Rachael closed her eyes. She remembered the motion, remembered how she fought to come back, to get her brain working again, remembered them speaking, but what? Who?
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
Jack said, “Okay, I want you to think about the weight distribution. Can you picture them carrying you? Is one of them carrying more of your weight than the other?”
She thought about that. “Maybe,” she said, “maybe the person carrying my arms was female. I remember smelling some scent, close to me, not sweet, but not pungent enough for a man to wear it.” She shook her head. “But I can’t swear to it.”
“That’s okay. At least you were aware enough to pretend you were still unconscious. It gave you a chance.” He paused, then lightly touched his hand to her forearm. “What you did, Rachael, it was amazing. You kept your head, kept the terror away, and used your brain. I am very proud of you.”
“I didn’t think I was going to make it. The pain in your chest, it’s unimaginable. You want to open your mouth so badly, but you know it will be all over if you do. When my head cleared the surface—” She stopped, swallowed. “I knew they were still there. I could hear them talking, not ten feet from me, standing on the dock. When I got in enough air to convince myself that I was going to live, I slid back under the water and swam under the dock, and waited. I heard them walking back up the dock, heard the car engine. I came up to see the lights.”
“You couldn’t make out anything? Think back—did you see a profile? Male or female? Can you describe the shape of the car?”
“No, they were gone by the time I was getting out of the water.”
“All right. Let’s go back to that diner.”
Mel’s Diner was charming, right out of the 1950s, with windows all along the front, Formica tables covered with red-and-white-checked tablecloths, and plastic menus. All along the windows were booths, the vinyl dark brown and cracked.
“I don’t believe it,” Rachael said as they walked in the front door.
“That waitress, she’s the same woman who was here last Friday night. Business is light, people in only a few booths, like it was on Friday night. The cook, you can hear him whistling from behind the counter in the kitchen.”
“Hey,” the woman said, doing a double take when she saw Rachael. “I remember you. Last time I saw you, you looked like a drowned rat. You look fine now, all dried out again. You all right, sweetie? Is this your husband?”
“He’s my bodyguard,” Rachael said, read the woman’s name tag, and added, “Millie.”
Millie whistled. “You know kung fu or jujitsu, foreign stuff like that?”
“All of it,” Jack said. “You always gotta go with a pro.”
“I’m thinking I’d like to hire a bodyguard, a hunky one like you, to keep that rat ex-husband of mine away from me. Could you kick him in the face for me? Can you kick that high?”
“Well, maybe a kidney shot instead?” Jack asked. “That’s more in my range.”
“You could start just about anywhere, honey.”
They ordered coffee, and Rachael asked Millie about any customers she’d had last Friday night who were strangers to her. There’d been maybe a dozen tourists driving through who stopped in, but none of them had struck her as being weird or nasty.
She left to pour more coffee into a local man’s cup, then came back, a thoughtful expression on her face. “I’m thinking, I’m thinking. Last Friday,” she said. “Hmm.”
She handed Rachael some creamer she didn’t want.
“I remember this one gent, he came in to get two coffees to go, one black, one blond with three sugars. Now that I think of it, he looked kind of on edge. No nervous tics, nothing like that, but he was impatient, tapped his fingers on the counter while I was pouring the coffee. It was maybe thirty, forty-five minutes before you came straggling in.”
“What did the gent look like?” Jack asked.
Millie pursed her lips. “He was maybe forty, longish black hair, sunglasses on, if you can believe that, like he was some sort of celebrity or some asshole wanting to look like one. He wasn’t big, kind of thin, I think, and his clothes didn’t fit him all that well.” She screwed up her face, thought about it. “Sorry, that’s about it. I can’t think of anything else. But I remember thinking I wasn’t sorry to see the back of him.
“I was pouring a refill for a guy next to the window and looked out. I saw him sitting in the passenger seat of a big dark-colored car, maybe a Lincoln, but I’m not sure. He and another guy were talking, drinking their coffee. Then my boss called me and that was the last I saw of them.”
“Did they seem angry?” Rachael asked. “Or pleased, congratulating each other?”
“Honey, I was too far away and it was too dark, sorry.”
Jack asked Millie more questions, then asked the same ones again, using different phrasing until he knew the well had run dry.
Rachael hugged her before they left. “Thank you, Millie, thank you very much.”
Millie patted her on the back. She looked at Jack again, up and down. “You being a professional bodyguard and all, you see to it you take good care of her, all right?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jack said, and smiled at her. “Millie, do you think you’d recognize the gent from Friday night?”
“I might be losing brain cells at a fine rate, but I still got enough to remember that face, even with the dumb sunglasses. He’s the kind you wouldn’t want to see in a bad dream.’’
“Good. I’ll bring you some photos to look at.”
A man shouted out from the kitchen, “Millie! I got the flats and strips for number three!”
“That’s pancakes and bacon,” she said. “I’m coming, Moe!” And she winked at Jack.
Once outside the diner, Rachael threw her arms around Jack, hugged him hard until he grunted. “You’re a genius. I didn’t say anything, but I never thought it would be of any use at all to come back out here. But Millie was here and she remembered me. And that guy. You are so smart, Jack.” She went up on her tiptoes and kissed him. “I’m glad I laid out the big bucks and got myself a real pro.”
He was laughing as his arms came around her. In the back of his mind, the FBI agent was screaming, Stop it, you moron, are you nuts? Step away from the girl, now. The FBI agent was loud and insistent, but he didn’t make any headway. Jack didn’t release her. In fact, he kissed her back and it felt so good he’d have given up his season tickets for the Redskins without a moment’s hesitation just to keep his mouth on hers and his hands—but the unwanted agent finally kicked him in the butt. Jack set her away from him to keep from yanking her down into the backseat of the car.
She looked up at him, her mouth open, face blank, eyes wide. She was breathing fast, which his agent self demanded he ignore. She swiped her hand over her mouth. “What? Oh my God, Jack, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do that. It’s just that... I lost it. You’re really smart, Jack. Oh damn.”
“It’s standard procedure, Rachael,” and that was true, but wasn’t that about the dumbest thing he’d ever said? He took a step back from her, had to. A beam of sunlight fell directly onto her and he saw the strangest thing. He saw her swinging a baseball bat. She walloped the ball and it flew and flew, and he realized it wasn’t Rachael, it was a little girl with Rachael’s smile and a braid in her hair—
“Stop being modest. I’m going to tell Dillon how brilliant you are.”
“Great Balls of Fire” blasted out of Jack’s jacket.
Jack had never flipped open his cell so fast. “Jack Crowne here.”