Will sat back with his hand hooked over the steering wheel and watched out the window, looking bored as hell.
All of it was a lie. He was tense to the point of brittleness, his brain churning in a manner that bordered on insanity. His paranoia was at an all-time high. Next to him, Diana appeared just as disinterested as he did. But he knew when they stopped she would spout ideas and plans with a force that implied she was now keeping them tightly reined.
They’d chosen a more southerly route this time.
Exactly as his life of normalcy had come back to him with surprising ease just over five years ago—getting up and holding a nine-to-five job, attending the occasional holiday party—so had this life of single-minded survival. Neither of them had even questioned the need to take an alternate route out of Pullman.
They never spoke of where they were headed.
The only conflict was one each of them debated internally: go directly underground or get Churkin first?
Will had no good answer for that. Since Diana hadn’t offered one, he figured she didn’t either.
The drive to Boise had brought with it the contradictory doldrums of long stretches of towering trees, beautiful in the last lush greens of summer and the ratcheting down of his chest as they approached his memories of the city. They had been here before.
Then the town had been blanketed in deep snow that both marked their passage and soon covered all trace of it. Lights in the houses had poured like liquid into the night when they’d come here to kill Eduardo Sandoval.
Even though they killed him, the task hadn’t been without its trials. They’d been working together for a while by that point; they’d gotten cocky, and they’d almost gotten themselves killed.
Though the city itself was a complete 180 from his last visit—late summer instead of early winter, broad daylight rather than night, an interstate drive-through and not a stakeout and a kill—the feelings buffeting him were hard to distinguish. Were they leftovers from the last visit, brought on by sense memories? Or was it simply that his current circumstances were the same shade of shit as they had been when he’d last fled this town?
He wondered if the Kurevs knew that he would never live in or near this godforsaken place. Will didn’t know how a town so mean to him could be so deceptively pretty. Mountains held him in on one side; on the other large squares of green lay quilted together, looking homespun and comfortable.
He was an hour away before he could count an honest breath.
Aside from a tilt of the head here and there, Diana hadn’t moved either. Maybe she’d been feeling the same things he was. They both bore physical as well as mental scars from that trip.
They didn’t speak until nearly five hours later when he pulled off the road into a service station just outside Ogden, Utah. Diana glanced sideways, gauging his reaction, and then turned her head back to the land in front of them.
The mountains stayed on their left this whole time. Will felt as though he’d been riding the slope of the Continental Divide—that if he veered toward it, the slope would shuttle him right back down where he belonged. The land was more open in front of them, and he could see what was coming.
He paid cash for the gas, hanging onto his bills in the wind that was picking up even in the short time he’d been standing there. He topped off the tank, going back for his change, feeling his hair stand on end, getting played with by the coming storm.
When he slid back behind the wheel, Diana spoke for the first time, her words carried on a deep sigh. “Let’s get food and a place to stay. We’re about to be socked in anyway.” She gestured lazily to the clouds gathering in the distance. “They have summer monsoons here.”
“Monsoons? You are shitting me.”
She held up the burner phone she must have just turned on. It had Internet and was registered to a made-up name at a made-up email and paid for with a prepaid credit card that was loaded with cash at a Walmart. “Monsoons.”
At least she’d been doing something while he pumped gas.
Telling her to make herself useful, Will cranked the engine and then followed her directions as though they were gospel. She led them to a cheap Italian restaurant and ran in to pick up the order she’d called in from the phone. Will waited, doing nothing, letting her work her magic.
Moments later, some nice guy held the door as she smiled at him, lips ruby red from the makeup she’d applied. The denim jacket and fluffed hair and sunglasses fooled them all.
After fighting the wind now actively attempting to steal their food, she turned and looked at him, “Out, left, and then three miles.”
He didn’t ask. Sure enough, they arrived just as the first rain started to fall. This time he went inside, paid cash, and read the hand-lettered sign on cut cardboard: That smell is lake stink it happens sometimes. -MGMT
Lovely.
By the time they let themselves into the room, they were wet and the food was less than hot. Their mood matched the room to a tee. Will braced the window and shoved the lone chair under the knob to the connecting door while she checked for holes, cameras, or problems that could come up in a seedy place like this. When he opened the Styrofoam container, he wasn’t surprised that the spaghetti with meat sauce looked just south of appetizing. He bit in anyway.
“Oh.” He couldn’t help it. “This is good.”
She smiled. “That’s what the reviews said.” She held out her own container and offered him a forkful of her fettuccine with Alfredo and mushrooms.
He took it and practically moaned again. “That’s good, too.”
“There’s cheese bread and sauce still in there.” She pointed to a paper bag, taking a long draw on her Coke, savoring even that.
They stayed silent, enjoying the food, occasionally stealing bites from each other’s dish. They both knew what it was to indulge the senses, and they knew there was always the possibility in this life that it might not happen again for a long stretch of time. Or possibly ever. So Will used his finger to get the extra sauce that had strayed to the corners of the container and tried not to think about the next time he might enjoy a meal so much.
Outside, the storm buffeted the windows, effectively pinning them in. Lightning hit close enough to rattle the windows; the rain droned over any other noise they might make. There was a flash-flood warning in the area, according to the local news he’d turned on.
He hoped the storm kept their enemies out.
He hoped their enemies had no idea where they were or what they were up to. He hoped Ivan Kurev had not come here on his mad chase, too.
But Will stayed put, riding the storm out by letting Diana snip and remove his stitches. She replaced the large gauze with individual Band-aids crosswise over the healing cut.
With his shirt already off, he peeled hers, too, enjoying the red bra that had peeked out when she’d pulled her shirt low to head into the restaurant. It had probably done the trick of keeping the people there from looking at, much less remembering, her face, but it had also gotten his attention.
Later, when their cell phones woke them up at three a.m., they noted the storm had effectively passed, and so had their rest.
The property they owned out here was a mountain plot, sold for cheap, no good for farming or ranching of any kind. The surrounding foothills meant their car would only be seen for a few minutes from each direction before they passed behind another piece of land jutting out of the earth.
Turning off the headlights, they worked their way through the misting rain from memory and dug according to their count from the landmarks. Will pushed the shovel into the ground, wet and disgruntled and silently praying.
This time, the bag dug up clean. Nothing to indicate anyone had been here. There were no notes or booby traps when they unzipped the canvas duffel, but Will still checked every gun and turned over every stack of stray bills they had parked here. At the final tally he could find nothing missing or tampered with, and he allowed all of it into the car before they reburied the bag.
They headed back to the motel, and his weary walk into the room gave him away.
“Me, too.”
It was all she said. All she had to say.
She’d been as nervous as he was. She was as tired as he was because she’d been strung as tightly.
Maybe they had been better—safer—when they’d been less on the same page. Only one of them worried at a time. Whoever was uptight would be pissed as hell at the other for not being worried, but one of them was always at their most alert, sane, whatever. Now? Now they were both mere moments from crashing.
It was seven a.m. and the sun was long since up. They didn’t have to hit the road, but being here when anyone came around wasn’t a good idea. Still, they took just enough time to rearrange their old loot and then fell onto the bed, Will face forward. He wasn’t positive he was still awake when he hit.
But not four hours later, the two burner phones went off at the same time.
Nick checked his phone again and snapped it shut at the same time his face pulled into a frustrated frown. Nothing. He hadn’t expected Diana to respond immediately, but he wanted her to.
He’d let the woman in the woods walk.
He couldn’t see her well enough to know if it was Diana or if it was Churkin. He couldn’t find any good outcome if he did confront her, so he stood there, weapon in hand for a long moment, staring right at her but too far away to see much more than that she was looking at him, too.
Turning his face—but not his eyes—toward Felino, he’d calmly lied, “I don’t see anything. I thought I did, but it was a cat or something.”
The woman scrambled away.
Felino came running over, holster unsnapped, hand on his weapon. “I thought I saw someone, too.” He followed this with a sigh and, “I guess we’re all just paranoid these days.”
You have no fucking idea, Nick thought. But he smiled at the other detective.
There were two possible outcomes that Nick foresaw if he confronted the woman. Had it been Churkin, Felino might have wound up dead. Had it been Diana, Felino might have taken her into protective custody and she would have wound up dead. It would be years later mind you, possibly from lethal injection, but it would have been a death sentence nonetheless.
Nick might have risked Felino for Churkin, but he wouldn’t risk his sister. Even knowing that she’d walked away with no promise to contact him, no real clue to where she was headed, or what she was doing next, he wouldn’t risk her. He’d let go of his ridiculous notion that she would help him run Vasilescu. He was starting to let go of the idea that Reese would be by his side—though he wasn’t fully convinced of that yet. He still believed that his doorbell would ring and she’d be on the other side. He wouldn’t doubt her at all; Nick would simply open his arms wide, ask where she’d been, and tell her they’d all thought she was dead. He’d say he hadn’t believed it; he had known.
His rational brain knew that was the stupidest thing. His rational brain also asked repeatedly if trying to hold onto Diana was much the same. She’d offered nothing in return. She didn’t even respond to the text he finally decided had to be sent.
He recited a mantra that she hadn’t turned on the phone. That they would return the message because Will told Nick he was on top of it. But what if Diana had talked Will out of that? Nick knew Will would side with her.
His rational brain told him there was a reasonable possibility she was dead. She should be dead. On any given day her chances of dying were much higher than the average person’s. The Kurevs were after her. The White Oak PD was looking for her. The FBI was starting to ask questions.
Nick wanted to help, but he was barely keeping his own head above water.
In the last week, he started to mobilize Vasilescu. And why not? He had nothing better to do. His sister had flown the coop, his girlfriend was dead, and his job was off the table until this shit was cleared up. He didn’t know that it ever would be. So he organized.
He used his personal leave to set up shop. Occasionally, he called into work. He kept his twice-weekly sessions with the mandated shrink, and he doled out just enough to be wounded without actually opening his ribcage and showing off the iced-over organ that had been his heart just over a week ago.
He gathered his key players and sent them out to find whatever meth they could buy. Within two days he had amassed enough baggies that he could have started running his own distribution center if he wanted. Fifteen of the bags contained the pink rocks. It really looked like candy. But he wouldn’t have it in his town.
Meth and crack had a way of turning even the most faithful, of creating the worst situations. He gave the baggies with clear to cloudy white crystals out to operatives with instructions to return them from whence they came and offer the dealers a way out. Nos were responded to with bullets.
The pink shit came from three separate middle-class houses around town. The Kurevs had moved in even more than he thought. Nick sent his best guys in to run smoke bombs and steal records. They took snapshots of computer screens and notebooks and hand-delivered all of it to Phil Megan.
The day before Reese’s funeral, he’d set up an anonymous tip about each of the houses. He had Phil turn over the documents along with the portion of the code. Nick had shelled out big-time favors for that one; he owed the code cracker something roughly equivalent to his firstborn. It was worth it, since the info got the FBI involved and linked the houses to the Kurevs by way of the pretty pink color and a few records that gave enough hints to point a big arrow in that direction.
The bullets got the APD’s attention, as well as that of White Oak—his men had taken out a local guy moving meth to soccer moms. Cobb County, Marietta, Fulton County, and several other PDs in the area had dead meth dealers to contend with.
Nick had visited Reese’s home earlier that morning. He wanted to apologize for his actions. Her burial should have been more reverent, the police force given more time to properly mourn her. Instead, Nick had put the department on high alert with murders and meth distribution and evidence that tied it all to the Kurevs. He could only offer that his own personal mourning would not be disrupted by the goings-on.
Since he hadn’t really come to embrace that she was dead, he hadn’t thought about going to her gravesite. Why would he want to see a granite headstone with a final date on it? Why would he want to stand on freshly churned earth? That was only a reminder that she was so recently gone that sometimes he thought he could hear her coming up behind him, that he could feel her arm brush his as she went by.
Berating himself, he tried to believe he was stuck in a sentimental loop about a woman he had fucked right before she died. He told himself she hadn’t been anything special before he’d watched her fall, just another woman he’d slept with.
The rest of him told his rational brain to fuck off. His emotion knew better. It sat in him, deeper than his bones and colder than hell, and remained unnamed.
So he’d gone to her house, wanting to look at it as though she might walk out the front door any moment or that her car might pull into the driveway. But when he drove into the neighborhood, his heart nearly stopped as he saw it from the end of the block. The bright red sign with white lettering announced that the house was for sale.
He drove right past.
Dammit, Reese.
He couldn’t blame her. Was she supposed to stop a bullet? Did he really expect her to have survived a shot directly to the temple? No.
He could blame Diana though. He did expect her to return his texts. He had to know if she’d been the one in the woods because if she hadn’t, then Churkin was back in town. If Churkin was back, then Nick was her number one target. He knew this time he wouldn’t see her coming.
Diana drove like a bat out of hell. Will sat beside her, his activity in the passenger seat like nothing she’d ever seen before.
He’d laid out an old towel on his lap, and while she tried to hug the top side of the speed limit, he cleaned guns. Just below the window line his hands worked at a furious pace. The speed didn’t stop the mechanical precision of his movements or make him skimp on focus or effort.
He simply pulled up one gun after another, popped the pieces apart, cleaned, oiled, rubbed, and slid everything back together. He sat calmly in the middle of several felony charges, his hands working almost automatically. Diana wondered if he hoped like she did that they wouldn’t get pulled over.
The two of them had shot out of the motel room like it was on fire, taking only enough time to be sure their shit was cleared out of there.
When they stayed, they put down sheets over each bed, partly because they were sleeping in the cheapest places they could find and who knew what the beds had seen? But pillows were the number one spot for hair collection, so they covered them, and took their coverings with them. She slept with her hair up, taking it down only to shower or when she needed to use it—like at the restaurant the other day. They went through hairspray like it was going out of style, and she combed it in the shower so she could catch and wash the strays down the drain.
Diana sprayed a bleach mix on all the surfaces in the rooms, including the floor, in each place before they moved in and again before they left. If someone wanted to run a full search, they might find something, but she was going to make it as difficult as possible.
Right now though, all it would take was one speed trap, one broken taillight and Will would be hard-pressed to get everything hidden before the officer came knocking on the window. Any officer worth his or her salt would see that Will was shuffling things around as Diana pulled over; his hands would still be covered in gun oil, and the car would still reek of it. As soon as the officer asked to see the gun, one or the other of them would have to ask, “Which one?”
Best to ride the speed limit like a small wave. Luckily, she’d spent the last several years learning what the tells were. There was a measure of satisfaction in knowing how to avoid getting pulled over, not because she was so proud or felt she was above anyone, but because she could not let Churkin get away and she couldn’t harm a fellow officer either.
She was two hours out of Ogden, Utah, and past Salt Lake City before she began to calm. Her awakening had been rude and abrupt. Accepting that they weren’t going to get to stop and pick up another bag, she charted the fastest course for Atlanta.
Unfortunately, it was still a twenty-eight-hour trip—if they only stopped for gas and food and didn’t hit any traffic. She wanted to hop on a plane but didn’t know if Carly Moore and Rowan McGarrity were wanted.
She did know Ivan Kurev had at least found the identity of either Chase Linden or Delia Slaint. The evidence said he hadn’t shared that information with his brothers, but there was a good possibility he’d shared it with his cousin. It didn’t matter anyway. Ivan’s note created paranoia, and paranoia dictated that they burn the identities. Chase Linden and Delia Slaint still held the deed to the property in Sullivan, Missouri, but they would never do anything else. Will and Diana would likely never go back. It was uncertain whether the Kurevs had the manpower or tech to set something up to watch the property, but the FBI did.
So Diana rode the gas pedal carefully and she plotted.
Nick’s text told her about the woman at Reese’s funeral—it sure as hell hadn’t been her, which meant it likely was Churkin. As soon as they’d started driving, she had Will text Nick back and tell him that. It was a real pisser, but it was probably better that Nick hadn’t gone after the woman he’d seen. Reese’s family didn’t need that drama, and no one needed more dead officers. Even if Churkin graciously died on the spot, there was no doubt she’d take at least one other person with her, if not more.
The second text had been from Owen, saying that the FBI was constantly surveilling the Kurev home in Chicago—Diana and Will read that information to mean they should stop doing so, lest they get caught at it—and that the new chatter was Churkin was back in Atlanta.
Two sightings of the woman, so close together, had Diana debating about not stopping for anything other than gas.
“We have to eat a decent dinner.” Will stared at her, his hands covered in gun oil and both his shirt and face bearing telltale smears. Had he not been on the hunt it would have been an endearing look. As it was, his eyes were hard, focused, intent.
She wanted to argue, but food was fuel and she wasn’t going to win this one. As much as she didn’t want to stop, as much as she didn’t get lightheaded—ever—she knew he was right. Soda and chips would never give them what they needed. She didn’t relent on sleep though.
Just before they hit Cheyenne, she found a gas station that fit her needs, and she dropped Will around back at the restrooms. Unfortunately for Will, the best place was the seediest, where she hoped her covered-in-gun-oil husband would go unnoticed.
She watched him carry the small duffel toward the dented gray door with the male logo markered onto the paint. Though the jeans he wore were newish because they hadn’t seen a lot of action recently, and though his hair was coffee colored now, she realized that he wasn’t Will anymore. He was Lee again. There would probably never again be white button-down shirts with subtle stripes woven into them. No more soft gray slacks and loafers, no ties. Will was gone.
Although she watched his ass disappear through the doorway with the proprietary feelings of a wife, she realized she was no longer his wife. As he’d said—yelled, actually—he’d never married her. It had simply been a piece of paperwork assigned to them, a tangle of quasi-legal names, and while Will had been married to Diana, Lee was not married to Sin. Rowan was not married to Carly. They’d both pulled off their wedding bands before they left Atlanta; the bands were markers of identity, and shiny to boot. But somehow she hadn’t realized she was also removing the marriage.
She shoved the car into drive and headed around front, feelings draining from her soul as surely as gas filled the tank.
Turning on the burner phones from Nick and Owen, she waited with her arms crossed. Her thoughts booted up while the phones did their loading routine. Will loved her. She knew it empirically. The evidence was too strong to fall any other way. Was that enough? Love didn’t fill all the gaps. She knew he’d never cheat on her, married or not, because she’d kill his ass, but it shouldn’t be threats and lack of opportunity that made him stay.
The pumps were slow here, but the men weren’t. Three different guys had given her at least a once-over as she leaned on the car. One had called her baby and asked if she needed help filling her tank. She chose to take him literally and said no thanks; the gas was slow but better than other options. She’d no more than finished the sentence than she saw Will round the corner, bag held tight in one hand his other running over his hair.
He wasn’t covered in gun oil anymore. He looked relatively the same, but she could see he’d swapped out his jeans and shirt for a clean set. His eyes flicked to the man who was still standing there, offering help with filling her tank. Without changing his pace, Will stepped up right in front of Diana, slid his free hand around her waist, and pulled her up for a deep kiss.
She kissed him back then narrowed her eyes, nearly hissing. “I don’t need you to lay claim to me. I can take care of myself.”
He grinned, and it showed in his eyes, warmed her nearly empty heart but completely didn’t match his words. “I know you can. But a woman who can take care of herself stands out here.” His free hand, still at her waist, flexed a little in possession.
This time, when he bent down to kiss her again, she flung her arms around him and clung.
Sliding into the passenger side this time, she quickly checked the phones while Will stashed his stuff in the trunk. There were no messages, but she gave Nick three meeting options, coded in a way he’d understand. He had a full twenty hours to figure it out. Then she turned both phones off.
If someone knew to track either of these numbers, they would see a path across the United States. But each time, Will and Diana stopped before they hit a large town and only turned the phones on and right back off, so anyone staying current with their signal would only know they had made it to Cheyenne. There were three major roads out of the city; she wasn’t about to give any hints about which one she was taking.
A pillow from the back seat offered rest, and she reclined the seat far enough to tilt a bit, but not enough to disappear from view. A sleeping passenger needed to be seen; a missing seat was suspicious. The “monsoon” from Utah was all but cleared from the landscape, but the bright sun didn’t alter her ability to sleep.
Husband or not, Will had her trust.
More tired than she initially thought, Diana drifted off, dreaming of the hunt.