Mercy Kill_ A Mystery - Lori Armstrong [12]
I laughed again and sipped my beer. “You know, this stuff ain’t half bad.”
“Ssh. I’m trying to discern the origins of the different flavors of hops.”
This was the J-Hawk I remembered. Not the bloated blowhard who’d been blathering bullshit across my home turf.
We’d met in Afghanistan. As the only two Dakotans in our little slice of hell, we ribbed each other endlessly about the rivalry between our sister states, tossing jokes and insults, but look out if anyone else made a derogatory comment about “The Dakotas.”
Major Hawley was an Army Ranger with the 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Group, and one of the few clued in to our all-female Black Ops section of the 82nd Airborne Division. Being stationed together across Europe and the Middle East made us uncommonly close—some of us closer than others.
The military discourages fraternizing, a rule I’ve adhered to for the most part. We all got lonely. We all missed the intimacy that only comes from sharing a bed with a lover. We all dealt with it in our own unique ways. But some chose to disregard the rules completely—like J-Hawk and my teammate Anna “A-Rod” Rodriguez.
I figured out they were sneaking around long before anyone else. Not because A-Rod spilled her guts to me, but because they’d gone out of their way to avoid eye or body contact when in mixed company. Making goo-goo eyes at each other in the chow line would’ve been less obvious.
Jealousy that A-Rod was getting laid on a regular basis while the rest of us weren’t wasn’t my issue. They were adults. They understood the repercussions if the brass caught wind of their hookups. But it bugged the crap out of me that J-Hawk had a wife and kids at home in North Dakota.
Anna, who was the biggest skeptic I’ve ever met, actually believed the line of bullshit cheating men used: J-Hawk’s wife didn’t understand him. So Anna felt no guilt whatsoever about being with a married man. She fell helmet over combat boots in love with him.
I dreaded the day it’d turn ugly between them, because it was inevitable. When that day came, I was the one who watched helplessly as two lives crumbled. Right then I swore no man would ever wield that much power over me.
“Mercy?”
My focus snapped back to him. “Yeah?”
“I see you’re still throwing off those leave-me-the-fuck-alone vibes.”
“When something works, I go with it.”
He laughed. “I take it Sheriff Dawson isn’t cowed by that attitude?”
“What makes you say that?”
“I waited out here to talk to you last night. Shouldn’t be sexy as hell when a woman pulls a gun on you, but for some reason it is. Then he was in your face, but arresting you was the last thing on his mind.” J-Hawk waggled his eyebrows. “So how long have you two been dancing the horizontal mambo?”
I sidestepped his question. “You didn’t think it was so sexy when Anna held a gun on you that last time.”
J-Hawk’s good humor vanished. He crumpled the beer can and tossed it into my truck bed before reaching for another. “No. It wasn’t sexy. Half the time I wish she would’ve pulled the trigger.”
I nearly gave myself whiplash my head whipped around so fast. “Why?”
“Look at me. My life sucks, and it ain’t looking to get better any time soon. My wife ain’t ever gonna leave Minot. ‘Army Ranger’ on a résumé doesn’t mean squat. Titan Oil was the only company that’d hire me.” He paused and drank. “What about you? How’d you end up tending bar?”
As I debated telling the truth or sticking with my standard noncommittal answer, I drained my beer and reached for another.
“I won’t say everything was hunky-dory after I returned from outprocessing. I tagged along with Jake, learning what it took to run a ranch this size. When Hope lost one of the babies, I ended up on nursing duty. Long story short, I resented feeling like the odd woman out and moved into the foreman’s cabin. By then the bad dreams started, and the only way to stop them was drinking until I passed out.”
“Every night?”
“Pretty much.”
He whistled again.
“We’re all warned about the adjustment time after retirement, especially just coming back from combat,