Undaunted

32

Jack paced the waiting room. Six steps to the north wall. About-face. Six steps to the south wall. Repeat. So long as his body was in motion, repeating and repeating, he could keep it from doing what he wanted.

He wanted to pound his fist through a wall. Through someone. He wanted to blow something up. He wanted this endless wait ended.

What he wanted didn’t matter one bit.

Kris was on the other side of one of the walls, surrounded by doctors and maybe . . . no . . . probably dying. She was going to be gone forever, and he’d never so much as hinted at what he felt for her.

Which would have been stupid. His job was to protect her, not fall in love with her. So, he’d blown it all. Let her stomp off and get herself killed and let her die without knowing how much he’d come to care for this poor, homeless, little waif.

He almost snorted at that thought. He was the only person who saw her as poor or homeless or little or lost. She fooled the rest of the world . . . but not him. He saw what the others missed.

And he loved what the others never saw in her.

And now she was dying.

Penny called, interrupting him before he melted down into some emotional puddle. That reminded him that he was a Marine, and there was someone he definitely owed a death. Penny intended to go over the crime scene with a fine-tooth comb and an electron microscope. He agreed.

When she said nothing after that, and the silence began to grow, he realized she expected something from him on the situation at his end. He told her Kris was in the operating room, and he knew nothing more than he’d known when he first got to her body.

And no, he didn’t know when he’d find out more. The doctors had their own chain of command and didn’t include a Marine in their need-to-know net. They might if he threatened them with his service automatic, but it just didn’t seem becoming for an officer and a gentleman.

Penny rang off before he’d had to say anything more.

The medic sat closest to the door that led to the surgery. She’d wiped off most of Kris’s blood. Now she sat, pistol at the ready, prepared to block the entrance to the only place that a miracle might give her commander back her life.

The sniper stood with his long rifle at the ready at the other end of the room, eyes on the door, or through the glass windows in the door to the hallway beyond.

Early on, lots of people had come to the door: reporters, hospital people, gawkers. Some had even risked pushing the door open a crack. A good look at the Marines’ deathly glares had sent them on their way.

Mr. Louis DuVale did not turn away at the sight of alert Marines. No, he charged in about an hour after Jack started his vigil.

“What have you done to my son?” he demanded.

Jack wanted to answer the question with a question. “What took you so long?” However, it didn’t take a mind reader to know that would only make things worse, and if Kris survived, she’d still need to work with this man.

“He’s in surgery,” Jack said. “I understand he’s not in any danger.”

The big man headed for the doors into the surgery suites. The small woman Marine stood.

“Get out of my way.”

“My princess is in there, sir. Her docs don’t need no one jiggling their elbows.”

“My son’s in there. I have a right to see him.”

“Talk to the nurses’ station.”

For a long minute, the two glared at each other. Him very important man. Her very deadly Marine.

Then the man got himself in reverse and turned his power glare on the head nurse on station. “What is happening to my son?”

“He is in recovery. He will be out here in a minute. Please wait, sir.”

“I will sit for one minute. One minute, you hear.”

He sat for several minutes before his son was wheeled out. Louis DuVale was at his son’s side in a moment, but it was Jack that the young man reached for with his one good arm.

“She saved my life, sir,” he said through tears. “She saved my life. I’d be dead if she hadn’t put me down, covered my body with hers, sir.”

“I know,” Jack whispered. “I know.”

“The doctor said the rest of me would be smashed up as bad as my arm if she hadn’t been on top of me. Why’d she do that? Why?”

“You can ask her when she gets out,” Jack said, trying to put more confidence in the words than he felt.

The doctor standing behind the orderly pushing the gurney looked worried at the display of emotion, then relaxed as the young man’s eyes closed, and he dozed off.

“Doctor, what’s wrong with my son?” DuVale demanded.

“Nothing sleep won’t handle. He’s got a concussion, shock, and a mangled arm, but, like he said, the young woman absorbed a lot of the metal fragments that would have made his situation a whole lot worse.”

“It’s all your fault,” DuVale half shouted, whirling on Jack. “Things like this don’t happen here! Then you show up, and look what they did to my son!”

He didn’t wait for an answer but followed the gurney.

Jack turned to the doctor. “How is Lieutenant Longknife?”

“I don’t know,” the doc said, lighting a cigarette. The nurse at her station coughed, but he ignored her. “I’m the junior hacker and slasher here. Doc Diem is not only the better cutter, but he’s the best head man on this planet, and from the glance I got at your girl, I’d say she needs him.”

Jack did his best to keep a dispassionate officer’s expression on his face, but he may have been less successful than usual.

“Don’t worry, old man, if anyone can help her, Doc Diem will.” With that attempt at a bedside manner, the young surgeon hurried after his own patient.

So Jack paced and the Marines watched and somewhere Kris was being patched back together.

Or maybe dying.

And Jack couldn’t do a damn thing. He balled up his fist, but resisted for the thousandth time smashing the wall as he paced up to it.

Lieutenant Penny Pasley had seen a lot more crime scenes than the average Navy officer. She’d trained for security before switching to analysis and interrogation, but she’d visited her first crime scene with her dad when she was nine.

Her dad hated criminals and all they did. He wanted her to know early that there was nothing glorious or cool about breaking the law. She’d learned from him; cops were her favorite kind of people.

Denver cops she might make an exception for.

She was very late arriving at the scene of the explosion. She’d had to take her team of investigators back up to the Wasp to get their gear before dropping back down to Denver. That had given the locals time to do their own review of the evidence.

Penny tried not to explode at the detective who handed her a report sheet.

“You didn’t find out anything about the bomb!”

“I wouldn’t say that. It was standard, commercially available TNT, say, three sticks in each bomb. The detonators were also off the shelf, chemical fuses available from any explosives supplier. It was just a generic bomb with no distinguishing qualities. You ought to be happy it didn’t have any nails or other junk surrounding the TNT,” he finished lamely, wilting under her glare.

“You don’t put any markers in your explosives?”

“No. We never saw much need to.”

“You don’t have any serial numbers on the detonators, fuses?”

“No.”

“We never saw much need to,” Penny and the detective finished together.

“Listen, I don’t know what it’s like on the planet you came from, but we’ve got pretty law-abiding people hereabouts. Denver may have five million people in it, but we’ve maintained that small-town attitude. People know each other and look out for each other.”

“And nobody ever kills anybody,” Penny finished for him.

“No. We get our domestic violence now and again. Usually the husband or wife is the perp, and sooner or later they confess. It’s been ten, twelve years since we had a real series of killings, but we caught the guy in the end.”

“Well, Kris Longknife doesn’t have a husband to kill her, and if anyone was going to do it, it would have been Jack, and he was right behind her, doing his best to protect her.”

The cop looked like Penny had lost him, but since he didn’t ask, she didn’t explain.

“We hear tell,” he went on, “that there was a bit of trouble at the hoedown she was at last night. Her old man executed someone else’s old man out among those cowpokes, and the blood debt hasn’t been settled. If that’s true, it’s not Denver’s problem.”

“How do you know so much about what went on last night out in cowboy country?” Penny asked.

“It was on the news not two hours after this bomb went off. You’d have to ask the TSN people how they found out, but don’t expect them to be easy about releasing their sources.”

“And you’re taking your guidance on this case from the news, huh?” Penny said. She’d watched her dad take an inch of skin off a junior detective for doing what this fellow just did.

“Well, maybe I am, and maybe I’m not, but my boss, the captain, seems to think that the source of your woman’s problem doesn’t lie in our town, and it would not be a lot of fun for me to try to get him to think otherwise.”

Which was a nice a way of saying that the local police force had its marching orders, and she’d have to deal with someone a lot closer to city hall if she wanted to get this stampede to judgment turned in any other direction.

A word by Princess Kris Longknife might do that, but at last report, she was unconscious and bleeding. Maybe dying.

No, if anyone was going to do something about this mess, it would not be Kris Longknife.

More than a few times, the thought of Kris getting out of Penny’s hair and letting her do things the way she wanted would have elicited a shout of glee. Unfortunately, today wasn’t one of them.

Penny turned to her team of technicians. “Tell me something that these people don’t know about these bombs.

With “Yes, ma’am,” and “Aye, aye, ma’am,” the Marines and Chief Beni went to work.

Willy Stone watched the Navy officer lead the Marines into the DuVale Building. He glanced at his reader and its bootlegged report from the police department. They had found nothing special about the bomb, certainly nothing that would lead them back to its source.

That was to be expected.

The decision to take Texarkana out of the Society of Humanity standards for marking explosives had been taken years ago . . . to save money. It had caused no one any problems.

Until now.

It amazed Stone how people who didn’t have a problem assumed they’d never have a problem. He couldn’t complain; it was things like this that made his job easy.

He turned away and walked around the block. A car was waiting for him. He said nothing as the driver took him where he needed to go.

He’d done enough damage here; it was time to raise the stakes.