Page 156 of Lone Star

The ambulances had departed, taking Cletus and Cowboy – neither conscious – to the hospital. Everyone else had been patched up as best they could be and put to work in some fashion. Blue had brought in a wheelbarrow from one of the sheds and was making trips out with loads of busted sheetrock. Talis had righted the salvageable furniture and Catcher – lost, bereft without his twin, even more detached-seeming than normal – was carrying out the broken pieces. A pile was forming in the parking lot, she had no doubt.

Eden had swept all the cotton-candy pink insulation into piles, and she would have Nickel shop vac it up when he returned, then have him slap on an attachment and start getting up sheetrock dust. Pup, hobbling on a badly sprained ankle, was nailing plywood up over the hole in the wall.

Satisfied for the moment, Jenny turned to the two invalids who’d been dropped temporarily on the sofa. Both of them had IV bags attached to hospital issue, wheeled metal stands, and both wore gowns and were barefoot, Tenny with his bandaged throat, and Jinx holding himself like an old man, pale-faced and sweating from the pain.

“Look at the two of you,” she said, realizing too late that she’d put her hands on her cocked hips. “Whose stupid idea was it to take you out of the hospital?” They’d arrived just minutes ago, the sight of them hobbling across the dirty floor so ridiculous she’d thought she must have hit her head.

“Theirs,” the FBI agent, Maddox, who’d driven them all, said, sour and accusatory.

Gringo rolled his eyes. “You sure do complain a lot for a guy who willingly helped three one-percenters shoot their way out of a packed hospital.”

“You shot your way out?” Jenny asked.

“We dropped some cartel guys,” Jinx said, voice hoarse and tight.

Reese reached over, subtle and deft, and pressed the pump attacked to Jinx’s IV. A moment later, his lashes fluttered. Morphine pump, Jenny guessed.

She locked eyes with Reese and tipped her head. “Can I talk to you a sec?”

Gringo looked more than a little scandalized. “I was there, too.”

“I know, hon. Reese?”

He followed away a few paces, toward the mouth of the back hallway and out of the fray of busyness.

“What happened?”

The rundown he gave her was succinct, flatly delivered, and unemotional; a soldier reporting back to his CO. Ordinarily, she would have found it creepy and sad, but for the moment, she was glad of his eerily level head.

“Melanie was with him?” she asked. “Not being forced?”

“No signs of coercion, but I can’t know what she was thinking,” he said, and she glimpsed the first flicker of something like emotion, a brief spark of disquiet in his gaze.

She nodded. “Right.” Then: “You did a good job, Reese. Thanks for looking after everyone.”

His pale brows lifted the slightest fraction in what could only be surprise. Poor kid.

“Will you help me get Jinx and Tenny set up so they can rest? Then I could use you on security.”

He stiffened, stood up tall, heels coming together. “Ma’am.”

She felt the tug of a fleeting smile as he turned back toward the sofa. Under the strange veneer of child-soldier-grown-up, she could detect the makings of a spectacular Lean Dog in that guy. He already knew one of the most important words in the vocabulary:ma’am.

~*~

“Agent Maddox,” Eden called as she continued to sweep, and his head lifted. She thought he looked surprised, and wondered if it was the fact that she’d addressed him, or if her accent had thrown him. “Can I speak with you a moment?”

She noted that he’d rested a hand on the butt of the gun at his waist since entering the clubhouse, and he kept it there now as he came to stand in front of her. Smart man – annoying, but smart. He wore a huffy expression, but she could tell that it covered a barely-suppressed panic. This was a rule-follower; a straight-laced, uptight, by-the-book guy who’d probably had a parent or grandparent in law enforcement, one who’d grown up idolizing men and women in uniform, rather than fictional superheroes.

An assessment she made on the fly, her own law enforcement experience so deeply ingrained that she couldn’t fail to assess and deduce each new acquaintance.

“What were your orders?” she asked, flicking a few more stray clumps of insulation with the end of her broom. “Why were you stationed at the hospital?”

“What?” Distracted, impatient. When she glanced up, she found him surveying the room, and knew some of the disgust on his face had nothing to do with the truck that had come through the wall.

She set the broom bristles on the ground, and gripped the handle like a staff, staring at the side of his face. It was rather a nice face; he was handsome in a fine-boned, albeit generic way; the kind of man her mother would have said came from “good breeding stock.” Though nothing remarkable leapt out to her.

Then again, she’d grown very used to Charlie Fox, and she supposed she had ridiculous expectations.

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