Bad Nights (2 page)

“I'm trying to help you,” Morgan protested, hearing her own voice go high and thin.

“Not likely.” The stranger's eye stayed on the weapon, and she knew he was calculating his chances of getting it from her before she pulled the trigger.

In that moment of confrontation, she knew she couldn't shoot him point-blank.

In desperation, she tried to throw herself backward, away from him. As she fell, her finger tightened on the trigger, and the gun discharged with an ear-splitting blast. Not like on the practice range where she always wore ear protectors.

The man's grip on her ankle loosened and he flopped heavily back against the leaves, his eyes closing again and his face ashen.

“Oh God. Oh no.”

Her heart was pounding wildly as she stared at him. For a long moment she was too shocked to move. Then she came down beside him on the leaves. After putting down the gun, she frantically began to check him over, looking for signs that the bullet had hit him. She ran her hands through his hair, touched his face, slid her fingers down his arms, across his chest, down his torso to his thighs, his knees, his feet, As far as she could tell, the bullet hadn't touched him. Thank the Lord.

When she'd finished her physical inspection, she took a moment to catch her breath. She hadn't hit him, but nothing had changed. He was still naked and injured, and she couldn't leave him outside on the cold ground.

Another thought skittered through her mind. What if the sound of the gun discharging brought the people who had done this to him?

Sobbing out a breath, she stared down at the stranger who had become her problem. He'd lost consciousness again, and she figured that he must have been operating on raw nerves when he'd grabbed for the weapon. He was badly beaten. She didn't even know if he had internal injuries, but she did know for sure that he needed help.

The wind was beginning to sway the branches of the trees above them. The temperature was dropping, and she knew a storm was coming.

If she'd thought it was safe to deal with him awake again, she would have tried to rouse him and help him walk to the house. Under the circumstances, that was much too risky. In fact, taking care of him was much too risky—because it was clear he thought that the men who had savaged him still had him in their custody.

Could she convince him otherwise?

Maybe after she got him inside.

That decision brought her up short. For all she knew, he could be a criminal, although she didn't think so.

She repressed a hysterical laugh. Did she think he had an honest face? Black and blue and honest all over?

While she was thinking all that, he was still lying out here, naked and cold.

After clicking the gun's safety on, she shoved the weapon into the waistband of her slacks and opened the afghan. She thought about rolling him onto it and using it to drag him to the house, but if she laid his weight on it and pulled, it would likely tear apart. Instead she spread it over him, thinking that his back was still against the cold bed of leaves.

When he moved his head and moaned, she held her breath, waiting for him to wake up and attack her again. But his eyes stayed closed.

After a silent debate, she left him where he was and ran back to the house where she found a tarp in the storage closet. Her dad had used it to cover the woodpile in winter, but she hadn't burned anything in the fireplace since forever.

Quickly she returned to the woods. When she didn't see the injured man, panic jolted through her.

Looking wildly around, she spotted him staggering a few yards farther into the trees, the afghan clutched around his shoulders. The man was obviously tough as iron—and bullheaded as a rogue elephant. As she watched, he went down again, obviously at the limit of his endurance.

She knelt beside him, murmuring soothing reassurances as she rolled him onto the tarp and breathed a sigh of relief when he didn't try to do her bodily harm. With him stretched out straight, she had a better view of his injuries. It looked like his body had taken an awful lot of punishment. Maybe some of his ribs were even broken, and she marveled that he'd gotten this far.

How far exactly?

She'd thought her nearest neighbor was a mile away. Was there someone closer? A cabin hidden in the woods, perhaps, where they'd been holding him and torturing him?

And they must know he'd escaped. Which meant they were looking for him now. That realization made her shudder.

Fat drops of rain were beginning to fall as she arranged the afghan over him again. Praying that she could get him to the house, she began to tug on the tarp, using it like a sledge, pulling his dead weight back the way she'd come, foot by slow foot.

Thoughts circled through her mind as she clenched her teeth and kept moving. Why was she doing this? She could just leave him out here and call an ambulance. Yet she couldn't shake the feeling that if she followed that route, he'd be dead.

On the other hand, he'd tried to attack her. When he woke up, would he do it again?

Even as she tugged on the tarp, then stopped to catch her breath, she questioned herself. Maybe she was trying to help him because something about him reminded her of Glenn.

Not his physical appearance. Her husband had been fair-haired with blue eyes—and a sunny disposition. This man was all dark shadows and hard angles. If she had to guess what he was, she'd call him a warrior. Whatever that meant. But there was something below the surface that she was responding to.

She made a scoffing sound. Maybe she was responding because she hadn't had a relationship with a man in more than a year.

But if she chose to have one, it wouldn't be with this guy. Would it?

The questions distracted her as she tried to hurry. The rain was only sporadic at the moment. Soon it would be coming down in buckets.

She was breathing hard by the time she reached the house. Thankful that the entrance was only one step up from the ground, she pulled him onto the porch. She'd thought about leaving him outside, but just as they reached the shelter of the porch, the storm broke in earnest, the wind blowing stinging drops of rain against her face and toward the front door.

Because she wouldn't have left a dog out in the storm, she pulled the man into the house.

Once he was inside, she wanted to slam and lock the door, but when she looked back the way they'd come, she saw a clear trail of skid marks where she'd dragged the tarp across the open ground, a dead giveaway that she'd been pulling something heavy, like an unconscious man. And somehow she had the feeling that giving away his presence in her house would be a bad mistake.

Quickly she ran back, found a forked branch in the woods, and swept it over the track, the rain pelting her as she tried to hide the path she'd taken.

She was remembering the house's pre-Civil War history as she closed and locked the door. Once it had been a stop on the Underground Railroad, the chain of safe houses that had harbored escaped slaves as they made their way from servitude to the freedom of the North.

Now it was sheltering another escapee, she thought as she stood dripping by the door. Because it was the easiest thing to do, she left him where he was and ran down the hall to change her sopping clothes. Once she was dry, she brought a blanket to the living room and used it to replace the soggy afghan. Then she went to throw all the wet stuff into the dryer.

***

His mind flickered awake again in a swirl of confusion. Lying very still, not making a sound, he tried to separate fantasy from reality, fact from fiction.

Where was he exactly?

Still without moving, he cataloged sensations.

He'd been outside, hadn't he? Outside naked. He remembered a cold wind that had lashed his skin and seeped all the way to the marrow of his bones. Now he was warm. And lying on the hard floor with a thin sheet of something rough against his naked back and hips. But the covering on top of his body was slightly prickly. A wool blanket.

He had no idea how he had gotten from outside to this place and gotten covered with a blanket. His fingers flexed on the wool, and unconsciously he grabbed the edges and folded them closer, gripping them as he tried to grip onto reality.

Naked. Why was he naked?

He struggled to pull forth a recent memory. But now that he was awake again, his head felt like little men with pickaxes were chopping away at the inside of his skull. When he raised his hand, he felt a lump on the back of his head that was tender when he touched it.

That wasn't the only pain. Not by a long shot. One of his eyes seemed to be swollen shut, and his whole body ached, like he'd been used for a dummy lineman at a football practice. Deep muscle and bone pain. Abrasions on his skin. And something that felt like burns. Not all over. Clustered on his shoulders, chest, and thighs.

That sent an image flashing into his mind of a man with a cigarette, drawing on it to make the tip glow before pressing it into his flesh.

Maybe it was true. Maybe he was making it up to account for the raw sensations.

Screw the pain. All of it. Right now his job was to figure out where he was and why. And get away. Because he was sure that he wasn't supposed to be here.

Lying very still, he listened for clues and heard the sound of heavy rain pelting a shingled roof. And smelled the scent of soap and woman lingering in the air.

She'd been here a few minutes ago. Or was it hours? He had no way of measuring time.

He turned his head, seeing a living room with slightly shabby but comfortable-looking furniture. Sofas, chairs. A coffee table. A television set. Not one of the new flat screen ones. An old, clunky model.

It looked like he was in somebody's home, but he didn't remember coming in, and he couldn't even be sure how long he'd been here. Wait, hadn't he thought all that before?

He tried to stop the circling of his thoughts. The woman must have brought him. But how? He had an impression of a slender blonde. She certainly wouldn't have had the strength to carry him.

But she must have gotten him inside somehow and left him on the floor. Did he know her? He didn't think so, but if not, why was he here?

Not knowing who she was—or anything else—sent panic coursing through him. He tried to focus, but thoughts swam into his mind and out again too quickly for him to capture them.

For a terrible moment, he didn't even remember his own name and the fear of
not
knowing
rose up like a giant wave, threatening to swallow him whole.

His name. What the hell was his damn name?

His heart pounded, and his hands clenched and unclenched as he struggled to remember his own identity.

Finally, a small part of the fog in his mind cleared away.

“Jack Brandt,” he whispered aloud, feeling a wave of relief. It was followed immediately by confusion. Hadn't he been calling himself something else?

Because he'd been…

He tried to grab on to that thought and hold it, but it skittered away like a crab scrambling to escape from a seabird at the edge of the ocean.

Was the woman working for…?

Someone bad. Someone who was planning…

The name of the man and his scheme wouldn't come to him, and he gave up in frustration.

A shiver went through his body.

He wasn't in Afghanistan, was he? No. He knew that from his recent observations. He'd been in the woods. Not in the rocky terrain of that godforsaken country where you never knew if one of the friendly villagers or a provincial police officer was going to turn and put a bullet in your back. And this was the wrong kind of house. In Afghanistan, he'd be lying on a dirt floor or stone. He'd see patterned rugs, not chintz-covered furniture. And there was no way he would have seen the woman's face.

As he turned over those details, memories of his last mission jolted through him. SEAL team fifteen had been sent to take out a nest of insurgents hiding in a remote mountain village. It hadn't worked out the way anybody had expected. He remembered a woman in a burka coming toward them, her hand raised as though she wanted something from them. Then a flash, as the explosives belt she'd been wearing under the shapeless gown detonated.

Behind her, men with automatic weapons had surged forward. Insurgents who must have known the team was coming.

Recent memories eluded him. But that terrible scene ripped through his mind like an explosion in a munitions storage bunker.

He squeezed his eyes closed, trying to blot out the memory of the massacre. He'd seen the team cut down by machine-gun fire and grenades. But somehow he'd gotten out alive and staggered into the rocks. The hostiles had looked for him. But they hadn't found him because he'd covered himself with rocks and dirt. When they'd given up and moved out, he'd looked for the other members of the team. He'd only found bodies. Everyone else was dead.

A terrible feeling of loss grabbed him as he fought that memory. It was in the past. The shrinks had told him it wasn't his fault that he was alive. They'd said he could never change the past. He had to cope as best he could. But what was the present? Where was he, and why?

He strained for coherence and cursed softly when it eluded him.

As he closed his eyes and scrambled for something to ground himself, two familiar faces swam into his memory. His two best friends. Shane and Max. Guys he'd met in jail.

That stopped him again. Why had he been in jail? What jail? What city? What country?

Again, he simply couldn't remember. But he and Shane and Max had gotten each other through a long, dangerous night in a holding cell full of tough, angry men.

He recalled breaking up more than one fight between guys too drunk to think straight and stopping a couple of badasses determined to keep everyone else away from the phone. Then there had been the jerks who'd thought they could decide who could use the toilet and who couldn't.

He and Shane and Max had forced the bastards to make nice.