Chapter 16
Elizabeth wanted to get paybacks with more physical violence against this man, but she also knew it was likely the only language he understood. Yet it wouldn’t change anything. She stepped back, looked at the other two, and said, “I need coffee.”
As she headed to the kitchen, the prisoner laughed at her. “You ain’t got the guts for this, do you?”
She didn’t want to have the guts for it. She didn’t want to be a person who ended up thinking this was the only way out of whatever nightmare they’d gotten themselves into. It wasn’t her way. It would never be her way. But she understood that, for some people, it was different, and violence would always be their way.
Standing in the kitchen a few minutes later, she poured coffee for the three of them. She heard the men talking in the other room, but she had absolutely no way to know if it was a good talk or an ugly talk. She didn’t trust the gunman, but not a whole lot he could do about it right now, and she was pretty sure that he wouldn’t ever see daylight.
If his partners in crime knew that he’d been compromised, she highly suspected they might take him out, but it wouldn’t be her job, or Masters either for that matter. She suspected he could kill quite easily, when provoked. Hell, after seeing that man here, in her home, and realizing what he’d done to her brother and what he was planning to do to her, she could kill him herself.
That had never been something she’d ever questioned. Murder was never something she would have dreamed she would ever consider. Yet it did help her to understand a lot of the world around her. When she realized just how messed up it was and how something like this could change things inside you, she saw very quickly how someone could turn from a peace-loving person into a protective mother lion. That was exactly how she felt just now.
As she sat here, staring out the window, Masters wrapped an arm around her and whispered, “Are you okay?”
She twisted to look up at him. “I am. I was just thinking about how quickly we can go from peaceful to violent in a heartbeat, especially when somebody close to us is endangered.”
“Absolutely,” he agreed. “That’s how revenge happens, and sometimes it can be a hard thing to stop. People always have their reasons. They always have what they consider as their priorities. Either they’ll make good on somebody else hurting somebody, or they’re starting off something they’ll finish. It doesn’t matter how it starts. It always ends up in a bad place, and you just don’t want to get caught up in it.”
“And what about you? Do you ever get caught up in that bad place?”
He shook his head. “It is a job for me,” he murmured. “I believe in justice, in right and wrong. I believe in the good guys winning. And the good guys need a little help sometimes,” he murmured, holding her close, his warm breath drifting down her cheek. “Sometimes I think I make a difference.”
She tilted her head back and smiled up at him. “I know you make a difference and not just sometimes,” she declared. “And it takes people like you to handle the assholes out there. I just know it’s not a job I could do.”
“And you don’t have to,” he noted. “It’s one of the reasons I do what I do—as long as it doesn’t bother you that I do it.”
She smiled and shook her head. “No, it doesn’t bother me. This work has to be done by someone, and my brother has already paved the way for it,” she pointed out, with a chuckle. “I’m more used to it than you might expect.”
“Good, then you won’t have a problem if I continue?”
“I would never ask you to do otherwise,” she stated. “This is who you are, and I would never take that away from you.”
He kissed her and nodded. “Our little victim out there, he’s talking up quite a storm.”
She asked, “Why?”
At that, Masters shrugged. “Sometimes they do that. Sometimes they hope we’ll go easy on them.”
“Only because he’s expecting to get slaughtered by his own people,” she pointed out. “That’s what his team would do to him.”
“I suspect it’s what they will do anyway,” he warned. “Guys like this, they understand that they can’t be left alive because they simply know too much. So, while he knows something, and he’s thinking that maybe what he knows is worth something, he’s trying hard to sell that bill of goods.”
“I don’t trust anything he says,” she muttered.
“And we’re not fools, so we know perfectly well what he’s doing.”
She smiled, then nodded. “Good. I’m not sure I want anything more to do with him though.”
“You can go up to your room,” he suggested.
“I am.”
“Somebody will take him to headquarters and then to lockup,” he explained, “and he won’t go to the regular lockup because we can’t take the chance. We have one down by our offices.”
“Interesting,” she said. “I don’t think my brother ever mentioned it.”
“No, he probably didn’t, but then there may not have been any need to either.” He chuckled and added, “Unless it’s something he thought you would benefit from knowing.”
“Obviously I don’t benefit from any of this,” she muttered. “Will you go too?”
“I’m not sure. If so, I will leave somebody here.”
She nodded. “It would be good if you could,” she whispered. “I just… It’s stupid. I don’t want to be scared. I don’t want to be afraid in my own home.”
“And you don’t have to be, but these are trying times. No matter what we might want or not want, this is a very difficult time. We obviously know that somebody was after you, so let’s not give them a chance.”
“You mean, another chance,” she clarified, with a wry look in his direction.
“Not another chance, but, hey, at least we got some sleep.”
“We got a bit more than sleep,” she noted. “We got a few minutes to ourselves.”
“And there will be more of those. I promise.”
She looked up at him and nodded but wasn’t sure she believed him. His job would always be the kind that took him away, and yet that was who he was, and she couldn’t change that. She wouldn’t change it because inherently it would be changing who he was too. And that she wouldn’t do. She carried the coffee cups out to the other room to see the gunman sitting there, still glaring at everybody.
When he saw the coffee, his face lit up.
She glared at him. “Did you ever give my brother a cup of coffee?” When he winced, she continued. “You’re probably the asshole who would throw it in his face, even knowing it could make his day a whole lot easier.”
“A lot of things could have made his day a whole lot easier,” he muttered, “but only if he hadn’t gone in the wrong direction in the first place.”
“There might be a cup of coffee for you if I thought you won’t be an asshole and go after me again.”
“It’s not likely that I would get you,” he sneered, “not with these guys around.”
“Yeah, I know, but I also understand that you might be somebody who would try, and I just don’t want to live with that right now,” she admitted, as she sat down.
“Oh, so I don’t get coffee. Like I give a shit.”
“You probably don’t give a shit about a whole lot.”
“I gave a shit about watching your brother suffer.”
She stiffened, then nodded, as she relaxed. “Sure you did. That’s what guys like you do, right? You victimize people, and, when they’re secure, and they are tied up and can’t fight back or even defend themselves, you beat them up. It’s the only way to make yourself feel like a big man because inside you’re a piece of shit. Your own mama would never look you in your face, and your dad would have dumped you somewhere alongside the road.”
“My dad did dump me alongside the road,” he snapped, glaring at her. “And don’t you talk about my mama.”
“Yeah? I wonder how your mama would feel about you now?” she asked, studying him.
“She would be just fine. She knows we’ve got to do what needs to be done, when life goes sour.”
“Yeah? What did my brother ever do to you?”
“What he was doing would have put away a bunch of us. So, he had to be stopped.”
She didn’t say anything, just waited.
“You don’t know, do you? Do you think that I just like to beat up people for kicks?”
“Yeah,” she replied. “That’s exactly what I think. It’s not as if you’ve said anything different.”
“I don’t have to say nothing.”
“Course not. I don’t care. I don’t even know if the authorities will be brought into this. The way these guys operate in the dark, chances are you’ll just disappear. Anybody you want us to write a note to?” Then she frowned and shook her head. “We can’t write a note either. So sorry, that’s just not happening.”
He glared at her and stiffened in his seat but didn’t say anything.
She continued to sip her coffee, as the other two men talked.
“Your brother deserved it.”
She stiffened, then relaxed again, knowing he was just out to get her goat. “Did he?” she asked, with a smile. “Interesting that we have such different views of it.”
“He stuck his nose where he shouldn’t have.”
“A young man was wrongfully convicted and then died,” she noted. “How much of that is sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong?”
He glared at her. “And now you know too much.”
She studied him over the rim of her cup. “I don’t know very much at all,” she replied. “I know you’re a piece of shit. I know that I will wake up in the morning, free and clear, and your life will be over, but what do you care? It’s the creed you’ve lived by all your life, isn’t it? And, when this is over, you don’t care if you live or die. Nobody ever cared about you, so why should you care about them?”
He glared at her, and she nodded.
“I’ve seen that kind before. The world owes you because you didn’t get that nice, warm little childhood. So, everybody out there, they owe you.”
“Nobody owes me shit,” he sneered. “You don’t know me at all.”
“Yeah, I do,” she argued. “You’re the guy who looks at someone like my brother, and he’s just nothing to you. You don’t see that he’s worked hard to help a guy in trouble for nothing that he did, somebody being pushed into something he didn’t do, charged with things that he had nothing to do with. And you don’t care because my brother went in a direction that you didn’t like, and you figured he should be taken out. It’s just that simple. He’s like this bug to be squashed, so let’s squash him.
“Yet the interesting thing is that that you didn’t squash him. It cost money, time, and effort to keep Nicholas hidden for four months, and you had a reason to do that. Time and effort aren’t something you’re good at. You want in, you want out, you want your money, then you want to go on to the next job,” she pointed out, with a shrug. “I get that. So why keep my brother alive? It’s not as if you cared. It’s not as if you had second thoughts. It’s not even as if you gave a shit about where he would eventually end up. You didn’t care if his body got eaten by coyotes or anything else,” she noted. “So why keep him? That’s what I don’t get.”
The voices around her stilled ever-so-slightly, and the gunman stared at her. “You don’t know nothing.”
“Nope, and you’re not telling me. I don’t give a shit about the rest of this. I don’t care about all these cases, cases my brother might have been involved in, nothing,” she shared. “I care about my brother, I care about what you did to him and why, and it’s the keeping him alive part that I don’t get,” she admitted. “There had to be a reason. I don’t think you make an extended effort like that without a payout, so what’s the payout?” she asked curiously, looking at him.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“Yeah, I would, but we’ll get there in time through this investigation. Maybe you fell in love with Nicholas, didn’t want to let him out of your life,” she suggested thoughtfully.
He looked at her in horror.
She shrugged. “Sometimes guys are like that, right? They fall in love with somebody, but maybe in this case you didn’t want to acknowledge that you’re gay or whatever. So you beat the crap out of Nicholas because, every time you saw him, you saw love, and you realized how much you hated yourself for what you’d become.” When he started sputtering, she just smiled and whispered, “That’s okay. I can keep your secret.”
He started screaming and roaring at her.
She smiled. “Now I think you protest too much.”
He fell silent, glaring at her.
“So, you are gay then,” she declared, with a mocking look at him. “You’re a big guy. I’m sure the guys in jail will love you.”
At that he shook his head. “I ain’t going to no jail.”
“You won’t go free,” she stated. “So what are your choices?”
He stared at her. “Maybe I will get free.”
“No, that isn’t happening. And your gravelly-voiced guy, he’s already dead.”
He sneered. “He deserved to die. He failed.”
“So did you,” she noted, eyeing him curiously. “I’m free, and you’re not exactly taking me back to wherever you’re supposed to go, are you? You failed. So what makes you think anybody will let you live?”
He stared at her and shook his head. “I’ve worked for them for a long time. This isn’t like a one-off job. It is a one-off job though,” he corrected himself. “It’s just that they know that I’m good for it. Even if this job screws up, it won’t matter none.”
“ It won’t matter none ,” she repeated, pressing the point. “Because you won’t be here anymore. You’ll be dead, by your own people’s hands. It doesn’t matter if you were good right before you messed up here. It won’t work for them because they can’t afford to have you screw this up, and that’s what you just did. You were supposed to take me in, but instead I’m not anywhere close to being taken in. You’re late. You’re not where you are supposed to be right now. Not with me. Not without me. So your bosses will know that you’re busy talking away to us. Now they’ll have to wonder what you told us. As far as I’m concerned, you’re not that stupid. So you know perfectly well how they’ll look at this. They know that you’re done, and I can’t say I blame them.”
“You don’t even know what you’re talking about,” he protested. “They know who I am and what I’m good for.”
“Sure. Until you were compromised,” she added. “Then all bets are off.”
“But I haven’t been compromised,” he pointed out, with a bright smile.
“They don’t know that.”
He stopped, glaring.
She nodded. “See? They don’t know you kept your mouth shut, and you can bet that we won’t be telling them that. We’ll be telling them about all the great things that you shared with us, how their gunman is gay, has a thing for the prisoners. We’ll see how they feel afterward.”
*
Masters didn’t know where she was getting all this psychological stuff from, but she was doing a hell of a job working up their gunman. Masters wasn’t even sure if the gay gunman would get through this without having a heart attack, now that she’d positioned it the way she had. Masters just watched and waited, and even Jasper waited to see what their captive would do.
The gunman looked over at Masters and snapped, “I want immunity.”
Masters’s eyebrows shot up. “I can’t give you immunity.” He looked over at Jasper. “I don’t think you can give him immunity either.”
Jasper laughed. “No, are you kidding? Not after what he did to one of our own team. He’s done for. That’s all there is to it. He’s done.”
The gunman started blubbering. “They’ll kill me.”
“Yeah, they probably will,” Jasper agreed.
Masters looked over at Elizabeth, just sipping her coffee, a blank look on her face. Yet he saw a tiny smile playing around the corner of her lips, as their visitor decided that maybe he should take another tack.
“I could help you.”
She snorted.
And, with that, he turned and glared at her. “I could.”
“I doubt it,” she replied. “We’ve already got pretty well all the information we need.”
“Yeah, but you don’t know anything about your brother,” he sneered. “I could tell you.”
“Yeah, but that would mean that I would have to believe you,” she pointed out, “and nothing so far tells me that you’re trustworthy enough to listen to. So, what do I care?”
“That’s not true,” he stated. “I have lots I can tell you, and there’s lots that you can learn. They do want him back, but he didn’t give them anything before. So I’m not sure that they’re terribly worried about it. They are a little worried about you though.”
She asked, “Why me? I don’t have anything.”
He nodded. “I told them that. I told them that I didn’t think you were worth fussing about, but they were all about making sure their loose ends were tied up.”
“So, think about that and your position,” she noted. “If they want loose ends tied up, where does that leave you?”
He paled and then nodded. “Okay, so maybe I’m not in as secure a position as I thought I would be.”
“Ya think?” she quipped.
He glared but turned to the men. “I could help with your investigation.”
“You haven’t told us anything helpful yet, so it’s not as if we have anything to go on.”
“They were looking for something at Nicholas’s house, and he wouldn’t tell them about it. The more they beat him up, the more he just shut up. They threatened him with hurting you, but, when they never followed through on any of their threats, I think he just didn’t play that game.”
“And did they say what they wanted?” Elizabeth asked.
“Now that he’s gone, I think they’ve decided that maybe they should check you out anyway.”
She shrugged. “It’s not as if I know anything. And, if my brother wouldn’t tell you, what makes you think I could?”
“Oh, you won’t withstand their version of torture,” he told her, with a sneer. “Women always think they can, until they start getting raped. At that point in time, they always give in.” When she stared at him in hatred, he nodded. “Y’all think you are so tough, but you’re not.”
“I can’t tell you what I don’t know, you idiot. So is that what that one asshole, Jim, used to do?”
He shrugged. “He liked women but in an ugly way.”
“He didn’t like women. He was scared of women,” she sneered. “Is that your problem too? You don’t want anybody to know you’re gay?”
At that, he lunged forward and fell over in his chair.
She laughed at him. “Do you think you’ll get anywhere in your situation?”
He stared at her, as the men set him upright again. “You’re pretty mouthy while I’m tied up. That’s the trouble. The minute I get untied, you can bet that you’ll pay for it.”
“Maybe, and maybe you’re the one who’ll pay. I just might have to keep my trusty little frying pan around.”
“Frying pan?” he asked, looking at her.
“Oh, didn’t you know that you got dropped by a woman with a frying pan?” Masters asked, laughing beside him.
The intruder turned and glared at him.
She walked over, picked it up, and showed it to him.
He shook his head. “That ain’t no weapon.”
“Yet it served its purpose. And right about now there isn’t anything I particularly want to hear from you. So, as far as I’m concerned, I’m going upstairs.” She turned and looked back at the men. “Unless you guys have a problem with that.”
“No, we don’t have a problem with it at all, unless you want to ask a few more questions.”
“Oh, I’ve got plenty of questions, but I doubt that he’ll answer them,” she stated, turning to look at him. “I would just as soon let his homophobic brothers have their fun with him. The guy who’s dead, Jim? It’s too bad because he probably would have raped you himself.”
“No, he wouldn’t,” the intruder snapped. Then he stopped and winced. “Actually he might have, if anybody got me down that long. Something was seriously wrong with that guy.”
“Ya think?” she quipped. “Yet you guys were totally okay to let him loose in this world.”
“Better to have somebody like that on our side instead of against us,” the intruder murmured. “Besides, your brother never did give up the information they wanted.”
“And what did they want?”
“They knew he’d been collecting information on a certain case, and they wanted it.”
“So they kept him for four months. Yet Nicholas held strong, huh ?” Jasper asked.
“This was all supposed to happen a whole lot earlier.”
“So, what changed?” he asked.
“Somebody got fired from a position, I believe,” the intruder shared, with a laugh. “And they lost access to something they desperately needed.”
At that, both Masters and Jasper straightened. “Access within the military?” Masters asked.
He nodded. “Somebody was in a position where they could get what they needed, and they were looking for information to delve into, for information on somebody, somebody who might have had a hand in a betrayal. And they wanted that information, and then they would make a move, but he got fired. He’s now dead because he couldn’t give them what they wanted. They lost it on him. I don’t know if killing him was intentional or not, but he’s dead. Then they were stuck finding somebody else, but they didn’t dare let go of your brother. And until that became an issue, well, now they’re basically back to square one.”
“So,” Elizabeth added, “they wanted the information, and they needed this other guy.”
“Yeah, he had part of it, and your brother had part of it, and, with the two parts together, they could solve their problem.”
“Does their problem have anything to do with a recent shooting on the airport at the base?” she asked.
He smiled. “You would love to know that, wouldn’t you?”
“An interesting thought,” she replied. “It’s hard to imagine that there would be this much shit going down on the base and not have it all connected somehow.”
He shrugged and yawned. “I would need a whole lot more assurances before talking about something like that.”
“Really? Chances are you don’t even know,” she stated. She got up and walked over to look out the window, and just then came a loud crack . Masters threw himself around her and flung her to the ground, landing on his back, as he rolled her over to the side, along the wall, out of the line of fire. Jasper had already gone out into the night, as she stared over at the man tied to the chair. “Oh my God,” she cried out.
“Don’t look,” Masters told her.
She turned her head in order to avoid looking, but it was hard. A perfect little brown hole appeared right between the intruder’s eyes, and he was already dead. She looked up at Masters and whispered, “That was his own people, wasn’t it?”
He nodded. “Absolutely.”
“Shit, will we ever be free of this?”
“We will,” he stated, “no doubt about it. And this?… This just takes the investigation up to a whole new level, but we’ll need to ship you out, until the case is settled and you’re safe and sound.”
She shook her head. “I’m staying right here. I’m staying right here with my brother.” Masters glared at her, and she glared right back. Then she smiled and whispered, “I have all the more reason in the world to fight now, so I’m not giving up.”
“It’s not always about giving up,” he pointed out, “but sometimes we have to leave it to fight another day.”
“This wasn’t about me,” she stated. “Obviously this latest gunman was here to get something from me, but this shooting? This was all about him and about making sure that he couldn’t talk, wasn’t it?”
Masters nodded. “He failed. And they don’t like failures.”
“Shit,” she muttered. “I can’t imagine a world like this, where these guys are just so empty inside that this is the sum total of their world.”
“Usually it’s about money or power or both, but, in this case, it might just be about revenge,” he suggested, as he looked back over at the dead man. “What is interesting is that, when he denied this being connected to Mason’s shooting, he was nodding his head.”
“I saw that, and that was weird. I think it was a message. Maybe a message to the guys outside or maybe he heard something because he was killed right afterward. Maybe it had everything to do with a silent yes for us.”
“The bottom line is that this investigation is about to kick into high gear.”
Wrapping her arms around him, and holding him tight, she whispered, “Thankfully my brother is out of that part of the investigation.”
“And we’ll keep guards on him,” Masters said.
“So, get them to move in a bed for me, and I will stay there with him,” she suggested. “And, when it’s safe to come back here, we’ll come back together.”
He looked down at her, a frown on his face.
She shook her head. “Let’s at least be sensible moving forward. I’m not leaving my brother. I lost out on months and months with him. I’ll stay there with him at the hospital. You’ve already got Tesla with her husband, so put me and my brother right next door, and keep the guards on all four of us. I’ll always be wary, always be protective, but you can bet that nobody’s coming back after my brother. Not again,” she declared, “not after what he’s been through.”
Masters smiled at her and tapped her on the chin. “You do get protective.”
“You know it,” she stated, with a smile in his direction. “And I wield a mighty and dangerous fry pan.”
He burst out laughing and held her close.
She whispered as she looked up at him, her arms around his neck. “Besides, this way, if we want to, we can always sneak off to a hotel room. At least we found each other.”
He kissed her and smiled. “That we did. Now we just have to stay safe.”
“Not a problem,” she agreed. “Maybe you have other people you can hire to help out, guys you trust.”
“Jasper and I do have a couple. We’re slowly bringing our friends over to work in the department here on base,” he shared, with a laugh. “Not that everybody here is somebody we can’t trust, but—”
“I know. The minute there’s that lack of trust though, it’s hard, isn’t it?”
“It is,” he murmured.
“Stay close, huh ?”
He chuckled as he held her close and whispered, “Like Velcro.”
“Sounds good to me,” she murmured.
In the distance, they heard the emergency vehicles, and he sighed, now sitting her up with him. “And now the chaos begins.”
“That’s okay,” she claimed, “because, in this storm, in the midst of it all, you’re the calm in the center.”
He smiled and looked down at her. “I can’t believe we found each other, with all this happening.”
“I know,” she murmured, “yet somehow it feels that we were never apart.”
“I agree with you there.” He stood and turned, with her still in his arms, to face the next step in this craziness. “Here goes.”
And, with that, the front door burst open, and several team members raced in.
Masters looked over at Jasper, saw the expression on his face, and Masters nodded. “We need somebody else.”
“I know,” Jasper confirmed. He faced Elizabeth and sighed. “I don’t know quite what to do with you though.”
“We’ve already got a solution for that,” Masters replied, with a smile, “if you’re okay with it.” Then he quickly brought up her plan.
Jasper frowned, then shrugged. “We already have to protect the rest of them, so we might as well. Pack up a bag. Looks like you’ll stay at the hospital for a few days.”
She smiled and kissed Masters, then said, “I’ll be right back.”
“I’m coming with you.” He looked back at Jasper and added, “We need to get some new men, at least two, I think.”
Jasper nodded. “I’ll take care of it.”
“I do have suggestions.”
“Don’t worry. I already know who we should ask for.”
“Who’s that?” Masters asked.
“Gideon first.”
“You got that right,” Masters agreed, with a laugh. “Bring him in. At least then we’ll know what we’re dealing with.” And, with that, he raced upstairs to get Elizabeth packed, so that they could get her to the hospital and safety, ready for whatever else would come.
When he walked into her bedroom, she threw her arms around him, caught him in a big kiss, and muttered, “I just had to do that.”
He chuckled, holding her close. “Come on. Let’s go get you settled.”
“I am settled,” she declared, “at least on the inside.”
And, with her bag quickly packed, he led her downstairs and out into their very bright future.