Jana DeLeon - Miss Fortune 06 - Soldiers of Fortune

by Jana DeLeon

  Carter stepped up beside me. “I saw Ida Belle and Gertie over at the picnic table. How come you’re separated from your herd?”

  “We’re taking turns making the rounds. You know, making sure no one is falling down drunk or using the Lord’s name in vain…whatever happens to be illegal on a Friday night in July.”

  He grinned. “It’s a long list. Probably a dozen violations going on right under our noses.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing Nelson left before he noticed any of them.”

  The grin vanished. “Nelson was here?”

  “Yeah, but I have no idea what for. He pulled up, swiped a funnel cake without paying, then made a beeline for Ida Belle, Gertie, and me and threatened us.”

  “Threatened you? How?”

  “He said we’d be in trouble if we didn’t keep our nose out of anything going on in Sinful, and since that didn’t appear to move us, his next threat was directed at you. He said he could make things difficult for you.”

  Carter scowled. “That worthless son of a bitch.”

  “I told him not to bet on it.”

  The grin returned. “That’s what I love about you.”

  “And what you hate.”

  “Maybe I just don’t like your friends.”

  “Water seeks its own level.”

  “Ha. You may think you know them, but I guarantee you, no one is on the same level as Ida Belle and Gertie. It would take a combination of a criminal and magician to even come close.”

  I laughed. “They’d take that as a compliment.”

  “I know. That’s why neither of us is going to repeat it.”

  There was a pause in the conversation and Carter glanced around the park, looking as though he wasn’t quite certain what he was supposed to do. “What are you doing here anyway?” I asked. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing he’d voluntarily show up for.

  He gave me a fake surprised look. “What? You’re not happy to see me?”

  My radar went off. He wasn’t here out of any personal interest at all. He was here because he didn’t trust Ida Belle, Gertie, and me. “If I thought your motive didn’t include checking up on me,” I said, “I’d be happier. What I can’t figure out is exactly what you think we could be up to among a bunch of high school students. Do you think they’re hiding a meth lab under the merry-go-round?”

  A flash of guilt passed over his face, but he quickly recovered. “No. But I don’t think Ida Belle and Gertie volunteered you for this job out of the goodness of their hearts, either.”

  “Well, if they have an ulterior motive, I’m not in on it. I’m just here to level the playing field. Two old ladies against a bunch of teens didn’t seem balanced.”

  “A lot of people might argue with you given that the two old ladies in question are Ida Belle and Gertie.”

  “Maybe, but I don’t see how this gets them anything but sore feet and a monumental dose of boredom.” Time to turn the tables. “In fact, the only people in this town I’ve seen today who were doing things they weren’t supposed to are you and Walter.”

  “The doctor didn’t say anything about fishing.”

  “And if you were really fishing, no one would have a problem.” I stared at him for several seconds. “You went to look at the explosion site, didn’t you?”

  “So what if I did?”

  “Look, I got no problem with you going against Nelson or whoever and doing what you think is right, because I trust your judgment. But the reality is that you were lying in a hospital bed a couple days ago, damned near dead. And I don’t care what kind of shape you’re in. Your body still needs a reasonable amount of time to recover from trauma, and your brain is worse than any other part. It’s running the whole show. You’re literally messing around with your microprocessor.”

  He looked a tiny bit guilty, but still wasn’t willing to give up the ghost. “You sound as if you care.”

  “I do care,” I said, my voice stronger than I intended for it to be.

  To hell with it. I turned to look him straight in the face. “Do you have any idea what it felt like to see the top of your boat disappearing beneath the water and knowing that by the time we got there, you’d be long gone? Do you have any idea what it felt like to dive into that inky black, nothing to go on and desperately hoping for a miracle? Do have any idea how hard it was to watch you airlifted away and have no idea if you’d be alive when I got to the hospital?”

  My voice choked a little on the last sentence and it made me even angrier. I’d never meant to blurt all that out, but I couldn’t take it back now.

  Carter stared at me, his expression a mixture of surprise and guilt. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I never thought about it from your perspective. The truth is, I’ve been trying to forget about it from mine. I really am sorry. I didn’t think…”

  “You don’t think I worry?”

  “No. That’s not it. I guess I didn’t think about how much it took out of you.” He shoved his hands in his pocket and blew out a breath. “What are we doing here, Fortune? Me and you?”

  The old me would have quipped “standing in front of a bonfire,” but current me wasn’t feeling sarcastic. Current me only felt scared. “I don’t know.”

  “If you don’t know, should we even bother?”

  “Do you know?”

  His eyes widened. “I, uh.”

  “That’s what I thought. The reality is you haven’t thought it out any further than I have, and when you try, you get to the same roadblocks.”

  “There’s only one roadblock that I can see, and that’s what you plan to do at the end of the summer.”

  Chapter Eleven

  The honest answer was that I didn’t know, but if I said it, I was afraid Carter would think he was the reason I wasn’t sure. The reality was I didn’t know what I would do at the end of the summer because I didn’t know if I would be cleared to return to DC or have to go into hiding somewhere else. Either way, at that point, the gig was up and Carter, along with everyone else in Sinful, would meet the real Sandy-Sue and know that I’d lied.

  “Are you going back home?” he asked.

  “That’s where my life is. What would you have me do? Throw it all away and move down here? And for what? I’m not rich, and I don’t have a job here. There’s not even a job in this town that fits my skill set.”

  Except working for the Heberts, and that wasn’t a viable option.

  “And while I’ll be the first to admit that I’m insanely attracted to you,” I said, “we’re barely in the beginning of a relationship, if you could even call it that. It’s nowhere near the stage where you start changing your life for someone. And the truth is, we don’t know that it ever will be.”

  “I…when you put it that way.…” He sighed. “I know it’s completely unreasonable to ask you to pick up and move, and honestly, that’s not what I meant.”

  “You asked me my plans for the end of summer. What else could you have meant?”

  “I guess I wondered if at the end of August you would get on a bus and leave and that was it.”

  How could I possibly answer him when I didn’t know the answer myself? I couldn’t explain the real me, and even if it didn’t put me, Carter, and everyone else in Sinful at risk, I still wasn’t sure I could answer the question. I’d been struggling for a while now with my life, my choices, my definition of friends, family, and happiness. And the only thing I knew for certain is that I’d gotten it all wrong before Sinful. That didn’t mean I was ready to leave everything behind for something new. I wasn’t even sure I was capable of doing so. But what it did mean is that I was taking a hard look at my life for the first time, and it was coming up short.

  “I don’t think that would be ‘it,’” I said finally. “I can’t picture my life without the people I’ve met here, but I can’t picture my life here, either.” I shook my head. “My trip here has me questioning a lot of things, but I’m afraid I don’t have any answers.”

  He took my hand and s
queezed it. “I understand. You know that I do. I reassessed everything about my life when I came home from the Middle East, and it took a long time to settle on what I thought I needed.”

  I nodded, remembering Carter telling me about his life evaluation after his military career. “But you found your answer here in Sinful. Now that everything you wanted is under fire, what are you going to do?”

  “If I lose my job, Sinful is in a lot more trouble than me. I refuse to have my happiness owned by my career. There’s plenty of places I can be a deputy, and I’m sure they’ve all got good fishing and nosy old women.”

  “What about Emmaline?”

  “I can visit. Or she can move. Whatever. My point is, I’m not willing to let one thing have that much control over me. The military required a hundred percent of me, every second of every day. I’ll never let something have that big a piece of me again.”

  “Know thyself.”

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  I took in a breath and blew it out. “This is what I know. I have a career I love, but I’m beginning to realize that I need more. I like spending time with you, and I don’t want it to stop. Beyond that, I don’t know anything else.”

  He lowered his lips to mine and gave me a soft kiss. “Then that’s good enough for now.”

  “And the end of summer?”

  “I’m sure by then, we’ll have it figured out.”

  He sounded confident, which should have made me feel better, but he didn’t have all the facts. Carter thought I was dedicated to filing books and chasing down overdue fees. If he knew that the career that had such a hold on me was CIA assassin, would he be as confident of those answers? Would he even feel the same way about me at all?

  I forced a smile and we started walking, hand in hand, toward the picnic table. No matter how many times I asked myself those questions, I knew the only way to get the answer was to lay it all on the line. And that was something I couldn’t do. Not yet. And if I was being truthful with myself, I was worried about what the answers would be.

  “How’s Walter feeling?” I asked, trying to change the subject to something that wouldn’t jack my anxiety level up.

  “Stubborn and ornery as ever.”

  “In other words, fine?”

  “Exactly. My mom was over at his place when I left, cleaning his house and rearranging his pantry. He had this pained look—like he had gas and had just been shot, you know?”

  I smiled. “I’m sure he’ll survive it.”

  “I don’t know. Walter’s lived a quiet, long life without a woman interfering. He loves Mom, but every man has his limits.”

  “And those limits include rearranging a pantry?”

  “She’d just finished ironing his underwear, and she took all his beer because of the pain meds.”

  “Hmmmm. I didn’t see you hustling her out of your house.”

  “Hell, I’m not that crazy. Besides, I’m her son. There are all sorts of Southern rules about things like allowing your mother to take over your house and your life when you’ve been injured.”

  “What if you’re married?”

  “Most wives are happy to get out of the way of an injured or sick husband.”

  “Good point.” I’d spent a particularly long weekend hiding out in Turkey with Harrison, who’d broken his thumb during our mission. You would have thought he’d been placed under a steamroller for an afternoon with all that whining. If our extraction had taken any longer, I would have broken something else on him just to hear a different complaint.

  I knew Carter was stubborn about being less than a hundred percent, but I didn’t think that was necessarily a male thing. I was the same way. Admitting that I was too injured or ill to perform at full capacity was something I’d do right after I voluntarily went to a nail salon. I’d gone once, but since Harrison had been armed and instructed not to let me leave, I didn’t figure that counted.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me how I’m feeling?” he asked.

  “No. I’m afraid you’ll ask me to cook for you.”

  He laughed. “I haven’t seen a domesticated thing about you since you stepped off the bus and tossed your shoes in the bayou. The closest I’d come is asking you to pick up takeout.”

  “I could get to Francine’s and back in a second with that airboat.”

  Carter studied my face for a moment, then shook his head. “You’re really having fun with that thing, aren’t you?”

  “Of course! It skims so smoothly across the top of the bayou, it’s almost like flying. And even though I’m sure Ida Belle has a death wish, I have to admit that she knows how to handle fast engines.”

  Carter stopped and turned to face me. “I’m sorry I came off so harsh this afternoon at Stumpy’s house. I’m not trying to get in your way of a good time, or Gertie’s, for that matter. But when she flew across the bow of Walter’s boat, I thought she was a goner.”

  “You were really worried about her.” It was a little surprising and yet at the same time, it wasn’t surprising at all.

  “Yeah. She reminds me a lot of my grandma.” He smiled and we started walking again. “You would have loved her. She was a real pistol, like Ida Belle, but had that try-anything spirit like Gertie. I thought she was the greatest ever, and she’s also probably the reason my mom starting going gray in her thirties. Anyway, I went a little overboard and I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay. I think it’s sweet. And honestly, I wasn’t wild about the idea from the beginning, but if you could have seen the look on her face riding that gator down the bayou. I mean, before it set off on its death mission.”

  “I can imagine. How is she feeling?”

  “She darn near pulled her arms out of their sockets and Bengay’s second-quarter profit is going to shoot up by a mile, but she’ll be fine.”

  The words had no sooner left my mouth when I heard a whoop from a group of teens, then a boom box fired up, blasting MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This.” Ten or so teens wearing absurdly large, sparkly gold pants ran in front of the bonfire and started synchronized dancing.

  Gertie jumped up from the picnic table, clapping her hands. “It’s a flash mob. Darn it, if I’d have known, I would have brought my Hammer pants.”

  “You have some of those?” I asked.

  “You don’t?” Gertie set out toward the dancers. “I’m joining in anyway.”

  Ida Belle shook her head. “She won’t make it five seconds before her arms give out.”

  I looked at the dancers and decided five seconds was generous. They looked like they were standing on hot coals while simultaneously shooting basketball. It was rather frantic, and not all that together. Gertie ran into the middle of the mix and started flailing around.

  Carter climbed on top of the picnic table and took a seat.

  “I’ve got to get this on video.” I pulled my phone from my pocket and headed in front of the dancers, making sure I had a clear view of Gertie.

  “That woman isn’t going to be happy until she’s a YouTube fiasco,” Ida Belle said.

  “If I’d been able to record the alligator float escape, she’d already be there,” I said.

  I zoomed in a bit on Gertie as she did some hip-thrusting thing. And that’s when I noticed something white rolling through the dancers. I lowered the phone and looked at Ida Belle. “Did you use all the gas when you were starting the fire earlier?”

  “No. Only about half of the jug.”

  I zoomed in on the jug and saw brown liquid splashing around in it as it rolled. I zoomed in again, and saw another flash of white farther back. “Uh, Ida Belle, where did that kid put the other jug of gas?”

  “I don’t know. I just told him to move it.”

  “Yeah, well, I think someone moved it afterward because it’s sitting about ten feet in front of the fire, and it looks empty.”

  Ida Belle frowned. “If someone had added it to the fire, we would have noticed. The flames would have shot up to the moon. I’ll go check.”


  She worked her way around the back of the dancers and lifted the milk jug. She frowned and felt the bottom of it, then looked at the ground. When she looked back up at me, she looked panicked.

  Before I could figure out what was wrong, she rushed into the midst of the dancers and started yelling, “Everyone get away from the fire! There’s gasoline on the ground!”

  Holy crap! The jug had a leak, which meant that the ground around the bonfire was soaked with gasoline. I checked the other jug that was still rolling around among the dancers, basically a rolling explosive if that bonfire spread.

  “Gertie,” I yelled. “Grab that jug!”

  She looked confused for a moment, then looked down at her feet where I was pointing and lifted the jug. I waved my arms, gesturing for her to get the jug away from the fire, and she started trotting out of the crowd. I hurried over to the dancers, yelling at them to move, but they looked at me as though I was crazy just as they had Ida Belle.

  I grabbed the arm of the nearest dancer and pulled them out of the way. “There’s gasoline on the ground. Get away from the fire.”

  The teen’s eyes widened and she grabbed her friend and pulled her away with her. Some of the other dancers noticed others moving away and stopped dancing.

  “You guys suck!” a teen yelled and tossed a full water bottle at the group. Clearly, he wasn’t the quarterback because he overshot the group completely and the bottle landed in the bonfire. The bonfire wood, weak from burning, snapped in half and a long piece pitched forward toward the remaining dancers. Fortunately, they’d all heard the snap and turned to look, so now they all scrambled to get out of the way.

  As soon as the flaming wood hit the ground, flames shot up, snaking across the grass. Gertie took one look at the approaching flames and set off running, still clutching the other jug.

  And that’s when I realized that jug had a leak, too.

  As she ran, a steady trail of gasoline spilled out of the bottom of the jug and on the ground behind her, leading the flames away from the bonfire and straight down the slope of the park toward the street.

  “Throw it!” I yelled at Gertie.