Chapter 9-1
999 Words
Chapter 9
Beatrice: 1988
Beatrice sat in the dark of the Georgia night, a hundred yards from the battered Ford Fairlane and the bleeding Frank Adams. She hadn’t meant to b****y him, but that happened during training. Still, she hadn’t meant to.
The heat scorching the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center had been at the front of her mind while she’d waited hidden in the back of the car.
Now she had a different heat to consider. And it wasn’t one she liked. She didn’t want to feel this way about anyone. Especially not some piece of crap off the street who had tried to carjack her. Except Frank Adams wasn’t that. She knew more about him than she was supposed to, had managed to talk her way onto the background investigation team.
He lived with three other guys in a third-floor walk up. A Morningside Heights project at the far upper-west end of Manhattan. One so bad that it should never have been built to begin with, never mind torn down. When the investigating team went in, she was glad there were four agents together, the neighborhood was that rough.
They’d done round-robin interviews of all three of his roommates, each team member conducting their own individual interview. That way the Secret Service team could compare stories and answers afterward.
Big guy named Hale might have been the one to sit on her car hood. The build was right, but she’d only seen him from the back, and only briefly at that before Frank had blinded her windshield with his window-cleaning spray. She’d bet that the three roommates had all been around her car that night.
She didn’t worry about that. Without Frank, they weren’t likely to be more than petty criminals. What was interesting was that none of them would give up the least thing about Frank despite, she knew, Frank telling them it was okay. Their various stories about him were somewhat inconsistent, just as always happened in real life unless you practiced the stories, but they were totally loyal to him. She’d pushed hard on the carjacking, without mentioning that to the other agents or in her reports.
She hit a stone wall, even after saying she’d been the woman in the car and recognized each of them. These guys would lie their way right into jail to protect Frank. He’d earned absolute loyalty in a world that didn’t trade in it.
Only child of a coke w***e who’d been dead half a decade. Apparently she’d tried to be a good mother despite that. Father, no one had a clue. Even Frank had simply put a question mark on his background form. Hospital records had no other information. No one in his Morningside Heights project recalled a steady boyfriend for her, especially not from twenty years ago. Memories were short in the projects. But they’d remembered his mother as a lost soul, though pleasant and seriously pretty, right up to the overdose. Those were never pretty.
School teachers were deeply frustrated by him. Intelligent. Good grades. Didn’t talk much, but had shown up consistently, a rarity in itself, and was never found without a thoughtful answer when questioned. The only telling remark she found was from a junior year science teacher. “Boy has no real focus on what to do with himself.”
Beatrice sat with her back against one of the concrete barriers of the Georgia training grounds. Despite the night’s heat, she pulled a dark hood over her head until it hung just above her eyes, masked to near invisibility like a Jawa. She wondered if Frank had ever seen Star Wars.
She wondered entirely too much about Frank for her own comfort. She’d discovered and shepherded him through application and recruiting, then dumped him into the training system. It should have ended there.
But her world hadn’t returned to center. If it had, then what was she doing squatting in the cicada-throbbing darkness of FLETC with a knot on her head where she’d been shoved against the car door? Who knew the guy was so damn strong that he could stop a two-footed kick against the door with the palm of his hand. Her thigh still twinged where he’d dug his fingers into the nerve cluster to break a perfectly good headlock. And her lips still burned with the heat of his kiss.
She needed to put some real distance been them.
Then why are you sitting in the dark watching Frank Adams continue the exercise, Beatrice? You are so not going to be caught mooning over some man. You got away. You’ve got a role to play. Move your a*s.
That the last order to herself sounded more like something Frank would say than herself, well, that only added to the problem. She kept an eye on his dark silhouette against the white Fairlane as she started moving sideways into the night.
Frank prowled the perimeter, his empty weapon drawn, aimed low, and swinging slowly before him exactly per training so that it was already in motion if he had to aim. It was faster to change direction of an active motion, than break muscle lock of a position held still for too long.
He hadn’t sprinted after her.
Again, team player. It was a two-man exercise, and he didn’t leave his partner with the unknown variable of the driver in the car. Any trainee that did was marked instantly dead by the trainers.
Actually, he wasn’t moving quite per training. He was spending the bulk of his time on the side of the test zone that she’d exited from. Still looking for her.
He froze, his massive frame silhouetted by the flashlight his partner was using to inspect the vehicle. Frank was looking straight at her, or at least it felt like that. There was no way he could see her. No way he could know she’d begun to circle around and hadn’t simply kept going.
But still he stood facing her, as if he could sense her even if he couldn’t see where she stood a hundred feet into the brush.
Then he put one hand to his lips and ran it across his mouth. As if his lips also burned.
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