Chapter Twenty-Three
Petra
What was it that Tamika said to Petra the morning they were supposed to fly out of D.C.? “A body in motion tends to stay in motion.”
Her time with Hawkeye had been one crisis after another. Was that the kind of chemistry they swirled when they were together?
Petra hated crises, though she thrived in them.
When something terrible was afoot, she was energized from beginning to end.
The problem was that they came to an end, and she always crashed hard.
She thought of past relationships when she’d try to explain it. She wasn’t ghosting them; she was hibernating, trying to recover. But unless someone knew how burnout felt, yeah, it wasn’t something easily imagined.
No, it wasn’t a matter of eating more protein or hitting the gym harder.
It wasn’t a matter of mind over matter or putting the pedal down on her inner drive.
She. Shut. Down.
And the last time she didn’t listen to her body and pushed and pushed, she ended up in bed, unable to do even the rudiments of personal hygiene for months on end.
That was the end of her last long-term relationship.
And probably the end of all long-term relationships.
Petra had adapted herself to the idea of doing life solo.
She was fine with it.
Quasi-fine with it.
Alone had its good points and its bad.
She sure did like the idea today that all she needed to do was put up a bat signal and Hawkeye would be there by her side, helping her to navigate the challenge.
That and he could give a mighty fine kiss.
Petra held her index finger out in front of her face, forcing herself to focus there.
A lot had happened that day—over the last two days.
A lot.
And all her thoughts felt like they were crowding up on each other, pinging into one another.
It was as if she was hunkering in the middle of a swarm, one of which was a killer bee. She needed to find it and keep her eye on it.
Petra’s survival brain had been on overdrive since she landed in St. Croix. It was too long.
Anxiety was a terrible sensation.
Coffee would be good—a generous hit usually helped her regulate her dopamine.
While coffee woke her colleagues up, it made Petra feel like taking a nap.
Coffee would help—but Petra couldn’t motivate herself off her seat to see if she could find a pot somewhere.
Besides, she needed to be here so the nurse could find her and hand her the script. Petra wanted to get home and take a shower, wash the scrapes, and throw away this sundress.
Exhaustion was settling in as adrenaline left her system just like it had for Terry—like it would for any human after a day like today, she reminded herself.
Her thoughts flitted over the day from patch discovery, to doctor, to meeting Lucky and taking a ride over the rutted red earth being smacked in the face by tree limbs as they careened past.
She thought about Herb in the front seat and how her antennae had gone up. The look in his eyes. The tone of his speech. There was something shiny and plastic about him.
Something about him made Petra’s teeth itch.
Petra patted the pocket of her sundress and was surprised to find that the girl’s necklace was still there.
She didn’t pull it out. She’d look at it later.
Petra wondered what happened when the girl’s parents discovered the necklace was missing.
Jenny.
Jenny!
Shoot. Petra had used her connection with Holly Smokes to see if she could gather some information about the design of the pendant.
But now that Petra thought about it, maybe that was a bad idea.
Either way, Petra should definitely give Holly a heads-up.
Petra didn’t have Holly’s contact information with her, and it might be hours before she got back to the hotel and her computer.
Avery was Holly’s editor.
Yeah, Petra’s gut told her not to wait. Pulling her phone out, Petra quickly tapped a message.
Petra: Hey, Avery, are you available for a phone call?
The phone rang a minute later.
“Hey there,” Avery’s voice was bright and chatty, which didn’t jive with the survival state Petra had been swimming through for the last two days. “What did you do today? Lay out with a pineapple drink and soak in some sun?”
“Sun happened. Drinks did not. Have I got stories to tell you when I get home.” Petra worked hard to lighten her tone so she didn’t worry her friend.
“Stories plural?” Avery’s voice turned sing-songy. “Do any of them happen to include a certain handsome operator named Hawkeye?”
“In ways big and small, yes, he was along for the ride. Before I get too distracted, I’m calling you for an important reason. I brought up Holly Smokes' name in a conversation I had today.”
“Mmmkay.”
“There was this woman, Jenny Johnson, who reads Holly’s books. And it turns out Jenny also goes all over the world doing adventure races. I thought it’s such a small world at that level of racing that they might know each other."
“Were they in the same races? I’m having dinner with Holly this week. It would be fun to put them together.”
“I can look in a minute and text you. “
“Holly is really Beth McNight.”
“Yup. I remember. She said she doesn’t want her kids to know she writes SEAL-populated reverse harems with whips and butt plugs. But I think she races under Holly, so she can use the images for social media, right? I’ll look for both names.”
Petra started to think that a combination of her job and the events she’d just lived through might have clouded her thoughts.
Before she disparaged this woman’s name and warned Holly off, maybe she should do a little more investigating.
“Fun fact,” Avery said, “while men can, on average, run faster than women in shorter runs. Women are faster when they run ultra-long distances.”
“Which would be how far?” Petra asked.
“In my book? Anything over five miles seems excessive. I’m going to make this up. I think it’s at the fifty-mile mark or around there.”
“Just making facts up, tossing them out there for me to gobble up?”
“I know how you like to snack on a good factoid. But go back and check me. There’s a website with women’s adventure races and times. Just put it in a search engine.”
“Okay, Avery, let me do a little searching around. I’ll text you anything I find. Have a good evening.”
“Petra?”
“Mmm?”
“That was why you called?” Avery asked.
“There’s a lot going on. I think I called prematurely,” Petra said with a sigh. “I need to clear my head.”
“I get that. Call me when you figure it out.”
Petra glanced around the part of the emergency department she could see, and her nurse was nowhere around. Petra’s cuts were so minor compared to the injuries that were coming in. From the codes that were ringing out, near drownings, heart attacks, burns, and broken limbs were taking up everyone’s attention. And Petra wanted that. She wanted to slide into the triage in such a way that she was merely the minor inconvenience of a scrawled signature.
She leaned back and looked out the window.
The Cerberus men stood in a circle, hands on hips, dogs sleeping or resting in the center.
Then she looked down at her phone, feeling like she was about to open a kettle of worms.
Here I go.
Herb and Jenny Johnson.
When culling through names, Petra had found that she could get to the right person the fastest by using both names of a couple.
When she pressed ENTER, Petra was not prepared for what she found.
Yes, there were lists of Jenny’s races and pictures of her and her family.
But there were also news articles reporting on how the FBI had caught Herb and Jenny with so much evidence of their white-collar crimes that the couple had pled guilty in the hope of a lenient sentence. Even with a clean record and small children, a light sentence would be seventeen years for Herb and fourteen years for Petra.
They were felons.
Sentencing was in two weeks.
Looking through this new lens, Petra thought about the couple and their behavior.
Did today make any sense at all?
Criminals .
That was so unexpected that Petra didn’t know what to do with it other than to let Avery know to warn Holly away from any interaction.
Criminals.
Was that the explanation for the necklaces and the daughter’s anger? Why did she yank it off and throw it? Was she mad at her parents for going to prison?
Those thoughts took up so much space in Petra’s mind that when the nurse said, “Miss Armstrong?” Petra jumped and gripped her chest.
“Oh! Hahaha.” Petra grinned. “You surprised me. I was in Lala land.”
“The doctor says to take the medication until it’s finished. If you have any red striations or unusual symptoms, seek further medical help.” She held out a slip of paper with an old-fashioned prescription on it.
It had been a while since Petra had seen one of these, and she had to look at it for a moment.
“Are you okay?” the nurse asked.
“Fine. Tired. Going home to get cleaned up now. This can’t happen very often, there would be more supports in place.”
“Not necessarily. Supports in place is a funding issue,” the nurse said. “But I can tell you what I’ve heard on the news playing in the different treatment rooms. They’re saying that seismic activity just south of Puerto Rico caused rip currents and rogue waves throughout the Caribbean. Usually, when one island gets in trouble, the other islands rally. In this case, they’re stretched thin everywhere. Teams are spooling up to come from the Florida and some other of the East Coast National Guards. But can they get here in time to be of any real help?” She shrugged as she pulled her gloves off and put them in a biohazard bag. “At least it wasn’t a tsunami. Here on the island, there’s really nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. I mean, what do you do? Go to the highest point and cling to a tree?”
“I hope the evening goes smoothly for you all. Thank you.” Petra waved the paper in the air.
And the nurse headed back into the fray.
Petra turned to the window and saw a doctor talking to the Cerberus huddle.
Pulling the necklace from her pocket, Petra held it up.
It just felt dangerous.
It just felt like something needed to be said.
Beside her, the bathroom door slapped open, and a kid came running out.
Petra caught the door and slid into the single-toilet room. She locked the door, turned on the water, and without sending a warning text, Petra pressed the button to dial Rowan.
This was a matter for the FBI.