Save Me, page 35
There wasn’t much in-between time. She mostly worked as a bodyguard and traveled with her clients. Right now, she was between assignments, or she wouldn’t have been around San Antonio. She had an apartment there because she wasn’t living in the same town with Cal. She’d had enough of gossip. Even kindly gossip. She’d never forgotten that last day in the hospital. While she lay awake that night, she had a thought. Cal had worked for Eb Scott, who had a counterterrorism school in Jacobsville. He trained mercs and did jobs for many governments including, it was gossiped, ours. She’d heard that he’d trained at least one woman from overseas who was going to work for a foreign government. That meant that he might take on Amelia, if she could convince him. She wasn’t afraid of much, and her grandfather had taught her to shoot a gun. It wasn’t much, but it might get her foot in the door.
* * *
So the next morning, quaking inside, she’d phoned Eb and got an appointment to talk to him. She’d hitched a ride with an orderly at the hospital who lived in Jacobsville. He dropped her off at Eb’s huge compound.
He’d given her a strange look when she told him why she was there.
“I can do it, Mr. Scott,” she said quietly. “I may look like a wimp, but I’m not. And,” she added quickly, “I have an undergraduate degree in chemistry.”
That had raised both his eyebrows. “Chemistry?”
She nodded. “Plus, one of the guys auditing my class had done demolition work while he was in the service.” She smiled slyly. “He taught us how to make deadly substances out of common household chemicals.” She leaned forward. “I can make bombs,” she added.
“Well, damn.” He burst out laughing. “I have to confess, this is the most interesting interview I’ve conducted recently.”
She grinned. “I learn fast, study hard, and I won’t run under fire.”
“Why do you want to do this sort of work?”
She sighed and sat back in the chair. “I’ve just been thrown over by the only man I ever cared about, because of something he thought I’d done that I didn’t do. He wouldn’t listen when I tried to tell him the truth.”
“You might try to make him listen,” he began.
“He got married two days ago,” she said flatly.
Eb drew in a breath. He knew Cal Hollister, and his temper. The man was like a stone wall when he made up his mind. And if he’d married someone else, he was through with poor Amelia. Everybody already knew.
“It’s not really a life for a woman,” he began.
“I have nothing left to lose,” she said simply and without self-pity. “There are lots of roofs. I only need to step off one of them.”
He grimaced. He’d misjudged the level of her desperation. She kept her emotions under tight control, but she was in deep pain, and it showed.
“So it’s you or Australia.”
He stared at her. “Australia?”
“It’s what the mob guys call it. Down under? Hint, hint?”
He got it and shook his head. “You’re so young,” he began.
“Misery doesn’t have an age limit. I need to get out of Texas and do something with my life, while I still have one.” Her dark eyes were quiet. “I know about the work you do. It’s not only important—it saves lives. I know what your agents have done over the years. It’s a record anyone would be proud of. I’d like to be a part of that. I’m good at chemistry, top of my class. I’ll bet you’ve got somebody on staff who can teach me how to do demolition work for real.”
“In fact, I do, part-time. I’ve got Cord Romero.”
“I’ve heard about him,” she recalled. “Stuff of legends.”
“He is. He’s with the FBI and gets antsy from time to time, but he’s not risking his wife, Patricia, to try and slide back into merc work. So when he’s climbing the walls, he comes down here to teach for a day or two a month.”
She grinned. “I’d be a good student. I promise.”
He shook his head and sighed. “Okay. But there will be lots of rules.”
“I love rules,” she said.
“And the work will be dangerous.”
“I love dangerous, too.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure that if I don’t find something challenging to do, that I’ll mourn myself to death, Mr. Scott,” she replied, and just for a few seconds, the depth of her anguish was visible.
He hesitated, but only for a minute. “All right.”
She smiled. “Thanks. So, when do I start?”
“Tomorrow morning, at eight. You’ll live in.”
“Thank you. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to pitch a tent on Victoria Road.”
“You’ve got a house...”
She shook her head. “It’s already on the market,” she said, and her face hardened to stone. “I’d dig ditches before I’d live in a house with my great-aunt again, after what she did. And I was let go at my place of employment day before yesterday.”
“Why?” he asked.
Her eyes met his. “Because I was in the hospital unconscious and didn’t call to tell them that.” She sighed “It’s been a pretty harsh week.”
“We all have those,” he replied. “We get through them.”
“That’s what I’m counting on. A new job. A new life.”
“It will be hard,” he cautioned.
“Life is hard.”
“Point taken.” He stood up. “Welcome aboard, Amelia.” And he smiled.
* * *
The first two weeks were the hardest. Amelia had never had to learn a martial art. She was out of shape, because the job she’d had in San Antonio was working in a warehouse doing inventory and putting up stock. That wasn’t hard. Martial arts was.
Fortunately, she loved it at once, and excelled at it. Decked out in her new kit, she performed the katas with grace and energy, enjoying the feeling it gave her to learn something new and potentially lifesaving.
Guns came harder. She was a dead shot with a light pistol, but she couldn’t cock the .45 auto she was given, so Eb switched her to a Glock. It was a lighter weight and fit her hands perfectly. She spent a lot of time on the firing range, using both hands, as she’d been taught, along with the different stances that were common to police department protocol.
“Not bad, Amelia,” Eb said on her third week at it as he studied the placement of bullets in the target. All, every one, was dead center.
“I love it. Shooting is fun!”
He chuckled. “It is, here, because the targets don’t shoot back!” he reminded her.
“Not to worry, sir, I can duck with the best of them!”
“Lies,” a deep voice drawled from nearby.
She grinned at Ty Harding, who was also taking Eb’s courses. He was tall and good-looking, with long dark hair, dark eyes and a handsome face. They’d graduated high school together. Ty had had a crush on her, but she never felt that way about him, so he’d settled for friendship.
“You think so?” she chided. “Okay, shoot at me. Go ahead. I’ll show you how to duck and make it look graceful!”
“You do it and I’ll send you to Guatemala to hunt narco lords,” Eb threatened him.
Ty made a face. “You let her get away with murder.”
“Not yet,” Eb chuckled. “Okay. Back to work!”
* * *
She learned martial arts and gun safety. And within the first two months, Cord Romero showed up to teach her demolition.
“My wife made me give it up,” he grumbled as he taught her how to assemble an IED—an improvised explosive device. “Just because a bomb went off once, only once!”
“A bomb...?” she exclaimed, all eyes.
Cord was gorgeous. He had a wife that he rarely talked about, but most people knew that he’d been a merc before he joined the FBI. Tall, dark-eyed, dark-haired, olive complexion. His foster sister, Maggie, was also gorgeous. Eb Scott was engaged to her, although Ty Harding said that it was mostly just friendship. Maggie and Cord had been foster children, both adopted by the same woman. Maggie, so he said, went out of her way finding things to irritate the man she truly loved, which was Cord.
“I had my mind on something besides what I was doing,” Cord explained. “So pay attention. When you defuse a bomb, there’s nothing in the world except you and the bomb. Got it?”
“Got it,” she promised.
“Okay. Now, this is how you connect the wires...”
She knew already how to combine chemicals to produce toxic substances, so adding that to ordnance in bomb-making was second nature. Cord had lots of experience at the art, and she paid close attention. As he explained to her, that knowledge might one day save her life, or someone in her group.
“Why chemistry?” he asked as they went on to a new project.
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I’ve always loved it. One of the first presents my parents ever gave me was a junior science chemistry set.” She made a face. “I blew up the coffee table.”
He chuckled. “I blew up a snake.”
“A snake?”
“I improvised some fireworks. Mamie, my adopted mother, had no idea that I knew any such thing. One day while she and Maggie were out shopping, I bundled together some gunpowder and other substances in the outbuilding. I accidentally dropped the device right onto a rattlesnake.” He grinned. “I didn’t mourn much.”
“Neither would I!”
He laughed. “When Mamie saw the damage to the yard, she started to fuss, but Maggie said that it was a great way to get poisonous snakes out of the way and she should encourage me to use my skills.” His eyes sparkled. “Mamie gave in. I learned demolition mostly the hard way until much later, when I trained in it.”
“Was your dad really a bullfighter?” she asked.
“Indeed he was, and very famous. So was my grandfather.” He shook his head. “Bullfighting has a bad rep these days, but in the early nineteenth century, it was the mark of a man, to be able to walk into an arena armed with only a cape and fight a bull that could weigh half a ton. And you only had a cape and courage to do that. The bull had the advantage. They were huge, and their horns weren’t blunted.”
“I read about them,” she said. “I got library books about Manolete.”
“Yes, one of the most famous of them all. They called him El Monstrou, and it wasn’t an insult. He was magnificent, they say. There’s a monument to him, a statue, where he’s buried.”
“He got gored in the ring,” she recalled.
“He did, but it wasn’t the bull that killed him. It’s said that he was given a blood transfusion with the wrong blood type.” He shrugged. “There was a lot of gossip about his death.”
“That’s so sad.”
He nodded. “The world was a different place in the late 1940s, just after the war. The bulls who killed matadors were as famous as the men who died in the ring,” she added. She glanced at him. “They say it was that way with men who sang opera, back in the same period of time. They were treated like royalty in Italy, even in America!”
“Now, don’t tell me you like opera,” he teased.
“I love it. Anything Puccini wrote,” she sighed. She glanced at him and chuckled. “I know. I’m a Texas girl. I should love country-western music. And I do. But I’ve rarely met any sort of music I didn’t like.”
“That’s good,” he said. “There’s nothing worse than a music bigot.”
She burst out laughing.
“And don’t you forget it,” he added. “Now, back to work!”
She went to bed tired every night, but her new life was exciting, and she loved every facet of it. She still mourned Cal, though. It seemed some days that she’d dreamed the brief period of time she’d had with him when they’d been so close.
* * *
The cab driver spoke again as he pulled up at her apartment building. “Miss, we’re here,” he said, a little louder, interrupting her thoughts about the past.
She caught her breath. She’d been lost in flashbacks and hadn’t heard him. “Oh. Sorry!”
He laughed. “I do the same thing. I drift off into the past. Sometimes it is good to look back and remember good times.”
“These weren’t so good,” she said as she paid him. “But life is all lessons.”
“Indeed it is. Have a good night.”
“You, too.”
Her apartment was one of the newer ones, very homey with all her little touches, and it had a great view of the River Walk. She had a small balcony. She liked sitting out on it and watching the boats go up and down with tourists on them while mariachis played nearby. San Antonio was a fascinating place to live. She never grew tired of it, although she’d been away for some time guarding ex-merc Wolf Patterson and his new wife.
Now that Wolf’s enemies had given up or been killed, she wasn’t really needed there anymore. She’d checked in with Eb Scott, but he had nothing at the moment, so she was taking a well-deserved vacation for a couple of weeks.
It had been going well, until tonight. She hadn’t expected that she’d walk into a bad memory in Fernando’s. A very bad memory.
She made herself a cup of coffee and ate her supper on the balcony, while her stubborn mind climbed back into the past in Jacobsville. She remembered the first time she’d seen Cal Hollister...
Copyright © 2024 by Diana Palmer
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ISBN-13: 9780369748171
Save Me
First published in 2024. This edition published in 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Sharon Sala
Silenced Witness
First published in 2024. This edition published in 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Kia Dennis
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Sharon Sala, Save Me
