Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Aleksei Thompson’s phone started ringing as soon as he passed a crooked Balsam fir that served as his mental marker for when cell service cut off on the trail—or in this instance, restarted.
Shit.
He should turn around and walk back up the mountain.
He wasn’t ready to talk to anyone yet. Wasn’t ready to lose the clear mind and sense of peace he always found while hiking.
Alone in the woods, out of cell phone range, it was easy to let the real world slip away.
But reality was like smoke. It always found cracks to seep through.
He slipped his hand into his pocket, found the volume button, and held it down, effectively turning the ring into a vibration. He pressed forward, ignoring the buzz in his pocket and the temptation to flee back up the mountain. He was good at ignoring.
During the past couple of years, he’d become an expert at avoidance, a master of compartmentalizing. He lived. He worked. He occasionally visited his mother and called his sister. He pasted a smile on his face every time anyone asked how he was doing.
He lied through his teeth and said things were fine.
And when he couldn’t take it one minute longer, when his too-keen mind and guilty heart wouldn’t allow him to forget that Phillipe was dead, he hiked. He hiked to find respite from the constant sorrow simmering in his soul. He hiked to forget.
He focused on forgetting now, concentrating on the whisper of the breeze on his face, the mulchy, mossy aroma of spring, and the sporadic glints of sunlight on the glossy green leaves.
His spine eased as his legs covered ground in long rhythmic strides.
The trees thinned, and the path widened as he neared the trailhead.
He lowered the zipper on his weatherproof jacket.
It was getting warmer as the chill of early morning waned and the elevation decreased.
Birds chirped. A chipmunk skittered across his path. His hiking boots were quiet on the muddy trail. It had rained almost every day last week, and the nights were still too cold for the ground to dry quickly. A squirrel paused halfway up a loblolly pine, studying him.
Too much wildlife.
Which meant Jaka was too far behind.
Aleksei paused, whistled, and waited. He closed his eyes, focusing on the sounds of the forest. The birds quieted, and the low scuffle of small animals fleeing filled his ears.
He opened his eyes, and flashes of black, brown, and white appeared through the trees, followed by the pound and squish of paws on wet ground.
Jaka bounded down the path and came to a full stop next to him.
Aleksei dropped to one knee, the ground damp and cold on his leg.
His pants, unlike his jacket, weren’t water-resistant, but they were almost to the truck.
It didn’t matter if he got a little wet.
He buried his fingers in the dog’s long thick fur.
Jaka’s dark, intelligent eyes seemed to assess him before she nudged her forehead into his face.
He let his cheek rest there, feeling the tickle of whiskers and warm breath, regaining the inner calm the ringing phone had ripped away.
“Sometimes, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
Jaka barked softly.
It was crazy, but sometimes he thought Jaka actually understood him.
Maybe not his words, but it was as if the Australian shepherd sensed what he needed.
Comfort. Distraction. Play. A good long hike.
His mother kept telling him that a dog wasn’t a substitute for a human, but, on this one thing, his usually correct mother was dead wrong.
Jaka was better than a human. She was reliable and predictable. With her, there were no surprises. People, on the other hand, were an entirely different story. No matter how well you knew somebody, they could still do something completely unpredictable.
Like end up with a .40-caliber bullet in the back of their head.
The image dug into his mind like a falcon’s talons. Phillipe, face down on the blood-soaked sidewalk. Flesh and bone torn open by the force of the shot. Pink-gray brain matter speckling his hair. Then the medical examiner flipping him over. The money in his mouth. The missing hands.
He gulped in air as the protein bar he’d had for breakfast threatened to come up.
Fuuuuuuuck.
No matter what he did, he couldn’t escape that scene.
Alcohol. The FBI psychologist. Time.
They hadn’t helped. Hiking and Jaka were the only things that made him forget.
But they were temporary reprieves. The overwhelming sense of gut-wrenching loss always clawed its way back in.
Aleksei shifted so his forehead was pressed to Jaka’s, and he let out a long slow breath, trying to clear his mind.
Once that image invaded his mind, it was so goddamn hard to wipe it away.
Without warning, Jaka jumped. Muddy paws pressed into his shoulders, pushing him off balance.
He flailed his arms outward but gripped only air as he flopped backward onto the trail with Jaka’s paws on his chest and her rough, wet tongue on his cheek.
He tried to push himself up, but the ground was too slick to get much purchase.
His heavy hiking pack had turned him into a flipped turtle.
A smile pulled on his lips. If his sister were here, she’d be laughing her ass off.
She’d love seeing him floundering and unbalanced.
She was always teasing him about being a military science project, saying he was too fit to be a normal human.
After seeing Captain America: The First Avenger, she started calling him Cap, and Phillipe had picked right up on it, ribbing him mercilessly.
Phillipe even bought him a Captain America backpack for Christmas one year.
The backpack was hidden under a blanket on a shelf in Aleksei’s closet. He couldn’t bear to look at it.
The memories were sharper than his favorite knife.
Jaka resumed her enthusiastic tongue bath, pulling Aleksei back to the present. He gently pushed the dog down and shifted his weight to the side so he could stand.
“All right. All right. I get it. You don’t like it when I’m sad.
But you didn’t need to knock me over. I’m a muddy mess.
I’m going to have to change out of these clothes before we get into the truck, and the bathrooms don’t open until ten.
I’ll be lucky if I don’t get arrested for indecent exposure for changing in the parking lot. ”
Jaka’s response was to bark and trot ahead down the trail. He shook his head and followed.
The world really would be so much better if people were like dogs.
He’d taken only a few steps when the phone started vibrating again.
Whoever was calling was persistent. His mouth turned dry.
He should answer. What if something had happened to his mom?
Or his sister? He pulled the phone out of his pocket, glanced at the screen, and spit whatever moisture was left in his mouth to the ground.
Kemper.
Gary—ass-kissing, by-the-book, relentless as a dog with a bone—Kemper.
If he didn’t answer the phone, Kemper would just keep calling.
And if he turned the goddamn thing off, Kemper would probably have some white-collared, buttoned-up lackey standing at his front door by the time he got home.
When that man wanted something, he was tenacious.
Rumor was he’d spent nineteen straight days on a stakeout pissing into a Gatorade bottle and leaving the car only when he had to take a shit.
Too bad Kemper was too much of a company man to have used that same fire to speak up when the FBI pushed Phillipe’s murder under the rug. Instead, Kemper had chosen to follow orders and look the other way. When the shit hit the fan, Kemper had saved himself.
Asshole.
Aleksei had tried investigating himself, but that had gone over like bringing a preacher to a bachelor party.
The bigwigs had gotten pissed, and Kemper said they’d threatened to fire Aleksei for insubordination if he didn’t back off.
He hadn’t cared about the job, so he kept on digging.
Then, one morning, he came to work and found a picture of Phillipe’s dead body on his desk, with a confidential internal affairs memo theorizing that Phillipe was taking bribes.
There’d also been a printed copy of a Wall Street Journal article about his mom’s recently announced decision to run for Virginia Attorney General.
Someone had struck out the headline and written “Son of Rising Star Judge Involved in Bribery Scandal.”
The implication was clear. It didn’t matter that Aleksei was squeaky clean and the evidence against Phillipe was flimsy.
He was Phillipe’s partner and best friend.
If someone leaked that Phillipe was an FBI agent and claimed Aleksei was involved with whatever Phillipe was into, the facts would be irrelevant.
The media wouldn’t be looking for proof.
They wanted only a sensational story. If he didn’t back off, someone was going to feed lies to the media, and his mom’s political career would be over before it even started.
He couldn’t do that to her. Not when she’d worked so hard and come so far.
Her story was an impossible one. She was a Romani-Serbian immigrant who’d been the victim of human trafficking.
She had nothing when his dad got her out.
She worked to pay her own way through college and law school, her gender and accent making every step three times harder than it should have been.
She’d dedicated her life to fighting oppression, to protecting those with no one to fight for them.