Page 31 of I Dream of Danger
He woke up with a heavy bandage around his thigh and in great pain again, but he was told he wasn’t going to get any more painkillers until he was debriefed. Well, now they’d been debriefed and he had been offered pain relief, but he had other things to do.
Something he’d been wanting to do for three months, two days, and seventeen hours.
Call Elle.
He was perfectly within his rights as long as he didn’t talk about where he’d been or what he’d seen or what he’d done, which was cool. You don’t want to tell a woman you care about that, oh, sorry I haven’t called, but I’ve been living in a tree waiting to shoot a man’s brains out.
But Elle was smart. She’d made him for a soldier and she’d understand that he couldn’t talk about it. What difference did it make anyway? There were plenty of things for them to talk about and, well, he didn’t really plan on talking much anyway. Not for the first couple of days, anyway.
He planned to walk in, take Elle to bed, and stay there until they were both too sore to walk, the spell in bed broken only by eating and sleeping. Oh yeah. The thought of that—of taking Elle to bed and staying there for a long, long time—had sustained him over the past truly awful three months.
He was slated to become Delta. Not many Delta Force operators had girlfriends. Most, like him, had fuck buddies who didn’t mind if the men drifted in and out of their lives, leaving without a word and showing up again with no advance notice. But some had girlfriends. A couple were even married.
Nick had had no desire for a steady girlfriend, but Elle—Elle was different. He didn’t know how they’d make it work, but they would. Maybe he could convince her to move down here. There was a state university. Elle had always been an A student…she’d breeze through it, in whatever degree she wanted to get. And Nick could see her every time he came off an op.
That whole coming-and-going thing…he had to put a little Vaseline on the lens of his imagination there, because not too many women were happy at the thought of just sitting there waiting for their man to come back, in the hope that he didn’t come back in a pine box. But he could convince Elle. Elle cared for him. He’d seen it in her eyes, in her touch.
Oh God. Don’t think of her touch. Those three months slapping away bugs and sucking MREs, he hadn’t dared think of her because he’d get a woodie and he didn’t want to do that on the op. He was living with three other men, elbow to elbow, and he couldn’t do something about it without them knowing. Nick had got himself off any number of times with other guys around. They all did. Sexual release was a known stress reliever. But whacking off to thoughts of Elle while the other guys listened and cracked jokes…nope. Couldn’t do it.
But now he wasn’t on an op and he was going to see Elle real soon. With any luck he could coax her down here because the idea of driving the fourteen hours to Lawrence made his leg hurt just thinking of it. But he’d do it if he had to. Or he’d fly to the Kansas City airport, then rent a car to Lawrence.
However it was going to work, he was going to be with her before the sun set.
Oh yeah.
He’d memorized her home number and cell number. He tried home first and got the first of a number of shocks.
This number has been discontinued.
That freaked him. Had her phone been cut off because she couldn’t afford to pay the bill? Fuck! He hadn’t had time to dump money in her account before leaving on the op.
Then he went to DefCon I when he found out her cell was cut off too. Number nonexistent.
He Googled her from his cell and nearly passed out from relief when nothing came up. So she hadn’t been in an accident. She wasn’t—he swallowed around the dry boulder that had suddenly appeared in his throat—dead.
But she would certainly be hurting for money. He’d been planning to do this and was sorry it was so freaking late. Who knew he’d be sent on the longest op of his life? He was going to transfer the contents of his bank account to hers. He didn’t need money. It just sat there, this lump in his account. Let her have it.
First, check to see what she had in the bank.
He knew her bank account number. It was a local bank and their firewalls were pathetic. He easily hacked past them and then stared at his display.
Elle had closed her account. Three fucking months ago.
Now he was scared. A quick check showed that electricity had been cut off three months ago. Jesus. On a hunch, he checked the property rolls and stared. The bank owned her home. It had foreclosed on the mortgage that had been placed on the house three years ago. It hadn’t occurred to him that she’d have placed a mortgage on the house, but it made sense if she’d been having money problems dealing with the Judge.
He winced when he saw the amount. Over a hundred thou. Well, they’d manage.
Or not. Because Elle hadn’t been making payments. The home technically belonged to the bank now. Lots of people still lived in foreclosed homes, but not without electricity. Not in the middle of winter. His skin itched with anxiety.
If this were an op he could send a drone over the house, look for signs of life. A tended garden, smoke from the chimney. A drone at night with IR could see if someone was living there. It could even discern candlelight.
Shit. Not an image he wanted in his head. Ellen, huddling in a dark house lit only by candlelight.
There was no question of not going to Lawrence. He had to get there and fast. A quick e-mail check, and he discovered he could hitch a series of helo rides from here to Kansas City and rent a car from there. He could be in Lawrence by 1700.
The rides were uncomfortable and hurt his leg, but he didn’t notice. He just sank into himself as he was carried northwest, running through the same set of facts that made no sense. Or made awful sense, depending.
Because, well…there was another scenario buzzing in his head so loudly he had trouble thinking about anything else. The house and everything connected to it had been abandoned three months ago, exactly when Nick had abandoned her. He hadn’t abandoned her, not really, he’d had every intention of coming back, and he’d even left her an illegal note, but the fact of the matter was, he’d left. And though the note was already too much, it didn’t exactly give a lot of info.
