Military Man

by Marie Ferrarella

  Collin sincerely doubted that. But with an indulgent nod of his head, he did his best to make the young policeman feel better, since it seemed to matter to him. “I’ve got a good ear for accents, even if they’re slight.” Still, the officer looked disappointed to be placed so easily. He needed the officer buoyed, not crestfallen. “Otherwise I would have never heard it.” He turned toward Lucy. “Officer Harris, Dr. Gatling is with the coroner’s office and she needs to see the man that room.”

  Harris glanced at the ID tag that hung halfway down her chest, held in place with a navy-blue chord. “Kind of ghoulish, isn’t it?” The police officer frowned. “Seeing as how he’s not dead yet.”

  “We’re not jumping the gun,” Collin assured him. “We just need a couple of minutes alone with him to rule something out.” He tossed the words over his shoulder toward Harris as he opened the door.

  Quickly he ushered Lucy in ahead of him and shut the door.

  The sound of machines working in harmony echoed through the room. Lucy turned on her heel to look at the man who had brought her here. About to say something, she let it go in favor of something lighter. “You promoted me.”

  “Excuse me?”

  After the morgue and the autopsy area, this room seemed full of life, even though McGruder’s case was still touch and go. “You just called me Dr. Gatling back there. According to you, I just sailed through my final year and graduation.”

  His smile was sexy, working its way under her skin twice as fast because he didn’t seem to be aware of it. “And I’m sure you will.”

  She was nothing if not intelligent. The very way she held herself told him that she believed it, too. But he wasn’t here to analyze her body, awe-inspiring though it was. His job was to round up Jason and the faster the better. Every moment they delayed was a moment’s opportunity forever lost.

  “Now, about that DNA sample…” he prodded, glancing over his shoulder at the closed door.

  He had no idea how long they would remain alone in the room. A nurse or doctor could come through those doors at any moment, or worse, someone from one of the agencies involved in the investigation could be coming by to check on McGruder even now.

  They needed to hurry.

  Lucy nodded. Slipping on plastic gloves she’d put in her coat pocket, she took out a pair of tweezers and got to work. Leaning over the unconscious guard, she plucked out a hair and held it aloft to examine it.

  Collin looked at it from his vantage point, but saw nothing. His eye wasn’t trained for it. “What are you looking for?”

  “Just making sure it has a root attached.” She looked at him with a smile. “It does and it’ll do fine.”

  He glanced at his watch. Luck had a way of holding up for so long and then evaporating. No one had found them on his first trip here and they were still home free on their second visit. But how much longer? “Anything else you need?”

  “Probably my head examined for doing this,” Lucy muttered under her breath, placing the single hair into a small plastic envelope. She sealed it, then tucked it into her purse. “We’re done.”

  Not soon enough for him. He was beginning to get a pins-and-needles feeling at the back of his neck the way he always did when something was in danger of going wrong. He needed her out of here before anyone asked any questions and realized that they were acting independent of any particular directive from the variety of bureaus and departments vying for primary jurisdiction over the case.

  “Let’s go.”

  He didn’t have to tell her twice. Adrenaline had been rushing through her veins from the moment they’d stepped onto the floor, even though she was fighting to keep a blasé expression in place. It wasn’t all that easy to maintain, seeing as how her heart was pounding in her throat.

  Lucy hadn’t been kidding about the head examination she was contemplating. By all rights, she shouldn’t be here. If she was as straight an arrow as her mother had been, she would have probably called someone in the Army Rangers to report Collin’s misconduct.

  But that dilemma had been taken out of her hands the moment she’d agreed to go along with this. Despite her feelings about intimacy before marriage, moral righteousness had never been a problem for her. She always did the right thing—the way she saw it. And this, in its own way, was right.

  Besides, doing this put an exciting edge to what had heretofore been a very by-the-numbers assignment. Not that the actual case was. But her participation in it had been. Boring to the extreme.

  Until now.

  She nodded at the police officer as they left the room again. Military Man said something to him in parting that brought out a smile from the young man, but it was all a buzz in her ears right now.

  As the extremely masculine lieutenant hustled her to the elevator, his hand pressed against the small of her back indicating that her pace wasn’t quick enough to satisfy his needs, Lucy could vaguely understand what it was that her mother had felt. Taking on assignments that dropped her off somewhere in one of the four corners of the world, demanding that she live by her wits and her skill. It was one hell of an exciting rush, she had to say that for it.

  In a way, she’d never felt closer to her mother than she did right at this moment.

  And, in an odd way, close to this man she hadn’t even known existed a short twenty-four hours ago.

  They were the only occupants when the elevator swallowed them up and began its descent to the first floor. Only after the doors closed did Lucy allow herself to relax a little. She leaned against the wall and breathed a sign of relief.

  She saw a look of concern pass over Military Man’s face. “You all right?”

  She hadn’t realized that she was so audible. Lucy flushed, straightening. She did her best to pretend as if this was commonplace to her instead of something she’d never done before. She couldn’t remember ever crossing a higher authority than that belonging to either one of her parents.

  “Fine.” And then she couldn’t help adding with a laugh, “For a woman who might have just seen her career go down the tubes.”

  “No tubes,” he guaranteed with a shake of his head. “And if anything comes up, it was my fault. I made you do it.”

  So, he was willing to take the blame for this. Very gallant of him. She liked that. Lucy smiled. “No one who knows me would ever believe you.”

  He cocked his head as he studied her. So he wasn’t wrong about that spirit he saw in her eyes. “You that stubborn?”

  “I’ve been known to be.” She looked up and saw the red numbers drift by slowly, like snowflakes falling to earth. “The point is, Lieutenant, no one makes me do what I don’t want to.”

  He had no doubts of that. Collin crossed his arms in front of him. “So why are you helping me?”

  “Because I like puzzles.” That was the intellectual answer, but there was far more to it than that. After a beat, she told him the primary reason. “Because the look on your cousin’s face got to me.”

  Collin’s own look was rather dubious. “You talking about his scowl?”

  She shook her head. “Maybe I should amend that to say the look in your cousin’s eyes. I saw a look like that on an orphan’s face once.” And it had never left her. It made her pray never to feel that alone, that sad. “It was on the news. He was from one of those war-besieged countries. His home had just gotten bombed, killing his entire family. He was all he had left in the world.” Pausing, she looked up at Collin. “But then, your cousin has you, doesn’t he?”

  “Yeah, he does.” And his sense of family was right up there with God and Country. Maybe he felt the way he did about God and Country because of the sense of family his father had instilled in him.

  The elevator came to a stop on the ground floor, its gunmetal doors opening slowly. Collin stepped out, taking her elbow as if to guide her toward the front entrance.

  Lucy deliberately pulled her elbow away. Her eyes met his. “I’ve been walking on my own now for a number of years, Lieutenant. I’ve gotten
pretty good at it, too.”

  It was all part of his habit of taking charge. The more he controlled, the better the chance that everything would go his way.

  He made a show of dropping his hand to his side. “Sorry, didn’t mean to usurp your autonomy,” he told her. “Habit. Out in the field, when every second could be your last, you find yourself becoming a bit of a control freak.”

  She thought of her parents. Not so much her father, but when her mother was alive, it had been a constant struggle for independence whenever she was at home. Her father had learned early on that she was every bit as stubborn, as headstrong as her mother and that he was a poor match for either.

  “Yes, I know.”

  The pregnant tone had him looking at her quizzically. “You in the military?”

  “Everything but sworn in,” she quipped. And then, because she could see the questions in his eyes, she added, “Both my parents wore the uniform.”

  “What branch?”

  Lucy hurried to match his stride as they followed the exit signs down one corridor after another. “Army. Like you.”

  He stopped short of the exit, allowing her to walk out first as the doors yawned open.

  Standing outside for a moment, he took a deep breath. Cold air swirled into his lungs. It smelled and felt as if they might be in for a snowstorm. Collin looked around at the people as they passed them on the street, all wrapped up in their own worlds.

  Sometimes, he thought, it was more dangerous out here in civilization than it was in a war zone. At least in an officially declared war zone, you knew more or less where you stood, who your enemies were. Out here, you never knew who might be out to get you. Who would have ever thought, when they were growing up together, that Jason would have turned out to be such a threat? That he was capable of turning on everyone? Capable of murdering his own brother as well as who knew how many others. There were three bodies with Jason’s mark on them. Would they find more if they looked? Civilization, with its inability to read beneath the surface, had helped Jason to hide his cunning.

  Hell of a bitter pill for his uncle Blake to swallow, he thought.

  Lucy spotted the car they’d used parked where they’d left it, across the street in an adjacent lot. “We’d better get this to the lab,” she prompted.

  Since the results would be back in a matter of days, not hours, he saw no reason to rush now that they were out of the hospital. “I owe you lunch.”

  She was surprised that he remembered the throw-away comment he’d made earlier. She also remembered the rest of that offer and puckered her face. “Hospital food? I’ll pass, thanks.”

  He laughed. She looked adorable just then. Impish. He found himself fighting back a strong desire to kiss her. There was no getting away from the fact that he felt attracted to this woman who reminded him of Paula and yet didn’t. “I was thinking of a real restaurant.”

  Lucy pushed her sleeve up her wrist and glanced at her watch. “It’ll have to be a fast one. I’m due back soon.”

  He could appreciate the lack of time. Emmett was out there, following up leads, and could use a hand. But still, an obligation was an obligation. And he’d promised to feed her.

  “How about over there?” Collin pointed to a sandwich shop, one of a chain that was popping up all over the state. This one was in the middle of the block across the street.

  Breakfast had been a piece of toast, burned on one end because of a defective toaster. Given that she didn’t care for charcoal, she’d left that part untouched. She was hungry and saw no point in denying that fact. “Sounds good to me.”

  The light turned green. Collin began to take her elbow as they started to cross the street, then pulled back his hand, holding it and the other one up as if in surrender. “Sorry. Some habits are hard to break.”

  She laughed, widening her stride to get across before the light turned again and barred their progress. “You take your cousin’s elbow when you’re guiding him through a crowd?”

  “He’s taller.” She threw him a quizzical look as they reached the other side of the street. “I have a tendency to want to protect whoever’s smaller than me.” Which, he knew, included a large portion of the general population. If he’d worded it to say something about weaker than him or more vulnerable, he had a feeling he’d be in mortal peril. The corners of his mouth quirked in a smile. “It’s the uniform that does it.”

  Walking up to the sandwich shop’s glass doors, she deliberately pulled one open, then held it for him. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Collin merely shook his head tolerantly as he stepped inside.

  The late afternoon sun had trouble pushing its way into the small, almost airless studio apartment with its black, sooty windows that faced the back of a tire factory. It could have been any season outside the small perimeter. Inside was a place where desperate people came with their hard-gotten money to buy new names. To trade their lives for someone else’s in the hope that the new name would bring them more luck. Or at least enable them to escape the bad kind.

  Word of mouth had brought Jason here. Word of mouth and the same kind of desperation that brought the others. Desperation fueled with hate because he had been temporarily reduced to this, to being as common as the others when he was so much better.

  So much better than the man who sat in the filthy room, his ink-stained hand stretched out. Waiting.

  Swallowing a loathsome curse, Jason doled out the bills from his wallet slowly. The cache of money he’d had the good sense to put by in case of an emergency was dwindling. It put him in a more foul mood than he was in already.

  The ugly little man peering up at him from where he sat at the computer was demanding twice as much as they had originally agreed upon when he’d called to make the arrangements.

  He hated being taken.

  “That’s my price.” The man looked up at him, not flinching. Like a man who had crawled out of the jaws of death once and had nothing to lose anymore. “You want this passport,” the reedy voice taunted Jason, “you come up with the money. Otherwise I toss it.” He glanced down at the handiwork he’d just painstakingly created. “Makes no difference to me.”

  It would make a difference to the bastard if he shoved a blade between his ribs, Jason thought angrily. He’d already stabbed a prison guard. But he didn’t have the knife anymore. About to pull it out of the second guard’s chest, he thought he’d heard a car approaching the van. Hesitation would have had him risking his freedom and nothing was about to make him risk that. He’d fled from the scene like a hunted animal.

  It was only after he’d reached the cover of trees that he realized his knife was still back in the van. Still in the wound where he’d left it.

  But any knife would do in a pinch, he thought.

  The kitchen sink was less than ten steps away. He could see a knife lying on the counter. There was a yellowish substance—mustard, margarine, something of that variety—encrusted on the blade, but that wouldn’t matter. Dirty or not, it could still take a life if it was shoved in hard enough in the right place.

  As to right places, his education in that department was certainly growing.

  And the next time he left a man for dead, the man damn well would be, Jason fumed angrily, thinking of the guard who was still alive, who was, according to today’s freaking newspaper headlines, still battling for his life.

  None of this would have made the headlines if it hadn’t somehow involved Ryan Fortune, he thought angrily. He even owed his notoriety to that bastard.

  Jason could feel hatred filling his throat like bitter bile.

  “There.” He tossed the rest of the bills onto the desk in front of the man who had created his new passport for him. His ticket to freedom. Whenever he wished it.

  The gnarled man at the desk made no reply. Instead he picked up the bills and counted them out, one by one. Satisfied as to their amount, he took out a hand-held light, slowly passed it over the bills one at a time, its bluish light glowing eerily ov
er each.

  Impatience all but strangled Jason. The document creator had the passport hostage beneath the last of the bills. He continued turning them over, one by one.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Jason demanded hotly.

  The smaller man’s voice was as quiet, as calm, as Jason’s was not. “Making sure you’re not passing any counterfeit money to me.” He cackled like an old warlock. “Can’t be too careful these days.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Jason railed. He reached for the passport, but the other man merely pulled it closer to him and continued reviewing the bills. Jason uttered a ripe curse. “If I could do that, you stupid fool, don’t you think I could produce a passport without having to come to the likes of you?”

  Eyes that seemed colorless in the poor light raised from their task to look at him. The tolerance there galled Jason.

  “True. Very true,” the counterfeiter finally admitted, enjoying the humor he found in the ironic question. When he laughed again, Jason found the sound grating and irritating. Very carefully, the other man made a neat pile out of the money, then retrieved the passport from its place on the bottom.

  He held it out to Jason. “Here you go, Mr. Jordan Pullman. A new passport to take you on a magic carpet ride anywhere in the world.” He laughed again, tucking the money away.

  The man was still laughing as Jason left. Jason slammed the door behind him, wanting to get as much distance between himself and the insane man in the airless apartment as possible.

  He would have wanted to get as much distance as he could between himself and Red Rock, but there was still unfinished business left for him to tend to. There was the matter of the guard who still needed to be finally silenced.

  And he wanted to see Ryan Fortune in his grave before he left for parts unknown. It was, after all, what had become the driving force of his life. To see the other life not just ruined, but ended. In the most torturous fashion possible.

  That was the only way any of this would be worth it.