Cut & Run 05 - Armed & Dangerous (30 page)

“Zane,” Ty whispered, uncertainty clouding his voice.
“Iknow. It’s okay. I just hate that you’re so close to him.”
Ty jerked his head and pulled back. Zane let him go. “I haven’t spoken to him since he left Baltimore, Zane. I used to talk to him at least once every day, even if it was just a random text, but that’s stopped. He’s leaving me alone out of respect for you, for us, and I have to tell you, baby, I miss him.”
Zane snorted in annoyance.
“But if that’s what you need, I’ll do it. Do you understand? I’ll do anything you need me to do. Because I have never felt like this about anything, and I’m terrified of screwing up and losing it.”
Zane held his breath, meeting Ty’s eyes. “He’s your best friend, Ty.”
“If it’s you or him, there’s no question who I’ll choose.”
Zane was ashamed of the effect those words had on him. He felt like doing the Snoopy dance around the room. Instead, he said: “I don’t want that.”
Ty nodded. “Let it sit for a while. Okay? Let’s just live through this first.”
“Yeah,” Zane murmured, though his eyes were drawn up, to where Nick still was.
Ty was silent. Finally, he swallowed hard and shook his head. “I know you’re worried. Nick knows me pretty well. I think you’d probably have to go to Deuce to find someone who knows me better.” He looked up, as if measuring his words. “He knows what love means to me, when he’s not drunk off his ass like we were that night. It never should have happened, and he knows it.”
Zane had to deal with both a little spot of relief—that Nick knew better than to push—and a small spark of pain at the same time. It was true: he didn’t know Ty as well as Deuce or Nick. Zane allowed himself a melancholy moment. Sometimes it seemed that Ty could read his mind, but Zane was still fighting through gauze when it came to Ty.
“They’ve known you a lot longer than I have,” he said. “A lot of history there I’m not connected to.”
“Stop it,” Ty said gently. His voice was warm and affectionate, and his fingers slid up and down Zane’s arm as he stepped closer and wrapped Zane up in a hug.
Zane huffed but smiled against Ty’s shoulder. He liked that Ty knew him so well. It was like a splash of cold water to the face every time he started to sink into thinking he was a mystery. “So tell me something.”
“Anything,” Ty said in a low whisper. Just like the first time he’d answered with that, months ago in a tent, Zane’s stomach did a happy flip. He steeled himself to ask the only thing he could think of just then.
“How the hell does Nick afford this boat?”
Ty’s fingers came to a stop, and he seemed to be holding his breath as the muscles against Zane’s body tightened. Then he sighed and relaxed again, his fingers dragging against Zane’s neck as he stepped away.
“Come on, Ty, this isn’t city cop salary stuff. This isn’t even saving every dime he made in the Marines and eating Ramen noodles every meal.”
“It’s his home, it’s where he lives. You ever asked yourself how I afford a historic row house in the middle of Fell’s Point?”
“Not really,” Zane said with a frown. “I always figured you were just really adept at not spending money.”
“Jesus, Zane,” Ty said with a laugh.
“You never buy anything, you never have anything extravagant,” Zane continued, mumbling as he began to feel sort of stupid for never wondering about it. “How
can
you afford it?”
Ty shook his head, looking up as if he could see the deck above them. He met Zane’s eyes again before turning away. “I’m going to bed.”
“Ty, come on.”
Ty picked up the nearest pillow and chucked it at him. Zane caught it and threw it back. “You brought it up.”
“It was a payoff, all right? When they kicked us out of the Marines, they had to make sure we wouldn’t go crying to the press, so they paid us a lump sum and sent us on our way.”
Zane stared at him, not exactly shocked but close enough to it to gape. Ty closed his eyes and turned his head away.
“How much?” Zane whispered.
“Enough.”
“Why’d they do it? What’d you guys get into?”
Ty turned to meet his eyes, then gave a curt shake of his head. “That’s enough story time for one night. I’m going to bed.”

“THEY’VE completely dropped off the grid again,” Agent X said as he spoke to his superior.

“How is it possible that they keep evading you with two prisoners to keep under control?”
“I’m beginning to believe that Cross isn’t a prisoner, sir.”
“Excuse me?”
“I hesitate to conjecture, sir, but… I believe he thinks they’re trying to help him.”
“Why in God’s name would he think they’re trying to help him when all they want to do is deliver him to the man who wants him dead?”
“That I can’t say. But why, sir, would they attempt to deliver him at all if they merely want him dead? Why not kill him in Chicago?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it possible they don’t know what they’re doing?”
“Anything is possible, I suppose. We’ll try to take them alive.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hunting them down is becoming futile. I haven’t heard anything from the team we sent to Louisiana. But we knew that wasa ruse.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Come back to DC, we’ll sit on the Federal building. We know that’s where they’re going. I’ll send a team to Blake Nichols in Chicago. Perhaps we can find some clarity in all this.”
“Yes, sir.”
Agent X hung up the phone, looking at it in frustration. If Randall Jonas got his hands on Julian Cross, the last shred of evidence against him would be gone. Jonas was responsible for too many deaths. They couldn’t let these FBI assholes deliver Cross to his death too.

H OURS after crawling into bed with Ty, Zane still lay awake, staring at the stars through the windows, listening to the soothing sound of Ty’s breathing. Ty’s body was warm against his, something familiar in the midst of this absolute clusterfuck.

There was something incredibly romantic about where they were. The moon and stars were astounding out on the water, twinkling above them, unfettered by the lights of any city. He could hear the waves slapping against the hull, the creak of the boat as it bobbed at anchor. The gentle rocking under them would have been the perfect backdrop to curling up with his lover and making love all night long.

He shifted in bed, turning his head so he could look at Ty. He was trying not to think too hard about anything, but Ty was always at the forefront of his thoughts. Where the hell had the money come from? Why was Ty so uncomfortable with the subject? Was he telling the truth about the military paying them, or was that another classified cover? And then there was Nick.

When he’d first found Ty in the airport in Chicago, Ty had said he wanted to talk about a lot of things when they got home, to get everything in the open. Ever since, Zane had pondered what Ty could possibly have in mind. Obviously, Nick had been one of those things. He was angry and hurt, even though Ty hadn’t really done anything wrong but react to a kiss and then admit to liking it. He hated the bond Ty had with Nick, but he also hated to ask Ty to give it up.

A glass clinked from above, and Zane raised his head to listen. He heard another small sound, and he slid out from under the covers, trying not to disturb his partner as he clambered out of the oddly shaped bed. Ty usually woke at the drop of a hat unless he was truly exhausted. All the driving and running and fighting had used up everything Ty had in him. He didn’t even toss his head when Zane got out of bed.

Zane stood at the end of the bed and looked down at him, wondering about the panic that Ty had been feeling that night weeks ago when he’d left Zane asleep and bolted. Was there a force in nature that would make Zane walk away right now?

He shook his head, determined to let that stay in the past, and he grabbed his gun and headed up the stairs for the galley.
When he peered over the edge of the stair railing, he could see Nick standing in a weak pool of light coming from the sink. He cleared his throat to let Nick know he was there. Nick turned to look at him, glass in hand.
“Did I wake you?” he asked in a whisper.
Zane shook his head and climbed the rest of the steps, moving toward the little corner booth that was situated in the pilothouse. He set his gun on the tiny table and slid into a seat, turning to rest his elbow on the back so he could look into the galley. Nick had been really quiet, actually. Impressively so. Zane was just too attuned to noises in the night.
“Mind if I get a drink?” Zane asked, his voice hoarse and dry.
“What’s your pleasure?” Nick asked as he turned to the refrigerator behind him.
“Water, tea, coffee, doesn’t matter.”
Nick messed around in the refrigerator and finally pulled out a plastic bottle of water. He set the bottle and a glass of ice on the counter between them with a flourish and smirked. “Caffeine’ll keep you awake.”
“I’ll be awake anyway,” Zane answered, but he pulled the bottle and glass toward him. “Thank you.”
“No problem,” Nick said with a nod. He picked up his own glass again and leaned his elbows on the countertop. “What’s keeping you up? Aside from the people trying to kill you.”
“I don’t sleep much. Even when people
aren’t
trying to kill me,” Zane said, smiling.
Nick was nodding, watching Zane, though he probably couldn’t make out much since the only light in the room didn’t reach the corner where he sat. Zane wondered what Nick might talk about, if asked, or if he might share something about Ty that Zane didn’t know. Ty was their common ground. It was just talk between new friends, right? Only this friend knew Ty was
with
Zane, and he’d had his tongue down Ty’s throat a few weeks ago.
Zane shrugged that imagery off. He’d have to deal with it soon, but he wanted to see what he could get out of Nick first.
“I guess none of us sleep much. Ty’s down there muttering in Farsi,” he said as a way to break the ice.
“He does that still?” Nick asked in amusement.
“Only when he’s asleep or really, really pissed off,” Zane admitted, sliding the glass back and forth on the table near his gun. He kind of enjoyed the dig, letting Nick know that Zane was the one who held Ty at night. It might have been beneath him, but he didn’t care. “When he sleeps, he doesn’t sleep quietly.”
Nick gave that a melancholy smile. “We were all like that, to a degree. You can be disqualified from making Recon if you snore, but what they don’t realize is that after half a year, every one of us talked in our sleep. Or screamed.”
Zane emptied his glass and reached for the bottle to refill it. “I don’t think that’s something I’ve ever done. Talk in my sleep, I mean. Keep it bottled up, I guess.” Not to mention that a large part of the time he’d been undercover, he was sleeping with someone—or someones— he didn’t want knowing who he really was.
“Not healthy,” Nick chastised, smiling and lifting his own glass to his lips.
“Are you a friend of Deuce’s too?” Zane asked wryly.
“Ty’s brother? I’ve met him a few times. I don’t know, something about combining the Grady traits with psychological training didn’t sit right with me. Made me nervous.”
Zane laughed. “Grady traits? Like blustering out of tight spots and courage under fire?”
“And being crazy enough to pull off the impossible.” “Gummi bears.”
“Cheetos. And that look, like he knows exactly what you’re thinking and he finds it funny.”
“I hate that,” Zane muttered, setting down his half-full glass.
“Me too,” Nick said, laughing and looking down at the ice in his glass again. “God, I miss him sometimes.”
Zane looked up at him, an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of his stomach. He didn’t want to imagine what it was like to miss Ty.
Nick was silent too, watching Zane in the dim light again and drinking his water without further comment. Finally, Nick smiled and looked away with a shake of his head. “Ty told you, didn’t he?”
It threw Zane for a moment, and he stared at Nick, wondering if he was headed for a showdown of some sort. “Yes.”
Nick nodded, still looking down at the glass he’d set on the counter. “I was hoping he’d forget.”
“He told me that night. As soon as he got home.”
Nick nodded. “His brand of morality is pretty unique,” he said as he looked up to meet Zane’s eyes. He straightened and put both hands on the counter. “I owe you an apology.”
Zane frowned, not sure how to handle the straightforward approach. “Am I actually going to hear it?”
“Depends,” Nick answered with an easy shrug. “Do you deserve it?”
“Yes,” Zane said, meeting Nick’s eyes.
Nick raised one eyebrow and cocked his head to the side. “Ty told me he was involved with you, that he loved you, and I should have respected that. I didn’t, and for that I’m sorry,” he offered, sounding sincere.
Zane nodded, noting how precisely Nick worded that apology. “Now tell me how you really feel,” he said, keeping his tone dry. He didn’t want to start an argument, but he did want to know where Nick stood. And he did still want to slug him.
Nick snorted and gave him a grim smile. “I think you’re one lucky son of a bitch, and I kind of want to hate you. The hell of it is, I know Ty. He won’t come looking for me unless you give him a good goddamn reason to.”
“I know I’m lucky,” Zane said as he realized that the little bundle of nerves he’d always had to deal with when he thought about love and Ty just wasn’t there. Was that confidence? Trust in his lover? Zane wasn’t sure, but he liked it.
Nick lowered his head, shaking it minutely. “In that case, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry for making a move on your boyfriend.”
It sounded so absurd that Zane huffed a laugh. “Thanks.”
“Yeah.” Nick stood for an awkward moment, obviously not sure what to say or do.
“If you weren’t so damn much like him, I’d probably have been able to hit you,” Zane told him, wondering where the urge to share was coming from and kind of wishing it would stop.
Nick looked up at him, expression guarded. “If we can be friends, it’d make our lives easier. And Ty’s.”
Zane nodded.
“You can tell he’s tense. I’ve been wondering if that’s because of me, or just life. But then, he never did like it when people tried to kill him.”
“No one likes it when people try to kill them.”
Nick smirked at that. He picked up his glass and turned to get more ice from the freezer. He moved deliberately, trying not to make any noise. He glanced toward the stairs again. When he turned back to the counter, he reached for his own bottle of water to refill his glass.
“He said you’ve been on the run pretty much nonstop,” he said to Zane. “You’ve got to be as exhausted as he is, why are you really up?”
“Honestly? You.”
“Ah.”
Zane glanced toward the stairwell, then back to Nick. “How close
are
you?” he finally blurted out. “I have no frame of reference, other than the oorah and your tongue down his throat.”
“Whoa, okay.”
“Well?”
“Right. Uh… we met on the bus ride to Parris Island. Stuck together for the next… ten years, I guess.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“Then you’re going to have to be more specific.”
Zane shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never been able to really talk to one of Ty’s friends before, besides his brother. I guess I figured you might have some insight.”
Nick was already shaking his head before Zane finished. “Just treat him like you would when you unravel a slinky. That’s the best I can give you.”
“That’s disturbingly apt,” Zane murmured.
Nick’s lips twitched as he looked down at the glass in his hand. Zane looked at him, truly studying him. He was beginning to understand why this man was Ty’s best friend, coming out and kissing him aside.
“Anything else?”
Nick’s smile fell, and he nodded. “I’ve lost count of how many times over I owe him my life.” He looked at Zane hard, narrowing his eyes in the darkness. “There’s something you’re dancing around,” he said, confident in his assertion.
Zane sighed. He figured he must be really worn out if he wasn’t hiding his emotions as well as usual. Nick was reading him, and Zane wasn’t sure he cared. “I’m worried. This mess could go so bad so quickly, and you know him. He’ll be right in the middle of it.”
“Ty was made for messes. He and the cockroaches will be the only things to survive the final meltdown.”
Zane looked down at the almost empty glass he held and then set it carefully on the counter. “I wouldn’t bet on the cockroaches.”
Nick was quiet, but Zane could feel his eyes on him.
“You and Ty… you were prisoners of war, weren’t you?” he said, looking up to meet Nick’s eyes carefully.
Nick inhaled sharply and rubbed his hand over his mouth as he looked away.
“I was wondering… I don’t want to ask him details. He doesn’t know I know.”
Nick looked down at the counter and shook his head, then pushed away from the counter and paced away, running his hand through his hair.
Zane winced. “I’m sorry, I….”
“I just, uh… it’s still classified. Not something I really like to chat about,” Nick stuttered. He was truly flustered, and Zane realized that it didn’t suit him.
“I thought maybe it would help me understand you two better. Understand him better. I’m sorry, I….” Zane shrugged. He had worried about asking Ty the details, but he hadn’t even considered the effect the mention of it would have on Nick. He realized that it had been cruel to bring it up. Despite wanting to hate this man, Zane foundthat he didn’t.
Zane’s words hung in the air between them. Zane wasn’t sure if Nick would give him details. Zane wasn’t sure that he wanted details, but he felt like it was something that had forged Ty into who he was now.
Nick returned to the counter, watching Zane, looking like a man with something heavy on his conscience. It was another look that didn’t suit him, and Zane frowned as a shadow crossed Nick’s face in the weak light.
“We were in captivity for over three weeks,” he told Zane without being prompted again. “Twenty-three days, nine hours, and fifty-one minutes.”
“Jesus,” Zane whispered.
“We were captured when our Chinook was taken down by an improvised rocket-assisted mortar. We’re not really sure how it happened; one minute we were in the transport, the next we were both waking up in a cell. The investigators said that the five us who were in the middle of the helo were thrown. He and I were the only two taken. They think it was because we were further from the wreckage. I don’t know. We were detained, questioned, and tortured for information.”
Zane shook his head. It was worse than he had imagined. He had guessed months ago that something had happened while Ty was in Afghanistan. Little clues had dropped over time, and Zane had collected them: Ty’s incessant nightmares and nocturnal muttering. Fear of small, dark, enclosed spaces. Hating being restrained or even forced to sit still for long. Recognition of interrogation tools and techniques. The POW sticker on the Bronco. The words Zane had overheard when Ty had spoken to Nick. And then Nick had confirmed it.
But when Nick laid out the details, it was so much worse than Zane had feared. Almost three weeks in captivity, being drilled for answers and tortured.
Nick gave him a moment to let the reality sink in and possibly to give him a chance to stop the narrative. Then he continued. “Ty kept pissing them off by speaking in different accents every time they questioned him.” He laughed. It was a bitter, thin sound. “He spent a whole day pretending he was Russian and telling them they were doing it wrong.”
Zane couldn’t help but smile. That sounded so much like the man Zane knew. Even in the midst of an ordeal like that, he was still
Ty
.
“They kept us together in a cell that wasn’t big enough for either of us to stretch out in. But we had each other, kept each other sane. When they’d come and drag Ty out, leave me there alone, that was the lowest I’d get. They could torture me all they wanted, do whatever they wanted to me. But sitting in that cell alone, wondering if he was coming back… those times are where my nightmares go.” Nick swallowed hard and looked away, his green eyes glistening as he tried to force the emotions back so he could continue. It affected Zane as well, and his chest already hurt in sympathy.
“Finally they started getting desperate. They realized that we were drawing strength from each other. Instead of separating us, though, they tried to drive a wedge between us. They’d take us out together, make us do the work. If we didn’t hit hard enough, we had to hit again. If we didn’t cut deep enough, we had to cut again. I don’t know how long it really was, but we estimated it was about a week that we spent torturing each other, beating the shit out of each other at gunpoint.”
Zane let his eyes fall closed. He had taken enough of Ty’s punches in the past to know how bad that must have gotten. He and Nick both must have been beaten to a pulp.
“But it didn’t work,” Nick murmured triumphantly. “They wanted us to resent each other, turn on each other. It just made us stronger, more determined to live through it together and escape. I don’t think they really knew what to do with us. We wouldn’t crack, we wouldn’t die, they weren’t willing to execute us. Ty wouldn’t shut up.”
His eyes began to peer off into a distance only he could see. Zane watched him, apprehension and nerves swamping him. He could sense that Nick hadn’t reached the worst part yet.
“Then they came up with something that would work.” He looked up at Zane, his hard eyes coming back into focus, bright with anger and memory. “One day they strapped Ty down to this table. I could hear the noise from my cell, and I knew from the way he was fighting, he thought he was going to die.”
The thought hit Zane hard, and he closed his eyes, wondering if he should ask Nick to stop. But morbid curiosity got the better of him, and he forced himself to open his eyes again.
“When they got him tied down, they brought me in there with him. They had him bent over the table, a rope over his back to hold him down. His hands were handcuffed behind him. They put cuffs on me, and I thought for sure they were going to make me cut him open.” Nick shook his head, raising his chin and glancing at the ceiling. “Then they told me I could either tell them what I knew or I could fuck him on that table with a gun to both our heads. And if I didn’t do it, they’d do it for me.”
Zane stopped breathing as he stared at Nick, suddenly frightened out of his mind. He’d expected to hear about torture, but not that. Was that what had happened to Ty to make him hate being held down?