Chapter 3
“I owe you,” Dane said. Not something he ever said lightly. Vendi nodded, but he didn’t smile as he turned over his flight log and keys to Dane. They stood on the tarmac outside the hangar where Vendi kept his small plane. A two-seater. Not that it mattered. There was only him and Shana.
“Not so much for the airplane,” Dane said. “It’s so small we’ll be lucky to make it to Cape Cod Airport.”
“F—ck you.”
“I owe you for the uniforms. I don’t want to get you in trouble. We’ll take them off as soon as we get a chance,” Dane said.
“You’re a f—cking bastard, you know that?”
“So they tell me.”
“Make sure you get back here in one piece. I’m holding you to that hundred thousand clams.”
Dane nodded and squeezed Shana to him. She was unusually quiet. Hell, she was never quiet, and since she’d gotten that text she hadn’t said more than a few words. There was a whole lot of something she wasn’t telling him.
The flight to the Cape was going to be tense—and that was without her unloading that world of trouble she was holding in.
“Come with us to run through the checklist,” he said to Vendi.
After raising one brow, Vendi trotted along with them to the plane. He stood just inside the open door while they went over the controls and checked the fluids, the electronics, and the mechanicals after starting the engine.
“I’ll be damned. All systems are go,” Dane said to Vendi.
“You ever flown a small prop plane like this?”
“Not in a while. I learned on a plane about this size. Around the same year. A 1945 Taylorcraft.”
“Very funny. My Piper isn’t too different from a Taylorcraft, but considerably newer than 1945. The radio call number is on the control panel.” Vendi pointed. “One-nine-five-N-three-Kilo. Don’t get me in trouble.” He looked up. “You fly in the dark?”
Not for a while, but this was no time to take out the manual. “Don’t worry, Vendi. I have no intentions of taking chances. I can fly a Piper in the dark. You have lights, don’t you?
“Where are you going to land her?”
“I told you. On the Cape. We’ll take a taxi from there and then we’ll get lost.”
“I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me your final destination?”
Dane was about to make a wisecrack, when Shana spoke up.
“I’d like to know that too—where are we going, Dane?” She sounded worried, like maybe she was hoping he’d take her to the other side of the world to escape.
“All in due time, my pretty,” he said.
“You make a terrible Wicked Witch of the West,” she said, but there was no humor in her voice.
“He’d scare the Wicked Witch if they met,” Vendi said. Then he saluted. “Godspeed. Call me when you can.”
Dane saluted back and pulled the flimsy door closed.
Then he pulled back on the steering column.
The engine revved and the plane jolted forward.
Using the pedals, he maneuvered the Piper toward the empty runway of the otherwise silent airport.
It was only nine p.m., but it was a Tuesday night in May, well before the full-fledged summer season. Thank God for that.
“Well?” Shana looked at him.
He turned his attention to her for a quick once-over while he guided the plane to the end of the runway for their race to takeoff. She held her hands on the edges of the seat as if they were climbing to the top of a roller coaster track and she expected the worst.
“We’re going to visit the governor.” It was the best place he could think of to keep her safe while he sorted things out, tracked down their mad bomber and shot him dead.
He wouldn’t confess his intentions about that last part to anyone, not even Shana.
But there was no way Dane would let this madman who had exploded their home live for more than five seconds after he got him in his sights. Maybe five seconds was too long.
Shana nodded. She knew it was a safe haven.
Massachusetts Governor Peter John Douglas had been the commander of Dane’s special ops unit back in the day, a mentor and a friend ever since.
They’d saved each other’s lives and called on each other in times of duress many times over the years.
The governor could keep their dead-or-alive status under wraps and keep Shana safe at the mansion with his family.
Because once Dane got the whole story from Shana about who this bomber was and what his beef was, there was no way in hell Dane was letting her work the mission with him. He could get someone else to help.
Hell, he’d track down the assassin alone if he had to. No way was Shana leaving the safety of the Governor’s Mansion until that bastard’s heart stopped beating.
He reached the end of the runway and turned the plane around. The tower gave him the go-head and he pulled on the throttle. The engine roared and they sped forward, increasing in speed. Before fifteen seconds elapsed, he pulled back on the wheel and lifted the Piper into the air.
The rush of speeding into takeoff never failed to get his adrenaline flowing. Checking the compass and altimeter, Dane turned the plane to the exact heading to reach the airport on the Cape within twenty minutes. As long as nothing went wrong.
He had his headset on and he gestured for Shana to put hers on too so they could talk more easily without shouting over the roar of engine and wind as they gained speed.
She put the headset on. “I’m okay,” she said. She did look more relaxed now that they were airborne and over the water with no ground-to-air missile launchers in sight. He’d noticed her checking the water and shoreline below them as they flew.
“Of course you’re okay. You’re Shana George. And you’re with me.” He found that he meant the words more than half seriously.
She smiled. And that made all the difference.
The tension he hadn’t realized had tightened across his shoulders now released.
He rolled his shoulders, testing them. Then he took a deep breath.
They had just under twenty minutes of airtime.
It was a good time to get her story about who the hell Whitey Nash was and why the hell he would bomb their house.
“You going to tell me about it or do I have to pry it from you?”
She glanced at him, then closed her eyes and leaned her head back against her seat. He thought she was going to ignore him and sleep, but then she spoke.
“Whitey was young for someone with such a prolific career. When we finally caught up with him, I went in first. Hot. In the skirmish, Whitey got cut. Bad.” She rattled a breath, then continued.
“They never did any plastic surgery to fix his face because he was in jail, a criminal presumed guilty of heinous crimes.” She stopped talking.
“What kind of crimes, Shana?”
“Kidnapping children. Young girls. He tortured them. We found one little girl that night, barely alive and thoroughly mutilated.”
She turned to Dane and looked him in the eye, her face tortured. “I didn’t consciously try to mutilate Whitey, but I suspect my subconscious had a say in it. When I drew my knife instead of my gun, that should have been a warning that I wanted to cut him. And I did. In more than one place.”
She was gathering steam with anger overriding regret or conscience.
“You don’t have to—”
She raised her chin and her voice too. “I cut his balls and his face. His balls were lost, though not his life. Why they bothered to save that I’ll never know.
I’d hoped he’d bleed out and die when I called for the ambulance.
I wasn’t the only one there. The other officer had a gun on Whitey, but didn’t fire. He let me take Whitey down my way.
“After that, I guess you could say I became legendary in the department, even beyond. A genuine badass girlie.” She smiled then, a strident smile that stood for a lot of things behind the scenes. Things he was going to need to find out about. But right now, one question stood out in his mind.
“Why did I never know about this until now?” Dane asked with a small tremor of trepidation.
“I have to admit that’s a good question.”
“All those times you gave me shit for my so-called legendary status and you had a legend of your own.” He tried to lighten the tension, not sure if it was his or hers he was more concerned about.
She shrugged.
“No. How could I glorify my most senseless, out-of-control act of destruction?”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself. Every legendary act has two sides.”
“There was no need for it. I know that now after I saw what it did to Whitey Nash. The aftermath was like a horror show. My so-called notoriety never reached the press. The details of the arrest were kept quiet for the most part and glossed over in the files.”
“That’s what makes it a legend,” he said.
Her takedown of Whitey Nash was something, in the end, that she was both fiercely proud of and fiercely ashamed of at the same time. Too ashamed to admit her shame to Dane.
She remembered the trial.
“Tell me about it, Shana,” he said, using his most convincing sexy rumble of a voice.
“Tell you what?”
“The rest of the story.”
“I’m not in the mood.”
He took his hands off the controls and, turning to her, framed her face with them. She should have known he wouldn’t let her get away with holding back.
“Okay. I’ll tell you. But for the record, I wish I had a drink.
” She freed herself from his grip and glanced at the horizon as they flew at a steady hum.
Then she faced Dane. A frisson of nerves ran through her, but she suppressed it, hoping he didn’t notice in the near dark.
She spoke loud and clear, owning her story, embracing who she was.
“Whitey sat at the defendant’s table with his shady lawyer and stared at me from the horrible new face I’d given him the entire time I was on the witness stand. When I stepped down and walked by him, I met his stare. In retrospect, that might have been a mistake.”
“You gave him one of your scowls,” Dane said, understanding. She nodded and continued.
“He jumped up and made the threat before anyone could stop him, loud and clear for all to hear. He said he wanted to kill me, but not until after he tortured me and disfigured me. Then said maybe he wouldn’t bother killing me after all.
Maybe he’d let me live the same way he did.
Half a man, half alive, an ugly gargoyle.
” She paused remembering, didn’t realize she’d shivered until Dane put a hand on her arm.
“You keep your hands on the controls,” she said, shaking him off.
She wasn’t sure why she was behaving so poorly, except maybe because she was angry with herself right now and that made her angry at anyone and everyone else.
Especially Dane. Especially because he was dragging the story from her when she didn’t want to remember it.
“I told him he looked how he was supposed to look because he wasn’t human.
” Shana took a long hard breath. That was another thing she probably shouldn’t have said to Whitey.
But she’d been young—or younger—since she still wasn’t thirty yet.
And she’d been in a na?ve lather of self-righteous rage over Whitey’s crimes.
“In the end, they subdued Whitey, gave him a shot of some kind of drug, and dragged him from the court. I wasn’t afraid of him.”
She looked into Dane’s eyes.
“Until now,” he said.
Shana nodded.
“Escaped?”
“No. They let him go. A lawyer got his sentence reduced. Got him out . . .” Her voice faded and she closed her eyes again.