Loose Ends (43 page)

J.T.’s smile faded.

“I remember you,” he said. “But not the way I wished I did.” So help him God, he didn’t, even with his own face staring right back at him.

“Don’t worry. We’ll just take it slow and see what comes up,” Kid said. “It’s early yet. Hang around long enough, and I guarantee I’ll do something to piss you
off, and then it’ll all come back to you, what a pain in the ass I am. By the time you remember me, I’ll probably be wishing you didn’t remember quite so much.”

“Yeah,” J.T. said, and looked away, out the huge expanse of windows fronting the loft. Over the last week, he’d spent hours going over every aspect of his life for the last six years with Dylan and Hawkins. In return, along with Zach, they’d told him his life story eight ways from Sunday, all the known facts, all the dates, everything except the missions. Those would remain classified until he could tell them what, when, and where they’d all done their jobs for the eight years before he and Creed Rivera had been ambushed in Colombia—if he ever could.

With Dr. Brandt’s help, he was looking for memories of his life, doing regressions, using relaxation techniques, and taking a meticulously charted series of cutting-edge medicines, psychopharmaceuticals created by Dr. Brandt to counteract and mitigate Dr. Souk’s drugs. They’d helped Red Dog get back nearly a hundred percent of her memory, and Brandt was optimistic that they could help J.T. regain his whole life, too.

But while he was looking for memories, he knew other members of the SDF team had a few they wished they didn’t, especially Kid and Creed. They’d witnessed the brutality of his “death” firsthand, Creed in the rebel’s camp and Kid when he’d gone down to Colombia to recover his brother’s bones.

“I heard about you in Bangkok,” he said, “through the grapevine, about this guy named Kid Chaos and the run he made through South America a few years back.”

The young guy acknowledged the accolade with a slight nod of his head, accepting the praise with as much subtlety as J.T. had used to deliver it. Kid Chaos was a legend among the world’s most elite soldiers. His mission to avenge his brother’s death, and the consequent
destruction of a whole cadre of narco-guerrillas from Colombia, was a story told on bases and in bars around the world.

Now J.T. knew he’d been part of that story, and that felt so damn odd.

“I’m sorry about what you went through on my account,” he said, wishing like hell that he had more to offer. From everything he’d been told, starting with the firebombing of the cantina where Kid had been waiting to take his brother’s body home, to the deadly deeds in South America, it had been a miracle the guy hadn’t been killed himself.

“You can make it up to me,” Kid said, and when J.T. looked, he was grinning again, a real shit-eating curve of nothing-but-trouble. It was amazing. Kid Chaos Chronopolous had dimples, just like J.T., and a helluva lot of sheer guts, just like J.T.

“If we both live long enough,” he agreed, hoping like hell that they did.

“Whatever it takes.” Kid’s gaze was steady, his voice calm. “One way or another, we’ll get it done.”

Looking at him, J.T. could believe it. Kid wasn’t like Jack Traeger, who had whisked Scout off to Paris and hadn’t shown any signs of coming back anytime too soon. Kid was older, without a wild streak anywhere in him. He wasn’t a loose cannon. The guy was solid, absolutely calm, absolutely assured, and J.T. was damned proud of him, whether he remembered having a reason to be or not.

The guy inspired confidence.

J.T. shifted his attention to the painting over the fireplace. “So your wife paints naked men.”

What else was there to say when you were looking at a guy spread out over eight feet of canvas, wearing nothing but a pair of wings and looking like he had been personally infused by the hand of God with almighty grace?

“A lot of naked men,” Kid elaborated without a trace of self-consciousness that J.T. could detect. “She even painted you.”

Oh, hell, no.

J.T. turned to face him.

“You’re kidding, right?” he said, then remembered Jane had told him the same thing.

Kid shook his head, his grin returning even wider than before. “Twice life size, a dark angel with a sword. She calls it
The Guardian
, and you’re in wings, just like the rest of us.”

“Naked?” Jane hadn’t mentioned naked, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t so.

“Nah,” Kid said. “You and Creed both got to keep your pants on.”

He looked around the loft again, at all the gear and the great view.

“So where do we go from here?” he asked. He still wasn’t comfortable with himself and all he was trying to absorb. It made it hard to be comfortable with anyone else—except Jane. The wild girl wasn’t about memories. She was about now.

“The firing range,” Kid said without missing a beat, as if where in the hell else would a couple of guys with an afternoon on their hands go. “We got some really cool guns in last week, and nobody’s been up there yet to try them out.”

Hoo-yah
, J.T. thought, because really, where else would a couple of guys go, especially guys with cool new guns to shoot?

Hours later, after a long session of gunpowder therapy and the briefing on the operation with Dylan, Hawkins, and General Grant, J.T. headed for home, which to his ever-loving pleasure was Jane’s place on Blake Street. So far, he and the Wild Thing had a damn good thing going.

The elevator door on the office floor closed, and just as he reached out to press the ground-floor button, he heard something that changed his mind. Someone else had moved onto the firing range, and he knew who.

Hell
. He knew where he needed to go, and he knew it wasn’t going to be easy.

The elevator stopped on the armory floor, and J.T. took a pair of ear protection muffs off a row hanging inside the car and slipped them on. When the door opened, it was onto the range and Creed blasting away with short bursts of a customized Para-Ordnance P14.

Creed emptied two more magazines and put a fresh one in before he acknowledged J.T.’s presence with a brief glance. He slipped the gun in his shoulder rig and put a light jacket on to conceal it before he looked up again.

“We’re going for a walk,” Creed said, picking up a small backpack. “Do you have all the meds you need for the night?”

When J.T. nodded, he headed down the stairwell.

J.T. didn’t hesitate to follow him. Something about this man compelled him, more even than Kid, or Dylan, or any of the other operators of SDF. Creed Rivera was a breed apart, even in the wild bunch of Steele Street.

The sun had been down for an hour when they hit the alley, but the day’s heat was everywhere, rising off the bricks and steaming off the asphalt. They fell into an easy stride together, and J.T. didn’t think too much about where they might be going, until from one block to the next, they crossed from the busy, upscale section of historic Denver, into the railyards between Union Station and the South Platte River. From there on, the terrain took a decidedly uncivilized turn.

And so it went for hours, with Creed on point, a night march following the winding course of the river through concrete corridors and industrial wastelands, through
low-end neighborhoods and natural areas where the trees grew thick and the bushes thicker.

By midnight, they’d reached the outskirts of the city—and still Creed kept leading him on, to what, J.T. didn’t have a clue. But the guy was good, easy to follow, and sure of his direction, north.

A few times Creed signaled him, alerting him to other creatures and men moving in the night and changes in their course, and the communication was seamless, so fluid. They moved well together, with far more ease than he’d ever managed with Scout or Jack. It was like slipping back into his skin.

In a small clearing with a fire ring, Creed stopped, and J.T. could tell the Jungle Boy had been there before. That maybe these long walks through the wild side of Denver to the back of beyond happened fairly frequently, and probably at night.

Creed started a fire in the stone ring, and J.T. added sticks and dried brush to the flames—and he sat down and waited.

If this was all there was, he was fine with it. The march had been a good one on a long spring night. His muscles were warm and tired, his head clear, and he liked being outside.

“I remember the guy who cut you,” Creed said, glancing up from stirring the fire with a stick. “If you want, I can tell you the story of how Kid and I tracked him to Puerto Blanco.”

“Puerto Blanco,” he said. “That’s a tough town.”
Oh, yeah
. He wanted to hear this. Sitting cross-legged at the side of the fire, he leaned forward—and Creed began.

“It started in Colombia, right after your funeral, when Hawkins and Kid lit out for South America. They’d gotten the go-ahead from the Defense Department, the Colombian government, and the Peruvian government
to do whatever it took to get rid of the NRF rebels. So it was one of those no-holds-barred–type deals.”

Yeah, he knew about those. He’d been running no-holds-barred for the last six years, and he had a feeling that he’d learned a lot of what he knew from this man.

“I think we did our share of those together,” he said, watching Creed’s face in the firelight.

The Jungle Boy smiled but the expression was fleeting.

“More than our share, brother, saving the world in spite of itself most every time.”

Yeah, J.T. understood that, too. He watched Creed take something out of his pack, and he grinned when he recognized what the SDF guy had brought.

“Tobacco.”

“Honduran cigars,” Creed said. “From Danlí.”

That set him back.

“Orlando’s?” He’d smoked many Danlí cigars over the last few years. Handmade in the Honduran highlands, chanted over by Mario Sauza Orlando, the
brujo
who rolled them, they’d often been his first line of defense against the pain wrought by Dr. Souk’s drugs.

“I found a box of them in your house on the Tambo River, sorting through the wreckage after you and I had our little run-in down in the boathouse.” Creed handed him one of the cigars, then bit the end off another and stuck it in his mouth. “And I swore, so help me God and the Virgin Mary, that someday, somehow, someway, you and I would sit down and have a smoke together.” He pulled the stick out of the fire and lit his cigar then held it over the flames for J.T. to do the same.

After they both got their cigars going and were puffing away, Creed slipped out of his coat and rolled up one of the sleeves of his shirt, exposing the three lines of scar tissue on his upper left arm.

“Alazne?” J.T. asked, surprised. The information on the scars he bore on his left arm had been part of his debriefing
with the guys, but he hadn’t expected to see the same scars on anyone else.

“No, not the witch,” Creed said, a trail of smoke escaping with his words. “Kid and I marked each other in Peru, while we were chasing the NRF.” He finished blowing out a stream of smoke. “Let me see your arm.”

J.T. complied, pushing up the sleeve on his left arm, knowing Creed wanted to see the three stripes incised into his skin, the only scars on him that hadn’t come from Dr. Souk.

Creed looked a them from across the fire. “I watched her the night she did that to you,” he said, taking another long pull off the cigar, his face growing grim. “And I watched the night Pablo Castano took his knife to you.”

Hard, hard times—what Creed had been through, what they’d all been through.

“He died for the deed,” Creed continued. “I sent him to hell in the mountains of Peru, watched his blood soak into the ground, and took it as my revenge, but it wasn’t enough, could never have been enough, until Paraguay, when I knew you were alive.”

The Jungle Boy lowered his gaze and went back to stirring the fire.

J.T. had dozens of scars all over his body, but none compared to the thick ridge of scar tissue running the length of his chest, the one Creed had witnessed, Castano’s work. Of all the horrors he didn’t remember, he was most grateful for not remembering that night.

But his man remembered, and J.T. knew he wasn’t alone in his nightmares, not anymore.

Hard, hard times
.

Dylan and Red Dog had felt the bite of Souk’s Thai syringes. They knew what he’d suffered in Bangkok. J.T. wasn’t alone in knowing that pain, not anymore, not now that he’d made it home.

He blew a ring of smoke across the fire and watched it fall apart in the flames.

“Good cigar,” he said.

“Damn good,” Creed agreed.

“Thanks,” he said. “Thanks for everything.” Thanks for not forgetting. Thanks for killing my enemy. He didn’t know how else to say what he felt, this utter thankfulness to be in this quiet wild place, to be finding his way back.

“
Semper Fi,
” Creed said.

J.T. looked up and met the Jungle Boy’s pale, gray-eyed gaze, and he’d never felt the meaning of the words more strongly—
Semper Fidelis
. Always faithful.

Always.

Seven months later, Kaua’i, Hawaii

“We’re setting a record here,” J.T. said.

“For most consecutive hours of doing absolutely nothing?” Jane asked, taking the last two weeks into account.

“You’re not doing anything back there?” he asked, sounding genuinely shocked. “You mean I’m doing all the work?”

“Work, schmerk.” She laughed. “You’re not working. You’re fishing, and I’m holding down the dock.”

And a damn fine dock it was. Jane was soaking it up, lying on this short expanse of hardwood jutting out into the Hanalei River. She could hear the surf breaking out in the bay, and if she turned her head just right, she could see where the fresh waters ran into the ocean.

A woman was paddling up the river, standing on a surfboard, with a little dog sitting at her feet along for the ride.

The day was gorgeous, absolutely sun-dappled, the heat made bearable by a languid breeze and the pitcher of ginger lemonade they’d brought down to the dock along with their lunch.

“Do we have any more cupcakes left?”