Into the Fire (48 page)

“If it’s none of my business—” Sophia started.

“No,” Dave said. “I’m actually…I’m glad you asked. Because I was talking to Dr. Heissman and…Well, what Nash said
was
private, yeah, but it reminded me of what I was talking about with Dr. Heissman—that’s how this is connected, just so you don’t think I’ve changed the subject…

“But see, I’ve always wanted you to be happy,” Dave continued, trying to turn more toward the window, which no doubt sent his voice directly up toward Lopez, who was driving. “More than anything. More than I want
me
to be happy. So for years now, I’ve just kind of sat on what I feel, which is that I’m in love with you and, um…”

There was silence. The socially-deadly kind. Both in the car and on the other end of the phone.

“Wow,” Dave said. “I can’t believe I actually said that.”

The phone at his ear started to ring, and as he pulled it back to look at it, he realized that it was Sophia. Calling him back. Because they’d been disconnected.

Un-fucking-believable.

“Hey,” he said weakly. “When did I lose you?”

“You said you were talking to Dr. Heissman,” she told him. “It’s really not important. But before I lose you again—are you with Lindsey and Jenk? Because I forgot to tell you—Eden Gillman is here at the cabin.”

“What?” Dave couldn’t believe that. “Is Zanella—”

“No,” Sophia said. “She’s alone. I think she might’ve hitchhiked here from San Diego. She won’t talk about Izzy or…Best I can figure is something went bad after the wedding. Whatever happened, it’s entirely possible that Izzy has no idea where she is. If that’s the case, he’s probably worried.”

“I’ll have Jenk or Lindsey call him,” Dave told her. Lindsey looked at him, and he made the mistake of telling her, “Eden Gillman’s in Dalton, at Hannah’s cabin.”

Danny turned around from his spacious seat in the front, lucky bastard. “Are you kidding me?”

Dave waved him off because Sophia was talking again. “Thanks,” she said. “I’ll call you as soon as Murphy gets here.”

“Soph,” Dave said, closing his eyes because no way was he going to try to drop the
I love you
bomb again with Gillman still glaring at him from the front seat.

But Sophia didn’t let him get a chance to speak. “We can meet somewhere in the middle and caravan back to Sacramento. Okay?”

“Yeah.”

“I really have to go.”

“Be careful,” Dave said.

“You, too. See you soon.”

And with that, Sophia was gone. Dave flipped his phone shut and met Gillman’s baleful stare.

“And I thought I was a loser,” the SEAL said.

“Danny,” Lopez reprimanded him quietly. “Have a heart. That had to have sucked.” He glanced in the rearview mirror. “Sorry about that, Dr. Malkoff.”

Dave nodded. It had sucked, and was pretty much continuing to suck, too.

“What did you really think?” Gillman said. “That she would say,
oh my God Dave, I love you, too
?” He snorted. “Dream on.”

“Dan.” This time Mark Jenkins tried to shut him up. He shook his head at his friend.

“So what the hell is Eden doing back in Dalton?” Gillman asked. “And where the fuck is Zanella?”

N
EAR
F
RESNO
, C
ALIFORNIA

Izzy was ten minutes outside of Fresno when his cell phone rang.

He could see from the incoming call’s number that it was Jenk, and he almost didn’t answer. But he was tired as shit and any conversation at all would help him better aim his truck between the road’s often blurry lines.

“Zanella,” he answered, because he didn’t feel like giving anyone, even Marky-Mark, a cheery
hi.

“Izzy, where are you, man?”

“That depends,” Izzy said.

Jenk laughed his disbelief. “On what?”

“Is Gilligan with you?”

“Cha,” Jenk said. “Murphy took Lindsey’s car, so we’re sardined into Jay’s with Dave Malkoff, too. We’re about twenty minutes behind Murph, heading back to Dalton, ETA forty-five minutes.”

“Don’t tell Gillman,” Izzy said, “but I’m about ten outside of Fresno, chasing down his crazy sister.”

“Fresno?” Jenk said. “Dude, Eden’s at Hannah’s cabin in Dalton.”

Izzy almost swerved off the road. “What the fuck is she doing back in Dalton?”

“We’d thought you’d be able to tell us.”

Dalton.
“Is she okay?”

“Yeah,” Jenk said. “I mean, no one said she wasn’t, so I assume…She’s with Hannah and Sophia. And Nash and Tess.”

“Thank God,” Izzy said. He had to pull over, he was so overwhelmed with dizzying relief. “Holy shit…”

After seeing those clips on that bullshit website, he’d hit the redial button on his kitchen phone to see if Eden had made any calls before she’d left. He’d hung up before the line connected, but the numbers last dialed came up on the screen and…

It was a phone number he vaguely recognized, with a Vegas area code, but he knew it wasn’t one that he’d dialed recently. Suspicious, he’d checked his cell phone address book and, sure enough, it was the number Eden had given him, all those months ago, for Jerry’s cell phone.

Ergo, before taking her bag of clothes and leaving, Eden had called Jerry from his kitchen phone, probably to beg him to pull those unseemly videos from that homemade porn website.

Jerry, wonk that he was, no doubt said something like, “You want me to do that badly enough, you’ll meet me in person.”

Which put Eden exactly where she didn’t want to be—back in Jerry and Richie’s fucked up, drug-dealing world.

Trying hard not to lose his cool, Izzy had gone down to the gas station on the corner, and using all of the coins he had floating loose in his truck, had called Jerry’s cell from a pay phone, pretending he was looking to buy some weed.

“I need me some of that superfine shit you got for me, you know, last time?” he’d bullshitted the asshole, pretending he’d done business with him many times before, IDing himself as Roger Starrett from Texas, out here on the left coast for business. “I’ve got wheels, so tell me where, my man, and I’ll bring cash, plus a bonus for your trouble. Just make the when ASAP.”

Which was when Jerry had let slip the news that he was spending the week in Fresno. But he gave Izzy a street address and told him to call back when he’d arrived outside the house.

Izzy’s intention was to show up, kick down the door, find Eden, and get her and Pinkie the hell out of there.

But she hadn’t gone to Fresno, thank God again.

“You really have no clue why she went back to Dalton?” Jenk asked him now.

And now Izzy did have a clue. She’d probably gone there because she was resourceful and she’d assumed Hannah wouldn’t be using her cabin for a while. She’d gone for some solitude—both to lick her wounds and figure out her next move.

Because Eden had been certain that, upon seeing those video clips, Izzy would kick her out onto the street.

“Jenk, as much as I love you, bro,” Izzy said, as he got back on the highway and drove as fast as he dared, which meant pedal to the metal. “This is one problem I definitely can’t share. Just…If you get to Dalton before me? Tell Eden that you spoke to me, that I didn’t tell you anything about what was going down, but that I said…Well, just tell her I still believe her, okay? And that I’m going to help her make this go away.”

“I’m pretty sure you’re going to get there first,” Jenk told him.

“Then do me a different huge-large,” Izzy told him, “and give Lopez a big wet kiss for me.”

“Why?”

“He’ll know,” Izzy said.

“Can’t do it,” Jenk said. “He’s driving and I’m in the back. But I’ll pass along the sentiment.”

“Gillman’s in the front,” Izzy deducted. “Tell him to give—”

“He respectfully declines the do-age of any favors,” Jenk reported, which was no doubt a paraphrasing of Gillman’s predictable
Fuck you, douchebag.

Oh, Danny, Danny, Danny. Such animosity. They were family now. “Seriously, Mark,” Izzy told Jenkie. “Thanks for calling me. I was worried about Eden, and…Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Jenkins said, and hung up, leaving Izzy alone to break the speed limit along an otherwise empty road, thanking God again that Eden was someplace safe.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-TWO

D
ALTON
, C
ALIFORNIA

E
den had just gotten up to stretch her legs.

She’d gone out onto the porch, and was feeling a little awkward about being there, since the man named Nash and the woman named Tess were having something of a heated discussion. “I don’t care,” Tess kept saying, occasionally throwing in an absolute “Yeah, well, I don’t believe you!”

But before Eden could slink back into the cabin, an explosion echoed and Tess staggered. Just a little bit.

And for a moment, time seemed to stand completely still. But then Tess looked down at her shirt, at the blossom of red that had appeared just above the waist of her jeans, and staggered again—as Nash grabbed her and started to shout.

He had his gun out as he pulled Tess back toward the cabin.

“Get inside!” He was screaming at Eden, but she couldn’t do more than crouch by the porch swing, arms around her belly, in a futile attempt to protect Pinkie as a second gunshot boomed and a second bullet hit the side of the building, as a third crashed and shattered a window.

As a fourth struck Nash and brought him down into the dust at the edge of the porch.

His gun left his hand as he cracked his head against the wooden stairs and he bounced like a ragdoll, lifeless and limp.

It was Tess who was screaming now—“No!” Her entire shirt front was dark with her blood, but, shielding Nash with her own body, she reached to reclaim the handgun she, too, had dropped when Nash went down, but another gunshot cracked, and she screamed again, pulling her hand in to her chest.

A voice rang out, male and with a rich twang that Eden had always associated with good times, with the colors and lights and music of New Orleans: “Nobody moves, nobody returns fire—or the next bullet goes directly into the head of the pregnant girl!”

Hannah looked at Sophia, who’d positioned herself so that she had a clear view of the back door, shotgun from Patrick’s case held at ready.

They both crouched underneath the front window, which was maybe not the smartest move strategically. But Hannah needed Sophia’s ears.

“I want hands where I can see them,” Sophia repeated the words spoken by the man outside. Whoever he was, he was back beyond the tree line, concealed by the brush. And whoever he was, he wasn’t alone. Hannah had caught the glint of reflected sunlight off of at least seven different rifle barrels.

Bayou drawl, Sophia had reported. Deep voice. Male.

“You with the baby coming,” Sophia relayed, “off the porch. Hands on your head. Good girl.”

Hannah’s cell phone couldn’t get a connection. They’d no doubt taken out the cell tower. And they’d cut the landline and the power lines to the cabin, too.

She’d just noticed that the electricity had gone down, just before Sophia had knocked her to the kitchen floor, and told her that shots were being fired.

If any of them died here today, Hannah knew that Murphy would never recover. And God, it was possibly already too late. Nash’s position as he lay in the dust was that of a dead man.

“How many are inside?” Sophia relayed. “He’s asking Eden, and threatening—dear God—to cut her baby out of her womb if she doesn’t tell him the truth.”

“Two,” Hannah shouted. “There are two of us inside. Cooperate with them, Eden. Do exactly what they tell you to do.”

“She’s verifying that there are two of us,” Sophia said, watching as Hannah checked her watch, nodding as she held out her wrist so that Sophia, too, could see the time.

Thirty minutes, and Murphy would arrive. But it was another twenty after that before Dave and the others—three Navy SEALs and a former LAPD detective—got here.

Hannah could stall and hope that Murphy would try to call as he got closer, notice that cell service was down, and approach the cabin as carefully as she herself had done hours ago. But if he didn’t, he’d drive right into an ambush.

And then there was the fact that stalling was a potential death sentence for Nash and even Tess, who desperately needed even the kind of rudimentary medical assistance that Hannah, with her police training, could provide.

“Come out with your hands up,” Sophia repeated the order from the man who was still hidden in the brush. “One at a time.” She looked at Hannah, speaking for herself now. “We don’t have a choice.”

Hannah nodded. “I’m right behind you,” she told the other woman, scrambling over to the computer and disconnecting the camera from the cord, looping the wrist-guard over her left hand.

They
didn’t
have a choice. Of course, full surrender—laying down their weapons and exiting the cabin the way they were doing—could result in bullets in all of their heads. Please God, Hannah didn’t want to do that to Murphy. Not without at least trying to negotiate.

Although there was no time to do it either slowly or carefully. She had to get directly to the bottom line. “We haven’t seen you, we can’t identify you,” Hannah shouted as she followed Sophia through the cabin door, hands held up so all could see they were empty. “Go back the way you came, and we will not pursue you. I know why you’re here, and you’re too late. Those pictures I took in the compound, two days ago? I’ve already e-mailed them to the FBI. They clearly show that Tim Ebersole is still alive—”

“Silence.” Sophia looked back at her to say. “Freeze.”

And there they stood. Instinctively, they’d each gone to stand on either side of Eden, who had tears running down her face, but still stood, chin high, defiant.

Hannah stole a look over at Tess, who was kneeling in the dust and gravel, trying to stop Nash from bleeding, all but ignoring her own wounds. She met Hannah’s eye, and the look on her face was terrible, and Hannah knew that unless he got to a hospital soon, Nash would not survive. But despite being injured herself, Tess was a fighter and as Hannah glanced at her again, she lifted the edge of Nash’s coat, showing her that she had access to another weapon.

Oh, God.

Hannah turned to see a man coming out of the cabin—clearly he’d gone in through the back—giving his compatriots an all clear.

And then they came, out of the brush. There were almost two dozen of them, a virtual army, all heavily armed. Most of them had rifles, but some held AK-47s—huge machine guns that could cut a human being in half in less than a heartbeat.

One of the men went directly to Tess, and hit her hard in the head with the butt of his rifle. She slumped over, and the man reached down and took the handgun she’d been hiding, out from under Nash’s jacket.

Beside her, both Sophia and Eden dropped to the ground, and for one awful moment, Hannah thought they’d been shot. But then one of the men holding an AK-47 screamed at her—getting right in her face, spittle flying out of the corner of his mouth, “I said, get on the ground, bitch, hands on your head!”

Please God, keep Nash and Tess alive and Murphy safe. Please God, keep Nash and Tess alive and Murphy safe. Hannah closed her eyes as rough hands searched her for weapons, as someone pulled the camera off her wrist, as something pricked her—a needle poke and then searing heat in her leg as, damnit, they’d drugged her, as the world blurred and swirled and then went black.

Murphy’s first clue that something was wrong was when he tried to call Sophia, to tell her he was ten minutes from the cabin, but she didn’t pick up. He took the shortcut that wasn’t really a shortcut unless you knew the roads, and he gunned it around the familiar curves, forcing himself to keep breathing.

What if the Freedom Network had followed Hannah here from Sacramento?

What if they somehow had made the connection between the VW Rabbit with Alaskan plates and this cabin here in Dalton?

What if…?

One thing Murphy knew for sure was that
he
wasn’t followed. He’d driven all the way from Sacramento with one eye watching his rearview mirror, yet had seen no one. And there was no way, since he’d taken Lindsey’s car, that the Network was tracking him via GPS.
No
way.

He cursed Dave for a bit, for letting Hannah out of his sight. And then he cursed Hannah for being Hannah and evading Dave.

And then he focused on a different
what if.
What if he got there, and Hannah knew that he’d been lying when he’d told her he didn’t love her, too?

Oh, God, he loved her—which should have been hard enough to deal with, were he and Hannah isolated and alone in the idyllic quiet of her cabin. He should have been wracked with grief and guilt. How could he move on without feeling as if he were betraying Angelina, or at least Angelina’s memory?

But he didn’t feel that way. He felt…at peace.

Part of it came from the realization that he was no longer the man that Angelina had loved. That Vinh Murphy had turned to ashes, alongside of her.

Part of it came from knowing that, for as long as he lived, he would always love Angelina, and a small part of him would forever mourn the life they didn’t get to share.

It was similar to the small part of him that had mourned the loss of Hannah, when he’d let himself be claimed by Angelina. Even on his wedding day, a beautiful, perfect day of joy, he’d looked at Hannah standing alone in the church, and he’d felt a sadness for the loss of a dream he’d once held, a dream he believed would never come true.

Life was about choices, and he’d made his with gladness and—most of the time—hadn’t looked back.

But life was also filled with accidents, with randomness, with inexplicable happenstance. With death, and unchosen loss.

For years, he’d railed against fate and God and the unfairness of life, but his tears and his grief and his pain hadn’t brought Angelina back.

And here he’d come, full circle—back to Hannah. He always came back to Hannah.

Who loved him. She’d always loved him and she loved him still—this angry, broken, still-healing man he’d become.

And Jesus Christ, all he wanted was to sit somewhere. Quietly. With her beside him. For about two years. And just…be.

But no. The same violence and hatred that had taken Angelina from him was back—and this time the fault was completely his. Whether he’d murdered Tim Ebersole or not, he’d gotten Hannah involved. He’d gotten her shot at and nearly killed.

And he would
not
do this again. He would not bury Hannah.

He would not.

His original plan, when he’d first gotten into Lindsey’s car, had been a simple one. Get his gear out of the cabin, then wrestle Hannah to the ground to get his hands on that letter he’d written her last spring. As long as she was insisting they have a face-to-face, he might as well make it worthwhile and burn that evidence—as circumstantial as it was. He’d even let her say whatever she wanted to say—hell, she could try to convince him that Tim Ebersole was the freaking tooth fairy—as long as she said it in his car, heading back north, with Tess Bailey and Jim Nash literally riding shotgun.

Yeah, he’d get her to Sacramento, return Lindsey’s car, and if, after FBI analysis, the photos Hannah had taken turned out to
not
be Tim Ebersole, he’d go in for psychiatric analysis, pretend the fog lifted, and confess to killing the man.

Alone. Without Hannah’s help.

He’d then go into custody where the Freedom Network could hate him as much as they wanted, and Hannah could have her life back.

At least that had been his plan before she’d told him that she loved him.

He then spent some time cursing himself, for writing that note that he’d given her back in Steve and Paul’s kitchen.
Don’t give up on me…
And then he thanked God that he’d written it, because doing so had saved her life.

As he got closer, as he tried again to call, he saw that he, too, no longer had cell service, so maybe the disaster he was imagining was completely in his head. Service was down. It happened.

But he slowed as he made the turn off onto Warson’s Gate because there was a car—a blue subcompact with California plates—parked among the brush there at the bottom of the hill.

It was where guests parked, Hannah had told him, when Pat had a party and the driveway was full. It was also possibly where Hannah parked when she was hiding her presence at the cabin.

Too in a hurry to be equally cautious, Murphy continued up the road.

The driveway was empty.

There was no sign of anyone—not Tess or Nash or Hannah—and his stomach twisted as he saw that, behind the screen, the front door was hanging open.

And then he saw the blood.

Oh, God, no…

In a heartbeat, Murphy was out of the car and over to the stairs. There was a still-red stain of blood there in the dirt, and a trail leading up and into the cabin. “Hannah!” A second trail led around to the side of the structure. “Han!”

“Murph,” a voice answered him, a genderless whisper, but it couldn’t be Hannah—she couldn’t have heard him calling.

Still, Murphy ran around the side of the cabin where—oh, Jesus—Jim Nash sat leaning against the woodshed, covered in blood.

He looked nightmarish, like a dead man still moving, and the world spun and Murphy almost fell down, he was so dizzy, but he heard an echo of Hannah’s voice in his head,
I need you here!
and he fought not to go back in time to that driveway in Malibu, to Angelina…

“Gotta call for help,” Nash told him through lips that should have already breathed their last.

Murphy knelt next to him, half afraid that he was hallucinating, that Nash was dead and he was imagining him speaking, the way he’d been so certain Angelina had whispered
I love you
on that awful, awful night, even after the doctors had told him that most of her brain functions had ceased upon the bullet’s impact.

He forced himself to focus now on Nash, whose hands
were
moving. He was trying to splice together the two ends of a cut phone line. It shouldn’t have been that hard to do, but he’d been shot, in the head and in the chest. The wound in his head was bleeding into his eyes, and the injury in his chest was making it more and more difficult for the man to breathe.