The Defiant Hero (31 page)
She answered breathlessly, her heart racing, thinking it was finally Tyra. “Locke.”
There was a moment of silence, then Starrett’s voice. “It’s only me. Sorry.”
Somehow he knew she was waiting on a phone call. “What do you want?”
“No luck finding Nils yet, huh? He still hasn’t checked back in?”
She didn’t say a word. There was no way she was going to give him any information that he didn’t already know. For all she knew, he was with John Nilsson and Meg Moore right this very moment.
“I guess not. You on duty?” he asked.
“No.” She was off until late tomorrow morning.
“I’m at a pool hall,” he said, “bored to tears. You know how to play?”
“No.”
“Want to learn?”
“No.”
He laughed. “Want to know where I am?” He didn’t let her answer. He just rattled off the address.
“This is going to be really funny, right, Roger?” Locke said, flipping through her map book until she’d found the street he’d named. “When I come all the way down to that shitty part of town, and walk into some biker bar, and you’re not there. That’s going to be some joke when it’s just me and five three-hundred-pound white supremacists, huh? As a person of color, I don’t appreciate being walked into a potentially dangerous and volatile situation.”
“Whoa, wait—I would never do that.”
“Then you be there,” she said. “You be there when I show up.”
She hung up the phone, feeling like a fool for rushing over at Starrett’s beck and call. But she didn’t have anything else to do, and she was going to feel really stupid when she called Jules and had to tell him that she’d spent the entire afternoon with her thumb up her butt.
Her cell phone rang again and she tensed. “Locke.”
“Hey, it’s me,” her partner said, as if she’d conjured him just by thinking about him. “Lookit, I can’t help you out with Cowboy Sam tonight. I’m sorry, I know I promised to set up camp outside his hotel room from midnight to six, but I’m being sent south.”
Locke ran a stale yellow light. “Anything I should know?”
“Nilsson’s rental car just turned up at a roadside motel. Apparently someone fitting Meg Moore’s description checked in earlier. They’re both gone now, but the car’s still there. I’m going to go check it out, see if the local boys missed any vital clues.”
“They’re sending you without me?”
“I actually talked Bhagat into letting you stay back here,” Jules told her. “It’s a nothing assignment and you know it—checking something that’s already been checked? The car was broken into. There was nothing inside it. And just a muddy pair of jeans and a T-shirt in the parking lot. An old pair of sneakers and socks. Nilsson must’ve thrown a change of clothes into the backseat, and when some local thief broke into the car, they grabbed everything. When they realized it was just some clothes, they must’ve just dropped ’em where they stood. Still, I’m going to go down there, look at the car and go, hmmmm. Then fly back to DC and tell the boss everything that the local guys already told me.”
“Call me when you get back.”
“You bet. Sorry about tonight.”
“No problem,” Locke said. “I’ll cover it. Hey, did you hear I nearly keeled over this morning? It’s getting hot out there. I’m telling everyone—we all need to be careful. Summer’s here. Push fluids.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah, it was nothing. I’m just . . . letting folks know.” It was a preemptive strike, to steal Starrett’s thunder. If everyone already knew she’d gotten a little overheated this morning, Starrett couldn’t make it sound worse than it really was when he told his version of the story. Which she had no doubt he would do.
“Take care of yourself,” Jules ordered. “Get some sleep.”
“Yeah, maybe I will tonight.” But probably not.
Locke hung up the phone as she pulled into a parking space just past a building that bore a sign saying POOL HALL. Well, there was an original name. She checked her map again, checked the numbers on the other buildings. This was definitely the address Starrett had given her. She locked her car behind her.
Four motorcycles on the sidewalk. No swastikas painted on any of them—always a good sign.
She straightened her shoulders and took a deep breath, and went in the door.
It was dark inside, with the perpetual dank of a room that never saw sunlight. It smelled like stale beer and mildewing particle board. A long bar lined the wall right by the door, and there was a worn path in the cheap tile leading to it.
There were four pool tables in the back and . . .
Starrett.
He was there.
He was standing off to the side of a game being played by a group of young women—college students from the look of them. As one of them set up her shot, the others hung on Starrett’s every word.
From a safe distance, Locke could understand and even appreciate his appeal. He was handsome but not too pretty, with a face that was all masculine angles and edges. He wore his hair much too long for a Navy officer, tied back in a pony tail. She knew that meant he still spent much of his time in extremely hostile, dangerous places where looking like a U.S. Navy officer would have been bad for his health. On one level—a very distant level—she had to admire him for that.
He was taller than most men, and well built, with long legs, narrow hips, broad shoulders, and the kind of muscles that meant he used his arms for picking up more than a pen and paper. He wore a snug black T-shirt tucked into a pair of worn-out blue jeans that were stacked over—what else? Cowboy boots.
And that, Locke realized, was a hint that he probably wasn’t going to try to outrun her. Earlier today, when he’d lost her, he’d had his sneakers on.
He probably wasn’t going to outrun her, she reminded herself. With Starrett, she could assume nothing.
After all, why had he called her here if his goal wasn’t to humiliate her again in some way?
Keeping an eye on him, Locke sat at the bar and ordered a soda. It wasn’t long before he came and sat down next to her.
“Bored, huh?” she said.
“To tears.” He smiled at her as if he were actually glad to see her.
“Right.” He smelled good. She didn’t want him to smell good and she didn’t want him to smile that way. She took a sip of her soda, frowning across the room at the young women who were still glancing in Starrett’s direction. Anything to keep from getting swallowed up by the blue of his eyes.
He turned to gaze across the room, too. “They’re a little too young for me.” He hooked his boots over the rungs of the stool and signaled to the bartender for another draft beer. “I prefer my women to be women, not schoolgirls.”
“And you’re telling me this because . . . ?”
“Because you seemed, I don’t know . . . interested?”
“I’m not.”
He toasted her with his beer. “My apologies. I guess it was just wishful thinking on my part.”
“Someday,” Locke said as he drank a full half of the mug, “I’m going to head an FBI counterterrorist team, and you’re going to be assigned to assist me. I’m going to be in command, and you’re going to have to do exactly what I order, and you’re going to remember all those tired come-ons and innuendos that were designed to intimidate me and—”
“I’m not trying to intimidate you,” he scoffed. “If I were trying, you’d be intimidated.”
She rolled her eyes.
“I’m just . . .” He squinted up at the TV in the corner, where a baseball game was playing in silence, the mute on. “I’ve always been . . . afraid of you, I guess.”
Locke swiftly hid her surprise. Of all the things she’d expected him to say, that was not one of them.
“I was always scared you’d actually talk someone into letting you join the SEAL units,” he explained. “Scared they’d meet you and realize you were good enough to make the Teams. And I’m sorry, Alyssa, but the entire dynamics would change drastically if we started letting women in. I guess I was always just afraid you were going to be the one to actually kick down the door. So I treated you like shit.”
Never in a million years had she thought he’d admit any of that. Locke laughed—a mix of disbelief and surprise that she couldn’t contain. “You still treat me like shit.”
Starrett shrugged. “I don’t treat you any differently than I treat anyone else.”
“Yeah, right. You’re always trying to get Jenk or Stan Wolchonok to go back to your room and get naked with you.”
“I wasn’t really trying to—” He laughed. “That was just talk.”
“Meant to intimidate.”
“Meant to be funny,” he countered. “Where’s your sense of humor? You know, women are always shouting about equality, but then when you get it, you don’t like it. Typical. So you want me to teach you how to follow someone without ever getting made?”
She blinked at the sudden change of subject.
He smiled. “That’s not a trick question.”
“Yes.”
Starrett nodded. “Good.”
“What’s the catch?”
“No catch.”
She narrowed her eyes at him.
“Really,” he said. “You’re already good—just not good enough. I’m bored, we’re both here in wait mode with nothing better to do.” He gave her another of those whole body cowboy shrugs and an aw shucks grin.
Locke didn’t trust him. She didn’t like him. And she knew he didn’t like her.
There had to be a catch.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fourteen
“I NEED YOU to talk to me,” Nils said. The coveralls he’d put on were comfortably loose and warm despite the slight smell of gasoline that clung to them. They also had his name on them. John. Stitched in gold thread above the pocket. He’d laughed when he’d first seen it, but Meg hadn’t even cracked a smile.
She shook her head now. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I’m sorry, John. I don’t want to hear it. You’re not going to get me to change my mind, so talking isn’t—”
“No, we don’t have to talk about Razeen or the Extremists. We can talk about anything. Just to keep me awake. Seen any good movies lately?”
“You’re kidding.”
“Yeah, actually I was.” He glanced at her. The hazy sunshine brought out the lines of worry and fatigue on her face. Her eyes were distant, as if she were hundreds of miles away. With Amy.
Meg wouldn’t tell him where they were heading—or even if they were getting close to their final destination. All she would say was south. Route 95 south.
Nils cleared his throat. “Actually . . .” Just say it. What was she going to do? Get angry enough to grab a gun and start taking hostages? “I was wondering about Daniel.”
Meg kept her eyes glued to the road that stretched out into the distance in front of them, but he knew that he’d gotten her attention.
“Until a few days ago I had no idea he was dead,” he admitted. “And the report I read didn’t go into detail—not beyond, well, ‘Car accident in Paris, dead on arrival at . . . Saint Something Hospital.’ ”
“St. Luc.” She turned and looked at him. “What do you want me to tell you, John? That he was with his new mistress when he was hit by a drunk driver who killed them both? That he was coming back from an illicit weekend in the country while I was home with Amy, who had a stomach virus?”
“No, I—” He broke off. Looked at her. Looked at her again. “Oh, shit, you’re serious.”
“He tried. He really tried to be—” she started, then shook her head. “What am I doing, defending him?”
“Jesus, I’m sorry,” he said. “Why—” He stopped himself, but then plowed forward. This topic was already painful for her, why not throw some of his pain onto the table, too? “Why didn’t you call me when he died?”
“I couldn’t.”
“Why not?” he pressed, knowing that the truth could crush him, but needing to hear it just the same.
She wouldn’t look him in the eye. “I just couldn’t, all right? It was . . . I was . . . God, John, everyone knew about Ashley—that was her name—and it was like some freak show. It was so public. I had to deal with all this grief and anger and . . . and . . . shame while everyone watched. And then there was Amy. The worst was having to explain to Amy what that woman was doing in the car with Daniel.” She laughed, but there was no humor in it. “The son of a bitch.”
“If you’d called me, I could’ve helped. Meg, I would’ve come. My CO’s great, he would’ve let me take the time.”
Tears hung in her eyes. “If I’d called you, you would’ve been someone else for them all to stare at.” She slowly shook her head. Looked back out the window at the road. “Besides . . .”
“What?” he asked, wanting to know. Besides, what?
She just shook her head again.
“So. Why didn’t you call me later?” he asked, trying not to sound as if he were in the process of committing emotional hara-kiri, as if his casual question weren’t the equivalent of taking a big knife and cutting himself open, exposing himself, raw and bleeding, for her to kick aside. “After you moved back to DC?”
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