Chapter 25
KYLE
“This better be good,” I snarled into the phone as I padded out of the bedroom with an excited Bella on my heels.
It was my fault she was used to getting up so early, which was only a problem for me when I stayed up half the night with Cami.
And I wouldn’t trade that problem for anything in the world.
“I need you in here at the office,” Pasco said.
“Is this your definition of need or mine?”
“Someone’s cranky,” he said. “I’ll put on a pot of coffee.”
“Do I have twenty-five minutes so Bella and I can run over?”
“I’ll give you thirty-five if you’ll arrive in a better mood,” Pasco said.
“Smartass. I’ll be there in twenty-five, and I’ll still be pissy.”
I hung up and looked back at Cami, curled on to her side in the middle of my bed. For such a small woman, she was quite the bed hog. And I didn’t mind one bit. If I did take the ten extra minutes, I could crawl back under the covers and wake her.
No, that wasn’t fair. At least one of us should be able to enjoy sleeping in on Saturday morning.
I quietly pulled out running clothes and dressed, then took Bella downstairs for her breakfast. While she ate, I drank a glass of water, stuffed a power bar into my pocket, and jotted off a note to Cami telling her about my unexpected meeting.
I promised to be back in plenty of time to take her to the clinic for her afternoon shift.
I also included some suggestions for what we could do if I got back early.
Less than ten minutes after Pasco had so rudely woken me, Bella and I were trotting along the path through the woods. She still wasn’t cleared to go on a full-out run, so I kept the pace easy but invigorating. I was in a slightly better mood by the time I reached HQ.
I took Bella to the kitchen for a bowl of water and poured myself a cup of coffee. She had a drink, then curled onto the dog bed that Wheeler had bought for her. I was about to go searching for Pasco, but he found me first.
“Hey Rogers.” He slid into one of the kitchen chairs and set an e-tablet on the table in front of him. “Have a seat.”
“Shit.” I sank down into a chair. “Is someone dead?” It was a legitimate question in our line of work.
He shook his head. “Nothing like that. But it’s not good news.”
I took a sip of coffee, realized I’d left it black and bitter, and winced. But something about Pasco’s demeanor made me hesitant to get up and go to the fridge for milk. “You’re freaking me out, man.”
“Sorry.” He clasped his hands together and leaned forward. “Rogers, if an agent has information pertinent to an ongoing HEAT investigation, they’re obligated to inform the agency.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Did you bring me in here at zero dark thirty for a review of the training manual?”
“Sorry,” he said again, and now he was starting to piss me off.
Again. He seemed to realize it, because he talked faster.
“Look, I can understand you might get distracted, especially when you’re in a new relationship.
I just want to make sure that’s what this is, and not that you’re intentionally withholding information. ”
I sat back in my chair, stunned. “The fuck are you blathering about, Pasco?”
His eyes went wide. “You seriously don’t know?”
I stopped being pissed off and started being concerned. “I seriously don’t know. Please enlighten me.”
“You haven’t seen this?” He tapped a button on the e-tablet and shoved it across the table at me.
I stared down at the screen at what looked like text messages to Cami. “What am I looking at?” I asked, but even as I said the words, my brain was solving the puzzle. “These are from Riker.”
“We were already monitoring his cell phone,” Pasco said, “and a few days ago, I traced a burner phone to him as well. Last night around six p.m., he used the burner to send those to Cami.”
“1800 hours,” I growled. We used military time at HEAT and civilians like Pasco sometimes slipped. I’d never once gotten angry about it before now. But of course, Pasco wasn’t the problem. “At 1800, I was manning the grill. Cami was talking to her sister on the phone.”
“The messages must have come in while she was on her call.”
I looked up at him. “Well, that explains it. She probably missed them. I need to get back to her in case she sees them this morning and—”
“Rogers, she saw the messages.” Pasco reached over and scrolled the tablet screen. “She responded back five minutes later. Which means—”
“I know what it means.” Except it couldn’t really mean she was hiding things, keeping secrets from me, after I’d done so much to be able to share mine with her.
“Is there any chance she’s still in touch with Riker?” Pasco asked. “Other than these messages, I mean.”
“What, working with him?” My ire flew back to the forefront. “Not a fucking chance. Besides, does her response make it sound like they’re besties?”
“It doesn’t. But why wouldn’t she have told you?”
Well, that was the million-dollar question, wasn’t it? “You said yourself, people get distracted. I’m very distracting.”
I was grasping at straws. She’d had plenty of opportunities to tell me the truth. I’d even asked her if something was wrong. And then she’d lied to my face.
“I have to let Kat know,” Pasco said.
“Give me the rest of the morning,” I said. “Let me go home and see if she tells me, then I’ll call Kat.”
He sighed. “Okay, but you have to let Cami tell you. No leading the witness, so to speak. And if she doesn’t tell you, you need to let Kat know that as well.”
“Yeah, I know how it works, Pasco.” I propped my head on one hand and tried to think, to make sense of why Cami had done this.
“I’ll just...” Pasco pointed his thumb over his shoulder. He patted Bella’s head and she thumped her tail, then he went back to his IT cave.
“What do you think about all this, girl?”
If she could speak, I knew what she would say. She loved Cami. She trusted her. As much as Cami liked to call me her hero, she had been that for Bella.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “There has to be an explanation.” We would go home, I’d make breakfast, and then Cami would tell me the truth. I was sure of it.
Or maybe I wasn’t so sure, because before I went home, I needed to hit something. Preferably repeatedly.
“Christ, Rogers, what did that heavy bag ever do to you?”
I turned around to see Lang, wearing jeans and a black leather coat and holding his silver helmet.
“I thought you were out of town,” I said, pointedly not answering his question.
“Drove home this morning,” he said. “Just stopping by to get my new cell phone from Pasco.”
Fucking cell phones. I punched the bag again.
Pasco joined us, handing Lang his phone.
“What’s with the heavyweight champ over here?” Lang asked Pasco.
Pasco shook his head. “Not sure that’s one for me to tell.” He raised his eyebrows at me like he thought I should spill. Probably to get Lang off his back.
I punched the bag. “You can tell him.” Another punch, then a glare aimed at Lang. “But this doesn’t escalate to Kat unless it becomes absolutely necessary.”
Pasco gave him the one-minute summary while I took out more frustration on the heavy bag. When Pasco was through, Lang laid a hand on my shoulder to stop my onslaught.
“I need a cup of coffee.” He handed his helmet to Pasco, then pulled off his leather coat and handed that over as well. He looked at me. “You’re with me.”
I pulled off my gloves and dropped them on top of Lang’s jacket, then stalked after him.
“I’ll just take care of these things like I’m the butler,” Pasco called.
“Excellent,” Lang replied.
When we reached the kitchen, Bella jumped up to greet us. She was gaining energy and getting restless, which meant it was soon time to go home. If only I were ready for it.
Lang poured a cup of coffee and sat at the table. I reached for the pot.
“You sure you want more caffeine?” he asked. “You seem to be bouncing off the walls.”
“Fuck you,” I said, but I slunk to the table and collapsed into a chair without more coffee, because he was right.
After a long silence, Lang said, “Did I ever tell you how my marriage ended?”
Since this was the first I was hearing he’d been married, that was a no. I shook my head. “If I had to guess, I’d say the long deployments.”
“Why the fuck would you have to guess when I’m sitting right here and can tell you?”
I pressed my lips together to keep quiet. I was pretty sure he was yanking my chain, but I didn’t want to fuck around and find out.
“Why are you so scared about with this relationship?” he asked, changing direction and giving me whiplash.
“What? Who said I’m scared?”
He glared at me, not answering.
“I thought you were going to talk about your marriage and how it ended.”
“We’ll get back to that in a minute, but right now, you’re avoiding my question and wasting my time.”
I ran a hand through my hair. “It’s not about the relationship. It’s about keeping her safe. Just being with me is a danger to her.”
He furrowed his brow. “I’m sorry, I thought we were talking about the hot little blonde, the one who stole a dog from a drug ring, right out from under some asshole’s nose. You must mean some other woman who didn’t accidentally step in a steaming pile of shit.”
Now I glared at him. “Of course I mean Cami. And yes, she stepped in it, but she was doing the right thing. Then I happened to be at the right place at the right time, and she thought I was her hero. But I’m no hero.
I’m putting her in more danger. And I have even less chance of protecting her if she doesn’t tell me the truth. ”
He held up a hand. “Back up, back up. You’re worried you can’t protect her? What was that last week in your driveway? I showed up and there were two hostiles down, a third in retreat, and three different law enforcement agencies en route.”
“The third guy could have gotten away.”
“Really? Because I had a feeling you just left him for me to take care of so I wouldn’t get cranky about missing the fun.”
I shrugged. “I did have a grenade launcher if it came to that.”
Lang laughed. I couldn’t remember seeing him do that in the five months I’d known him.
“I figured. So, you think if your vet had hooked up with...I don’t know.
..a zookeeper, he would have kept her safer?
Because here’s the thing you need to get through that thick head of yours.
They were coming for her, with or without you.
And no, you can’t always keep her safe. Being alive is inherently unsafe.
You want to be in love, that risk is the price you pay. ”
“Maybe the zookeeper wouldn’t have told her to turn over the drugs to the feds, those idiots who doxed her.”
“The FBI did us a favor,” Land said. “Their fuck-up smoked out the advance crew. Now we know more are coming, and we can prepare. I hate to break it to you, asshat, but the woman’s right. You’re her hero.”
I shook my head. “Then why is she lying to me?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably something deep and dark and catastrophic, like she’s not perfect.”
I sank down farther in my chair. “I’m not asking her to be.”
“Good. Because in the end, what ended my marriage wasn’t what came at us from the outside. Do you know what did us in?”
I had a lot of smartass comments on the tip of my tongue, but not enough energy to share them. I shook my head.
“We stopped working on it,” he said. “Stopped talking. Didn’t ask questions. Made assumptions.”
“I take it this is an allegory for Cami and me.”
He quirked an eyebrow. “Have you boys been practicing your vocab words?”
“And people say I’m the smartass.”
“People say you’re the class clown,” Lang corrected. “They say Wheeler’s the smartass. Although it is a fine line. To answer your question, yes, it’s an allegory for your relationship.”
“Christ, Lang, that was a long, painful way to arrive at communicate better.”
“Yeah, but if I didn’t make it painful, you wouldn’t remember it.” He stood, indicating our bro bonding was over.
No, I would never call it bro bonding to Lang’s face, but I was definitely using that exact phrase when I shared this story with Hayes and Wheeler.
“I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, this conversation never happened,” he said, as if he could read my mind. He was back to being Lang. Scary as always. “Rogers, this stays between us, right?” he said more firmly. “We’re not going to have a problem, are we?”
“We’re not.” It would have been a great story to share, but Hayes and Wheeler wouldn’t have believed it anyway. “Thanks for this conversation we never had.”
“One last thing,” he said.
“She’s too good for me?” I guessed.
“Hm. Sounds like something I’d say. And probably true. But not what I was thinking.”
“Then what are your final words of wisdom, oh great sensei?”
He scowled. “Be smarter than you look and don’t fuck this up.”