“Nearly done,” the nurse chirped, not taking the hint. “Just need to check your blood pressure.”
Camille coughed, clearing her throat. “Seriously, you need to go. Your being here is raising my blood pressure.”
“Won’t take long,” the nurse said. He picked up her arm to put on the BP cuff.
Camille threw her head back against the pillow. “Jacques,” she sighed. “I have asked this man to leave and he won’t.”
Thibodaux turned slowly to face the wide-eyed Nurse Greg. His jaw flexed, nostrils flared. The muscles in his neck tensed. Moving in close, he put his arm around Nurse Greg, eclipsing him with hulking shoulders. Leaning down he whispered a few words in the man’s ear. Nurse Greg looked up, slack jawed, as if he’d just been slugged. He took one tremulous breath and left the room without even gathering up his kit.
“What did you say to him?” Camille narrowed her eyes.
“Not much.” Thibodaux shrugged. “I told him he was gonna have a hard time picking up all his teeth with broken fingers.”
“My man, the poet.” Camille grinned, but he could tell she was hurting.
“How you doin’, Sugar?” Thibodaux patted the back of his wife’s hand. It was cool and the veins seemed to stand out more than he remembered.
“I’m okay,” she said. “How’s Jericho?”
“Quinn?” Thibodaux cocked his big head to one side. “He’s… on an assignment. Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know,” Camille said. “I just haven’t heard you talk about him much lately. Seemed like you were becoming pretty good friends.”
“We are,” Thibodaux said. “But let’s us worry about you now. The doc says the baby is okay, but you were losing some blood. You’ll need to stay on bed rest for a little bit.”
Camille suddenly sat upright in bed. “The boys! Who’s watching the boys?”
Thibodaux ran hand across his wife’s forehead, easing her back against her pillow. “They’re fine, Sugar.” He shook his head. “Sandy’s with them.”
“Sandy’s just sixteen.” She turned her face away.
Jacques’s mouth hung open. “Honey, Sandy watches the boys all the time. She knows how to handle them.”
He was on the edge of the chair now, leaning over the bed so he could be on her level to console her.
Her hand began to tremble. She looked back at him. A tear ran down her nose.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” she whispered.
Camille spent the next ten minutes recounting what had happened with Lt. Colonel Fargo and the bald man who’d come with him. Thibodaux sat motionless, taking in every awful, heartfelt word. He struggled to remain calm while his wife told him how these men had been looking for Quinn and how they’d bullied her, kicked her in the stomach, and scared his little boys. They were the reason she was even in the hospital.
When she was finished, he stood and walked outside the room to use up his allotment of non-Bible curse words for the next decade.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Fargo slouched in the passenger seat of a green Jeep Cherokee a block up the street from Thibodaux’s house. Bundy sat behind the steering wheel, sipping on a Red Bull and gritting his teeth. They’d lost the suits for khaki slacks and black T-shirts. Bundy’s ugly brown tattoo of a scorpion was now completely visible and appeared to scuttle every time he flexed the tendons on his thick neck.
Fargo found it obvious the man didn’t like him. He hardly spoke unless spoken to and carried out orders with open disdain. The lieutenant colonel assumed it was because he hadn’t actually been to interrogation training himself. He’d heard Echoes were a closed society. Still, they had a job to do and he intended to see it was done correctly. Responsibility could not be delegated, he told himself. And capturing Jericho Quinn was his responsibility.
He pushed from his mind the fact that no one would have been looking for Quinn had he not pressed his uncle to have his name added to Congressman Drake’s list.
“He can’t just have vanished,” he said out loud, hoping to start a conversation with Bundy.
The first sergeant turned to look at him in the darkness of the Jeep but said nothing.
“Did you make the lookouts cover all uniformed branches?” Fargo tried to look stern, like an officer inspecting his troops, but he was pretty sure he just looked dyspeptic. Bundy had a way of tilting his head, just so, that made Fargo cringe.
“All of them,” Bundy whispered, sounding like a bald version of Clint Eastwood. “Including the Girl Scouts.”
“Have you…”
Three black sedans screeched down the street to park in front of Thibodaux’s house. Two men in suits jumped from each vehicle. Four of them, armed with long guns, set up a perimeter around the house while two went to the door.
Fargo threw his binoculars to his eyes and watched as a moment later the men led a teenage girl and six pajama-clad boys out into the waiting sedans. He recognized protective custody when he saw it.
Something inside him felt like it broke and drained away. “Thibodaux knows,” Fargo moaned, swallowing a mouthful of bile. “She told him.”
“Of course she did, sir.” Bundy smirked. “What did you think would happen? This is what we want-shake things up, stir the shit. See what they do.”
“Oh,” Fargo heard himself say. “If Gunny Thibodaux gets his hands on us, I know exactly what he’ll do.”
CHAPTER FIFTY
Karen Hunt, tough-minded paramilitary operative, slumped in the chilly stone room that served as her new cell. She’d been dragged away to face death alone, apart from the man who seemed her last friend on earth. Rocking back and forth, eyes clenched tight, she wondered how long she’d stay conscious while the men outside sawed her head off.
She’d seen videos during training-horrible things, images that wouldn’t leave her mind. There was a time when soldiers and spies had been taught how to hold out as long as they could during torture-to keep from spilling vital information-but now, captives were rarely even interrogated. They were merely dragged in front of a cheap video camera and beheaded. She’d heard Specialist Nguyen’s cries for help, down to his last gurgling whimper. These Jihadi bastards were more interested in a slow and agonizing death than an execution.
The guards had taken all her clothing, literally ripped it from her writhing body while they held her down. She’d thought they were going to kill her right then, but the children hadn’t been allowed in the room and she knew they were supposed to witness such things. Fear gave way to anger as she decided they meant to rape her instead. They did neither, simply taking her clothes and leaving her a thin, white cotton robe. She supposed it was to be her death suit, but took some pride in the fact that it had taken five full-grown Tajik men to restrain her.
Ordinarily, Hunt was a woman of supreme self-confidence. “Virtually unflappable,” her raters at Camp Perry had said. But the hopelessness of her situation, the certainty of violent struggle and a slow and painful death, was an acid test she was not sure she could handle. Her jaw felt slack, her stomach knotted until she could hardly sit up straight. The stark plainness in the stone cell spun around her like a gray cloud, formless and sinister.
“I’m not ready,” she whispered to herself. The thought suddenly made her chuckle. Her face twitched in a pained half smile as tears dripped from the end of her broken nose to the stone below. Who was ready to die? Everyone had future plans, dreams, lists left uncompleted… They saw themselves as the star in the little movie playing inside their head.
A jangle of keys outside the heavy timber door jerked her back to reality. She was thirty-three, not nearly old enough to be at the end of her own movie.
Hunt swallowed. They’d left her untied. She still had the skills from her training. Killing a man quickly was not as difficult as it sounded.