Stone Cold Undercover Agent

by Nicole Helm

  “There we are, pretty girl,” The Stallion cooed, resettling the doll on the shelf and brushing a hand over its fake hair.

  Jaime shuddered and looked away.

  “Until this mess is taken care of, you are all on lockdown. No one is leaving the premises until Herman is taken care of.”

  “Then, boss?” Layne asked a little too hopefully.

  The Stallion smiled pleasantly. “And then we’ll decide what to do about the hypnotist.”

  Lockdown and death threats. Jaime tried to breathe through the urgency, the failure, the impossibility of saving this man’s life.

  He’d try. Somehow, he’d try. But he had the sinking suspicion Herman was already gone.

  Chapter Five

  Gabby couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t an uncommon affliction. Even in the past two years, exercising herself to exhaustion, giving up on things ever being different, avoiding figuring out the pieces of The Stallion puzzle, insomnia still plagued her.

  Because no matter how she tried to accept her lot in life, she’d always known this wasn’t home.

  But what would be home? Her father was dead. Her sister would be an adult woman with a life of her own. Would Mom and Grandma still live in the little house on East Avenue or would they have moved?

  Did they assume she was dead? Would they have kept all her things or gotten rid of them? The blue teddy bear Daddy had given her on her sixth birthday. The bulletin board of pictures of friends and Ricky and her and Nattie.

  Her heart absolutely ached at the thought of her sister. Two years apart, they hadn’t always gotten along, but they had been friends. Sisters. They’d shared things, laughed together, cried together, fought together.

  Tears pricked Gabby’s eyes. She hadn’t had this kind of sad nostalgia swamp her in years, because it led nowhere good. She couldn’t change her circumstances. She was stuck in this prison and there was no way out.

  Except maybe Jaime.

  That was not an acceptable thought. She could work with him to take down The Stallion, and she would, but actually thinking she could get out of there was... It was another thing altogether.

  She froze completely at the telltale if faint sound of her door opening. And then closing. She closed her hands into fists, ready to fight. She couldn’t drown that reaction out of herself, no matter how often she wondered if giving in was simply easier.

  “Gabby.”

  A hushed whisper, but even if she didn’t remember people’s voices so easily, she would have known it was Jaime—Rodriguez—from a man calling her Gabby.

  Gabby. She swallowed against all of the fuzzy feelings inside her. Home and Gabby and what did either even mean anymore. She didn’t have a home. The Gabby she’d been was dead.

  It didn’t matter. Taking The Stallion down was the only thing that mattered. She sat up in the dark, watched Jaime’s shadow get closer.

  The initial fear hadn’t totally subsided. She wasn’t afraid of him per se or, maybe more accurately, she wasn’t afraid he would harm her. But that didn’t mean there weren’t other things to be afraid of.

  She had sat up on the bed, but he still loomed over her from his standing position. She banked the edgy nerves fluttering inside her chest.

  He kneeled, much like he had earlier today when they’d been putting together her map. Except she was on the bed instead of her makeshift markers.

  “Do you have any more ideas about the locations? Aside from directions?” he asked, everything about him sounding grave and...tired.

  “I have a few theories. Do we...do we need to go over all that tonight?”

  “I’m sorry. You were sleeping.”

  “Well, no.” She had the oddest urge to offer her hand to him. He’d taken her hand earlier today and there had been something... “Is something wrong?”

  He laughed, caustic and bitter, and she didn’t know this man. He could be lying to her. He could be anyone. Then there was her, cut off from normal human contact for eight years. The only place she had to practice any kind of compassion or reading of people was with the other girls, and she’d been keeping her distance lately.

  So she was probably way off base to think something was wrong, to feel like he was off somehow.

  But he stood, pacing away from the bed, a dark, agitated shadow. “It doesn’t get any easier to know someone’s going to die. I tried...” He shook his head grimly. “We should focus on what we can do.”

  “You tried what?” Gabby asked, undeterred.

  “I tried to get a message to the Rangers, but...” He kneeled again and she couldn’t see him in the dark, found it odd she wanted to.

  “But?”

  “I think it was too late.”

  Gabby inhaled sharply. Whether she knew him or not, whether she’d lost all ability to gauge people’s emotions, she could all but feel his guilt and regret as though it were her own.

  She didn’t know what the answer to that was...what he might have endured in pretending to be the kind of man who worked for The Stallion. Gabby couldn’t begin to imagine... Though she’d ostensibly worked for the man, she’d never had to pretend she liked it.

  “If we’re an hour west of El Paso, I would imagine each spot would be likely the same distance from the city in its sector,” she said, because the only answer she knew was bringing The Stallion down.

  It couldn’t bring dead people back, including herself, but it could stop the spread. They had to stop the spread.

  She kept going when he said nothing. “He’s very methodical. Things are the same. He stays here the same weeks every year. He eats the same things, does the same things. I would imagine whatever other places he has are like this one. Possibly identical.”

  In the dark she couldn’t see what Jaime’s face might be reflecting and he was completely and utterly still.

  “Jaime...”

  “Rodriguez. We have to...we can’t be too complacent. There’s too much at stake. I am Rodriguez.”

  “Okay,” she returned, and she supposed he was right, no matter how much she preferred to call him something—anything—other than what The Stallion called him.

  “But you’re right. The eastern compound was around an hour west of Houston. I wonder... He is methodical, you’re right about that. I wonder if the mileage would be exactly the same.”

  “It wouldn’t shock me.”

  “Have you seen the dolls?”

  Gabby could only blink in Jaime’s shadow’s direction. “Dolls?”

  “He has a shelf of dolls in his office. They sit in a row. I’d always thought they were creepy, but today...” Jaime laughed again, this one wasn’t quite as bitter as the one before, but it certainly wasn’t true humor. “You should get some rest. I didn’t mean to interrupt you. We can talk in the morning.” He got to his feet.

  She didn’t analyze why she bolted off the bed to follow him. Even if she gave herself the brain time to do it, she wouldn’t have come up with an answer.

  He was a lifeline. To what, she didn’t know. She didn’t have a life—not one here, not one to go back to.

  “I wasn’t sleeping.” She scurried between him and the room’s only exit. “What about the dolls?”

  He was standing awfully close in his attempt to leave, but he neither reached around her for the door nor pushed her out of the way. He simply stood there, an oppressive, looming shadow.

  Gabby didn’t know what possessed her, why she thought in a million years it was appropriate to reach out and touch a man she’d only met today. But what did it matter? She’d been here eight years and worrying about normal or appropriate had left the building a long time ago.

  So she placed her palm on his chest, hard and hot even through the cotton of his T-shirt. Such a strange sensation to touch someone in neither fight nor comfort. Just g
entle and...a connection.

  “Tell me about the dolls,” she said in the same tone she used with the girls when she wanted them to listen and stop whining. “Get it off your chest.”

  * * *

  HIS CHEST. WHERE Gabby’s hand was currently touching him between the vee of straps that kept his weapons at hand. Gently, very nearly comfortingly, her hand rested in the center of all that violent potential.

  Jaime was not in a world where that had happened for years. His mother had hugged him hard and long that last meal before he’d gone undercover, and that had been it. Two years, three months and twenty-one days ago.

  He had known what he was getting himself into and yet he hadn’t. There had been no way to anticipate the toll it would take, the length of time and how far he’d gotten.

  That meant bringing The Stallion to justice was really the only thing that could matter, not a woman’s hand on his chest.

  And yet he allowed himself the briefest moment of putting his hand over hers. He allowed himself a second of absorbing the warmth, the proof of beating life and humanity, before he peeled her hand off his chest.

  “He cradled the doll like a baby. Talked to it. Damn creepiest thing I’ve ever seen—and I’ve seen some things.” He said it all flippantly, trying to imbue some humor into the statement, but it felt good to get it out.

  The image haunted him. A grown man. A doll. The threat on a man who would most certainly be dead even if Jaime’s secret message to his FBI superiors made it through.

  Dead. Herman, a man he’d never met and knew next to nothing about, was dead. Because he hadn’t been able to stop it.

  “Dolls.” Gabby seemed to ponder this, and though her hand was no longer on his chest, she still stood between him and the door, far too close for anyone’s good.

  “If there are identical dolls in every compound, I’ll never be able to sleep again after this is all over.”

  Even in the dark he could see her head cock, could feel her gaze on him. “Do you think of after?”

  “Sometimes,” he offered truthfully, though the truth was the last thing they should be discussing. “Sometimes I have to or I’m afraid I’ll forget it isn’t real.”

  “I stopped believing ‘after’ could be real,” she whispered, heavy and weighted in the dark room of a deranged man’s hideout.

  He wanted to touch her again. Cradle her small but competent hand in his larger one against his chest. He wanted to make her a million promises he couldn’t keep about after.

  “I...I can’t think about after, but I can think about ending him. If we’re an hour west of El Paso, give or take, and the western compound is an hour west of Houston, then what would the southern compound be? San Antonio?”

  “If we’re going from the supposition it’s the closest guarded one because it’s closest to the border, I think it’d be farther south.”

  “Yes.” She made some movement, though he couldn’t make it out in the dark. Likely they could turn on the lights and no one would think anything of it, she had been a gift to him, after all, but he found as long as she didn’t turn on the lights, he didn’t want to, either.

  There was something comforting about the dark. About this woman he didn’t know. About the ability to say that a man’s life wasn’t saved probably because of him. Because who else could he express that remorse to? No one here. No one in his undercover life.

  He finally realized she had moved around him. She wasn’t exactly pacing, but neither was she still in the pitch-black room.

  He couldn’t begin to imagine how she’d done it. This darkness. This uncertainty. For eight years she had been at someone else’s mercy. As much as he sometimes felt like he was at someone else’s mercy, it was voluntary. It was for a higher purpose. If he really wanted to, if he didn’t care about bringing The Stallion down, he could walk away from all this.

  But she was here and said she couldn’t even think about after. Instead she lived and fought and puzzled things together in her head. Remembered things no one would expect her to.

  She was the key to this investigation. Because she’d been that strong.

  “Loredo, maybe?” she offered.

  “It’s possible,” Jaime returned, reminding himself to focus on the task at hand rather than this woman. “Doesn’t quite match the pattern of being close to bigger cities like Houston and El Paso.”

  “True, and he does like his patterns.” She was quiet for a minute. “But what about the northern compound? There isn’t anything up there that matches Houston or El Paso, either. Maybe whatever town in the south it’s near matches whatever town is north.”

  “I haven’t been to the northern one, so I don’t know for sure, but one would assume Amarillo. Based on what I know.”

  “Laredo and Amarillo would be similar. Was the place west of Houston similar to this?”

  It was something Jaime hadn’t given much thought to, but now that she mentioned it... “I never went in the house, but there was one. It didn’t look the same from the outside, but it’s very possible that the layout inside was exactly the same.”

  “If you didn’t go in the house, where did you go there?”

  It confirmed Jaime’s suspicion that the girls didn’t know anything about the outside world around them. “He has a shed for an office outside.”

  “It must be in the back. He had us dig holes in the front.”

  It shouldn’t shock him The Stallion used the women he kidnapped for manual labor, and yet the thought of Gabby digging shallow graves for that man settled all wrong in his gut. “Did you ever see...?”

  “We just dug the holes and were ushered back inside,” she replied, her tone flat. Though she had brought it up yesterday when they’d first met, so clearly it bugged her. “It’s the only time I’ve been out...” She shook her head. “The office shed. Is the one here the same as the one in the west?”

  He wanted to tell her she’d make a good cop—focusing on the facts and details over emotions—but that spoke of an after she couldn’t bring herself to consider. So he answered her question instead.

  “The one he has here is a little bit more involved than the one he had there. And no dolls.”

  “The doll thing really bothers you, huh?”

  “Hey, you watch a grown man cradle and coo at a doll the way a normal person would an infant and tell me you wouldn’t be haunted for life.”

  Though it was dark and Jaime had no idea if his instincts were accurate without seeing her expression, he thought maybe she was teasing him. An attempt at lightening things a little. He appreciated that, even if it was a figment of his imagination.

  “As long as I’m on lockdown, I can’t share any of this information with my superiors. It would be too dangerous and too risky, and I’ve already risked enough by trying to warn them about...” He trailed off, that inevitable, heavy guilt choking out the words.

  “If the man ends up dead, it has nothing to do with you,” Gabby said firmly.

  “It’s hardly nothing. I knew. And I didn’t stop it.”

  “Because you’re here to bring down The Stallion. Doing that is going to save more men than saving one man. Maybe I wouldn’t have thought about it that way years ago, but... You begin to learn that you can’t save everyone, and that some things happen whether it’s fair or not. I hate the word fair. Nothing is fair.”

  That was not something he could even begin to argue with a woman who’d been kidnapped eight years ago.

  “Do you know who this man was?” she demanded in the inky dark.

  “He delivered messages for The Stallion.”

  “Then I don’t feel sorry for him at all.”

  “You don’t?” he asked, surprised at her vehemence for a man she didn’t know.

  “No. He worked for that man, and I don’t care who you a
re or how convincing he is in his real life, if you work for that man, you deserve whatever you get.”

  She said it flatly, with certainty, and there was a part of him that wanted to argue with her. Because he knew things like this could make you hard. Rightfully so, even. She deserved her anger and hatred and her uncompromising views.

  But he could not adopt them as his own. He was afraid if he did that he would never find his way out of this. That he would become Rodriguez for life and forget who Jaime Alessandro was. It was his biggest fear.

  He felt sorry for Gabby, but it made him all the more determined to make sure she got out. He would make sure she had a chance to find her compassion again.

  “Until I can get more intel to my superiors, the next step is to keep gathering as much information as we can. The more I can give them when the time comes, the better chance we have of ending this once and for all.”

  “End.” She laughed, an odd sound, neither bitter nor humorous. Just kind of a noise. “I’m not sure I know what that word means anymore.”

  “I’ll teach you.” That was a foolish thing to say, and yet he would. He would find a way to show her what endings meant. And what new beginnings could be about.

  Because if he could show her, then he could believe he could show himself.

  Chapter Six

  Gabby was tired and bleary-eyed the next day. Jaime had stayed in her room for most of the night and they had talked about The Stallion, sure, but as the night had worn on, they’d started to veer toward things they remembered about their former lives.

  She’d kept telling herself to stop, not to tell yet another story about Natalie or not to listen to another about the birthday dinners his mother used to make him. And yet remembering her family and the woman she’d been years ago—which had never been tempting to her in all these years—had been more than just tempting in a dark room with Jaime.

  She should think of him as nothing but Rodriguez. She shouldn’t be forming some odd friendship with a man whose only job was to bring down The Stallion. Knowing those things seemed to disappear when she was actually in a room with him.