Cold Dawn Part 7

Eliminating risks altogether wasn't possible.

If he thought his presence wasn't a coincidence, the police would be thinking the same thing. Nick had answered their questions and provided them with contact information. They could find him if they wanted to talk to him again.

"Yeah," Sean said finally. "For me, too. I'll talk to Hannah."

He disconnected, and Nick tossed his phone onto the side table.

The radiator again clanked loudly as heat surged into the room.

It'd be a long night. He checked the room service menu. He could order hot cocoa for two and go find Rose's room.

He raked a hand through his hair.

"No, you moron," he muttered. "Are you out of your d.a.m.n mind?"

No hot cocoa for two, and definitely no finding Rose's room.

Instead Nick stripped to his shorts, dropped onto the sunflower carpet and burned off his energy and frustration with a hundred push-ups and a hundred sit-ups.

Six.

Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.

R yan "Grit" Taylor had dreamed about tupelo honey, which he didn't think was crazy or anything, since that was his family's business. Still, it had been a long time since he'd dreamed about honey, or growing up on the Florida Panhandle. He sat up in his bed in Myrtle Smith's first-floor guest room at her home just off Emba.s.sy Row in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.

Less than a year ago, he'd been a Navy SEAL searching for enemy weapon caches in Afghanistan. Now he was waking up under a fluffy peach-colored blanket and watching sunlight stream through lacy shear panels on a tall window overlooking a dormant flower garden.

Myrtle's house was more traditional and girly than Grit would have expected. She'd probably threaten something untoward if she knew what he was thinking, but he hadn't seen her in a few weeks. She was still up in Vermont, b.i.t.c.hing about the cold and snow and baking cookies and scones and such. The front of her house-especially her office-had burned in a suspicious fire in November, but the back was in good shape.

Grit went through his routine to put on his prosthesis, a new one, his left leg having adapted and adjusted to the mechanics of prosthetic use. The procedure was automatic now, at least most days. He seldom experienced phantom pain anymore, either. The nerves in his residual limb were learning a new way to communicate to his brain.

Not that he'd forgotten he'd had his left leg amputated below the knee in a remote Afghan mountain pa.s.s, after he'd been shot in an ambush.

A Special Forces master sergeant who'd been with him that day was camped out down the hall in Myrtle's second guest room. Elijah Cameron had taken a near-fatal gunshot wound to the femoral artery and nearly bled out. Only his own quick action to tie a belt around his thigh, creating a tourniquet, had saved him. He was now fully recovered.

Grit didn't know why things had worked out the way they did.

He put on his service uniform and headed to the kitchen. Elijah was at the little round table with his size-twelve feet up on the rattan-seated chair across from him as he cradled a flowered mug of coffee. He nodded out the French doors at the patio. "Do you think we ought to fill Myrtle's bird feeders?"

"They're the wrong kind. She's only feeding squirrels with those things." Grit got down another flowered mug and poured himself coffee. The kitchen had dark cherry cabinets and a collection of delicate china teacups and saucers-more flowers-displayed on a shelf. "A bada.s.s Was.h.i.+ngton reporter like Myrtle and look at this place. Reminds me of my grandmother's house by the Apalachicola River. Myrtle even knows what tupelo honey is."

"So do I," Elijah said.

"No, you don't."

"I do. You told me after we were shot up. In the helicopter. White tupelo trees. Bees. Only honey that doesn't crystallize."

"No kidding. I said all that? You remember?"

Elijah shrugged. "It was something else to think about."

Besides dying. Besides the dead.

Grit sat with his coffee. "Moose's widow sent me a picture of the baby. You get one?"

"Yeah." Elijah kept staring at the half-dozen empty feeders. "Cute kid. Ryan Cameron Ferrerra. I didn't even know Moose that well. I couldn't keep him alive. I get why his wife named a baby after you. Not after me."

"We were with him when the Grim Reaper came for him."

Elijah nodded. "We were."

"I remember the two of you talking about why he was called Moose but grew up in Arizona and had never seen a moose, and you this Vermont mountain man."

Grit glanced out the window, no sign of spring yet out in Myrtle's backyard. He half expected Michael "Moose" Ferrerra to be on the patio. Moose had liked to joke about wanting to go back to Southern California and grill hot dogs on his patio. Instead he'd died in Afghanistan, doing the job he'd trained to do, made the commitment to do.

Half to himself, Grit said, "Doesn't seem like almost a year."

"Nope," Elijah said, "seems like ten years."

Grit almost laughed as he turned back to his friend. "What're you up to today?"

"Painting Myrtle's woodwork."

"She won't say so, but she's afraid to come back here. She almost got her b.u.t.t burned up in her own d.a.m.n house. If I hadn't come along and saved her, who knows."

"That's not her version," Elijah said.

"She's a reporter. You trust her version?"

"She says she'd have saved herself."

"Ha." But if that was what she needed to believe, Grit didn't care. "It'd help if we knew who set the fire. You know my theory. Myrtle was onto Whittaker's network. He ordered her house torched but he didn't strike the match himself."

"It was an electrical fire. No match."

"I was speaking metaphorically."

Elijah grinned. "*Metaphorically'?"

Grit nodded out the window. "Look, pansies. See them? They must have reseeded. We didn't plant them. I like pansies. They're like little smiling faces."

"Grit, you worry me."

"Projection. You worry yourself. What's on your mind? Jo?"

"Jo's fine. She won't stay here and won't let me stay with her until she gets herself straightened out with her job."

"You two-"

"She's at work now. What about you? You going in?"

"The Pentagon and Admiral Jenkins await. You want me to corral some general, get you a job?"

Elijah dropped his feet to the floor. "No need. I've been called in to do some intel work and a.n.a.lysis."

"Ah. Involve toting a gun?"

"A.J.'s talked about having me back at the lodge."

It wasn't a direct answer, but Elijah would know that. Grit let it go. "With Jo down here working for the Secret Service?"

"She doesn't have to stay in Was.h.i.+ngton." A twitch of a smile from Elijah. "She and Myrtle could open a quilt shop in Black Falls."

It was a ray of humor from Elijah, anyway. Grit wasn't a contemplative sort. "The dead guy in Vermont's on your mind. He would be even if your sister and this Nick Martini hadn't found him. It was a kerosene lamp fire. Do those happen much up there?"

"We have electricity in Vermont, Grit."

"Was it Lowell Whittaker's lamp?"

"I don't know." That thought clearly didn't sit well with Elijah. "Lowell might not be stupid, but I can see him putting the wrong fuel in the lamp. This guy sees it and figures he doesn't need to waste his flashlight batteries."

"Strike a match, and poof."

Elijah stood up. He was tall, but Jo Harper liked to say she could take him in a fair fight. Grit wasn't sure how she defined fair. She was another native Vermonter, in love with Elijah since high school-but he was the bad boy and she was the police chief's daughter. Grit had spent enough time in Vermont in recent months to work out who was who in little Black Falls.

"At least it wasn't the woodstove," Grit said. "I hate woodstoves."

"What's to hate?"

"Wood boxes, smoke, ashes. Every time I ran out of wood in my cabin up there, it was icy and snowy out."

"It's winter, Grit. What did you expect?" Elijah walked over to the sink and rinsed out his mug. "Rose didn't need this."

Grit turned from the pansies and bird feeders. "She picks through rubble for survivors of disasters. She finds lost little kids. She can handle herself."

Elijah gave Grit a hard-a.s.sed Cameron look. "You aren't thinking about asking her out, are you?"

"No. She's like a sister to me."

"She is my sister."

"That's why you don't see her as one of you."

Elijah frowned. "Grit, that makes no sense."

"It makes perfect sense. What's with this Nick Martini character?"

"I've met him a few times out in California, but I don't know him well. Sean trusts him."

"Vivian Whittaker trusted her husband, and turned out he was running a network of paid a.s.sa.s.sins out of their study for fun and profit. You'll talk to Sean between coats of paint?"

"Yeah."

Grit started for the utility room, which led to Myrtle's tidy garage. "Say hi to Jo for me. You know, three's a crowd. If I stayed at her apartment in Georgetown and she stayed here-"

"Won't work that way."

Grit didn't pursue the subject, because he had a feeling if he did, Elijah would shoot him-not to kill, just to wing him and shut him up.

Or maybe to kill him, after all. Elijah and Jo had reunited under stressful conditions, and fast. They had stuff to work out. Not the big stuff. The little stuff that could eat away at a relations.h.i.+p.

Not, Grit thought, that he knew from experience. He'd never found anyone he'd been tempted to marry. He wasn't sure now he ever would, not specifically because he was missing his lower left leg-it had more to do with the ambush, watching a friend die. He'd watched himself become more and more distanced from everyone he knew. He realized what was happening, but as can-do as he was, he couldn't seem to do anything about it.

He went out to the garage and got into Myrtle's second car, a 1989 Buick that she'd inherited from some dead uncle in South Carolina. The interior smelled faintly of cigars.

Grit was almost at Ma.s.sachusetts Avenue when his cell phone jingled next to him on the pa.s.senger's seat. He picked up.

"Where are you?"

He recognized the voice of Charlie Neal, the sixteen-year-old son of the vice president of the United States. "Stop sign," Grit said. "I'm driving. I threw caution to the wind and answered the phone. Aren't you in school?"

"On my way. I have a calculus test today. So boring."

"You aren't taking one for your coconspirator cousin Conor, are you?"

"Conor took a test for me. I didn't take one for him. He did terrible."

The two look-alike cousins had done prince-and-the-pauper switches so that Charlie could get out from under his Secret Service detail. They both were in trouble with their parents, the Secret Service, Elijah Cameron and Grit Taylor.

Grit pulled over into the shade. He wasn't that used to driving again, and he'd learned to give any conversation with Charlie and his 180-IQ his full attention. "What do you want, Charlie?"

"Our arsonist is back."

Grit wasn't that surprised by Charlie's comment. Cars zipped past him on the residential street that ran perpendicular to the one he was on. The Buick was warm, the morning temperature almost springlike, but he didn't roll down his window. The car wasn't bugged-he'd checked. The Secret Service was onto his friends.h.i.+p with Charlie Neal. Jo Harper didn't like it, but Charlie's dad, the vice president, had decided Grit was someone the incorrigible teenager would listen to.

A positive influence, Grit thought. Him.

Preston Neal probably hadn't thought Grit and Charlie would be talking pyromaniacs again. Charlie had figured out a network of paid killers was at work back in November, before anyone else. He didn't need such nice-ties as evidence. He remained convinced a serial arsonist had been one of Lowell Whittaker's contract killers and was still on the loose.

"Whose phone are you on?" Grit asked him.