Chapter 3
Fear doused her bloodstream like kerosene on a fire.
She opened her mouth to speak, her jaw trembling instead.
She had no weapon, nothing to defend herself.
She thought of the gun upstairs in its old cigar box.
There was a baseball bat in the garage, some hundred yards away. Knives in a drawer well out of reach.
She forced one word past the tightness in her throat. “Selena?” Every neuron in her brain was telling her to run, but her legs were full of concrete, her body plastered to the floor.
No one answered.
It wasn’t her daughter, but someone was there.
Her fingers reached out, finding the back of a dining chair and curling around its worn spindles.
She lifted it to her chest. When she spoke again, her voice was nearly unrecognizable, the register deep, the cadence slow and commanding. “Get out of my house!”
Her words had the trespasser moving, chairs banging into tables in an invisible line across the room.
He was heading right for her. She hurled the chair into the air, a startled grunt as it connected with its target, something metal and heavy hitting the floor.
She grabbed another chair, holding it as she had the first like a lion tamer at an old-time circus.
A loud crash erupted behind her and she jumped, reflexively spinning toward it, but strong arms locked around her waist from behind.
She wrestled against the fierce hold as her attacker ripped the wooden legs from her hands and threw the chair aside.
He smelled musky, with a thick overlay of spicy deodorant.
Before she could even think, she was slammed facedown against a table with such force, the wind emptied from her lungs in a rush.
This is how it ends.
Memories mixed with the present. The ocean waves were pulling at her, the weight of the car dragging her down.
“Mommy?”
Her daughter’s voice pulled her out of her own head.
Selena must have followed her downstairs.
“Run!” she choked out, desperate for her little girl to get to safety.
“Get Bill!” Half lifting her body and pulling her arm back, she landed a punch on flesh-covered bone.
She didn’t know where she’d hit him and quickly realized she needn’t have bothered.
He grabbed her shirt and lifted her off the ground like a rag doll.
The first blow came out of nowhere, hitting her jaw and slamming her teeth together with brutal force. She tasted blood. After that, they landed in quick succession, her face battered between bare knuckles like a walnut being shaken in a jar.
Her mind fell into an abyss, fear and sensation blurring into a thick haze that obliterated thought and sensation completely. She was in a car full of cold water, rocking with the waves, darkness and fear taking her breath away.
“Let her go!” Bill’s familiar voice sounded so distant she couldn’t tell if she dreamed it was there.
But her attacker relented and she came around enough to realize Bill was really there—really there and pointing a gun at them.
The smallest red light shone from the doorway, the laser sight of a rifle.
Bill was a Navy SEAL, long since retired, with an extensive collection of weapons.
He was a force to be reckoned with, even now, and in that moment she forgot her earlier worries about his health.
He was strong and capable. He would protect her.
Bill fired, an explosive boom filling the room with a painfully loud sound wave. Jackie’s hands covered her ears, a startled gasp escaping as the man fell to the ground in front of her, some part of him landing on her feet.
“He was reaching for the gun on the floor,” said Bill, his silhouette moving toward her, the strange outline of his night vision goggles clear to her when he turned his head. “Are you all right?”
“I think so. Is he dead?”
“Yes.”
“Do you recognize him? Is it…?”
“Mama…” Selena cried from the doorway.
“Go ahead. I’m going to see if I can fix the lights,” said Bill. Jackie ran to Selena, bumping into tables in her haste to get to the girl, squinting against the light as she pulled Selena tightly against her chest. She buried her face in her daughter’s hair. “Shh. It’s okay now. It’s okay.”
Selena sniveled. “I got Bill like you asked me to.”
“Shh. I know. You did good, sweetie. You did real good.” Jackie’s hands trembled as she stroked Selena’s back, her mind desperate to make some sense of what had just happened.
It had been years since she’d feared for her life, but her mind went right back there as if no time had passed at all, no safety having ever been attained.
Who was that man? As much as she wanted to believe it was a random act of violence that brought him here, she couldn’t allow herself the luxury of such na?veté.
No, a storm was coming, far larger than the atmospheric one raging toward them over the ocean.
A different kind of storm that wouldn’t allow her such an easy escape.
She could see now, the peace she’d found in Mexico was nothing more than a veil that had separated her from reality, the fabric far too easily pulled back to reveal the danger that was waiting.
There could be others lurking nearby. She shivered and hugged her daughter closer to her, taking comfort in the girl’s steady breathing and the warmth of her body.
Thank God Bill was with them. He was the only other person besides her daughter Jackie considered family. He would protect them. Keep them safe.
They stayed that way for long minutes, until Selena’s tears stopped falling and her grip on Jackie’s shirt loosened.
She was asleep. Jackie didn’t want to put her down, didn’t want to go into the other room, didn’t want to see the dead man and contemplate what would happen next.
So she stayed where she was, listening as Bill moved around, the door opening and closing, wondering what he was doing and not really wanting to know.
She didn’t know how long it had been when Bill came back, entering with a limping gait.
Sweat had soaked through his shirt at his underarms and chest, and his brows were lowered over his heavily flushed face.
He laid a small photograph on the table beside her.
A picture taken many years earlier, Jackie leaning back against the porch railing at the house she’d shared with Doug in San Diego, her expression carefully blank.
She picked up the picture, remembering the scene well.
She’d been angry with Doug over a campaign speech he’d made at the town hall meeting, the memory feeling strangely like it belonged to someone else.
“Where did you get this?” she asked, her voice barely more than a whisper.
“In the dead guy’s pack, which also has more military gear than a SEAL on a mountaintop in Kandahar. And the .45 semiautomatic on the floor.”
The noise she’d heard when she threw the chair, the weapon he’d been reaching for when Bill shot him. She’d known it already, hadn’t she? If her attacker hadn’t dropped it, should would be dead right now. She swallowed against the dryness in her throat. “He came here for me.”
“Yes.”
She stared at nothing, her pulse racing. The man who attacked her was dead, but this could only be the beginning. “What now?”
“We get rid of the body, try to buy us some time. I’ll drive it up to the cliffs and dump it into the ocean. I already got it in the back of my truck.”
No wonder he was red. “You shouldn’t be lifting so much.” Her words sounded silly, the guidelines his cardiologist had given him now seemingly irrelevant. But he didn’t look well—hadn’t looked well in weeks. “Are you having any chest pain?”
“I’m fine.” He turned to leave the room.
“How bad is it?”
He turned around with a sigh. “Let me take care of this guy, then you can worry all you want about me. But for now I’ve got to get this done.
” He moved to leave the room but stopped before reaching the doorway, groaning as he grabbed his chest. “Goddamn it.” He moved to sit down, half falling onto the floor.
“Bill!” She quickly put down the sleeping Selena and crossed to him.
“Stupid ticker,” he grunted. “Goddamn it!”
“I’m calling an ambulance.”
He grabbed her shirt. “Wait. We can’t let the first responders in here! They’ll see all that blood.”
“We can’t wait to call them.” She moved for the phone.
“Help me outside. Pull my truck around back, and get that body out of here first chance you get.” He winced. “Before daybreak. Make sure nobody sees you.”
She couldn’t imagine how she would do that on her own, but it hardly seemed relevant right then. Bill was having a heart attack, his third since he’d come to live with them five years before. “Okay.”
“I already searched the grounds. No sign of anyone else.” His face contorted in pain and he cursed colorfully. “Call Mac O’Brady. The number’s in my phone. Tell him we need a couple of his best guys down here to protect you. They’re SEALs. Retired, like me, but younger. They do private security.”
She was panicked now. He was talking like he wouldn’t be here himself to do it, and she feared he would not. “You’ll call him yourself when you’re able.”
He snapped at her. “Now, Jackie! Call him now, before they realize this guy took the express train to kingdom come, and they send someone else after you.”
He was right. She nodded vigorously. “Just as soon as we get you an ambulance.”
“Then get rid of the body.”
“I will.”
He closed his eyes and she took his wrists firmly in her hands, grateful for the hardwood floors that made dragging him a possibility as her mind worked to catch up on the night’s developments. She wasn’t safe here anymore, there was a chance Bill would die, and she needed to dispose of a body.
Navy SEALs coming to her rescue.
Some guy named Mac O’Brady.
Strangers in her home.
She threw open the door. It was as if she’d opened Pandora’s box, wind whipping grains of sand at her face as thunder rolled in the distance.
With a strength she didn’t know she had, she dragged Bill over the threshold and across the wooden porch, then raced back for her phone and dialed the ambulance.