Take Over at Midnight (The Night Stalkers) (27 page)

The Coast Guard had rushed a cutter to the scene from where it had been patrolling farther west. For twenty long minutes she had waited, hovering fifty feet from the boat and staring at her father in silence.

His smirk had grown.

When he took a hand off the windshield, as if to scratch his head, Lola sent a round whistling past his ear to slam into one of the engines. The force of the 30 mm shell actually ripped it off the mounting and sent it plunging into the ocean depths.

The hand reclamped to the windshield and the smirk went away.

Lola considered dropping the crew chiefs on the deck to secure him. But didn’t want to risk her team. She knew how fast his hands could deliver pain, though he’d rarely done more than slap her, how powerful he would remain despite his age. No one would ever be exposed to that again, especially not her crew.

Her crew. They were her crew now. Sure, she’d flown command, but they were her crew.

The Coasties swarmed aboard the racing boat. Once they had it secure, Lola settled the DAP Hawk on the helideck of the Coast Guard boat.

“You done good, team.” She wanted to make sure they knew, somehow understood how important they’d all become to her. “You done real good.”

“You too, Chief,” echoed back to her, from all of them one by one.

The situation remained stable while the Coast Guard secured everything. Her hand still aching from not firing that single 30 mm round through his chest. Even after the moment had passed and she knew she wouldn’t actually do it, resisting the urge to let fly had remained a struggle.

As soon as the Hawk was secure on the deck and she had it shut down, she clambered out of her seat. At first she’d thought to go down and confront him, stare down the demon from her past face to face. Had thought how it would feel to spit in his face. He was going to get off scot-free, and she’d lost her chance to just shoot him.

Instead, she sat on the cargo deck of the DAP Hawk and watched the action from her perch high atop the helideck.

She sent Tim and Connie down to make sure the Coasties handled the Soman with the respect a weapon of mass destruction deserved.

At first the Coasties had been solicitous of Deputy Sheriff Ricky LaRue, checking him for injuries from his ordeal. Then there was an abrupt shift of attitude. Tim climbed up from where he’d gone below, carrying a plastic bag of something white.

Suddenly the Coasties had Ricky LaRue slammed against the side of the cockpit and were reading him his rights.

Her father looked up at the helideck as they handcuffed him, and Lola had to resist the urge to flinch away.

Instead, she sat up straighter, holding his gaze until he looked away first. Somehow he shrank in size as they dragged him toward the boarding ladder hanging down from the cutter’s tall side.

Kee sat down beside Lola to clean her sniper rifle. The sounds slowly descended to the steady background hum of a military ship going about its duties, a sound so familiar it was akin to silence.

“Thought you were a phony.”

Lola looked up at the radar mast etched white against the night sky. Kee was right. Nothing about her was real. The competent soldier Chief Warrant 2 Lola LaRue. A facade. The woman who has her act so together, a complete and utter fraud. Some persona she’d made up out of poor assumptions and insufficient bravado.

Lola turned to watch the Sergeant sight the barrel, then set to running a BoreSnake down it to remove some stray residue.

Finally Kee stopped what she was doing and turned to stare directly at Lola with those narrow, penetrating eyes of hers.

“I thought you were all flash. And no f’ing way you deserved someone as good as Tim. I could see you caught him from the first second. Knew that wasn’t right.” Then she flashed a smile that lit her up. “Should’ve known you were okay when Dilya liked you.”

Kee snapped her gun back together without looking down to see her motions. She turned to stow the gun in its case, then stood for a moment before Lola.

When Kee glanced down at the deck, Lola followed her gaze.

Her father stood there, drawing himself up tall despite the handcuffs and four-guard escort.

Kee turned back to Lola and snapped a smart salute to her. Clear for all to see. Making it obvious to the man below exactly who had taken him down.

Lola returned the salute. Didn’t even bother to look down as they led him away. He no longer mattered and she didn’t need to witness his final demise.

Kee then cracked a smile, more welcoming than any salute. “You done really good, Chief Warrant.” And she headed down to the main deck.

Lola stared up at the sky and contemplated the night. A moon, a spread of stars now that the helideck work lights had been shut down. A night lit much like the roof of the Fort Rucker hangar where Tim had made impossibly gentle love to her.

Made love to her.

She closed her eyes, remembering. And she had made love to him. Had felt as if… No, she had belonged in his arms. The safest place in the world. Now maybe she understood Emily a little better. To have a part of a man she loved so much growing inside her, nothing could be more important when that was happening.

She wasn’t ready to quit flying. Not by a long shot. And she’d bet that Major Beale would find a way back into the sky after the birth.

Maybe it wasn’t the flying that made it worth the effort and hardship and pain. Maybe it was who you flew with.

Lola looked back down from the sky, and there Tim stood in his unconsciously competent pose, not five feet away, swaying ever so lightly as the cutter rode the waves. The race boat now in tow as they turned for port.

“Twenty cases of one-quart steel bottles. Enough to take out a dozen cities. He thought it was moonshine. Went sheet white when he discovered he’d wanted to sample some of the product. The guys with the guns had yelled at him when he tried.”

“So, he gets away with it. Again.” She should have shot him when she had the chance.

Tim grinned that easy smile of his. “Not so much. That bag I found wasn’t the only one. He must have been out on a run when you called his cell. That’s how he got there ahead of us. It just happens that he also has a quarter ton of heroin aboard. Wonder how much cash that cost him?”

Lola nodded. He’d go down hard for that. This wasn’t some local judge in the Big Easy. With the Coasties involved, this one would hit Federal court. Maybe she was finally done with her past. Maybe, just maybe, she was who she said she was, Chief Warrant 2 of the Army’s SOAR, a Night Stalker of the 160th.

“They’ve got a nickname for you now.”

Lola grimaced. “That doesn’t sound good.” She’d left behind more than few black eyes when various crews had tried “Stripper LaRue” and a dozen variations on it.

“They’re calling you ‘Hammer LaRue.’ Kinda fits.”

She looked at him in silence, knowing full well exactly who had started that nickname—the oh-so-pleased-with-himself man right in front of her.

“Just ‘The Hammer,’ for short. Personally, I kinda like it.”

She rolled the sound back and forth. She liked it, too. The power, the strength, but still herself.

“Hammer LaRue and Crazy Tim. Quite a pair, huh?” It wasn’t until after she said it that she realized quite what she’d given voice to.

Tim went all quiet. Hands rammed deep in his pockets. So still that he almost faded from sight like a D-boy.

She knew what was in his pocket. Knew what he hoped for and wanted.

Lola also knew that there would never be anyone who could know her the way Tim did. Who had been able to talk her back from that cliff edge where warfare turns to murder. Had found her in the dark shadows that surrounded her soul.

And no one that she’d ever known so well. No one who made her feel safe and loved and important. No one else had ever made her feel complete, and Tim could do it with the simplest gesture of merely taking her hand.

There wasn’t anyone that she ever could love the way she did Crazy Tim Maloney.

He voiced no question. But he was asking.

She’d been sitting in almost exactly this spot on the edge of the Huey’s cargo bay that day. It had been spread for a picnic, not dusty with blowback from the miniguns. But he’d asked the question again no less clearly.

And she had given one answer the first time, smashing an heirloom and his heart in the process. The joke had been on her. Who’d have thought that Lola LaRue also had a heart that could be shredded.

Who’d have thought that she had a heart that could be healed by the love of a good man.

This time she knew her answer to his silent question.

She pulled up her legs, shifting back into the shadows of the cargo bay, sitting out of the reach of the sole work-light atop the cutter’s helideck.

Then she extended her left hand back into the soft light to beckon Tim to join her. She held her hand out to him, with the ring finger slightly raised.

A sigh ran the length of her body as the cool gold slid onto her finger and his warm lips marked it in place.

Curling his fingers into hers, she pulled him into the dark shadows of the chopper and the dark shadows of her life, where Tim spread nothing but the brightest light.

Lola LaRue stood at a moment and a place she’d never imagined.

A simple “I do” joining her life to Tim’s. The two simple words completed her declaration that matched his.

When he kissed her, tears flowed and she couldn’t stop them. Tears and laughter and one of his searing kisses that made her know she could fly.

In moments, her laughter had swept the wedding party and then the rest of the crowded restaurant closed for the occasion. Mark Henderson, who’d escorted her down the aisle, now close beside Emily, her maid-of-honor, still barely showing despite the clingy bridesmaid dress. Big John, looking absolutely amazing in his best man’s suit swept his quiet wife into his arms and delivered a smacking kiss that she wholeheartedly returned.

Dilya ran forward, still carrying her near-empty basket of rose petals, to offer her a quick hug before dodging back to her parents barely in time avoid Tim’s family descending on her.

Lola let herself relax and lose herself in their unstinting welcome and was quickly buried several people deep until Tim rescued her.

Food flowed from the kitchen, and they gorged on delicacies and delights. None of them were on call, but even the second glass of wine wasn’t finished by any of the Night Stalkers; they were giddy enough without the alcohol.

She felt beyond giddy herself and couldn’t stop smiling each time she saw the gift table piled high. She knew that in the depths lurked a double present from bride to groom. The first had cost her a month’s pay, an antique teapot as exquisite as the one she’d shattered. The second, a plaque. The engraved brass plate noting the date of the first shared kill of Sergeant Tim Maloney and Chief Warrant 2 Lola LaRue and mounted above it, the original teapot handle. A joke on both of them that would make Crazy Tim the butt of a joke that his friends would never let him live down, no matter how many years they were together.

When she retreated to a quiet table for a breather, she found Emily Beale sipping from a glass of sparkling apple cider. It somehow seemed the first minute they’d had together. Lola had been too wound up to be coherent in the upstairs apartment as the three women of her crew had helped her get ready.

Perhaps it was the first time they’d been alone together since… Lola could feel a blush rising to her cheeks.

Emily considered her for a long moment.

Lola inspected her hands.

“Hell of punch you have, Chief Warrant.”

“Uh. Thank you, Major. Sorry, Major.”

When Lola managed to look up, the Major was watching her closely.

“I’ll have to remember to return the favor some day.”

“The favor?”

Now it was the Major who looked away, contemplated her cider for a long moment before speaking.

“There will come a time when you have to face choices, Chief LaRue, choices that you don’t want to make for what seem many and good reasons. But to which the answer is obvious. I should never have set foot on that chopper. I knew it, but commanding the
Vengeance
had defined me so completely that I didn’t know how to be anything else.”

Lola nodded. She knew all about fighting the right choice for the wrong reasons. All she had to do was look up and spot her husband laughing with his best friend, a smear of cake on his cheek that still no one had told him about. He looked up to see her, and again Lola felt the smile bloom from deep inside her.

“I’m resigning my commission.”

That shocked her attention back to the Major. “No! You can’t.”

“Already did. And I browbeat Peter into accepting it, though he was pretty grumpy about it. Especially when Mark turned his in, as well.”

“No! Emily, that’s not right. You can’t just throw all of that away. How did the President ever agree to let you go? I need to talk to him.”

She’d half risen to her feet to go find him. There. Flirting with Tim’s mother. Emily stopped her with a hand on her arm.

“Actually, Peter’s sponsoring us in a little endeavor.”

“What endeavor?” Lola dropped back into her seat.

It had been strange to fly without Emily beside her, even after the few short weeks they’d been together as crew. But to have her not in the service at all, that absolutely wasn’t right.

“Ever flown a Firehawk?”

Lola could only shake her head. Had seen the footage. Sikorsky Black Hawks rigged with spray equipment, fighting forest fires in places that ground crews could never reach.

“One of the odd things about flying a Firehawk, very few people shooting at you. The other oddity, well, countries are always glad for help from a Firehawk team, even countries where there’s normally no way to get in, even undercover. You should come fly with us some time. It’s going to be fun. Mount Hood Aviation, up in Oregon. Look us up when you’re ready.”

Lola knew about Mount Hood—part firefighting, part CIA undercover transport, an odd leftover of Air America back in the 1960s. That could be interesting. But not where she wanted, needed to be at this point of her life.

“Maybe we’ll fly together again some time.”

Emily looked at her. Took her hand and squeezed it hard. “I’d like that, Lola. Truly I would.”

She returned the gesture, fighting back the tears. The unquestioned truth of that from Major Emily Beale took her breath away.

Tim came up beside her before she could get her breath back. She rose to her feet and kissed away the icing still on his cheek. He looked goofy happy as he pulled her away from Emily.

He danced her out onto the cleared center of the restaurant’s floor. He snapped his fingers and pointed at his cousin Jimmy who punched a button on the screen in front of him.

A tango washed out of the speakers and Lola couldn’t think of when she’d been happier. Perhaps dancing with Tim that very first time on the dusty Afghan soil, surrounded by helicopters. Perhaps that had been her glimpse of what was possible.

No. She looked into Tim’s eyes as he swept her down and then back up into his arms.

There, in his eyes, there was the glimpse of the possible.