Dan & Tyler 2 - Wintergreen (13 page)

"I'm alone now, sir," he said, interrupting Cole's lecture on manners, which didn't have much bite to it. "Did you get him?"

 

Cole sighed. "He's dead." "Mm," Tyler said noncommittally. "Is that right."

"He shot himself when the team sent to pick him up at his house told him that I wanted to see him. As an admission of guilt went, it was… convenient, although it's regrettable that I had no chance to discuss his actions with him. The team leader has assured me that there was no chance to prevent what happened." There was a pause, and then Cole added reflectively, "I find myself disagreeing with that belief, which is why that team now has a new leader."

Shot himself. Tyler considered that for a moment and found himself on Cole's side when it came to condemning the team, who had undoubtedly reacted instinctively when Sturgis pulled a gun. Which may or may not have been aimed at Sturgis' head.

"How many did you send?"

 

"Three in the house, four more on the grounds."

 

"Idiots," Tyler said without heat.

 

"You would have brought him to me alive."

 

"It's not the way I usually operate," Tyler pointed out dryly, thinking that it'd maybe been too long since Cole was in the field. Things got messy.

 

Cole cleared his throat, ignoring Tyler's comment. "I want to see you. Immediately. There are loose ends to clear up--"

 

"Now that I've heard from you, I was planning to take off," Tyler said before Cole planned his life out for him. "Disappear with Dan for a while."

 

The silence from Cole that followed was eloquently disapproving, and Tyler sighed. "I came close to losing him over this, Cole. I did what you wanted; I gave you your traitor. We're done."

 

"You know that it's not that simple."

 

Frustration, dark and bitter, boiled up inside him. "I'm making it simple, Cole. I don't work for you anymore. You managed without me for two years--"

 

"You call what happened managing?" Cole demanded. "If you'd still been working for me--"

"My job was killing people," Tyler interrupted. This had to end here. "I was a weapon you pointed and fired. I wasn't involved with internal security, and if you're deluded enough to think that I'd have picked up on Sturgis turning when I had my hands full with my own assignments--"

"I think you underrate your survival instincts," Cole told him. "The first agent killed would have set alarm bells ringing for you as a potential target yourself, and you would have acted to protect yourself and found out who was to blame. I know you."
"Yeah, well, you don't know me now," Tyler said, tiredness swamping his relief that it was all over. "I'm not interested in coming back to my old job--"

"No one is asking you to do that. I accept that your usefulness as a sniper is over."

 

"And I'm not interested in becoming your sniffer dog."

 

"Now, that's a pity, because you'd be very good at it and it wouldn't carry with it the risks or responsibilities of your former position."

 

"You have got to be fucking kidding me," Tyler said incredulously. "I'd be a target from day one, and if I screwed up--"

 

"You wouldn't."

"I'm sweating just thinking about it," Tyler said, which wasn't a lie. He could feel his throat tighten and his hands shake. Fuck. "I don't want that life. Office work, field work, secrets and lies-- And Dan would hate it."

"Mr. Seaton. Yes." Cole hummed thoughtfully. "Well, let's be realistic here; I'm sure he's been pleasant company, but he's hardly likely to be a permanent fixture in your life, is he? Take a few weeks' vacation together -- a month, even -- and after that we can send him on his way with a little cash in his pocket, or find him a job somewhere." Cole sounded kind but firm, an indulgent parent admonishing a wayward son. "It's time to get back to work, John, and although Mr. Seaton's background contains nothing to his detriment, I can't really see him fitting into your life once you leave your rustic retreat."

"You're right," Tyler said evenly. "He'd be bored out of his mind and so would I. For the last time, Cole, no. You call me again and I'll hang up. You show up here and I'll--"

 

"Shoot me?" Cole suggested.

 

"Don't tempt me."

He ended the call and leaned his head against the back of the couch, staring up at the dusty rafters, his heart hammering. Stressed out and panicking after one phone call, and Cole wanted him back in a life where every minute would be either mind-numbingly dull or life and death intense and days off and public holidays didn't exist.

He wouldn't last a month. Time to follow Dan's example and run, taking Dan with him.
Chapter Eight
"I'm forgetting something."

 

Dan kept hold of his patience. "Tyler, you've got lists. With check marks all over them. You're organized. If you've forgotten something, it's something not worth remembering."

Maybe you could be too organized. Dan's packing hadn't taken long. He'd arrived on Tyler's land with nothing but the clothes on his back and a few dollars, and he hadn't gone on many shopping sprees since then. Tyler had given him a suitcase and told him that anything that didn't fit in would be left behind, because they were traveling light. Dan had responded by packing everything into a backpack instead and then surreptitiously tucking his laptop into Tyler's suitcase when he'd found that it wouldn't fit into the backpack.

Tyler's packing had been equally rapid, which hadn't surprised Dan at all, but their departure had been spread over days, not hours, which did. Tyler was all about the need to leave, but something seemed to be making him drag his feet, and Dan didn't know what it was.

Now, though, they were practically out of the door, and yet Tyler was frowning, chewing the inside of his cheek pensively. Dan wanted to
go
; there was a big world out there waiting, the sun was finally shining with some warmth behind it, and they were going to drive off like the end of a movie, with nothing to worry about but his suspicion that Tyler's taste in road trip music wasn't going to match his own and Tyler would get snappy as hell if Dan's map reading got them lost.

"Just leave it--" Dan began, but Tyler snapped his fingers, a look of relief spreading over his face as he pulled a key out of his pocket. "Is that the spare key to the cabin?" Dan asked evenly. "The one you were supposed to leave with Anne when you said goodbye to her yesterday?"

Tyler nodded, looking as close to sheepish as he got. "I was so busy promising to send her postcards that I walked away with it."

 

"Well, that's not a problem," Dan said. "Go and drop it off now, and I'll do one last look around here."

 

"Come with me," Tyler suggested. "We can grab an early lunch before we--"

"No," Dan said firmly. "We're going, okay? No lunches, no long goodbyes, no final trip to put something else into storage -- we are
out
of here. When you get back, I'll be waiting on the porch, door locked behind me, and you'll pull up, I'll get in, and off we go."

"If you think I could drive away without checking for myself that the place is locked up tight, forget it."
"Fine, you can see for yourself that I've mastered the art of turning a key," Dan said, "but that's it. Now get your ass into town and give Anne a hug from me."

"I'll give her a kiss instead," Tyler said, goosing Dan as he walked by. "We both know she likes you best because you remembered to say you liked her new hair and I didn't even notice she'd cut it."

Grinning, Dan watched Tyler walk over to his truck, admiring the view when Tyler broke into a jog, his long legs moving smoothly. Dan was already anticipating pulling over for the night and curling up next to Tyler in a bed they didn't have to make the next day. Motel rooms could be on the skuzzy side, but he'd slept in worse places, after all. A night under a tree in the woods sounded romantic, but the worst motel mattress was still softer than stone-embedded dirt that stole the heat from your bones and gave back nothing but a damp, spreading chill. Dan watched the truck drive away and then began a thorough, if redundant, check of each room.

In a day that had begun at dawn and ended long after dusk, they'd packed up most of the cabin and put the contents into storage in a facility one town over. Tyler had told Anne that they were leaving, but no one else. Advertising that the cabin, remote as it was, was going to be standing empty would have been risky, and since there was no one else in town that Dan really wanted to say goodbye to, he'd shrugged and gone along with it.

Walking from room to room didn't take long, and apart from a quarter wedged between two floorboards that Dan pried out for something to do, there was nothing that should have been packed that wasn't. The cupboards were empty of food, the bedding had all been washed and tidied away, and they'd slept in sleeping bags, which had then been tossed into the truck.

Dan had wanted to fly, not drive, something that was at the top of his to-do list, but Tyler had pointed out how much there was to see if they drove across country to their first destination, a small town in the Florida Keys with a restaurant claiming to serve the best Key Lime pie in the world. According to Tyler, every restaurant down there said they did that, but this time it was true. They weren't in a rush, so Dan had gone along with that, too, even though getting onto a plane in the gray, thin light of March and stepping off a few hours later into sunlight with green ocean waves lapping up against a white dazzle of sand sounded pretty good, and miles of wet road, well, not so much.

He was agreeing a lot with Tyler recently, not because he didn't have a mind of his own, but because Tyler looked like a man on the edge and Dan didn't want to push him over. If it didn't matter too much, he just said 'yes' and nodded and watched the relief of no argument to deal with brighten Tyler's eyes.

The living room still had the long green couch and the table in it, so it wasn't completely empty, but the books had all gone into storage, with the exception of a few of Tyler's favorites that he'd packed for the journey, and that made the room look desolate.
Dan shook himself out of his melancholy. They'd be back. At least -- Well, he wasn't sure if they would or not, but as long as he was with Tyler, he didn't care where they lived. He would miss the cabin and the woods when spring truly arrived if they were in a city somewhere, but there was going to be so much to see -- God, he couldn't wait.

He locked the back door and shot the bolts, too. Knowing that Tyler would undo it all and relock the door himself didn't stop Dan making sure that he did it right. The front door, well, since Tyler was going to want to come in, there really wasn't any point in locking that. He'd just sit on the porch and wait for Tyler's truck to come bumping up the narrow lane.

Anticipation fizzed through him as he looked around, committing the scene to memory to be brought out when he was thousands of miles away and feeling homesick. Dan grinned at a squirrel, gray tail fluffed up as he scavenged for food he'd buried in the fall, and felt a pang at the thought of the weeds that would cluster thickly in the fertile soil of the garden with no one to keep them at bay.

He wondered if their route southeast would take them anywhere near his old home. It probably would. Tyler had asked if he wanted to see his dad, just to let the man know that he was alive, but when Dan had made it clear just what he thought of that idea, Tyler hadn't pushed it. Might be fun to go through town doing ninety, though, whistling out of the window as he stirred up the dust and let every single person watching just choke on it.

The mildly vengeful fantasy distracted him from his surroundings, so that when a woman stepped out of the trees, he jerked upright, startled into displaying a distinct lack of cool.

 

"Uh, hi?" he called out, and got a wave back. Curious, he walked down the porch steps and over to where she stood looking lost, a rueful smile on her face.

Hiker, clearly, though they didn't get many of them, since the woods belonged to Tyler in every direction for quite a ways. When hikers did show up, it was usually summer, not chilly spring with the trails all a mess of frozen mud. He assessed her automatically: mid-thirties, pretty, toting a backpack and wearing tailored dark brown pants and expensive walking shoes. She held a map in her hand, folded neatly, and a fleece hat that matched her pants and jacket was drawn down over fair hair, shoulder-length and shiny. Her eyes, when he got close enough to see them, were green, the color too vivid to be anything but contacts, and he wondered if they were originally brown.

"Would you believe it?" she said, and gave the map an impatient shake that made it rustle dryly. "I've got this and a compass and I'm still so turned around that until the sun decides to set, I won't know which way west is -- and then I'll be as much in the dark as I am now." The smile turned flirtatious. "And no, I don't have a GPS doodad; they're cheating, don't you think?"

"Depends on what you're doing," Dan said cautiously. She didn't belong here, in some indefinable way, and he strained his ears, hoping to hear the rumble of Tyler's truck. "Hiking," she said promptly. "I'm supposed to be meeting my friends in Carlyle. We were all dropped at different points in the woods, and there's a bottle of wine for the woman who makes it to our hotel first."

"It's not all that safe in the woods by yourself," Dan said, with the authority of a man who'd slept rough and never seen anything bigger than a groundhog. "Suppose you twisted your ankle or something?"

"I've got a cell phone," she said, some of the charm dropping away. "Listen, I suppose getting directions from you is cheating, too, just a teensy bit, but frankly, I'm bored of playing Girl Scout, so…"

Dan pointed at the driveway. "Follow that track and you'll come to a road. Carlyle's to the left."

 

She flashed him another smile, this one warmly grateful and just a shade too appreciative for the little he'd done. "
Thank
you." A nod, with some dimples showing, and she turned to walk away.

It took her three steps to stop and glance back, fumbling in a deep pocket of her jacket. "I don't suppose I could impose just a little more and ask for a refill for my water bottle? I'm
so
thirsty after all this tramping through the wilderness."