Chapter 3
“What if they find me?” asked the man, his shoulders hunched and his eyes wide. The tracks of recent tears were visible on his cheeks.
Colin felt sorry for him. It was one thing to sit across the table from a mobster or a drug runner.
Javier Martinez was an academic who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Colin leaned back in his chair and gave his most confident look.
“They won't. But if you are ever threatened, you call us and we move you immediately.”
“My family...”
“Your wife and kids can come, too.”
Martinez looked into his lap.
Picking up his coffee, Colin took a sip and waited. It was a difficult decision to wrap your head around. He had often wondered if he himself could do it—walk away from everyone he knew, leave behind all that he had worked for and start completely over.
Martinez raised his head and fixed Colin with a penetrating stare. “Has anyone in the program ever been killed?”
“No one who followed the rules has ever been killed.”
“The rules.”
“Yes. No contact with anyone from your former life. Not friends, not family outside of those who are moved with you, not colleagues from work. No one.”
“I'm a scientific researcher. I publish several times a year...”
“That will have to stop.”
Martinez's face contorted.
Colin had sat here before, watched other men wrestle with the decision to give up everything in exchange for their safety. He didn't envy Martinez, and he didn't judge him his grief.
“I need to talk to my wife.”
“Of course. Would you like me to get her now?”
He nodded.
Colin pushed back his heavy metal chair and stood up, grabbing his coffee as he went. At the door, he stopped and turned back to the other man. “I'm sorry you have to make this decision, Mr. Martinez.”
Colin walked down a corridor, crumpling his coffee cup as he went.
His stomach burned from the brew and his morning’s work.
Cases like this were his undoing. Everything the Martinez family had worked to build was about to be abandoned, leaving only the people themselves to carry on.
It was unfair. It was horrific. It was just another day at the office.
He had become a U.S. Marshal to make a difference, to be a champion for the innocent. The simple reality was far less heroic. Colin stepped into a waiting room and closed the door behind him. “Mrs. Martinez, your husband would like to see you.”
She raised bloodshot eyes to his. “What happens if Javier doesn't testify?”
He had been expecting the question. They always asked. He perched a hip on the table. “He'll be free to go back to his life.”
“They'll leave us alone if he doesn't testify.”
“They might.” She was young, maybe late twenties.
Too young to walk away from her mother and father, to have her children grow up without grandparents.
“But the man who took a picture of your little girls getting off the school bus still knows where you live, still knows their names and what they look like. Are you comfortable with that?”
Her bottom lip quivered as she spoke. “I haven't been comfortable with anything since my husband watched that man on the subway get shot to death.”
“Mrs. Martinez, I wish I could undo what's been done already, but I can't. All I can do is offer you and your family a way through this.”
“We’ll lose everything.”
“You'll have a fresh start.”
She put the back of her hand to her lips. “Officer...”
“Deputy Mitchell.”
“Deputy Mitchell,” she said, looking very serious, “what would you do if you were Javier?”
How he wished in that moment that he could wipe this away, make it as though it had never happened. What he was offering was the next best thing. “I would enter the program, Mrs. Martinez. I wouldn't be here if I didn't believe in it. WITSEC can give you a new life.”
“I don't want a new life, I want my old one.”
It pained him to say the words that needed to be said. “That's already gone.”
Colin was sitting at his desk doing paperwork when the thought of Gwen went through him in a rush of heat. He lifted his pen and raised his head, exhaling like a man who'd been kicked in the stomach. Her remembered her scent, the breeze in her hair. Could feel her eyes on his, uneasy.
Sometimes he went weeks, or even months, without thinking of her this way. Then suddenly she'd be there, her presence as tangible to him as if she had been leaning over the desk.
Naked.
Not that Colin had ever seen Gwen naked, but he had pictured it more times than he could count. That woman excited him like no other ever had, and he'd never even touched her.
He had come close once, though.
Colin shook his head as if to clear it and turned to the clock. An hour past quitting time. He cleaned off his desk, then stood and pulled his suit coat over his dress shirt, flipping the collar down in one practiced motion.
There was no point in going home now. Already, his mind was shutting down all rational thought so he could wallow in memories of his dead friend's wife. Gwen's blue-gray eyes laughed at him in his mind, like a bride waiting to be taken to bed.
Bride waiting to be taken to bed? What the hell are you thinking?
He was saved from his own thoughts by the ringing of his cell phone. Glancing at the caller ID, he saw it was his brother, Rowan.
“How does he know?” Colin said to himself.
He would swear, all he had to do was think of Gwen and his brother would come to her virtual rescue, more than fifteen years after the fact.
The thought put him back in time, on the patio overlooking the river as he teetered on the edge of sanity itself.
His body so close to Gwen's back, he could feel the heat of her along his entire torso like an intimate caress.
He reached up tentatively toward her arm, inching closer. Colin had wanted this for so long, had wanted this woman since the moment he saw her. The fabric of her dress grazed his sensitive palm and his eyes closed in anticipation of the touch.
Rowan's voice behind him was fierce. “Colin!”
Colin had been so frustrated. Angry. He spent the rest of the evening drinking heavily and trying to catch Gwen's eye, until Rowan pulled him into a bedroom.
“What the hell are you doing?” asked Rowan, hands on his hips.
“None of your goddamn business,” said Colin, aware of the slight slur in his speech.
“David's our friend, Gwen is his fiancé, and you are so far out of line it's not funny. That makes it my business.”
Colin's ears started to ring. “They're engaged?”
Rowan nodded. “And you'd better not screw this up for David. Do you hear me?”
Indignation rose up inside him. “I wasn't the only one out on that veranda.”
“You were the one whose hands were in the wrong place, brother.”
“She wanted me to touch her.”
“Bullshit.”
“She did.”
Rowan shook his head and ran his hand through his thick dark hair. “Did she say that?”
“Not exactly.”
“Not exactly. What are you, a freakin' mind reader?”
Colin didn't answer, just stared at him.
“Fuck this.” Rowan pulled his wallet out and shoved money at his brother. “I'm calling you a cab. Go to Dante's, or Michelle's, or whatever. But you can't stay here.”
“I'm not going anywhere.”
Rowan pointed his finger at Colin's chest. “You are, if I have to throw your ass in the cab myself.”
Colin got in Rowan's face. Colin was bigger across the shoulders, stronger any day of the week. “You and what army?”
David stepped into the open doorway. “This army,” he said quietly.
Colin stared at David, as much a brother to him as Rowan ever was. Colin had known him for as long as he could remember, had lived with him for more than ten years after David’s father went away, loved him like family. Colin swallowed against the knot in his throat.
Gwen was a fantasy, the woman he wanted and could never have. David was so much more. Colin looked at the floor, raising his hands in surrender as the room pitched violently to one side. “Okay. I'll go.”
Regret washed over him as he stared unseeing at his ringing phone. That was the last time he had seen David alive. He shook his head as he answered the phone. “Hey, Rowan. What’s up?”
When Colin left the office, he'd gone to the gym and picked up two games of racquetball in an attempt to exorcise the Ghost of Gwen.
When that didn't work, he bought a six-pack of Stella Artois and had himself a private party out on the veranda, watching the Friday night boat traffic glide across the river and wondering what might have happened if he'd confronted that woman all those years ago.
It was a pastime he rarely allowed himself, thinking about Gwen. He preferred to live his life in the here and now, with real live women who existed right in front of him and didn't make him feel like half of some mystic puzzle they had no intention of putting together.
Colin stood at the kitchen sink, washing out the tall pilsner glass that had been his weapon of choice last night. Only in the last few hours was he starting to feel better, the emotions that had come to a boil now cool and relenting.
It was time to get over Gwen Trueblood.
Maybe he should think about settling down, finding a woman to love and get married.
Since Rowan married Tamra and had the baby, Colin was feeling decidedly envious.
There was something nice about being part of a couple, having a family of your own.
He turned around and took in the kitchen of his grandmother’s house where he had lived alone for the better part of a decade.
He wasn’t lonely, exactly. He just wanted something better, even if he couldn’t imagine having those things with anyone other than Gwen. He cursed out loud at the direction his thoughts were taking again. He would not do this.