![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
leigh57Title: What If You Catch Me, Where Would We Land
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
leigh57
Pairing: Jack Bauer/Renee Walker
Word Count: 33,600 total – approximately 3000 for this chapter (The next one's really long -- but it made sense to break it here!)
Rating/Warnings: R; sex, violence, language, references to physical and sexual abuse, spoilers for the entire series
Summary: But every once in a while when the guards were down, he’d click off the filters and let himself have her back, only for a minute. Light of her smile, smell of the skin on her neck, brush of her hand on his chest, checking for wounds. Rich stereo soundtrack of her voice.
Author's notes: With Chapter One
Chapter 3: Dance me through the panic, ‘til I’m gathered safely in
Jack stretched his arm back until his shoulder gave a satisfying snap. Unzipping his bag, he pulled out a pair of small black binoculars and looped the strap around his neck. He picked up his pistol and checked the clip for the fifth or sixth time, slamming it back into place before he returned the weapon to the top of his bag, secure in case he had to grab everything and get out, but equally ready to pick up and fire if necessary. Twisting his neck one more time to make sure he could settle in and be still, he tucked his body into the corner by the window.
By angling the binoculars precisely, he could see through the tiny opening where the curtain didn’t quite meet the window casing. The street outside was lit with the blending neon glow of blue, green, red and orange signs, but he knew the window would only reflect the light. On the off chance someone happened to be staring directly at the four square inches of space occupied by his binoculars, they’d still see nothing but a shiny piece of glass. He’d checked last night.
He focused on the bar across the street, twisting the knobs with small movements until he could see the black snake tattoo on the bartender’s neck and read the labels of the beers on tap. He scanned the length of the bar, half-hoping she’d decided to come early. No matter how much logic told him it was all true – that Renee was alive and on her way, that Chloe would never have risked contacting him if there was the slightest slice of doubt – something inside him wouldn’t let him believe until she was there, until he could see her standing at the bar, watch the way she held her face neutral and guarded like she always did when she felt threatened or unsure.
He didn’t have to pause for a second look at any of the people who were perched on barstools – laughing, drinking, and talking. She wasn’t there. He glanced at his watch. 21:34. Of course she wasn’t there. The smart play in this situation would be to leave herself exposed for the minimum amount of time necessary. It’s what he would have done, and despite the foggy unreality that had settled over him since the second he’d clicked opened Chloe’s frantic email, if he knew one thing it was this: Renee wouldn’t make any mistakes.
Jack rested his head against the wall behind him and shut his eyes, squeezing to moisten them and remove the blur of exhaustion. He’d spent all of last night and a decent portion of the morning shifting from one uncomfortable position to another on the hard bed of his shitty hotel room. The few times he’d managed to drift off, he’d blinked awake fifteen or twenty minutes later, staring at the brown stain on the ceiling (it incongruously reminded him of the otter in those books he used to read Kim) while his heart skipped beats and he forced himself not to look at the clock every three minutes.
The room was so quiet that he could hear the tiny tick of his watch’s second hand. He refocused his eyes on the bar and counted the seconds as a method of distraction (something almost hypnotic about the rhythmic, precise sound), inhaling deeply to fight the trembling in his hands and the twisting in his stomach. As it got closer to 9:50, he took a slow sweep of the bar, stopping briefly to assess each patron. A twenty-something couple holding hands and leaning in to whisper to each other between sips of beer. A foursome of university kids laughing and making crazy hand gestures while the bartender set up another round of shots they didn’t appear to need. A fiftyish man sipping what looked like scotch and soda while he watched the soccer game on an enormous widescreen TV mounted in the corner. Standard crowd for a Saturday night, Jack assumed, not that he was an expert in British culture.
No one set off his radar, even pinged it a little. He moved the binoculars to the bar’s main entrance, twisting the focus knob a millimeter back and forth (more to occupy himself than because he couldn’t see). His head throbbed and his stomach hurt; he realized he hadn’t eaten anything since the club sandwich he’d gotten at some hole-in-the-wall pub near his hotel last night.
At exactly 9:50, Jack saw two men near the entrance shift their eyes to the door with unmistakable interest, and he knew she was there.
His eyes swept over her at a frantic pace, trying to absorb every small detail at once.
Her hair was shorter and a shiny deep walnut, her eyes dark brown. She was thinner, paler if that were possible, and the way she held herself was so rigid and self-contained that she almost seemed to occupy negative space. Everything about her posture screamed ”Fuck off,” and Jack braced himself against the wave of memory – her expression when he’d pulled up her sleeve to reveal the scar on her wrist, the way he’d wanted to grab that flash of vulnerability, hold it tight so she couldn’t shut him out again.
Even someone who had known her before would have had a hard time recognizing her.
He didn’t.
All the cosmetic changes meant nothing. Not when all the details of her – the countless tiny things he’d spent months working to force far away into unvisited sections of his mind – were in front of him now in living color. The way she stood with her arms crossed over her chest, elbows jutting, just like she had when she took command after Larry’s death. The way her eyes never stopped moving, sweeping the room, fight-or-flight at full throttle. The set of her jaw, so different than when she had her guard down, when she trusted, when her face relaxed into that smile he’d replayed so often there were scorch marks on his neural pathways.
Despite the tension that shook him relentlessly, his body a high-voltage wire, he allowed himself a minute to stop. Pause. Inhale.
And drink in the reality that he was watching her from no more than a couple hundred feet away, the smooth skin of her cheek so clear in his binoculars that he had to close his free hand over the heat that flooded his palm.
_________________________
He wouldn’t be late.
Renee pressed the balls of her feet against the wooden barstool. Her palms were ice cold but sweaty, and her heart had been hammering at twice its normal speed for hours (she was vaguely beginning to wonder how long it could do that before she had a heart attack). She swirled the red plastic stirrer counterclockwise in the vodka tonic she hadn’t touched, creating a miniature whirlpool orbited by ice. Her left wrist rested against the glass, enabling her to stare at her watch while giving the impression that she was gazing into her drink.
He wouldn’t be late.
It felt like the only solid thing she knew. If he was going to show up at all, he’d arrive exactly on time or a minute early, because anything else would be sadistic. She’d attempted to prepare herself for this moment from the second she’d made the decision to contact Chloe, but now that she was here – breathing in beer, cigarettes, breath mints, and shitty cologne – she wasn’t sure what she’d do if ten o’clock came and went and Jack didn’t appear.
“Can I buy you a drink?”
Only her extensive training kept her from startling. A tallish blond guy sporting a lime green shirt and unfortunate sideburns stood looking at her expectantly. Her stomach made a sickening twitch and she wiggled a little to fight the nausea. She wanted to say, I already have a drink, dickwad, but she needed to focus on her central goal, which was to be noticed as little as possible. So she arranged her face into what she hoped was a pleasant but neutral smile and said (doing everything in her power to keep the tremor out of her voice), “No, thank you. I’m meeting someone.”
Lime green man stopped looking at her before she even finished her sentence, mumbled, “Enjoy,” and moved away as quickly as the crowded bar permitted. Renee stirred her drink faster and thought how much she had always hated dating rituals. Her eyes darted back to her watch. 9:54.
She realized the analogy was imperfect, but after all the time in Witness Protection, being out here on her own made her feel like a zoo animal – once free but long in captivity – abruptly rereleased into the wild. She was accustomed to constant vigilance, but only now did she understand how much she’d come to take it for granted that no one was going to find her in Flagstaff. Every loud noise (glasses dropping, drunk patrons yelling, the screech of the beer tap that clearly needed oil), every brush of a passing body against hers made her nervous and jumpy. She couldn’t help thinking that at some point the adrenaline would have to run out. In case the trembling in her hands was bad enough to be visible, she wrapped them around her still untouched drink, careful to keep her left wrist tilted up.
She waited, forcing herself to control her breathing. In. Out. In. Out. Over and over, while her eyes tracked the needle-thin red second hand. It had circled the oval face one and three quarters more times when she felt a body nudge hers. She shot a sideways glance at the arm to her right. It wasn’t Jack’s, so she returned her gaze to her watch and tried to slow her stirring so as not to spill her drink.
Then the man was leaning over, his mouth near her ear, voice so low she was astonished she picked up his words. “Listen carefully, because he said to tell you this exactly. His words. ‘If it hadn’t been the end of the discussion, maybe we’d be having Coronas on Kim’s back porch right now.’”
Renee could hear her pulse in her ears. She knew she shouldn’t react, but she couldn’t stop herself. She glanced up and sideways, her eyes meeting the grey unfamiliar eyes of the man next to her.
“Don’t look at me,” he muttered. “Take a sip of your drink, pretend you’re half-interested, and listen.”
She didn’t follow his instructions, looking directly at him while her hand reached for the reassurance of the Glock under her jacket. Conflicting thoughts bombarded her like tireless zombie darts, but one clear thread emerged from the chaos.
The man sitting next to her was referring to the conversation she’d had with Jack after he got off the phone with the president. And there was no possible way anybody else on earth could know anything about that conversation.
The man grinned a touch, the bar lights reflecting off what appeared to be several days’ worth of stubble. “You don’t need your gun,” he said, smiling as if they were having a friendly meaningless bar conversation. “If I put a hand on you, he’ll know. Then he’ll find me and kill me, our long friendship notwithstanding. I’m armed because he asked me to be, but I’m not a threat.”
Renee still hadn’t found her voice when the distracted bartender yelled over the mixed conversations of the crowd, “What can I get for ya?”
“Scotch, neat.” The man pulled out a five-pound note and stuck it on the bar. He leaned closer; she noticed he was careful not to touch her body. “I have to admit, I’m surprised. I thought you’d be hammering me with questions.”
She cleared her throat and said (with a tiny quirk of her mouth to offset the tone in case another patron caught a word or two), “Maybe I’m trying to decide whether or not to kill you.”
He picked up the dark amber drink the bartender had put in front of him and took a generous swallow. “Your choice, but as I said, it’s not necessary. As soon as I know you believe me, I’ll deliver the message and you’ll never see me again.”
Message.
Oh god. He wouldn’t.
“Fine. Let’s assume I believe you. What’s the message?”
“Not that easy. He insisted that I should be a hundred and ten percent sure you knew he’d sent me.”
Sent me.
Of all the possibilities, this was one she hadn’t even considered. She clenched her hands until she could feel the tips of her fingernails piercing flesh. “Did he give you anything else?” she asked quietly. “That was supposed to make me believe you?”
“Several things.”
“What’s one?”
“He says he still feels the same way about the fifteen people on the bus.”
She wanted to curl into a ball, right there in the middle of the bar. Her stomach felt as if thousands of tiny fists were punching it, inside and outside, everywhere. Heat blistered in her face and her heart pounded with so much force it hurt her chest.
He was alive. He was okay. But he’d fucking sent someone else to tell her.
Why?
She pulled the stirring straw out of her drink, picked up the glass, and took a large gulp, slamming it back on the bar so hard that some of it sloshed out over her fingers. She didn’t bother to pick up the white square cocktail napkin, but she did study the indentations stamped in a neat pattern around the edge, trying to triage this onslaught of information and figure out what to do.
She’d prepared for two possibilities. Jack would show up or he wouldn’t. Pain lanced through her left temple, warning sign of the migraines she’d started getting as soon as she woke up in the hospital. She fumbled in her purse for one of her pills (the last thing she needed was to have to excuse herself to throw up, although given the way things were going, she couldn’t guarantee this situation wasn’t headed in that direction no matter how many pills she took) and tossed it back with another large swig of her drink. Then she said, her voice as cold as she could make it, “He’s okay then? He’s safe?” She looked up again. “Do you have a goddamn name?”
“Ben. I was on LAPD SWAT with Jack.” He paused for a beat, watching her. “And yes, he’s safe for the moment, but you know the drill. That can change at any time. There’s a long list of people looking for him. That’s why he didn’t come himself.”
“Where is he?”
Ben shook his head. “He asked me not to tell you even if you pulled out my fingernails or broke my kneecaps, which he said you might.” He let an ice cube from his now empty drink slide into his mouth. “Besides, he may have moved on already. He trusts me as much as he trusts anyone, but that’s not saying much.”
“When did you last communicate with him?”
“Yesterday afternoon.” Had she not spent years (both in training and in the field) learning to pick up on signals any average person would have missed, Renee wouldn’t have observed Ben’s microscopic hesitation, the sixteenth note before he spoke, the way his face betrayed confusion for a millisecond before it hardened back into the conviction of a practiced lie.
Suddenly it all made sense.
The ambient bar noise (conversational mishmash, clink of glasses, drunken laughter, roar of soccer on the flat-screen TV) faded into eerie silence in Renee’s head while she let the pieces snap into place, thought about what she would have done in the same situation.
Holy shit. He was here, watching her, probably even listening to her.
Intentionally catching the bartender’s eye, she smiled and leaned closer to Ben, putting her mouth a few inches away from his ear. “Jack, you son of a bitch.” The pounding in her head was escalating, but she couldn’t control the red fury that snaked through her midsection and up into her cheeks. “Don’t do this. Please. Tell me where to go, what to do, anything. But don’t do this.”
Ben pulled back, his face impassive. “He didn’t mention that you were insane.”
“Fuck you,” she whispered, hoping the dim bar light obscured the flaming red of her face. “And you too, Jack.” She closed her left hand over the smooth coldness of her glass, condensation dampening her already sweaty palm. The pain slicing through her head made the lights dangling from the bar above her shimmer. “I’m not going back,” she said, struggling to keep her expression neutral while she looked at Ben and spoke to Jack. “I’m not. So you’re not keeping me safe by staying away.” She swallowed, breathing in because she needed to not lose control, not freak out or throw up or do anything to make herself stand out in the crowd.
She picked up Ben’s drink, tipping it back and chewing on the last few pieces of ice. For a second, she studied the only window from where Jack could possibly be watching her. She could see nothing. The darkness outside turned the bar window into more of a mirror, reflecting the glow of the lights and the faces of the patrons. Renee leaned forward again. “I’m gonna count to ten, Jack. Silently, so you’ll have to guess when I get there. If you haven’t told me where to meet you by then, I will walk out of this bar and start looking for you. You’ll have a time advantage, but there’s probably only one building that would give you the exact angle you need, and you know I can find it.”
She flattened her palms on her jeans and began to count.
Ben declined the bartender’s offer for another drink and muttered, “He also didn’t mention that you’re a complete pain in the ass.”
Renee didn’t respond, focusing on the word seven as she heard it in her head, trying to concentrate on the numbers so she wouldn’t plow a path through the thirty or forty people between her and the door. The moment she hit ten she stuck her hand in her bag, digging for a couple of pounds to pay for her drink. She was opening her wallet when she felt Ben’s hand on her arm, polite but restraining.
“Wait.”
Previous Chapter
Next Chapter
Author:
leigh57Pairing: Jack Bauer/Renee Walker
Word Count: 33,600 total – approximately 3000 for this chapter (The next one's really long -- but it made sense to break it here!)
Rating/Warnings: R; sex, violence, language, references to physical and sexual abuse, spoilers for the entire series
Summary: But every once in a while when the guards were down, he’d click off the filters and let himself have her back, only for a minute. Light of her smile, smell of the skin on her neck, brush of her hand on his chest, checking for wounds. Rich stereo soundtrack of her voice.
Author's notes: With Chapter One
Chapter 3: Dance me through the panic, ‘til I’m gathered safely in
Jack stretched his arm back until his shoulder gave a satisfying snap. Unzipping his bag, he pulled out a pair of small black binoculars and looped the strap around his neck. He picked up his pistol and checked the clip for the fifth or sixth time, slamming it back into place before he returned the weapon to the top of his bag, secure in case he had to grab everything and get out, but equally ready to pick up and fire if necessary. Twisting his neck one more time to make sure he could settle in and be still, he tucked his body into the corner by the window.
By angling the binoculars precisely, he could see through the tiny opening where the curtain didn’t quite meet the window casing. The street outside was lit with the blending neon glow of blue, green, red and orange signs, but he knew the window would only reflect the light. On the off chance someone happened to be staring directly at the four square inches of space occupied by his binoculars, they’d still see nothing but a shiny piece of glass. He’d checked last night.
He focused on the bar across the street, twisting the knobs with small movements until he could see the black snake tattoo on the bartender’s neck and read the labels of the beers on tap. He scanned the length of the bar, half-hoping she’d decided to come early. No matter how much logic told him it was all true – that Renee was alive and on her way, that Chloe would never have risked contacting him if there was the slightest slice of doubt – something inside him wouldn’t let him believe until she was there, until he could see her standing at the bar, watch the way she held her face neutral and guarded like she always did when she felt threatened or unsure.
He didn’t have to pause for a second look at any of the people who were perched on barstools – laughing, drinking, and talking. She wasn’t there. He glanced at his watch. 21:34. Of course she wasn’t there. The smart play in this situation would be to leave herself exposed for the minimum amount of time necessary. It’s what he would have done, and despite the foggy unreality that had settled over him since the second he’d clicked opened Chloe’s frantic email, if he knew one thing it was this: Renee wouldn’t make any mistakes.
Jack rested his head against the wall behind him and shut his eyes, squeezing to moisten them and remove the blur of exhaustion. He’d spent all of last night and a decent portion of the morning shifting from one uncomfortable position to another on the hard bed of his shitty hotel room. The few times he’d managed to drift off, he’d blinked awake fifteen or twenty minutes later, staring at the brown stain on the ceiling (it incongruously reminded him of the otter in those books he used to read Kim) while his heart skipped beats and he forced himself not to look at the clock every three minutes.
The room was so quiet that he could hear the tiny tick of his watch’s second hand. He refocused his eyes on the bar and counted the seconds as a method of distraction (something almost hypnotic about the rhythmic, precise sound), inhaling deeply to fight the trembling in his hands and the twisting in his stomach. As it got closer to 9:50, he took a slow sweep of the bar, stopping briefly to assess each patron. A twenty-something couple holding hands and leaning in to whisper to each other between sips of beer. A foursome of university kids laughing and making crazy hand gestures while the bartender set up another round of shots they didn’t appear to need. A fiftyish man sipping what looked like scotch and soda while he watched the soccer game on an enormous widescreen TV mounted in the corner. Standard crowd for a Saturday night, Jack assumed, not that he was an expert in British culture.
No one set off his radar, even pinged it a little. He moved the binoculars to the bar’s main entrance, twisting the focus knob a millimeter back and forth (more to occupy himself than because he couldn’t see). His head throbbed and his stomach hurt; he realized he hadn’t eaten anything since the club sandwich he’d gotten at some hole-in-the-wall pub near his hotel last night.
At exactly 9:50, Jack saw two men near the entrance shift their eyes to the door with unmistakable interest, and he knew she was there.
His eyes swept over her at a frantic pace, trying to absorb every small detail at once.
Her hair was shorter and a shiny deep walnut, her eyes dark brown. She was thinner, paler if that were possible, and the way she held herself was so rigid and self-contained that she almost seemed to occupy negative space. Everything about her posture screamed ”Fuck off,” and Jack braced himself against the wave of memory – her expression when he’d pulled up her sleeve to reveal the scar on her wrist, the way he’d wanted to grab that flash of vulnerability, hold it tight so she couldn’t shut him out again.
Even someone who had known her before would have had a hard time recognizing her.
He didn’t.
All the cosmetic changes meant nothing. Not when all the details of her – the countless tiny things he’d spent months working to force far away into unvisited sections of his mind – were in front of him now in living color. The way she stood with her arms crossed over her chest, elbows jutting, just like she had when she took command after Larry’s death. The way her eyes never stopped moving, sweeping the room, fight-or-flight at full throttle. The set of her jaw, so different than when she had her guard down, when she trusted, when her face relaxed into that smile he’d replayed so often there were scorch marks on his neural pathways.
Despite the tension that shook him relentlessly, his body a high-voltage wire, he allowed himself a minute to stop. Pause. Inhale.
And drink in the reality that he was watching her from no more than a couple hundred feet away, the smooth skin of her cheek so clear in his binoculars that he had to close his free hand over the heat that flooded his palm.
_________________________
He wouldn’t be late.
Renee pressed the balls of her feet against the wooden barstool. Her palms were ice cold but sweaty, and her heart had been hammering at twice its normal speed for hours (she was vaguely beginning to wonder how long it could do that before she had a heart attack). She swirled the red plastic stirrer counterclockwise in the vodka tonic she hadn’t touched, creating a miniature whirlpool orbited by ice. Her left wrist rested against the glass, enabling her to stare at her watch while giving the impression that she was gazing into her drink.
He wouldn’t be late.
It felt like the only solid thing she knew. If he was going to show up at all, he’d arrive exactly on time or a minute early, because anything else would be sadistic. She’d attempted to prepare herself for this moment from the second she’d made the decision to contact Chloe, but now that she was here – breathing in beer, cigarettes, breath mints, and shitty cologne – she wasn’t sure what she’d do if ten o’clock came and went and Jack didn’t appear.
“Can I buy you a drink?”
Only her extensive training kept her from startling. A tallish blond guy sporting a lime green shirt and unfortunate sideburns stood looking at her expectantly. Her stomach made a sickening twitch and she wiggled a little to fight the nausea. She wanted to say, I already have a drink, dickwad, but she needed to focus on her central goal, which was to be noticed as little as possible. So she arranged her face into what she hoped was a pleasant but neutral smile and said (doing everything in her power to keep the tremor out of her voice), “No, thank you. I’m meeting someone.”
Lime green man stopped looking at her before she even finished her sentence, mumbled, “Enjoy,” and moved away as quickly as the crowded bar permitted. Renee stirred her drink faster and thought how much she had always hated dating rituals. Her eyes darted back to her watch. 9:54.
She realized the analogy was imperfect, but after all the time in Witness Protection, being out here on her own made her feel like a zoo animal – once free but long in captivity – abruptly rereleased into the wild. She was accustomed to constant vigilance, but only now did she understand how much she’d come to take it for granted that no one was going to find her in Flagstaff. Every loud noise (glasses dropping, drunk patrons yelling, the screech of the beer tap that clearly needed oil), every brush of a passing body against hers made her nervous and jumpy. She couldn’t help thinking that at some point the adrenaline would have to run out. In case the trembling in her hands was bad enough to be visible, she wrapped them around her still untouched drink, careful to keep her left wrist tilted up.
She waited, forcing herself to control her breathing. In. Out. In. Out. Over and over, while her eyes tracked the needle-thin red second hand. It had circled the oval face one and three quarters more times when she felt a body nudge hers. She shot a sideways glance at the arm to her right. It wasn’t Jack’s, so she returned her gaze to her watch and tried to slow her stirring so as not to spill her drink.
Then the man was leaning over, his mouth near her ear, voice so low she was astonished she picked up his words. “Listen carefully, because he said to tell you this exactly. His words. ‘If it hadn’t been the end of the discussion, maybe we’d be having Coronas on Kim’s back porch right now.’”
Renee could hear her pulse in her ears. She knew she shouldn’t react, but she couldn’t stop herself. She glanced up and sideways, her eyes meeting the grey unfamiliar eyes of the man next to her.
“Don’t look at me,” he muttered. “Take a sip of your drink, pretend you’re half-interested, and listen.”
She didn’t follow his instructions, looking directly at him while her hand reached for the reassurance of the Glock under her jacket. Conflicting thoughts bombarded her like tireless zombie darts, but one clear thread emerged from the chaos.
The man sitting next to her was referring to the conversation she’d had with Jack after he got off the phone with the president. And there was no possible way anybody else on earth could know anything about that conversation.
The man grinned a touch, the bar lights reflecting off what appeared to be several days’ worth of stubble. “You don’t need your gun,” he said, smiling as if they were having a friendly meaningless bar conversation. “If I put a hand on you, he’ll know. Then he’ll find me and kill me, our long friendship notwithstanding. I’m armed because he asked me to be, but I’m not a threat.”
Renee still hadn’t found her voice when the distracted bartender yelled over the mixed conversations of the crowd, “What can I get for ya?”
“Scotch, neat.” The man pulled out a five-pound note and stuck it on the bar. He leaned closer; she noticed he was careful not to touch her body. “I have to admit, I’m surprised. I thought you’d be hammering me with questions.”
She cleared her throat and said (with a tiny quirk of her mouth to offset the tone in case another patron caught a word or two), “Maybe I’m trying to decide whether or not to kill you.”
He picked up the dark amber drink the bartender had put in front of him and took a generous swallow. “Your choice, but as I said, it’s not necessary. As soon as I know you believe me, I’ll deliver the message and you’ll never see me again.”
Message.
Oh god. He wouldn’t.
“Fine. Let’s assume I believe you. What’s the message?”
“Not that easy. He insisted that I should be a hundred and ten percent sure you knew he’d sent me.”
Sent me.
Of all the possibilities, this was one she hadn’t even considered. She clenched her hands until she could feel the tips of her fingernails piercing flesh. “Did he give you anything else?” she asked quietly. “That was supposed to make me believe you?”
“Several things.”
“What’s one?”
“He says he still feels the same way about the fifteen people on the bus.”
She wanted to curl into a ball, right there in the middle of the bar. Her stomach felt as if thousands of tiny fists were punching it, inside and outside, everywhere. Heat blistered in her face and her heart pounded with so much force it hurt her chest.
He was alive. He was okay. But he’d fucking sent someone else to tell her.
Why?
She pulled the stirring straw out of her drink, picked up the glass, and took a large gulp, slamming it back on the bar so hard that some of it sloshed out over her fingers. She didn’t bother to pick up the white square cocktail napkin, but she did study the indentations stamped in a neat pattern around the edge, trying to triage this onslaught of information and figure out what to do.
She’d prepared for two possibilities. Jack would show up or he wouldn’t. Pain lanced through her left temple, warning sign of the migraines she’d started getting as soon as she woke up in the hospital. She fumbled in her purse for one of her pills (the last thing she needed was to have to excuse herself to throw up, although given the way things were going, she couldn’t guarantee this situation wasn’t headed in that direction no matter how many pills she took) and tossed it back with another large swig of her drink. Then she said, her voice as cold as she could make it, “He’s okay then? He’s safe?” She looked up again. “Do you have a goddamn name?”
“Ben. I was on LAPD SWAT with Jack.” He paused for a beat, watching her. “And yes, he’s safe for the moment, but you know the drill. That can change at any time. There’s a long list of people looking for him. That’s why he didn’t come himself.”
“Where is he?”
Ben shook his head. “He asked me not to tell you even if you pulled out my fingernails or broke my kneecaps, which he said you might.” He let an ice cube from his now empty drink slide into his mouth. “Besides, he may have moved on already. He trusts me as much as he trusts anyone, but that’s not saying much.”
“When did you last communicate with him?”
“Yesterday afternoon.” Had she not spent years (both in training and in the field) learning to pick up on signals any average person would have missed, Renee wouldn’t have observed Ben’s microscopic hesitation, the sixteenth note before he spoke, the way his face betrayed confusion for a millisecond before it hardened back into the conviction of a practiced lie.
Suddenly it all made sense.
The ambient bar noise (conversational mishmash, clink of glasses, drunken laughter, roar of soccer on the flat-screen TV) faded into eerie silence in Renee’s head while she let the pieces snap into place, thought about what she would have done in the same situation.
Holy shit. He was here, watching her, probably even listening to her.
Intentionally catching the bartender’s eye, she smiled and leaned closer to Ben, putting her mouth a few inches away from his ear. “Jack, you son of a bitch.” The pounding in her head was escalating, but she couldn’t control the red fury that snaked through her midsection and up into her cheeks. “Don’t do this. Please. Tell me where to go, what to do, anything. But don’t do this.”
Ben pulled back, his face impassive. “He didn’t mention that you were insane.”
“Fuck you,” she whispered, hoping the dim bar light obscured the flaming red of her face. “And you too, Jack.” She closed her left hand over the smooth coldness of her glass, condensation dampening her already sweaty palm. The pain slicing through her head made the lights dangling from the bar above her shimmer. “I’m not going back,” she said, struggling to keep her expression neutral while she looked at Ben and spoke to Jack. “I’m not. So you’re not keeping me safe by staying away.” She swallowed, breathing in because she needed to not lose control, not freak out or throw up or do anything to make herself stand out in the crowd.
She picked up Ben’s drink, tipping it back and chewing on the last few pieces of ice. For a second, she studied the only window from where Jack could possibly be watching her. She could see nothing. The darkness outside turned the bar window into more of a mirror, reflecting the glow of the lights and the faces of the patrons. Renee leaned forward again. “I’m gonna count to ten, Jack. Silently, so you’ll have to guess when I get there. If you haven’t told me where to meet you by then, I will walk out of this bar and start looking for you. You’ll have a time advantage, but there’s probably only one building that would give you the exact angle you need, and you know I can find it.”
She flattened her palms on her jeans and began to count.
Ben declined the bartender’s offer for another drink and muttered, “He also didn’t mention that you’re a complete pain in the ass.”
Renee didn’t respond, focusing on the word seven as she heard it in her head, trying to concentrate on the numbers so she wouldn’t plow a path through the thirty or forty people between her and the door. The moment she hit ten she stuck her hand in her bag, digging for a couple of pounds to pay for her drink. She was opening her wallet when she felt Ben’s hand on her arm, polite but restraining.
“Wait.”
Next Chapter
