Killing Time (One-Eyed Jacks), page 4
She was a ball breaker, all right. New tactic. “Do we have a timetable for when these cuffs come off?” he asked point-blank.
No answer.
“Okay, fine. Could I at least have a drink of water while you work it out in your head? I’m bone dry here.”
She thought for a moment, then finally stood and walked hesitantly across the room toward a door he suspected was the bathroom.
The fact that she was willing to show him a little mercy told him reams about her. No self-respecting tango, street thug, or banger would give two rips about his poor parched throat. While it was clear she could handle herself, this particular skill was not her bailiwick—and knowing that only made him more pissed that he’d let her get the drop on him.
As soon as she turned her back to him, he went to work on the flex cuffs, hoping that all the hours of competitions he and the guys used to stage paid off. There had been a lot of down time between missions, a lot of hurry up and wait. You could only play so many games of cards and basketball, so you got creative. Flex cuffs were plentiful and tying each other up and trying to beat each other’s escape times provided not only a diversion but a skill set that might come in handy one day.
Looked like today was the day his uncontested speed record was going to be put to the real test. And when she closed the bathroom door behind her—a stroke of luck that the lady needed some privacy—he made full use of the window of opportunity.
Pressing the inside of his wrists together, he wedged his right thumbnail under the edge of the first of a line of tiny teeth that locked into the plastic band on the catch on his left hand. Stretching, he tipped his head back so he could see what he was doing, then glanced toward the bathroom door when he heard a flush and then the sound of water running.
He had to move fast. Straining to get the right angle, he repeatedly worked his nail over the first tooth until it finally gave and slipped under the catch. The left cuff loosened a fraction of an inch. He repeated the process. Another tooth gave. Another breath of room.
He had the feel of it now. Like riding a bicycle. He repeatedly wedged his thumbnail under the next tooth, pressed, felt it give and immediately loosened another tooth, then another, and another . . .
The bathroom door swung open. He let his wrists go limp so she wouldn’t suspect what he was up to.
She walked to the bed, a glass of water in one hand, his gun in the other.
Tricky, but doable.
Eyes narrowed and wary, she hesitated.
“Like I can do anything trussed like a chicken on a spit,” he grumbled. “Please. Give me a drink.”
He put plenty of helplessness in his tone. Added a dose of self-pity in his eyes.
Scowling, she finally leaned over him, extending the glass toward his mouth.
He lifted his head and drank deeply. Because he was thirsty. And because he wanted to give her a reason to let down her guard.
“Thanks,” he said, appearing to be clearly defenseless and so fucking appreciative he wanted to gag. “More. Please.” Oliver Twist at his humble best.
She didn’t hesitate this time. She leaned a little closer, extended the glass. And he struck.
He jerked his left hand free of the loosened plastic loop, knocked the gun across the room, grabbed her hair with his other hand, and jerked her down on the mattress.
Water flew everywhere; glass shattered on the tile floor. She scrambled to get away but before she knew she’d been had, he flipped her onto her back, straddled her hips, and pinned her wrists above her head.
She put up a good fight, and she didn’t fight like a girl. She had some serious moves but he had size, physical strength, and a big dose of pissed-off on his side.
She bucked, jabbed with her elbows and attacked with her knees, giving him all he could handle until he finally managed to secure the cuffs around her wrists, loop them over the head rail, and jerk them tight.
Breathing hard, he pushed himself off her and off the bed. Not fast enough to avoid her flying feet, though. She clipped his cheek good with a boot heel and damn near knocked him on his ass.
Swearing, staggering, and gingerly touching his fingers to his cheekbone, he grabbed his gun from the floor, found his one-eyed jack, and tucked it in his pocket.
“So . . .” Sucking wind and grinning in the face of her anger and his pain, he dropped into the chair at the foot of the bed. “Welcome to my world.”
6
Of all the stupid moves, Eva couldn’t believe she’d let Brown get the drop on her. She knew what kind of an operative he’d been, knew not to let down her guard around him. But because she had, now her head was on the chopping block instead of his.
The sense of dread that had dogged her all the way to Peru went off the charts. Anger quickly outdistanced it. The bastard was enjoying this. She felt only a small measure of satisfaction as she watched his cheekbone redden and swell where she’d nailed him with her boot.
A good five minutes had passed since he’d cuffed her to the bed. Once he’d caught his breath, he hadn’t wasted time searching the room.
He didn’t find much. She’d been careful. If she was right and she’d been followed to Lima, she didn’t intend to make it easy for her shadow to find her—which wouldn’t make it easy for Brown to find out anything about her, either, and that, too, was by design. She didn’t want him knowing her real identity. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
To make certain, she’d rented the room by the hour. Paid cash and used one of her fake IDs. Multiple passports and extra cash were stashed in a locker at the airport, the combination committed to memory. So he wasn’t going to find anything to identify her here. But he did find the extra doses of Ketamine she’d brought along for insurance. And he’d found her Glock 19 in her purse, which meant he now had all the firepower.
Both handguns lay on a squat table he’d shoved against the wall near the foot of the bed, where he stood now—out of reach of her feet. He held a full syringe in his hand, playing with it, playing with her head.
“Ve have vays of making you talk,” he said with an arched brow and the worst German accent she’d ever heard.
The hard look in his eyes overrode his sick sense of humor. She had to stay strong. “Ooo. That was original.”
“I don’t have to be original.” He considered the needle. Considered her.
Now he was making her nervous. “You’re not going to use that on me.” She hoped to God she was right.
“Give me one good reason not to.”
She tried to get comfortable and felt a brief moment of guilt over how long she’d kept him bound in this very same position. It hurt her shoulders—and she didn’t have the added discomfort of once having had hers dislocated. “You won’t get any answers if you knock me out.”
“Maybe I don’t want answers.” The German accent and the joking were long gone as he slowly raked his gaze over her body. “Maybe, after all the shit you put me through, I want what you promised to deliver back at the cantina.”
A sick feeling slid through her stomach. “You need to drug and rape your bed partners to get a little action these days, do you?”
“Listen to all that judgmental scorn from the woman who didn’t hesitate to use a needle on me.” His smile was ugly. His voice was so soft and chilling it made her shiver—especially when he moved closer . . . a prowling, pissed-off lion. “Enough playing around. Talk to me, chica. I’ve reached the end of my patience. Who are you, how did you get your hands on that file, and what do you really want from me?”
He looked dangerous now. Unreasonably gorgeous and mean, suddenly, as the anger that flashed in his eyes turned to an arctic cold rage. “Talk or I walk. Right after I tape your mouth shut and give this wad of cash to the desk clerk of this fine establishment and tell him not to disturb you until the money runs out.”
He held up the bills he’d dug out of the front pocket of her jeans—another experience that hadn’t lacked in humiliation. “This ought to buy a good ten days of uninterrupted solitude, don’t ya think?”
She made herself hold his gaze. “You wouldn’t do that. You wouldn’t leave me here to die.” Or for whoever wanted her silenced to find her defenseless.
He shoved the cash into his hip pocket. “I’m a cold-blooded murderer, remember? Wasn’t that the gist of the charges you leveled against me?”
When she didn’t say anything, he walked to the door. “Suit yourself.”
“All right.” She was suddenly afraid he would leave her. After what she’d done to him, could she really blame him? “All right,” she repeated when he hesitated with his hand on the door knob and waited.
She swallowed. He didn’t need to know the whole truth. Not until she knew if there was even a prayer of trusting him. “You were right. I did lose someone that day. A friend.”
He got very quiet. Then he leaned heavily against the door and waited for her to tell him.
“Ramon Salinas,” she finally confessed, unable to control the tremor in her voice. She hadn’t spoken Ramon’s name aloud for a very long time, and it hurt every bit as much as she’d thought it would.
For a long moment they were both quiet—both of them assaulted by their own thoughts about Ramon. When she’d recovered enough to look at him, she realized that he hadn’t recovered at all. His somber gaze searched her face.
“How did you know Salinas?”
There had been bad blood between the two men. A part of the reason she so despised Brown was because of the stories Ramon had told her about him. Ramon had told her that Brown had always done everything he could to undermine him—whether it was throwing wrenches in his bids for promotion, questioning his authority, or cutting into his action with women—before Ramon had met her, of course.
She’d had no reason to doubt Ramon. He’d told her that Brown was a hot dog and an egomaniac who took unnecessary risks with other people’s lives—risks that, according to the file that had shown up so mysteriously a month ago, had gotten Ramon and all those others killed.
She had to focus. “He didn’t like you much.”
He grunted. “You’re pulling punches now? The man hated my guts.”
“He told me you were a hotshot and a wild card. He even told me that you were probably going to get him killed one day.”
That had been right before he’d returned to Afghanistan for a second deployment and hooked up with the One-Eyed Jacks again. It was on that deployment that Operation Slam Dunk disintegrated and Ramon had died.
“So you figure that’s exactly what I did,” he surmised correctly.
Still slumped against the door, he looked exhausted with the weight of Ramon’s memory. “How did you know him?” he asked again with a closed expression.
“I did a story on him,” she lied. She refused to give Brown the advantage of knowing how she and Ramon were really connected. “When he was home recovering from—”
“Shrapnel from an IED,” he interrupted with a war-worn look in his eyes. “Took a hit in his leg in a skirmish outside Kabul. It sent him back stateside for a couple months.”
“That’s when I met him. While he was recuperating.” That part was true. “He gave me an interview.” That part wasn’t. What he’d given her was a ring. They’d been married three months when he redeployed to Afghanistan.
She flinched when Brown pushed away from the door and walked back to the chair. Eyes on hers, he stood behind it, gripped the back with both hands, and leaned on it heavily. “Try again. Active duty Spec Ops soldiers don’t give interviews.”
He was right. She had to pull it together if she wanted to convince him to believe her. “It was strictly anonymous. I never referred to him by name. It was more of an overview . . . the perspective of a soldier on the ground.”
“Did you drug him, too, to get him to talk?”
She expelled a deep breath. “I’m sorry about that.” It was a lie and she’d do it again in a heartbeat. She didn’t have time to be nice. Nor was she particularly inclined.
She seldom was. Nice wasn’t her thing.
He considered her with a hard look. “Now you’re sorry? I don’t think so. You wanted your pound of flesh. You’re happy as hell you made me suffer. That’s why you came looking for me, right? To make me pay?”
She wanted him to suffer, all right, the way she’d suffered after losing Ramon eight years ago.
It had taken a long time to work through the grief. But she’d finally moved on. Then a month ago the file on Operation Slam Dunk with all of its conflicting information had dropped into her hands . . . and somebody spooky had landed on her ass. From that moment to this one, her entire world had shifted.
Eight years ago, she’d been told that Ramon had died on a routine training mission. That he’d made a careless mistake that had cost him his life. So all this time, she’d believed a lie that had told her Ramon had not died a hero’s death, but one caused by his own carelessness.
The OSD file blew the lie to smithereens. The “official after-action report” on Operation Slam Dunk, signed off on by the Spec Ops commander, said that Ramon had died on a reconnaissance mission in Helmand Province. A mission that had turned into a bloodbath when Mike Brown had defied orders.
And yet, while the official after-action report laid all the blame squarely on Mike Brown’s shoulders, he’d vehemently denied any wrongdoing in his pretrial statements. That denial had compelled her to look deeper.
Nothing she’d found out said Brown wasn’t guilty. But every new piece of information she’d uncovered raised more questions. Then the shadow had appeared, and her sources had dried up. Someone had been following her ever since, and Eva didn’t have a doubt in her mind that her own life was in danger.
Just like she had no doubt that her shadow had followed her to Lima. She’d never seen the spook, but so help her God, she could almost smell the guy.
She jerked her head front and center when Brown snapped his fingers, commanding her attention. “You’re drifting, chica. We were talking about Ramon.”
She cleared her mind, tried to pick up the thread of their conversation. “Ramon talked to me because he was a friend of my brother’s.” Another lie, but she was determined to stay this course and somehow regain her advantage.
“How were they friends?” he asked, grilling her the way she’d grilled him. “Your brother in the military?”
“What does it matter?” she snapped. She didn’t want to go down this path. It left her open to more scrutiny. “He was a friend, okay?”
He spun the chair around and straddled it. “Seems like maybe a lesson in hostage etiquette is in order. You shouldn’t get testy with me, Pamela. Remember, I’m the one holding the needle this go-round.”
7
Eva breathed deep, regained her composure, and stared him down.
He dragged a hand through his too-long hair, brushing it off his face. Between the hair and his much more than a five o’clock shadow, he looked ragged and worn and still ridiculously gorgeous. His eyes were bright and clear now. The Ketamine had worn off.
“Fine,” he said when her silence made it obvious she planned to stick with her story. “Ramon was a friend. You hate me because he died. Got it. So, what? You plot for eight years to find me and tell me what a horrible person I am? Sorry. I’m not buying that.”
When she said nothing, he studied her face intently, and when he finally spoke he sounded thoughtful, even a little sad. “Did you come here to kill me, chica?”
“If I’d wanted you dead, I’d have put something with a little more kick in that syringe. I told you. I’m doing a story. A tribute to Ramon. A retrospective,” she said, restating her original lie, then adding a little extra, working him. “And I waited eight years because I’ve been on assignment in the Middle East. You might have heard? There are wars on terror, uprisings, military coups breaking out everywhere?”
“You know how it is. Us bottom-feeders tend to live under rocks. We miss things.” He gave her a considering look as he gingerly touched his fingers to the swelling under his eye. “Okay. Because you’re so entertaining, I’ll play along. You’ve been a busy little war correspondent. But now you’re back on Ramon’s story. Please, do enlighten me more.”
“In the process of doing research about Ramon and his deployments, I was given access to several military documents.” Another bold-faced lie. She’d never been given access to anything. If it hadn’t been for that top-secret file showing up out of the blue on that flash drive—no explanation, no return address, no postmark, because it had been delivered by a courier service that had conveniently lost all information about the sender—she would have never opened up this particular can of worms.
His eyes sharpened on hers. He clearly suspected that she was lying about how she’d gotten the files, yet for some reason, he played along. “And they handed over the OSD file. Just like that.”
Relieved that his skepticism seemed to have transitioned to interest, she pressed on with her lie. “No. Not just like that. My guess is they intended to supply me with a press-ready overview of the operations run since the war started. Your basic homogenized and carefully culled material. Declassified, redacted, and already made public in some form. They weren’t supposed to give me the Operation Slam Dunk file.”
His face paled again at the mention of the file. “Then how did you get it? That file isn’t supposed to exist anymore.”
“It exists. I read it.”
His expression grew grimmer. She’d already proven how much she knew about him with information that could only have come from the file.
“Okay.” He conceded the point. “Let’s back up. Who are they? Who gave you the information?”
“I don’t reveal my sources.” She couldn’t if she wanted to. She didn’t know who her benefactor was or what his or her motive was for dropping the bomb in her lap that had led her here to Lima and Brown.
“It’s so reassuring to know that you have some professional code of ethics—drugs and flex cuffs notwithstanding.” He lifted a shoulder. “But that could just be me, splitting hairs.”
