Into the Night (5 page)
No way.
Sam wasn't the kind of man to go for months on end without sex. And he sure as hell wasn't getting any from Mary Lou.
Jealousy clogged her throat and angry tears threatened to escape.
"It's nice seeing you," Alyssa said insincerely.
Mary Lou just stood there as they took their food and pushed through the doors, out into the heat of the sunny afternoon.
"Earth to Mary Lou!"
She turned to find Aaron the asshole standing right next to her. "Where the heck did you go?" he asked, laughing as if he'd made a huge joke. "Standing there, spacing out, like someone came and vacuumed out your brain."
It took everything in her to keep from slapping him, simply for being a fool.
"Your husband called a while ago," Aaron told her. "It was before you got here. I forgot to tell you. He said he'd try to make it in during lunch."
Well, he hadn't. And Mary Lou didn't know whether to be upset about that or relieved. The only thing worse than seeing Alyssa would have been seeing Alyssa and Sam in the same room.
"He said to say he's going out with the team tonight," Aaron continued. "He won't be back until tomorrow, probably in the evening."
Of course Sam wouldn't make it home tonight. That was no real surprise.
Alyssa Locke was in town.
Mary Lou took off her hat. She had to get out of there.
Now.
"Where are you going?" Aaron asked.
"I told Matt last tune I was in," Mary Lou lied. "I have to leave early today. Haley's baby-sitter has a doctor's appointment. I would've tried to get a replacement, but Matt said it was okay—"
"Go," Aaron said. "See you next week."
Mary Lou went.
Chapter 2
"I work for the President," Joan told the junior lieutenant named Muldoon as they stood outside the Team Sixteen building on the U.S. Naval Base. "In the White House. I probably have a higher security clearance than you do."
He nodded expressionlessly. "Yes, ma'am."
Ma 'am. Ouch.
On closer examination, it was clear that Junior was older than twenty. He was easily twenty-one.
"I'm not very happy about this," she told him.
"I'm sorry about that, ma'am."
"Yeah, I can tell—you're really weeping."
He glanced at her. "We're encouraged not to cry in public, ma'am. Ruins the warrior image."
Joan laughed. Well, what do you know? Perfect Boy had a sense of humor. Yet he still didn't even crack a smile.
"Shall we start the tour, ma'am?"
"Yeah, sure. Why the heck not?"
"You've seen the SpecWar and the Team Sixteen buildings," he said as he started to walk, slipping right into tour guide mode, automaton style. "Why don't we start with the BUD/S area? This is the grinder—it's called that for obvious reasons. It's where most of the physical training or PT starts. BUD/S stands for Basic Underwater Demolition/SEALs— it's the intensive training we all go through. It's the toughest training program in the entire U.S. military. SEAL candidates enter in classes of about a hundred and forty men, most of whom don't complete the program. They ring out—quit. When all is said and done, most graduating classes have only about twenty percent of the men they started with still standing."
On the flight from D.C., Joan had read about BUD/S in a packet of info Meredith had dug up. It included something called Hell Week, which was five days of grueling physical activity in which the SEAL candidates got only a few hours of sleep in very short bursts. Junior wasn't kidding when he called the program tough. It was very impressive, but...
"You're one of the ones who made it through, huh?"
She'd gotten the impression that only the toughest and meanest actually went on to become SEALs. And while Junior was handsome and gleaming, he seemed neither of those other things. If he heard the skepticism in her voice, his mild glance in her direction was the only sign he gave that it bothered him. "Yes, ma'am."
"Congratulations."
"It was quite some time ago, but thank you, ma'am."
Ma'am, ma'am, ma'am. Grrr. Was it possible that he was saying it now because he knew that it bugged her?
He led her through a gate. "Since most SEAL operations involve water, a great deal of our training takes place in the ocean or here in the pool."
"Where are you from?" she interrupted, wanting this tour to be given by the real, living person inside that sparkling uniform—the guy who got a bad case of gas when he ate beans with his burritos—rather than this information-spouting, picture-perfect Navy robot.
"Ohio, Maine, and Florida."
"Is that supposed to be multiple choice, or is the answer all of the above?"
A smile. Alleluia. Although it was painfully polite. "All of the above."
"Was your father in the military, too?"
"No, ma'am. He was a college professor," Junior told her. "He taught physics."
"Yikes. No wonder you ran off and joined the Navy."
Nothing. No real reaction to the fact that she'd just made a joke other than another polite smile.
It was a lame joke, sure, but still... Joan resisted the urge to take the kid's pulse. Maybe that joke he'd made about crying hadn't really been a joke. Maybe he'd been serious.
"Here we have a class going through drown proofing," Muldoon said, and she focused on the enormous pool in front of them.
And on the fact that—"Holy shit!"—a young man, clad only in bathing trunks, was being thrown into the deep end with his hands tied behind his back. ''''What are they doing!"
The pool was filled with similarly tied young men. Others stood along the side, patiently waiting their turn to be bound and thrown into the water. Still other men, wearing T-shirts, floppy hats, and boots with their swim shorts, either tied up the younger men or prowled the edge of the pool, watching the ones in the water.
"This is training?" Joan asked Muldoon. "Training for what? Capture by an evil overlord?"
Junior's smile seemed far more real this time, but she might've been imagining that.
"SEALs have to be completely comfortable in the water," he told her. "These men are learning what it feels like to be in the water under, shall we say, less than perfect circumstances."
"Shall we say ... ? I'd say, yeah, Junior, this is a teeny bit less than perfect."
He cleared his throat. "To successfully complete this exercise, they need to sink to the bottom, then use their feet to push off to get back to the surface. Once there, they can take a breath, then hold it as they again sink to the bottom, exhale on their way back up, take another breath... It's not that hard to do once you get into the rhythm—you can keep it going for hours as long as you don't panic."
Hours. Holy cow. "You really did this?"
He actually gazed at her for several long seconds before answering this time. "I am a SEAL, ma'am. I've really gone through BUD/S. I've done it all. And then some. Ma'am."
Well, well. A trace of an edge was in his voice. A spark of life. Maybe there was a real boy hidden inside this perfect, wooden one after all. And it was true. She'd guessed correctly. He was attempting to ma 'am her to death.
"Will you please call me Joan or even Ms. DaCosta— instead of ma'am?" she asked. "Every time you call me that, I feel as if I should rush out and buy a cane and support hose."
Junior didn't actually laugh, but he did manage another more genuine-seeming smile. "That would be a complete waste of money. In my opinion." His smile faded, and he fixed his gaze on a distant point. "Respectfully, of course. Ms. DaCosta."
Hello. A Navy SEAL who actually blushed? Yes, color was rising from the collar of his uniform and tingeing his perfect, smoothly shaven cheeks.
Was this not turning into one of the weirdest days of her life?
Obviously Junior here wanted to make sure that she knew he wasn't hitting on her or being inappropriate in any way. Or maybe he thought that her mention of support hose was her way of hitting on him, rather than another of her pathetic attempts to be funny and to get him to relax already. Maybe he'd somehow found out that she'd asked his CO to dinner and expected her to do the same with him. But unless Paoletti had intercepted him and told him ... No, she just didn't see that happening. Still... Eek.
"So. This is called drown proofing," she said briskly, feeling her own face start to heat at the idea that he might think that she thought... Jesus God, he had to be ten years her junior. He couldn't possibly think she would ... Did he ... ? Unless he thought she was the female equivalent of Rear Admiral Tucker—hitting on everyone in range, provided he had a penis.
Maybe if she kept the conversation moving neither one of them would feel the urge to curl up and die. "God. Talk about extreme."
"This is one of the easier exercises," Muldoon informed her. "Believe me, this isn't extreme."
"Well, it's very ... visually extreme," Joan said. Enough of this embarrassment already. Just talk to the kid. "One of the things I'm doing here is scouting locations for photo ops for the President's daughter's visit. The White House and the Navy want to turn this event into good PR for everyone. And a picture really is worth a thousand words, particularly when it's on the front page of USA Today. So what do you think? Should we recommend tying up Brooke Bryant and tossing her into the pool with these boys while the press is allowed to snap away?"
Laughter. Finally. It was only a chuckle, but hey, it counted. Muldoon the junior lieutenant actually had dimples, God bless him. He finally met her gaze again. "We?"
"Don't want your name on that report, huh?"
"No, thank you." He laughed again. "I'm just the liaison. I'd like to keep it that way. At least as far as the White House is concerned."
Coming from anyone else, that might've been a subtle come on. But from Junior... Joan simply could not think of it that way.
"How long have you been in the Navy?" she asked, using all of her so-called people skills to try to keep him from retreating back into the impersonal tour guide. Engage them in conversation about themselves, listen when they answer, smile and maintain eye contact, keep body language open and friendly. But not sexual. It was a fine line, but one she'd walked many times before. It was one of her strengths—her ability to be "one of the boys."
God, she hoped he didn't think the support hose comment was her way of hitting on him, because that really was the last thing she'd been thinking.
"I joined while I was in college," he told her, relaxing another minute fraction of a smidgen. "I've been in eight years now, and I've been a SEAL for four of them."
She tried to do the math. "That would make you, what? Twenty-four?"
'Twenty-six," he corrected her.
So, okay, she wasn't all that much older than he was. At least not chronologically. And he'd crossed that do-not-touch, twenty-five-years-old-or-under-is-verboten barrier that automatically went up whenever a woman turned thirty.
"Well, I'm almost twenty-six," he admitted, as if God would strike him with a lightning bolt if he were caught lying. Who was this guy?
Joan laughed. At him and at herself. What did it really matter how old he was? This wasn't a date. And she wasn't looking for trouble.
"There was a time I always rounded up, too," she told him. "Amazing how age-ist people can be, huh? But it works on both ends of the spectrum, especially for women. Someone once told me that in my business, as a woman, you want to be perpetually thirty-five. Not too old and not too young. You know what I said when I heard that?"
"No. What?"
"I said, Screw that. I'm great now—I'm going to be off the charts when I turn forty. At fifty, honey, I may be older, but I certainly won't be too old, and as for you, at that point, you're not going to be able to afford to hire me. And when I finally turn seventy—look out."
He was smiling at her, and it was a big, fat, genuine smile that actually touched his eyes. Attaboy, Muldoon. Way to be a human being.
"Don't play the game by their rules," she told him, because, damn, he actually seemed to be listening to what she had to say. "So come on, Grasshopper. Give me the rest of the official tour, and then we can fight to the death about the parts of the base you've been told not to let me see, okay?"
She was leaving work early. What was that about?
One thing Husaam Abdul-Fataah had learned about Mary Lou Starrett was that she lived her life like clockwork.
Three days a week she dropped the kid at day care in the morning, then drove her rattletrap of a car over to the Coronado Naval Base, past the guards at the gate, and down the road to the McDonald's, where she parked in the shade alongside the Dumpster. She worked a four-hour shift, and she always arrived twenty to thirty minutes early and sat with a cup of coffee, her nose in whatever book she was currently reading.
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