Cold River - Carla Neggers [89]
“People used to think my cousin and I were identical twins.”
“You’re not,” Elijah said.
Jo turned her Secret Service face to Grit. “What are you doing here, Petty Officer?”
Definitely not in a happy mood. Grit said, “I told Mr. Neal here that I’d listen to what he had to say.”
“And?”
“I listened. He’s a kid. He has a lot on his mind.”
Charlie started to protest, but seeing how he had a 180 IQ, he finally figured out that Jo was looking for an excuse to shoot him. “I’m finished with my waffle,” he said instead, not exactly meek but not argumentative, either. He handed Elijah a key card. “Room 17.”
Before Elijah could leave, Mark Francona entered the motel. Charlie didn’t wither at all. Francona breathed in through his nostrils before he spoke. “Special Agent Harper and Mr. Neal here can come with me.” He pointed at Myrtle, then Grit, then Elijah. “You three can find your own way home.”
“Mr. Neal wants me to go back to Washington with him,” Grit said. It wasn’t in him to leave the kid to the feds for such a long trip, even if he deserved it.
Francona looked at him. “Yeah? I want to read a book by a fire. Neither is going to happen.” He turned back to Charlie. “Let’s go.”
Charlie got to his feet and put his hand out to Grit. “Thank you,” he said, shaking hands as if he were about to have his last cigarette and go before the firing squad.
Jo fell in with her boss and the vice president’s son and headed out.
“Francona’s mad,” Myrtle said after they left.
Elijah shrugged. “He’s always mad. His sense of humor just covers it up most of the time.”
Myrtle sputtered. “What sense of humor?”
“Come on,” Grit said, rising. “Let’s go back to Black Falls and pack. You and me on a road trip, Mom.”
“Call me Mom again and I’ll run us off a cliff. I’m driving.”
Elijah was quiet. Grit understood why. Jo was gone. He said, “She’ll be back.”
“Maybe we went too fast,” Elijah said, half to himself.
“Myrtle and I will look her up in D.C. and figure out what’s going on. Jo needs to be back in her old life. She needs to be sure that who she is and what she wants will be the same when she’s back in D.C.”
“What did Charlie want?”
“To help find these killers. It’s past time, Elijah.”
Elijah didn’t budge. He’d had his own dealings with Charlie Neal. Charlie had called him about paid assassins in November, after Ambassador Bruni’s murder. “Charlie didn’t make the effort to come up here without specific intel,” Elijah said. “You know what he’s like.”
“Your brother Sean and his partner are smoke jumpers. They fight some bad wildfires.”
Elijah’s eyes narrowed, and he showed no emotion whatsoever.
Which told Grit that he had his friend’s full attention. “We have a lot of dots. Not all of them will connect.”
“Did Charlie mention Bowie O’Rourke as well as my brother?”
“Jo leave you out here in the cold? Need a ride? We can talk on the drive back to Black Falls.”
Twenty-Two
January 2—Beverly Hills, California
Devin Shay fished debris out of the pool with a long-handled net while Sean stood on the patio of his Beverly Hills house and buttoned his jacket. Another black-tie event tonight. He hoped it’d be a distraction. It was all wrong that he was in California. Yesterday he and Devin had dropped Toby off at his host family’s house outside Malibu. The place was spectacular, but all Toby had wanted to do was get out on the trails with his bike.
All Sean wanted to do, then and now, was to get back to their sister.
Her brothers clearly missed her. They didn’t want to show that they did, but it was obvious. Whether or not any of the Shays—including Hannah—would admit it, she was a second mother to them. Given the gap in their ages, the bond between them would have been different, anyway, but Devin and Toby had lost their mother as young boys and Hannah had stepped up to keep them together as a family.
Sean had been so preoccupied with what she was up to with his father’s cabin and Bowie O’Rourke, with the force of the sudden, surprising, no-win attraction he had to