Chapter 2
Pete
The next morning, I woke up sore in all the right places.
The kind of sore that reminded me I was still alive, still moving, still capable.
Knuckles bruised, ribs tender from where one of the punks had landed a lucky shot, left shoulder stiff from the twist I’d put on the leader’s arm.
Nothing broken. Nothing that wouldn’t heal in a few days. I’d taken worse in Syria. A lot worse.
I rolled out of bed in the small one-bedroom Duke’s fiancée Serena had found for me in West LA. Duke was a fellow SEAL, a stand-up guy, and the feisty Serena fit him.
This was close enough to Hawk HQ for quick response, far enough from the freeway noise to sleep when the nightmares let me.
I flexed my hands under the kitchen light while the coffee maker gurgled. The split skin across my right knuckles would heal soon enough. I’d cleaned them last night, wrapped them loose, and crashed without bothering to shower. The smell of sweat and street grime still clung to me.
I ran at night to clear my head and tire myself enough to sleep. They said evening exercise hurt your sleep, but not for me. Collapsing into bed dead tired was my recipe.
This morning, her face kept replaying in my head. Dana—the girl from my past that I now couldn’t help but remember.
Not a hallucination. Flesh and blood, wide-eyed in the dark, staring at me for a few frozen seconds before she bolted. The same sharp cheekbones. The same stubborn set to her mouth I’d memorized in high school when she’d tutored me in math.
The girl who I’d crushed on—older now, and well filled out in all the right places, but still that Dana.
I’d called her name. Instinct. She’d run away. I thought I’d seen her once, more than a week ago, but then told myself it likely wasn’t true.
I poured black coffee into a blue mug that said SEAL the Deal—a gag gift from Duke when I’d first come on board with Hawk—and carried it to the window.
Birds sang outside, and for the first time since I’d arrived, my mood wasn’t shit. I’d seen Dana, a shining visage from my past, not a hallucination. Now I just had to track her down and reconnect.
Under the scalding hot water of the shower, I let the past, what I remembered of it, play in my head. I would find her, and this time, I wouldn’t let her father get in the way. I might have come from trailer trash, but I’d become a Navy SEAL and a far better man than he would ever be.
I finished my coffee, dressed in jeans and a black Henley, then grabbed my Sig Sauer P226. Habit, one I didn’t follow when I went out running.
Hawk Security occupied a nondescript office building with a gated garage on the lower level. Glass and steel, security cameras everywhere, the kind of place that looked boring until you tried to get in.
I pulled the sweet Porsche Cayenne Turbo GT that was my company ride working for Hawk Security into the garage. Joe, our mechanic, waved me into a parking slot, and I shut it down, leaving the keys in the car.
“Sticking around for an hour?” he asked. “I want to change the oil and the gearbox fluid.”
“Go for it. Fob’s in the car,” I responded as I headed for the offices.
I came across Zane first. He frowned and then asked, “Get in a fight with your toaster?” He was as sharp as they came and didn’t need to be close to notice the signs of my fight last night.
I ignored the attempt at humor. “I saw her again.”
“Who?”
“Dana.” I kept my answer short to avoid any discussion. “She ran off.” That in itself was more than he needed to know.
“Really?” His face gave him away. We were SEAL brothers, but he still didn’t trust my judgment these days, all because weeks ago, I’d told them I’d seen Xavier, a fellow warrior the DOD listed as Killed in Action.
I checked my knuckles—clear evidence that last night had been real. “She was being hassled by some guys.” Hassled was putting it mildly. Dana’s friend had been thrown to the ground.
“That sucks.” Those words were genuine. He and I lived by the same code in that respect. “I take it you handled it?”
“Affirmative.” All three of them would remember last night for a long time. One of them would have a cast today. “I’ve got to find her.”
Zane nodded. No argument. I’d said the same thing about Xavier. That time, he’d disagreed.
I continued down to Jordan “Jordy” Hawk’s office. The place looked like a NASA command center with all the screens on the wall, only smaller. The biggest difference was NASA for sure had a lot less computing power in their big room than we had at our fingertips—according to Jordy.
The tech guru himself spun in his chair. “What happened to you?”
Apparently, I was going to get that question a lot today. “Three idiots wanted to check their skull hardness against my fist.”
“Still breathing?”
“They were when I left.” I hadn’t stuck around for any cops. Without the girls there to corroborate my statement, who knew what story the three assholes would cook up?
A block away, I’d dialed 9-1-1 anonymously to report hearing a fight. They’d gotten an ambulance they didn’t deserve—assholes.
Dana had run away from me.
Why? It didn’t make sense.
I’d saved her. Her friend had been knocked to the ground. Knives were out. And somehow, she’d looked at me like I was the bigger threat.
“Donut?” Jordy offered, holding up a disgusting glazed one, a sugar bomb.
“No thanks, but can you spare an apple?” He had a basket of them off to the left. A walking contradiction, a box of donuts and a basket of apples and pears next to a bowl of walnuts.
He tossed me one. “Let me guess, you want me to ID the idiots so you can finish the job?”
I peeled the little grocery sticker off the apple and tossed the fruit from one hand to the other and back. “Maybe later. It’s the women who were attacked that I’m interested in finding.”
He checked out my hand again. “A girl. Figures.” He spun his chair around to his keyboard. “Where and when?”
“Last night, nine-thirty-ish, a block or so east of The Rusty Bucket.” I bit into the juicy apple. I liked that he chose Fuji. What I wouldn’t have given for a single apple in that Syrian hellhole.
Keys clacked as his fingers flew over the keyboard. “How ’ish are we talking on the time.”
“Not sure. I was busy dodging knives.”
A map of the area came up on one screen with a few colored dots. After he clicked on two dots, some blurry video played on a second screen, and then different images on a third.
“I may not be able to help you,” he warned. “Not much coverage in that part of town.”
While we watched zilch happen on the screens, Zane joined us. “What’s up?”
Jordy spun and offered the box of donuts up to Zane. “Pete wants to watch his beat down last night.”
“That’s not it,” I objected before I realized that Jordy had provoked me on purpose.
Zane selected a simple donut from the box. A smaller one with light chocolate frosting, less of a sugar bomb than the one Jordy had offered me.
“We’re going to track down the girls Pete saved last night,” Jordy corrected.
“Girls?” Zane prodded.
“Dana had a friend with her,” I explained, before taking a bite of the apple.
An hour and two apples later, Jordy shut down his search. “Look, there’s not enough coverage out there. I can’t find them walking. My hunch is that they got into their car and drove off, end of story.”
“What about checking cars?” Zane asked, saving me from being the one to ask Jordy.
The tech genius spun around and folded his arms. “There’s too much area and not enough cameras. It’ll instantly expand to the whole damned city. I don’t have that kind of time.” He turned to me. “Sorry, Pete, but we need another trail to follow.”
I threw my third apple in the trash. “Thanks, man.”
Zane pushed off the desk he leaned against. “Want some help?”
“Maybe later.” For now, this was something I had to do myself.
I returned to the desk I’d been given and pulled up the area of the bar on Google Maps, looking for a logical clue to the route she would have taken. I’d use all my spare time after hours to find her if it was the last thing I did.
Lucas Hawk, our bossman, found me half an hour later. “I hear you’re looking for a girl from your past who got beat up last night.”
I nodded. It was better than being asked if I was looking for a dead man. “Uh-huh.”
He cocked his head toward the door. “Maybe you’d have better luck finding her out there.”
“What if you need me for—”
“Let Zane or Duke know if you need help,” he said before I could ask if he needed me for a company assignment.
As an Omega commander, Lucas had developed a serious reputation in Spec Ops.
Questioning an ex-Delta and Omega operator, was foolish, and that went double for Lucas Hawk, the man who legend had it could kill with a single finger.
I stood and grabbed my jacket. “Yes, sir.”
Maybe he was sending me out because, from what I heard, he had zero tolerance for violence against women.
The scuttlebutt was he’d delayed an official mission for two hours to detour for a visit to a drug kingpin running a rape house.
Hassan Fazel and four of his lieutenants had ended up buried under a pile of rubble.
Either way, I was grateful to have the latitude to search out the girl from my past. “Thank you, sir.”