Splendid Isolation

by Helena Maeve

  “Shame about the wine,” Cole wheezed, tucking himself back into his clothes.

  Manuel tracked his gaze to the fallen bottle. “Wasn’t that good anyway.”

  “You made me buy it.”

  “Think we’ve established I make you do bad things.” And he didn’t so much make as encourage Cole to step off the beaten path. Playing in the muck alone was lonely.

  Cheeks flushed with exertion, Cole squinted at him. “Is this the part where you fall on your sword?”

  Rather than rely on words to reply, Manuel circled the car to the passenger side and tugged open the glove compartment.

  “I see.” Cole had the good grace not to sound surprised.

  Manuel didn’t notice his revolver until he had already straightened, the Smith & Wesson in hand. Pleasure was forgotten at once.

  The lingering tenderness in his chest curdled like spoiled milk.

  “I remember, too, you know,” Cole said. “I remember how you left me in the dirt. How I had to claw my way back into the field after the investigation was over. It was very romantic, the way you blew my cover sky high. I barely got away from Macias—”

  Manuel scoffed, hefting the pistol. “Because they were too busy chasing me. Why do you think I left?”

  Cole held his gaze. “I thought you were a professional.”

  “So did I.”

  “What, then? Do we have a shootout to settle accounts?” Cole wanted to know. “You’re the better shot.”

  The salt-skin taste of his sweat still slung to Manuel’s lips. He couldn’t set it aside long enough to separate the man who’d been moaning under him a moment ago and the obstacle in his path, staring him down with gun in hand.

  “You’re the one with his finger on the trigger,” he pointed out.

  “Habit.” But Cole made no move to lower his spare revolver. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that he’d planned for every eventuality.

  “There is a third option,” Manuel offered. “We go back. No one else pays for my mistakes…”

  “No.” Cole’s throat bobbed as he swallowed.

  “You don’t have a fucking choice. You let me go, you’ll be the one answering questions on a timer tomorrow morning.”

  “I’ve done it before.”

  “I don’t want you doing it for me!”

  “Done that before, too.” Cole hefted his revolver in a lax grip. He seemed to ponder the value of firing it at Manuel’s chest, a hint of doubt in his expression that Manuel nearly—nearly—mistook for Cole changing his mind.

  He started when the revolver flew in a clean arc over the dogwood and landed somewhere in the mud and the weeds.

  Marvelous. “Wasn’t that Section property?”

  “They can bill me,” Cole shot back. A cloud dimmed the glare of the sun. “You want to be a martyr, you drive yourself back to the house. Let Kazinsky take another crack at you. Maybe, if you’re very, very lucky, you’ll die of a heart attack over the next few sessions so you don’t have to see your old South American friends again.”

  Though he had yet to flip off the safety, Manuel’s finger had found its way through the trigger guard. The thought of squeezing down fluttered through him like a particularly poisonous fantasy.

  “I shot you,” he recalled, “in Havana.”

  Cole shrugged. “I drugged you.”

  “Before or after we…”

  His glare cut that line of argument short.

  “Right,” Manuel drawled, swallowing in a dry throat. “So this is, what? Guilt? Your hare-brained idea of setting the record straight?”

  Cole held his gaze, unflinching. The wind whipped at the flaps of his gray suit jacket. “Whatever you need to tell yourself.”

  “How about the truth, for a change?”

  “Fine. I wanted Robin,” Cole rasped. “Not you. I wanted a prize. You’re just—”

  “Chopped liver?”

  “A flesh wound. And I’m sick of carrying you around with me. So go ahead. Shoot, don’t shoot… I did everything I could, but if you won’t save yourself, then there’s nothing—”

  A gunshot shattered the rural quietude.

  Manuel dropped to his knees, stomach hollowing. Oh, God. What had he done? He looked down at the gun in clutched his hand, the trigger yet to be depressed.

  Cole slammed to the ground beside him.

  “I didn’t,” Manuel started.

  “I know. Wrong angle.” Panting, Cole let his head fall back against the car. “North side. Reckon it might be a sniper.”

  “Oh. Terrific.”

  Cole made an acquiescing sound, wincing. “Help me out—” He had his jacket halfway off before Manuel registered the red flower blooming on his shirtfront.

  “Shit.”

  “Clipped me on the shoulder. I think— I think that’s all.” Cole grimaced but didn’t protest when Manuel forcibly wrestled the jacket all the way down his arm. “Your hands are shaking.”

  They were, Manuel discovered with some degree of surprise. He’d never shied from blood before. It came with the territory.

  “Been a while since I’ve had to play nursemaid,” he quipped. “Stage fright.” His voice trembled, too, as he unbuttoned Cole’s shirt and loosened his tie. “If you die on me…”

  “Don’t— Don’t be so dramatic. It’s just a scratch.”

  “Right,” Manuel huffed. The cotton shirt stuck to Cole’s shoulder when he made to pry it off.

  His whimper twisted at Manuel’s insides. There was nothing for it. He had to see.

  “This might be a good time to ring your controller and get us out of here.”

  With eyes wet and lips thinned against a pained moan, Cole shook his head. “They’ll take you back.”

  “What?”

  “They’ll take you back,” Cole repeated, knotting a hand in Manuel’s shirt. “Put pressure on it. Bleeding’ll stop.”

  Not with a bullet in there it won’t. Manuel couldn’t make out an exit wound. “You’re being awfully cavalier about this.”

  “I was a discard in Havana… How do you think I got myself to the station?”

  “By the skin of your teeth, no doubt. And I’m sure it’s a gripping tale, but I don’t want to hear it right now. Save your breath. You’ll tell me later.”

  Cole flashed him a watery grin. “Look at you…”

  “What?”

  “You love me.”

  Manuel rolled his eyes. The bullet had more than clipped Cole’s arm. It had perforated flesh, leaving a nice, pencil stub sized, sopping wound in its wake.

  “Oh good, delirium has set in already. Hush now.” You’re not a throwaway anymore. And he sure as hell wasn’t going to die in Manuel’s arms, in some forgotten meadow, the perfume of homemade jam still clinging to his clothes.

  Cole eased his mobile out of his jacket. Manuel’s chest tightened. Thank God—

  With a clean swing of his uninjured arm, Cole lobbed the device into the dogwood. “Like I said…” He grinned groggily in the face of Manuel’s disbelief. “I’m not taking you back.”

  * * * *

  “How long has it been?” Cole wondered.

  The midday sun had given way to full-blown dusk, but it was impossible to tell if minutes or hours had passed since.

  Manuel had always believed the countryside to be bright with myriad stars. Because it had been that kind of day and because luck was not on his side by any stretch of imagination, leaden clouds had settled over the fields in the evening hours, shrouding the moon and making it impossible to gauge the shooter’s position in the ensuing gloom.

  He scrubbed an icy hand over his face to banish a hunger headache. “Since we left? I don’t—”

  Cole shook his head against the car door. “Since you were in a firefight.” The hemorrhage had stopped, but his voice was becoming increasingly water-logged, blood loss slowly but steadily sapping what was left of his strength.

  Manuel fingered the trigger gauge on the Smith & Wesson. “Did some work i
n Afghanistan.”

  “For us or…” Cole glanced at him and smirked. “Ah, I thought so.”

  “I’ll refrain from pointing out that it’s your law-abiding pals that let us take off from the safe house without an escort. If you’re going to sling mud—”

  Cole folded his uninjured hand around Manuel’s knee. “No one’s slinging mud at your former allies. Just because they’re dead-set on seeing you in a shallow grave doesn’t mean they’re bad people, right?”

  “It’s a little late for moral relativism.”

  “It’s never too late to be introspective.”

  “Are you sure the bullet didn’t ricochet into your skull?”

  Cole shot him a wan smile. “So tetchy.”

  Manuel scowled. By his reckoning, he had reason to be. He checked the magazine again, as if there was the slightest chance the two bullets he’d had left a minute ago would have multiplied when he wasn’t looking. He’d been a better shot in Afghanistan. Now his hands shook as he chambered another round.

  “I wouldn’t,” Cole said, squeezing his leg.

  “Would you rather stay in the great outdoors until you develop septicemia?”

  “It’s dark and he’s camouflaged well enough that you missed him the last ten times you tried. Let’s not waste those last few rounds.” He squirmed, wincing as he got a leg under him and rested his hand against the door of the Volkswagen. “I may have an idea.”

  Manuel paled. “No.”

  “Yes.”

  He started to reach for Cole—it should have been easy to keep him down, a hundred and fifty pounds of skinny Brit, and injured to boot—but his fingers seized only air.

  Stubborn, Cole was already on his feet, bolting away from the car and into the shrubbery. One final burst of energy propelled him from the safety of their makeshift barricade and into the sniper’s line of fire.

  Manuel swore, even as twisted around and took aim over the hood of the car.

  The flash of his muzzle gave away the target across the field, at the very edge of the nearby wood. There. Shots rang out a split second before Manuel squeezed the trigger.

  Two rounds detonated in the eerie quiet of the countryside, startling a flock of pigeons from the desiccated branches of a hollowed-out birch.

  Manuel’s pistol clicked on the third round, empty. He tasted ash in his mouth.

  “Cole, you stupid son of a bitch! You all right?”

  No answer.

  “Cole!”

  The sniper fired a warning shot over the hood of the Volkswagen. It went wide, but Manuel suspected that was the point.

  It was meant as a kick in the teeth, proof that his efforts had once again yielded nothing.

  Manuel ducked, pistol still clutched weakly in one hand. Now this becomes a trench war. Unless Cole somehow made it back to civilization and returned with reinforcements, Manuel would remain pinned down, alone.

  Damn you, Cole.

  It might have been a minute or an hour before the cloud cover cleared enough for Manuel to glimpse his gray suit jacket in the dirt, discarded like second skin.

  The sleeve was dark with blood.

  Manuel’s stomach slammed into his knees.

  “Cole!”

  Pulse racing, Manuel peered into their scraggly surroundings. Was there a body at the edge of the dogwood? He squinted, but even with a thin blade of moonlight to aid him, shapes and shadows were hard to separate.

  He knew that Cole had lost a lot of blood in the ten or fifteen hours since they’d been attacked, but was it enough to stain his clothes such a vivid crimson? Did it take another bullet to get the job done?

  Manuel pressed the heels of his palms to his eyes. Keep it together. You’ve done this before. Never unarmed, granted, and never when a man he maybe cared for was bleeding to death not ten feet away.

  He forced breath into his lungs, let it out slowly.

  If bullets hadn’t perforated the hood, he might be able to back the Volkswagen out, hope for an obstacle to impede the sniper’s view. It would take hot-wiring the engine, since Cole had the keys. Nothing too difficult about that.

  Then what? He could drive to the safe house and be branded an accomplice. He could run, like Cole had wanted him to.

  Loose clumps of soft dirt trickled from beneath cat-quiet footsteps.

  Manuel stiffened, heart hammering against his ribs. Cole? No. The direction was wrong. He hefted the pistol by the barrel and prepared to use it as a club. Needs must…

  “I know you’re running on empty.” The voice was familiar, if a great deal less fond than Manuel remembered it.

  Disbelief clung as Arthur rounded the car, rifle casually slung over his shoulder.

  “You? But…”

  “Yes?”

  “You died…”

  Arthur hitched up his shoulders. “Leave enough DNA behind and forensics will believe anything.” He tilted his head. “Are you happy to die on your knees?”

  “I— What?”

  Manuel heard him the first time, but his addled brain refused to compute the information. It was still struggling to process the thought that Arthur was alive, standing in front of him. Unharmed. Then the other shoe dropped.

  Arthur was unharmed because he’d been the one to execute the attack on the Cottage.

  “Why would you do this?”

  “It’s a living,” Arthur said, as though it should have been obvious. “Nothing personal.”

  No matter how stupefied Manuel felt, the haze of disbelief faded fast.

  Arthur sighed and unslung his rifle. “If you two had been inside the house the first time, this would’ve been over so fast you wouldn’t have felt a thing…” His smile was crooked, a checkmark in someone else’s agenda. “Unfortunately, now I have to make it look like a murder-suicide, which means more work for me and a lot of pain and heartache for you. So, come on. Up you go. If you’re going to die, at least die like a—”

  Manuel groaned, his mind racing. “I’ve always hated that cliché.”

  A gunshot all but blew out his eardrums.

  Arthur let out a blood-curling scream, his right leg blown out from under him. He landed poorly, crashing into the side of the car and failing to find purchase. Another bullet shattered the hand that gripped the rifle.

  His horrified shriek was at least as loud as the report of the gun. Bullets pitted the soft dirt, forming a constellation of fatal errors.

  Cole staggered drunkenly against the other side of the Volkswagen. A tendril of blue smoke rose from the revolver clutched shakily in his fist. “Didn’t think that was going to work.”

  His legs started to give out just as Manuel struggled to his feet.

  He never hit the ground.

  Chapter Eleven

  Sedation was par for the course after Cole’s ordeal. Manuel understood that on an intellectual level. He also understood that he was supposed to be resting in his own bed, across the hall.

  The nurses had been by twice to hurry him along. The third time would probably involve restraints, burly orderlies and drugs to put him out cold.

  He didn’t move from his seat.

  The hospital room was nicer than most he’d visited. Still painted in shades of beige and white, sure, and still scented with the vaguely stomach-churning whiff of antiseptic, but there was a TV—switched off—and a window with a view of another brick wall less than fifteen feet away.

  Somehow, perhaps because Manuel had spent a few months in scenic country cottages, the confined space didn’t register as imprisonment.

  That comes later.

  Cole stirred beneath the covers.

  Manuel foisted an expectant, wary glance onto the bed, his lungs all but out of commission. You’re not dead. He should have grown used to the idea after the doctors deemed it unnecessary to hook Cole up to a heart monitor or a respirator. Despite the bone-white cast of his skin, he seemed to be holding up well in the aftermath of a foiled attempt on his life.

  Reason didn’t stop Manuel fro
m dreading the worst.

  Even when he saw Cole’s eyes flutter open, he still agonized about all that might have gone wrong. We waited too long. You’ll never regain the use of your arm. No one had actually said as much to Manuel, but the fear persisted.

  The doctors wouldn’t tell him if he asked. He was nobody.

  “Mm,” Cole purred, “you’re still here.”

  “Yeah…”

  “Didn’t they throw you out earlier? Thought I heard that.”

  Manuel rolled a shoulder. “I was hurting for company.” He didn’t dare reach out. He wasn’t family. He didn’t qualify as a friend. The things he and Cole had done back at the house and out in that field were strictly off-the-record.

  The catch in his throat when Cole smiled groggily was utterly irrelevant in the greater scheme of things.

  “Is he out of surgery yet?” Cole asked, elation dimming.

  He didn’t have to clarify who he meant. Cole’s wasn’t the only hemorrhaging body transported in haste to the nearest hospital.

  “No idea.” Bringing himself to give a damn was a still a work in progress.

  “Here’s hoping I didn’t hit anything vital…”

  “Since when did you become burdened with a respect for human life?” Manuel shot back.

  It wasn’t a summary if you hadn’t shot him, he would have killed me, but the sentiment was there, simmering steadily beneath the surface, along with his gratitude.

  Cole rolled his head against the pillow. “Your presence has a therapeutic effect. I’m starting to see the error of my ways.”

  “You’re high, aren’t you?”

  “They are pumping some first-rate drugs into me,” he admitted, grimacing as he raised his injured arm to show off the IV line. “I can tell you’re stewing in envy over there…”

  Manuel sucked his lips against the smile that threatened to surface. “You know, I think I like this version of you better than the hardass schoolmaster routine.”

  “Do you really?”

  The door swung open before Manuel could reply. The will to do so vanished by the same token.

  Chelsea stalked into the room.