Warrior Without A Cause. Nancy Gideon
One wall held a projection screen, the opposite a large dry-erase board and cork wall studded with idle pushpins. Obviously a com center for covert planning. She could see Chaney heading up a briefing session while equally hard-eyed operatives sat attentively around the table. She couldn’t see herself curled up comfortably with a novel and there was no television in sight. On the rear wall, a countertop housed a microwave, minifridge and small sink. So much for luxuries.
While watching her for any telltale misgivings, Jack gestured to the right and left. “Take any room. They’re all the same. Connie will bring you some dinner. Until then, make yourself at home.”
Her home was here. His home was there. With the woman and child.
“I will,” she said with as much enthusiasm as she could muster. She said it to deaf ears because Jack Chaney was already gone. And she was alone.
Setting the carrier next to her luggage on the floor, Tessa sighed. “Just you and me, Tinker. Like always.”
The big tabby came out of the carrier hissing and puffed up in an affronted bristle. After sniffing the air, he immediately began yowling. Tessa wasted no time setting up his litter box in the spartan bathroom. With his business tidily covered, Tinker plopped beneath the table to groom and calm his distressed nerves. Tessa picked up a bag and went to pick a room.
It really didn’t matter which one she picked. All were equally unwelcoming. Half a dozen on one side of the war room and half a dozen on the other. For its convenience to the bathroom, she took the first door on the right.
Now she understood Chaney’s amusement over her baggage.
The room contained a twin-size bed covered with a brown chenille spread. There was a drawerless night table hosting a homemade lamp with a glass base filled with beer bottle caps. A nice decorative touch. The only one. The small single window was covered by heavy brown curtains. There was one chair, as ugly and uninviting as the rest of the room, and a closet. The closet was a recessed hole in the wall featuring a clothes bar with a baker’s dozen wire hangers and two plank shelves, one above and one a foot off the plain brown rug. She could envision steel-toed boots lined up neatly beneath a stack of olive drab chinos, a line of T-shirts on the hangers and who knows what on the top shelf. Certainly not her designer exercise wear and brand new Nikes.
She was in the wrong place. Chaney had tried to tell her. Stan had tried to tell her. Maybe she should have listened to one or both of them.
Too late now. Too late to do anything but make the best of it. And make herself at home.
She unpacked one bag. There didn’t seem to be any point in emptying the others. She’d obviously have no use for the more civilized outfits she’d packed. She set her toiletries on the baseless sink in the bathroom and after checking for hot water and towels, returned to her cubicle.
Tinker had deposited himself on the foot of the bed to finish up the meticulous currying of his tail. He paused to eye her irritably then continued the task, not breaking the rhythm as she sat beside him on the bed. The mattress gave slightly, promising unexpected comfort. She lay back, only meaning to test the springs. Her exhausted body and soul had other ideas.
The soft sound of a door closing woke her to complete blackness. Two things about the north woods became abundantly clear. It was quiet and it was dark. Not the need-to-adjust-the-eyes-to-get-around kind of darkness that one had in the city but the pitch, unadulterated inkiness of nothing but stars and a sliver of a moon. No neons, no street-lights, no glancing headlights from passing cars, no glow from the telephone number pad or TV remote. Nothing. Nada. Darkness.
She crept from the room, her hand on the wall to guide her. And then the smell of something absolutely delectable provided a beacon into the main living area. After fumbling around, she located a light switch to illuminate the big, empty room. A casserole dish sat next to the microwave on the counter. Her stomach rumbled in encouragement. She and Tinker sat to a hearty beef and rice mixture washed down with several glasses of the milk she found in the minifridge.
Fed, rested, and with dishes rinsed, Tessa allowed herself to be drawn back to the puzzle of the main house. Shutting a disgruntled Tinker inside, Tessa slipped out onto the narrow front porch. Immediately taken by the chill and the isolation, she wrapped her arms around herself and looked toward the only light in the vast black backdrop surrounding her.
She’d never spent any quality time with nature. Her short jaunt at camp when she was nine had ended when a chicken pox epidemic sent all the girls scurrying home in their anxious parents’ Mercedes after just one afternoon. What she knew of trees and other woodland fauna, she’d discovered at carefully arranged gardens under protective domes or in sculpted backyards for the occasional summer party. She’d had one plant, a dieffenbachia she’d been assured could endure any hardship or neglect. It had lasted a month under her care. Cut flowers in a vase was as close as she got to appreciating the great outdoors. And now she was wondering if she should have kept it that way.
Warmth and welcome, however, glowed behind the massive walls of glass and steel. But not a welcome for her. She wasn’t sure why the idea of Jack Chaney having a family unsettled her so. Perhaps because she was uncomfortable with bringing possible danger to their door. Possibly because of the more basic things that had stirred her when she’d looked at her teacher and protector. Things one shouldn’t admit to when the man had a family.
A wife and child threw all her conceptions about Chaney off balance. Lone Wolf. Stan had summed him up with that moniker and she’d liked the deadly and fiercely independent image it evoked. That was the image she’d bought into when she’d hired him: the skilled assassin, capable of slipping in anywhere to get the most unpleasant of jobs done. Just because he moved with government approval didn’t change the basic makeup of the man. He was a killer. The kind of man her father made a career of putting away for as long as legally possible as a danger to society. The kind of man she now turned to to preserve all that her father had stood for. She smiled grimly at the irony, not sure straight-arrow Robert D’Angelo would have appreciated it.
A brief movement behind the backlit vista of glass caught her notice. A single figure stopped and stood in bold silhouette, staring—if the creepy sensation along the hairs on her arms was correct—right at her.
Jack.
He was watching her watching him. And he probably wasn’t liking it.
Abruptly the shadow was gone and Tessa was alone once more. At least she felt alone. As alone and abandoned as she’d felt at her father’s graveside. Without direction. Without purpose—except for one driving goal. To prove that everything her father embodied wasn’t a lie.
“You shouldn’t be outside. It makes you a target.”
A squeak of surprise escaped her as Chaney’s voice sounded practically at her elbow. After a few panicked blinks of her eyes, she could make out his shape in the darkness on the other side of the porch rail. She’d never heard his approach. It infused her with the debilitating sense of vulnerability again.
“I thought you said I’d be safe here.”
“Safe implies a certain amount of common sense. You don’t stand out in the open unless you want to draw attention to yourself.”
Then what had he been doing up at the main house in front of the window? But of course he’d wanted her to see him then. Just as he hadn’t wanted her to see him until his disembodied voice nearly scared the beef-and-rice casserole out of her. He was making a point.
Point taken. She wouldn’t be safe anywhere until her father’s murderer was caught. And the only one who could protect her was herself. Those were the skills Chaney was going to teach her.
“When do we get started tomorrow?”
“So early you’ll still think it’s today so I’d suggest you get some shut-eye. I guarantee, tomorrow night you’ll hurt too bad to sleep.”
She thought he was kidding.
He wasn’t.
His voice came out of the darkness.