Chapter 8

Make your weird light shine bright… so other weirdos can find you.

-Bumper Sticker

Cobie

My mind was working at about a thousand miles an hour.

However, I was stuck on one thing in particular.

I am not anyone’s cash cow!

Sam sat back in his chair. “How do you know Drake?”

Dante’s mouth worked, causing his jaw muscles to flex.

“He used to be my brother’s best friend,” he grunted. “At first, I wasn’t too sure about it. But his name, Drake Garwood, isn’t so fucking common. I knew it was too big of a coincidence. Then, when I had to go to the reading of the will in Mary’s stead, I recognized Drake immediately.”

“Does your brother know?”

He shook his head.

“No.”

“Are you going to tell him?” I asked.

I was really curious. Why wouldn’t his brother know this? It was his niece who was affected, after all.

He shook his head again. “Not yet. I don’t have enough proof. I don’t want to jump the gun yet, then ruin whatever friendship they have left if it’s not what I think it is. Reed still talks to him on occasion. He’s made it a point to keep up with him through the years, and I don’t want to ruin that relationship without knowing the full story. Maybe he’s just caught up in this. Maybe he’s just in over his head and needs a way out. Maybe he won’t do anything at all, but I just can’t take a chance with Mary like that.”

I licked my lips and blew out a breath.

“Marianne told me once that Drake scared her,” I hesitated. “Then another time, after their son was killed, she lost it, blaming it on Drake. She said that he did it on purpose, and even went as far as to tell the cops, as well as every single news outlet that covered the baby’s death, what she thought.”

He stared at me unnervingly.

“She also told me, about a week before she died, that Drake had her going to some doctor that she thought was ‘pretending’ to cure her cancer.” I licked my lips again. God, why were they so dry? “He’s an MD, I looked him up after her death. I couldn’t get her words out of my brain. But the thing is…”

“But,” Dante drawled.

“But that’s all that I could find on him. There’s no case studies or articles or anything on these experimental miracle treatments he supposedly developed. There’s literally nothing out there on him at all.”

The man scowled.

“I’m not going to say that I’m good at finding shit on people, because I’m not. What I’ve found out is by asking people stuff, like I did with you. I don’t have any computer skills what-so-fucking-ever. That’s why I wanted to come talk to these guys. I need to know what the fuck is going on.”

“Because of what you showed me earlier?”

“Yes.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“Why now?”

His jaw clenched at my question.

“Honestly?”

I blinked.

“Yes,” I paused. “Why would I ask you a question and not want you to be honest?”

He chuckled.

It was the second time he’d done anything like that in the entire hour that I’d been in the same space as him.

“Tell me about the pictures.”

“What pictures?” the beautiful man that Sam had introduced as Rafe asked.

Dante reached into his pocket, pulled out the jump drive and then slid it across the table.

Rafe immediately reached for it and slid it farther down the table to the man called Jack.

Jack took it, stood up, and walked over to a panel on the wall where he plugged the jump drive in.

“Hope that the data isn’t corrupted,” I muttered mostly to myself.

Dante gave me a look, and I found myself blinking my eyes innocently at him.

He rolled his and turned when a screen descended at the front of the room.

“This is like the future,” I uttered to myself once again.

Jack turned and offered me a smile.

“Not the future,” he said. “Just technology that is advancing every single day.”

I didn’t argue with that, mostly because it was so true.

Every two years, a new iPhone came out, and every two years, I got a new one. The newer models weren’t really all that different from the older ones. At least that’s how it seemed until you compared an older iPhone to your newest one, side-by-side.

Something I’d actually done myself a few weeks ago while I’d been digging through my grandpa’s old desk and found one of my old phones.

The fucker had even turned on and run after I’d charged it. I was purely amazed and sat there for twenty minutes looking at the old pictures. Of course, the pictures were tiny compared to the phone I carried now. Pictures that I’d somehow lost, and smiled for hours as I thought about the things I used to do as a teenager. Camping with my grandparents. Fishing with Grandpa. Cooking with Grandma.

God, there’d been so many freakin’ pictures of pies that I’d had to laugh.

“Tell me where you were when you took these pictures.”

Sam’s comment brought me back to the present, and I stared at the same picture that Dante had shown me earlier.

“Right outside her house.”

“You live there with him?”

Dante shook his head. “This is her old place. She rents it to him.”

I nodded my head, and we explained what had happened again to them.

“At first, I started watching her place, thinking she was living there. When I realized Drake was there, I’d intended to leave it alone, not wanting to draw attention to myself. But then I started noticing strange things, and I couldn’t help myself.”

“See that number, Sam?”

Max’s question had me straining my eyes to see where Max was pointing.

“No. Where?”

“That one.”

A red laser light appeared where a hazy gray number was on one of the bottom boxes, and I strained to see it even more.

“What is i…” I turned my head at the same time as I spoke and stopped when I saw Max, a gun in his hand, aiming it at the screen.

My mouth fell open.

His eyes met mine, and he saw the way they were nearly popping out of my head, and then looked kind of sheepish.

“Fancy laser pointer you have there,” I mused as he put the gun back in someplace behind his back.

Hmmm. I hadn’t realized he was armed.

Imagine that.

“Sorry,” he snorted. “Seemed easier than getting up. My knee fucking hurts.”

“Everything always hurts,” Jack agreed, retaking his seat.

These men were all older. Late forties, early fifties, I’d guess.

But, don’t think for a second that these men weren’t handsome as hell, or that they were any less dangerous than a younger man at his prime.

Nope, I’d been around my fair share of military men in my time. In fact, I’d been a member of the LTWC—Longview Texas Welcoming Committee—since I was a kid. Twelve at the most.

See, it all started when I realized how alone I really was in the world. Yes, I had grandparents, but they were literally all I had.

Which got me to thinking about other men and women who didn’t have even what I had.

Then, one time I’d heard about a soldier coming home, and a welcoming committee was needed for him since he didn’t have any family. So, I’d begged my grandmother to take me to Dallas, and together we’d welcomed home this young soldier from war. It was so satisfying seeing his smile directed toward us that I’d been doing it ever since.

In fact, I had one that I had to go welcome home in three days.

Most of these soldiers were young, but that made them no less deadly.

But these older men in the room with me, staring at me like I was amusing them, were definitely in their prime, right along with the soldiers I welcomed home every few weeks.

“I’ll send it to my woman and see if she can do anything. She only has the laptop with her at work, though. It might take her longer.”

Sam stood up and opened the door wide. “Janie!”

A woman whom I presumed was Janie came walking in with a sandwich in one hand, and a dill pickle in the other.

She was a gorgeous blonde with long, flowing hair, bright green eyes, and a smile that was stunning. She was slim on top, but her bottom half had a little more meat to it than the rest of her, making her hips flare wide.

“Yeah?” Janie asked, leaning forward to take a bite of her pickle.

It crunched noisily, and she looked sheepishly around the room, pausing only slightly on Rafe a little longer than the others, before returning her gaze to Sam.

“Can you do me a favor and bring me the report on a Drake Garwood?” he asked her. “Everything.”

Janie nodded and turned to go.

I watched her hips sway as she walked away, and I wasn’t the only one.

Rafe watched her, too.

Like a hawk.

But before Sam and the other two could notice, he returned his eyes forward.

And caught mine.

I raised my brows at him, and he gave me nothing in return. Not a smile. Not a shrug. Nothing.

Interesting.

Someone had the hots for the help!

Grinning, I went back to paying attention.

“In all honesty, I would’ve continued to keep my distance and only watched had I not witnessed that last night,” Dante said, looking at the photos. “I have a feeling he’s in it up to his eyeballs, and it won’t be long before he’s looking for alternate ways to get money.”

“The info we pulled on Drake was bad if I remember correctly.” Sam rubbed his forehead. “I can’t remember exactly, though. I might be getting him and another guy mixed up. But I remember pulling her. She almost didn’t make it. Wren, I think.”

Jack grunted. “It was Wren. She was the one who showed up sick as a dog, battling a fever, and so banged up and bruised that we couldn’t touch her anywhere without her crying out in pain.”

Knowing that Marianne had gone through that was making me sick to my stomach.

“Only one of our birds who asked to go back, though,” Max said. “That’s why I remember her so clearly.”

I had nothing to say to that.

Why would she go back if she was safe?

“They were exhuming the son’s body, and they needed her eyewitness account to charge the husband,” Janie said as she came into the room, looking down at the papers in her hands instead of at the room. She ran into a chair but didn’t seem to care as she stopped and continued to speak as she read. “The case was almost dismissed due to not being able to find Marianne. According to Marianne/Wren, she went back because she wanted her husband to pay for killing her son. Only the case was dismissed anyway due to lack of evidence found during the autopsy, as well as the fact that Marianne had been diagnosed as clinically depressed at the time, which Drake’s attorney used to get her testimony thrown out.”

I remembered that vividly.

It’d been a huge case, and it’d also brought Marianne home. I’d been both stunned to see her and ecstatic that she was back. She seemed to be back to the old Marianne, that was until she’d started spewing all those accusations about Drake.

They’d been so outrageous that I’d not taken her seriously. How could I? The man that she described wasn’t the man that I knew. That anyone knew.

Drake had never once shown himself to be anything other than a caring father and husband. He doted on their child, and he loved Marianne. He took care of her, and he supported her through her bout with postpartum depression.

Hadn’t he?

Was I wrong? Had I gone against my friend, thinking that she wasn’t in her right mind, only to find out that she had been right all along?

This was all so surreal that I was having a hard time making sense of it all, and I didn’t know what to think.

“Marianne was diagnosed with severe postpartum depression,” I found myself saying, my physical body in the room, but my mind had traveled back about two years into the past. “She told me once that she dreamed about killing her baby. Sending him to Heaven where he couldn’t be hurt anymore.”

The table quieted. “I always assumed that it was her, that it was because she… wasn’t well. I never actually thought that any of it was true. The wild accusations and the way that she had acted… knowing what I know now… I just… well, I feel like I betrayed her as a friend.”

God.

I hadn’t believed her!

“Tell us about the times that you saw her. Was she always scared?”

Sam’s quietly worded question had me nodding.

“I met her in the hospital when she had her baby, and we’d hit it off so well that we exchanged Facebook info. Shortly after that, we met for coffee. It just bloomed from there. But every time that Drake would come into the room when I was at their house, she would get all wonky.”

“Define wonky,” Sam ordered.

I bit the inside of my lip and closed my eyes as I recounted the first time that I wondered what was up with their relationship.

***

“This coffee is to die for,” I exclaimed, inhaling the aroma that wafted from my cup. “I love it. I would totally box this up just so I could smell it. I’d probably get the same buzz from sniffing it as I would from drinking it.”

Marianne started to laugh but that laughter quickly died when her husband, Drake, walked into the room.

I still wasn’t sure what to think about that man.

He was handsome, in a polished sort of way. I normally found myself veering more toward the rugged, lumberjack type of men. Men with beards and longer hair, and who wore flannel shirts, work boots and faded jeans.

Drake Garwood was nothing like that, and I didn’t think I’d ever seen him in anything less formal than dress slacks. Today he was wearing black suit pants, and a white long-sleeved, button-down shirt tucked into those pants. He finished it all off with a black belt, black dress shoes, and a burgundy tie. The suit jacket was slung over his arm.

He didn’t smile when he saw Marianne. In fact, he looked at her almost… indifferently?

He didn’t say anything as he went to the baby, Raymond, and picked him up out of his bouncer.

Marianne was practically quivering. But was it in anticipation or… something else?

I couldn’t tell, but I definitely could feel the tension in the room. What was that all about?

I opened my mouth to say something, but the words froze in my throat when my eyes lit on the diaper explosion. Raymond had poop from the tops of his ears all the way to his feet. Only, before either Marianne or I could say anything, Drake curved his arm around the baby and cradled him close to his chest.

The bright brownish-yellow mess smeared the chest of Drake’s shirt along with his hand.

Drake froze and then turned his angry gaze to Marianne.

“You let my child sit in this?” he snarled.

Marianne started to shake her head. “I didn’t…”

Drake walked over to Marianne, thrust Raymond in her arms, covering her with the baby’s mess, and then glared at her. Just when he was about to start yelling, my presence made his notice, and he hesitated.

“Clean him up.”

Then he left.

“Marianne.” I reached for the baby. “Oh God.”

Marianne stood and then walked to the kitchen sink where she washed what she could off, then started emptying the sink of its dishes. Once she had that done, I walked over with the baby, and we set him down into the sink, hosing him off as best as we could with the sprayer.

“You’re not seriously washing him in the sink, where our dishes go, are you?”

Marianne seemed to tense, her whole entire body freezing as she tried to say something that wasn’t going to make him angrier but ended up not saying anything at all as she waited for him to continue.

“You are.” He walked up to Marianne’s side, this time in a dark gray shirt, and glared. “That’s disgusting.”

Marianne’s lip quivered. “I’m sorry.”

He didn’t say another thing. He just walked straight out of the house without looking back.

“Ummm,” I hesitated. “He does realize that babies are messy, right?”

Marianne shrugged. “I’m not all that sure that Drake actually knows anything at all about children.”

***

“And, in all honesty, what he did that time wasn’t all that worrisome. I think any man would’ve been upset about poop on their shirt before they went to work.”

“No,” Dante disagreed. “I’d give goddamn anything to have my child’s poop on my shirt. Or their throw up. Hell, I’d give anything to walk into the laundry room to get one of my shirts only to find it stained with their crayons that got mixed up in the wash with my work shirts.”

Nobody said anything.

“You have other kids?”

Dante made a sound in the back of his throat like a wounded animal. “No. Not anymore.”

“I wouldn’t be mad. Not like that,” Max butted in, likely sensing the sudden tension. “I’d be peeved, but not at my wife, and certainly not at the kid. It’s not like that’s controllable.”

I nodded, feeling weird all of a sudden. “I was a little weirded out by their interaction. But that was just one incident of many. Things like that happened a lot. I remember thinking that it was like he only picked their kid up for show, like he only did it out of obligation maybe. Marianne freaked out whenever he picked the baby up, almost as if she was just waiting for him to hurl the baby across the room. And that wasn’t just once in a while—that was every single time that I witnessed it.”

“Why did you think she had postpartum depression?” Jack asked. “What, other than what you’ve already told us, put all these red flags in your head?”

I tried to think back to an instance in time, and I couldn’t pinpoint one.

“Mostly it was due to the fact that she said she had it, that Drake said she had it. Then, when the baby was younger, maybe about two months old, she told me about wanting him to go to Heaven. After that, it was like she almost stopped… loving him.”

Dante hissed in a breath.

“What do you mean she stopped loving him?”

“The kisses,” I said. “She used to give him kisses all day, every day. She’d dote on him. But, after she told me about that dream, it was as though she started to distance herself from him. I’d come over, and the baby would be crying. I’d arrive for coffee, and she’d hand him over, almost as if she couldn’t get rid of him fast enough.”

Nobody knew what to say to that.

“Maybe she was distancing herself because she knew he wouldn’t be here much longer.”

That was Janie.

We all looked in her direction.

“What?”

Janie flushed at Rafe’s quiet question.

“Maybe she knew what was about to happen.”

“You mean, maybe she knew that Drake would kill her child, and she was trying to minimalize her feelings so it didn’t hurt as much?” I offered.

Janie looked at me and nodded gratefully. “Yes, exactly.”

“Maybe,” I murmured, looking down at my hands.

The room was silent after that, almost as if no one knew what to say.

“Well,” Jack muttered. “I haven’t heard back from Winter yet. Once I do, I can give you the number on those boxes… do you mind if I keep this?”

Dante waved his hand away.

“Fine.”

Jack grunted his thank you, and I looked around.

Was this where we left? We didn’t know anything more than when we arrived.

Well, kind of.

I now suspected that Drake was a terrible person who had a hand in killing my friend. She may not have died from anything that he could be convicted for, but he’d certainly played a part in how her treatments were handled.

Shit.

“Do I kick him out of my house?”

“I think you should tell him that you’re selling it,” Rafe piped in. “Tell him that you’re strapped for cash and that you have no choice. If you want, I can be the go-between.”

I looked at the man across the table.

“That makes sense,” I muttered as I turned my eyes to the table, trying not to stare at the man.

Rafe—Raphael—was beautiful. So, so beautiful.

Normally, he would be the type of man I would go for. Tall, dark, and dangerous. But there was something about Dante, though, with his brooding good looks, and his anger that was almost palpable, that really had me gravitating toward him.

“If I tell him that I have to pay for cancer treatments, he’ll understand,” I muttered almost to myself.

The table went silent.

Sam, who was shuffling his papers into a neat stack, froze. Jack stopped repeatedly clicking his ballpoint pen. Janie, who’d been absently spinning in one of the chairs, stilled. And Max stopped tapping his fingers against the tabletop and stared at me.

Dante, who’d been at my side absently cracking his knuckles, was the only one who continued to do so.

My eyes came up, and I found myself staring at Rafe again, who looked considerably more interested in me.

“You have cancer?”

I opened my mouth to reply, but Dante beat me to it.

“Yeah, breast cancer. She says she’s not doing anything for it, though.”

I turned a glare on the man at my side.

They seriously didn’t need to know that.

Rafe grunted.

I looked back at him, and he was scrutinizing me with a gaze that I was sure took in every minute detail, down to the tiny hairs that I probably had growing on my chin.

“I once thought I had testicular cancer, but it turns out it was an infection.”

I blinked.

“You did?”

My eyes automatically went to his pants, where his testicles would be, causing him to laugh.

“If you’re wondering, I lost one of the boys,” he expounded.

“That’s why we call him Uniball,” Sam muttered, and he, too, was looking at me.

“Rafe will be a good fit for this, don’t you think?” Jack asked, I assumed, Sam.

Rafe sat back in his chair and continued to study me.

“I have to go overseas in a few weeks, but other than that, I should be free,” Rafe added.

Sam grunted and stood.

“Sounds like a plan.” He handed the stack of papers back to Janie. When he’d taken them from her, I didn’t know. “Make a copy of those and give the duplicates to Dante in case he needs what we have. Dante,” he turned to study the man at my side, “when we get more info, I’ll let you know. For now, Rafe is free to use as you please. If anybody asks, though, make it sound like you’ve hired him. We don’t want anyone thinking he’s working with us due to liability reasons.”

Dante grunted. “Considering I’m already paying him…”

“I’m a Jack of all trades.” Rafe laughed.

“You’re a pain in the ass,” Dante said as he stood. “Thanks for the help.”

Then he shook all the hands in the room, including Janie’s, but excluding Rafe’s.

“I expect you to let my brother know that you weren’t on the clock today,” Dante grunted.

Rafe laughed then.

“I’ll be sure to do that.”

Then Rafe left.

“Janie, you got those papers?”

Janie jumped and turned to look at Sam guiltily. “Uhhh, yeah. Sorry. I’ll get them right now.”

Then she was gone, disappearing less quietly than Rafe had.

“Gonna be a problem.”

I looked over to see Jack talking to Sam.

Sam grunted. “Don’t start.”

“It’s gonna happen,” Max said.

“What’s gonna happen?”

All the men looked at me, and Sam grimaced. “Janie has a small crush.”

No, Janie had a big crush. One that was going to get her in trouble, apparently. But, if I was a woman that looked like Janie, I’d have a crush on the bad guy, too.

“Hmm,” I muttered, then smiled. “Thanks for helping us!”

I offered my hand to each man, and every single one of them squeezed it lightly, like they were afraid to break me.

I grimaced.

Yet another thing that I didn’t like about having cancer. Once people knew you had it, they treated you differently.

Before, they might’ve just given me a handshake. Now they were looking at me like I was about to die any second.

Guess I had a whole lot more of that to look forward to, didn’t I?