Chapter Twelve

He couldn’t hold her tight enough, not in Kevin’s patrol car, not walking up the stairs to her apartment, and not once he got her inside her apartment with the deadbolt and all those other nifty fasteners firmly locked behind them. It didn’t matter that he’d come to his senses earlier during their brief encounter in her bedroom. Jake was a man and he was wrong about Lacy. He needed to prove it.

They didn’t make it past the refrigerator before they devoured each other in one long physical connection that they both seemed to need more than oxygen. She clung to him, trembling with more than just fright. Even Jamaal turned his face out of respect for the hungry kiss Jake covered Lacy’s mouth with.

Her breath became his breath, her pulse pounding in sync with his as if they shared the same fire in their blood. With one hand firmly rooted at the back of her neck, he deepened the kiss, wanting every last thing she had to give him right there and then. She returned the offer, her tongue tangled with his and tasting, her teeth nipping at his lips while both arms hooked around his neck and held him tight. Like he needed to be held, too. Like she couldn’t bear to let him go.

Such lovely restraint only made him more certain. Jamaal was on his own tonight. He’d better keep his big black ass inside the apartment where it belonged, and he’d better not screw this one good thing up because Jake was bedding down with Lacy, no ifs, ands or buts.

“Ahem,” Jamaal coughed politely, which meant he either wanted more spaghetti or they were embarrassing him. Jake broke the kiss, but didn’t release Lacy. No way. With his fingers still in her hair and around her ear, he pressed her head under his chin while he turned to face his buddy.

“You good?” Jamaal asked.

Jake nodded. I am now. “We need to talk,” he said decisively. The time had come to strike a better offense against Poindexter, and who better to fight that war than three Marines who just happened to be in the same place at the same time? “I’m not waiting for Poindexter’s henchmen to come back and finish what they started. It’s time we strike back.”

Jamaal’s eyes lit up, but those weren’t the eyes Jake needed to see. He peered down at the soft and warm woman in his arms. Forest green glittered up at him with determination and maybe a little bit of Oo-rah and a dash of hell, yeah.

“When?” she asked, her chin tilted in defiance like the good Marine she was.

Suddenly Jake was front and center of his squad again, and all eyes were on him. His inner sergeant stepped up and cocked his head. Right on cue his shoulders squared. “We have something Poindexter wants. Lacy, you’re up. Tell Jamaal what you brought home with you. It’s time he knows.”

She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and faced Jamaal. “Marlee gave me evidence that might convict Poindexter. At least that’s what she said.”

“Why don’t y’all come in here and sit down so I can see you better?” Jamaal asked, his big bruiser body half-turned on the couch to face his buddies in crime still in the kitchen. “Hell, I been waiting for you half the night. I had to make my own fourth helpin’ of spaghetti. Cleaned the kitchen, too. Did y’all notice?”

Jake took a minute to scan the spotless kitchen. His buddy had even dried the dishes. “Thanks. You’re a lifesaver.”

Jamaal shrugged, but the light in his sappy eyes said it all. Even a big drunk needed an ‘atta-boy’ once in a while.

Lacy pulled out of Jake’s arms, headed for her bedroom. While she was gone, he hurriedly doffed the Good Samaritan duds and changed back into his jeans and T-shirt. Her apartment was warm enough that he left two layers of his shirts folded and sitting on her desk. Before she returned, he dropped to his butt alongside the couch, leaving room for Lacy. Wearing underwear after months without having any was a nice touch, a little confining in the crotch at times, but nothing he couldn’t handle.

When she came back, Marlee’s cash box rested at her fingertips by its silver handle. “I don’t have a key, and I don’t know what’s in it, so don’t ask,” she said as she took her seat beside Jamaal.

Jamaal lifted the box out of Lacy’s hands and studied the keyhole, his face scrunched up like it always did when his mind was actually working. “These things have a simple rotating lever the key flips up into a hole inside the frame of the lid. When the lever’s up, it clamps onto the lid. When the lever’s down, it releases. It’s not like there’s tumblers or anything complicated to work with. The key blade only turns the lever. I’m surprised she didn’t use a stronger lockbox with a combination if her evidence is so important.”

“Can you open it?” Jake asked, wanting to get to the point. Whatever Marlee had on Poindexter, he needed to see it.

“You bet your ass I can. Get me a screwdriver, and we’ll be inside this baby in no time.”

Lacy jumped off the couch and went to the cabinet below her kitchen sink. Pulling out a small plastic toolbox, she returned promptly with two screwdrivers. “I didn’t know which you needed,” she said, offering a Phillips and a standard, handles first to Jamaal.

He shot Jake a sly wink. “Now how’s she think I’m going to pry the lid off with a Phillips?”

Jake had to readjust his position on the floor as the most adorable blush colored Lacy’s neck and cheeks. He hated that Jamaal had put it there, but damn, her feminine response glowed all over her lithe body. She’d probably thought she was being efficient and saving herself another trip bringing both screwdrivers, but thank goodness she hadn’t seen how the sight of her affected him. Or his jeans.

She punched Jamaal’s bicep to bring her point home. “It’s been a long day. I wasn’t thinking, okay?”

He chuckled, stuck the flathead screwdriver under the edge of the lid and very gently turned it less than a quarter turn to the right. The top popped open as easy as if he’d used a key.

“Wow. That was quick,” Lacy said.

“You see, Lace, it’s all in the wrist,” Jamaal demonstrated like anyone cared. “All a guy’s got to do is—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jake muttered as he scrambled to see what was so important.

Jamaal handed the box over to Lacy. “It’s all yours. Open it.”

Her fingers trembled on the handle, but she lifted it without any fanfare. A thumb drive was taped to the bottom of the box. That was all.

“Talk about anti-climactic,” Jamaal grumbled. “I was hoping to see a wad of cash, maybe the pistol Poindexter used to kill a senator or something.”

“Do you own a computer?” Jake asked as Lacy peeled the drive out of the box.

“It’s in my closet,” she said, a funny look shadowing the usual light in her eyes as she handed the box back to Jamaal. “Hold this. I’ll get it.”

When she was out of earshot, Jamaal asked, “She keeps a computer in her closet? Don’t you think that’s a little weird?”

“No weirder than two guys hanging out in her apartment all day like a couple ghouls.” At least she owns a computer. Jake pushed off the floor. “I’ll go see if she needs any help.”

“Yeah, you do that, why don’t you.” Jamaal snickered.

Jake ignored the taunt, but that was when he discovered what Lacy hid in her closet. Were they her secrets? Peering into her darkened bedroom about stopped his heart. She hadn’t turned the light on. Only her trusty nightlight caught the show. But what a show.

Jake closed the door behind him. He had to. The place was filled with artwork. Of sorts.

One canvas after another now lined the closet side of her room. She stood half-inside her closet, pulling out another wood-framed oil painting. And another. He stopped dead in his tracks. The war in Afghanistan had come to life with all its ugly reality in oil painting after oil painting. One showed nothing but a box of bloody legs and arms. One particular arm reached out from the bloody mess, the fingers spread wide as if reaching for help.

Another canvas was filled with a close-up of half of a man’s sweaty face, his angry eyes framed by tear-laden lashes. Jake looked closer. In the brimming reflection of his eyeball was the horrific view of a beheading. The sword was still raised in the fierce Taliban warrior’s hand. The object of his wrath, another Marine, lay bound with his arms behind his back, his body bent over a tree stump. A chopping block. A very bloody chopping block.

Jake licked his lips, not realizing his mouth was open until he did. In yet another painting, a soldier knelt in globs of oil painted mud with his hands clenched uselessly at his sides, his head tipped back, his eyes squeezed shut, and tears rolling down his bearded face. Jake recognized the horrific angst of that stranger. His mouth wasn’t opened. He wasn’t screaming. That poor soldier was—coping. Coming to grips with Death in the only way he knew how. Cursing God.

“Lacy,” Jake said hoarsely, not sure what he was looking at, torment or therapy. The lovely tragic paintings were everywhere.

She jerked upright with yet another canvas clutched in her hands. “Jake, I... Umm, I didn’t hear you.”

“What’s all this?” he asked, gesturing toward the macabre gallery. “Did you paint these?” Please tell me you didn’t.

A particularly sad one had just caught his eye, a depiction of a soldier’s boot in the sand, only no leg was attached to the foot in it. Blood dripped from the severed veins as if a heart still pumped. The damned stream of red ended at the stem of a pink rose growing out of the desert sand. The leg had to have belonged to a woman to end up at that pink flower like it did.

Claustrophobia swept up from the bedroom floor, filling Jake with the need to leave in order to breathe.

“I paint,” she answered quietly, her gaze riveted to his face. “Least I used to.”

There were no words. Each painting was a beautiful work of the saddest art. She’d caught the light and darkness of each scene in such a way that she’d brought the soldiers, or what was left of them, to life. Or death. The one of the man on his knees looked vividly lifelike, his anguish palpable, so think Jake could taste it.

The reflection of the beheading looked eerily lifelike, too. Lacy certainly knew how to capture the face of terror. But how could one human being put all that raw heartache on canvas? The undeniable beauty of her work scared Jake, but it also pulled him in. There was a reason behind this—art. A scary reason.

Taking one slow step after another, he pushed the suffocation aside and entered the realm of a woman he didn’t really know. The woman he thought he honestly already loved, but who just might be as bat-shit crazy as him.

“Why?” he asked, his throat as dry as an Afghanistan desert. “Why remember all this? All of them?”

“I don’t,” she whispered guiltily. “Once I paint them, I say a prayer, and I let them go. It’s the only way I can help them—and me—move on.”

He gulped, needing a helluva big open window and a lot more air than this tiny room offered. “Help them?” God, woman, they’re not the ones who need help. It’s you.

Lacy set the large canvas she’d just pulled out of her closet on the bed. “I can’t help them if I can’t paint them, Jake. They roam around in my head, and they keep dying until...” She gulped one of her noisy gulps. “It’s like they’re stuck in time like me. They can’t go forward and they can’t go back, so I put them on canvas, and I let them be real one last time. I breathe on them while I paint them, Jake. They get to be warm again.”

She nodded at the portrait on her bed, a collage of blurred faces where only one stood out in horrible, dramatic detail. She’d painted an Army Ranger with his buddy cradled in his arms. God, the pain in that haggard Ranger’s eyes. “I give them a part of my soul, and I talk to them, Jake. I let them feel the hairs of my paintbrushes and the soft, smooth glide of the oils. They get to smell the linseed and the turpentine. If it’s a good day, they listen to my music with me. Sometimes I cry with them. Sometimes they do all the crying. None of them wanted to die, you know. But sometimes we laugh, too. They tell me their stories. I tell them mine. Then I tell them it’s okay now, and then...” Her voice trailed into a whisper. “I let them go.”

He couldn’t stop staring. “Do they leave then?” Christ, I hope so.

Her pretty red head bobbed adamantly. “Oh, yes. At least the ones I’ve painted so far have left. I think they find peace in knowing they haven’t been forgotten.”

To anyone else, Lacy would’ve sounded fifty shades of stark raving crazy, but Jake got it. He knew right where she was coming from. She’d found a way to keep one foot in both worlds, one with her lost friends from Afghanistan and one in the sometimes scarier, civilized world called America. She’d found a way to self-medicate that didn’t involve drugs or booze. Or suicide. In her mind, she’d found a way to help her buddies. Best of all, she’d found a way not to time warp out of control.

But the thought of all she’d seen during her deployments scared him. “How many f-friends did you lose?”

“You have to understand,” she said. “I was part of the security detail attached to the foreign press corps. Because they needed to be where the action was, I travelled all over Iraq and Afghanistan. Wherever they went, I got to go.”

There was pleading in her eyes, so Jake gave her what he could. “Tell me,” he said as he lowered to the edge of her bed, wanting to better understand.

She blew out a deep breath between pursed lips and pointed to the canvas of the leg and the pink rose. “Okay. So for instance, this is Lance Corporal Terry Ash. Roadside bomb. IED. She bled out in Laghman Province before anyone could get to her. Her mother owned a floral shop in Oklahoma. I can’t remember the name of the town, but I’m sure she told me. We talked a lot while I was painting her portrait. So okay, umm, I wanted Terry to let go of what happened to her over there and go home to her mom, so I painted her blood trickling into the rose. Nourishing it so that something beautiful would grow in the desert that took her life. Her mother likes pink roses. I sent Terry home in a rose, Jake.”

Jake stilled and listened. It made sense to him, but then, it would. He was crazy, too.

“And this guy.” Lacy tapped the canvas of the Marine on his knees. Her fingers grazed his muscular shoulder like a compassionate friend. She’d even caught the layer of dust on his anguished face and the prism in the teardrop in the corner of his eye. “This is my buddy, Guy Rodriguez. He and his K-9 were part of our detail. They were killed in Ghazni Province, Afghanistan. Taliban ambush. That’s what he looked like right after his dog went down in a hail of automatic fire. Kiska. A silver German Shepherd with black tipped ears.”

Lacy took a deep breath. “Guy got shot within seconds of Kiska because he ran to help her. It happened fast. I know because I was there. He loved that dog. I killed the bastards who killed him and his dog, and I’d do it again if I had to. He wanted me to use a palette knife instead of a soft brush. Guy said he needed to feel again.”

Her voice had taken on an eerily calm tone, as if she were repeating lines she’d memorized from an old high school play. “It’s funny though. I never thought to paint Kiska. Maybe because she’s already home? Huh.”

“Who’s this?” Jake asked of another piece. It showed nothing but a rectangular piece of the stars and stripes, but he knew exactly what it was—the flag over a casket on its way home to someone’s mom and dad. Or their wife or husband.

“Gerald.” She stroked the flag tenderly. “Fire fight. Helmand Province. He wanted his dad to be proud of him, so I painted the flag he went home under. He said his dad would know he was beneath it because it was our flag and the reason he gave all,” she explained as if she totally believed she had spoken with the dead man. “May I paint someone home for you?”

“No, umm,” Jake paused. A once perky blond in scorched and bloody desert cammies sprang to mind. Man, what if this crazy idea worked? “Maybe...”

Lacy sat with him. “I don’t blame you if you think I’m crazy, Jake. When I processed out, I came home to this huge void in my life where no one knew what I was talking about. It’s like I was a walking zombie, only no one seemed to care that I was still dying, and they sure didn’t want to hear what I needed to tell them. So I stopped trying, and I kept everything to myself.”

She folded her hands in her lap. “Only I couldn’t stop crying. I had this big ugly hole in my heart, and an ocean of tears inside of it that no one could see. I couldn’t sleep, and my brain was on overload trying to remember what and who I was before I joined the Corps. It’s like I was caught in a game of Whack-A-Mole, and someone kept hitting me in the face with a sledgehammer to make me fit into America like everyone else, only I couldn’t. I still can’t. I never will.”

He grunted, knowing precisely what that sledgehammer did to a person.

Lacy kept going. “I don’t understand the people in my country anymore, Jake. I don’t think I want to. It’s like they’re too busy with stuff that doesn’t matter. None of them care what’s going on over there. None of them care about us, or what we have to live through once we come home. One day it hit me. I was so alone that all I could hear was the echo of my pain dripping in my soul like a drippy bathroom faucet nobody could fix. And do you want to know what it sounds like? It’s the pebble you drop into a deep dark hole, only it never hits bottom. It just keeps falling and you keep waiting. I started screaming, and it kept dripping, and, well, you know how that turned out.”

“Do your parents know you’re in Anacostia?” Jake asked.

“No. Do yours?” she asked right back.

“No,” he had to admit. He hadn’t talked to them in a couple years. Didn’t think he could. That was what had brought him to Jamaal. Only someone who’d been there understood.

She took his fingers in her hand, stroking them individually. Her fingertips smoothed over his nails and cuticles like she needed to commit them to memory. Or she was crazy.

“See. You’re hiding, Jake, just like me. My mom and dad live in Baltimore. My sister and her husband own a nice home down south in Richmond. They’re not far away, but I don’t want to see them. Why do you think I don’t have a cell phone with a bunch of stupid apps like every other person in the world? Cell phones have GPS cards, Jake. Somehow my parents would find me. I know they would. They’d want to fix me, and I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be fixed. I’m not the one who’s broken. They are.”

He looked into her eyes, searching for a hint of crazy, but all he saw was trust. Everything Lacy had just said made perfect sense. Even the paintings. They were her brand of self-medication, her way of finding closure with the havoc war had left in her psyche. In her heart.

He lifted her slender, clean fingers to his lips and placed a kiss on the tips of them one by one. “You’re amazing, Lacy Wright.”

She grunted. “Ha. You’re the one who’s amazing the way you took charge before. I thought I was going to lose it at the clinic. That threat or whatever’s painted on the side of the clinic freaked me out, and poor Ernie gave me a look like he didn’t know who I was. I had the craziest urge to start painting again, only I don’t know who that burned up corpse used to be. How could I help someone I don’t know find their way home? That corpse looked like a banshee. All I could see was the scream coming out of its mouth and—” A full on body shiver attacked her. She pulled her hand away from Jake to rub it off her arms. “I can’t get that picture out of my head until I know who it was. You don’t think I’m too crazy, do you?”

Too crazy? Not just crazy? He retrieved her hand, needing to maintain the physical contact. Holding onto her gave him time to formulate an answer. It made him feel grounded for the first time in a long while. “You’re no crazier than I am.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel good?”

Jake had to smile. She was right. Either they were both crazy or they were both struggling like hell to adjust to time and space they’d never fit into. Either way, they were now in it together. “Maybe there is one person I want you to paint,” he said, “but not until this thing with Poindexter is settled. Her name was Emily Blum, only she changed the spelling to Emile so her CO’s would think she was a guy when they looked at the roster. I know I was looking for a guy the day she showed up.”

“She was important to you?”

“Yes,” he answered honestly. “Only I never told her. We served together.” He stopped right there. Talking about the past never helped the present. Only mucked it up was what it did. Made it harder to focus. To not time warp.

Lacy’s eyes lit up. “I’d love to do that for you. Anything. And you’ll see. It helps to let them live one last time even if it’s only to say goodbye. Thanks for believing me.”

“Why wouldn’t I? You’re nothing but believable, Lacy Wright,” he said with another kiss to her fingertips. That led to a taste of the tender pulse at her wrist. Another on the pulse at her neck, and she was as aroused as he was. He eased her down to the mattress, but the thought of her lying with those brutal paintings spoiled the mood. There were just too many people in the room and most of them were dead.

As if he’d been summoned, Jamaal pounded on the door. “You two fall asleep in there? I thought we were going to plan defense? If you’re staying in bed, I’m going back to sleep.”

Lacy burst into a giggle. “Oh, oh, we’ve been caught.”

“Do you really have a computer in your closet?” Jake asked before she pulled away.

“Actually, I do. It’s a laptop. I never use it because I thought maybe there was a GPS locator in it, too. I’ll get it, but it might need a charge.”

“Stop worrying about being found,” he said, his fingers refusing to let go of hers even as her hand slid out of his. “I think you already are.”

And there was that smile again, that breathtaking piece of heaven dropped straight as an arrow into an apartment in crappy Anacostia. She crashed on top of him, the warmth of her soft breasts mashed into his chest, her palms at his cheeks, and her lips temptingly close. Every muscle sprang to stiff attention. She had to know what she was doing to him. No way could she miss the proud salute his body was giving her.

“You know what that means, don’t you?” she asked breathlessly while she planted a kiss on the end of his nose. Another on each shaggy cheek.

The sweetest breath brushed over his face, blessing him with the love of an amazingly tough and resilient woman. Now he knew how those guys and gals on the canvasses must’ve felt like when she painted them. Life seemed to flow from Lacy. The atoms of oxygen in her breath made him want to suck in a deep breath of her and start living.

“What?” he asked weakly, his hands on her taut little backside and his heart in his throat. If he kept tearing up every time she came close, he’d have to turn in his dog tags and his man card with them.

She landed one last whisper-kiss on his nose. “It means you’re found, too.”