Chapter 27
“I’m out,” Jairo said and slapped his cards down beside the kitty on the table…table being a euphemism for the upturned wooden crate that had once been used to transport poultry…kitty being an almost unidentifiable pile of oddball objects that might have had a modicum of value at some point in history.
“He’s bluffin’,” Shepherd said and kept his eyes on Gabe. “You can always tell ‘cause he gets that dumb-ass innocent look on his face.” Shep coveted the plastic rat Intel had bet. Gabe was sure of it. It would go nicely with his rubber chicken and flying bat. “I’ll raise you one slightly used wool sock and—”
Ten feet away, Abdul Wakil Ghafoor burst through the door.
Instincts sharpened like stilettos had Gabe grabbing the bastard by the throat. His fingers tightened.
“Don’t!” someone begged, but he was sworn to protect his squad, to—
“Durrand!” It took him a moment to realize Ghafoor’s voice was a little feminine. Longer still to notice he sounded like Edwards. By the time he was fully conscious, her face was a frightening shade of gray.
He loosened his fingers with an effort. She coughed and stumbled backward.
His surroundings came into focus by slow increments. The room was small, dim, curtains pulled. They were in their humble hostel in la Candelaria. Not a single assailant was in sight.
Holy hell! His hands were shaking. “Sorry. I’m sorry.”
It wasn’t until then that he realized a plastic tube was protruding from the cephalic vein in his left forearm. An IV bag hung from the headboard, and his left shoulder was bandaged.
Guilt flared through him like a guided missile. “You okay?”
“Lie down.” Her voice was raspy.
He shook his head and twisted to stand, but she pushed against his chest.
“Lie back before you screw up your fluids.”
He eased onto the pillow. Not because she told him to. And certainly not because he was too weak to resist.
“How long was I out?”
She rubbed her throat and cleared it. Her expression was kind of pissed. Maybe she wasn’t the kind of woman who liked to be strangled after saving some jerk-off’s life. “Three, maybe four hours.”
Holy shit! he thought but kept his expression bland, his tone neutral. He’d learned long ago to put his emotions in another compartment. The Army was top flight on teaching stoicism. “How’d you get me here?”
“Stole a car,” she said and shaking two tablets from a plastic bottle, handed them over. He wondered if the tremor in her hands was merely to remove the tablets or if perhaps she was a little disturbed that he’d tried to off her. “Take these.”
“What?”
“Ampicillin. I found them in your duffle. Along with everything else known to mankind.” She shook her head at his excess. She wasn’t the first to think he took the Boy Scout maxim too far. “Do you really think we need firecrackers? And what’s with the chloro—”
“You stole a car?” He wasn’t sure if she had misunderstood his question, or if she was avoiding the subject intentionally.
“Yeah, well, I was going to carry you here but I thought someone might get suspicious if they saw me piggybacking you down the Central Trunk Highway.” She lifted an open can of 7-Up. She’d lucked out finding a store that sold American beverages. “Drink this. It’ll help restore your pH.”
He took the soda but didn’t lift it to his lips. “Where’s the car now?”
“Anyone ever tell you you’re a crappy patient?”
“My sister,” he admitted. “Sarge.” He scowled. “And every nurse I’ve ever met.”
“You strangle them, too?”
“I usually try to refrain.”
She laughed. He was pretty sure the sound shouldn’t make his heart flip over. Especially since she looked like hell. If he didn’t know better, he would think that someone had taken an eggbeater to her strawberry shortcake hair. There was a streak of blood across her hand, and a stripe of mud traversed a jagged course from her cheek to her opposite eyebrow. But that was nothing compared to her clothes.
“What happened to your shirt?” he asked.
She glanced down, lifting her brows when she spied the left sleeve hanging precariously from her shoulder. “Tough day at the office.”
“What happened?” he asked again and noticed for the first time that a scratch marred the creamy skin of her upper arm.
“Take your meds and I’ll tell you.”
He nodded. Strangling her, hadn’t made her more cooperative, after all. Maybe compliance would.
He popped the pills into his mouth. The soda felt strangely soothing and abrasive at the same time. He drained the can in a matter of seconds and set it on the cheap laminated bedstead.
She nodded, looking impressive. “I bet you were a big hit at frat parties.”
“Your shirt,” he reminded her.
“I met a guy. Greg Timpany. American, actually.”
He waited.
“Turns out he didn’t really want to give up his car. Or…” She wobbled her head a little, juggling semantics. “His boss’s car, actually.”
Gabe’s gut cramped up. He should have never brought her here. Not when he wasn’t one hundred percent. Maybe not even then. But he drew in a deep breath. “Where’s the vehicle now?”
“My guess? A bordello. Maybe on Carrero 16.”
He stared at her.
She cleared her throat. “Timpany has probably retrieved it and gone looking for entertainment.”
It took him a minute to absorb her words, longer still to surmise the implications. He managed to gain his feet a split second later. “How did he know where to find it?”
“I called him.”
A couple hundred questions stormed through his mind, but there was no time to voice them. “We ruck up in five minutes,” he said.
“What?”
“We’re leaving.” He glanced around. “Get your stuff together. All the medical supplies. Ditch the water. We’ll sterilize what we need on the way. But don’t—”
“We’re not going until your blood pressure’s back up.”
He narrowed his eyes at her, heart beating like a drum in his overtaxed chest. “Mission accomplished.”
“Listen…” she said and spread her hands in front of him as if she were warding off an angry bull. Her fingers looked ridiculously dainty. Goddamnit, he should never have brought someone here with such ludicrously tiny fingers. “He’s not going to turn us in.”
He inhaled slowly. He was a patient man. There was an entire platoon of men who would attest to that fact. “You said you stole his car.”
“Well…technically, yes.”
“Then you told him where to find it.”
“Yes.”
So many goddamn questions! “How’d you know how to contact him?” he asked and tossed a pair of khakis into his duffel. A spasm contracted his back at the movement.
“He gave me his card.”
He turned toward her, wasting precious seconds as his eyebrows jerked toward his hairline. “Planning to have drinks later on?”
Her cheeks flushed, making him wonder if he was near the mark. Holy fuck. He tossed a map at his bag.
“Listen, I don’t know why he gave me his card.”
He stared at her guileless eyes, her Barbie doll body. “Probably a mystery that’ll never be solved,” he said and turned toward the items that remained strewn across the lone chair.
He could feel her frown on the back of his neck.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.
He drew a deep breath and glanced over his shoulder at her. “What makes you think he won’t tell the authorities?”
“He promised he wouldn’t.”
His gut cramped up as he scanned her tattered clothes again. “Was this before or after he attacked you?”
She pursed her cherry blossom lips. “He doesn’t know our location.”
“Where’d you leave the car?”
“I parked it by la Parque Independencia.”
He thought about the map he had poured over two nights before and shook his head, bemused. “How far away?”
She shrugged and checked his fluids. They were two-thirds gone. “Three miles. Maybe four. Sit down.”
He sank slowly onto the bed, mind churning. “You ditched the car and walked here?”
“Ran mostly. But no one saw me. It was dark. Lie back.”
He did as ordered. The mattress felt ridiculously lovely beneath his achy muscles, lumps notwithstanding. But he felt as rigid as a rifle. “This Timpany guy…was he—”
“Just be quiet. Relax.”
Relax? Was she kidding? He hadn’t relaxed since 2001. “Sure,” he said. “I’m just a little fuzzy about the chain of events.”
“You can defuzz later.”
“Humor me,” he said.
She gave him a peeved look. If she were any cuter, she’d be a carny prize. Three direct hits and you win a Jenny with a y Edwards doll. “Take these and I’ll give you a rundown,” she said and held up a trio of multi-colored capsules.
“What are they?”
“Pain meds.”
“I don’t need ‘em.”
“Oh. You don’t like drugs, GI Joe? Okay.” She nodded. “I guess Shepherd will just have to work out his own problems then.”
She looked too sweet to be so manipulative. Huh. Wrong again. He held out his hand. She dropped the pills onto his palm. A glass of water followed. He drained that too then set it beside the empty soda can before starting to list off the order of events. “We reached our rendezvous at 1400 hours.”
“Thereabouts,” she agreed.
“The police arrived minutes later.”
“Or they were already waiting.”
He nodded, thinking as he spoke. “Or they were already waiting.
One of the officers approached the Jeep. What did he say?”
Her expression looked pinched, her only concession to an ordeal that would have bested half the men in his unit. “He said he saw you leave our vehicle. Knew you were going to get drugs or weapons.”
“So either they were watching Javier or someone tipped them off.” Guilt struck him, so sharp it stung, but he ignored it, still wending his way through the shady hours in his mind. “I saw them coming and returned to the Jeep at a tangent to the road.”
“You were wounded,” she reminded him and looked a little shaky.
“Yeah.” The pain was beginning to slip away like water through terry cloth, leaving him drained and limp.
“When did it happen?” she asked.
“Your passenger got off a shot before I could get my hands on him.”
“You should have told me you were hurt.”
He ignored that. “How long do you think it took us to reach the highway?”
She shook her head. “Seemed like days.”
True. He remembered the bitching pain with tense breathlessness. “Three hours maybe?”
“Could have been more.”
“So we reached the road at approximately 1700 hours.”
“Sounds about right.”
“Then I passed out.”
“Swooned like a debutante.”
He snapped his gaze to hers. Did she find this amusing? No. Nobody would think being run down like rodents was entertaining. Except Linus Shepherd, of course. But not a girl with apple dumpling cheeks and too skinny fingers. Still, the light in her eyes fascinated him.
“I passed out,” he repeated, watching her carefully. “In a very manly fashion.”
She grinned, just a flash of humor so enchanting it made his chest hurt. But he forced himself to go on. Timelines were important.
“Then you…” Good God. “Jacked a car and…” He frowned. The world was getting a little mushy around the edges. “How the hell did you get me inside it?”
“We dragged you.”
He raised his brows, beginning to understand his myriad aches.
She darted her eyes away and fiddled with the bed sheet. “Sorry about that but…” She shrugged, looking peeved and apologetic at the same time. How the hell did she manage that? “Turns out, you’re really heavy,” she said, and he chuckled.
When he glanced at her again, she was gazing at him. Was there tenderness in her eyes, or was he losing his mind? It did seem to be slipping away. He tried to soldier his thoughts.
“You must have had the gun on him.”
“Sure,” she said but her expression seemed strange. Sheepish almost.
“We still have the one bullet left?” he asked.
She glanced away. “I don’t think so.”
He managed to raise his brows.
“I’m pretty sure it’s empty.”
“Did you wound him?”
“No,” she said and fidgeted some more. “Not to speak of.”
“What does that mean? Not to speak of?”
“We had a bit of…” she shook her head. “Fisticuffs.”
His heart rate was picking up again, making his chest feel heavy, his head light. “Fisticuffs?”
“We fought over the gun.”
He stared at her. “And not a restroom in sight?”
“Go to sleep, Durrand.”
Not on her life, he thought, but his limbs felt like wet cement, his tongue like glue. “Where’s the gun now?”
Turning slightly, she adjusted the dial for the IV and murmured something.
“What’s that?”
She cleared her throat. “Timpany’s got it.”
He felt his stomach freefall. “He shot at you?”
She shrugged, but he managed to grab her arm and tug her toward him. The scrape along her biceps took on new, red-hot meaning.
“That’s from a bullet?”
“Could be. Things happened kind of fast.”
He nodded. “So Timpany probably knows our location within a three mile radius, the police are after us, and we have no weapons. Is that about it?”
She pulled her arm out of his grip, scowl hard on his face. He would have laughed at the expression if he weren’t so damned tired. “Listen, I did the best—”
“No, you listen.” He managed to snatch her fingers before she was out of range. But darkness was coming for him, rolling him under. He tried to marshal his senses, to impress on her the seriousness of the situation. “You…did…hell…” he mumbled and dropped weightlessly into the abyss.