Over the Line

Over The Line

Cindy Gerard

The Bodyguards Book #4

For Mom and Petey. I miss you guys.

And for friends
—
who make life special and just a little bit crazy.

RANGERS LEAD THE WAY.

Prologue

Saturday, June 17th, Reliant Astrodome, Houston, Texas

Sixty-eight thousand screaming, swearing, and hard-drinking World Wrestling Alliance fans rocked the dome to various chants of "Death Mask! Death Mask!" and "Bull! Bull! Bull!"

Jase didn't exactly get it. But then, he didn't exactly care. He wasn't a headliner like Death Mask or The Bull. In fact, he'd barely made the roster. What he was, was filler. Half of a warm-up match—veteran Bruiser Cahill versus the rookie, ex-U.S. Army Ranger Jason "Plow-boy" Wilson—for a crowd that thrived on mayhem and muscle and blood.

Jase could give them all three. Although at the moment, he was a little shorter on one commodity than the others. His nose gushed blood like a gas pump.

"For chrissake, take it easy, will ya?" he muttered as Cahill—280 pounds of steroid-pumped flesh and nasty body hair—locked him in a half nelson and tried to bury his ass on the stinking mat.

"W'sa matter,
hew?"
Cahill mocked. His breath was rank and his BO even ranker, adding insult to injury as he cranked the nelson tighter. "You bite off more than you could chew when you decided to take me on? Fuck. You ex-Army Ranger types are all alike. Think you're tough. You're just a pansy-ass pussy punk."

Ho-kay.
That did it. The fun and games were officially over. Jase had been putting up with Cahill's shit for close to ten minutes now. He was willing to play the patsy— hell, a buck was a buck and this gig kept his belly full— but insult the Army? Insult the Rangers? Screw that.

Cahill might outweigh him by a hundred pounds, but the fact was most of Cahill's muscle was in his head. Jase was smarter. He was faster. And he outmeaned the WWA veteran by half.

"You just couldn't keep your mouth shut, could you, Cahill?" Jase muttered, knowing that what he was about to do would probably cost him his paycheck. He didn't give a shit. Putting this asshole in his place would be worth it.

One hard kick for momentum, a hard chomp on Cahill's forearm, and Jase was off the mat and riding Bruiser's back like an organ-grinder's monkey.

The crowd roared and booed and hurled cups of warm, foaming beer at the ring. Cahill bellowed and stumbled to his feet. Jase clung like Velcro, locked one forearm around Cahill's throat and the other over his mouth and nose so the old boy couldn't breathe.

Bruiser lurched around the ring, trying to shake Jase off. He clawed wildly at Jase's hands, but Jase had sealed them tighter than a wrestling promoter's wallet. Out of breath, Bruiser dropped to his knees again; Jase used the downward momentum to flip Bruiser to his back, wrestle him into a cradle, and pin him. It was all over in less than thirty seconds.

Over. Done. New
champeen
of the who-gives-a-shit-let's-get-to-the-main-event match.

"I'm gonna fuckin' kill you!" Bruiser screamed with a feral growl as he staggered to his feet to the taunts of the irate crowd who'd laid out hard-earned money and side bets with chumps stupid enough to play the odds that Bruiser wouldn't win.

Score one for the chumps.

"Kill you, you little bastard!" Bruiser roared again.

Jase ducked between the ropes and jumped out of the ring onto the arena floor. "Promises, promises," he muttered, dodging a flying cup as he headed for the backstage locker room, beer mixing with the blood that dripped down his face.

In one way or another, Jase had been half-ass trying to kill himself since he'd DX'd out of Ranger Bat six months ago. And he'd gone at it with some pretty good ammo; this counterfeit WWA gig was his latest attempt. Which meant he highly doubted that Bruiser Cahill could accomplish what he himself hadn't been able to do.

When he swung open the locker-room door, his Army duffel hit him square in the chest. He caught it, then looked up from the blood dripping from his nose and into the eyes of Clem Lamont, the promoter for the Houston event.

Lamont looked like he'd been chewing nails and one had stuck in his throat. His normally pasty-white face was fire-engine red. His bloodshot gray eyes bulged. A vein in the center of his Cro-Magnon forehead throbbed like a bitch.

"You stupid shit!" Lamont roared.

Jase held up a hand, not up to putting a helluva lot of effort into supplication or apology. "Yeah, yeah, I know. I was supposed to lose."

"You're the biggest loser I know, asshole. And you just proved it. You're through. Finished! You'll never get another gig in this business."

"My life is over," Jase said in a bored monotone. "However will I live with my dreams shattered?"

"You know your problem?" Lamont rolled a shoulder, all jerky and irritated beneath the raw silk of his royal blue suit coat. "You're a smart-ass. I was grooming you, kid. Grooming! I went out on a limb when I hired you. A no-name. No-brain."

Lamont had the last part right. Jase had been a no-brain for ever thinking he was cut out for this sideshow. "I'll just shower and get out of your hair."

"You'll just leave, goddammit! To hell with the shower. Boys." Lamont stepped aside as the backstage security crew—Mutt, Jeff, and Leon, three cement blocks on legs, knuckles dragging on the floor—came ambling toward Jase, fists clenched, jaws tight, smiles nonexistent.

"Your shit's in the bag," Lamont added, and walked away, shaking his head.

"And the check's in the mail, right?"

Lamont flipped Jase the bird over his shoulder. If he had anything else to say, Jase didn't hear it. But he got the message just the same as Mutt and Leon each grabbed one of his arms and
assisted
him outside.

Jase leaned back against the building as Jeff slammed the alley door shut behind him. He told himself good riddance and breathed in air that wasn't scented of blood, sweat, and beer. Instead, car exhaust, Texas dust, and the pungent scent of the downside of a hundred-plus-degree city day filled his lungs. Still, it was an improvement.

An hour later, he was flat on his back on a cheap motel bed staring at the ceiling. A neon light blinked on and off through the grimy window. A cockroach crawled across the cracked wall.

Other than the cockroach, he was alone—a not so nice place for a man who was a far cry from a loner.

And he was damn weary of the solitude. He was also very alert, suddenly, of the most acute stab of honest emotion he'd let himself feel in six empty months: shame.

He was so ashamed.

This was what he'd become. A loser. A brawler. A phony gladiator who couldn't even throw a fight he'd been paid to lose.

How had that happened? How had an apple-pie-and-ice-cream farm boy from Clear Creek, Iowa, who'd been raised on responsibility and spoon-fed integrity, come to this? How had a boy who'd dreamed of becoming a cop become a joke? How had a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, a decorated U.S. Army Ranger—
Hooah!
—fallen this far from grace?

And how much further could he actually fall?

He covered his eyes with a forearm. Heaved a deep breath. Okay, yeah, so he'd sworn off the booze several months ago after he'd come to facedown in a gutter, robbed of everything but his humility. But he was still as shiftless and aimless as a drunk with a case of Mad Dog. The thing was, booze hadn't been his answer. It had only dulled the pain. Jase didn't want it dull. He'd needed to feel it. Feel something, anyway.

He dragged his sorry self out of bed. Stared at his bruised and bloodied face in a smoky mirror. And almost buckled under the wave of disgust that swamped him.

His eyes were supposed to be blue, but they looked mud-gray and gritty with strain, his color pasty from lack of sleep. The ringing in his ears was a constant, steady annoyance—one of the only constants in his life these days. A constant reminder that his dream job considered him a nightmare.

"Sorry, son. We're damn proud of what you've done for our country. Damn proud. And we'd love to have you on the force, but—"

But Jase couldn't pass the Atlanta police department hearing test. Couldn't pass
any
police department hearing test.

"So far, civilian life hasn't worked out real well for you, has it, chump?" he muttered, dragging a hand over his buzz-cut blond hair.

Nope. Not working out so great.

On a weary grunt, he ambled toward the shower to wash off the blood and the beer and the sweat. He twisted the faucet, let the water get good and hot. Then he stood beneath it and let it scald his skin and drown out the scent of mold.

Not only was he a man without a purpose; he was a warrior without a war. And he was still trying to figure out where that left him.

He hadn't been able to stay in the Army; that was for certain. Not with his hearing loss. Not with Sara still at Benning and probably married to Debrowski by now.

Sara. God, he loved her. And he'd told her so. After she'd healed. After several months had passed from the day she'd buried her husband. A husband Jase had fought alongside in Iraq. A husband who'd come home safe and whole, then taken his own life—but not before he'd tried to take Sara's, too.

"
I
love you, Jase. I will always love you for being here for the boys and me. But I'm not
in
love with you. I'm so, so sorry."

She'd had tears in her eyes when she'd said it. Tears of pity. Tears of regret.

Jase lifted his face into the shower spray, ignored the sting as the hot water shot needles of pain into a fresh, raw cut on his cheekbone.

He'd had to get away. Away from Benning, where there was a chance he'd run into Sara every day. Reupping hadn't been an option. The doc had made that clear. He sure as hell couldn't go back to Iraq, even as an independent contractor. His concentration was for shit. And his hearing—well. He'd have gotten someone killed for certain—and the sad truth was, it probably wouldn't have been him.

He twisted off the faucet and stepped out of the shower onto mildewed tile.
What a pathetic loser,
he thought, reaching for a dingy "white" towel. He wondered if No missed it. Missed the battalion. Missed his squad.

"Hell no," Jase muttered aloud. Nolan miss the Army? Not in this lifetime.

Nolan—
No-man
—Garrett was married to the woman of his dreams, raising babies and doing legitimate security work with his brothers and sister in sunny West Palm Beach, Florida.

Jase dug around in his duffel until he found a clean pair of boxers. Stepping into them, he thought of his former squad leader. Nolan Garrett was the man. If Jase had ever looked up to anyone other than his big brother, Jeremy, and his father, it was No.

As it always did, thinking of Jeremy brought a sharp ache of loss. He had died way too young. And Jase had started drinking too young because of it—disappointing his father in more ways than one. Disappointing a lot of people.

Back in Jase's heavy-drinking days in the Rangers, No had had to bail him out of more tight spots than he could count. He remembered a night in West Palm in a dive named Nirvana where No had backed down a pack of bad-guy biker types with nothing more than a pool cue and a feral scowl.

"Too bad No can't get you out of
this
fix," Jase muttered, thinking about the mess his life had become in the months since.

He froze with his white T-shirt halfway over his head. Then slowly tugged it down over his bruised ribs as his heart rate ratcheted up a couple of beats.