Parachute #2
“A lot less than when I was going through med school,” Bailey told him, not wanting to think about those two years he’d been rooming with a bunch of smokers and had needed to feed his own fix.
“I don’t want anybody to see—”
Behind them, Bailey heard the clatter of hard-soled shoes and a thickly accented voice saying, “That is him!”
And Dean grabbed his hand and bolted for the door, pressing the Bluetooth earbud he’d been wearing and ordering, “Now, Marcus, now!”
They crashed outside the double doors, scaring a couple of orderlies, who scattered, and then leaped into Dean’s rental car, Dean in front, Bailey in back.
“Drive!” Dean barked, and Bailey stared out the window as the two goons who’d come back to Vlade’s body slammed outside after them. Marcus peeled away from the curb, pulling an abrupt right, and Bailey was left staring behind him.
“Do you think they caught the plates?” Marcus asked.
“No way of knowing,” Dean replied tersely. “Where’s your safety?”
“Two hours away, heading east. Yours?”
“Fort Stockton. We’ll meet Birdie between here and there in about three hours.”
“Birdie?” Marcus replied, a note of whining in his voice at odds with the big man’s debonair appearance. “Dean, do we have to?”
“Yes, we have to,” Dean muttered. “Did you not hear me make arrangements with Val not twenty minutes ago? It’s your own goddamned plan!”
“But I wasn’t thinking Birdie. I thought we could call in a favor from the Bureau!” Marcus retorted.
“That’s ridiculous,” Dean told him. “Val’s got an hour’s head start on us, coming from a closer direction on a clearer freeway. None of the Bureau airstrips are close enough to where Val’s going to be!”
“But Dean,” Marcus reasoned, and Bailey felt some satisfaction in the realization that he, Bailey, was not the only man on the planet who felt like Dean could be unreasonable, “that means Birdie has to fly back . I don’t want to jump out of an airplane today!”
“You don’t have to jump out of an airplane today!
” Dean retorted. “I’ll get clearance to voucher Birdie as an asset.
You and I will land in an airplane five miles outside of Sangrino del Corazón, the cartel’s compound in Mexico.
Bailey is going to jump out of the airplane and be transported to safety along with everything he loves. ”
“We’re going to what ?” Marcus demanded.
“I’m going to what ?” Bailey snapped, hard on his heels.
“Oh, please,” Dean muttered. “I think it should be perfectly obvious. I just told both of you what the plan is, and now I need some peace and quiet while I call Birdie, who needs to be filled in.”
AN HOUR later, Dean had spent so much time on his cell, he’d needed to charge it while he spoke into his Bluetooth, and Bailey was overwhelmed at how many other people were overwhelmed by the man who’d been sharing Bailey’s bed.
Conversations with Dean seemed to go as well for anybody else he steamrolled as they did for Bailey and Marcus, and Bailey had no choice but to sit and listen as Dean gave directions to somebody named Birdie that included a price point that made Marcus wince and Dean promise to double whatever the Bureau paid out of his and Marcus’s own pockets.
“Mine?” Marcus snarled as Dean was talking. “My pocket too?”
“Is it your bust?” Dean snapped, hitting the Mute button. “Then, yes, your pocket. Don’t cheap out on me now, Cabrillo.” Then he unmuted himself and resumed speaking into the phone about destinations and a small airstrip outside a town in Mexico Bailey had never heard of, and then he’d signed off.
Before Bailey could ask a single question or so much as suggest they pull over for him to eat (since he and Dean had never gotten breakfast that morning), Dean had hit another number in his phone.
This next phone call was full of acronyms Bailey didn’t get and coordinates Bailey didn’t understand, but this time when Dean signed off, Marcus managed a word in edgewise.
“You were a little rough on him.”
“He was being slow,” Dean replied, sounding deeply in a funk.
“Well, yeah, but Dean, he’s our SAC!”
“He shouldn’t be in charge if he’s that stupid about civilians and necessity,” Dean replied and then hit yet another number and was off planning again.
Bailey began to feel a little woozy. He’d really needed that espresso and whatever he’d been planning to get from the vending machine.
“Marcus?” he asked, under Dean’s conversation but loud enough to be heard. “Are we going to stop anywhere?”
“Not planning to,” Marcus replied shortly. “If you gotta pee, I’ve got a special bottle.”
“I’ve gotta eat ,” Bailey told him, a little desperation in his voice. “I’m serious. If I don’t regulate my blood sugar, I get spacey and weird and nauseous—”
“Diabetic?” Marcus asked, and gratifyingly enough, he aimed for the nearest rest stop that obviously had some fast-food outlets.
“No, just sensitive to fluctuation,” he said. It ran in the family, though, so he and his father tried hard not to go too far between meals.
“Fair enough. We do need you firing on all cylinders.” Marcus took the next exit and began slowing the car down considerably.
“Besides, if you didn’t eat, Dean’s living on coffee too, and I know that because I bought him the coffee.
” Loudly into a pause in Dean’s conversation, Bailey heard somebody’s stomach grumble.
Dean glared at his partner in annoyance.
“Are we getting food?” Dean murmured under his breath. “Thank God. Marcus’s gas when he hasn’t eaten is horrific .”
Bailey gave him a long-suffering look, but Dean was glaring into space and chewing out the next person who did not seem to be able to read his mind.
“You’re, like, his eighth sibling, aren’t you?” Bailey asked Marcus sourly, and Marcus gave him a sheepish smile in the rearview mirror.
“He says sometimes I’m the one he special ordered, but I came with factory defects.”
Bailey shook his head. “It’s a good thing we met when you were saving my ass,” he said frankly, resting his hand on Bumble’s pet carrier, where Bumble snoozed happily, obviously deeply sedated. “It’s really hard to hate you for being his work wife after that.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Marcus told him kindly. “For one thing, Dean and I just never could hit that way.” He let out a sigh. “For another, there’s sort of someone else.”
“Sort of?” Bailey asked, surprised by the yearning in the big man’s voice.
“He’s very young,” Marcus said. “And I’m waiting for him to grow up a little. It’s taking forever.”
“He’ll be out of college in a year,” Dean said, suddenly back in the car with them again. “And I’m dying for a hamburger, no onions. Any objections?”
“Hardee’s it is!” Marcus said brightly, and, thank God, they headed for some calories.
Bailey had enough trouble with his own life right now. He didn’t need to be sticking his nose into Marcus’s.
A DOUBLE cheeseburger with onion rings later—with a stop at a decent restroom and a snooze in the back of the sedan while Dean continued to micromanage the planet—had Bailey feeling a little bit better about things.
He was sitting up from his slump over Bumble’s cat carrier, padded with a blanket he’d found shoved behind the driver’s seat, and blinking rapidly, trying to get his brain to catch up to his body, when Dean spoke clearly from the front.
“Mr. Bumble’s still asleep, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” Bailey said, checking on his cat again. “Jesus, Dean, how much did you give him?”
“He should be out for another four hours,” Dean said, sounding apologetic. “I looked up the dosing, but I had to push the envelope. This is going to be a rough trip for him, and I don’t want him to wake up until it’s over.”
Bailey nodded, and then as what Dean said penetrated, he remembered something else Dean had said. For a moment he glanced around wildly at the flat desert vista of southwest Texas and thought, No .
And then he remembered that ferocity with which Dean had attacked everybody in his life over the last few hours and thought, Oh shit . No .
And then his mouth opened all by itself, and he said, “Please tell me I’m not leaping out of an airplane with my cat.”
Dean sucked air through his teeth—Bailey could hear it from the back of the car.
“Well, not strictly with him. We’re sending a supply platform down that Mr. Bumble gets to ride on.
Marcus is really good at steering things like that.
You , on the other hand, are going to have to get a few quick lessons. ”
Bailey blinked hard and then blinked again.
“Why?” he demanded faintly. He was a smart guy.
He knew he was a smart guy. You didn’t work your way through med school bartending without some ability to extrapolate a lot of logical conclusions from a little bit of pertinent information.
But he couldn’t… couldn’t reason why Dean was doing this, and therefore couldn’t reason a way out of it.
He heard Dean’s sigh, and then to his horror, since Marcus was going about 100 mph on a mostly deserted freeway, Dean unbuckled his belt and turned physically around in the seat so he could meet Bailey’s eyes.
Bailey thought he was going to die of apoplexy, and he’d never actually seen anybody do that before. “Dean, oh my God, turn around ! For fuck’s sake, put your seat belt on. Have you ever seen what car wrecks can do? Jesus Christ—”
Dean reached out and feathered his thumb across the shaggy hair on Bailey’s forehead, pushing it out of his eyes, and Bailey was so arrested by the gesture he actually shut up.
“I’m doing this so the people who killed Vlade can’t trace you,” Dean said softly. “Vlade was one of our CIs, but we think he was a plant. He kept trying to feed us false information, and we kept figuring out what the real bust should be. He got killed because they thought he’d turned for real.”
Bailey crossed his eyes.