The Unsung Hero (24 page)
He might’ve been mistaken. It might’ve been a coincidence. Except for the fact that he didn’t believe in coincidences. In the very same small town where he’d spotted the Merchant, he also coincidentally sees a man with a round tattoo on the back of his hand?
Not a chance.
His head was pounding and he felt sick to his stomach, but he’d been a SEAL long enough to know exactly what he had to do.
He had to follow the dark-haired man covertly, without him knowing he was being followed. He had to see where this guy was going, possibly find out where he was staying. And he had to try to get close enough to get another look at that mark on his hand.
“Sorry, changed my mind.” Tom set the bottle of soda down on the counter as he swiftly moved past it toward the door.
His headache and nausea faded to a dull background hum as he stepped out of the store and into the humid summer heat. The night was sharper now, clearer. He had a renewed sense of purpose and the entire world had an edge.
He saw the dark-haired man walking across the convenience store parking lot to . . .
Shit.
As Tom watched, the man pulled an old touring bicycle from the bike rack, climbed on, and began to pedal away.
Tom jogged to the rack, but the only other bike there was securely locked.
Double shit.
He could follow on foot, but running after a bike didn’t exactly qualify as covert.
Unless . . .
He was wearing shorts and sneakers, a T-shirt. As long as the dark-haired man didn’t go too fast . . .
Tom took off down the street at the fastest pace he could get away with and still look as if he were out for a leisurely recreational run.
For a small town, Baldwin’s Bridge was hopping. It was 2330, and the downtown area from the Honey Farms all the way past the hotel and marina, all the way to the beach, was still brightly lit and crowded with people. Tourists and vacationers and high school students were out in droves, wandering the quaint brick-paved streets. The music from the distant church carnival down by the beach gave the town an even more festive air.
The dark-haired man on the bike was moving faster than most of the strollers, but not by much. Brick roads, even ones as carefully kept as those in Baldwin’s Bridge, could be hell on a bike rider. Tom knew that from experience. Riding too fast could make a man feel as if he’d spent an hour with his balls being shaken by a hardware store’s paint mixer.
But Tom had to push himself faster as the dark-haired man turned the corner onto Webster Street, heading toward the beach and the church carnival.
Webster Street had regular pavement and a slight downward slope to it. By the time Tom reached the bottom, he was running as fast as he could, and the dark-haired man was still pulling away from him.
He’d soaked his T-shirt through, and his legs and lungs were on fire. He hadn’t run too often since his release from the hospital, certainly not this hard, never this far. And he hadn’t run at all over the past few days, not with the headaches he’d been having. Still, this should have been nothing. This was a garden party compared to the running he’d done regularly with Team Sixteen. Jesus, take a few months off, and it’s all over.
The pounding in his head had moved to a very prominent place in the foreground, directly behind his left eye, in fact. Tom staggered slightly as the road in front of him seemed to shift and heave.
He forced himself to keep his eyes on the dark-haired man. He’d slowed slightly because of the crowds around the entrance to the church parking lot, but Tom had to slow down, too.
His ears were roaring and the world was spinning.
One foot in front of the other. He’d done this before—he could do it again.
Music was blaring from speakers, and barkers trying to draw the attention of the crowd were shouting over it.
The bright lights, spinning dizzily with the carnival rides, only added to the chaos of the jostling crowds.
Tom could barely focus, barely see.
He searched for the dark-haired man, but he was gone. Completely swallowed by the crowd and confusion.
He lurched forward, unwilling or maybe just unable to give up. The frowning face of a disapproving mother flashed into his line of sight as a wide-eyed boy was yanked out of Tom’s path.
He needed . . .
He wanted . . .
He had to get out of this crowd, and he pushed his way to a clearing by the side of a food stand, desperate for air, but able to fill his lungs with only the cloyingly sweet scent of fried dough.
Hands on his knees, he tried to catch his breath, tried to grab hold of his equilibrium, tried to make the world stop moving and the lights stop swaying.
And there it was.
A bike. Leaning up against the railing of the Tilt-A-Whirl. It was quite possibly the dark-haired man’s bike—although Tom wasn’t completely sure. He couldn’t seem to focus well enough to see it clearly.
Tom moved toward it, back out into the crowd, searching for the dark-haired man. Christ, where were those blinding lights when he needed them? The people lined up to ride the Tilt-A-Whirl were standing in the shadows, and because of that, they all seemed to have dark hair.
Tom looked instead for the tattoo. Right hands. Right—
He saw it!
But then he saw another. And another. And . . .
There were dozens of them. He was standing here, literally surrounded by dozens of members of the Merchant’s secret organization.
Pain knifed behind his eyes.
Jesus, that didn’t make sense. That was wrong. It had to be wrong. He fought the haze, searching for the reason and . . . Cell size. Yeah. He knew for a fact that the Merchant never operated with a cell of more than ten, usually more like six or seven.
Yet there it was. That round mark. The Merchant’s eye. Everywhere he looked, everyone had one. He tried to look more closely, tried to see it more clearly, but his vision was blurred. He had to sit down. He had to . . .
One of the tattooed hands reached out to him. “Tom? Oh, my God, are you all right?”
The hand was attached to an arm, which, by following it, led him to a face. A familiar, female face.
Mallory. Angie’s daughter.
No, it was two Mallorys. They were both looking at him as if from a very great distance. Since when had she been recruited by the Merchant?
He grabbed her hand, pulling it closer to his eyes and . . .
It wasn’t an eye or even a tattoo. “It’s a fucking clown’s face,” he said, his voice distant over the roaring in his ears.
It was a badly smudged ink stamp of Bozo the Clown. Everyone had a fucking clown face on their hand.
“You pay ten dollars for the stamp,” the Mallorys told him in eerie unison. How the hell could she sound so far away when he was holding on to her hand? “And then you can ride all you want until the carnival closes at one.”
Tom sank to his knees.
“Jesus, Tom!” Mallory crouched down next to him as he let go of her hand and dropped to all fours. He just . . . needed to rest. . . .
“You know this guy?” Another voice—male, almost as young as Mallory—came from just as far away.
“He’s my uncle,” he heard her say. “I think he’s completely shit-faced. Bran, do you have a car? I need to get him home.”
“Um, no. Um, Mal, I, uh, I . . . think I have to go now.”
“Oh,” Mallory said. “Well . . . sure.”
“This is just a little too weird for me, you know? No offense, but . . . I’ll see you around sometime.”
“Right. Sure. I’ll see you.”
“Asshole.” Tom didn’t realize he’d said it aloud until Mallory laughed.
“You got that right,” she said. “I’m sorry, but it would be a little too effing weird for me just to leave you here to get rolled. Or picked up by the police.”
“I’m sorry,” he muttered through his haze of gray. “I’m not . . .” But he couldn’t remember what it was that he wasn’t. He focused on a sorry-looking patch of grass directly in front of him, focused on not giving in to the grayness. There was a reason he couldn’t just put his face on the ground and give up, wasn’t there?
“Don’t worry about it,” she told him. “He was pretty much looking for a way to ditch me after I turned down his generous offer to jump my bones. Like that was my grand prize for going out with him.”
“Last of . . . the romantics.”
She laughed again. “Come on, Tommy, back on your feet. Do you think you can walk?”
“Am I walking now?”
“Not exactly.” She tugged at him and he tried to help her, but his body was uncooperative. “Come on, Tom, I’ll get you home. Just lean on me.”
Kelly couldn’t sleep.
She sat out on her balcony, pretending she wasn’t gazing at the dark windows of Joe’s cottage.
She wasn’t gazing at just any windows. The windows she particularly wasn’t gazing at were Tom’s bedroom windows.
She willed him to get up out of bed and turn on his light. She willed him out his door, out of Joe’s house, and across the driveway. She bet he could climb up onto her balcony effortlessly.
And she’d been waiting almost seventeen years for him to do just that.
She willed him to come to her rescue, to save her from this sleeplessness that haunted her, from her anger and her grief and her pain.
It wouldn’t be the first time Tom had come to her rescue.
She’d been fifteen the first time he’d saved her. She’d arrived home from school to find that her father had consumed his physical limit of evening martinis about five hours too early and had crash-landed in the middle of the kitchen floor.
She’d searched for Joe, desperate to get her father to his bedroom before her mother came home—desperate to avoid the start of World War Three.
But it was Tom she’d found, gleaming with sweat, at his pile of weights back behind the garage. And after he’d helped her wrestle Charles into bed, Kelly had started in on her litany of excuses.
“I don’t know what happened,” she said. “He must’ve slipped on some water in the kitchen. Maybe he’s not feeling well—the flu’s going around. Maybe he had the flu and he was dizzy and he slipped on some water in the kitchen and—”
“Kelly, I know your father’s drunk.” Tom hadn’t let her get away with any of it. “I could smell the alcohol on him.”
Kelly had been shocked. Charles Ashton was an investment banker. He’d never missed a day of work because of his drinking, but from the moment he came home till the moment he went to bed at night he always had a glass of something potent in his hand. He wasn’t a public drunk, though. He’d sit out on the deck or in front of the TV and just quietly fade away.
You were safe if you didn’t get too close. If you did, he would lash out with that acerbic tongue, that scalding sarcasm. Nothing was good enough, no answer was acceptable. There had been nothing she could say that wouldn’t warrant the response of some belittling comment from her father.
So Kelly had learned to keep her distance. And she’d never, ever brought friends home with her. That was her rule number one.
She followed it devoutly, especially when Charles went into semiretirement. He worked from an office in Baldwin’s Bridge from nine to twelve. And then he came home and sat in that same damned deck chair all afternoon, until he staggered off to bed shortly after dinner.
“I know he drinks himself to sleep every night,” Tom had told her all those years ago, gently lifting her chin so that she had to look into his eyes. “I take the trash to the dump. I see the bottles. You don’t have to pretend with me.”
Kelly was mortified. Someone besides her and her mother knew. Tom knew. “Don’t tell,” she begged, suddenly afraid that she might throw up, afraid she might make it even worse by bursting into tears. “Please, don’t tell anyone.”
“Oh,” he said quickly, “no way. You don’t have to worry about that because I wouldn’t. I won’t. That stuff’s private. You can trust me.”
He was so kind, sitting next to her on the stone wall that framed one end of the driveway.
And for the first time that Kelly could remember, she’d actually been able to drop her upbeat pretense of optimism. For the first time, she’d finally had a chance to unload a little of her despair and anger at her father. None of her friends knew her father drank the way he did, and it was such a relief to finally have someone to talk to about it, someone she didn’t have to—as he’d said—pretend around.
And for a few weeks, in the magical evenings of the early summer, when Kelly went out in the yard to her tree swing after dinner, Tom would often appear and they’d talk. Sometimes for hours. Sometimes about her father, but mostly about nothing. Anything. Everything. Kelly’s friendship with Tom was based on a soul-baring level of honesty she’d never had before, and it was incredibly precious to her.
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