Troubleshooters - Into The Night Part 23

She was the anti-Alyssa, telling him in her southern sugar pie voice how she was a regular winner in all of the local wet T-s.h.i.+rt contests as if that were something to be proud of, and, yes, he'd pursued her precisely because of that.

Although Mary Lou had been as eager to take him home that night as he'd been to go there. That part wasn't his fault. It was the other nights, after he'd realized that she'd cast him in the role of Prince Charming, after he knew she didn't see their casual s.e.x as either casual or mere s.e.x, that he was to blame.

To give himself a little credit, he'd ended their affair when he realized she was actually hoping he'd marry her. He wasn't a total s.h.i.+t. Just a partial s.h.i.+t, with a run of some very bad luck.

A partial s.h.i.+t who'd found out the hard way that getting f.u.c.ked turned into a negative, soul-sucking experience if there wasn't love or at least genuine caring involved. A loser who had learned that hero wors.h.i.+p wasn't love. That it wasn't even close.

There was an op last year in Afghanistan that went really wrong. Sam had led a squada"Muldoon, Gillman, Izzy, Jenk, and Cosmoa"that got hit by an al-Qaeda ambush. The ambushers were amateurs and didn't wait until the SEALs were close enough to wreak real havoc. Cosmo took a hit, but the bullet was spent and didn't do much damage.

When the SEALs returned fire, the tangos turned tail and ran, but Sam gave the order to engage the enemya"to go after them and either bring them in for questioning or eliminate them.

The terrorists didn't go for plan A, opting instead to fight to the death.

Which the SEALs did, quickly and efficiently, only to find that two of their ten attackers couldn't have been more than eight years old. As for the others, the oldest was maybe eighteen.

Amateurs, indeed. They were children. And now they were dead children.

The CO had made them all go in for a couple of extra sessions with the shrink after that one.

It had been Mike Muldoon's personal nightmarea" engaging the children who fought as terrorists, and G.o.d knows there were a lot of them in al-Qaeda, may their parents burn in h.e.l.la"and Sam spent hours with the younger man, just letting him talk it out, just listening.

But eventually Sam had gone home to a hot dinner that Mary Lou cooked for him.

He couldn't choke it down. He'd needed to talk about it, too.

And there was Mary Lou. His wife. Sitting across the kitchen table.

He'd reached for her hand.

"Who would teach their children to hate and to kill like that?" he'd asked after haltingly telling her as much as he was allowed to about the op, about how sick he'd felt looking into the faces of those dead little boys.

And Mary Lou had started to cry.

Her tears, however, were not in sympathy. No, in fact, she was upset with him, and she pulled her hand away. This was in the days when they still fought regularly. It was before she started trying to please him at all costs.

"Don't talk like that," she'd told him. "You're a SEAL. You shouldn't be talking like that, like they didn't deserve what they got. I'm the one who suffered. I was scareda"terrifieda" when that helicopter went down in Pakistan. I'm the one who sat in front of the TV for eighteen hours, waiting for a sc.r.a.p of news that would tell me if I was going to have to raise our baby girl without a daddy. You wanted to go there. You wanted to fight. I hear you say that all the time. You want to feel bad for someone? Feel bad for Haley, who spent the past four weeks without her father!"

Needless to say, their conversation hadn't gone any further.

That was the day he had understood that she didn't love him any more than he loved her. She loved the idea of him, sure. She maybe even loved the image she'd built of him in her heada"some superman who never doubted himself, never faltered, and never failed.

But that sure as s.h.i.+t wasn't him.

Truth was, Mary Lou didn't give a d.a.m.n about him. She had no real desire to get to know hima"especially if the real him deviated from the picture-perfect super-him she held in her head.

From that day on, Sam had given up trying to make his marriage work. He stopped attempting to be interested in the differences between green and yellow split peas or how many pies to bake for the church bazaar, and started merely to endure.

"Come on, I'll walk you back to your car," he told Mary Lou now, aware that Jazz's door was wide open.

"I wouldn't've come here if it wasn't important," she told him as they headed for the stairs. "I've been trying to be patient about a lot of things, Sam, but this is something I cannot abide."

Sam fought to suppress a surge of frustration and anger. Getting angry at Mary Lou only made things worse. She'd start to cry and it would be twenty minutes instead of five before he was back upstairs. "This is about Alyssa, right? Well, stop right there, because she doesn't have anything to do with the reason we're going wheels upa""

"No," she said. "It's nota""

He plowed right over her as he held open the door that led outside to the parking lot. "The FBI isn't part of this operation, so you can sleep a little easiera"never mind the fact that I've told you, I've given you my f.u.c.king word, at least two million times that I haven't so much as touched her since we were married. So just go home, Mary Lou. Go the h.e.l.l home and get over it."

Her cheeks flushed. "This isn't about her. I'm not going to fight with you about her anymore. I'm not."

"Then what did you come here to fight with me about?" Sam spotted her car over by Muldoon's truck near the building's entrance.

"I didn't come here to fight with you at all. I came to tell you that the lock on my trunk is broken. Anyone can get in there any time they want."

Sam clenched his teeth against a stream of foul language. He was going to have to endure one of Lieutenant Jacquette's lectures because the f.u.c.king lock on the f.u.c.king trunk of her f.u.c.king car was f.u.c.king broken. A lock that had been broken long before Mary Lou's sister Janine had given her the car.

The muscle in his jaw was surely jumping, but Mary Lou didn't appear to notice. She was busy opening her trunk.

"I came here to tell you that I don't want you leaving things in my car," Mary Lou told him, chin held high for a change. As much as she was p.i.s.sing him off right now, it was refres.h.i.+ng to see her show some backbone after spending the past few months with the Stepford Wife clone. "And especially not this" She gestured to the trunk behind her.

Sam knew he was supposed to look inside, so he did. "I thought you wanted jumper cables in there, in case you needed them again."

"Look beneath them," she ordered tightly.

Sam looked. He even picked up the cables and shook them. "Trunk's empty, hon," he told her.

"What?" She turned with a gasp, and then started searching the wheel well. "No, it was just here..."

"I don't know what you thought you saw in here," Sam told her as she even looked beneath the spare, letting it fall back into place becausea"surprise, surprisea"nothing whatsoever of his was in there. "But if I'm going to have any hope at all of getting promoted, from now on in you're going to have to wait to have your hallucinations after I come home at night."

And that was cruel.

Mary Lou's eyes filled with tears, but her chin stayed high as she dug through her purse for her keys. Without another word to Sam, she took the jumper cables from him, tossed them back in, and slammed the trunk closed, leaning on it to make it latch. She marched around and climbed into the car, slamming that door behind her, too, and starting her piece-of-s.h.i.+t-on-wheels with a roar.

Ah, f.u.c.k.

Sam knocked on the window, and she rolled it down a meager half inch so she could hear him.

"Look, why don't you take my truck home." He held out his keys. "I know a guya"Al Speroni, remember him? He owns that body shop next to the video store. I'll give him a call, ask him to come pick up your car and either fix the lock or replace the entire trunk lida"he owes me a big enough favor. You can drive my truck until I get home. How's that sound?"

Apparently it sounded good enough to Mary Lou, who turned off her car and rolled the window down a little farther so that she could take his keys.

"Leave your keys under the mat," he told her. "Just the car key, not the house key, okay?"

She nodded.

"I've got to run," he said. "Give Haley a kiss for me."

She turned to look up at him. "I wasn't hallucinating, Sam."

He was already backing away. No way was he going to talk about this anymore right now. He was already screwed as it was. "I have to go. You take care, all right? One day at a time. I'll see you in a few days."

Sam ran for the building, free for the next forty-eight hours.

The feeling was a good one, despite the reaming he'd yet to receive from Lieutenant Jacquette.

Jesus, maybe he should put in for a transfer to another teama"something that would put him in some hot spot on the other side of the world, where Mary Lou couldn't come with him.

s.h.i.+t, she'd probably be happier with that arrangement, too. She'd get her superhero without having to clean up his all-too-human mess day after day.

He'd miss Haley, though. And the guys in Team Sixteen.

And Alyssa Locke, a little voicea"persistent f.u.c.kera" inside of him chimed in.

He was as pathetic as Mary Loua"still in love with his fantasy of Alyssa, despite finding out that she was someone else entirely.

Sam went inside and took the stairs two at a time, and went directly to Lieutenant Jacquette's office, knocking on the open door. "Sir. Got a sec?"

Jazz Jacquette looked up from his desk. His default grim expression got even darker when he saw that it was Sam.

"Sir, she doesn't get how the military operates," Sam told him. "I a.s.sure you that I've tried and tried to explain thata""

"I'm sure you have." The XO sat back in his chair, shaking his head slightly as he looked up at Sam. "It's a shame she won't listen, because it is hurting you, Lieutenant."

Sam nodded. "I know that, sir. I'm thinking about asking for a transfer. I think it might be a good idea if I went overseas."

The expression in Jacquette's eyes was impossible to read. "That would be a serious loss to this team."

"Thank you, sir, but I don't know what else to do."

"I've heard the rumors, but ..." Jazz cleared his throat. "You married her because she was pregnant, is that correct?"

Sam laughed, but there was no humor in it. "Gee, I thought that went from rumor to verified fact a long time ago. Yes, sir, it is correct."

Jazz nodded solemnly. "Sam, I'm speaking to you not as your XO right now, but as your friend. You married the girl because she was pregnant, but she's not pregnant now, is she?"

Sam understood the implication. As unsavory as it was, the possibility of divorce had popped into his thoughts way more than a time or two. But, "Am I supposed to just ignore Haley? She exists. I'm her father. If I divorce Mary Lou, I'll be divorcing her, too. There're no two ways around it."

Jazz bounced the eraser end of a pencil on the file on his desk. "You know, from the way I hear it, you already are pretty much ignoring Haley. Of course, that could just be a rumor, too."

Sam clenched his teeth over a completely inappropriate reply to an executive officer.

Another deep sigh from Jazz. "Sam, these past six months now, your head has been somewhere else. I don't know where you've gone or, really, what's going on with you, but I do know this. I don't want you transferring out of this team. I want you back. I want my best officer back to giving a hundred and ten percent, not this half-a.s.sed fifty or sixty that you've been delivering lately."

His best officer. Holy f.u.c.k. Lieutenant Jacquette didn't use words like best. Ever. Sam didn't know whether to s.h.i.+t or go blind. So he just stood there.

"Tell her to stay away, Lieutenant," Jacquette said. "Next time I see your wife in this building, I will call the sh.o.r.e patrol and they will physically remove her and charge her with trespa.s.sing. You might want to warn her about that, because it will not be fun for her."

Jesus. "I'll tell her that, sir."

"Good." Jazz was already once more buried in his files.

"By the way, if you tell anyone that I called you my best officer, I will deny it completely."

Sam had to smile. "If I told anyone, sir, trust me, they wouldn't believe me."

"Depends on whether or not they knew you, Lieutenant," Jazz said. "If they've served with you, they'd believe it." He looked up. "Don't you have things to do?"

"Yeah," Sam said. "I'm just temporarily overcome by a case of the warm fuzzies. I thought I'd bask in the warmth of your love a little bit longer, sir."

Jazz didn't smile. In fact, his legendary glare was pretty d.a.m.n daunting. "Let me put it into language that I know you can understand. Get the f.u.c.k out of here, Starrett."

"Aye, aye, sir." Sam got. But as he walked away, he could have sworn he heard Jazz Jacquette laugh.

Chapter 12.

Charlie sat in the lounge chair on Donny's screened-in porch.

She and Vince had bought this furniture for their grandson several years back, and at the time, she'd protested. When would he ever use it? The porch was off-limits to him because, although there was a ceiling and roof overhead, apparently aliens were capable of squeezing their way through the tiny holes in the screens.

But Vince had just smiled the same way he'd always just smiled all those decades they'd been married. "The chairs are for us, Charles," he'd said.

And, indeed, she'd spent quite a bit of time sitting out here since then.

Inside the house, Donny was still sleeping, and Vince was still standing guard, as he'd promised.

Of course, aliens could attack and Vince would never hear them coming. Unless they brought a marching band with a big ba.s.s drum with their a.s.sault team.

She should talk. Her own ears weren't what they used to be, either.

Sixty years ago, she could hear every word spokena"no, whispereda"from well down the hall.

"I, well, I just wanted to come over here to thank you for what you did last nighta"you know, coming to my rescue like that."

Charlotte had been lying down in that spare bedroom, in that apartment she'd once shared with James, exhausted from the explosive events of the night before, when the sound of quiet voices awakened her.

It was no wonder she was so tireda"she'd sat with Sally until the police arrived, and then she'd brought Vince back to bed and cleaned and bandaged his feet, cut from the window gla.s.s he'd shattered to get inside Sally's apartment.

Then, before she went back to her own bed, she'd insisted he show her his wounds. She wanted to see with her own eyes that his trips up and down the stairs hadn't torn out his st.i.tches.

It had taken her bursting into tears to get him to complya" an outburst that had been as completely unexpected to her as it was to him. She was not p.r.o.ne to such emotional demonstrations. In fact, she hadn't even crieda"not noisily like thisa"when that telegram about James arrived.

Idiotically, she cried again from relief when she saw that Vince had, indeed, not injured himself any further.