Chapter Eleven
THE CHOPPER’S TAIL exploded in midair.
“Brace for impact!” the pilot shouted.
But bracing made no difference when they hit. Cole felt as if not just the chopper, but his whole body, had exploded, as if his bones had left him, flying out through his skin.
Most of the men had been thrown free.
There was no help for the three who hadn’t been.
Fire. Smoke. Pain.
Yet no one rushed to scramble away. Everyone was looking to see who needed help. When the survivors finally pulled back, they did it in pairs, the men with lesser injuries carrying those who couldn’t move under their own power.
Derek’s pant leg was on fire. He had Alex on his back in a fireman’s hold. Alex was bleeding so hard, his blood was soaking Derek’s leg and putting out the flames.
Cole’s right shoulder felt dislocated. He had shrapnel stuck between his ribs and incredible pressure in his chest. He couldn’t breathe. If metal had punctured his lungs, he had only minutes left. He was determined to use those minutes to drag Matt to safety.
He tripped. Went down, white-hot pain exploding behind his eyelids. Matt screamed.
Cole bolted upright in bed before he was fully awake, drenched in sweat. He was gulping for air, his chest tight.
He rubbed his hand against the pain in the middle of his chest, swore, and hauled himself out of bed. He needed a shower.
Hope Hill. Home. Safe. Annie. His subconscious mind threw words at him it thought might settle him.
He let them rumble through his brain while he stood under the spray. Afterward, he didn’t go back to bed. He dressed and sat in the chair by the dark window. He stared into that darkness until his mind was empty.
At midnight, he ambled out into the parking lot, ready to go feed the skunks with Annie. He’d missed her when she’d gone to the evening feeding. He’d had group therapy. He made sure to attend those sessions and listen carefully. He’d figured with people baring their souls, he might catch a clue. He hadn’t so far.
He shoved his hands into his pockets, still pissed that he hadn’t found anything in Shane’s room that afternoon, that he’d let Shane catch him.
“What are you doing here?” the Texan had asked when he’d found Cole coming out of the room.
“Sorry, man. Your door wasn’t locked. I’m out of toilet paper. I thought you wouldn’t mind if I grabbed an extra from under your sink.” He held up the roll he’d picked up two minutes before, his contingency plan in case someone saw him leaving Shane’s room. SEALs always had a plan for every eventuality. “I’m not gonna make it downstairs tracking down the custodian, you know what I mean?”
“Freaking bean burgers, amigo. Cooks have a fiber fetish.” Shane shook his head. “Feel free to take a dump here. Just don’t stink up the place.”
“Nah, I can make it back to my room.” Cole walked away, calling back without turning, “Navy SEAL shit don’t stink.”
If Shane laughed behind him, Cole didn’t hear it.
He’d gotten away with the room search, but he had no new information. Daily progress: zero. As he scanned the parking lot for the umpteenth time for Annie, he kicked a pebble across the blacktop and watched it bounce into the darkness.
A dark-blue pickup pulled in. Trevor jumped out and headed straight for Cole.
“Couldn’t sleep.” The kid flashed a sheepish grin. “Had a craving for pizza, so I thought, why not. They have some pretty good pizza over on Main Street. Was watching TV over there. The hurricane just hit Cuba. Now it’s a category three. You think it’ll come up this way?”
Cole shrugged. “They usually turn out to sea.”
“Yeah. Are you going out?” Trev asked in a way that said he wouldn’t mind being invited along.
But Cole said, “Waiting for someone.”
“Right.” Trevor smiled brighter to hide his disappointment that Cole’s words weren’t followed by Wanna come with us?
“I guess I better get to bed.” He walked away slowly, willing to be called back. “Have fun.” He made his last attempt.
He reminded Cole of a puppy wanting reassurance and affection, wanting to be part of a pack, even a pack of two. Cole looked after him. Maybe they could hang out tomorrow for a while. Trevor had been here longer. Cole could ask him about the patients he hadn’t ruled out yet. The kid was such an obvious mess, maybe people didn’t think they had to be on their guard around him. Maybe he knew something that would help Cole finish his job.
Cole waited a few more minutes after Trevor disappeared inside the building. Still no sign of Annie or her car. Maybe she’d gone already. Because Cole didn’t like the idea of her alone at the house at night, he hopped into his pickup and drove over.
Her car wasn’t in the driveway. All the windows were dark, even the window on the garage door. She wasn’t in there feeding her little stink muffins.
Maybe she’d come and gone already, spending the night with a friend instead of at Hope Hill. The possibility that that friend might be male had Cole in a dark mood as he headed back to the rehab center.
He was only a couple of blocks from Annie’s when he passed a police car flying in the opposite direction. The lights flashed. The sirens blared loudly enough so even Cole caught some of the sound. Detective Harper sat behind the wheel. Cole did a U-turn and barreled after him.
When the cruiser pulled into Annie’s driveway, the detective lunged out of the car and ran toward the front door. Cole didn’t follow him. Annie’s car wasn’t there, so Annie probably wasn’t there. Maybe a neighbor had seen someone skulking around the house and called it in.
That siren would have been heard from a mile away. Whoever had been in there was gone at this stage, and whatever damage he’d wreaked was done. Cole put pedal to the metal and drove for the spot on the other side of the cornfield where the path that began at Annie’s fence ended.
If the intruder ran when he’d heard the siren, Cole might still be in time to catch him.
But the first thing Cole saw was Annie’s car on the shoulder just half a mile from the house. Empty.
Now the fear hit him.
He drove past the Prius, turned down the next road, and kept going. The spot where he’d hoped to find the intruder’s car stood deserted. If the guy had come this way, he was gone now. Nothing to see here.
Another U-turn and he was back at Annie’s car again. This time Cole stopped and got out. The Prius was locked. He checked the ground, illuminated by his pickup’s headlights. No sign of struggle. Worry punched him in the solar plexus anyway.
He left her car and sped all the way back to her house.
The lights were on now. He pulled up behind the cruiser, ran to the front door, found it unlocked, went in.
“Annie!”
Detective Finnegan came to greet him, hand on his holstered weapon. “What are you doing here?”
“Thought I’d help with the midnight feeding again. Saw the cruiser. What’s going on?”
Annie, pale and frowning, popped out from one of the rooms. “Cole?”
“What happened?”
“Let’s all sit in the kitchen. Then how about I ask some questions first?” the detective suggested, keeping himself between them. The sharp gaze he kept on Cole said somebody was in trouble.
The man took out his notepad, which already had some writing on the top page. He’d already questioned Annie. Cole wasn’t surprised when the man turned to him as they sat.
“You come by often in the middle of the night?”
Shrug. “Can’t sleep anyway.”
The man shot a look at Annie. Because her patients probably didn’t come home with her on a daily basis. Or drive by her house at midnight. Cole rubbed a hand over his chin. He sounded like a stalker.
Then he caught the wary look on Annie’s face, and he felt it like a punch in the gut.
Did she think he was acting like a stalker? For the detective to think something like that was one thing, but Annie . . . Dammit.
Cole rested his hands on his knees and sat still, no sudden movements, trying to make his body smaller and less threatening. He didn’t want to scare her. If he was scaring her . . .
Desperation washed through him. “I’m a Navy SEAL,” he told Finnegan. “I’ve been trained to run toward trouble and not away from it. When something’s off, I investigate. I’ve come out with her to feed the animals before. Tonight, she wasn’t at Hope Hill. I know she’s in some kind of a stalker situation. I didn’t like the idea of her out here alone in the middle of the night, so I thought I’d drive over.”
Finnegan looked at him as if weighing every word. He wasn’t impressed by Cole’s explanation. His cold expression said he was protecting Annie, and Cole needed to stay out of his way. When the detective turned to Annie, the question in his eyes clearly spelled, Want a restraining order against this guy?
But Annie said, “He’s OK, Harper. He’s one of the good guys.”
And Cole realized only then that he’d been holding his breath for the last couple of seconds.
She should have told him to stay away, just to be on the safe side. And she’d gone way too far with calling him one of the good guys. She missed the mark by a mile there.
Cole didn’t correct her, because he wanted the detective to think that he was one of the good guys. No sense getting his ass arrested tonight.
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” he asked Annie.
And she did, beginning with someone opening her gate and her animals getting out. Then worse. Intruder. Male. Unidentified. Possibly armed. Took off when he heard the police siren.
By the time she finished, Cole wanted to kill. She’d been in the freaking closet the whole time, scared to death. If Finnegan had been on the other side of town and gotten here ten minutes later . . . Cole didn’t want to finish the thought.
He’d been in front of her house. No lights. No car. He’d turned around and driven away while Annie trembled in the damn closet inches from danger.
She could have been killed. The thought threatened to explode Cole’s head. He wanted to pull her into his arms right there in her kitchen, in front of Finnegan.
“I’ll drive Annie back to Hope Hill,” he said instead.
Finnegan nixed that right out of the gate. “You go ahead on your own. Miss Murray can drive her own car when we’re done here. I’ll escort her in the cruiser.”
The dismissal rankled Cole, but he stood. He wasn’t going to argue with the detective. Not yet. Not over this. Not as long as Annie was safe. But he reserved the option to stand up to the law in any number of ways if he thought they were falling down on the job. Because there was one thing everybody needed to understand here. He wasn’t going to let Annie get hurt.
Cole drove back to Hope Hill and went inside. He didn’t go straight to his room. He stayed in the hallway window that overlooked the parking lot until Annie drove up, the cruiser behind her. To his credit, Finnegan got out and walked her to her room.
Cole waited just around the corner. When he checked after a few minutes, Annie’s door was closed, and Finnegan was walking away. Cole allowed himself to relax and went about his mission.
At two o’clock in the morning, pretty much everybody was asleep. Time to take a look at the rest of the offices he hadn’t made it to the other night. But even as Cole walked away from Annie, his mind kept returning to her.
She’d taken the last couple of days pretty well, and they had been rough. But tonight was rougher. An intruder in the house would send most women into hysterics, and a lot of men too. Annie had hidden herself and calmly called the police. She hadn’t fallen apart during or after.
She had courage, and courage was the quality Cole appreciated the most in people. She was no fragile butterfly flitting from flower to flower in naive abandon, living in her little, happy, peppy, tree-hugging world, as he’d first thought. Annie Murray was a strong woman.
He thought about her sitting calmly at the kitchen table and recounting the intruder episode.
He wanted her.
He wanted the generous mouth and generous body that went along with her generous soul. He wanted her soft curves. He wanted to see her amber eyes darken with desire.
The realization nearly knocked Cole on his ass. Yeah. Worst idea ever.
Nevertheless, he wanted to go back to her room right now and not leave. But what Annie needed overrode what he wanted. And he was pretty sure she didn’t need him.
She needed someone like Harper Finnegan. The detective was young, good-looking, and carefree. He’d been clearly concerned about Annie. And the man was probably tough enough to protect her. Cole wanted her protected. Even if the thought of her with Finnegan left him filled with a dark rage.
He left the dorms and entered the main building.
The first floor held a rec room and the cafeteria in the back, reception in the front. He went upstairs where the staff offices were and pulled out the ID card he’d once again borrowed from Annie’s bag earlier while she’d been rubbing her eyes and Finnegan had been consulting his notes.
Once Cole was inside, he was set. The individual offices had key locks he had no problem picking. Dr. Ambrose had one of the largest offices. Maybe because he was a PhD.
Cole entered but didn’t turn on the light, not even after he closed the door behind him and closed the blinds on the window. He used the small LED light he had in his pocket and swept the gray metal desk first.
No laptop. Ambrose had taken it home.
Cole turned to the filing cabinet, picked the lock, and looked through the patient files.
He found nothing beyond a lot of psychobabble, diagnoses, treatment plans, and drugs prescribed.
Nothing useful on the bookshelf, just a million copies of Psychology Today and other similar publications, reference guides, two copies of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a bunch of inspirational booklets, and self-help guides. Ambrose handed those out to patients. He’d given a handful to Cole during their first session.
Two full shelves held nothing but research books on the history of medicine, many of them on medieval practices. Looked like Ambrose had a hobby.
Cole returned to the desk and popped the lock on the single drawer. Empty notepads and a bunch of pens, a couple of thank-you cards from past patients. He closed the drawer and locked it again.
On his way out, his light fell on Ambrose’s lineup of diplomas on the wall. Nothing interesting there either. Apparently, the guy had gone to graduate school in England.
Cole turned off the LED light before he inched the door open and looked out into the hallway. Nobody there. Except . . . light showed under the door of one of the offices. When Cole had come through earlier, that strip of light hadn’t been there.
Whose office was that? From the outside the offices all looked the same, two rows of white doors on white walls, all evenly spaced.
Then he remembered: Milo Milton, the acupuncturist. Cole had only had one session with the guy so far. Not his favorite thing.
Cole’s skin had been cut and punctured too many times during torture. He remembered the pain, even if he’d been shot up with drugs half the time. His captors had hoped the drugs would make him talk. The nightmares he’d hallucinated . . . He hated the memory. And he wasn’t a fan of needles either.
What was Milo doing here at past two in the morning? The acupuncturist was thirty, into everything Eastern medicine, a giant fan of incense burning. During their one session, Cole had barely been able to breathe. He still got the pungent smell of sandalwood in his nose every time he thought of the guy.
He had a hard time picturing Milo tangled up in the transmission of military secrets. The guy was nearly as bad as Annie. He probably wished for world peace for his birthday.
As far as foreign connections went, he’d told Cole during their session that he’d been to Nepal a couple of times. But Nepal was a long way from Yemen.
Based on Cole’s considerable experience, Milo was an extremely unlikely candidate.
Opportunity? Sure. Means? Maybe. Motive? That last one stumped Cole completely.
Not money. Milo believed in voluntary simplicity, not owning anything beyond what was absolutely necessary.
Still, Cole could have missed something.
He looked behind him. If Milo was passing on information, who was passing information to him? Maybe Milo was here waiting for the guy right now. But the hallway was dark and empty in both directions.
Cole moved forward with as much stealth as he could muster, knowing that if he made any noise, he wouldn’t be able to hear it, but Milo might.
When he was at the door, he stopped. Was Milo alone? If there were people in there, if they were talking, Cole couldn’t hear.
He silently cursed his CO for putting him on the job. Cole had to be the worst person for it. What gave anyone the idea that he’d make a good spy? Stupidest idea he’d ever heard. No pun intended.
He shrugged off the tension in his shoulders. The mission had been entrusted to him, so he would do the best he could.
He figured the gap at the bottom of the door to be about an inch wide. He eased his large body down onto the carpet and lined up his eye with that gap.
Having his full body on the floor was good. He hoped if someone was coming, he’d feel the vibrations from their steps. Because he sure wasn’t going to be able to hear them.
The man walked the hallways, anger making his hands clench and unclench at his sides.
He’d come every night when Annie was at Hope Hill, instead of going to her house to look through her windows. He couldn’t do that here. At her house, since her bedroom looked to the back, she didn’t draw her curtains. Here, she always closed the blinds.
He couldn’t get into her room either. That made him furious with frustration. He’d gotten into her house. Prying off a sheet of plywood had been pretty easy. Yet the memory of walking into her bedroom was less than satisfying.
He’d just wanted to watch her, to softly touch her hair.
Then he had planned to go back to the garage and butcher that damn potbelly pig. Ugly piece of shit.
He’d actually stopped by the garage before going into her house, wanting to stomp a couple of her little skunks and leave the small bodies in her bed as a warning of what would happen if she continued to defy him. But he hadn’t been able to find the skunks.
And Annie hadn’t been in her bed. She’d hidden from him.
And then the police came.
Then Cole Makani Hunter.
Bad, bad Annie. She had entirely too many men around her.
She was alone now, once again.
The man slowed in front of her door. Light came through the cracks. She was awake.
He hesitated. If he knocked . . . But how would he explain why he was here? He had no excuse for a visit.
Soon, but not tonight, the man promised himself as he kept walking down the hallway. Very soon, Annie Murray would understand just how seriously she needed to take him.
If he had to take out one of her animals, so be it. He’d begun his game with roadkill for the sole purpose of scaring her, but he found he liked killing. There was a primal satisfaction to ending a life and being able to watch as it happened, as the victim’s eyes dimmed.