Cold Pursuit - Carla Neggers [7]
“I keep dreaming I’m going to lose him.”
“Mr. Cameron…Drew…”
“I wake up in a cold sweat, Jo. My heart pounds and I can’t go back to sleep. I know he’s going to die over there. I don’t know what he’s doing, exactly—he tells me what he can. But it’s dangerous. And he’s not going to survive.”
Jo had crushed the cherry blossoms in her palms and dropped them on the walk. Drew Cameron wasn’t a worrier. She doubted there was a Cameron ever born who was. They were action oriented and forward looking. They didn’t brood—they didn’t dwell on those things they couldn’t do anything about.
Like keeping a son at war safe from harm.
Jo was unable to fathom Elijah dying young. He would always be the devil-may-care teenager she’d promised to love forever.
Except it hadn’t worked out that way.
“It’s natural to worry,” she’d told his father, “especially given the nature of Elijah’s work.”
“I’d give my life for Elijah,” Drew had said simply.
“He knows that. Come on. Let’s look at the cherry blossoms.”
“Jo…”
She had never seen him—maybe any Cameron—so openly emotional, but every instinct she had told her why he had come to see her. She’d stopped, staring out at the Tidal Basin as she spoke. “You did what you thought was right when you broke up Elijah and me and kicked him out of your house. There’s nothing for either of us to forgive.”
“Will you still think that if he’s killed?”
“Have faith.”
They’d continued their cherry-blossom tour in near silence, and Jo couldn’t help but imagine what the children the usually stolid man next to her claimed to have seen looked like. How many of them were there? Were they boys, girls—a mix?
Did they have Elijah’s deep blue eyes?
She hadn’t been able to bring herself to ask Drew to describe them.
She’d fallen for a bad boy and a Cameron all those years ago, and he’d left her for the army. There was no going back.
When Jo received word of Drew’s death on Cameron Mountain and Elijah’s narrow escape in Afghanistan, she had thought back to that eerie conversation among the cherry blossoms and wondered if, somehow, Drew had gotten his wish—if he had, at least in his own mind, exchanged his life for his son’s.
It wasn’t a conversation she intended ever to have with Elijah or any Cameron.
Recent evidence to the contrary, she did know that some things needed to be left unsaid.
She jumped down from her rock and decided to resume unpacking.
But when she returned to the cabin, she dug out her cell phone and checked the signal. Weak. She tried her boss’s direct line, anyway.
Deputy Special Agent in Charge Mark Francona picked up on the second ring and sighed. “What?”
“I’m in Vermont,” Jo said. “How long do I get to stay in exile?”
“Who is this?”
“Jo Harper.”
“Jo who?”
Click.
Despite his enormous responsibilities and straight-as-an-arrow professionalism, her boss had a peculiar sense of humor.
On the other hand, maybe he was being serious.
Jo flipped her cell phone shut and dropped onto the ratty couch. She stared up at a dusty picture of a trout on the cheap wood paneling above the old propane heater.
Maybe, in his own way, Francona was trying to tell her that the sand was running out of the hourglass on her Secret Service career, and she’d be stuck in Black Falls forever.
Two
Elijah grabbed a neatly split, perfectly dried log from the two cords of wood he’d had delivered at the top of his driveway. He felt no pain or even residual stiffness in his right thigh where he’d been shot. He had tied on a tourniquet himself that long, bad night to stem the bleeding and keep on fighting.
He hadn’t expected to live. The Special Forces medic who’d treated him, and later his doctors, had said it was a miracle he hadn’t bled to death.
He didn’t believe in miracles.
A sudden cold wind blew up from the lake. Even if it took until midnight, he wanted to get the wood stacked tonight.
His help, in the