Page 43 of Seal of Honor
“Yo, Q. You here with me?” Marcus’s hand passed in front of his face and he blinked back to the present, silently cursing himself. He didn’t stroll down memory lane often, and when he did, he never went that far back. He shook his head. He had to stop zoning out. Jesse was already suspicious about his medical condition and he didn’t need to add more fuel to that fire by blanking on Marcus.
He also had to get out of this fucking apartment—it made his skin crawl with the memories of Big Ben. He cleared his throat. “Find anything?”
Marcus gave him a narrow-eyed once-over but then shrugged. “Nah. Place is cleared out. If Jacinto ever lived here, it wasn’t recently.”
Quinn nodded and started toward the door. “Let’s go over and see how Ian and Jesse are doing at the warehouse. Maybe we’ll get lucky and—” His phone vibrated in his pocket and he held up a finger. “Hang on.” He checked the screen.
Harvard.
Even as his stomach dropped into his pelvic cradle with sickening speed, he tried to keep his voice level. “What did you find?”
The kid’s voice was almost all static. “Nothing good.”
And it wasn’t. Gabe’s Jeep abandoned on the road, windshield shot up, with no sign of him or Audrey.
Quinn rubbed a hand down his face, appalled that tears blurred his vision. There were so few people left in the world he considered friends, and even less he counted as family. Gabe was family. If that fucker went and got killed… Christ, he might just lose his grip on the thin shred of sanity he still had.
“…dead bodies,” Harvard said, and Quinn snapped back, realizing he’d lost the thread of conversation.
Concentrate, asshole, he told himself. He’d never had a problem keeping on task before, but… well, a lot had changed since the car accident. “What bodies?”
Harvard made an exasperated sound. “Four of them on the road. Looks like a shootout?—”
“That Quinn?” Jean-Luc asked in the background. “Let me talk to him.” Then, “Quinn, those bodies are trouble. I can’t begin to explain what happened between them and Gabe, but some of their friends showed up as I was leaving the scene and came after me. I lost ’em. Wasn’t easy.”
And the hits kept coming. “Did you get any intel out of them?”
“Not from the guys chasing me. They had guns and they were pissed. I wasn’t about to stop and have a hi-how-are-ya chat with ’em. But,” he added before Quinn could protest, “I got the plate numbers of both vehicles and photos of the dead men. Already sent to Harvard’s email, and he says he’ll start on the IDs as soon as we get back.”
“All right. You’re sure there was no sign of Gabe or Audrey near the Jeep?”
“Positive.” He mentioned how Gabe’s cane and sunglasses were still in the vehicle, and that they found his gun in the foliage beside the road. “Harvard thinks he ditched it.”
“I agree. If guerrillas ambushed them, he’d have wanted to pose less of a threat.” Luckily, Gabe was a threat with or without a firearm. “What about his phone?”
“Couldn’t find it.”
So he ditched the gun, kept the phone…which had GPS. Thank you, Gabe, you smart son of a bitch.
Relief surged through Quinn, making his hands shake. He hoped like hell Marcus didn’t notice.
“Get back to base ASAP,” he told Jean-Luc, then disconnected the call and speed-dialed Jesse. “Change of plans. Hold off on the warehouse. We’re going after Gabe.”
* * *
“Go,” Gabe whispered when the door opened.
Audrey hesitated only a second.
It was a second too long.
The black silhouette of a man slunk around the corner of the hut, spotted them, and raised his gun without even a shouted warning. He never got a shot off; Gabe dispatched him with a burst of three quick, clean headshots. The man in black’s eyes widened, and, gun dropping from his limp hand, he crumpled where he stood. The AK-47’s retort echoed off the mountainside and set off other gunshots around the camp in a daisy chain reaction of panic. The guerrillas poured from their huts, confused, sleepy, and half-dressed, right into the oncoming bullets of the attackers. Those who didn’t drop dead went for their own weapons, and soon, the clearing sounded like a fireworks show.
Bang, bang, bangbangbang. Boom!
Audrey shrank back. This was it. They were both dead. She’d never see her nephews again, never know if her brother made it home safe or if her paintings sold at the art show. She’d never find out if sex with Gabe was as good as she imagined it might be. Never know if their chemistry was purely an adrenaline-fueled consequence of the circumstances or something more.
God, she didn’t want to die.
