Page 77 of Seal of Honor
C’mon, Gabriel. Wake up again for me.
She tried tugging on his arm, but that only succeeded in making him slouch sideways in the taxi’s backseat.
The driver eyed her in the mirror. She eyed him back, sizing him up. He was a big guy, more fat than muscle, but moving Gabe would be much easier with his help.
“I’ll pay you extra,” she said when he balked at the suggestion.
Grumbling, the cab driver slid from behind the wheel, and together, they managed to half-carry, half-drag Gabe as far as the front entryway.
Ah, the power of the almighty peso.
Audrey didn’t dare turn on any lights, having no idea what the cab driver might see inside the room, so she fished in Gabe’s pants pockets, paid him with every bill left there, and ushered him out as fast as possible. She helped Gabe down to the floor and went to the window to make sure the taxi was gone before hitting the overhead light.
Harvard’s computer hummed on the table in the corner. Marcus’s hat hung forgotten from a lamp. A box of cold pizza with one measly slice left sat on the table in the center of the room on top of a map, which had a circle around the address Mena had given Gabe.
So they hadn’t abandoned the house. They’d followed Gabe’s orders to check out the address.
Frantic, Audrey searched forJesse’s medical bag. She’d seen him retrieve it from a bookshelf…
Gone.
Of course, the medic wouldn’t leave home without it, but was it too much to ask for him to leave a scrap of gauze behind?
Behind her, Gabe groaned, and she spun to find him up on his hands and knees. She’d once teased him about being the Terminator, but, God, he really must be. She hurried to his side and soothed a hand over his sweat-damp head.
“Shh, shh. Lay down, sailor. We’re safe. You got us home. We’re safe now.”
Either he wasn’t fully conscious, or he took her words to heart because he collapsed back to the floor without a word of protest. The dress shirt bunched up around his shoulders, and she saw that he was bleeding again, blood soaking through the bandages the pilot had helped her wrap around him.
All this time, during the whole flight from Cartagena to Bogotá, he’d been bleeding when she thought she’d patched up his wound.
Panic ripped through her, a visceral, sharp sting that snapped her back into action. Spotting Quinn’s coat on the back of a chair, she figured he wouldn’t mind her ruining it if it saved Gabe’s life and bundled it into a compress. Gabe sucked in a sharp breath when she pressed it to his wounds, which was a good sign. She hoped. She remembered an episode of some medical show saying that if a patient responded to painful stimuli, they were not in a coma.
So now what?
Audrey had no clue what else to do for him, but the team had to be back soon, right? They just had to wait it out, so she sat on the floor beside him, keeping pressure on the compress with one hand, stroking his hair with the other. And she talked to him.
“You stay with me, Gabriel, you hear me?” She tried to keep her voice strong, commanding, positive, but her tears spilled over in earnest and choked the words. “You need to stay here so you can save my brother and protect the world from the bad guys like Cocodrilo and Mena and Liam and—and you’re going to come to Costa Rica and swim with my dolphins. Your men need you to stick around, too. Quinn… God, he really needs you, you know? He seems like a very sad, lonely man, and he… he just needs you. And so do I.”
Gabe didn’t move, didn’t acknowledge that he’d heard her in any way, but she kept talking. “You hear that? You have to stay with me because we all love you. I love you, and I’m not ready to lose someone else I love. I’m still grieving for my parents, and I might have to grieve for my brother. So, please, please don’t make me grieve for you, too. Please, I?—”
A phone vibrated somewhere in the room, and Audrey shot to her feet. She hadn’t thought to look for one, figuring everybody had taken their phones along, but hallelujah, someone had forgotten theirs.
She found the source of the bzz bzz bzz under the pizza box and a stack of papers. It was Marcus’s phone—at least, she assumed so from the photo of a surfer catching an enormous wave. She reminded herself to plant a big, fat, wet kiss on the man when she saw him again.
Marcus had a text from someone named Giancarelli, but she ignored it and called up Quinn’s number. Dumped straight into voicemail. Next, she tried Jesse and got the same. So she called Harvard’s number, thinking he was the most likely to be somewhere he could answer. The Imperial March from Star Wars swelled from the bedroom off the living room. She followed the sound and pushed open the bedroom door.
Harvard.
Skinny, tousled, and sleepy-eyed, he sat on the edge of the bed in only a pair of white briefs, fumbling around for his phone. When it stopped ringing before he got to it, he groaned, gave up the search, and flopped back to the mattress.
She’d never been so happy to see anyone in her life. “Harvard!”
He bolted upright. His shaggy hair hugged his head on one side while the other stuck up in a near mohawk. “What?” He squinted at her, then scrambled for his glasses and put them on crookedly. “Audrey? Holy shit.”
“Gabe’s hurt.” There would be time for lengthy explanations later. “Do you have any way of getting hold of Quinn?”
“Uh, yeah. Yeah, of course. Uh… let me… it’s here somewhere.” He groped around in the bed for a radio and hit the talk button in Morse code. Three short bursts, three long, three short.
