Warrior's Second Chance

by Nancy Gideon

  It wasn’t a loud or unruly group, but the cluster of Vietnamese moved down the sidewalk in a forceful wave. Their banners and signs were mostly in the characters of their own language but some declared their cause with screaming intensity.

  Dr. Mengele deserves no honor.

  Horror not humanitarian.

  Where are our children?

  As news crews greedily turned their cameras toward the controversy, Barbara caught sight of a face in the crowd. Her breath seized up.

  In his neatly pressed suit, with his bland smile, Chet Allen didn’t stand out as a psychopathic killer.

  He was only visible for an instant, only long enough to make certain she saw him, before blending back anonymously into the push of ticket wielders.

  The anxiousness already dampening her hands became a cold, icy glove of fear.

  The curtain was about to go up on Allen’s private play.

  She sat through the evening of long-winded and often teary testimonials, capped by the presentation of Frye’s humanitarian award. The doctor was suitably gracious and overwhelmed, but still managed to take advantage of every photo op. In the crowded main hall where attendees poured from the auditorium, he set up court to laugh and pose; as he did, the showman surpassed the humble philanthropist.

  Then Frye’s gaze lifted and the joke he was telling faded upon his lips as he saw Barbara in the hall. His attention darted about, scanning the balconies above. Looking for Chet or Tag, she was sure. Finding neither didn’t reassure him for he nodded his thanks to the eager hangers-on and began to move toward the exit and the liquor-and babe-laced reception to follow.

  What was he so afraid of? The souring of a book deal or something far greater?

  She trailed after Frye’s entourage as they left the building, pausing as he stopped outside for more pictures. As the doors opened, she could hear the protesters. Frye’s effusive smile tightened ever so slightly but he never dignified their cause with a glance in their direction.

  And then it was too late for him to recognize any cause, even his own, as he fell, killed by a single shot from above.

  The sound, how could he ever forget it? The singsong cadence of voices from another world, another time.

  As their number surrounded and swept by him, McGee’s senses swirled. He breathed in the scent of jungle rot, sooty cooking fires and spicy stew, could hear the wail of babies and children crying, the barking of camp dogs. And over it all, the whooping of evac copter blades. A staccato of rifle fire, punctuated by screams of pain and fear, echoed through his head. He wanted to clap his hands over his ears, but he couldn’t raise them from his side. He was helpless to react, to respond to the stampede of desperate chaos, followed by deathly silence. By death. He was sinking into it like quicksand. The harder he fought, the faster he was pulled under.

  Someone bumped him, making him reach out to grab for purchase and sidestep to keep his footing. The blare of a horn brought his eyes snapping open. He was balanced on a curb about to step into traffic.

  Where the hell was he?

  He’d been at the Mall where the grass still glistened with morning dew. Chet had taken a shot at them, not to kill but to startle. He’d gone on instant alert until something snatched the moment away. A phrase spoken from behind him. What was it? What were the words that blew out his conscious thoughts like a match, leaving him in darkness?

  It was dark now, a darkness filled with remembered feelings, those of panic, noise, flight. Something had happened behind him, something to incite that terror to escape in those who swarmed from the scene, pushing past him to get away from an unseen danger. It wasn’t a memory. It was happening now.

  He turned slowly. The sense of being in a dream state weighted his reaction time, the movement gradual to the point of lethargic. In comparison, everything around him was moving at double time. Finally, his focus fell upon a group gathered near the main exit…of the Kennedy Center? A figure was on the ground. Men with handguns were crouched low, scanning the area with hard professional eyes. The walk was stained a bright spreading crimson. Someone had been shot.

  And he was standing less than one hundred yards away with a rifle in his hand.

  He stared at it, the XM-21 with silencer, as surprised as if he’d grown a second hand. It was heavy as hell and good only up to about 300 yards. But it made no noise. It wasn’t his. He hadn’t held one in his hands since he’d left ’Nam. He didn’t know where it had come from or how it had gotten into his grip.

  Then it all clicked together like the clink-clank of an ejected cartridge. Someone had just been shot and he was holding on to a recently fired weapon.

  The crush of Vietnamese carrying picket signs shielded him from the view of law enforcement officers rapidly flooding the scene. To his continued surprise, he realized that they were concealing him purposefully with their bodies, with their banners. Protecting him. The way they would someone who’d just rid them of a terrible evil. His back was patted, his free hand pumped, and what few words he could catch had to do with “thank you” and “he deserved it.”

  Then the rifle was plucked from his unresisting hand. He found himself staring into the face of an Asian man toting press credentials.

  “I’ll see this disappears,” the journalist was saying. Then they made eye contact and just stared at one another, an odd sort of not-quite-recognition taking them both unawares. McGee didn’t know the man, had never seen him or met him or spoken to him before, but something was so familiar. He just couldn’t seem to place him in this setting. Those eyes, looking up at him, wanting…something, what was it? The vibration of white noise intensified in his head until it drowned out the sounds around him. He couldn’t hear himself ask, “Who are you? How do I know you?”

  Then the journalist tucked the rifle beneath the flap of his raincoat and urged, “Go. Hurry,” before he slipped away in the panicked throng.

  Good idea. He got a very big sense of being in a very wrong place.

  As he started to turn, he noticed a striking Vietnamese woman in the crowd circling the fallen figure. He knew her by sight, if not name, just as she seemed to know him. Her features sharpened with shock and then another emotion, one that even at this distance he recognized as hatred. She whirled around, searching for and finally finding her husband as he pushed through the throng of people to get to her side. She grabbed Patrick Kelly’s arm and pointed, her gestures and agitated speech telegraphing a mounting hysteria. Then Kelly’s gaze followed her directing hand right to where McGee was standing.

  And behind Kelly stood a dismayed Barbara D’Angelo, her features frozen in shock.

  Regret clear in his expression, Kelly called to the nearest officer, but before the cop could look in his direction, McGee was gone.

  She could feel him in the shadows of the room without turning on the lights. As she reached for the switch, he caught her hand to still the motion. His touch was cool compared to her almost feverish state.

  “Leave them off,” came his quiet command. “Your bags are packed. I’ve rented a car for you. Don’t ask questions. Just go.”

  The firm push of his orders had her digging in her heels. She would not be chased off without an explanation.

  “He was our only lead.”

  The calm in his tone fractured. “Don’t you think I know that?” She heard him take a quick breath then exhale slowly at a modulated pace. “You need to go now while you can still get out of town. It won’t take them long to put two and two together and get me and you. You don’t want to get caught up in this.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  Silence.

  She slipped her hand from his restraining grip. Light flooded the foyer, making her blink and squint against it. His gaze bored into hers, never wavering, as steady as a pale blue laser. No expression registered upon the razor-sharp angles of his face. Her heart beating hard and frantically, she repeated the question.

  “Did you kill him?”

  She expected a quick denial,
anything but the soft-spoken truth he delivered.

  “I don’t know.”

  She searched for some shred of emotion in that long beloved face. She could have been looking upon one of the city’s many monuments for what little he betrayed.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? How could you not know? McGee, how could you not know?”

  Finally a flicker behind his eyes. Not furtive, but fearful. “I wasn’t actually there at the time.”

  Too many shades of meaning colored that claim. Her thoughts started spinning in a thousand different directions. But oddly, none of them led away from him in fright.

  “We’ve got to get out of the city.”

  We. Surprise crumpled the chiseled lines of his face. He stared at her in disbelief and dismay. “There is no we. Barbara, you’ve got to get the hell out of here. This isn’t a game any more.”

  “It was never a game to me.”

  With that roughly spoken fact, she moved past him into the room, where their bags were already packed for a quick getaway. As if it had been planned. As if he’d been prepared.

  But, of course, that was part of his training. To expect the unexpected.

  So far, it had all been unexpected where Barbara was concerned.

  Think. Think.

  Would McGee have pulled the trigger? Frye was Tag’s only link to his past. Why would he want him dead?

  She drew a slow breath to flush the clutter from her brain. Focus. Think.

  She took her room key and laid it on the dresser. Hoisting her bags, she asked, “Where’s the car?”

  He started to relax his stance, but the tension remained in his expression. A hard, resigned expression. Almost regret. As if he were disappointed that she was taking the out he offered. “I moved it to one of the side streets. A white Buick Le Sabre.”

  Nice and nondescript. He’d been a busy boy.

  “Bring it around to the rear exit. I’ll meet you there.”

  “Barbara.”

  She didn’t turn. She didn’t want to see the evidence of the emotion she heard in his voice as he hesitated.

  “Go,” she prompted. “Hurry!”

  She never heard the door close behind him.

  Her insides started trembling, a quiet quivering at first and then building to soul-shaking tremors. What was she doing? What was she thinking? He couldn’t assure her that he hadn’t pulled the trigger.

  A quiet calm seeped in, covering doubt, shrouding reason in a dense, blanking fog.

  None of it mattered. They were in this together. They had a mutual cause. That goal hadn’t changed. And there was no way he was going to skip out on her again, leaving her with all the responsibilities. This time, she meant to see that he kept his promises.

  It was shamefully easy.

  She toted her wheeled baggage right past the police already swarming the lobby on the way to Frye’s room. One of them even held the door open for her. “Have a nice evening, ma’am.”

  A nice evening, indeed. On the run with a possible killer. She expelled her breath in a shaky gust.

  As she pulled the bags toward the curb, a white Buick pulled up, nice and easy, in no hurry at all, its trunk popping. She slung the bags into it and then got into the passenger seat. They slipped away from the hotel without notice.

  “Head south,” was all Barbara would say, but her thoughts were far ahead, already at their destination.

  The drive was uneventful. They avoided the main roads, slipping out of Virginia and into the Carolinas. They were crossing into Florida when Barbara stirred from her fitful napping. The faint grays of dawn etched a harsh lithograph of the man behind the wheel. When she asked him to, he pulled into the next rest stop without question. After a brief stretch, with necessities seen to, she returned to the car.

  “I’ll drive.”

  He didn’t argue, slipping silently into the shotgun position.

  Florida was a long state. It took long hours to traverse the busy interstates leading to Miami. It gave Barbara too much time to think as Tag dozed in the seat beside her.

  Had he fired the shot—an assassin’s shot—to end Frye’s life?

  Her heart rebelled against what her mind was considering. Taggert McGee came from a harsh, even brutal past, from a family that had no respect for the law or love for their fellow man. He’d gone from that ugly place to one even crueler, to one that made cold, calculating murderers out of boys like him, Robert and Chet. Robert had come back with a thankfully blanked memory of what he’d done while Chet still reveled in it. What about Tag? Was he still working in tandem with Chet? Had this all been some carefully planned ruse to get her to play accomplice to their scheme?

  Her daughter’s life and that of her granddaughter could well depend upon how she read the current situation. How rusty those intuitive skills had gotten while living a life of pampered privilege. Could she trust them any more than she could the man beside her?

  He’s dangerous, Frye had told her. Was he right? Shouldn’t he know? After all, Tag was his patient…had been his patient. His experiment. And now that Frye was dead, who had the knowledge to bring him out of the mists concealing his past?

  He’s dangerous.

  She glanced beside her. In the warmth of midday, he appeared all bronzed and relaxed in slumber. Gentler, somehow, without the harsh edges. Like the young man she remembered. The one she still held in her heart. Could that man who’d once discussed poetry and politics in the tall grasses behind the high-school bleachers with her be capable of such a deliberate act of violence? Could the man who shared his DNA with her treasured daughter also be a cold, emotionless killer? Was he the same kind of monster Vietnam had made of Chet Allen?

  No. She couldn’t have been so wrong about him. Not then. Not now.

  He made a soft sound in his sleep and turned toward her on the seat. Without the knife-edge alertness, he looked younger, kinder, blameless. The man who had courted her sweetly, whose stirring kisses coaxed her into surrendering her virginity with little or no objection. And then had left her and the child she was carrying for another to provide for and protect.

  What did she really know about the man she’d so briefly loved and eternally pined for? Enough to justify riding across country with him, a jump ahead of the law? Enough to trust him with her safety…her heart?

  Agitated and exhausted beyond clear thought, she reached for the radio, hoping for distraction.

  “…have an all-points bulletin out for the man suspected in the shooting. McGee, who had been a psychiatric patient of Frye’s, is considered armed and dangerous. Anyone with any information…”

  She shut the radio off.

  Barbara glanced to the right to see a stern-faced Tag McGee straightening in his seat. She couldn’t help the sudden jump of alarm that had her stiffening at his movements. But he was only reaching up to rub his eyes.

  “Looks like he might get his book deal after all. Or at least a low-end movie of the week.”

  Barbara said nothing, concentrating on the road. She could feel his study of her and didn’t relax until his attention turned to their surroundings.

  “Where are we?” he asked, frowning at the sight of palm trees lining the road.

  “Just entered Dade County.”

  “Miami?”

  She nodded.

  He eyed her with sudden suspicion. “What’s in Miami?”

  “My parents.”

  A long pause. Then Tag swore. “Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse.”

  Chapter 8

  The home of a retired judge was probably the last place the law would think to look for a wanted man. And it was the last place Tag McGee would have chosen to hide.

  Joseph and Claudia Calvin lived beyond just well. Their eighties-style home of glass and steel sat on the water’s edge of South Beach like a modern art sculpture. All precision angles and cold surfaces, it reflected the man McGee remembered. As a teen, he’d been awed by Judge Joe and the sleek Bohemian woman who
was Barbara’s mother. They represented everything he considered as good, successful and admirable. Everything his own family was not. And they’d both condemned him by circumstance, without giving him a second chance or a second thought.

  These were the people Barbara had brought him to for help.

  He was a dead man.

  Claudia Calvin answered the door. In her mid-seventies, she still looked like a ditzy flower child with her mop top of curls, flowing crinkle skirt and multiple necklaces over a white embroidered tunic. She’d gotten in on the ground floor of modern psychotherapy and pioneered getting in touch with one’s feelings to the pre-baby-boomer generation. Her soft, somewhat silly exterior hid the shrewd, razor-sharp mind that dissected with analytical skill. And he could see that clinical brain processing the sight of the two of them together on her front steps.

  “Barbara, what a nice surprise. And Mr. McGee, if my memory serves me.”

  If Barbara was a surprise of a pleasant sort, Tag was certain he was a shock rating right up there with discovering poodle poo on the bottom of her Italian shoes only after she’d crossed a plush pastel carpet. And the feeling was mutual.

  “Mrs. Calvin, how good of you to remember.”

  Her eyes narrowed. Oh, yes. He could see she was remembering everything. Then her gaze darted to the left and right to see if anyone had marked their arrival. She gripped her daughter’s arm, firmly commanding, “Come in, dear. There’s no need for you to stand out in the hot sun.”

  Where the neighbors might see them and recognize them as the fugitives on the news.

  They stepped into a sea of pale turquoise and rose tranquility right out of an art deco Miami Vice episode—white furniture, white walls and white stone with tasteful splashes of the muted colors in the appropriate places. Obviously done by a highly paid interior designer because there wasn’t one hint of warmth, personality or intimacy in the place.