One Tough Marine. Paula Graves
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“I do,” he said with a smile. “It’s a silent one. You tripped it, by the way.”
“I’m an amateur. These people aren’t.”
He forced himself to smile. “So we’ll be cautious. You and Stevie stay here in the garage. I’ll lock the side door from the outside, so nobody should be able to get in. You’ll have the door opener if you need to get out, and I’ll leave the car key here with you.” He removed the Mustang’s ignition key from his key ring and handed it to her. “If you don’t hear anything from me in ten minutes, get out of here and go to the nearest police station. Tell them everything you know.”
He could tell from the look on her face that she had no intention of going to the police. But he wasn’t going to sit out here in the garage all night arguing a hypothetical.
“Once I make sure the house is safe, I’ll come back and get you.” He got out of the car and closed the driver’s door behind him, bending to look back in the open window. “We’re going to figure this all out, Abs. I promise.”
In her eyes he saw her desire to believe doing fierce battle with disillusionment. He wondered how much of that disillusionment was thanks to Matt’s lies and how much was a product of his own grave mistakes.
He slipped out of the garage and locked the door safely behind him, walking the flagstone path to the house with care, knowing that one slip onto the pebbles below would alert anyone lurking inside his darkened house of his approach.
He eyed the side-door lock to see if it had been tampered with. Everything looked just as he’d left it. But he wasn’t so egotistical as to believe there was no way an intruder could get past his security setup.
He closed his hand around the Glock at his belt and slipped it from the holster. Falling back on years of urban combat training, he entered the door fast and low, sweeping the kitchen for any signs of occupation.
It was empty.
He almost let his guard down at that point, listening to the familiar silence of the house. But he hadn’t spent a decade in the Marine Corps just to forget the hard lessons.
He scanned the kitchen once more, looking for any signs of something out of place. The lack of disorder only amped up his tension. Because somewhere in his gut, he sensed he wasn’t alone in the house.
Which meant whoever was waiting somewhere behind a door or around the corner was damned good at his job.
There were times to fight and times to regroup. Deciding which time was which was something he’d learned over almost ten years in uniform. Suicide missions were last-ditch options. Much smarter to beat a strategic retreat, then regroup and make a plan of attack from a more advantageous position.
Especially when you had a two-year-old boy and his mother waiting in the garage to be collateral damage.
He turned quietly and edged toward the back door. He almost made it there before he heard a metallic click a few feet behind him.
“Major Luke Cooper, United States Marine Corps. Retired.” The slick voice behind him ended with a soft clucking sound. “So young for a retiree. Battle fatigue?”
Luke started to turn around.
“I’d appreciate it if you lowered your gun,” the man behind him added in what Luke guessed, from what Abby had told him, must be a Boston Brahmin accent.
“If you think I’m going to put my weapon on the floor and go down without a fight, you don’t know much about the Marines,” Luke said, his voice calmer than the roiling sensation in his gut would have suggested.
“I don’t think either of us needs to use our weapons,” the other man said, his tone slightly amused. “In fact, I think we probably want the same thing, don’t we?”
Luke lowered his Glock to his side but didn’t holster it. He turned around to find the man Abby had described from her earlier encounter—tall, muscular, dressed in black from head to toe. The ski mask fit him snugly, hiding all but a circle of pale skin around his sharp blue eyes and two thin, hard lips. He held a nasty-looking Colt M1991 in his left hand.
“I suppose we want the same thing,” Luke agreed, “but I doubt we’ll agree on what to do with it.”
The thin lips curved into a humorless smile. “Well, I guess we’ll have to deal with that when the time comes. Meanwhile, Mrs. Chandler has told you what my employer wants.”
“Actually, she doesn’t seem very certain what it is we’re looking for,” Luke countered, wondering how many other people were hiding in his house. One more? Two? Three? He’d feel a lot more confident about what he needed to do next if he had some way of knowing what he was up against.
“Captain Chandler took something from my employer. He wants it back.”
“Something? That’s a little vague.”
“You’ll know it if you find it.”
“Also vague.” Luke cocked his head. “Your employer must not think very much of you if he couldn’t even tell you what you’re threatening women and children to find.”
The other man drew a swift breath through his nose, sucking the black knit up tighter against his face. His eyes flashed with hate, but when he spoke, it was in the same slightly bemused tone he’d used all along. “You served with Captain Chandler. You were close friends.”
“Look who knows how to use Google.”
The masked man smiled again. “You served side by side with the captain in Afghanistan four years ago, and again with him in Sanselmo shortly before he died.”
“What did you do, memorize my service jacket?” Luke asked, feigning boredom, although the intruder’s breadth of knowledge about his time in the Marines suggested he had some pretty well-connected sources, probably in the government.
Which meant they were up against an even tougher enemy than he’d anticipated.
The intruder’s smile grew ugly as he saw through Luke’s mask of indifference. “You see, I wasn’t bluffing when I told Mrs. Chandler she really had no choice but to help us find what we’re looking for.”
“She didn’t think you were.”
“We were wondering who she’d run to for help.” There was a hint of innuendo in the man’s tone that made Luke’s skin crawl. “You see, we knew she’d go to the person most likely to know what her husband had been hiding from her.”
“But you didn’t know who that was?”
“We do now.” The masked man chuckled. “Isn’t technology wonderful? A phone call, a text message, and in mere moments, almost everything you need to know is at your fingertips.”
“You should be in a commercial.” Luke made a show of looking around the spotless kitchen. “Should I feel insulted that you didn’t trash my place the way you did Abby’s?”
“You haven’t seen the rest of the house.”
Luke arched one eyebrow. “Say, did you find a dark green sock anywhere? I’ve been looking for it for weeks.”
The man’s smile faded. “Seven days, Major Cooper. Mrs. Chandler clearly believes you can help her find what we’re looking for. If you can, I suggest you do.”
“Or what? You’ll hurt a two-year-old?” Luke sneered. “What a fulfilling job you have.”
The masked man took a swift step forward. Luke’s gun hand twitched upward.
A second man in a black mask stepped around the corner into the kitchen and put a restraining hand on the other man’s arm. He murmured something Luke couldn’t quite make out.
The man with the Brahmin accent visibly took himself under control. “Seven days.”
“Got