas with three drag queens.”

  Gillman looked up again at that. Eye contact. He immediately looked back down, but it was definitely a start. “Drag queens can’t be lesbians. Drag queens are guys.”

  “But they refer to each other as she,” Jenk pointed out. “And if they’re into each other …”

  “Whoa, good point,” Izzy said. “So it’s a lesbianish thing on the surface, except they’re really chicks with dicks. As opposed to guys with a surprise.”

  “Guys with a …” Now Gillman made eye contact with Izzy. He had to in order to give him a properly disdainful WTF look.

  “A female cross-dresser,” Jenk explained.

  “There’s no such thing,” Gillman said. He actually put down his cards. “I mean, yeah, maybe back in the nineteenth century, when women had to wear hoopskirts, sure, but nowadays women wear pants all the time.”

  “There’s pants,” Lopez said, “and there’s pants.”

  Gillman wasn’t convinced. “But—”

  Izzy cut him off. “They exist, Wendy. Take my word for it.”

  “Wendy?” Now Lopez was confused.

  “I think it’s a Peter Pan reference,” Jenk told him.

  Gillman was easily outraged, especially by statements made by Zanella. It was interesting, this intense rivalry or personality clash or whatever it was between the two men. Jenk had been out in the real world, on dangerous ops, with both of them; they worked together in perfect harmony, no hint of any animosity, cogs in a well-oiled machine. But during R&R … Look out.

  “Now you’re saying Wendy was a cross-dresser?” Gillman challenged Izzy.

  Iz laughed his frustration and disbelief. “I’m saying you’re a fucking idiot, and that yes, there are female cross-dressers here where I live, outside of Never-never-land.”

  “What, do you know this because you’re one of them?” Gillman asked, and Jenk cringed because Izzy unfolded, rising to his feet.

  But he just stood there, all six plus feet of him, towering over the table. “Yeah, Dan,” he deadpanned. “I’m a woman. And this girl needs to whiz, wicked bad.” He disappeared into the bathroom.

  Jenk exchanged a look with Lopez. Well, that happened. Or, more accurately, didn’t happen. He raised his voice slightly so that Izzy could hear him through the bathroom door. “You know, my three drag queens were at least as tall as you.”

  Gillman, the fucking idiot indeed, actually looked disappointed that the conversation, so to speak, hadn’t been taken outside. He also looked as if he’d completely forgotten about their card game. That was good, and Jenk wanted to continue keeping him distracted. “So I was around eleven years old, it was Christmas Eve. New York was getting hit with the worst snowstorm in something like a hundred years. It was really coming down—like somebody-better-go-find-Rudolph bad. And my dad, as usual, had waited until the last minute to get a gift for my mother—that was his MO. He swore to me, every year, that she would like her present better if he could find it on sale. I was pretty sure she would like it better if it didn’t suck because he’d gotten it five minutes before the stores closed on Christmas Eve, but he was convinced he was right.”

  Across the table, Gillman was engaged. “My dad used to do that, too. Mom had this scary I can’t believe you spent our money on this piece of shit smile that she gave him almost every Christmas morning.”

  “So it’s four in the afternoon on Christmas Eve,” Jenk continued, “and there’s already a foot of snow, and my dad and I are in the Honda—Mom’s always been into high gas mileage vehicles, so no SUV or truck for us. We’re spinning in circles down Route 35, which is okay, because no one else is crazy enough to be out on the road. We finally reach the Jefferson Valley Mall, and to my dad’s complete horror, it’s dark. The whole mall closed early because of the weather. On Christmas Eve. So we head into Yorktown Heights, but the only store open is this convenience store, over by the motel. But Dad’s desperate, so in we go. And let me tell you, the gift selection was grim. On top of that, the clerk says, Computers are down, no credit card sales. But my dad has cash, and he’s trying to choose between these tacky votive candles, a Yankees mouse pad, and this disposable toilet bowl brush, and I know he’s in serious trouble. I mean, I’m only eleven, but even back then I understand that you don’t buy your wife a disposable toilet brush for Christmas. Unless you don’t want to get any until Memorial Day.”

  “Unless, she’s got, like, a toilet bowl fetish,” Izzy suggested, emerging from the bathroom.

  “Have you met Jenk’s mom?” Lopez asked him.

  “No,” Izzy said. “Have you?” He turned to Jenk. “I’m jealous. You bring Lopez home to meet the ‘rents, but you don’t bring me? What am I to you? Just some cheap, easy plaything that you use and discard?”

  “So I’m trying to talk my father into the certificate-for-a-romantic-weekend idea,” Jenk spoke over him, because sometimes it was best just to ignore Izzy. “I’m telling him there’s a program on our new home computer that he can use to make it look like he spent hours designing it. Plus Mom will love the idea. My ulterior motive, of course, is to be allowed to stay home alone with Ginny, my older sister—who had some extremely hot friends.”

  “Ginny’s pretty hot herself.” Izzy turned to Gilligan. “You ever meet Ginny?”

  “Yeah, once,” he said, and it was clear he wouldn’t have used the word hot to describe her. “She came to San Diego. She was kind of, well … large. I mean, short, like Jenk, but … round. No offense, Jenkins.”

  “Yeah,” Izzy said. “No offense, Jenkins, but Gilligan thinks your sister is freaking fat.”

  “She was pregnant,” Lopez pointed out, ever the voice of calm.

  “She was?” Gillman looked to Jenk for confirmation. “I didn’t know she was married.”

  “Yeah. Gin’s got three kids,” Jenk said. He put his cards down on the table and, stretching, stood up. Chickie was still out in the driveway. Jenk could see him through the window, pacing back and forth out there as he spoke on his phone.

  “Wow,” Gillman said.

  Jenk opened the mini-fridge and pulled out another beer.

  “Wow,” Izzy echoed. “For someone with three kids, she’s not just hot, she’s freaking hot.”

  Jenk popped the top and held the bottle out to Gillman. Who took it, alleluia, and took a long swig. “Iz?”

  “Nah, I’m good,” Izzy said.

  “Jay?”

  “Thanks.” Lopez drained his bottle, and Jenk traded him for a new one, putting the empty in the growing pile with the others.

  “So we’re in this store,” Jenk continued his story, “and these three huge woman—I mean they were really tall. They come in, and they’re dusting the snow off their coats and their hair, and they’re really disappointed at the no credit card news. One of them—Sherilee—o
verhears my conversation with my dad.”

  “Sherilee,” Izzy repeated.

  “Sherilee, Rhonda, and Marcia,” Jenk said, sitting back at the table. “Sherilee goes, Last-minute Christmas shopping? And my dad takes, like, four steps back. He’s staring, and I think it’s because, well, he’s height-challenged like me, and this woman is about six four. She’s also wearing a tiara. How many women shop at the SuperQuick in a tiara? She goes, Not to be pushy, but I make jewelry. And I’m looking at that tiara, thinking, No way. But she calls one of her friends over, pulls back the other woman’s sleeve. And there’s this bracelet that looks as if it were made for my mom. It was silver and turquoise and … It was beautiful. It was beyond perfect. And my dad, he’s clearly freaked out, but he has to ask. How much? She looks at me, she looks at him, says, A hundred dollars. She hands it to Dad to look at more closely. Dad goes, Fifty. She says Cash? And he takes out his wallet. And she says to her friends, Go, girls. And they start gathering armloads of chips and Yodels—there’s not a lot of real food in that store. Turns out the trains stopped running, so here they are, at the Yorktown Heights Motel, with three dollars cash between the three of them. If my dad hadn’t bought that bracelet, they wouldn’t have been able to buy anything to eat until the computers came back on line. And from the way the lights were flickering, it wasn’t going to be soon.”

  The door opened, and Chickie came back into the room. But he looked as if someone had jammed a pole up his ass. He made a beeline for the cooler, grabbing another Pepsi, before disappearing into the bathroom.

  “So I’m talking to them,” Jenk continued, “and they’re really nice. They’re actresses, and they do a cabaret show, traveling around the country. Marcia plays the piano, and they all sing. And I’m looking at those bags of popcorn they’re holding, thinking about the lousy Christmas Eve dinner they’re going to have, so I say, Why don’t you come have dinner with us? And my dad kind of freezes, and I don’t know why. We’ve always had a strays-and-orphans policy at our house—there’s always someone from outside of the family at our holiday meals. So I say to my dad, You know Mom won’t mind. And Sherilee says, Thank you, honey, you’re so sweet, but … we’ll be just fine. And Dad’s got the bracelet in one hand, and me in the other and he drags me out the door.