by Fiona Quinn
“Have you heard from Randy and Axel? How is Pablo?” I asked.
“His fever was down this morning,” Striker said. “They have him scheduled for surgery in two weeks. That is, if everything continues to stay on track.”
“Thank you, you have no idea what this means to me. Amazing. Just amazing that I’m here. It’s so good to see your faces.” I felt like Dorothy, waking up from the head injury that sent her to Oz, and here around me were my old friends. No, probably a bad analogy. My guys had heart, courage and brains to spare. No need to go on a silly quest for proof.
“And Maria – any idea where she is right now?”
“Striker told you we have Maria Rodriguez in custody,” Blaze said.
My mind stumbled around for the information. “Yes, I think I remember him saying she had been arrested.” How did that happen? And so quickly? Before the storm, she had been at the prison. “Wait. Start at the very beginning,” I pleaded. Everyone looked over at Gater, our team’s storyteller.
“Ma’am, I guess you’re more likely to remember everything that happened until Maria kidnapped you. When they had you manacled and carried you out of the house.” Gater rubbed his hand over his buzz cut blond hair. “The ambulance arrived, and they treated me. Tammy was clutching baby Ruby with a death hold, just a shaking and a sobbing. The paramedics had to wrestle Ruby from Tammy’s grip to check on her. Ruby was fine though. Her being in danger turned out to be a farce Maria used as a lure. The team came in right behind the ambulance.”
Gater stopped to clear his throat. He moved his hands from my feet to cross them over his chest, making his biceps bulge under his compression shirt. He was leaning his hips against my footboard. I wanted him to shift back. I wanted to feel him touching me, again, reminding me this was real and not one of my prison daydreams.
“Tammy didn’t have the make of her Aunt Maria’s vehicle, nor nothing that would help us find you,” Gater continued. “Your neighbor, Manny, saw a red van leaving, but he hadn’t noticed the license plate. Even when we had him hypnotized, he wasn’t able to tell it. So that got us nowhere. We put Tammy in to Iniquus Witness Protection and started looking for Maria.”
Striker stood up as the door opened. Silence dropped over our group as a nurse bustled around my monitors. She checked my IV line. “This young lady needs to be kept quiet. I know you need to debrief her, but you have to be careful that she’s kept calm. She’s still listed as critical.” The nurse’s voice was no-nonsense with a hint of dictatorial.
“Yes, ma’am,” Striker said.
I heard the door click.
“Chica, at first it seemed you disappeared into thin air like one of your magic tricks.” Striker put his hand on the bed and leaned in so we were face to face. “We were pretty much slamming our heads into a wall for the first month of your captivity.” Striker’s lips were dry and tight, and the muscle under his right eye twitched. Except for these tells, I would think Striker was reading a grocery list; he was so damned controlled and even. “Our first clue came in when we got the video of you with the Mexican paper. But again, all this told us was that they had you, and you were alive. We didn’t trust the Mexican paper, because it was too obvious.”
Striker sat down on my bed again, and was absentmindedly drawing circles on the palm of my hand. This time, it felt good. I needed the distraction to help me deal with my pain. I didn’t want to call for meds yet. I wanted my brain functioning.
“We found the file you were working on,” Striker said. “I’m not sure how you figured out that Consuela Hervas was really Maria Rodriguez, or that she had married Julio Rodriguez. Your brain, Lynx, always astonishes me. We also saw that you made the connection between Julio Rodriguez and the Marcos Sylanos case. We thought that would have been a good direction to take – only, Sylanos is dead.”
“How is he dead?” I asked.
“Killed accidentally when one of his security guards’ guns went off. That was two weeks prior to your kidnapping. So we didn’t go in that direction. We were sure this wasn’t Sylanos’ doing,” Striker said. “Are you okay?”
I had squinched my eyes tight. I wanted to hear this. I didn’t want the pain that shot across my chest to stop Striker from telling me their side of my story. I forced my eyes back open. “I’m hanging in. Keep going, Striker.”
“We saw how you had found Julio down in the Florida prison. We checked the tapes and visitor records, and found out that Maria went to see Julio every Sunday. We staked out the prison and watched for her. Sure enough, she showed, right on schedule. We put her under surveillance, hoping she’d lead us to you. We knew we could arrest her at any point, because we had her niece Tammy’s statements along with Gater’s.”
“You didn’t arrest Maria for interrogation?” I bit my lower lip and tasted blood. I heard water running. Blaze came over with a damp cloth and wiped my face. He slid an ice chip into my mouth. Sucking on the ice gave me a moment’s relief from the fire burning in my throat. I listened to Striker.
“Once we got the ransom letter about doing a prisoner exchange — you for Julio — Maria couldn’t go see her husband any more. Now that Julio’s name was involved, we would obviously be watching him. Axel and Randy were doing the stakeout. But by the time we got the arrest warrant in hand, she had slipped through our fingers.”
“To go collect my fingers in Honduras.”
There was a long silence.
“How did you arrest her?” I asked.
“Axel and Randy took her into custody in the village south of your prison. She was sedated and brought in on the same plane as Pablo and his family.”
“Okay, now that Maria is in custody, Julio is still in jail, and Sylanos is dead, Command still thinks that that I’m in enough danger that I need a whole team for protection, because Omega is out in the desert looking for me as we speak?”
Striker’s eyes were as hard and sharp as broken glass. “Doesn’t think. Knows.”
Five
“Where’s Deep?” I asked. He was my only teammate left unaccounted.
“He’s in the bunks, ma’am,” Gater said. “He was out on search duty yesterday, and then he stood watch with you last night.” Gater’s accent was as smooth as Zydeco music and the aroma of a midnight bonfire.
“Yesterday? That makes no sense at all. You guys had already found me yesterday; hadn’t you?” My energy was flagging. I needed to get some sleep; I should cut this first homecoming debrief short. But that need vied with my desperation to understand what was happening.
“We have an ongoing search going as cover for your being found.” I couldn’t see Jack, but his voice was somewhere to my left, outside of my peripheral view. “Two days after your 911, we changed your classification from missing person to recovery.” He had taken a step closer, and now I could catch glimpse of his jet-black hair and one of his husky-blue eyes. “We hadn’t given up on you, knowing your resourcefulness. We were hoping you had plenty of food and water with you, but we also needed to get Omega off the trail and keep you a little safer.”
“They could still find my plane and see there’s no corpse.” My hands and feet went numb, and my lips started to buzz. That couldn’t be good. I focused back on Gater at the end of my bed to try to still the whirlpool.
“After we found you, Deep and Jack stayed back to bury your fires,” Gater said. “And to put the plane under a camo tarp.”
“Now what?” I said, not really sure what information I was asking for, but wanting them to keep feeding me news.
“Tomorrow, Lackland is going to officially call off your search. They’re going to say a public prayer for your soul in the mess hall. Surely that’ll get out to Omega,” Striker explained.
I let my gaze drift from face to face. “I feel incredibly vulnerable in this traction device. Am I safe here? Do you think Omega can get on base?”
Striker bent in so I could see his eyes. “Listen to me, Chica. You’re in a safe place.”
My brow drew together
. It didn’t feel very safe.
“I’m friendly with Lackland’s commander,” Striker explained. “I ran a couple of missions with his team way back. He hates Omega. They put us in a lot of danger when we were in Africa together.”
Alright, this was personal. Now protecting me against an Omega arrest warrant made more sense. “Why, what happened?” I asked.
“An Omega unit went on a drunken civilian killing spree. It made American movement in that area treacherous. We lost all of our painstakingly built relationships, and we ended up having to abort our mission.” Striker ran a light finger down the side of my face, and over the hard knot of my jaw muscles. “I trust this guy unconditionally. You. Are. Safe.” His voice expressed his conviction. It wasn’t hard to read the seriousness in Striker’s eyes.
“Okay. You trust him. But there are lots of people here who might not be on board.”
“Lackland’s on high alert, though they’re saying that the alert was triggered by a suicide bomb threat from a militant group,” he said. “Being on lockdown keeps undocumented people out of the compound. This is a secured wing of the hospital, and we have, at a minimum, two team members with you at all times.” Striker looked at the machine, which was now emitting a low-level siren. “One outside of your room, one inside - but you know as well as I do, Lynx, who we’re dealing with. We need you to get stable as soon as you can so we can get you moved.”
My heart stuttered. I gritted my teeth against the searing pain in my chest. I heard more sirens wailing from my monitors. The nurse banged through my door. She stormed around the end of my bed to check the monitors.
“OUT NOW.” I saw her arm point towards the door, and her meds floated me away.
***
A sixth sense tickle in my brain stirred me to consciousness. Gater must be here. My eyes blinked open. The room was dark, except for the utility light over my bed, dimly lighting the machines for the nursing staff. Gater sat on my bed, watching me.
Gater was golden tanned with sun-streaked hair, no matter the season. He had a dusting of freckles across his nose that made him disarming, and his eyes were the kind of warm chocolate brown that made a woman think he might need a little mothering. Though at six-foot-three, with the physique of a gladiator, he was as capable as they came.
“Hey, Gater.”
“Hey, Lynx. You okay?”
“I’m fine. Well, I’m going to be fine,” I smiled. “Someday soon, I’ll be sitting in front of a campfire, listening to you tell this tale.”
“Glad you woke up.” He rubbed his hands together like they were cold. “You were talking crazy things in your sleep.” He pulled a foot up, balanced it on the rung of my bed, and propped his elbow on his knee.
“About Pablo?” I asked.
“Something about snake oil?” His brow raised quizzically.
“Oh, yeah? Huh. Funny that that should be on my mind.”
“It means something to you?” he asked.
“It’s actually letters. S-N-K-O-I-L. It was the license plate on the van that Maria and Hector used to take me to Florida.”
Gater leaned in a little further, obviously excited by this piece of information. “Hector was the man’s name? Do you have anything more on him? A last name? Anything you picked up on the drive that could help us find him?”
“No last name, sorry. Besides, I think he said it was his girlfriend’s van. DC plates. You could start there.” I searched my memory for anything else that might help them find Hector, but no other specific detail bubbled up. “I thought, from the conversation between the two of them, that Hector was a gun for hire and would probably trade information for his freedom. He might not know much, but then again he might know something.”
“S-N-K O-I-L,” Gater repeated. “That’s important.” He stood from his perch, gave a knock at the door, and spoke quietly to whoever was guarding the other side.
I lay there with the demons of that horrible night stabbing me with razor sharp memories. Gater on the ground with Hector’s Taser probes sticking in his skin. The static sizzling sounds and guttural agony of Gater’s torture. Baby Ruby in Maria’s arms with the hunting knife poised over her heart. My fault. All of it. I felt my heartbeat ramming up behind my ribs, newly screwed into place.
The door clicked shut, and Gater sat back on my bed. I closed my eyes for the length of a breath, and forced my thoughts down a calmer path.
“Can you tell me about Beetle and Bella? Who has my dogs?” I asked.
“I was taking care of them and living in your house the whole time you were gone. When the call came in they had picked up your mayday in Texas, I took the pups across the street to Justin’s and asked him to drive them up to the Millers’ Kennel. I’ve talked to the Millers since then, and your girls are doing good.”
I gave a half smile. “Tell me about Amy. How’s she doing?”
“Don’t know. Amy and me aren’t an item no more.”
Wow. My brows went up. “Is it because of this case? Will you get back together when this is all straightened out?”
“It’s a little more complicated than that.” Gater eased a little closer, which brought him into sharper focus. “When you were taken, I was working around the clock to find you. We all were.” Gater’s eyes lost their warmth, hardening with some undefined emotion –disgust maybe? No, that didn’t seem right.
“Amy never understood what it meant when I said I was married to my job,” Gater said. “She didn’t understand what it meant to have a teammate in peril. I think she was jealous of you, ma’am.” Gater nodded his head slightly as if re-affirming the conclusion he had already drawn. “She didn’t get our relationship. I couldn’t explain it in a way that helped, though I tried. She thought you were competition.”
Shit. Now on top of everything else, I was the reason Gater and Amy weren’t together. “Oh,” I said. In my mind, I had a lot of words – sympathetic, inspiring, hopeful, supportive — but none of those words drifted down to my tongue. So all I said was, “Oh.”
“Amy wanted to get my focus off you and onto her,” Gater rubbed a flat palm up and down his cheek. “I asked her, if she had been kidnapped, would she like me to take my attention off finding her for any reason? She said if it were her, it would be different. And that’s when I realized we were too far apart in our hearts. So I ended it.”
“I don’t know what to say.” I fidgeted uncomfortably with my sheet.
“I guess that’s cause there ain’t nothing to say.” Gater shrugged a shoulder. “Amy and I were in different stages of life. She wanted me to commit myself to her, get married, and have a bunch of babies. I’m not there right now. Someday, yes, or my momma’s gonna come after me with a fryin’ pan. But right now? Naw.”
The image of Gater’s five-foot-tall, 100-pound mother swinging a cast iron frying pan at her Goliath-of-a-son was so ridiculous that it made me giggle. Gater grinned back at me.
“Hey, you said you were living in my house, Gater. Not in the rental side of my duplex?”
“No, ma’am. There was a fire in the neighborhood. Missy’s rental house had faulty wiring.”
“Holy cow.”
“Lucky thing Deep and me were out running the dogs, and we saw the smoke. We got everyone out. Their stuff was ruined. And the house had too much water damage to be lived in no more. So we moved the family into your rental, and moved me over to your place.”
“I’m so glad you did that.”
Gater nodded. “Iniquus changed out the furniture I had in there for what Missy picked out at our supply warehouse. Command let her have everything she needed to set up house again. And Striker took the whole family out and bought them new clothes, books, toys for the kids and stuff. Missy didn’t have no insurance.”
That was uncharacteristic of Command. I wondered why they intervened for Missy. They must have had some angle. Striker, on the other hand – of course he did the generous, big-hearted thing. “Thank you so much.”
“Weren’t much.” G
ater patted just above my knee and left his hand resting there on my twig of a leg. “We were glad to do it.”
“Is everything else okay in my neighborhood? What does everyone know about the night Maria got me?”
“It’s a lucky thing you’ve got a detective living right there across the street. Dave had everything on lockdown right away. Had all the right people in place to start the investigation.”
The longer I listened to Gater, the more his speech resembled a Shakespearean play. I was getting the gist of what he was saying, but it also sounded mildly like a foreign language. I couldn’t quite wrap my thoughts around the meaning behind all his words. I screwed my attention down tight and focused in on what he was saying as best I could. The effort scrunched my face and pulled at the bandaging.
“Dave had a meeting with the other neighbors to tell them what we knew. We didn’t want to scare them none, but they needed to know to come to us if they had anything at all they thought could help,” Gater said.
“How did Dave explain this? Did he know the real story?” I asked.
“Dave knew what you were facing; he was in the meeting when FBI got there.” Gater paused and scratched at his chin where the beginnings of a five o’clock shadow grew. Dark circles traced under his eyes, and I wondered when he had last hit the bunks.
“About your neighbors,” Gater continued. “Dave told them you had got a distress call from Tammy, babysitting across the street. That Tammy had said she needed help because baby Ruby had stopped breathing.”
“And people believed this?”
“Everyone thought that made sense, since you volunteered with the rescue squad.”
Now that I was in traction, I realized how much I enjoyed nodding my head. I was down to words, and some limited arm gestures to help me communicate and that felt too stilted and unnatural. I tried to show Gater with my eyes that I was following the story, so he would continue.
