Into the Fire
Authors: Suzanne Brockmann
CONTENTS
For Ed, my own personal dog whisperer.
Just like Gladys said—you’re the best thing
that ever happened to me.
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank
you,
dear reader, for your continued support of my Troubleshooters series, of which this book is the lucky thirteenth installment. (And a heads up, gang, because we’re going to try to get the fourteenth book,
Dark of Night,
into your hands early next spring. Watch my website
www.SuzanneBrockmann.com
for the deets about that!)
Thank you to the wonderful team at Ballantine Books—Jennifer Hershey, Courtney Moran, Kim Hovey, and Kate Blum—and to my agent, Steve Axelrod.
My first-draft readers snapped to it in a particularly short time frame for this book, and gave me some valuable feedback. Huge thanks to Lee Brockmann, Deede Bergeron, Scott Lutz, and Patricia McMahon, aka the Encylopedia Patricica.
Thanks, as always, to the home team—Ed, Melanie and Jason Gaffney, Eric Ruben, Fred and Lee Brockmann, the amazing Kuhlmans, Apolonia Davalos, and the two greatest Schnauzer puppies in the world—C.K. Dexter-Haven and Lil’ Joe. (And Mel, thank you for Aidan, a puppy of the human variety! He makes the world a better place with his sunshine and smiles!)
Mondo thanks to my PayPal goddess, Kathy Lague, who makes my virtual signings possible, and allows me to get hundreds of signed, personalized books into the hands of my readers. If you’re reading this in the front of
Into the Fire,
it’s probably too late to get a signed copy of
this
book via Internet order and U.S. mail. Sorry ’bout that. But I’ll be holding a virtual signing for
Dark of Night
in early 2009. Visit my website in January for details!
Thank you to my good friend and go-to man for research, Navy SEAL Tom Rancich, who never laughs at my silly questions. (Will a handgun that’s been submerged in used cooking oil still fire…?) Thank you, too, Tom, for your continued presence on my Internet bulletin board. (Check out the series of video interviews with Tom that I posted on YouTube. Go to
www.YouTube.com
and search for “Brockmann, Rancich.” Tom’s a great storyteller. You gotta hear his story of how he met himself…)
Thank you to the real-life Gail Deegan and her wonderful husband, Bill Huddleston, for their generous donation to Greater Boston PFLAG. You inspire me! I suspect you would make a truly excellent FBI team leader, Gail, if you ever decide to change careers.
And equal thanks to the real-life Lynn McCrea, who made a matching donation to GB PFLAG and gave her name to Izzy Zanella’s crazy downstairs neighbor. (Let me know if he gets too loud!)
Gail and Lynn, you both rock. The money you donated will help fund GB PFLAG’s Safe Schools program—thank you, from the bottom of my heart.
Thank you to my team of volunteers, who are standing ready for me to give the signal to hold my next reader weekend: Sue Smallwood, Erika Schutte, Gail Reddin, Dorbert Ogle, Peggy Mitchell, Heather McHugh, Jeanne Mangano, Laura Luke, Beki & Jim Keene, Stephanie Hyacinth, Suzie Bernhardt, and Elizabeth & Lee Benjamin. Any minute, guys, I promise….
Check my website at
www.SuzanneBrockmann.com/appearances.htm
for information about my next reader event.
As always, any mistakes I’ve made or liberties I’ve taken are completely my own.
P
ART
O
NE
S
IX
M
ONTHS
A
GO
C
HAPTER
O
NE
J
ANUARY
2008
D
ALTON
, C
ALIFORNIA
H
annah Whitfield woke up alone in her bed.
Which wasn’t that unusual. In fact, this had been her only opportunity to
not
wake up alone for the first time in years—due to the still somewhat unbelievable fact that she’d actually had sex last night.
Hannah swept her hair out of her eyes as she reached to turn on the lamp that sat on her bedside table, trying—not as successfully—to push away her feelings of imminent dread. Her head was pounding and her ankle was on fire so she took a pull from the nearly empty bottle of Johnny W. she’d left next to her bed. Hair of the dog, was the age-old excuse. She knew better, but right now she needed the drumming pain in both her head and her ankle to back the hell off.
Last night had been far from fairy-tale-inducing material, with no impending happily-ever-after in sight. True, she’d wanted to get with this particular man ever since their very first encounter—since he’d knocked her off that Alaskan pier, a hundred years ago.
A hundred years? No. It felt more like a solid thousand since the tall, dark and handsome man with the laughing brown eyes had held out an enormous hand and helped Hannah out of the icy water. It felt like an eternity since either of them had so much as smiled. And maybe it had been. Maybe tragedy had its own rules in the time-space continuum. The year following the death of a murdered wife and best friend passed at the speed of five hundred years in normal, happy, human time, with all of the previous years of laughter and joy instantly fading to ancient-seeming, sepia-toned distant memories.
So, yeah. Last night had been grimly moonbeam- and fairy-dust-free. Once upon a time, Hannah had let herself get laid—except, no, that wasn’t quite right. She’d been the layee. It was Vinh Murphy who’d gotten laid—for the first time since Angelina had died.
Last night, like most nights these days, Hannah had been somewhat anesthetized, but she was nowhere near as shit-faced as Murph. They’d had an argument about the same old same old—the keys to his truck. Hannah had swiftly adiosed them when he’d shown up at the cabin at 0100, already wasted. That was his MO—she wouldn’t see him for months, and then he’d appear. Usually in the dead of night, flashing his headlights in the driveway, stinking of gin, his brain damn near fried from whatever else he’d ingested in his attempt to forget that his wife—the love of his life, as he called Angelina—was forever gone.
They’d argued—
no, I will not give back your keys
—and Murphy had tripped over the leather ottoman and fallen. He’d hit his head on the arm of the sofa, and Hannah had thought he was down for the night, so after she’d helped him up, she’d dragged him over to her bed. Her intention had been—as always—to let him sleep it off in her room here downstairs, while she pulled herself up the ladder to the mattress in the loft.
But as she’d toppled him onto her bed, her bad ankle had bent the wrong way and the sudden surge of pain had made her lose her balance. She tried to straighten up, but Murphy’d held on to her, the expression in his dark brown eyes far different from anything she’d ever seen there before.
“Hannah,” he’d said. “I’m so fucked up.” And then he’d kissed her.
Yeah, Murphy had kissed her, and she should have scrambled away, but she hadn’t. Instead, she’d pulled up her nightshirt and opened her legs for him and he’d pushed himself inside of her, which, God, had felt so good, even though she knew it was the worst kind of mistake—not just flat-out stupid but incredibly, insanely wrong for too many reasons to count.
And no, sex with Murph hadn’t been the romantic, passionate ecstasy she’d dreamed about all those years ago when he’d laughed and pulled her back onto the pier alongside Patrick’s boat, but rather a fumbled, clumsy, silent, joyless rutting. Murphy didn’t kiss her again. He just kept his eyes shut and his head down as his body strained, as Hannah clung to him, not allowing herself to wish or hope for anything—not even her own physical relief—as he filled her, as she felt his heart pounding alongside of hers. But she came right away because it had been close to forever for her, too, and he was right behind her, shuddering his release.
And then, there they were, mere seconds after it had started. In Hannah’s bed with most of their clothes still on. Bonus moron points went to both of them for failing to use protection of any kind.
It was then that Murphy started to cry—which he’d never done in front of her, not even at his toasted worst, not even at Angelina’s horror-show of a memorial service. And so Hannah had cried, too, just holding on to him.
He’d finally fallen asleep in her arms, here in her bed, but now he was gone.
A light was on in the living room.
Hannah moved as quietly as she could out of the bedroom, considering she’d misplaced her cane and…
“What are you
doing
?” Her shock and volume apparently startled him and he turned, guilt on his grim face, her keys in one giant hand as he held the lock to the gun case in the other. He didn’t try to explain—he didn’t need to. He just went back to trying the next key.
It was possible Hannah was going to throw up. “What’s your plan, Murph?” she asked instead. “You gonna kill yourself—right here in my living room?”
He didn’t answer. Or maybe he did, but his back was to her as he fumbled with the key ring. He was still drunk or high or whatever he’d been when he’d first appeared at her door nearly four hours ago.
“Stop,” she said, her heart in her throat. He swayed slightly, but he didn’t even slow down. “The key’s not on there—I don’t even have a key.” It was a lie. She
did
have a key, even though the weapons weren’t hers. They belonged to her uncle—everything in this cabin did. A former Marine and Vietnam vet, Pat had a similar glass-fronted case at his place up in Juneau, and she had the key for that one, too. He trusted her, Pat did.
Semper fi
and
hoo-yah
and all that, even though she’d never actually
been
a Marine.
Murphy had, however. He knew Pat well. And he knew Hannah. Drunk or not, he didn’t need to do more than glance at her to know the truth. The key
was
on that ring he was holding.
“Please stop,” she said again, begging him this time.
And this time Murphy did. And he turned and looked right at her. “Why?”
How am I going to live without her?
He didn’t need to say the words for Hannah to know what he was thinking. God knows he’d said it enough since Angelina had died.
“Jesus, Murph.” Hannah felt her voice shake. “I lost her, too. It’s time to stop the bullshit. It’s time to start dealing—”
He turned to face her again. “Dealing?
You’re
gonna to talk to
me
about
dealing,
while you hide away here—”
“I’m not the one who wants to kill myself!”
“Yeah,” Murphy said, making sure she understood, speaking carefully so that his words didn’t slur together. “Because you’re already dead and buried.”
Hannah felt herself bristle and the retort was out of her mouth before she could stop it. “Fuck you!”
“Tried that,” he said, his eyes filled with such hatred. It took her aback until she realized it was self-loathing that she saw there. “Didn’t help.” He turned back to the keys, but even as he tried the next one, he sank to his knees, his shoulders shaking as he began to sob.
And all of Hannah’s hurt and anger and fear morphed into near-blinding grief. “Vinh,” she said as she crossed to him.
“I wanted her,” he told her through his tears, his words even more blurred. “Not you.”
“I know,” she said, as she held on to him, rocking him, her heart breaking for him, and herself, too. “I know that.”
“I’m so sorry, Hannah…”
“Shhh,” she said. “Murph, it’s okay. I was trying to help. I thought…” She’d thought she could at least give him what he seemed to want—a chance for relief, release. Yeah, right, like it had been all about Murphy and what he’d needed. “God, I’m sorry, too.”
J
ANUARY
2008
S
AN
D
IEGO
, C
ALIFORNIA
The most beautiful woman in the world walked into the bar.
It sounded like the setup to a not-particularly-funny joke. But the bar was the Ladybug Lounge—the SEAL Team Sixteen hangout near Coronado Navy Base—and the woman…
She was incredible.
It seemed almost sacrilegious that all movement didn’t stop, that the clamor of the place didn’t cease, that the room didn’t fall into an appropriately reverent hush. Instead, a group of jarheads didn’t even look up from their game of pool, the jukebox continued blaring the YouTube-famous treadmill song from OK Go, the crowd at the corner booth burst into raucous laughter, and the bartender blended a new batch of piña coladas with an earsplitting appliance whine.
Instead, Izzy Zanella alone stopped breathing to watch as the most beautiful woman in the world let the door close behind her. His heart damn near stopped, too, as she approached the bar where he was perched on a stool, nursing a beer.
It was true that she wasn’t dressed to be noticed in a pair of cutoff shorts and a gray
Colbert Nation
T-shirt, flip-flops on her perfect feet. Her dark hair was pulled back into a casual ponytail, but despite that, with her heart-shaped face and flawlessly smooth skin, her Natalie Portman eyes and that mouth that he knew he’d see tonight in his dreams, she was magic personified. It seemed incredible since Izzy couldn’t remember his last girlfriend’s chin—she must’ve had one—but even this woman’s chin was freaking perfection.
Which was saying something, because for him to be looking anywhere besides her five-mile-long, suntanned, beach-bunny legs was unbelievable.
Damn.
While he’d never passed up a chance to appreciate a nice pair of legs, he was pretty much in the legs-were-legs-were-legs camp.
Not anymore. He’d always thought of himself as a breast man, but now that he’d died and gone to leg heaven, he’d have to rethink that, although she had plenty of C-cup action going on, too.
Izzy could see the string-straps of a bikini—yellow and black—tied around her graceful neck. And for the first time in God knows how long, he found himself praying.
Please, Yahweh, let her be lost on her way to the beach. And let him offer to show her the way so that he could see the rest of that barely there bathing suit…
As she came closer, he saw that her eyes were indeed a rich, dark, mysterious brown. Their gazes locked and…She shifted slightly to the right, away from him, putting an empty barstool between them.
Oh. Yeah.
He’d changed out of his BDUs, but he hadn’t showered—opting instead to beat his teammates over here to the Bug, to get a cold beer inside of himself as quickly as possible—his desperately needed reward after the forty-eight hours of sheer hell that had been described by the senior chief as
an easy training op.
Izzy still wore his olive drab, sweat-stained T-shirt—along with blue-and-white flower-patterned surfer jams that had been among the few clean pieces of laundry in his apartment day before yesterday.
Meaning, they’d
been
clean—day before yesterday. Before that dickweed Danny Gillman had torn out of the craphole of a parking lot over at the simulated swamp—because God and the senior chief knew that every “easy training op” needed a freaking simulated swamp—and sprayed Izzy and his unzipped sea-bag with
the
stankiest-smelling briny-ass mud known to mankind.
Yeah, thanks to Gillman, the most heartbreakingly beautiful woman in the world didn’t want to sit too close to Izzy at the bar.
But she
did
glance at him again, with trepidation on her perfect face.
Wise move, staying upwind like that.
Things he should have said—perhaps with a reassuring yet appreciative, warm yet manly smile. But when his heart had stopped—somewhere back when she’d opened the Bug’s door—his vocal cords must have gotten gummed up, because all that came out was a great, big, tumbleweed-and cricket-chirping-filled silence.
Izzy accessorized it perfectly with some slack-jawed, openmouthed, glassy-eyed staring.
Of course it could have been worse. He could have stared at her whilst scratching his balls and belching.
She turned away, leaning forward slightly, elbows against the bar to catch the barkeep’s eye, which made the bottom of her T-shirt separate from the low-riding waist of her shorts. Skin was revealed. Smooth, perfect, sexy-as-hell skin that proved without a doubt that her bathing suit wasn’t a one-piece. Somehow Izzy kept himself in his seat, fighting the urge to fall to his knees and weep with joy.
“Excuse me,” she said, in a voice that was surprisingly husky and deep, yet still inspiringly musical.
“We card here,” Kevin the bartender told her, his flat rudeness making Izzy bristle.
“No,” she said. “I mean, I know. I’m not…I don’t…” She was flustered, but she took a deep breath and started again. “I’m looking for…for…a friend of mine? He’s a SEAL, with Team Sixteen…?”
A
friend…
But then ol’ Kev gave her a knowing look, clearly thinking the same thing Izzy was—that she was some ditched ex, looking for one last face-to-face with a guy who’d already left her in the dust—crazy-assed mofo that he had to have been to dump
her.
“You’ll have to wait for your
friend
outside. I don’t want any trouble in here.”
She squared her shoulders, clearly preparing for battle, but Kevin dismissed her by turning away, and then, alleluia, Izzy found his voice. “What’s his name?” he asked. “Your friend.”
She eyed him warily, and he gave her what he hoped was an “I don’t bite—too hard” smile.
“I’m Izzy. I’m with Team Sixteen, too. So I probably know him. Your friend.”
“Danny,” she said as hope dawned in her eyes, as she looked Izzy over more closely, no doubt realizing that he wasn’t just some fashion-challenged homeless man, taking a break from dumpster-diving. “Gillman?”