Shameless (The Contemporary Collection)

by Blake, Jennifer

  “Long distance?”

  “There's no such thing as distance when you're working with computer signals.”

  “You are joking — aren't you?”

  Michelle gave a brief shake of her head. “Deadly serious. It seems to pay these days, with all the burglaries and drug-related crimes, not to mention the people who might like to pick Charles's brain for his specialized knowledge — or Reid's, for that matter. It's just another alarm system, really, one a little more innovative than most.”

  Cammie had to admit it made sense. She said, “I hope Charles won't get into trouble over this computer search. I'd feel terrible.”

  “There's no special risk, though Charles wouldn't do it for just anybody. On the other hand, he and Reid are far too used to covert operations, acting just that tiny bit above and beyond the law, to let it worry them too much.”

  “They seem to be enjoying the whole thing,” Cammie commented.

  “No doubt they are. They have the same kind of minds — meticulous, but free-ranging. It's a shame Louisiana is so far away,” Michelle went on as she leaned back in the overstuffed couch, tucking her feet under her. “Charles has missed Reid; there aren't many people he can talk to about what he does, even fewer who would understand it.”

  It was unsettling, to catch this glimpse of the life Reid had been living while away from Greenley. She said in tentative tones, “Perhaps he'll move closer, if the sale of the mill goes through.”

  Michelle gave a quick shake of her head. “I doubt that; he seems content where he is. Charles would be ecstatic, of course. They go back a long way together. Reid saved Charles's life once, you know.”

  “He didn't mention it.”

  “I'm not surprised; he claims it was just one of those things men do in a fight. It was during a border clash, one of the daily PLO skirmishes that took place in Israel in the months before the Gulf War. Charles and Reid were working in a makeshift communications headquarters. The place was blown up by a bomb preset in a car parked outside. Four of the Israelis were killed outright, another had a concussion. Charles was trapped with a roof beam across his back and a bone smashed in his leg. Reid was bleeding from a half-dozen places, some of them inside. Then the place was attacked. Charles and Reid and the other man were surrounded for hours by the Palestinian infiltrators. Reid was the only one able to put up much of a defense, yet the Palestinians were down to four men from a total of sixteen by the time help arrived, or so I gather. I've never heard the full tale — deliberately, I think.”

  Her voice stifled, Cammie said, “Reid can, apparently, be very — lethal.”

  A quizzical expression touched the other woman's face. “He's also the most gentle man I've ever seen. It's a puzzle. I've often wondered if it has something to do with being from the South.”

  “The legendary southern gentleman?” Cammie said wryly. “I don't think so.”

  “It's personal to him, then; I might have known. He is more totally himself, more secure inside himself, than anyone I've ever met. He's so strong that he has apparently never wanted or required much in the way of emotional defenses. That makes what happened in Israel just before he left the Company so much more terrible for him than—”

  The other woman broke off as the sound of a crying baby came from the room where little Reina had been put to bed. “Be back in a second,” she said, and uncoiled from the couch to vanish into the nursery room.

  She came back a few minutes later with the fretful baby on her hip. Michelle tried to soothe her, offering bottle and pacifier, joggling her on her knee, rubbing her back, offering toys and nibbles. Nothing seemed to help.

  Charles came out of his absorption and turned his head to watch them across the room. After a moment he called, “How about bringing her to me?”

  The flash of relief on Michelle's face was instant. She carried the baby to her husband, passing her over. The baby quieted instantly.

  Michelle looked disgusted as she rejoined Cammie. “That kid is a man's baby. No surprise, I suppose, since Charles took care of her during the day, from the time I went back to work until she was six months old.”

  Cammie smiled, watching the bearded man return to his work, shifting the baby expertly to his shoulder while he pressed computer keys in a swift, one-handed hunt-and-peck rhythm. Beside him, Reid's gaze rested on the child before he looked away. He shifted his chair to give Charles more space.

  Charles glanced at Reid with a considering look in his dark eyes and a tilt to his mouth behind his beard. His gaze steadied. Abruptly, he lifted the contented, thumb-sucking child and pressed her into Reid's arms.

  Reid stiffened. His eyes were suffused with the same unbearable anguish Cammie had seen once before. An instant later they turned blank, and a harsh, inarticulate sound of protest sounded in his throat. Charles did not relent, but met his friend's gaze with fixed regard while he held the sleepy child's head against Reid's shoulder. Slowly, carefully, the baby's father removed his hold.

  Beside Cammie, Michelle sat forward in alarm. Her sharp-drawn breath made a hissing sound in the tense quiet.

  Reid brought up one hand with a jerk to catch the baby before she could fall. Then slowly, as if against his will, he raised the other and settled it gently upon the small, narrow back. The baby sighed, relaxing against the firm muscles, turning her face into the curve of his neck.

  Reid closed his eyes while he drew a deep and difficult breath. He moistened his lips as if they were dry. His gaze, when his lashes lifted again, was without focus, with a clear shimmer between the lids.

  “Oh, God,” Michelle said, sagging back against the couch.

  “What is it?” Cammie said in perplexity, even as she recognized the draining away of her own near unbearable anxiety.

  “Coffee,” Michelle said abruptly as she straightened and sprang to her feet. “I'll make some for us. And there's cheese cake if you'll help put it on plates, Cammie.”

  Cammie knew an excuse when she heard one. She followed the other woman from the living room into the kitchen. It was no surprise to see Michelle lean against the cabinet, clasping her arms around her upper body as if to still the visible shiver that shook her.

  Her voice sharp, Cammie exclaimed, “Surely you didn't expect Reid to hurt your baby.”

  “No, no; it was just so — so miraculous, I can't stand it,” Michelle said with an unsteady smile.

  Cammie stared at her for a taut second. “What is it? What really happened in there?”

  “For just a second, I half-expected to see Reid pitch my baby daughter back at Charles like a ticking time bomb. He was here in New York just after she was born, you know. When he came to visit, I made the mistake of giving her to him to hold. I thought he was going to faint; he turned whiter than her undershirt. I didn't know then, Charles hadn't warned me.”

  “About what? I realize there's something, just — not the details.”

  Michelle's gaze held hers for a long moment before she looked away. “If Reid hasn't told you, I don't think I should. You'll have to ask him.”

  “And if he won't talk about it, what then?” As there was no relenting in Michelle's expression, Cammie added in urgent tones, “Please. I have to know.”

  The other woman furrowed her brow in thought as she turned toward the refrigerator and took out a cheese cake, then set dessert plates beside it. Moving to the coffee maker on the cabinet, she pulled it forward and filled it with water, then reached for a sack of gourmet coffee and an electric coffee mill. The smell of the fresh-ground beans rose in the room as the beans were added and the mill did its noisy work. The other woman dumped the coffee into the maker and turned it on.

  Finally, she turned back to Cammie. “I may regret it, but…” She shrugged. “It's just that he — well, this thing with children has nearly driven him to the edge. It was the reason he quit working with covert operations, the main reason he went home and buried himself in the woods down South the minute he had an excuse. He — He killed a little
girl, you see.”

  Cammie put the knife she had picked up to cut the cheese cake down again. Disbelief shuddered through her, leaving blank distress in her mind. “No,” she said in low tones. “No, I don't see it at all.”

  “It was in a little settlement in the Golan Heights. Reid was working with the Israeli elite forces as an adviser, commanding a task force of a dozen men. It was their job to prevent PLO infiltration and to keep the town quiet. There had been rioting among the Palestinians in the area, but things had stabilized. The task force spent their days with routine patrols, readiness drills, jawboning local leaders. There was also a lot of free time. Headquarters was in the middle of the town, near the market. There was a couple of Palestinian families living down the street. One of their little girls, hardly more than five or six, played around the front door, hung around most of the day. Everyone made a pet of her, especially Reid. They gave her candy and gum, made toys for her, taught her a little Hebrew, a little English.”

  Cammie put a hand to her lips in the beginning of pain and distress as she saw where the story was leading. She could picture it all so well, too well.

  “You may know something of the Israeli-Palestinian problem,” Michelle went on, her voice weighted with weariness, “the endless, bloody fighting over a narrow strip of sandy land, the deep hatred that has been festering now for generations, the violence of the intifada. You may have heard or read, too, about how little human life counts for in the Middle East, especially female lives.”

  “That little girl—” Cammie said with difficulty.

  “Her father had been a leader in the intifada, and was killed in an uprising. The girl, her baby brother, and her mother were living with the father's brother. This man, the girl's uncle, was fanatic about the movement. Fight to the death, no sacrifice too great, that kind of extremism. He had sent the girl, of course.”

  “You mean…”

  Michelle stared straight ahead, her gaze bleak. “When the task force became used to seeing her playing around them, when they took her in among them, then she was sent one last time. She was sent with explosives wired for detonation and strapped with heavy tape to her chest.”

  “No,” Cammie said, shaking her head in dread.

  Michelle nodded in slow acknowledgment. “She walked into headquarters bright and early one morning, bringing a bowl of fruit. Reid discovered the trick when he reached to give her a quick hug of thanks. He knew what it meant, knew he had seconds to act. The choice was never between her life and his, there was not a shred of hope of saving her; you have to understand that. All he could do was get her away from his men, to save them. That was his duty, his responsibility. He caught her, slung her away from them out into the street. And he told Charles it was the terror in her eyes, and the knowledge of what had been done to her, that haunts him. That and her terrible understanding.”

  It was long moments before Cammie could speak past the thickness in her throat. “Her uncle killed her, not Reid.”

  “Yes. But to Reid, it seems he should have known what would happen, should have seen it coming and prevented it. Or, failing that, should have held the child as she died.”

  Reid's pain became Cammie's. It burrowed inward, a consummate horror complete with blood-red images seared into her imagination as they must be burned into his mind. She understood the darkness she'd seen in his eyes on that night at the Fort when she had accused him of abusing children. She could see how a young girl bearing food at the reunion, looking up at him with a sweet and grateful smile, had caused him to instantly recoil. She recognized the wellspring of the aching tenderness of his touch. And acid tears pooled in her eyes, shimmering with the hard thud of her heart.

  “Don't do that, or you'll have me blubbering,” Michelle said. She turned sharply and ripped off a paper towel, handing it to Cammie before taking one for herself.

  Cammie couldn't let Reid know that she knew, not here, not now. She blew her nose and drew a ragged breath. She tried to close off thought as Reid had shown her, and wondered if this was how he'd learned that difficult lesson. She wondered, too, if it always worked for him.

  “Anyway,” Michelle said unsteadily, “it looks like Reid is beginning to get over it, finally, since he actually held little Reina just now.” The other woman slanted a glance both watery and teasing at Cammie. “Could be finding a big girl to hold first helped.”

  Cammie tried a smile, not very successfully. “I doubt that was ever a problem.”

  “Reid was not very susceptible that way, at least according to Charles. There was some woman a long time ago who hurt him. I don't think she turned him into a basket case or a monk, but she gave him a certain immunity.”

  She was discovering a great deal more about Reid, Cammie thought, than she wanted to know. Turning from Michelle, she gave her concentration to serving cheese cake.

  The two men were watching the computer screen and talking in barely audible voices when Cammie and Michelle returned to the living room. The baby was asleep, lying as boneless as a rag doll against Reid's shoulder, supported by one large hand. The softness in his face as he turned toward them was nearly enough to cause the return of tears.

  “Come look at this,” Charles called. “I think we won the lottery.”

  He had, through methods best ignored, tapped into the FBI's Organized Crime Squad records for the southeastern part of the country, including New Orleans. He had worked with the FBI on O.C. before, and so had a good idea where to find what Reid wanted. It was not as simple as looking through the activities of the local Mafia family, however.

  “What you have to understand,” Charles explained, “is that, as with most things in New Orleans, organized crime is different there.”

  Cammie gave a nod of understanding. Her smile rueful, she said, “I once heard someone quip that if crime was organized in the state of Louisiana, it's the only thing that is.”

  “That about sums it up,” Charles agreed with a smile in his voice. “The Marcello family is the oldest Mafia family in the United States. Carlos Marcello, the don famous for his quasi-connection to the Kennedy assassination, is dead now, but things muddle along pretty much as usual. The Marcello version of La Cosa Nostra, as they prefer to call themselves, is relaxed compared to the families of the Northeast. They have their blood rituals and oaths and loyalties, but they don't pretend to control all the crime in New Orleans; there's plenty for everybody so long as newcomers don't step on obvious toes. Also, there's no rigid hierarchy of captains and soldiers. Feuds and fighting for territory aren't the Marcello style, nor is creating mayhem in restaurants or littering the streets with dead bodies. If someone absolutely has to be disposed of, it's done quietly, with a decent funeral, or else the corpse gets recycled in the alligator swamps.”

  The fluid nature of the crime family alliance, he went on, made it more difficult to keep track of, much less to crack. The FBI had been keeping a close eye on the situation, however, as Reid had indicated, since gambling became legal within the state.

  Keith Hutton's name appeared on a list of high rollers whose debts had been turned over to a collection agency operated by a minor Bossier City-Shreveport branch of La Cosa Nostra. He was down for a figure in excess of a quarter of a million.

  Reid reached out, being careful not to disturb the sleeping baby on his shoulder, to tap the figure beside the blinking cursor on the computer screen. “I'd say reneging on that kind of money would be enough to earn him a quiet ride out of town, enough for a professional hit by way of example.”

  “You were right, then,” Cammie said, and placed her fingers on his free shoulder, because she wanted so badly to touch him at that moment.

  “Only there's no proof,” he answered, “nothing to place the strong-arm boys in the neighborhood, nothing to show that anybody expected them to be there.”

  “You didn't really think it would be that easy?” she said.

  He smiled, though his gaze did not quite meet hers. “Maybe not. But it would have b
een nice.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “That is, of course, the question,” he said quietly.

  There was nothing else to be discovered in New York, and no point in staying any longer. At the airport as they waited to leave, there rose inside Cammie a wild impulse to hop the first flight to Paris, or to Venice — anywhere else in the wide world except home. It had to be suppressed. Running away, no matter how seductive it might appear, would not help. They caught their plane.

  The things Michelle had told her lingered in her mind. She wanted to speak to Reid about them, but there seemed no good time, no natural way to introduce them. She didn't want him to think she pitied him, and was loath to have him know she and Michelle had discussed him behind his back. In any case, she wasn't sure she could talk about the incident with the little girl without crying.

  As she sat listening to the drone of the plane, feeling its vibration, she thought of the woman who might have hurt Reid. Was it possible she was the one? It pained her to think so. She could not imagine failing to return his love if he ever decided to give it. He had so much to offer a woman.

  I am nothing if not constant.

  He had said those words to her not so long ago. She wondered just what he'd meant by them, how far into the past they extended. She would give a lot to know.

  He was so protective, so concerned for her. No woman could ask for a more careful or considerate lover. How much did that stand for, if it stood for anything?

  She loved him. She had suspected it for days, but had known beyond a doubt as she watched him hold Michelle's baby so carefully in his strong hands.

  It was strange to admit it, perhaps, when she had thought him capable of murder. The heart wasn't logical, of course, or particularly bright. It could be swayed by a glance, a smile, a single word. It had few principles, less sense.

  Chimes sounded. The stewardess came over the intercom, announcing the approach into their home airport at Monroe. Cammie checked her seat belt. It was a small airport with a short runway and an approach through the turbulent air currents over the Ouachita River. Landing was always steep, bumpy, and a bit hairy. She reached to slip her hand into Reid's. He turned his head, his eyes warm, steady, reassuring.