Into the Fire (44 page)

Who laughed, but not because he found Dave funny. “And somehow I knew you were going to say that, too.”

D
ALTON
, C
ALIFORNIA

“Hands where I can see ’em. Now.
Now!
”

Eden opened her eyes to find herself staring into the barrel of a very deadly looking gun. Her hands were under the fleece blanket she’d burrowed beneath as she’d settled in for a nap on the sofa. She struggled to pull them free.

“Don’t shoot me, I’m pregnant,” she shouted back, which was pretty stupid. “I’m unarmed,” she added as she put her hands in the air, which was really what mattered.

It was a hell of a way to wake up, damn near wetting her pants, immediately bursting into tears.

But crap, she’d never seen the business end of a weapon at this proximity. Danny used to hunt, and he’d instilled in her a deep and abiding respect for firearms. You never,
never
aimed a weapon at another person, unless you were willing to use it—and live with the consequences.

Richie had had a handgun not unlike this one, which was one of the reasons Eden had urged Jerry to break ties with him. She’d hated it when he waved it around.

“How many are you?” It was a woman who was holding this gun in Eden’s face. Short dark hair, dead-serious eyes that were a mix of blue and green, slightly round cheeks—it was the same woman who was in some of the photos that were on the fireplace mantel and magneted to the refrigerator door. The woman who lived here in this cabin. Hannah Something.

Eden didn’t understand the question. How many…? Hannah was deaf, not blind, wasn’t she? Hadn’t someone said she could read lips?

“Are you here alone?” Hannah all but snarled at her. “That’s a yes/no question. Shake or nod your head!”

And Eden got it. “Yes,” she answered, nodding emphatically. “It’s just me. I’m alone. I didn’t think you were coming back right away, so I let myself in. Please,
please,
point that thing away from me!”

With that, the gun, thank God, was out of her face. Hannah, however, did not make it disappear altogether, handling it—unlike Richie—the way Danny always had, as if she knew how to use it.

She was bigger than she looked in the pictures. Taller and more solid, and way more unfriendly for someone who seemed so photogenic. In all the photos, she’d had such a warm, wide, welcoming smile.

Right now, her mouth was a grim line. “Are you with the Freedom Network?” Hannah demanded.

“The who?
No!
”

“Then who the hell are you?”

Of course, she had every right to be angry. Eden
had
broken into her home…

“I’m so sorry,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I’m Eden. Gillman. I was here just yesterday with some people who were looking for you. You’re supposed to be out of town, helping someone named Murphy. I didn’t think you’d—”

“Who?” she demanded.

“Murphy?” Eden repeated.

“No, who was looking for us?” She didn’t talk like a deaf person, like that character, Joey, on
West Wing,
so maybe she wasn’t Hannah. “Give me names.”

“Dave,” Eden said. “Malkoff. And…and…Lindsey.” What
was
her last name? “Jenkins. And their company. Troubleshooters.”

Recognition mingled with relief in the woman’s eyes. But there was disbelief there, too. “
You’re
one of the Troubleshooters?”

“You
are
Hannah, right?” Eden asked, and the woman nodded.

“Should I write this down? Do you understand me? Should I talk more slowly?”

“No,” Hannah said. “You’re doing fine. Although I didn’t get your name. Eve?”

“Eden,” she repeated. There was a pad and paper right on a coffee table, probably exactly for this purpose, and she wrote it out for Hannah.
Eden Gillman.
It was probably best to leave Izzy out of this.

The older woman nodded. “Thanks. And yes, I’m Hannah. Do you really work for Troubleshooters?”

“No,” Eden said, shaking her head to be even more clear. “My husband—ex-husband—well, he’s not my husband, he’s a friend.
Was
a friend. He’s a SEAL and he and his friends were helping Dave find Murphy.”

“Okay,” Hannah said. “Most of that before
helping Dave find Murphy?
I didn’t get it.”

“It’s a long story,” Eden told her, unable to keep her eyes from tearing up. If Izzy wasn’t on his way overseas, he was surely back at his apartment by now. He’d probably found those videos and had already called his lawyer about that annulment. “I didn’t think you were going to be back here for a while, so I came because I needed a place to stay while I figured out what I’m going to do. I was going to clean up before I left and…lock the door and…It was wrong, and I’m sorry, but I was desperate.”

Hannah’s eyes were not unkind as Eden forced herself not to cry. “How far along are you?”

“Six months. I’m due September second.”

“Okay, that’s good at least.” Hannah carried the gun over to the kitchen and put it on the counter next to the sink. She limped as if she’d twisted her ankle, and as soon as she reached the counter, she leaned on it to keep her weight off her left foot.

Dave had told Izzy, who’d told Eden, that Hannah had been in a really bad car accident, and that the infection in her leg had somehow made her deaf. Eden didn’t really get how that could have happened, so it was possible she’d missed something in there.

Hannah quickly washed her hands before turning back to Eden, drying off with the hand towel that had been hanging on the oven door handle. “I was a little afraid I was going to have to add delivering a baby to my
to do
list. You look like you’re going to pop any second.”

Eden rolled her eyes as she laughed her despair. “I know. What I’m going to look like in September, God only knows.” She shifted her feet onto the floor. Lord, she was so tired. “I’ll go. I honestly didn’t mean to—”

Hannah interrupted. “Who dropped you off? Those ladies in that car…?”

She’d been
watching
? “I was hitchhiking and they picked me up,” Eden told her. Sarah and Mary. She’d had to listen to their lectures on the dangers of accepting rides from strangers, for four solid hours. In return, they’d dropped her at the cabin door. “I think they might’ve been nuns.” She took a deep breath. “I know it’s a huge imposition, but if I could just sleep on your couch for a little while…”

But Hannah was shaking her head. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s not safe. I’m pretty sure the Freedom Network wants to kill Murph and me.” She pulled back the sleeve of her T-shirt and there was a bandage on her arm. “They shot at us in Sacramento.”

Eden couldn’t believe it. “Shot at you? Why?”

“Long story,” Hannah said. “I’ll tell you after we’re out of here. I’ll give you a lift into Dalton, my car’s at the bottom of the hill—but until we leave, I need you to be my ears. Sit by the door and let me know if anyone drives past or, God forbid, pulls in. Can you do that?”

Eden nodded. A lift into Dalton. Great.

Hannah dug through a pack that she’d been wearing over one shoulder and took out a cell phone. It was one of those disposable kinds that she’d probably picked up at a drugstore. “I also need you to call Dave Malkoff and tell him where we are, give him this phone number. I think he’s probably looking for me, and the sooner he stops freaking, the better. For all of us. Please tell him we’ll call him again, when we’re done here. We can coordinate where to meet.” She held out the phone to Eden. “If you want, you can come along. But I’m not sure how safe it is, and I’m pretty sure we’ll end up going to Sacramento. But maybe that’s better for you than Dalton.”

Eden nodded as she took the phone, her heart still sinking. Dave was going to ask why she wasn’t with Izzy and…“I don’t know Dave’s number.”

“Then call the Troubleshooters office,” Hannah told her, “and get it.”

This was, quite possibly, a test. If Eden truly were who she’d said she was, she’d know the location of the Troubleshooters office. As Hannah watched, leaning against the kitchen counter, right next to that handgun, Eden dialed 411.

“What city please?”

“San Diego, California,” she told the automated operator, and Hannah nodded. And slipping her weapon into a ziplock baggie, which was kind of odd, she tucked it into her pocket, then limped up the ladder into the loft.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY

S
ACRAMENTO
, C
ALIFORNIA

M
urphy couldn’t believe it.

“As soon as Sophia and Tess have contact with Hannah, they’re going to call me,” Dave tried to reassure him.

“What the hell, Dave?” He was microseconds from losing it. “That’s supposed to make me feel better? That Tess and Sophia could be caught in the next crossfire, too?”

“Lindsey and Mark Jenkins are in the parking lot,” Dave told him. “A couple more of their friends–SEALs–are on their way. As soon as they get here—”

“No,” Murphy said. “Nope. I am
not
doing this.” He looked at Jules Cassidy. “Am I done here?”

“You are.” The FBI agent wasn’t particularly happy about telling him that.

Murphy bee-lined for the elevators, and when the doors didn’t open quickly enough, he pushed open the door to the stairs. It hit the wall with a crash.

Dave was right behind him, reaching for him. “Murph—”

“Get your hands off me!” Murphy kept moving, batting the other man’s hand away and great. He’d gone and hurt Dave’s feelings. Well, too bad. It was better than Dave or, God, Lindsey ending up dead. God help him, he would not survive another friend getting killed because of him. He would rather die himself, first.

Hurt feelings or no, Dave refused to back down, rattling down the stairs, after him. “We’ll go to Dalton, we’ll find Hannah—”

“
We
won’t do jackshit,” Murphy informed him. “
I
will find Hannah,
I
will get her to safety, and you and your team will stay far the hell away from me, do you understand?”

Dave shook his head as he followed Murphy out of the stairwell, into the lobby, into the parking lot. “Sorry. Can’t do it.”

Lindsey, part Japanese- part Korean-American, was leaning against her car—an unremarkable white subcompact—with her husband. Back in Murphy’s other lifetime, when he worked for Troubleshooters, before Angelina’s murder, before Lindsey had met her husband, she and Murph had been friends. At maybe one half of his size, she’d often asked him to help her hone her hand-to-hand skills. And he’d often had to resort to sitting on her as the only way to keep her from kicking his ass.

She straightened up as she saw him coming, trepidation in her eyes, clearly unsure as to how happy he’d be to see her again, after all this time. Or maybe it was the fact that he was barreling down upon her, like a freight train, that made her look so uncertain.

“I need to borrow your car,” he told her, to hell with the fact that they hadn’t so much as said hi to each other in years.

She glanced at her husband, Mark, who was not all that much taller than she was, but far more powerfully built. A SEAL, Dave had said.

“We’re here to help,” Mark told Murphy, instinctively knowing not to greet him with an outstretched hand. “Get in, and we’ll take you wherever you want to go.”

“We’re waiting for Gillman and Lopez,” Dave reminded them. “And damnit. I forgot all about Dr. Heissman. Linds, will you call her for me?”

“I’m on it.” Lindsey got out her cell phone.

“The guys’ll catch up,” Mark said easily. “I’ll call and tell Jay that Gillman’s gotta drive—”

“No,” Murph interrupted. “You misunderstand. I don’t want a ride. I want to
borrow
your
car.
You hand me the keys, you stand here, you wave good-bye.”

“No way,” Lindsey said. “Absolutely not.” She turned to Dave. “I’m going straight to the doctor’s voice mail. Should I leave a message?”

“Please,” he said. “Ask her to call me.”

“Why not let us ride shotgun?” Mark asked, easygoing and super-reasonable, good cop to Lindsey’s bad.

“Because I don’t want you to live through what I did—scrambling on the tarmac, searching through the blood and brains for the missing pieces of your wife’s skull,” Murphy told him, his voice tight.

“Oh, great, Murph, thanks.” Exasperation and disgust rang in Lindsey’s voice as she pocketed her phone. “Mark’s going to Iraq, probably within the week. Way to distract him while he’s over there.”

The SEAL was pretty tough. His freckles stood out on his face, as he went slightly pale at Murphy’s grim words, but he didn’t back down. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he told Murphy. “I’m sorry for what you had to endure, but it’s my experience that working in a team—”

“Fine,” Murphy said, giving up and looking around at the rows of parked motor vehicles. “Don’t lend me your car. I’ll hotwire one.”

“From the FBI headquarters parking lot?” Dave asked, disbelief and amusement in his voice.

“You find this funny?” There was an older model Chevy Impala, the window open a crack, a few cars over from Lindsey’s. Murphy checked the plates. California. Good.

“Of course not,” Dave said. “Murph, come on. This is insane.”

The key to not getting immediately picked up for stealing a car lay in buying extra time by switching license plates. All Murphy needed was a few hours, so he didn’t have to do too much switching around—three cars should do it. He checked the bolts that held the Impala’s plate in place, but they were too tight for him to turn just using his fingers. “Linds, you got a tool kit?”

“To help you steal a car?” Lindsey asked. “I don’t think so.”

Dave rubbed his forehead as if he had a terrible headache. “You’re not stealing a car, okay? Can we just all take a deep breath—”

Murphy put his fingers into the space created by the partly open window, to see if he couldn’t work the glass down. Push came to shove, he could break it…But then he saw that the door was unlocked, so he opened it. That was easy.

Dave tried a different approach. “Do you really want to go to jail for stealing a—”

“I don’t give a shit what happens to me.” Murphy looked up from where he’d crouched to examine the casing around the base of the steering column. He’d be able to pop that off, no problem, connect a few wires…“Don’t you get it? I thought I made that clear
before
you let Hannah go off on her own—”

“Well, way to go.” Dave lost his temper, too. “Way to let me know in advance that your new girlfriend has a WonderWoman complex! I would’ve taken precautions if you’d given me a warning. Although you know what? She probably would’ve gotten past me anyway. She’s as crazy as you are!
Damn
it, all she had to do was
ask
me and—”

Murphy exploded. “Yeah, like she’s going to ask for help from the company that helped kill her best friend!”

The expression on Dave’s face—guilt, remorse, anguish—was one Murphy recognized. He’d seen it often enough in his own mirror.

“I just want Hannah to be safe,” Murphy said, more softly now. “That’s all I want. I’ll go to jail forever if I have to, just as long as I know she’s safe. And you’re right. You couldn’t have stopped her. I’m sorry that I—”

“No,” Dave said. “You have every right.”

Lindsey was there, then, with the keys to her car. “Take it,” she said, holding the key ring out to Murphy. “Just…call me and let me know if you need help. Oh, and if we don’t catch up, letting me know where you leave it would be nice, too.”

As Murphy hugged her, hard, he met her husband’s somber gaze over the top of her head. No doubt Murphy’s harsh words about blood and brains were still echoing in his mind.

Good.

“Don’t follow me,” Murphy told him, told all of them. “Don’t come near me. It’s not safe.”

Decker woke up, drooling into a throw pillow on Dr. Heissman’s hotel room sofa.

He’d actually fallen asleep. The fact that he now had to wipe off the entire lower half of his face was testament to just how soundly he’d been out.

Light was coming in beneath the heavy curtains that covered the windows and the sharp aroma of something burning filled the room. It was the coffee pot, in the kitchen corner of the suite. Sometime between now and late last night, when the doctor had made a half-pot of the stuff, it had boiled itself dry.

Decker took the glass pot from the heater and filled it with cold water—which of course, shattered the damn thing, right there in the sink. Heckuva way to start the morning.

Except it was hardly even morning anymore. He stared at the clock on the microwave. Had he really slept that long?

He checked his watch. Apparently so.

Last thing he remembered was talking with Jo about his “misguided” idea that a relationship could “fix” someone who was broken, i.e., Decker, although they both pretended they were talking about Nash and Tess.

Last night, he’d told Dr. Heissman things he’d never told anyone before—how relieved he’d been when Nash seemed to settle in to their new job at Troubleshooters, and to his new life with Tess. It was as if Nash had been given a chance to start over, start fresh—and he’d embraced it enthusiastically, with a joie de vivre that Decker had never witnessed before.

Thinking back, Decker couldn’t remember when that honeymoon period, so to speak, had ended. He’d purposely drifted away from Nash, not wanting to feel like a third wheel. And okay, yes. A truth had been outed in his rant that Jo Heissman had not missed.
I wanted what Nash had found…

Last night he’d admitted to Dr. Heissman that, before Nash first hooked up with Tess, Deck had had a little fantasy going. One that included him coming home from a mission to find Tess waiting there, with her warm smile and…Yes, he’d imagined definite possibilities—that Nash had stomped on with both feet. Not out of malice, but out of ignorance. Decker had, after all, played the maybe-Tess-could-be-his-girlfriend card extremely close to his chest.

So after Nash and Tess got together, Decker had kept his distance. Not because he loved Tess—he didn’t—but because he
could
have loved her.

And because, yes, he wanted what Nash had appeared to have found.

And then Angelina had died, leaving him even more isolated.

It was then that the doctor had laughed and asked him if there were any disasters that had happened in the course of his lifetime that he
didn’t
feel responsible for…

And somewhere in there, in one of the moments of silence that grew longer and more frequent, he’d fallen asleep.

The suite was now quiet. Empty.

Decker stuck his head in the bedroom, but the doctor wasn’t in there, the bathroom door open, the room dark. Her suitcase—small, with wheels—was open on the low dresser, beside another TV.

Decker didn’t hesitate. He flipped the light switch and carefully went through her bag. Her pink nightgown was on top, and it slipped through his fingers, as soft to the touch as he’d imagined. Slippers, robe, a plastic baggie with travel-size toiletries. The clothes she’d been wearing yesterday, neatly rolled up. A hooded sweatshirt that said
MIT.
A romance novel about…vampires? Huh. He would have expected nonfiction. Something dry and scholarly, perhaps trying to prove a connection between ADD and spec ops warriors.

But vampire lovers…? Of course, he’d been surprised by the pink nightie, too.

And, after he’d had his little meltdown, he’d also been surprised by the way Jo Heissman had opened up, so seemingly candidly, about her years with the Agency.

“I left shortly after you and Nash did,” she had told Decker as he’d sat on the sofa, still numb and emotionally exhausted. “It was within a month.” She smiled. “Douglas Brendon didn’t like me very much either.”

“How come I never met you at HQ?” Decker managed to ask.

“The Psych department kept a low profile,” she told him. “Although I did run into Nash once, in the basement hall.”

Which was why Nash had pulled her aside, after that meeting where Tommy’d introduced her to the team. Deck had heard him ask her, “Have we met?” At the time, she’d denied it.

“I didn’t think he’d remember me,” the doctor said now. “We really just…crossed paths. Of course, I knew who
he
was. Before Doug Brendon took over and changed procedures,” she explained, “certain key staff members in the psych department regularly convened to review the profiles and evaluations of those operatives given high stress assignments—such as Nash. And yourself.”

“You’ve seen my Agency psych file?” Decker couldn’t believe it. Or, Jesus, maybe he could. Still, he couldn’t just take her word for it. “So you know about the little, uh—” he cleared his throat delicately “—impotence problem?”

She smiled. “I don’t recall any reference to that, no. And as a symptom of stress, it would have been a topic of discussion. However, I do believe we spent quite some time on your insomnia. John—Dr. Westley—felt your failure to sleep was tied to your self-imposed celibacy, which was a subject of intense fascination to him. Probably because, as a field operative, you could have gone into Support, snapped your fingers, and had a half a dozen attractive women vying to go home with you. His finger snaps didn’t get quite the same results.”

“Yeah,” Decker said. “Because he was married.”

“Divorced,” she corrected him, “although perhaps he didn’t share that with you. Dr. Westley was impressed—we all were—with your moral compass. Whether it was the right choice or not, you felt strongly about your decision to refrain from intimate relationships with your coworkers, and you stuck with it. Even though it apparently cost you your potential relationship with Tess Bailey.” She paused. “What else can I tell you to convince you that—”

“I’m convinced,” Decker said. “At least that you’ve seen my file, and talked about me with John Westley. How about Nash? You review his file with Westley, too?”

“Not in detail, no.”

Decker nodded. “Well, that’s convenient.”

“He wasn’t one of Westley’s cases,” Dr. Heissman told him.

“Yeah, he was. He told me—”

“Did he?” she asked. “Or did you just assume?”

Decker was silent. It was entirely possible that he’d assumed…

“That hallway in the basement? Where I saw Jim Nash?” she said. “It led to a highly classified, high-security-clearance section of the building. He was alone, and he went through the door, so he must have had the code to unlock it.” She got up to pour herself another cup of coffee from the pot she’d made. “You were aware, of course, that there was a sector within the Agency that performed primarily black ops. Your file was flagged as approached, but black op status was denied. Do you want to know why?”