Page 58 of The Woman Left Behind

Restlessly, he changed positions, finally managed to get halfway comfortable. He was able to grab some sleep, waking when the thunderous sound of the engines changed. He’d been on so many planes that his subconscious recognized the altered pitch as a signal that they were slowing in preparation for approach and landing.

He stretched and got more water; around him, the others were stirring, too, alerted by the change in the noise level. Jina slept on, her soft lips barely parted, but she didn’t look particularly blissful; faint, fleeting expressions gave her a troubled look. He watched her for a minute, then nudged her sneaker with the toe of his. She gave a quick little frown, pursed her lips, and that was it. He nudged harder. Another frown, and this one looked as if it meant business. On the third try, he gave the sole of her shoe a light kick and said sharply, “Babe! Wake up!”

She sat up with a jerk and blindly threw a punch that would have de-balled him if he hadn’t jumped back, but he’d been halfway prepared for that sort of reaction. The other guys started laughing. Scowling, she looked around at them all, then scrubbed her face. “I was dreaming,” she muttered. “About the dead guy on my foot.”

“Thought you might be,” he replied, keeping his tone neutral. “We’ll be landing in a few. There’s a forward lav, if you need to go.”

Without a word she jumped to her feet and headed forward, weaving her way through the secured pallets and boxes. She needed to piss more often than the men did, so over the months they’d all adjusted to stopping for more piss breaks and letting her go first. Levi sat down again, thinking philosophical thoughts about the realities of traveling with a woman.

Actually landing took them another half hour; according to his watch, there were a couple of more hours until sunrise. At least they’d had some sleep and none of them were as jet-lagged as they had been the previous mission. He and Ramirez would go straight to debriefing, but the rest of them could catch a little downtime.

The plane rolled to a stop and the big ramp lowered. They got their gear and wearily trudged down the ramp and toward where they’d left their vehicles. As soon as they were off and clear, the ramp was raised again and the plane taxied around to take off for its final destination.

“C’mon, you can ride with me,” he said to Ramirez, striding past him toward his truck.

Ramirez gave him a wary look. “Will my legs be okay?”

“As long as you stay away from Babe,” he replied equably. He unlocked the doors, leaned in to insert the key and start the engine, then began scraping frost off the windshield.

“Like seven big brothers, huh?” Ramirez said as he slid into the passenger seat.

“She has brothers. We’re the mean-ass guys she works with.” He didn’t want to be her damn brother. He wasn’t content with being the mean-ass guy she worked with, either, but for now he’d have to settle.

As he drove the mostly deserted pre-daylight streets to headquarters, Ramirez—evidently he had more balls than brains—said, “She’s a grown woman.”

Levi grunted. “Noticed that, did you? Did you also notice that she’s more than capable of telling us to shut up and mind our own business if she was interested? What does that tell you?”

Ramirez frowned. “Okay. Shit. I get it. She wasn’t interested.”

“She’d have thrown something at us if she had been.”

They reached headquarters and entered the nondescript building, signed in. Ramirez went one way, Levi went another. They would be debriefed on different aspects, Ramirez on what he’d learned while undercover, Levi on the exfil mission itself.

Two cups of coffee helped him get through the debriefing in a relatively benign mood, but he was damn hungry by the time they finished. As he was heading out of the building, he heard his name called and turned to see Kodak striding toward him.

“What’s up?”

For once, Kodak’s easygoing expression was absent. Instead he looked tired and grim.

“Thought you’d want to know. We lost Bingo day before yesterday.”

“Lost” meant “dead.” Bingo was the nickname Kodak’s team had given Brian Donnelly almost as soon as he joined the team.

“Shit,” Levi said under his breath. Losing any member of any team was always a kick in the gut, but Donnelly was not only one of the drone operators, he was Jina’s friend. That one time Levi had been around him, he’d had to like him even though he’d been jealous as hell over Donnelly’s status as Jina’s date. “What happened?”

“Things went sideways,” Kodak said wearily. “We were doing a hostile exfil, the LZ was hot, and Bingo took one in the head.”

That was a very brief description but Levi knew exactly what the exfil had been like, having done more than one himself. Chaotic, violent, bad shit going down. It happened.

And now he had to tell Jina.

Even though she was tired and would have liked to sleep for half the day, Jina had already learned that the best way to get back on schedule was to stay awake for the rest of the day and do normal stuff. Besides, she didn’t want to sleep just yet. The dead guy’s face—even though he was a bad dead guy—wasn’t far enough away from her subconscious. She didn’t want him to bother her, but he still did.

On the way home she stopped at an IHOP and had breakfast, taking care to sit well away from other customers because she figured she stank. If she did, at least the waitress didn’t make a face. Coffee, bacon, and eggs went a long way toward making her feel human again. Gray daylight was peeling back the shadows of darkness as she drove the rest of the way home.

When she unzipped her go-bag to dig out the dirty laundry, however, the smell nearly knocked her down. Her head turned aside, she dumped all the contents out in front of the clothes washer. Whether she’d worn everything or not, all of it was contaminated beyond what she could bear. If the source of the extremely bad smell hadn’t been her dirty socks, she’d have thought the guys had pranked her by maybe spraying the inside of her bag with sulfur mixed with skunk—and maybe dead possum thrown in for variety. Her Merrell sneakers smelled really bad, too, though the footbed was supposed to have odor control; maybe rain forest funk outstunk the control factor.

She stripped off where she stood, determinedly ignored the blood on her jeans, and started her laundry, even tossing the sneakers in, too. If being washed ruined them, then they were ruined. She could buy more sneakers, but she couldn’t stand that smell.

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