Operation Homecoming

by Justine Davis

  Chapter 11

  For a moment, Walker stayed where he was. His emotions had been in overdrive since the moment he’d arrived—if they hadn’t, he wouldn’t have slipped up like that—and he needed a moment to process.

  He’d known he wouldn’t be welcome anywhere here, and he’d come anyway. Because somewhere, deep down, he’d known he had to make peace with this, his old life, before he could move on. He hadn’t come here expecting a miracle, which was what forgiveness would be. He’d given up on those long ago. But if he didn’t at least try, it would hang over him for the rest of his life. And that life was going to be miserable enough without adding that to it.

  And once more it went to war inside him, the certainty that he’d done the right thing versus what it had cost him.

  I wonder how Cabrero and the other guys who do it for a living survive?

  He fought down the old wish. It was useless, wishing he had never gotten sucked up into it. He had been; he’d been the wrong person in the right place at the right time. And he believed—he had to believe—Cabrero when he said lives had been saved thanks to him. Lots of them. Because that was the only way he could live with essentially the loss of his own.

  Determined to shake himself out of pointless rumination, he followed Amy back inside.

  “...the only outgo.”

  The voice was coming from a young man whose image was on the flat screen on the wall over the fireplace.

  “Hold on for a second, Ty,” Quinn said, apparently instantly aware he’d come in. He looked at Amy. “Want him out?” Quinn sounded as if he’d relish making that happen.

  She barely flicked Walker a glance. “He’s irrelevant.”

  Quinn turned back to the business at hand, obviously taking her at her word. He was indeed irrelevant. She hadn’t just grown teeth, she’d grown fangs, Walker thought with an inward grimace.

  “So every transfer into that offshore account was for just under ten thousand?” Quinn asked.

  “Exactly,” the guy with the spiky hair and small patch of beard under his lip said. “Just enough to avoid the reporting requirement.” His brows rose exaggeratedly. “Screams shaky, don’t it?”

  “Structured deposits do,” Quinn agreed. “Do we know yet who the principal on that fictitious business is?”

  “Still tunneling on that.” The young man shifted his gaze, and even through the monitor Walker saw the appreciation in his expression as he looked at Amy, who was sitting on the couch next to Hayley, watching the screen intently. “Going in cloaked takes a bit longer,” the young man explained to her. “But you’ll never be connected to it.”

  Instincts Walker had never had when he’d last been home were firing. He’d learned that, too, how to put small pieces together, and how eventually, if you survived long enough, the small pieces made the big picture. And sometimes those pictures were horrible, even bloody, mosaics.

  He didn’t like these pieces.

  Amy had a problem.

  It apparently involved her boss.

  And a bank account he’d set up to make payments to a fictitious company.

  An offshore bank account.

  And Amy didn’t want to be connected to Foxworth’s digging.

  No, he didn’t like the sound of it. He’d seen too much of life’s dark side now to shrug this off as nothing.

  He took advantage of her being focused on the monitor to study her for a moment. Hayley had gone from cute to pretty to beautiful, but Amy had started out on an entirely different playing field. And not just in looks but in temperament and background. Which made the transformation all the more amazing. He wondered if that shy little girl was still in there somewhere, if you ever really got over the scars of being an odd one out as a child.

  He was so lost in his thoughts he was almost startled when the screen went dark.

  “He’ll find whoever’s behind that fake name,” Quinn was saying to Amy. “Then we’ll have a better idea of what we’re dealing with.”

  Amy looked troubled. “But you think there is something?”

  “There could be an innocent explanation. But it is suspicious.”

  “And then some,” Walker said. “That would take a lot of explaining.”

  Amy glanced at him, and to his surprise there was no anger in her expression. He doubted she’d changed her mind about him, but at least the active dislike had ebbed. Or maybe this was just more important to her.

  “Enough to keep going?” she asked Quinn.

  Quinn didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

  “Unless you want to stop,” Hayley put in. “It’s still up to you. We pull the plug anytime you say so.”

  Amy shook her head. “What next?”

  “We see what else Ty turns up,” Quinn said.

  “And keep Amy out of it, right?” Walker asked. “If this is what it looks like, it could get ugly.”

  Quinn raised an eyebrow at him. “Without saying.”

  “Good.”

  He glanced at Amy to find her staring at him. Was she really so surprised that her safety was a concern to him? Or had she just not thought of herself being in danger as a result of what she’d discovered? Either way, she’d best take it seriously.

  Or maybe he would.

  “Ugly?” she said after a moment.

  “Wherever that kind of money is getting tossed around, there’s always the potential,” Walker said.

  “He’s not wrong,” Quinn said, studying his brother-in-law with renewed interest.

  If you only knew, Walker thought.

  “Maybe I can help,” he suggested.

  Quinn made a sound that sounded like he was suppressing a snort. “I wouldn’t hire you as janitor.”

  Walker looked at him, forcing his face to show no emotion, but his voice was full of a bleakness even he could hear when he said quietly, “Too bad. From you, that’s a job I might take.”

  Quinn drew back slightly, studying him yet again. But after a moment he said only, “I’m thinking we may fire up Wilbur and head south.”

  Amy blinked. “Wilbur?”

  Hayley grinned. “His precious airplane. Liam named it.”

  Amy laughed.

  “It gets worse,” Quinn said glumly. “He named the helicopter Igor.”

  “Wright and...Sikorsky?” Walker guessed.

  “Exactly,” Hayley said. The smile she gave him was still a bit impersonal, but he’d take it gratefully.

  Amy was still laughing. It was a great sound; he liked it. He liked it too much. “He makes a habit of naming things, I gather?”

  Yes, she sounded altogether too amused, Walker thought.

  “That cute Texas boy...”

  Well, why shouldn’t she be amused? And attracted, if it came to that. The guy was a bit young, but what did that matter? He realized he had assumed, since she wore no ring, that she wasn’t married, but that wasn’t always a certainty. And she could be with somebody, even if they hadn’t tied the knot yet.

  He was glad no one was looking at him. He was sure his shock at the odd sensation of being punched again, this time in the stomach, must show. He looked at her again. She was still smiling, and it nearly took his breath away.

  He shook it off. Or tried to. It took him a moment of staring out the window. Somehow picturing the wedding ceremony he’d missed steadied him. That was the wedding he should be thinking about. He had too much to atone for here to let...whatever this was get in the way.

  “...hate to make you go all the way to LA on some skimpy information,” Amy was saying when he tuned back in.

  Hayley glanced at Quinn. “It will give him a chance to break out his second favorite toy.”

  “The plane is second?” Amy asked.

  “First is the helicopter,” Quinn sa
id with a look at his wife that seemed to heat the air in the room a couple of degrees. “Funny, it used to be the other way around.”

  It didn’t take much of a jump to connect that look to the story she’d told on the way here, that the helicopter had been how they’d met.

  “Some things change,” Hayley said quietly, looking back at Quinn with that same heat. It was a little disconcerting to see his little sister look at a man like that, but it told him a great deal.

  “And some things,” Quinn replied just as quietly, “never, ever change.”

  It was no sappy declaration of love with flowery words, but it was the most intense affirmation he’d ever seen.

  He heard a tiny sigh and looked at Amy. She was also watching Quinn and Hayley. She was wearing a different smile, a smile of happiness for her friend, but touched with what looked like a bit of wistfulness. But not a trace of envy, he noted. Amy loved Hayley too much for that, and there wasn’t a jealous bone in her; he was sure of that.

  Of course, not so long ago he would have said he was sure she never got spitting mad, either. Or outspoken. Or would have had the nerve to confront someone the way she had him. So clearly he needed to reassess his assumptions about Amy Clark. Especially the ones that had kept her, in his mind, in the category of his sister’s shy, studious, quiet, carrot-topped best friend.

  “...can do some other things down there, too,” Quinn was saying, and Walker realized he’d tuned out again. Crazy, since not so long ago doing that could have gotten him killed. “Charlie finally settled on a location for the southwest office. I should check it out.”

  “You’re moving?” Walker asked, startled. He hadn’t thought Hayley would ever leave her beloved Northwest.

  Quinn looked at him. His gaze wasn’t warm, but it wasn’t quite as contemptuous as it had been, either. “No,” he said after a moment. “Just opening a new branch.”

  “The fifth,” Hayley added proudly. “We’ll have one in every region in the country when it’s done and staffed.”

  Walker stared. Hayley had said they were headquartered in Saint Louis, and that’s where Charlie and Tyler were, but he’d had no idea Foxworth was that big. “And they all do the same thing?”

  “Yes.” Quinn obviously didn’t feel the need to expand.

  “How you’d end up in this one?”

  Quinn flicked another glance at Hayley and smiled that smile again. “More luck than I deserved.”

  “After the Middle East,” Hayley said, apparently more willing to explain, “I think he wanted the coolest, greenest place he could find. And Alaska was a bit too far from everything. Thankfully,” she added as she returned that smile to her husband. If nothing else, Walker thought, he could rest easy on that count. His little sister would be well taken care of. And about time, since he surely hadn’t been doing it.

  No choice, no choice, no choice...

  The old mantra that had somehow gotten him through echoed in his mind. But sometimes, no matter how often he told himself he’d done the right thing, he couldn’t quite make himself believe it. Couldn’t stop that other part of his brain from pointing out that the right choice was to take care of your own, and leave the big-picture stuff to those trained for that kind of thing. People like Cabrero.

  Or Quinn Foxworth. Because he had no doubt his new brother-in-law was one of those. There was something about his assessing look, something even more obvious when he was focused on something distant, that he was seeing much, much more than what was immediately in view.

  And if it had been the other way around, if Quinn had happened into the mess Walker had stumbled onto, he would have made the same choice. Walker was sure of that, too. Oh, he would have done it much better, no doubt, and could have skipped the intensive training because he’d already had it, but he would have done it.

  Of course, he never would have ended up in the same position, at least not as he looked now. He was too obviously a straight arrow. None of the brothers would have let him get anywhere close, whereas Walker looked like just the kind of footloose, rootless guy who fit right in. The kind they looked for, to use and discard. Which was what had landed him in that mess to begin with.

  Quinn was looking at him again, with that faintly curious expression. He’d come here hoping to regain at least some piece of the old loving relationship with his sister. But now he realized he wanted something else, too. He would like very much to have this man’s respect, and for more than just taking a punch. And he knew instinctively that if Quinn knew the truth, he might just get that respect.

  And he’d get that right after Hayley forgave him. Meaning never.

  Chapter 12

  “I wish you could have known the old Walker,” Amy said.

  Quinn, who had just called someone about readying the airplane, put his phone back in his pocket and leaned against the island of the small kitchen, where he’d gone to top off his coffee. He gestured at her mug with the pot, but she shook her head. She was already wound up enough; she didn’t need to pour the fuel of too much caffeine on top of it.

  “Their dad dying really devastated them all. But especially Walker.”

  “And you, too,” Quinn said softly. She gave him a startled look. “Don’t worry, she didn’t tell me anything. She wouldn’t. But it wasn’t hard to guess he was the father you wished you’d had.”

  “He was,” she agreed. “If it wasn’t for him, I might have grown up thinking all men were like my father.” She clasped her hands around the fading warmth of the mug she held. “And I thought Walker was just like him. He was just like him, until it happened. And then he just...left.”

  “Hayley said he walked away from a baseball scholarship, that he’d been good enough he had a shot at turning pro.”

  Amy nodded. “And he loved it. Or I thought he did. But the minute he graduated high school he took off. Said he couldn’t stay here another minute.” She grimaced; the coffee had just crossed the line into too cool to enjoy. She set the mug down. “We never knew where he’d call from next.”

  “But he did call.”

  “Yes. Regularly, at first. And came back to see Hayley every year on her birthday, and the occasional holiday. But then he stopped. Stopped even calling. Started just texting. Right when Hayley needed him most, when their mom was diagnosed.”

  “He abandoned you, too.”

  She waved a hand as if brushing away a persistent gnat. “I was just a silly schoolgirl with a crush. Which died pretty darn quick when I saw how much Hayley was hurting. What good reason could make up for that?”

  Quinn frowned. “Good reason?”

  She lifted a shoulder in a rather dismissive half shrug. “He insists there is one. But that he can’t tell us what it was.”

  “Can’t? Or won’t?”

  “Good question,” Amy said. Quinn looked thoughtful, as if he were pondering possibilities.

  She knew the feeling.

  * * *

  “She’s...changed.”

  To Walker that seemed safe enough, since it was undeniably true. Amy had changed. A lot.

  “Only on the outside.” Hayley watched Cutter as he investigated the large field across from the bench overlooking the sound. The leash she carried was more for anyone else they came across, she’d said. He was a perfect gentleman and utterly reliable, but he wasn’t small; he was very intense, and some people got nervous.

  “She’s changed at least a little on the inside.” His mouth quirked. “She used to like me.”

  “She used to adore you,” Hayley corrected. “And she was heartbroken when you left.”

  He shifted uncomfortably on the bench. They’d walked down here after they’d found themselves up and looking for coffee early on this Sunday morning. He’d half expected Quinn to stop them, but at a look from Hayley he’d backed off. Walker was thankfu
l for that. Now that she seemed willing, he’d wanted to talk to her away from the house and the chance of interruption by Quinn or Amy. Especially Amy.

  “She was thirteen,” he said.

  “And no one can get more heartbroken than a thirteen-year-old girl over her first crush.”

  He sighed. “I never knew it was that bad.”

  “What did you expect? You were her hero, after you got the mean girls to leave her alone.” Hayley looked away. “And I was so proud of my big brother.”

  She said it so regretfully his stomach knotted up. “But you’re not anymore.”

  To her credit, he thought, she didn’t say, “What’s to be proud of?”

  “I just don’t understand you anymore,” she said instead.

  “Neither do I,” he muttered.

  She looked at him then. Studied him for a moment. Cutter, as if sensing her mood, abandoned whatever it was he’d been sniffing at in the field and came back to them. She reached out and scratched behind his right ear as she said, “You could just explain. But you won’t.”

  “Or can’t.”

  “That’s a rather minute difference.”

  “It’s the difference between choice, and none.”

  This time she turned to look him straight on. “Do you remember Dad’s funeral?”

  “I remember every second of that day.” The ceremony, the long parade of vehicles and police motorcycles, the mournful bagpipes—he remembered it all.

  “Do you remember what Captain Malone said to you?”

  Like acid etched it into my brain. “‘See to your mother and sister, boy. It’s your job now.’”

  “And you swore you would.”

  “I know.”

  “You were there for my high school graduation. Then college. Mom’s fiftieth birthday. And I always knew if I needed you for something else, you’d come home. Because you loved me.”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened, Walker? Why did it change?”

  “It didn’t.”

  “But you didn’t come.”

  And there they were again. The question she had every right to ask and get that honest answer. Every right.