Page 14 of What is Lost

“Eww.” When she wrinkled her nose, her features took on a puckish look: an elf with attitude. Leaning in so closely that her lips brushed his ear, she said, “Although I might be up for that, Dr. Strangelove.”

What,what? A small thrill finger-walked the knobs of his spine. Was this an invitation? Couldn’t be. She was nervous, that was all. They were soldiers heading off into the unknown. This was about fear, not desire, not his need to cup her face in his hands and let his lips drift down her neck and over the notch of her collarbone as he slid a hand under her blouse and then her bra until his fingers found the hard nub of her nipple and gave that a playful?—

What are you doing?Crossing his legs, he pinneddown his erection with his thighs.You have to work together.

“John?” Her voice somehow penetrated both the growl of engines and the roar of blood in his ears. “Are you okay?”

“Who? Me? What?” He flashed back to that night on call. Now, as then, it was very difficult to look casual when a guy’s hard-on was, well,hard. “No, I’m good. Really. Seriously. Good, I’m good.”

“Awful lot of goodness there,” she said, waggling an earbud. “Not too late.”

“Naw.” He flapped a hand. “Saving you from your own worst impulses.”And mine.

At that, something flitted over her features, there and gone: a swift sparrow of emotion too fleeting to be read.

“Maybe I don’t want saving,” she said.

Famous last words.

ON THE ROAD WITH CHILD AND KING

OCTOBER 2023

So,Patterson’s plan was simple…and not so simple.

Two days after Patterson made his elevator pitch—and only an hour before John was supposed to pick up a rental for the drive to Boise—the guy surprised him with an add-on, a not-so-very minor detail heclaimedhad slipped his mind. Which, John figured, was horse doo-doo. There were two possibilities: Patterson either had second thoughts abouthisability orstability or both...orthe guy worried that if he’d leveled, John would walk.

He almost,almostdid. The only thing that kept him in the game was his certainty that Roni had died because of him. Bringing what was left of her home was the least he could do.

So, he sucked it up. What choice did he really have? Unless he succumbed to the temptation to find out how gunmetal tasted, he’d be looking atthat guy in the mirror for a long, long time to come.

The simple part was travel—Boiseto Chicago to Istanbul. Once there, catch yet a third flight to Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan—and a meet.

That’s also where things stopped being so simple. Because there was the not-so-insignificant problem of the add-on.

Three hours out of Boise, John turned to the guy behind the wheel and said, “Let me get this straight. Patterson says that once we’re in Dushanbe, we’ll be ‘met’ at the airport.” He added air-quotes. “What’s that even mean? Met by whom? With what name? Man? Woman? Vegetable? How many syllables?”

Taz Davila lifted a shoulder and let it fall—and this was Davila being expressive. “Hank didn’t say.”

“Meaning he either can’t or won’t.” John paused. “Or doesn’t know.”

“Doesn’t that sort of fall under the category ofcan’t?”

From Davila, this counted as witty repartee. Although he was Hannah Kendricks’ husband, John knew diddly about the guy. Davila wasn’t really involved in Brighter Days, which catered to ex-military: the broken, the scarred. The haunted.That wasn’t Davila, so far as John knew. Hannah’s man was in and out, sometimes there, sometimes gone for a week or more at a time from the rehab ranch. John could count the number of times in the past four months where he’d laid eyes on the guy on one hand and still have fingers left over.

Which was to say that what John knew of the guy amounted to just about nothing, other than he was one of Patterson’s Brotherhood Support Group. (Yeah, yeah, yeah, he knew the group’s real name. Sue him.)

Davila was also ex-Ranger. Looked it, too. Biceps, six-pack, the Sunday morning football scruff. The whole package put John in mind of the men who’d joined that transport from Germany to Doha. Men both he and Roni assumed worked for the CIA and whom they also figured they’d never see again.

As with so many other things surrounding the evacuation, that was also so very wrong.

He pressed Davila. “What if Patterson hasn’t been read in either?”

“Doubt it.”

“Meaning you don’t know.”

“Meaning you need to start looking at the doughnut, not the hole.”

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