Jason pressed the cold wet towel to his face, concentrating the pressure on his eyes. Both were on fire. The cool dampness helped. He sat on the floor, his back against the vanity. He had tried to flush the tequila by splashing cold water into them. It was ineffective. After five minutes, he could still not open his eyes.
He summoned the strength to lift himself off the floor. Crawling to the tub and shower, Jason climbed in fully-clothed. The fire in his eyes intensified when he removed the wet towel.
Fumbling for the handles, he managed to turn on the cold water through the tub spigot. He lay on his back with his face under the cold blast of water, drenching his face, eyes, and upper body.
He managed to pull open each eye with a hand, allowing the water to flush his corneas. After a minute, he exited the tub.
Jason stood dripping on the tile when he heard footfalls at the door. He turned his face in the direction of the sound. “Is that you?”
After a long moment of silence, Chrissie replied with a whisper. “Yeah.”
Jason wiped his hair and face with the towel. “Give me a minute.”
“No, I don’t have a minute,” she retorted.
Jason felt her grab his wrist and lift his arm. “This is yours.”
Chrissie turned Jason’s palm upward. She placed the small velvet box in his and closed his fingers around it.
Jason pried his eyes open with extreme difficulty, trying to look at Chrissie. He caught a Dali-like image of her through the tears and water. With the pain too great, he squeezed them shut again.
“Jason, I want you out of the house by tomorrow afternoon. You can sleep in the guest room tonight.”
Jason paused, summoning will. With his eyes still closed, he spoke in her general direction. “Don’t worry, I’ll be gone in thirty minutes.”
He heard the bedroom door close. Jason slammed the wet towel to the tiled floor. He cursed out loud, hollering at himself and the world.
His anger and frustration mounted in seconds. He needed to get away from here, from Chrissie. He was pissed at her—and at himself. Right now, he was pissed at the world.
Now in the bathroom with his eyes closed and burning, his anger flared, erupting like a massive solar flare. His past still haunted him. It was time to exorcise that demon.
That deviant emotion needed to be satisfied.
He wanted it now. He needed to hurt something … no … not something … someone.
The leader of Team Mohammed kept the GPS device under a small tarp to keep the screen’s green glow out of sight of passing boats or aircraft. His satellite cell phone bleeped.
The leader read the message from his handler. He did not know his name or location. If they were captured, they could not divulge information they did not possess.
Your package is tucked in. Mission is a go!
“Where to now skipper?” his lieutenant asked. Though they had trained hard in the last weeks for this mission, his men still did not know the location of the target.
“We’ll approach from the beach in two hours. We’ll stay offshore until then. The houses are crammed close on the waterfront. The target is northwest of this location. It’s a little more than four and a half miles from here. It’s a neighborhood called the Salt Ponds.” He pointed at the helmsman. “Make our course three-two-zero. You all know your jobs. Now stay low and out of sight.”
Jason rubbed his left flank above the belt line with one hand as he rested his hand on the Colt on the passenger seat with the other. Pain from the healed-over stab wound kicked up whenever he sat too long or felt stress. Tonight, the throbbing was caused by both, Jason thought.
His target was a regular at this strip joint, showing up every Friday night to ogle his favorite dancers and down a pitcher of suds. Headlights catered to the enlisted of Joint Base Langley-Eustis in northern Newport News, where the urban sprawl morphed into more rural environs.
Jason checked the Tissot. He squinted, rubbing his eyes to focus on the glowing hands. When they came into relief, he read the time: one thirty in the morning. Friday had turned into Saturday.
His eyes still burned. But at least he could keep them open.
After Chrissie had returned the ring, she stormed out. He couldn’t see her but he thought he heard her crying. Her slow, laborious utterances were laden with sadness. It had taken thirty minutes to get his eyes functional again. He’d placed the ring in a drawer in the guest room. He’d tried to get Chrissie to come out of their bedroom, knocking for five full minutes. But she refused to answer or make a sound.
Finally, he gave up and hastily pulled on a pair of jeans and a shirt retrieved from a pile of dirty clothes in the laundry room. He had already removed the gun from the gun safe in Chrissie’s night stand and put it in the glove box of the Mustang. His own weapons were locked away in his gun case in Yorktown.
He had no idea that Chrissie had been following him. He smirked in disgust.
You sure wouldn’t make a very good spy, he thought. How much does she know?
It could not be too much, he reasoned. He had not done anything except sit in the Mustang and watch the place, tracking and monitoring his quarry’s movements. Chrissie had surmised that he was waiting for a woman, an exotic dancer, because the place was a strip joint. Of course, there was no other woman. Chrissie was the one woman he loved with all his heart.
Jason had not corrected her when she’d tossed out her accusation of infidelity. He allowed her to think that was his secret. He hated lying, especially to her, but it was easier this way. In a kind of twisted stroke of good fortune, Chrissie had handed him the perfect alibi.
Jason was interested in someone inside Headlights. That someone was a man. A man he wanted to kill. A man who had tried to have him killed. In the past, Jason had killed out of necessity, in the heat of battle. Kill or be killed.
But would he take a life in cold blood?
Jason lifted the dog-eared composition notebook from the seat beside the Colt and leafed through the rumpled pages. His mark was nothing if not habitual. Jason had been observing him for almost three months. He showed up at Headlights faithfully every Friday night and closed the place down. Jason had ventured inside on two occasions to see what he did in there. Both times, he’d parked his ass at the elevated runway and craned his neck at the pasty and panty-clad dancers.
He shook his head.
They should be calling friends and announcing their engagement, then making passionate love and falling asleep in each other’s arms. He should not be sitting here like some private eye in a cheap detective story.
Jason should have stayed at the house, pounding on the door or breaking it down, demonstrating to her that he would not let her walk away. He wanted to tell her the truth. But it would only make her worry. Jason didn’t want Chrissie bearing the weight … or the worry of the past. She had been through enough. She would have to deal with the lie, for now. It pained him to think that she was dealing with the ravages of infidelity. Even if they never reconciled, one day, he promised himself, he would tell her the truth.
After the deadly events of the christening, it had taken months to get right again. But Jason’s ghosts never really left. They just hung around, waiting for a break in his mental armor. The shipyard, The Colonial, the Regional Jail. They haunted him. They visited often from the dark recesses of his tortured mind. In the days immediately after the assassination attempts, Jason promised himself he would hunt down Tattoo Man and the guard who allowed him into his cell in the Regional Jail in Williamsburg. As the days passed and he and Chrissie started rebuilding their lives, the need to avenge the mortal deeds waned, practically disappearing as he healed and dealt with his demons. Jason and Chrissie settled into a comfortable existence, getting to know each other once more. They filled their lives with newer, more pleasant memories. It had taken months for him to control the post-traumatic symptoms. He—they—had turned a corner. All had progressed smoothly for a year.
Then he received the note.
He wanted to tear it up and burn the shreds. But something in him refused to allow him to. The words dragged him back into the past. The anonymous missive, scribbled in perfect cursive on thick, fancy stationery tucked under the windshield wiper one November morning a year ago, was a simple one:
Two men are still out there. One a former guard.
The other covered in art. Your life and the lives of
your family are still in danger!
Twenty-five simple words ushered in a torrent of flashbacks and unresolved issues. They were ominous and chockful of threat.
He tried to dismiss it. But the more he thought about it, the more he understood its meaning. And the more the desire to finish the job filled him.
Your life … and the lives of your family …
Someone was threatening Chrissie and Michael. Two sleepless nights and distracted days after receiving the note, Jason decided he needed answers. That’s when he started his quest. He would find Tattoo Man and the guard.
Keeping Chrissie in the dark, at least until a few weeks ago, Jason toiled in the shadows, trying to hunt down the two men. Tattoo Man had disappeared. But the guard was still around. Jason had tracked him and watched his movements.
Jason believed in justice. He always had. He was obsessive about it. It’s what caused him to pursue the reasons behind Thomas Pettigrew’s death. It caused him to be sucked into an assassination plot. It almost cost him his life … and Chrissie’s.
That need for the truth and justice drove him to right past wrongs. And it was this same need that had just cost him his relationship. It was his own damned fault.
He thought he had defeated that constant yearning, barreling past it. But the note sucked him into the vortex once again. It rekindled his latent anger and need for vengeance.
Jason shook his head, trying to clear the frustration like a wet dog shedding water. He needed a clear head, no distractions. He needed to be able to focus on his target. He rubbed his eyes once more, checking them in the rearview mirror. It was dark. He couldn’t see, and he didn’t dare turn on the dome light. His eyes felt red and swollen.
He should be plastered by now!
The man was a heavy drinker. Jason didn’t know if he’d acquired the habit since being fired or if he’d always been a drunk. It didn’t matter. Jason would confront him after he’d downed enough beer to slow him down, to cloud his mind.
He checked the Colt lying on the seat beside him once more, reassured by its cold heavy metal. He had taken it from Chrissie’s small gun safe near their bed in the master bedroom two nights ago after she was asleep and placed it in the trunk of his Mustang. He wanted it available when the time was right.
The last thing he wanted was to be fumbling around for the gun and have Chrissie walk in on him. His own weapons were tucked away in his house in York County. He wanted Pettigrew’s aging Colt to be the weapon used to avenge everything from two years ago.
Chrissie had told him approximately where she dropped the gun in the James River as she fled Lily Zanns’s estate that evening two years ago. He had combed the shallow water on Saturday, three months after the christening, found the gun, and returned home with it. With Peter’s help, he restored it to pristine condition. It had remained locked in the small gun safe at the side of the bed ever since. Now, Jason caressed its glistening steel.
Tonight, he would begin the healing process, get answers, and put it all behind him.
Jason drew several quick, deep breaths, willing away the anxiety. He checked his Tissot. A few more minutes! Then he would make his move.