Hot on the Hunt

by Melissa Cutler

  He glanced side to side, surveying the windows and road for any sign of the rest of Logan’s crew. Though he didn’t see anything suspicious, there was no doubt in his mind that there were multiple rifles pointed at his head at that very moment.

  Logan looked relaxed, his hands in his pockets, probably on a gun or Taser or knife. “You can put your gun away. All I want to do is talk.”

  Oh, well, if that’s all he wanted to do. Yeah, right. He grabbed a handful of Logan’s shirt and shoved him backward through the door into the motel lobby.

  “You son of a bitch. When are you going to figure out that Rory’s the one you should be chasing, not us?” A bellboy gave a start and scrambled out of the way as John threw Logan through the open door of the motel’s empty café.

  He stumbled over the closed sign before recovering his footing. His hands came out of his pockets, weapon free. “There are whole units of soldiers and federal agents tracking Rory. If he’s still alive, he won’t be for long. My team has only one job and that is neutralizing Alicia Troy’s threat to national security.”

  “You just won’t give up, will you?”

  Logan folded his arms over his chest. “When you were on ICE, would you have given up?”

  Hell, no. But that didn’t mean he had to like it now that he was on the opposite side of the hunt. “Where’s the rest of your crew?”

  “They don’t know I’m here.”

  “Sure they don’t.”

  “I’m here as your friend.” That last part was said with an appropriate amount of self-deprecation, like Logan and John were in on the same joke.

  John forced a wry chuckle. “Great timing because I’ve been wanting to have a heart-to-heart with you, too. About how you set me up to lead you to Alicia.”

  It was Logan’s turn to chuckle. “The past is the past, John. I think a better question would be how did I find you today?”

  Good point. “I’m all ears.”

  Logan ran his tongue along the inside of his lower lip. Whatever bomb of intel he was going to drop on John right now was going to be a big whammy. “Alicia tipped me off.”

  Oh, please. “You’re not even going to bother with a convincing lie? I’m disappointed.”

  “Why do you think she sent you here alone?”

  He hated the logic in that. Impossible. She would never. She loved him as much as he loved her. He’d felt the truth in her declaration when they made love. For all the wrongs of her past, she’d never targeted him or set him up. Unlike Logan.

  “Why would she do that? You’re the only one who stands to gain from a lie like that.”

  “Not true. She’s trying to strike a deal with ICE. She thinks giving you up and turning over Rory when she finds him will help her cause.”

  “Rory’s dead.”

  “Are you sure?”

  John’s pulse pounded in his ears, loud and steady. There was a catch to this conversation that he couldn’t wrap his brain around yet. He looked past Logan to the motel lobby. Any minute now, the rest of Logan’s crew would probably burst through the door. Just in case, he set the computer bag on the floor behind him so he’d have the freedom to move unencumbered if it came to that.

  “So, then, let me guess,” John said. “You want me to give up her location first, as a goodwill gesture because, sore loser that I am, I want you to stick it to her? That’s your logic? And I bet you’ll give me leniency if I cooperate, right?”

  “No, on both accounts. I’m not taking you into custody, John. Like I said, I’m here as a friend.” He reached his hand around to the small of his back beneath his jacket.

  John steadied the aim of his HK45 at Logan’s chest, but all Logan did was withdraw a file thick with papers and hold it out to John. He didn’t take it. “What is that?”

  “Evidence I’ve been compiling against Alicia for a long, long time.”

  John nodded. “I think I get it now. First, you prove to me what a despicable traitor she is, then you turn me loose so I can lead you to her.”

  “That’s more like it, except without the sarcasm.” He waved the file in John’s direction again. “Once you really do see how despicable she is, you’re going to want to lead us to her.”

  John didn’t want to look. He didn’t need to read a bunch of fabricated lies about Alicia designed to turn John against the woman he loved. Logan should’ve known the bait wouldn’t work on John. As the man who’d recruited and trained him, he should’ve figured out that nothing was more important to John than integrity. And part of that integrity was loyalty.

  A sliver of doubt crept into his head. A week ago, his most stringent belief was that loyalty was his greatest weakness because it bred complacency—a false sense of confidence in himself, in his environment and in the people he trusted. Rory betrayed him. Alicia, Diego and Ryan had turned their backs on him and Logan had manipulated him to his own ends. He probably still was.

  But now he knew that wasn’t true. With all they’d been through together in the past few days, the battles, the intimacy, he trusted Alicia. He’d absolved her of her wrongs against him and she’d absolved him of his wrongs against her, so why was he standing there thinking about complacency? Why did he have a bad feeling about what was in the file that Logan held?

  He transferred his gun to his left hand and reached his right out as if he was going to take the file. He grabbed Logan’s wrist instead, yanking hard as he swung his gun around and clocked him in the side of the head as his knee connected with Logan’s gut. Logan tried to get his fist up for a jab to John’s middle.

  It was a nice effort, and Logan was known throughout the agency as a mixed martial arts beast, but nobody could brawl like John. It’d been that way when Logan trained him, he’d bested Logan at the rum distillery, and he was ready for the battle today.

  He was ready for Logan’s counterattack and took hold of Logan’s wrist, holding it down as he issued an elbow to Logan’s face that sent him stumbling backward. But John wasn’t done with the wrist he held. He yanked on it hard, pulling Logan forward, then sidestepped to give him room to fall. He sealed the deal with an elbow jab to Logan’s spine as he dropped, then pinned him to the floor with a boot to the back of his neck.

  He looked around, hands ready to fight off his next opponent, but all he saw were shocked, staring employees probably waiting for the cops to arrive. Unbelievably, Logan’s crew was nowhere to be seen. The man really had come alone. It was weird because John never caught a break like this. Just one opponent, whom he’d subdued with only one sequence of moves? Some might say to never look a gift horse in the mouth, but that was effed-up advice because nobody ever died from being suspicious.

  It all came back to complacency and a false sense of confidence—traps that John was determined to never fall back into again.

  He trusted Alicia and he trusted himself. Period.

  “Read the file, John. I’m not BSing you this time.” Logan’s words were slurred because the toe of John’s boot was nudging his jaw, but he otherwise sounded totally unfazed by the fact that John dropped him like a fly. “Alicia set you up. She framed you for Rory’s escape and she was planning to frame you for his death. Her death, too.”

  What kind of crazy lie was that? “Her death?”

  “I’m not making this up. Read the damn file. Then take the deal I’m offering you.”

  “What deal?”

  “Absolution. You’ll be a free man and welcome to return to U.S. soil.”

  Absolution. Of an entirely different kind than he’d experienced with Alicia in his arms. But if the doors to freedom were really being opened to him, then why did he feel as if he was in a cage that was shrinking every second? Sirens sounded outside, giving him a matter of seconds to escape the building before life got a whole lot more complicated.

  He lifted his boot from
the back of Logan’s neck and clubbed him across the skull with the barrel of his gun, knocking him out cold.

  He grabbed the file and the computer bag, then ran through the café and into the kitchen. He burst out the kitchen’s back exit and into an alley riddled with rain-filled potholes and broken palm fronds that must have washed up in the storm surge. Crashing through the water and debris, he came out on a frontage road.

  What he needed was a place to hide and sort through his thoughts. The file felt like a toxic thing in his hand, radioactive and dangerous. Even considering opening it made him feel as if he was betraying Alicia’s trust. Even if she never found out, how could he do such a thing as doubt her now, when they were so close to finding happiness together forever?

  Then again, how could he not look? Blind faith was what got him into this mess in the first place. He could go on and on about how he trusted himself, but obviously his instincts had been so wrong so often in the past that there was huge part of him that knew he had to protect himself from himself.

  He strode down the street, casual, looking around, trying not to draw attention as he dodged trash, downed signs and streetlights, and workers doing their best to put their lives and businesses back together. Four blocks from the hotel, he spotted a bar that looked open for business and ducked inside. It was dark and muggy, with four weary-looking customers sitting at the bar.

  He ordered a rum straight up, dropped twenty euros on the counter, and without waiting for his drink to arrive, headed to the restroom.

  He stood near the bathroom sink underneath a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling and stared at the file.

  How had Logan found him? No way could it have been Alicia. She loved him. The more logical scenario was that she’d accidentally tipped Logan off to their location at the hotel during her computer surveillance. But that was before the hurricane. Had they really been waiting there the whole time for John and Alicia to return?

  And where the hell was the rest of Logan’s team? It was B.S. all the way that he’d come to John on his own, but for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out Logan’s angle this time. He’d let John beat the crap out of him while barely putting up a fight.

  Alicia wouldn’t have set him up to take the fall for Rory’s escape and murder. She wouldn’t have planned to fake her own death and frame him for it. She just...No. It was impossible.

  With a curse under his breath, he ripped the rubber bands off the file and flipped it open. Time to prove what an idiot he was to doubt her.

  There was nothing melodramatic in the file like a note or threat from Logan to John, just a thick stack of official federal documents by agencies from ICE and the U.S. Marshals to the NSA. There were screenshots of a faked plane flight manifest, retouched pictures of him on Fort Buchanan security cameras.

  Following those were pages and pages of computer code that didn’t make any sense except that stapled to the front was a summary written on NSA stationary that said, in essence, that these pages contained code found on Alicia’s network of a program that had self-initiated on the morning of Rory’s prison break that planted a false trail from the prison’s power failure that led to his release to a manufactured IP address and identity in Florida belonging to John, but that had actually been created more than a year earlier.

  There were pages and pages of proof that Alicia had put a lot of thought into framing John. If—and this was a huge if—they were real. Because Logan had already manipulated him once and there was nothing saying he was above doing so again, especially given how bloodthirsty he was to neutralize Alicia.

  Feeling skeptical and guilty for betraying Alicia’s trust by reading the file, he flipped past the packet of code to the end. What he saw felt like a punch to his chest, knocking the wind clean out of him. He blinked and shook his head, then looked again at numbered ICE crime scene photos from Alicia’s house in Phoenix along with a chem analysis of the room that found bleach on the floor and in the tub, trace amounts of her blood in the tub’s drain and John’s hair and fingerprints on the sink and shower curtain, the results certified by ICE’s special investigation unit.

  The last page of the document was an arrest warrant for John, citing Rory’s prison break and murder, and Alicia’s murder.

  He sank to the ground and leaned his back on the door as his world started to spin.

  She’d set him up. And not on an impulsive whim. She’d been planning his demise for more than a year. She’d faked her own murder and wanted John to rot in prison for it. She hadn’t just been hungry for revenge against Rory, but revenge against him, as well.

  He couldn’t compete with that. What had she been thinking when they’d made love? Even then, was she plotting how she’d isolate him and contact Logan? Even if she’d changed her mind during the two days and nights they’d spent in each other’s arms, that didn’t negate this. The lies. The deception.

  He really was a spineless fool, a follower and easy target for others to pin their sins on.

  A patsy. Like he was when Rory’s corruption came to light. Like he was when Logan wanted to locate Alicia. It didn’t matter what John did or how much personal integrity he carried inside him, he couldn’t escape this fate of being at the mercy of others’ corruption. He was doomed to a life of being the fall guy. How had everything gotten so screwed up with him? How could being good and true and honest be such a flaw?

  He loved Alicia with all his heart and she’d used him.

  He clamped a hand over his mouth as pain, just as bad as the night she’d first accused him of working with Rory to murder her, rose up through his chest, closing his throat, making his sinuses tingle.

  He crushed the file to his chest and gave himself over to a breathless, crippling pain worse than he’d ever experienced in his life. Did having an ironclad sense of honor really make him a sucker? Then again, thinking that bad things shouldn’t happen to good people was a fallacy of the worst kind. Bad things happened just because bad things happened. And he got complacent. Fatal error.

  A knock at the door startled him, followed by a man telling him in French to hurry it up because he’d been waiting in the hall for ten minutes. John hauled himself up and braced his hands against the sink.

  “Juste une minute,” he said. Drawing a fortifying breath, he looked at his reflection in the mirror. So this was what a loser looked like. Always the sidekick, never the alpha. A doomed man.

  No, that wasn’t true. And this was one pity party that had to stop immediately. He didn’t have to play this game with these people. He didn’t have to live this cycle of trust and abuse anymore.

  He could walk away. He wasn’t helpless or doomed to this fate. He could wash his hands of Alicia, Logan and Rory. Let them duke it out without him. He stared at himself in the mirror. It was time to go back into exile, this time for good. Far away from all the people who’d hurt him. He deserved better than this. Better than being a patsy for his lover, his best friends, his coworkers. It was time to retake control of his life.

  He slung the strap of Alicia’s computer bag over his shoulder. He felt so numb, so impossibly numb. Like that night on St. Croix a year earlier, on that balcony in Frederiksted. He felt nothing. He really was starting over, this time alone—as a wanted man, a true traitor of the government after his run-ins with Logan’s crew and helping Rory and Alicia escape the consequences of their sins.

  And he didn’t have a friend in the world except Eugene and the other handful of islanders he’d cultivated acquaintances with during his stay. He opened the door, muttered an apology to the local shaking his head at him, annoyed by the wait, and turned to the back exit. This time, he was absolving himself instead of waiting for others to do it for him. He was a good, honorable man, and if this world couldn’t handle that, then he didn’t need this world. It was time for a new life and to find a way to be whole again.

  He hailed th
e first cab he could find and directed it to the private airstrip. It was time to find Alicia so he could take one last parting look at the woman he’d loved with everything he had. And then it was time to move on.

  * * *

  The plane was still in the hangar and in good shape. Alicia would be able to fly them out of Martinique as soon as the debris was cleaned from the runway and the winds died down a little more.

  While she waited for John, she spotted a corded phone on a table in the corner, sitting on top of a Martinique directory. What would it hurt to make a few calls and possibly find Rory—or at least his body? She ran a mental list of pros and cons, found the pros to be compelling enough, then flipped through the directory until she found a listing of local hospitals. It was a long shot, but there wasn’t any danger in making an anonymous call from a business line.

  After a look around the hangar to double check that she was alone, she picked up the receiver and dialed the first one. While it rang, she concentrated on the ideas of panic and fear, hoping to infuse her voice with both.

  A hospital receptionist answered in French.

  “Yes, hello. English, please?” She might’ve been able to pull off French, but not convincingly. Luckily, the receptionist switched to English and asked her how she could help. “I’m looking for my husband, who went out to buy some batteries before the hurricane hit and never made it back to the hotel. I need to know if a man that matches his description came to your hospital.”

  The woman was concerned and had a lot of questions about whether or not Alicia had contacted the police, the name of the hotel she was staying at and a physical description of Rory.

  After all that, and a ten-minute wait on hold while the woman checked with the emergency room staff, the call was a dead end.

  She poked her head out of the hangar opening but didn’t see John yet, so she dialed the number of the next hospital in the phone book and repeated the story. On the fifth hospital, the receptionist returned in record time from putting her on hold to check for a man who matched Rory’s description.