Killing Time (One-Eyed Jacks) (17 page)

Gabe scratched his jaw. “So how much trouble have they stirred up?”

Eva shrugged. “They’ve actually been pretty quiet,
so the FBI has been content to list them on their watch list as a cult and monitor their activities.”

When she fell silent, Gabe looked at Mike, then back to Eva. “I’m guessing that silence I hear precedes the sound of a shoe about to fall?”

She drew a deep breath. “Because of the escalating extremist rhetoric on his underground website, it’s now suspected that UWD is a front for a paramilitary operation. Recently, he was spotted in a surveillance photo meeting with a known member of the Juarez drug cartel’s La Linea.”

The Juarez organization had far-reaching tentacles, with contacts and suppliers all over the world. They were also ruthless. Too many headline stories showed crime scenes with the decapitated bodies of their victims. Recently, Acosta Hernandez had been sentenced to ten consecutive life sentences after pleading guilty to charges of racketeering, drug conspiracy, money laundering, firearms violations, murder, and conspiracy to kill in a foreign country. Hernandez had been linked to over 1,500 homicides in Mexico alone.

Gabe’s expression hardened. “So we’ve got a wacko running a cult tied to the Juarez cartel. Talk about a goatfuck.” He turned to Mike. “I still don’t get the connection to you.”

When Mike’s eyes met his friend’s, he looked haunted and hunted.

“He was in Afghanistan,” Mike finally said, his voice gruff with emotion. “The night OSD went
down. I saw him. I saw Lawson. The sonofabitch was in the Mi-8 when it landed.”

•   •   •

Mike was low on sleep and high on fatigue. Yet as he stood alone on the terrace, he was as revved up as an Indy race car. Adrenaline, hate, and the need for revenge fueled him. His fingers were clamped so tightly around the terrace rail they ached, yet he couldn’t let go. Consumed by rage, he was afraid he might grab the first thing he could put his hands on and heave it over the side. Potted plants, furniture, he didn’t care. He wanted to throw something. He wanted to hit something. He wanted to destroy something.

His entire life had been kicked to the curb because of Lawson. For eight years, he’d told himself to forget what happened. Tried to “nut up” and carry on.

But he finally wanted his life back. He wanted payback. First, though, he needed answers.

They had to find out what Lawson had been doing in Afghanistan. Had he been gunrunning even then? The village had lit up like a bomb site when that ammo had started cooking off. Had the One-Eyed Jacks team stumbled onto one of Lawson’s weapons caches? Had he needed them all dead to keep from being discovered? Was that why he’d needed a fall guy when he’d found out there’d been witnesses—Mike, Taggart, and Cooper?

If that was the case, then Lawson had to have a pipeline directly to someone in the military to pull it off. Someone with clout. Someone who had been on
board and on his payroll, who had driven the locomotive that ran Mike out of the service.

His mind spun in circles trying to figure it out. Maybe it had been something even bigger than an ammo dump or weapons cache. Their FOB in the Pashtun Helmand Province had been within a hundred kilometers of the epicenter of Afghanistan’s poppy and opium pipeline. Had Lawson been cashing in on the rampant opium trade? Had he been supplying the Taliban with weapons in exchange for the opium? Was he still supplying them, in addition to dealing with the Mexican drug cartel?

They’d get their answers eventually—including answers about who Lawson was in league with and had helped him with the cover-up.

Yeah. Now that they knew where to start, they
would
find out. Gabe had headed inside to his office over an hour ago and alerted the BOI team. All their resources were now invested in digging up every piece of intel that existed on Joseph Lawson and his known associates, and in finding out who leaked the OSD information to Eva, and why someone wanted her dead because of it.

He breathed deep. Willed his fingers to unclamp from the rail. He needed to chill. Needed to level himself out. This was far from over. It was just beginning, and this was about more than his own personal vendetta. Another deep breath.

Boom Boom Taggart and Hondo Cooper hadn’t merely been his OEJ teammates. They’d been his
friends. His brothers. Like the Black Ops team were brothers.

He hadn’t allowed himself to miss them.

But he missed them tonight. Missed their trash talk. Missed them having his back, and him having theirs. He wanted desperately for them to know he hadn’t sold them out to save his own neck. Wanted things back to the way they had been between them.

Right. He might as well wish for world peace. Neither was going to happen.

“You okay?”

He hadn’t heard Eva step out onto the terrace. So he guessed that would be a no. No, he was not okay.

“I’m fine,” he lied. “You should turn in. Tomorrow’s bound to be a long day.”

Tomorrow they’d have enough intel to decide how to proceed. Mike already knew the basic game plan: Get Lawson. The man’s thin, ferret face and beady eyes had haunted him for too damn long. When he found him, Mike intended to make him squeal like a stuck pig, bleed him for information, then tear him limb from limb.

Eva joined him at the terrace rail. He should warn her away. Right here, right now, was not a good place for her to be. Not when he felt this raw and achy, in need of something to release the emotions that had built up inside him like white-hot steam.

But one look at her face and he knew he couldn’t send her away. He’d known her for . . . what? A little
over twenty-four hours? And yet he could tell she was troubled.

She had something she wanted to say.

Exercising more patience than he thought he had left in him, he waited. Let her take her time.

“Lawson . . . knowing who he is, knowing he was in Afghanistan.” She glanced at him, then looked away again. “It’s a game changer for you.”

He pushed out a breath that sounded a little like a laugh, a lot like a groan. As understatements went, that was Guinness World Record–worthy. “Little bit, yeah.”

“I can’t . . .” She stopped and the emotion that clogged her voice made him turn toward her again. “I can’t imagine what you must be feeling.”

Her dark eyes glittered with tears that made it clear she
could
imagine the tumult of emotions inside him. This changed things for her, too. She now had a name and a face of the man who’d had a hand in her husband’s death.

Don’t do it,
he warned himself.
Do not touch her. Do not comfort her. Not unless you’re prepared to start something that she’s not going to want to finish.

He was so close to the edge right now, it was all he could do to keep himself together, to keep from howling at the moon, beating his chest and demanding the entire world look at him, listen to him, believe him.
I did nothing wrong.

“I’m so, so sorry for what this has cost you.” The compassion in her voice rattled him.

She
rattled him. He’d seen the way she’d been watching him since they’d connected Lawson to Afghanistan. She was worried about him. When had she started caring? And man, she shouldn’t. She had her own adjustments to make. Thinking her husband died on a mission was one thing. Knowing her husband had been betrayed by another American . . . that was no easy weight to bear. Not to mention, someone wanted her dead.

Do not touch her.

But he couldn’t stop himself. He lifted a hand, made the slightest contact with her shoulder. “Eva—”

And she moved into him.

Mike held his breath, finally giving in and drawing her against him. To comfort her. That’s all.

The breath left her in a sigh as her arms wrapped around his waist. She pressed her cheek against his chest and nestled against him, and God, oh, God, she felt small and fragile and so uncharacteristically vulnerable, it made his chest hurt.

“For years, I thought Ramon died because of his own careless mistake. He was a warrior. You’re a warrior. You understand. It wasn’t how he would have wanted to go out. And then I find out I was lied to. And lied to again.”

She stopped, worked at composing herself, and Mike wished he could feel something other than contempt for Ramon Salinas. She didn’t deserve what he’d done to her, and Salinas did not deserve Eva’s grief.

“But none of that is going to bring him back.” She lifted her head, tipped her face to his. “For you, though . . .
everything
changes for you. I lured you
back here on the promise of a chance to clear your name, but I never really believed it was going to happen. I used you to get to the truth.”

He knew too much about feeling guilty. About how it made you feel about yourself, about how demoralizing it was. “Everybody uses, Eva. It’s the way of the world.”

A sad smile lifted one corner of her mouth. “Spoken like a man jaded by life.”

“Jaded? Resigned? Fine line. And it doesn’t matter how you got me here. I don’t care. The end result is that because of you I might get my life back. Whatever that might look like.”

He’d seen his brother, Ty, last year when he’d tagged him to help with Joe’s problem. He hadn’t seen his mom and dad in years, though. Talked to them, yes; he kept in touch and kept tabs on them, made sure they were all right. But he’d been too ashamed to face them.

“You didn’t deserve what happened to you.” The regret and compassion in her voice joined forces with the look in her eyes and completely undid him.

He’d done a lot of stupid things in his life. Some he’d thought about. Some he hadn’t. But as they stood there with Jenna’s flowers all around them and the sky doing its moonlight and madness thing above them, he quit thinking about the fact that the woman watching him with soul-deep eyes was Ramon Salinas’s widow. He quit thinking about the fact that she’d drugged and shanghaied him.

He only thought about how much he wanted to kiss her. How much he needed a connection to someone. No, a connection to
her
. Someone who had lost as much as he had.

Screw smart. He’d wanted to do this from the first time he’d seen her, drunk on his ass and looking to get laid. He’d wanted it sober, cuffed to a bed and determined to wring her neck. He’d wanted it at a noisy table at the Bogota airport, when she’d finally dropped her act and confessed who she really was.

But most of all, he wanted to kiss her because she looked like she needed to be kissed. Because she looked both tentative and on the brink of something she didn’t understand, but in this moment didn’t want to fight.

Eight years away from a loss they’d both suffered, miles from where they’d started, they’d reached a moment where they were kindred souls. Souls in need of solace, and a respite only they could give each other because of their common bond.

He cupped her cheek in his palm and, holding on to what he chose to read as an invitation in her eyes, he lowered his mouth to hers.

Insane, but perfectly, unerringly right. God, she tasted sweet and sad, and like someone who didn’t want to be sad anymore.

Her lips were lush and soft and open as they met his, accepting and yielding and needy. It completely unhinged him.

It had been a long time since a woman had needed
him. A long time since he’d wanted one to. But he wanted to be important to her, strong for her, and even weak for her so she would understand how much she was giving him in return.

With a low groan, he deepened the kiss, drew her tighter against him, and took things to a different level. Tentative and sweet shifted to demanding and dark as desire outdistanced tenderness. They both fed from it, built on it, until his leg was wedged between her thighs, her hands tunneled under his shirt, and their mouths devoured each other’s.

The wet heat of her tongue sent shockwaves of longing straight to his groin. He pressed his hips against her, letting her feel what she was doing to him, and got so lost in the heat firing between them that it took a while to tune in to the sudden tension in her body.

She’d stiffened against him. The hands that had threaded through his hair now pressed flat against his chest, resisting.

He lifted his head, relaxed his hold, and gave her the distance she suddenly needed.

Long, long moments passed with nothing but heavy breathing and wildly beating hearts separating them. Below, the traffic continued to rumble. A soft light glowed from inside the apartment. A dewy dampness had fallen on the night. And where there had been heat, he now felt a clammy cold.

“Well.” He forced a deep, steadying breath. He’d started this; he needed to be the one to restore the status quo. “I guess that was probably inevitable.”

She tucked her chin to her chest, slowly removed her hands. “Yeah,” she agreed, sounding breathless. “I guess it was.”

She backed away then, crossed her arms beneath her breasts, and shook her head. “Doesn’t mean—”

“Anything,” he cut in, so she’d think he was on the same page. “I know.”

She smiled ruefully. “I was going to say, it doesn’t mean it was smart.”

“Oh. Right.” So it had meant something to her, too?