TrustMe

by Unknown

  She gathered her thoughts. “Four days before he died, Jimmy told Seth he was going to change his will and his life insurance, making Laura, his fiancée, his beneficiary. He planned to do it the next day. Not only that—” she spoke a little faster since she could sense Taggart’s sudden exasperation with what he clearly considered her naiveté at accepting at face value her brother’s version of anything “—but Seth also had no reason to hurt Jimmy because I’d already agreed to lend him the money to bail out the ski shop.”

  “What?”

  She nodded. “I told this all to the police, but they didn’t believe me. I suppose I can’t blame them too much, since all they’ve got is my word on it. I had part of the money in savings—” which had since gone to Seth’s attorney “—and I intended to borrow the rest. But Silver’s a small town and, because I deposit the bookstore’s receipts several times a week, I knew the bank’s loan officer was out on a family emergency. I was just waiting for his return to make the arrangements.

  “Obviously, there’s no way I can prove that,” she said earnestly. “Except I know that I’m telling the truth, and that means Seth didn’t have a motive.”

  Shifting, Taggart stretched out his legs and mulled it over for a minute. “So we’re back to the mysterious stranger theory?”

  “No. I don’t think so. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and I think Seth’s wrong. I don’t believe Jimmy just happened to be carrying the gun and had the misfortune to walk in on something. That explanation relies on too many coincidences. I think somebody took the gun from his house, and either waited for him at my place or followed him there. I think he was killed on purpose.”

  To her relief, he didn’t instantly shoot her down. “Okay, but why? From what I understand, he was a nice kid.”

  “He was.” She felt the familiar ache, but saw no reason to go into how much she’d cared about Jimmy, how much he’d been like a second little brother. When this was finally all over, when Seth was safe, then she’d allow herself to mourn.

  Taggart, however, seemed to sense her sadness, and settled her back into the curve of his arm. “But?” he prompted.

  “But I read a lot, including mysteries and true crime stories, newspapers and magazines, and most of the time when someone’s murdered, the crucial question is who gains from the victim’s death.”

  “Which in this case happens to be Seth,” he said quietly.

  “Yes. But as I just explained, Seth believed just the opposite. And even if he didn’t, even if he thought he was still Jimmy’s beneficiary, he didn’t need that money—which he probably wouldn’t have received in time to save his business anyway—because he knew I was going to help him out.”

  He sifted the ends of her hair through his fingers and slowly blew out a breath. “Okay. But going with your theory, who other than Seth stood to profit from Dunn’s death? The fiancée?”

  She shook her head. “No. She’s not my favorite person, but in her defense, I didn’t know her long before all this happened, and despite what Jimmy told Seth, nothing was left to her. Besides, she has a pretty good alibi—she and her brother were with Jimmy’s parents, waiting for him to show up so they could have dinner.”

  “Then who?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted.

  He must have heard the dejection in her voice, because he gathered her closer as they both lapsed into silence. To her surprise, he was the first to breach it.

  “I’m not sure what I think at this point,” he said slowly, choosing his words with care. “I’m no cop, but I do know you’re not going to solve anything being on the run. The longer you defy the court, the worse you’re making things for yourself—and I’m pretty damn certain that’s tough as hell on your brother.

  “Still, the bottom line is that sometime in the future you will be going back, whether you want to or not. It wouldn’t hurt for you to consider that it might be easier if you had somebody you could trust at your side.”

  Like him. Even though he didn’t say it, his meaning was clear. Not certain what she felt—disappointed that he hadn’t endorsed her theory about the murder, frustrated that despite his earlier promise he still clearly intended to come after her when her forty-eight hours were up, or moved by his offer to stand by her—she sighed. “I guess we both have some things to think about,” she said softly.

  “Yeah.” Linking the fingers of one hand with hers, he drew her onto his lap and brushed his lips over her temple. “I guess we do.”

  He remained still for a moment, and then his mouth began a lazy slide lower, pausing to bestow kisses on the corner of her eye, the top of her cheek, the edge of her mouth.

  “Although,” she said as she shifted to provide him easier access, unable to stifle an “oh” of appreciation when she felt him growing hard in reaction, “I suppose we don’t have to do it right this minute.”

  “No.” In a single deft move, he wrapped an arm around her and twisted, neatly positioning her underneath him. “I don’t suppose we do.”

  The nightmare came near dawn, creeping into Taggart’s sleep like deadly tendrils of smoke slithering under a doorway.

  For one endless second, he felt the horror slyly twine itself around him. Then he was dragged away from Genevieve’s comforting warmth and sucked deep into the bottomless abyss of the past, only to be spat out high in the Hindu Kush, the brutally beautiful mountain system that rose like a crown atop northern Afghanistan.

  He’d been here before and knew what was coming. Knew, dreaded and despaired, yet was powerless to save himself from reliving the event that had nearly destroyed him.

  It was a beautiful early-summer night. Stars spangled the vast bowl of the sky, while desolate spears of rock rose like a jagged picket line on either side of the steep, twisting defile that was the Zari Pass. A new moon hovered overhead, painting the landscape with eerie light.

  As in every other nightmare before this, Taggart was both observer and participant.

  Even as he hovered nearby and watched himself, he also felt the familiar weight of the pack on his back, the comforting shape of the M-16 in his hands, the slight burn in his lungs from the thin mountain air. He felt the rocky ground under his feet and heard the occasional murmured comment from another member of the unit through his headset.

  “So what do you think, J. T.?” His lieutenant’s quiet voice floated back to him on the breeze as the other man unexpectedly bypassed his mike.

  “I don’t know, Laz,” he answered quietly and also off-mike.

  Usually he walked point, since he preferred being out in front of the team, his senses strung tight, knowing that whatever happened the enemy would have to get by him first.

  Tonight, however, he’d taken the tail, so he could help the CO keep an eye on Caskey, the new kid who was sandwiched between them.

  A fatal mistake, the watching part of himself knew. If he had the lead, the coming tragedy wouldn’t happen. He wouldn’t allow it.

  Still, to his credit, the him at the back of the pack sensed…something. Yet a glance up the track where Bear, Willis, Alvarez and the rest of the guys were strung out ahead of them like floats on a fishing line revealed nothing out of place.

  He went with his gut anyway. “I can’t put my finger on it, but it just doesn’t feel right.”

  “Yeah. I’m getting that, too.” With the decisiveness that typified him, the other man thumbed on his mike so everyone could hear him. “Team, this is Alpha. Listen up, guys. We’re packing it in for the night. We’ll set up camp at that bend in the trail a quarter mile back.”

  “Sweet,” Willis remarked, making the word into two syllables with his lazy Alabama drawl. “’Cuz I aim to tell you, sir, this place is creepin’ me out. Plus I gotta take a leak.”

  “Again?” Alvarez’s snort of good-natured disgust was pure east L. A. “Man, what is your problem? You must have a bladder the size of a friggin’ thimble.”

  “Yeah? Well that still makes it way bigger than your—”
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  Whatever part of his teammate’s anatomy Willis intended to insult was lost forever as he lowered his gun, reached for his fly and took a handful of steps toward the edge of the trail.

  Without warning, a ferocious blast went off, flinging him up into the air.

  For what seemed like an eternity, the young communications expert seemed to hang in the air, his body silhouetted by the glare from the land mine’s explosion. His agonized wail shrieked through his mike until he abruptly crashed to the ground and went mercifully silent.

  In the next instant the night disintegrated into a thousand disparate pieces, blown apart as the team was hit by a barrage of enemy fire that seemed to come out of nowhere.

  Taggart registered the whistle of incoming rocket-propelled grenades; the staccato cough of automatic weapons fire; the deeper pop of older, Turkish-made bolt-action rifles. The smell of gunpowder and cordite filled his nostrils, along with the coppery scent of fresh blood.

  Laced through that devil’s brew were the shouts as men scrambled for cover, followed by screams as their paths intersected with the rest of the landmines slyly hidden along the trail’s outer perimeters. Like human dominos set into motion by the hand of hell, his second set of brothers toppled one after the other.

  Hunkering down to return fire, he heard himself shout, “Damn it, Caskey, no!” but it was too late as the younger man bravely raced forward toward the source of the incoming fire, only to be slammed back a dozen feet by a hail of gunfire.

  In a series of freeze-frames burned forever on his mind, he saw Laz go down, too, then felt a scalding rush of relief as he heard his friend curse through the headset and realized he was only wounded.

  “Hold on!” he shouted, ignoring the bullets he sensed whizzing past as he scrambled forward.

  “J. T.?” Laz’s amplified breathing was labored. “Get the hell out of here, now! That’s an order.”

  “No way.” Reaching the other man, he hefted Laz in a fireman’s hold, swiveled back around and began to run. “Hang on. You just hang on, damn it,” he ground out, too hyped on fury, fear and the resultant overload of adrenaline even to register that he was carrying two-hundred-plus pounds as he sprinted full out. “We’re gonna be fine.”

  All he had to do was make it to that hairpin twist in the trail that Laz had mentioned, and he knew he could hold off whatever the enemy threw at him. And praise God, it wasn’t that far away now, he was only a stone’s throw away—

  The flash of the RPG hitting the totem of rock to his right was blinding. He felt the concussion roll over him a second before the sound reached his ears, and then he was flying, tumbling through an endless darkness, falling down, down, down, knowing he was dead since he couldn’t even hear his own desperate screams—

  “John? John. Listen to me. It’s okay. You’re okay.”

  The woman’s faraway voice whispered through the dark, a glimmer of light breaking through the blackness of his despair.

  “Wake up. You’re having a dream.”

  An angel? No. Angels didn’t exist in hell. What’s more, that voice, and the comfort and peace it promised, felt familiar somehow. As if she’d held off the dark and given him refuge before…

  “Come on, wake up now, John. It’s just a dream. A bad dream. You’re safe.”

  Genevieve. He snapped his eyes open and was abruptly assaulted by the sound of his own harsh breathing, the taste of blood from having bitten his tongue, the sour stench of fear rising off his sweat-slick skin.

  Shivering violently, he stared up at her propped above him, her eyes dark with worry. Saw her hand come down to soothe him, and instinctively reached out to block it. “Don’t.”

  “But—”

  “Just give me a minute.” He waited for her hand to withdraw, then squeezed his eyes shut and, ignoring the fact that his guts felt as if he’d just bungee jumped off the Empire State Building, concentrated on the simple act of breathing.

  Time spun away. He wasn’t sure how long it took him to clamp down on his emotions, to banish the ghosts of Laz and Willis and the others, to will away the shakes, although it probably wasn’t even a minute.

  However long it was, when he finally opened his eyes, he had himself firmly under control. “Sorry,” he said, reaching down deep to dredge up a rueful smile.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. Just a bad dream, like you said. Had me going pretty good there, but I’m okay now.”

  Despite his assurance, the concern didn’t leave her face. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No.” Somehow he managed not to flinch as she laid her hand on his cheek. “You know how it is. Even if it wasn’t already fading, I probably couldn’t explain it.”

  For a moment longer she continued to search his face, as if she knew damn well he was lying. He braced, fully expecting her to call him on it, but to his profound relief, she seemed to accept what he’d said at face value.

  “Okay. If you’re sure,” she said softly, settling back down and laying her head on his shoulder.

  “I am.” He gave her arm a reassuring squeeze. “It’ll be light soon. Try to get back to sleep.”

  “You, too.”

  “Sure.” Even as he said it, he knew it wasn’t going to happen.

  So it wasn’t any great surprise to be lying awake, watching the darkness in the room gradually lighten, long after her breathing had deepened into the sound sleep of the good and the righteous.

  It was the kind of sleep he hadn’t experienced since that night in the Hindu Kush when every member of his unit had died.

  Everyone but him.

  Eleven

  G enevieve watched through the kitchen window as Taggart chopped wood like an automaton. Feet spread, shoulders bunching beneath the clean denim shirt and dark-green down vest he’d retrieved from his bag that morning, he appeared impervious to the spectacular beauty of the day.

  Instead of taking time to appreciate the brilliant sunshine that made the snow sparkle like diamond dust, or looking up long enough to notice the lone eagle riding the thermals like a teenager out for a joyride, he wielded the ax with an unrelenting rhythm that was exhausting to watch.

  At the rate he was going, they’d soon have more kindling than logs. Not that she cared. Wood was wood, and whatever its size it would burn.

  She had far more pressing matters on her mind. Like whether John was out there for the exercise the way he claimed. Or if, as she suspected, his real goal was to keep her at arm’s length.

  Despite his reassurance of the previous night that he was fine, which he’d doggedly repeated again this morning, she knew he wasn’t. Before he’d escaped outside, she’d had ample time to see the strain around his mouth, hear the detachment in his voice he couldn’t entirely hide, practically touch the barrier he’d thrown up around himself.

  If that wasn’t enough to clue her in, being on the receiving end of his too-frequent smiles—which never quite reached his eyes—was.

  She wondered if he had any idea he talked in his sleep.

  With a slight shudder, she recalled the heartbreaking sound of his despair that had jolted her from sleep. His mumbled narrative may have been too disjointed for her to glean exact details, the when or where or how or why, but she’d heard enough to know he’d been in some sort of firefight that hadn’t gone well. Men had died. Men he’d cared about.

  It was also clear he’d sooner have his tongue extracted through his nose than share what had happened. Although she’d taken pains to keep her voice mild and her expression composed, simply asking if he wanted to talk had triggered a response similar to a heavily fortified gate slamming shut.

  One moment he’d been there with her, haunted and hurting; in the next, the essence that made him the man she loved had been securely locked away behind an unbreachable wall.

  Genevieve tapped a distracted finger against the kitchen counter.

  She might not be
able to get him to open up, but surely there was something she could do to stop his brooding and put an end to his self-inflicted isolation.

  She stood there a moment longer, considering the golden gift of the sunshine, the heavenly blue of the sky, the pristine expanse of the snow, and realized the eagle had it right.

  It was a day made for play. And while she might not be able to get through John’s defenses, she thought she might know a way to get him to lower them all by himself.

  Wasting no time, she gathered her snow gear, pulled it on, then slipped outside. Unconcerned with detection, since John was so absorbed in pulverizing another log he probably wouldn’t notice if a flying saucer touched down beside him, she picked her spot and made her preparations.

  When she was ready, she dusted off her palms, hefted one of her arsenal of snowballs in her hand and waited until her target was positioning the next log for its execution. The instant he straightened, she took a steadying breath, wound up for the throw and let loose.

  Bull’s-eye! She allowed herself a second of satisfaction as her missile struck Taggart squarely between the shoulder blades and sent a spray of snow shooting up to lodge at the back of his neck.

  Ducking back around the cover of the stairs, she watched as he dropped the ax handle and spun around. “What the—”

  She popped out and hurled snowball number two be fore he could complete the sentence. Unfortunately, her aim was off this time so she missed him entirely, the icy orb whistling harmlessly past his ear.

  He scowled, clearly not amused. “Knock it off, Genevieve. I’m not in the—”

  “Oh, jeez.” She winced as her third try went high, hitting him in the chin instead of the chest. Yet the look of disbelief on his face as snow showered him, coating him from eyebrows to lips, was priceless. She didn’t even try to hold back the laugh that rolled out of her.

  He reached up, wiped himself off with his gloved hand. “You think that’s funny?” he demanded, his narrowed eyes as green as his vest.

  “As a matter of fact—” Wham! To her delight, this time she got him smack in the open neck of his shirt “—I do.”