He tried to block the murmur of voices coming from Sally’s room upstairs, but the crashing sound of breaking glass made him sit up in bed.
It was nothing entirely new. There’d be giddy laughter now…Except there wasn’t. Just that murmur of voices. Sally’s low and intense, her words indiscernible, the man’s louder, suddenly clear.
“If you’re not going to give it back, I’ll leave when I’m goddamn ready to leave.”
Another crash. And this time Sally cried out in pain or fear, it was hard to tell which.
Vince was up and out of the bed, standing on wobbly legs that hadn’t made it farther than the bathroom and back in over a week.
Another crash and another. Jesus, this guy was beating her! Where the hell were his pants? “Charlotte!”
The light went on in the hallway, and Charlie pushed open his door, her mouth grim. “I’m calling the police.” Wrapping her robe around her, she vanished toward the stairs.
Upstairs, it sounded as if Sally had locked herself in her bathroom. Her “friend” was now beating on the door instead of her, thank God, but Sally was sobbing, begging for someone, anyone, to help her.
To hell with his pants. To hell with the police, too—they weren’t going to get here in time to help at all.
Vince took the stairs down to the front door faster than he should have and fell the last few steps. Charlie was beside him then, all soft flannel and sweet-smelling hair.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t, Vince—I’ll go!”
“Like hell you will!” He somehow pushed himself up and toward the door. “Call the police and stay here!”
The night air was cold and bracing. Sally’s door was around the side of the house and up a rickety flight of outside stairs. It had a wooden railing on both sides, and he was able to pull himself up mostly using his arms, two steps at a time.
By the time he reached the top, Charlie was behind him again, pushing something into his hands.
A baseball bat.
James’s, no doubt. Thank you, James, you old son of a bitch.
“Stay back,” he told her again as he hobbled toward Sally’s door.
But she didn’t. She followed him.
The damned door was locked.
He could see through its window, through a gauzy curtain, into Sally’s living room. It was a homey, tidy little room with a rocking chair knocked over from its place next to the radio, a braided rug, and a crocheted blanket thrown over the back of the sofa.
The man pounding on the bathroom door was a behemoth, but a behemoth with a swollen, bloody lip—good job, Sal!
“Go back downstairs,” he said, trying one more time to convince Charlie. If he was going to have to fight with this giant, he wasn’t going to be able to fight fair, and he didn’t want her to watch.
She shook her head. “I’m not leaving you, Vincent.”
It was a moment he would have liked to savor—with her genuine concern for him filling her eyes, her face scrubbed clean of all makeup, her usually tidy hair a golden cloud around her staunchly squared shoulders.
But damn, that bathroom door wasn’t going to stand much more abuse.
Sally screamed again and Vince didn’t hesitate. He swung hard and put that bat right through the window. The crash of breaking glass resonated through the night, and somewhere in the neighborhood a dog started to bark. Across the street, a light went on. Good. The sooner the police got here, the better.
He reached through the broken window, unlocked the door, and went inside, trying his best to sidestep the broken glass, which was pretty much impossible.
“Don’t come in,” Vince warned Charlie, but of course, she ignored him again. Thankfully, she had slippers on as the glass crunched underfoot.
“Who the hell are you?”
No doubt about it, Vince had definitely caught the attention of Sally’s friend. The man was wearing a disheveled but otherwise gleaming new Air Corps uniform with a first lieutenant bar on his shoulder. He was an officer but clearly no gentleman, and obviously far more than three sheets to the wind. He wiped his bleeding lip with the back of one hand as he sized them up, his gaze lingering on Charlie’s thin bathrobe.
Vince stepped in front of her, planting himself and praying that his knees wouldn’t give way. Not now, please, Lord. Her fingers tightened on his arm and he knew that she’d just realized how big this guy was.
“I’m a Marine who fought hand-to-hand on Tarawa,” Vince told him evenly, told Charlie, too. No doubt she’d forgotten exactly how he’d received those wounds that had kept him confined to her bed for so many days. “I suggest you leave, Lieutenant. I believe you’ve worn out your welcome here.”
“Oh, you do, do you?”
“Sally, are you all right?” Charlie raised her voice to be heard through the bathroom door. But all they could hear was the sound of the woman sobbing.
“That fucking whore stole my wallet,” the behemoth said as if, even if it were true, that gave him the right to beat her.
“Watch your mouth around the lady,” Vince countered sharply.
“Yeah, if she’s friends with Sally, that ain’t no lady you’re with tonight, pal. Make sure you bang her hard and get your money’s worth. That’s all I’m trying to do here. Get my money’s worth.”
Vince didn’t raise his voice. “Listen carefully to me. You are not worthy of breathing the same air as either of these two women—both of whom have lost husbands in the war, and neither of whom have ever stolen anything in their lives—a fact I would swear to on my sainted mother’s grave.
“So I’m going to start to count. And if you’re not on your way out the door and down those stairs by the time I get to three, I’m going to kill you.”
“Oh, yeah?” the man scoffed.
“Yeah,” Vince said. “Look into my eyes. I will kill you. I’ll probably even enjoy it. God knows I’ve killed far better men than you.
“One.”
The behemoth stared from Vince’s face to the bat and back.
“Two.”
Whatever darkness he saw in Vince’s eyes apparently worked. The man moved, fast, but it wasn’t an attack. He headed for the door, skidding slightly on the broken glass, and slamming it closed behind him.
Charlotte rushed for the bathroom door. “Sally, he’s gone. Open up!”
Vince sank down into one of Sally’s kitchen chairs, exhausted and aware that even though he hadn’t been forced to fight, he’d revealed far more of himself to Charlie than he’d ever intended.
He stared at his feet, cut from the glass and bleeding. Funny how it didn’t really hurt.
“Vince bluffed him into leaving,” Charlie told Sally through the door, but as she glanced back at him, he could tell from her eyes that she knew the truth. It had not been any kind of bluff at all.
He would have killed that man. Without blinking.
Mary Lou was on her way in to work, dropping off Haley at Mrs. U.’s, when she saw it.
She was getting the stroller out of the trunk of her car because Mrs. U. and her four-year-old, Katie, wanted to take a walk with Haley down to the doughnut shop.
Of course, another doughnut was the last thing both Mrs. U. and Katie needed, but Mary Lou kept her opinion about that to herself. Particularly when, after setting up the stroller on the sidewalk, she went to close her trunk and saw it.
It was wrapped in some kind of fabric—oilcloth, she thought it was called—and pushed way into the back, behind the jumper cables she always carried and had used on more than one occasion.
She reached in and pulled it toward her and unwrapped it.
And found herself staring at a deadly looking automatic weapon with a spare banana clip.
“Someone wants to give her mommy another kiss,” Mrs. U. said from right behind her, and Mary Lou quickly wrapped the big gun back up, shoving it behind the cables and slamming the trunk closed.
God damn Sam! What was he thinking, leaving a gun like that lying around where anyone could take it? He
r trunk didn’t lock. Anyone could just open it up and help themselves.
Inwardly fuming, she forced a smile and gave Haley another hug and kiss good-bye.
She headed to work, remembering Ihbraham’s words from last night, when they’d talked on the phone.
“If you don’t tell him that you are unhappy,” he’d said, as they talked about Sam, “then how will he ever know?”
She’d told him she’d been working overtime the past few months to be compliant and agreeable. She was trying hard not to stir things up, for fear of driving Sam away.
“But is this thing you fear,” Ihbraham had asked, “this being alone again, is it really so much worse than the being alone that you already have?”
She’d thought about little else all night—especially when Sam finally did come home. He climbed into bed beside her and fell immediately asleep. And Mary Lou lay there, still as completely alone as she’d been ten minutes earlier.
This gun in the trunk had to be mentioned. There was no doubt about that.
The guard at the gate of the base waved her in. And Mary Lou parked in her usual spot alongside the Dumpster.
She marched into the McDonald’s, tired as hell of being alone.
ELEVEN
JOAN WAS SLIPPING into a clean blouse when there was a knock on her hotel room door. She peered through the peephole and saw Muldoon standing in the hall.
“What are you doing back so early?” She left the door open so that he could come in as she buttoned the last of her buttons, heading for the car keys that she’d put on top of the TV cabinet.
They’d stayed so long at Donny’s, Muldoon had gotten to the base a mere four minutes before an important meeting started—a meeting that he couldn’t tell her anything about. Instead of taking the time to drop her here, they’d gone straight to the base and she’d dropped him instead. He’d insisted that she take his truck and drive herself to the hotel.
“May I come in for a minute?” he asked now, still planted securely out in the corridor.
“Of course,” she said, tucking her blouse into her pants and grabbing the keys. “But I’m a little crunched for time right now, so I can really only spare a minute.” She tossed him the keys to his truck as she swept into the bathroom and raised her voice so he could still hear her. “I’m meeting Commander Paoletti and his fiancée for lunch, and I seem to have misplaced my fairy godmother, so I’m going to have to rely on makeup and this curling iron—ouch!—to transform myself into something presentable.”
Said curling iron was hot enough to require sticking her finger under cold running water after touching it—dumb move.
Joan leaned in toward the mirror for a closer look at the dark circles beneath her eyes. “God, I hate jet lag. I need some of that special makeup—you know, the kind that you buy after you get into a car accident and meet your airbag face-to-face…?” What she really needed was a longer nap. She shut off the water and dried her hands.
“Actually,” Muldoon called back to her, shutting the door behind him with a click, “you can relax, because your lunch date is about to be postponed.”
The phone rang. There was an extension right there in the bathroom, but Joan stuck her head out the door to look at Muldoon. What, was he psychic or something?
He was standing politely by the door, but was looking around her room, at her laptop set up on the desk surrounded by an embarrassing number of empty coffee cups, at the silk dress on a hanger that she’d decided not to wear to this lunch because it was a little too youthful and flirty, at the still-unmade bed that she’d crawled back into for an hour after spending that exhausting morning with her crazy brother.
And with Muldoon. She’d spent the entire morning with Muldoon, too. It was entirely possible that the most exhausting part of the morning had come after he’d stripped down to his T-shirt and muscled Donny into the shower, then into his pajamas and, once clean, into his sleeping bag on the closet floor.
Because then there they were. Standing guard against the hordes of roving aliens while Donny slept the sleep of the dead.
Alone in her mother’s house, in her tomblike living room, where that stupid clock—the loudest clock in the entire damn world—ticked.
Joan had always hated that clock.
They’d sat there, surrounded by that infernal ticking, and Joan had babbled on and on about God knows what, talking about anything and everything to avoid discussing the subjects that really mattered. Like how completely freaked she got whenever she came into this house that she had no choice but to come to at least once a year because Donny never left. How awful it had been growing up under the shadow of Donny’s illness. How badly she wanted Muldoon to tear her clothes off in a fit of passion that was violent enough to knock over that stupid clock, or at least noisy enough to drown out the ticking for a little while.
He now met her eyes as if he could read her mind, and she retreated back into the bathroom and picked up the ringing phone. “DaCosta.”
“Hey, Joan, it’s Tom Paoletti. I’m glad I caught you.”
“No lunch today, huh?”
“Yeah, sorry about that. We’ll have to reschedule. My timetable for a certain…project has just shifted, and…”
Joan shut off her curling iron. “It’s not a problem, Commander.”
“Good. I’ve made arrangements for you to have access to the base while we’re gone through Lieutenant Steve McKinney, from the public affairs office.”
“Gone?” she repeated. We, he’d said. She stretched the headset cord so that she could again lean out of the bathroom and look at Muldoon. “Are you going somewhere?” she asked.
Muldoon nodded while Tom answered. “Training op. We’ll be off base for about forty-eight hours—we’ll be back before you know it. Steve’s a nice guy. He’ll be able to answer any questions and even help you set up some of those photo ops you’re looking for.”
“Steve McKinney.” Joan went back into the bathroom and wrote the name on a piece of toilet paper with eyeliner, digesting what Tom had just told her. Muldoon was going to be gone for forty-eight hours. And when he came back, Brooke would be in town.
Shit.
“I also wanted to leave you Kelly—my fiancée’s—cell number,” Tom told her. “She didn’t want to call and bother you, but she asked me to let you know that she’s having an impromptu dinner—really casual—at our place tonight. It’s something some of the wives and girlfriends like to do when we go wheels up like this. She told me to tell you that you’re welcome to join them—you know, get a glimpse of that aspect of military life, if you want.”
“That’s…very nice,” Joan told him as she wrote down the number he rattled off. It was more than nice, it was brilliant. She could picture Brooke surrounded by a group of wholesome-looking young women, bonding over coffee. Myra was going to love that. “I’ll definitely give her a call.”
“Great. Again, I’m sorry about lunch.”
“You’re forgiven.”
His laughter was a warm rumble in her ear. “I’m glad. Look, Joan, as long as I have you on the phone…I know Lieutenant Muldoon spoke to you about this, and I understand you don’t have the authority to make these kinds of decisions, but I really think this is the wrong time for President Bryant to come out here to the base. I mean, a low-profile tour would be one thing, but for the kind of dog and pony show that the White House is looking to put together…?”
“I’ll do my best to see that your reservations are brought to the attention of as many decision makers as possible, Commander,” she told him. “At least then you’ll be on record. And if something does go wrong—”
“I can say I told you so?” he interrupted. “That’s not what I’m looking for. That’s not good enough.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said. “But I just don’t have the kind of influence to help you out.”
“Do the best you can,” he told her. “And if you see Muldoon, tell him to get his butt back to the base, ASAP.”
; “Good luck—wherever you’re going,” Joan said.
“Thanks. Catch you later.”
Joan hung up the phone and went out of the bathroom.
Muldoon was still standing by the door.
“Is this really just a training op?” she asked him.
He looked her in the eye. “Yes, it is.”
“Which is what you would tell me even if it wasn’t, right?”
Muldoon nodded. “Yeah. But this one really is training.”
“Which is also what you’d say,” she pointed out.
“Yeah.”
“Where are you—”
“I can’t tell you. You know that.”
“Yes,” she said. “Of course. I’m sorry. I’m just…”
He was looking at her a little too intently, so she forced a smile despite her sudden realization that any given moment this man—and Cosmo and Gillman and Jenk and Sam Starrett and all of the other fabulous, wonderful men of Team Sixteen that she’d met over the past few days—might be thrust into any one of the numerous hot spots around the world where the U.S.’s Special Operations forces were going head-to-head with terrorists.
Forty-eight hours from any given moment, Joan could well be attending Mike Muldoon’s funeral. She suddenly wanted to sit down, but she forced herself to stay standing, to keep smiling at him.
“You have my cell phone number, right?” he asked. “In case you need me? I mean, I’m sure Steve McKinney will be able to handle any problems, but…”
“I’ll be fine,” Joan told him. “Just…be careful, okay?”
He took a step toward her, and she turned away, suddenly afraid of what he had seen in her eyes.
God, what had he seen in her eyes?
Lust? Probably, God help her. He certainly was attractive, with his quiet, clean strength and the intelligence that lurked in those pretty blue eyes.
Longing? For sure—and that was even worse than lust. She could feel it still, bubbling within her, a rolling boil of feelings and emotions she was afraid to examine too closely for fear of what she might find.
It gave her a sense of immediacy, a sharp awareness that tomorrow was not always guaranteed.
Into the Night Page 19
