Bottom line, Heron hadn’t said a goddamn thing about the hows or wheres or whys of the explosion, and Isaac hadn’t asked. “Need to know” was the rule of thumb in XOps: The boss and an operative show up with one blown into deli meat and the other dragging both their sorry asses through the sand in the middle of the night?
Fine. No biggie. Whatever.
After all, sometimes the information you carried was more dangerous than a loaded gun at your temple.
As Jim abruptly ended the call to the boss, Isaac had a bone to pick with the SOB. “First of all, I don’t need you going all martyr on me—so can the ‘I shot him’ shit. And what the hell? Matthias tried to kill himself?”
“First of all,” Jim echoed, “I don’t do collateral damage, so you can suck it up on whatever I do to save your ass. Second . . . yes. He did. The device was one of ours, and he knew precisely where to step. He met my eyes as he put his foot down . . . and mouthed something.” The guy shook his head. “Not a clue what he’d said. Then boom! Most of the detonator was vaporized. But not all of it. Not all.”
Fascinating. “How long until he gets here?”
“I don’t know. But he’s coming. He has to.”
Yeah, as for the stuff about the second in command? That was nothing he wanted to know about, frankly. He had enough intel swelling his skull. The only thing he cared about was getting tonight over with.
“I’m shit-tired of waiting,” he muttered.
“Join the club.”
On that note, Isaac looked around. The ADT system was off and so was the big boy behind Grier’s closet, but all the doors were locked, so chances were good they’d know if someone broke in.
“Listen, I’m going to go upstairs,” he said. “Keep an eye out up there.”
“Okay.” Jim’s shrewd eyes refocused on the rear garden like he expected an infiltration at any moment. “I’ll cover the back forty.”
As Isaac went to mount the rear staircase, he paused and leaned back into the kitchen. Heron was standing in front of the glass, hands on his hips, frown clamped on his brow.
No, the guy wasn’t dead. And he honestly didn’t seem bothered by the reality that a bullet could come crashing through all that see-through at any second.
“Jim.”
“Yeah.” The man looked over.
“What are you? Really.”
As silence stretched, the word “angel” winged around in the space between them. Except surely that wasn’t possible?
The man shrugged. “I just am.”
Roger that, Isaac thought. “Well . . . thank you.”
Jim shook his head. “We’re not out of the woods yet.”
“Regardless. Thank you.” Isaac cleared his throat. “Can’t say that anyone has ever stuck their neck out for me like this.”
Well, that wasn’t true, was it. Grier had in her own way. And God, the mere thought of her nearly made his eyes sting.
Heron bowed a little and seemed honestly touched. “You’re welcome, my man. Now quit being a sap and guard the third floor.”
Isaac had to smile. “I may need a job after this, you know.”
A grin appeared, but faded quick. “I’m not sure you want to go through the job-application process for where I’m at. It’s rough.”
“Been there. Done that.”
“Which was what I thought, too.”
With that, Isaac hit the stairs.
Yeah, sure, ostensibly he was going to look out from the top floor, but there was another truth to be had, another driver.
When he entered Grier’s bedroom, he went straight to her closet and stood over the mess of clothes that remained on the creamy carpet. She’d left the project of rehanging half-done—because, duh, some asshole had gotten capped in her front hall.
But he could take care of the problem.
As he waited to see whether there was going to be a bizarre kind of reunion with Matthias or a shoot-out that left the pair of them dead, he picked up her blouses and skirts and dresses and, one by one, made order from the chaos.
At least he could clean up something for her; God knew, that body was still downstairs, albeit wrapped in plastic like something about to be shipped through a mail-order house.
There would be time to move it later, however.
And no other opportunity to take care of her things.
Besides, the “sap” in him wanted some kind of final contact with her—and the closest he was going to get was handling with care what had once lain against her precious skin.
CHAPTER 45
Grier followed her father’s Mercedes out to Lincoln, and when the familiar pylons on either side of the farmhouse’s drive appeared, she took the first deep breath since they’d left Beacon Hill. Turning right down the cracked-seashell lane, she pulled up in front of the gray-and-white clapboard and put her Audi in park. Although the heart of downtown Boston was only twenty miles away, it might as well have been two hundred. Everything was quiet as she turned off the engine and stepped out of her car, the clean, crisp air tingling through her nose.
God, how she loved this place, she thought.
The gentle, fading light of the gloaming softened the tree line that ran around the six acres of fields and gardens and bathed the clapboard in a buttery illumination. Before her mother’s death, the place had been a retreat for the four of them, a way to get out of the city when they didn’t go to the Cape—and Grier had spent a lot of weekends here, running through the meadow and playing around the pond.
After her father became a widower, he had needed a fresh start, and so she’d moved into the town house and he’d come out here permanently.
As her father approached from the garage where he’d docked that huge sedan of his, his loafers crunched over the little shell fragments. When she’d been young, she’d thought that drives like this were covered with a special kind of Rice Krispies. Instead of milk poured into a bowl, all you needed were feet to get the chattering sound going.
He was cautious as he came up to her. “Would you like me to get your things?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“And perhaps we should have dinner?”
Even though she wasn’t hungry, she nodded. “That would be lovely.”
God, they were like people at some cocktail party. Well, a cocktail party that involved dead bodies, guns, and running from killers—fashionably late, in this case, meant you were dead, not just the victim of a hair catastrophe or bad traffic on one-twenty-eight.
Which reminded her . . .
Grier looked around and felt the back of her neck tingle. They were being watched. She could feel it. But she wasn’t anxious; she was calmed by whatever it was she sensed.
It was Jim’s men, she was willing to bet. She hadn’t seen them drive up, but they were here.
After her father got her suitcase out and shut her trunk, she locked the car—and tried not to think about the fact that the man with the eye patch had been inside the damn thing. Frankly, it made her want to sell the Audi, even though it only had thirty thousand miles on it and ran like a top.
“Shall we?” her father asked, indicating the front walk with an elegant hand.
Nodding, she stepped forward and led the way up the brick path to the door. Before opening the way in, her father turned off the security system, which was just like hers, and then unlocked the dead bolts one by one. The moment they’d both cleared the jambs, he shut them in, reengaged the system and relocked everything.
No one was going to get at them here: This place made the one in town look like a papier-mâché pup tent when it came to security.
After Daniel’s death, this house had been prepared for a siege—something she hadn’t understood until now. All the clapboards had been stripped off and microthin fire-retardant panels put in place on the interior and exterior; all the leaded glass had been replaced with bulletproof panes that were an inch thick; the antique doors had been swapped out for ones that had reinforced lead frames; oxygen-monitoring equipment and heavy-duty HVAC systems had been installed; and there were no doubt other improvements that she wasn’t aware of.