He broke off when a man loped across his path. Or rather, skipped across it. Like a child. And while he was big enough to be a short adult, he—
“Hi! I’m Andy. I know you.”
The minute Andy turned to face him Leo put the pieces together. The distinctive shape of his face and eyes and that always definable innocence proved him to have Down syndrome. And Andy was right. He did know him. He’d been involved in some parallel crime, as an innocent witness, the day Docia had “disappeared.” He had seen him briefly before someone had come to pick him up.
“That’s right, Andy. How are you, kiddo?” Leo looked around, trying to see if there was someone with Andy this time. “What are you doing here, Andy?”
“Looking for Officer Jackson. I’m his deputy.”
That made Leo grin. Andy mispronounced deputy, but far be it for him to correct him. Jackson had clearly taken a special interest in Andy if he was coming here to see him with any regularity.
“I’m sorry to tell you, Andy, but Jackson isn’t working today. He had to work late last night so he took the day off.”
“Oh.” He looked absolutely crestfallen. “He said I could turn on his siren. It’s very loud, but I’m not afraid.”
“That’s a very good thing. Nothing you need to be afraid of as long as you’re a deputy and on the right side of the law.”
Of course Leo wasn’t exactly choirboy material, but Jackson liked to carry on their friendship in an “ignorance is bliss” fashion. Back when Leo had been an army ranger and on the side of the white hats, he and Jackson had never had a difference of opinion on anything. They had raised Docia by themselves, Leo paying the majority of the bills while Jackson went to college and the Academy. But by the time Jackson had graduated from the Academy Leo had seen two tours in Afghanistan and was looking at a third if he didn’t ring out while he had a chance. It wasn’t that he couldn’t hack humping around seventy pounds of gear in the scorching desert heat, watching a man being blow up right next to him after he was unlucky something else entirely.n when enough to step on a land mine. No. What had chapped his ass had been something else entirely.
The things they weren’t allowed to do. Protect villagers from gunrunners or other such bullies. Keep the local children from being forced to walk a field in order to test for land mines before the enemy moved forward. Or bomb-detecting dogs who were treated as “equipment” in the army, ferried onto planes not properly pressurized, heated, or cooled, and not given the rights of the true soldiers that they were. Including contented retirement with a loving family who would be given the funds for the animal’s room and board. Perhaps it was Jackson who had made him more sensitive to that. But more likely it was from his own eyewitness accounts of those dogs’ infinite bravery and devotion that saved lives. Outside of their handler’s praise and some food, they didn’t ask for much of anything else.
But the clincher had been the women. Whether it was coming into a village and seeing the remnants of a raid of killers and rapists and hearing those unforgettable wailing cries, or the frustration of female soldiers being mishandled and maltreated by a bunch of arrogant sadistic motherfuckers, he simply couldn’t abide being part of an army that let those things happen … and then let it slide by, neatly swept under a red-tape rug and a code of silence that, basically, victimized the woman all over again because she couldn’t bring her rapist to justice. Now granted, it didn’t happen on a constant basis, it all depended on who was investigating and just how important the soldier accused was to the unit. It had been the final straw for him. He’d gotten out of the army. From then on he’d set his own moral compass, a code of honor really, and gone from there. For a guy like him, mercenary just seemed the way to go. He’d just pick an underdog that appealed to that code and hire himself out. He wasn’t Superman of course; he looked for compensation in order to pay the mortgage, buy some beer with a good dose of pay-per-view, and the occasional .44-caliber hollow-point bullet. But sometimes some jobs compensated for the lack of funds of others.
Now, because of the sometimes polar sides of the law each of them operated on, he and Jackson had agreed that, for the sake of their friendship, Leo wouldn’t talk about doing anything overtly illegal, and he wouldn’t do anything construed as misbehaving in Jackson’s jurisdiction.
He could live with that. He knew Jackson would be there when he needed him most, no matter what the circumstances. It was just his job to see that those circumstances never arose.
Since Jackson was the closest thing he had to a brother, Leo’s actual blood brothers being contemptible douches, he was inclined to do anything that might make life easier for him.
“Hey, since Jackson is AWOL at the moment, what do you say I take you to my place for breakfast? I’m pretty hungry and I’m just around the corner.” He hadn’t even been home yet since landing, so he’d have to hit the Price Chopper on the way.
“That sounds great!” Andy said eagerly. He followed Leo to his truck and they both got in. Leo stopped at the store and then went to his house. Actually, it was Docia’s house. Or used to be. She’d left it vacant in order to abandon all her loved ones and run off with some golden boy. The man could do no wrong in Docia’s estimation and Leo could swear he saw stars twinkling in her eyes when she looked at him. But after she’d moved out she’d let him move in and take over the mortgage. It was a nice little historical bung his shirtag.alow on a nice little historic street. She’d been slowly improving it with Leo’s and Jackson’s help and he figured he’d probably pick up where they had left off. It wasn’t very big, but it was a damn sight better than his old apartment and it felt a little homier to boot. And it was nice to feel Docia’s whimsical touch to the place. It reminded him of her constant attempts to bring a feminine touch into their house as she was growing up. It was like having her there, even though she wasn’t.
Well, he was still miffed at her for that. I mean, who does that? he asked himself. Where’s the logic in running off to live with some guy she’d just met? Leaving all her family and friends?
Leo was frowning as he let himself into the house. The keychain had a bright pink rabbit’s foot on it, the exact way that they had been handed off to him. She’d said, “Here, you can take it for luck. I’ve already had the best luck I could ever hope for.”
So after letting them in he found himself touching the soft fur, the silly thing chasing his frown away and making him smile. Damn her anyway, she’d always known just how to get her way with him. Growing up, she’d had him and Jackson wrapped around her little fingers. It was a wonder she wasn’t spoiled rotten to the core.
No. They’d done a good job with her. She’d always been a little bit shy, a little less ambitious than he’d liked, but almost overnight she had seemed to grow out of it and come into her own.
And perhaps if he hadn’t been so deep in all of his thoughts, he would have seen Andy’s innocence drop away, the sudden malevolent avarice that filled his eyes.
Leo felt something hit his back hard, the strike astoundingly painful. He jerked around with sharp reflex, reaching to strike out at whatever had hit him. But for some reason his arm and hand on the left side would not obey his command, would not lift and move with the practiced strength that had become second nature to him. He saw Andy, saw the wide-eyed glee in his eyes and for an instant thought the kid had been horsing around. But then why wouldn’t his arm move? And why did he still …
Then he tried to take a breath to scold Andy for his actions and nothing came. Nothing more significant than a gurgling wheeze that, at first, didn’t even sound like it came from his own throat. He didn’t understand. Couldn’t comprehend. Then he looked over his own shoulder at the burning spot on his back that still hurt from Andy’s strike and that was when he saw the knife. A huge hunting-style knife, just like the one in his boot that very second, wicked sharp on one side and serrated on the other, its black grip touching his jacket and telling him the blade was buried straight to the hilt.
St
raight through his back ribs.
Straight through his lung.
Maybe even his heart, he thought as he fell to a single knee, fumbling for his own blade in an effort to arm himself. But he was left-handed and working without fresh oxygen. It felt like drowning, like a black weight pressing on his chest.
“No! No-nah-no-nah-no!” Andy sing-songed as he pounced forward, disarming Leo of his knife as though he were a child. With a sense of furious outrage Leo realized he’d just given the little fuck another knife. Andy pushed at him, his strength surprising and powerful, the impact of it sending Leo skidding across the wood floor until he slammed into the wall. It knock his shirtag.ed what little breath was left in him right out of his undamaged lung and a moment of pure, unadulterated panic swept over him. It was such an alien sensation after facing so many forms of death, including the possibility of his own. But none of it had been like this. None of it had felt like this. And then the demented man-child was scrabbling over to him on all fours, panting at him like a puppy getting ready to play.
“Oh, so many things to do!” he declared. “Where should Chatha start, hmm? Any suggestions? Preferences?” He held a hand to his ear, as though he were listening intently. “No? No-nah-no-nah-no! Well never you mind, dearie. I have many many suggestions.” Leo watched his vision beginning to go a little dark around the edges as he felt and tasted blood in his mouth, very likely via his lung.
But he was quite conscious when his knife was pulled free of its sheath, and quite conscious when the tip of it was pressed against his gut right above his navel. Then Andy leaned his weight in the slowest of increments onto the blade, watching with genuine curiosity for Leo’s expressions. Leo wanted to shout in agony and fury as the wicked blade eased slowly into his body.
“A little to the left? A little to the right? Come, come, we want to know. Tell us. We only want to make you happy!”
Leo gagged up more blood, the barest of sound choking out of him.
“Left! To the left! Excellent suggestion! We like it very much.” The blade pulled free, moved two inches to the left and then slowly, very slowly, reentered his body. All the while Andy watched Leo’s eyes, watched his grasp for life as death tried to claw at him and bring him under the surface.
The fight within Leo was his curse. It took two more penetrations by that life-raping blade before he finally lost consciousness.
Jackson woke slowly, something inside of him feeling the fall of darkness, flipping an instinctive switch inside of him that told him it was safe to come awake and face the world. He took in a deep breath, bringing forth the scent of sweetness that instinctively tightened his body with awareness. Then he felt the warmth of her, all along the left side of his body, her back pressed up against him in such a way that he suspected she’d alternated from lying half over him to this attempt at spooning against him. Her head was cradled by his arm, somewhere about the vicinity of his elbow, and he felt her breathing against his skin. She was on her left side, the dips and curves of her body on relaxed display. She had come to bed in her skirt and sweater but the skirt, which had been judiciously knee-length, had crept up her thighs quite a bit. Enough to tease, but not enough to satisfy. He wanted to know what kind of panties she had on. It was the craziest impulse, but he realized he couldn’t figure it out. The conservative length of the skirt could mean very plain white cotton briefs, but the CFM heels she constantly wore in the workplace screamed the possibility of a naughty, lacy thong.
Truth was, it wasn’t the first time he had wondered about it. And like that other time, he grew unbelievably hard at the thought.
“Christ, Waverly, you’re a goddamn pig,” he muttered aloud with a recriminating groan. Then he found himself seriously debating the benefits of reaching to inch the hem of that skirt up just a little farther. Just enough to tell but not enough to make him hate himself overmuch. He discarded the idea almost as soon as he entertained it. Being a pig in his thoughts was one thing, being one in his actions was something else entirely. to make me feel …ck when
She wouldn’t know, his new, smug bastard of a conscience taunted him.
“Shut the fuck up,” he groused at Menes. “You’re more of a pig than I am.”
More a man of action, Menes argued breezily. You spend far too much time debating the right and wrong of things and far too little time seeing where your impulses might lead you. You will not know if she would welcome your touch if you never seek an answer.
Jackson wished it didn’t sound incredibly logical. He wished Menes would just shut up and leave him be. At what point had he thought welcoming another being into his body had been a good idea?
When you were facing no other option but death.
Oh. Yeah. That.
Jackson decided to look around the room and assess where he was. He was still trying to get used to his ability to see in the dark. It seemed so unnatural and strange even after three weeks of slowly realizing his acuity in the dark was improving every night. Now seeing in the dark was like daylight, or close to it, all the details of the large bedroom jumping out at him.
This was a man’s home. He could tell by the way it was decorated, or rather the lack thereof, and the fact that a man’s watch was resting on the bureau across from the bed. The sudden idea that this could be her lover’s home entered his mind in a white hot flash of anger and jealousy.
No! She is ours!
There was such passion in the thought that he didn’t know for sure where it originated from. Himself? Menes? It was all Blending together more and more and he was beginning to have trouble distinguishing between the two at certain times. The only thing he could do was ask himself whether or not he would have thought something like that before Menes had taken possession. He wanted to say no. Never. And with any other woman he would have known loud and clear what to think. But he had to confess to himself that he had imagined things where she was concerned that he never would have thought himself capable of before meeting her two years earlier. He may have kidded himself before, but ever since Menes had taken up residence inside of him he’d faced the fact that she was the rising star of his fantasies. More and more so every damn day. Especially since she’d given him hell for being an arrogant jerk.
Christ, it was as though getting set down and put in his place had been a complete turn-on.
Maybe it had been. Maybe he liked his women a little bit tough. A little bit dominant. Able to stand up for herself. Perfectly capable of telling him where to go when he deserved it. It sure seemed that way to him at that moment. Maybe that was how he’d been getting it wrong all this time. He’d always chased after the curvy vacuous kind, thinking they would be simple to manage and fun to play around with.
But truth be told there had been no curvy and no vacuous women in his life for a very long time. Truth be told he hadn’t been much interested in anyone else since a certain redheaded doctor had walked into the station like a breath of soft, perfume-scented air. He could smell her even now, even after they’d both spent hours in the cold night doing their jobs, he could smell the sweet warmth of her. And maybe that was because he rolled up on his side a little and touched his face to her hair, but just the same … only she could manage to smell good when everyone else smelled something else entirely.n when like sweat and too many long hours drinking stale, crappy coffee.
But she wasn’t exactly perfectly kempt at the moment, her glorious red hair spilling left and right and all haphazard directions over her face and his arm. She was wrinkled at the skirt and even a little at her sweater, and peeking over to see her face, he saw the dark smudges of makeup that she had neglected to clean off. He would lay bets she’d rather be caught dead before letting someone see her like this, which made him suddenly realize why she wasn’t in a relationship.
No, the man who owned this place might be a lover, but he was nothing important to her. She simply was too tightly wound and it was too important to her to be seen in a flawless manner. Relationships were messy and unkempt,
they were about letting others see you at your dirtiest, your silliest … the real you that you were.
Wow, Jackson thought, he was getting pretty damn insightful in his old age. And there was the fact that he had a very old soul inside of him now. Menes had walked quite a few lifetimes, seen more things and more women than Jackson might have ever conceived of. But what it always seemed to boil down to for Menes was the one, the only one whom he would ever love.
Jackson was given relatively hefty doses of the feelings that Menes had for Hatshepsut. He could feel Menes chafing for her, could feel a level of patience warring with a level of frustration inside him. Menes missed her. This remarkable creature that had his implicit loyalty … he missed her with so much power it left a vacant hole in his heart. And Jackson was forced to remember that it meant one day very soon all of his focus would be directed toward another woman. The thought sat very ill with him, despite Menes’s reassurances that all would turn out well in the end. All he knew was that it would mean more of the process of saying goodbye to his former life and all the things in it. And that filled him with what was becoming a very familiar sadness.
The thought made him think of Sargent. The poor dog. To work so damn hard and his only recompense was two humans who let him starve and thirst for an entire day! The thought galvanized him, making him ease his arm from beneath her and move as carefully as he could off the bed so as not to wake her. She didn’t have an internal clock attuned to the coming of dusk, so she would sleep for as long as her body would let her and as far as he was concerned she could use it. She might not have been tromping through the woods, but she had worked just as hard comforting the mother while at the same time battling the woman with her wits.
And that thought reminded him of something else he had to do. As he moved into the main body of the house looking for Sargent, he was also looking for a phone. He found both in the kitchen, Sargent in the exact same position they had last seen him take up on the rug. But when Jackson entered the room Sargent’s ears pricked forward an instant before he lifted his head.
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