“Gaby?” Mason’s voice again, coming from the other side of the counter. She looked over at the radio, still sitting where she had left it. “I feel like I’m talking to myself here. Won’t you say something?”
He doesn’t know.
She could hear it in his voice: Mason had no idea she had lost consciousness for…however long it had been. Maybe it was just a few seconds, after all, because he sounded more bored than anything.
“It’s not too late, you know,” Mason said. “With Mercer’s people out there, we can always use more volunteers. You’d fit right in, and you can count on me to keep quiet about what you’ve been up to out here. We’ll just pretend it never happened. Clean slate and all that. What do you say?” When she didn’t respond, “I bet all the boys would go crazy trying to get into your — Uh, I mean, be all friendly like with you.”
This time she didn’t stop herself from crawling back down the length of the counter and snatching up the radio and keying it. “That ship sailed when you tried to kill me, you piece of shit.”
“She lives!” Mason laughed. “Sorry about that. I thought you were someone else.”
“Fuck you.”
“Okay, okay, I admit it, I knew it was you. Can you blame me? These last few days have been a real pain for both of us.”
“Go to hell,” she said, and lowered the radio back to the floor. Just holding it to her lips was tiring, and with her useless left arm it meant she had to rely on her right, and she preferred to be holding the M4 instead.
“That’s not very ladylike, is it?”
She lifted the radio back up with some effort. “Fuck off.”
“You kiss Nate with that mouth?”
“I do more than that.”
Mason laughed again. It was loud and booming, and she tilted her head to see if she could hear it outside the diner, but she couldn’t. Wherever he was, he was well hidden enough that his voice didn’t travel. At least she had the satisfaction of knowing that with everything reduced to rubble around her, he couldn’t have been all that comfortable out there.
“By the way, you hear that?” Mason asked. When she didn’t respond, he said, “Shooting’s stopped. You know what that means, don’t you? The rescue has, alas, been canceled. You’re all by yourself, Gaby. There’s just you and me now. Somehow, I always knew it’d end up this way.”
She glanced to her left, where all the shooting had come from before the silence. What were the chances Mason was telling the truth, that Danny and Nate had been stopped on their way to her?
No. He’s lying. That’s what he does. He lies.
She looked back at the radio. Mason was in a mood to talk, so who was she to keep him from flapping his gums? The more attention he paid to her, the less he was looking for Danny and Nate, because she didn’t believe for a second they were both dead, and death was the only thing that was going to keep them from coming to her.
She picked the radio up. “Last night…”
“What about it?” Mason said.
“You attacked us.”
“So?”
“You weren’t supposed to do that. But you did.”
“That’s what’s on your mind? Now? With Danny and Nate dead, and you in that diner all by your little lonesome, surrounded by my guys?”
She ignored him and said, “Why did you attack last night?”
“Because I could,” Mason said. “Because the person our mutual friends were luring to Gallant had arrived, and they gave me the go-ahead to finish you off. I know, I could have sat back and let the little beasts finish the job without ever having to get my hands dirty, but I really wanted the satisfaction of shooting Danny in the face. It must be the Army Ranger thing. I don’t have a lot of ambitions in life — survival’s always been the number-one goal — but to take out a Ranger… Well, I couldn’t resist.”
Danny’s going to love hearing that…because he’s not dead.
God, please, don’t be dead, Danny. Don’t be dead.
“I met your friend, you know,” Mason said.
Friend?
“Will,” Mason said. “The other Ranger. Back in Louisiana, outside of Dunbar. That was me. I put that together. Well, most of it. See, we’ve been connected for a while now, only you never knew it.” He chuckled, clearly satisfied with himself. “You don’t know how many times I wanted to let that slip while you were dragging me around Texas.”
“You were there…”
“Not just there. I was the one who handed him over to them. To her.”
Her?
Gaby stared at the radio, not quite sure what she was feeling. Anger? Hatred? Guilt?
There had always been a large hole in her knowledge about what had happened to Will that day and the days after. The not knowing had affected Lara the most as she waited for him, but it hadn’t been easy on her and Danny either because they were the last two to see him alive, and it weighed heavily on them that they had left him out there, alone.
Maybe, she thought, that was why it was so hard for her to believe that the thing from last night was Will, because admitting it was also accepting that Will hadn’t managed a miraculous escape, a fairy tale she continued to cling to all the way up to last night. In so many ways, accepting that the blue-eyed creature that had shadowed them from Larkin and Starch and now Gallant was, in fact, a transformed Will was the same as coming face-to-face with her failure.
“Hey, you still there?” Mason was saying. “You didn’t fall asleep on me, did you?”
She didn’t bother answering him. Her shoulder hurt and her left arm had grown three (five?) times its normal weight, and it was difficult just to lift it an inch off the dirty diner floor. Besides, Mason’s voice was starting to give her a headache.
“Sweetheart?”
Don’t call me sweetheart, you sonofabitch, she thought, but didn’t have the strength to say into the radio.
“I guess this is goodbye—”
She was so numb and tired and ready to just close her eyes and go to sleep that she almost didn’t react when a hellacious series of gunfire crackled through the radio and cut Mason off in mid-sentence. At first Gaby thought it was all taking place on Mason’s side of the radio, but no, she could actually hear it outside in the street, too.
Crunch! as something broke underneath a heavy boot to her left.
Gaby turned her head — at this point it was the easiest part of her to move without sending jolts of pain through her body — as a man in a black uniform stepped out from a back hallway. The man had frozen in place when his boot came down on a piece of fallen plaster, the crunch that she had heard earlier. He was cradling a rifle and looking forward, searching for (her) something when she saw him.
Almost as if in slow motion, the man turned his head in her direction, and for the briefest of heartbeats they stared silently across the length of the counter at one another. The gunfire from across the street continued, but neither one of them heard it at the moment. For a second — maybe two — there were just the two of them in Tobey-something, staring at one another, both shocked to see the other there.
Mason?
No, not Mason.
She hadn’t needed to see his face to know the man wasn’t Mason because he was too tall and too skinny. He was holding his rifle in front of his chest, the muzzle pointed slightly forward and down, so when he reacted he had to lift the weapon and turn at the same time. She didn’t have to do anything because her M4 was already flat in her lap, the muzzle pointed right at him.