Gone Too Far (27 page)

“Uh, Kel,” Tom said as she hiked up her skirt and straddled his lap, right there at the table where he’d laid out all of his notes. The door was ajar. The guards couldn’t see in, but they sure as hell could hear every word they said.

“We have only thirty minutes,” she told him, starting to unfasten his pants.

He caught her hands. “Kelly.”

“Wow, that was fast. We’ve only been married a few hours and already you don’t want to have sex with me.”

She was just kidding. Wasn’t she? “The door’s open,” he said, holding her gaze, trying to make it clear with his eyes that if it was only about what
he
wanted, he’d be inside of her already.

Oh baby, the panties on the floor thing always made him crazy, and she knew it.

Kelly didn’t look away from him as she raised her voice. “Is it going to bother you boys out in the hall if my husband and I have sex on our wedding night?”

There was a pause, then one of the two guards—they couldn’t have been much more than twenty years old—said, “No, ma’am!”

But then the door closed with a definite-sounding
click
.

“Hey!” that first guard said.

“We can take a few steps down the hall,” the other guard said. “I think it’s safe to say he’s not going anywhere.”

Kelly laughed.

Tom let go of her hands. “See, that’s not SEAL thinking,” he told her as she . . . oh,
yeah.
“A SEAL would assume this
is
the time I’m going to try to get away.”

“That’s just an excuse to listen at the door.” She kissed him.

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” he said, pulling down the front of her dress to discover that she wasn’t wearing a bra. “It’s going to make it harder to get an annulment if we need to get—”

“I lied,” she told him. “I’m not going to let you annul our marriage.”

“If I’m convicted—”

“I’m not going to let you be convicted.”

Tom looked at her as she sat with him buried deeply inside of her, little pieces of her hair falling out of her French braid, her cheeks flushed, her eyes flashing, and her magnificent breasts bare and all but heaving as she breathed hard and fast, unafraid to let him see that he made her pant with desire.

His
wife
.

“God, I love you,” he gasped. She wasn’t the only one panting.

“I went to the library,” she said, and he had absolutely no clue as to what she was talking about. She’d started moving, that long, slow slide up off of him, and the even slower slide down that made his eyes roll back in his head. “And I asked the librarians if they knew Mary Lou.”

Who?

“They said she came in . . . a couple of times a week,” Kelly continued raggedly. “One of them told me . . . she saw her once with a man. She remembered it because it was so unusual—Mary Lou was always alone. But then . . . there was this one time, with this one guy who was flirting with her . . . and even carried her books out to her car. The librarian thought they maybe knew each other. And—get this—the library has a surveillance camera . . . out in the parking lot because—Oh yes!”

He’d let his mouth take over for his hands, drawing her breast into his mouth and swirling his tongue across the rock-hard pellet of her nipple. What an incredible turn-on, knowing she was so hot for him. But it was hard to say if that was what had elicited her enthusiastic response, or if it was the fact that, at the same time, his hand had slipped lower, touching her lightly between them.

“Don’t stop doing that,” she ordered.

And then she was silent for a moment, and it wasn’t until she started talking again that he realized she had been collecting her thoughts, which was pretty damned amazing, since his thoughts had been narrowed down to “Oh God,” and “Oh yes,” and “Hold on, hold on, don’t come yet . . .”

“There’s a camera in the library parking lot,” Kelly told him, “because there was a . . . a bunch of robberies and vandalism about eight months ago. The librarians told me . . . the camera probably acted as a deterrent . . . because there were no further problems, but they’ve kept it running. And . . . you’re going to love this—”

Yes, he definitely did love this.

“They never recycled the videotapes,” Kelly announced. “They just labeled them and filed them. Don’t you just love librarians? I’ve got a month and a half of . . . surveillance tapes from the library parking lot in the trunk of the car. To take home and watch. And see if I can’t find a picture . . . of Mary Lou with this guy. . . .”

“Unh,” Tom said, because although none of what she’d said seemed to make sense to him, it seemed obvious from the triumphant ring in her voice that she wanted some kind of response.

“I know,” Kelly said. “It’s probably nothing, but I need to do
some
thing . . . and finding people who actually knew Mary Lou . . . seems to be a good place to start. I spoke to Max Bhagat on the phone tonight, and he thought that was a good idea, too.”

Max . . .

“Max suggested . . . I talk to the other wives and girlfriends of the guys in Team Sixteen . . . and try to remember the weeks or even months prior to the assassination attempt. If a terrorist targeted Mary Lou as a potential way to get weapons onto the base . . . he had most likely done some surveillance on the rest of us, too. You know, created additional contacts . . . that he might be able to use as a backup plan. Max thought we should compare names and even descriptions of people we’d met during that time . . . see if there’s anyone we all knew. . . .

“He said to tell you . . . he’ll get out here to see you as soon as he can,” Kelly continued.

But then she pulled his head up and kissed him, which was good, because it meant that neither one of them had to talk or listen for a while.

“We’ve got two agents inside of Donny DaCosta’s house,” she reported, “with him since he’s refused to leave, and we’re attempting to locate Mary Lou’s landscaper friend without tipping off the entire city to the fact that we’re looking for him. If someone—Don’s ‘alien’—
is
following him, it could well be in an attempt to locate Mary Lou. If we do it right, we can pull both men in for questioning at the same time.”

“Max go to San Diego?” Sam asked, trying not to think about that kiss he’d seen. The thought of Alyssa with Max had always been hard to cope with, but
seeing
them together like that had been unbearable.

“No, he sent Peggy and Yashi out there for now. He went back to Sarasota, for—” She paused. “—a number of reasons, one of which has to do with some political bullshit about some Senate investigating committee.”

“It must be tough, having to spend so much time apart from him,” Sam said.

She didn’t answer, instead taking a conversational turn to her favorite subject. “Are you ready to come in yet?”

“Please don’t hang up on me,” he said.

“That sounds like a no.”

“Let’s not play this game.” He was so freaking tired. “Please? I just want to talk to you.”

“Okay,” she said. The clarity of their satellite connection was so good, it was almost as if she were sitting right beside him. “Tell me about Ringo.”

That caught him by surprise. “What’s to tell that you don’t already know? It was a nickname.”

“I want to know about Ringo, the person. Your sister said that starting around eighth grade, you stopped answering to Roger—that you became Ringo.”

“You called her.”

“Yes,” Alyssa said. She didn’t mention his revelation about his father, although he knew she must’ve talked about that at length with Elaine, who was always more than willing to discuss her theories on the topic. “She wanted me to tell you to turn yourself in. She’s worried about you.”

“She shouldn’t be.”

“She is. She still calls you that—Ringo.”

Back to this again. Sam sighed. “Yeah. Noah and Claire do, too.”

“Were you into music or something?”

“No,” he told her. “It was just a nickname Uncle Walt gave me. That was all he ever called me and, you know, I actually thought at one point that he’d forgotten my real name.”

“That’s pretty unlikely, considering you spent a lot of time at his house, hanging with his grandson. He probably had a copy of your rap sheet.”

“Yeah, well, I was a stupid kid, what can I say?” Sam laughed softly. “Shit, I was dumb as a stone. I still am, sometimes. But I didn’t have a rap sheet,” he added.

“I was kidding, Starrett. So why did you refuse to be called Roger? And why did you drop Ringo and turn yourself into Sam?”

“I didn’t drop Ringo. I just . . . stopped hanging around with the people who called me that. After Walt died, I just . . .” He’d found it hard to keep up their friendship after Noah had married Claire. They suddenly had completely different lives. Sam, in the Navy, working his ass off to achieve what had started out as Noah’s dream—to become a SEAL. Then, when he did, it was hard to visit. It seemed almost as if he were rubbing Noah’s nose in it.

And yet the few times he had come back, Nos had seemed so happy with his family and his job. Working for Walt . . .

“I’m still Ringo,” Sam told her. Although every time he caught sight of himself in the rearview mirror, he gave himself a scare. With his haircut and clean shave, he looked like a total stranger. And forget about the clothes he’d picked up on sale at the Men’s Warehouse. He’d transformed himself into someone completely unrecognizable.

“I don’t think you are,” she said. “I think you took Ringo and packed him up and stuck him in some storage box somewhere—same as you did with Roger back in eighth grade.”

“Okay,” Sam said, trying to pretend that her words hadn’t shaken him. Was it possible she was right? Had he really done that? He tried to keep his voice light. “You now know too much about me.”

“Do you have any pictures?” she asked. “Of you as a kid?”

Sam leapt upon the tangent eagerly. This was much easier to talk about. “I think Lainey has a bunch. Probably Noah, too. Walt liked taking snapshots. He had a couple of drawers filled with old photos and letters and all sorts of stuff. Documents. I remember he and Dot got this dog, it was probably back around 1962, and they saved the records from the vet from when he was treated for worms. The dog had been gone for years, but that piece of paper about those worms was in that drawer. I used to love to sift through that stuff. You never knew what you would find. And then one day I found—”

He stopped. Was he actually going to tell Alyssa this story?

Yes.

If he told her about this, then she’d understand why he’d purposely packed Roger into a little box—just like she’d said. And maybe she’d also understand why he was still Ringo—why he’d always be Ringo. At least he hoped he still was.

“One day you found what?” Alyssa asked.

He was going to have to start closer to the beginning.

“Uncle Walt walked with a limp,” he told her, “because Dot’s brother didn’t like the idea of her marrying a black man, and the motherfucker went after Walt with a sharpened shovel and damn near cut off his leg. Walt had just come back from the war, and he’d flown God knows how many missions without being injured, and this little racist prick goes and cripples him for life.

“Noah and I hated all of Dot’s brothers, but we particularly hated the one who cut him—her younger one. We used to imagine what we would have done if we’d’ve been there. We used to rant and rave about vengeance and justice, and Uncle Walt would just chuckle and say he’d gotten the ultimate revenge by living a long and happy life. He had the love of a woman he adored and his two boys to look after him in his old age.” Like Walt hadn’t been the one who’d looked after Sam and Noah right up to the day he died. “That’s what he called me and Nos. We were
his two boys
.”

Sam had to clear his throat.

“I can’t begin to tell you what it meant to me to have Uncle Walter claim me as his own,” he told her. “Before I met Noah, I was kind of, like, I don’t know, this little wild animal, I guess. I mean, in hindsight it’s pretty obvious that my father was fucking with my brain—although it sure as hell could have been worse, huh? My mother spent most of the time stoned on Valium and Lainey was great, but she was so much older than me. . . .”

How could he explain this? “See, no one ever touched me,” Sam said, “and I think little kids really need to be touched. You know, hugged. Even little boys.
Especially
little boys. Walt used to just grab me in a bear hug, and Dot kissed me hello every single time I walked into her house, and even Noah was so comfortable with himself and so at ease with being affectionate that he used to put his arm around me when we were just sitting around and . . .

“For the first time in my life I felt like I had a home. I was safe when I was with them. I could say anything and never be called stupid. I could break shit, you know, and it would be okay. We’d all just work together to glue it back together. It was . . . the first time that happened I was . . .”

He couldn’t begin to find the words. So he just plowed ahead. “I started doing better in school, because if Walt’s face could light up like that when I got a C plus, I wanted to see what he would look like if I got a B or, shit, an A. I even stopped fighting.” Sam caught himself. “Well, I tried to stop fighting. Every now and then some asshole caught me off guard. But I did try.

“In eighth grade, Noah and I started taking flight lessons. Dot and Walt owned a flight school as well as a fleet of small planes, and Walt told us if we passed the written course with a B plus or better, he’d start taking us up in his Cessna. So we had these big books that he gave us, and we spent all our time studying aerodynamics. It wasn’t easy. I remember I was taking a break. Noah was on the phone with some kid from his science class about the project they were doing, so I wandered into the dining room and starting poking through the picture drawer, and I noticed there was an old envelope slipped in there, along the side, that I’d never noticed before.

“I took it out and opened it, and it was a bunch of really old pictures. A girl and three boys—two bigger boys and one little tiny one, much younger than the others, like maybe Haley’s age. I loved looking at old pictures because it was like staring into a time tunnel. The cars in the street, and the clothes, and even the expressions on the kids’ faces was like from a totally different world. So I flip the picture over and on the back it says, ‘Dick, Frank, Dorothy, and baby Roger, 1934.’

“And I realize, holy shit, this is Dot and her brothers, and I turn the picture back over to get a better look at the baby—because he’s going to grow up and swing that shovel at Walt, and he’s got this goofy smile on his face. He’s just a little kid. But there’s more pictures, so I look through them, and there’s Dot in her uniform with her brothers, and the little one, Roger—God, I hated that he had the same name as me—was about my age, and I’m still looking hard into his eyes, trying to see the evil that’s in his heart.

“And then I pull a piece of paper out of that envelope, and it’s some kind of official document, and I realize it’s a marriage license between some guy named Percy Smith and . . . and Dorothy Elizabeth Starrett.”

“What?” Alyssa said.

“Yeah. Dot was married before, too,” Sam said. “Just like Walt. I knew that. Smith was her first husband’s name, and she kept it after he died. I guess it just never occurred to me that she’d once had a maiden name. All the correspondence I’d read had been to and from Lieutenant Dot Smith.

“So I sat there, staring at those pictures, sick to my stomach, because my father was Dot’s little brother, Roger. My own
father
had crippled Walt. And I was convinced more than ever that Walt and Dot didn’t know my real name. I’d been Ringo to them for so long, I thought . . .”

He had to take a deep breath. “I thought that they couldn’t possibly know who I was, because if they did, I surely would not be welcome in their house. And I was sick about that. Sick about them finding out and sending me away, and sick about deceiving them. I didn’t know what to do.”

“Oh, Sam,” Alyssa murmured.

“I went home and I didn’t sleep at all that night. The next day was Saturday, and Noah was working on his science project in the morning, and I knew it, so I went over to the Gaineses’ house, and I took that big flight textbook and I marched up to Walt and I put it on his desk.

“And I said,
’Thank you for letting me use your book, sir.’

“And he kind of sat back in his chair and said,
’You’re not giving up, are you?’
” His voice had been so mild, and his eyes had been so warm. Walt’s eyes were always warm. Roger had nearly started to cry right then and there.

“I told him that I couldn’t take flying lessons from him,” Sam told Alyssa now, “because I couldn’t afford to pay for them. And I didn’t feel right taking them for free. Taking his charity. And Walt, he never really got angry, at least not at Noah and me, but he got pretty grim at that. He told me that it sounded like those were my father’s words dribbling out of my mouth."

“And I said that my father didn’t know about the lessons. And Walt just kind of looked at me. I’m sure he was trying to figure out what was going on. He asked me—” So gently again. So Walt. “—didn’t I want to learn to fly? And I kind of scraped my courage together and squared my shoulders and I told him. I told him that he didn’t know who I really was, and that he wouldn’t want to be so charitable, giving me expensive things like flying lessons, if he knew my last name.

“Walt was completely floored, I’m sure. I was bracing myself to drop the bomb and tell him I was the son of his mortal enemy, Roger Starrett, when he dropped what felt like a bomb on me. He goes, ‘Roger Starrett, you don’t really think I don’t know your name, do you? Why do you think I call you Ringo? It’s a play on the spelling of Starrett. You know, Ringo Starrett, Ringo Starr . . .?

“Now it was my turn to be floored. And I told him that I’d just found out, just yesterday, that Dot was my real aunt, my real blood relative—not just pretend, the way I’d thought. I told him that my father was the same brother who’d crippled him, and I said something like,
’I’m a Starrett, too. You should hate me.’
”

It was then that Walter got it. He understood that Roger had come to him to return that book to make it easier for Walt to kick him out of the house, out of their lives.

“And Walt said—I’ll remember this forever.” Sam’s voice shook but he kept going. “He said, ‘Ringo, sweetheart, you are not your father. You are you, and I will love you until the day I die. I would love you even if you told me your last name was Hitler.’ He told me that Dot was a Starrett, too, and he didn’t have any trouble loving her, either. It was, um . . .”

Sam’s voice didn’t just shake, it flat-out wobbled, and he stopped. “It was the first time I really, truly understood the way love was supposed to be,” he whispered. “Unconditional.” Up to that very moment, the blessed sanctuary he’d found at the Gaineses’ house had always been something that could’ve been taken away from him. He’d lived every day knowing that sooner or later he’d do what he always did and go too far. He’d do something unforgivable and he’d be cast out of this paradise he’d found.