Page 178 of Blue Moon

The dog was back with a clean bill of health, and the money was where it should be, and those were the only things Luna needed to care about.

Dinner ended up being takeout with Storm and Dusk. Tulsa was nowhere to be seen, but Pale showed up just before midnight and helped himself to a taco.

“You get the money back?” he asked.

I nodded. “Yup.”

“How’s the girl doing?”

“Which one?”

“The singer.”

“She’s cosied up with her emotional-support SEAL, and she’s doing better than I expected. She was more worried about the dog being missing than anything else.”

Pale sniffed the air. “A dead deer, huh?”

“Shut the fuck up.”

He just laughed. “I gotta get some sleep.”

“Getting old?”

“That and I have to fly to Miramar first thing in the morning.” He took a bite of taco, then cursed as half the filling fell out. “You should come.”

“To Miramar? Why would I want to go to Miramar? I have enough eye candy on my own team.”

“I’m going to see a woman about a job, but I don’t think she’ll take it. She might say yes to an offer from you, though.”

“Oh?” Finding candidates for the Special Projects team was always a challenge, and in special forces, men vastly outnumbered the women. In recent years, Pale had stolen most of the unicorns for his own posse. “She’s a Marine?”

“Yes, but not for long. She’s about to be released from the brig.”

Okay, this was getting interesting.

“What did she do?”

“Rearranged a PFC’s genitals.”

“And what did he do?”

“Behaved inappropriately with a woman outside a bar.”

“Justified?”

“There was an argument she should have stopped after the first punch. Even then, she’d probably have gotten away with it if the PFC hadn’t been a congressman’s son.”

“I see. And you want her for the Choir?”

“I think she’d be a good fit, but I also think she’ll tell me to go to hell if I suggest she works for Uncle Sam again. Congressman Bartell really screwed her over.”

“Bartell? Isn’t he the sleaze on the armed services committee?”

“That’s him.”

So, reading between the lines, Bartell had raised his son in his own image and then put pressure on the USMC to cover up the boy’s transgressions. Nice.

“What’s her name?”

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