“No more bombs,” I said, too softly for Cohen to hear.
Cohen checked his watch. “Feds said they’d be here by now. We’re burning up daylight.”
We fell quiet. I settled with my back against his car and closed my eyes. The heat danced spots on the other side of my eyelids and I swayed, still carrying the events of the morning like a live wire in my hands.
“Sydney.” Cohen cleared his throat. “You don’t have to pretend. Not with me.”
My eyes shot open. “Would you shut up? I’m fine.”
“You forget I’m the one who listens to you talk in your sleep.”
“You eavesdrop?”
“Shamelessly. Mostly you mutter. Makes it damn hard to work out what you’re going on about. Bombs and guns. Lethal hand-to-hand. Normal girlfriend shit like that.”
I reached for a joke about how all Marines talk about bombs and guns. But instead I was thinking I’d never be able to keep my secrets if I needed a muzzle at night.
“Your job,” I said, “is to make me feel better. And you suck at it.”
“I’m just doing a little reality check. You got that denial thing going.”
I looked at him full-on. “You talk in your sleep, too.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
I love you, he’d said to me in the dark hours of early morning. And he’d been fully awake when he said it. But love had to be built on mutual understanding, and Cohen and I were still groping our way toward that. I didn’t have a lot of confidence we’d get there. We’d grown up in worlds so far apart that one of us might as well have been raised by wolves. That, of course, would be me.
Plus there was the fact that at least one of us carried secrets that could get you killed. Five months earlier, a man claiming to work for the CIA had come to kill me. I’d spared his life and sent him back to his superiors with a message: Despite what they believed, my beloved in Iraq hadn’t given me anything before he died beyond a few personal effects and his dog. No list of spies, no secret plans, no map to Saddam Hussein’s gold. I had nothing they could possibly want and I had no idea how to find the little Iraqi boy they were also searching for. I hoped that by sparing their man, I’d proven myself credible. They were now free to crawl back into their respective holes and leave me alone.
But I’d have to be crazier than I am to count on that. So I’d taken the few things my beloved had given me and locked them away, then spent the last five months watching over my shoulder. Watching over Cohen’s shoulder, too, although he had no idea. Five months, and nothing but silence. Except for the scar at my hairline and the hole in my kitchen drywall, I could almost chalk everything up to paranoid delusion.
Now, in the droning summer warmth, I crossed my ankles, letting the car take most of my weight. Heat radiated from the metal.
“About this morning,” I said. “When you told me you—”
“Don’t worry about it.” He gave me a lopsided grin, all the more poignant for being so hard to manufacture on a day like this. “I just didn’t want it to be obvious that it’s all about the sex.”
“The sex is pretty good,” I admitted.
“Not too shabby,” Cohen agreed.
The wind gave a little kick, and the last of the dust from the bomb swirled away. Overhead, the sky was as wide and untroubled as a clear conscience. Smoke from my cigarette vanished with the breeze. A red-winged blackbird lit on the fence erected by MoMA-D and gave a single, lonely trill.
“I am sorry about this morning,” I said. Glutton for punishment.
“I shouldn’t rush you.”
“But I didn’t need to be an ass about it.”
“Half an ass.”
I elbowed him.
“Okay,” he said. “Total ass.”
I couldn’t help it. I laughed. He smiled. For just a moment, God was in his heaven.
Behind us, engines rumbled. We turned and watched as a pair of Ford pickups threaded their way around the other vehicles and pulled to a stop near the gate. A woman stepped out from the first truck. Tall, early fifties, dressed in slacks and a navy blazer, her thick, brown hair cut short to frame her face, a badge on a lanyard around her neck. She wore sunglasses and looked as composed as if she were glancing over a wine menu.
Two men got out of the second truck. They wore navy-blue jackets stenciled with bright yellow lettering: FBI. Then below that, JTTF.
“The woman must be our SAC,” Cohen said. “Madeline McConnell. She’s in charge of the CARD.”
My bomb-addled brain hurried to catch up with Cohen’s alphabet soup. SAC. Special Agent in Charge. And CARD. The FBI’s Child Abduction Rapid Deployment team. At least I knew the other string of letters. The JTTF was the Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Lieutenant Engel had seen the three agents and was heading toward them. He waved at Cohen and me, gesturing for us to join them.
I dropped the cigarette, stepped on it, and retrieved the butt. I pulled my earpiece from my pocket. “Time to roll.”
Special Agent in Charge McConnell’s poise was even more striking up close. I wondered if she’d ever been drunk or lost her temper, said something she regretted or smoked her way through a pack of cigarettes before she even got out of bed. I’d bet my bank account she’d never had Jack Daniel’s on her morning cereal.
I wondered how it was possible to reach your fifties and be so self-possessed. Today, even thirty felt out of reach.
The JTTF agents had the erect bearing and tight haircuts of former military. John Ritland was midthirties, five-ten, a weight lifter, with an old scar at his temple and another along his jaw. He was all economy of motion, but the spark in his eye suggested he was prepared to kick ass before his target saw it coming. His partner, Bob Wyman, looked ten years older and was five inches taller, but he had the same look in his eye. I liked them both immediately.
We shook hands all around.
“I heard about you,” McConnell said when I introduced myself. Her eyes were invisible behind the shades. “You took down that white supremacist gang last February. Excellent investigation. The papers called you a hero. You’re still working the rails?”
“Even heroes need gainful employment.”
She regarded me a moment longer, and I got the distinct impression she was disappointed with my decision.
“There a problem?” I asked.
A beat of silence. Then she said, “Of course not.”
Her gaze shifted to my partner and she squatted so she was eye level with Clyde. “This must be former Staff Sergeant Clyde.”
I nodded, surprised at her use of his rank.
“Belgian Malinois,” she said. “Best breed there is. Loyal. And smart as hell.”
Clyde preened, clearly smitten. Pushover.
McConnell straightened. “You were a sergeant,” she said.
So she knew the tradition of ranking military working dogs one level higher than their handlers as a way of showing respect and ensuring discipline.
I shook my head. “A lowly corporal. I inherited Clyde from his second handler.”