I reflected on that for a brief moment. Again, it was something to explore, although given the way she’d described the hit team, it didn’t seem like the right fit.
“All right. What about your life pre-Tom. Who else were you seeing? Any ex-boyfriends this could be connected to?”
Her face crinkled as she thought about it for a moment, then she said, “Well, there was this one guy, this dickhead FBI agent who knocked me up and split.” She looked at me, flatly, then gave me a half-smile of contrition. “Sorry. Totally uncalled for, I know. The thing is, after you . . . I had a newborn baby to look after. You think I was out hitting the clubs and living la vida loca?”
“No, but . . . it’s been a few years. You must have seen some other guys before Tom?”
She waved it off. “Yeah, sure, there were a couple of guys. But nothing serious. And nothing even remotely shady about either of them. I didn’t want to have anything to do with that life after I left the job. I had a baby to think of. I didn’t want to deal with that kind of bullshit.”
A slight grin creased my cheek. She caught it.
“What?”
“It’s just hard to think of you in those terms,” I told her. “Leading a quiet life.”
She let out a small, nervous laugh. “It took some adjusting, believe me. But Alex was all the motivation I needed.”
“And that’s why you left the DEA.”
“Pretty much. I didn’t want to stay on the job and risk leaving an orphan behind. And I didn’t want to stay in Mexico either. There was too much blood in the streets after Calderón decided to take on the cartels,” she said, referring to the then newly elected president’s decision to send out his army to try to wipe them out from his very first day in office, back in 2006—a war that, at last count, had claimed more than thirty thousand lives. The lucky ones had been gunned down, the rest either beheaded or burnt alive, their remains often buried in anonymous mass graves or dissolved in caustic soda.
An uncomfortable question clawed its way out of the tangle of questions clogging up my mind. I frowned and went silent, unsure about bringing it up now. But I couldn’t resist. I needed to know.
“Tell me something,” I asked. “When did you find out?”
“That I was pregnant?”
“Yes,” I pressed, half-reluctantly. “Was it before or after I left?”
She looked at me for a moment, then said, “Before.”
I felt a boil of anger bubble up inside my temples. It wasn’t the answer I’d hoped for. I just shook my head and looked away.
“Hey, you were the one who took off, remember?”
I turned to face her. “That doesn’t mean anything. I didn’t know. You had my number. Why didn’t you call and tell me? Did you think I wouldn’t want to be part of it?”
“No. I just didn’t want you to be part of it,” she replied, holding my gaze, her tone firm and unrepentant. She paused, watching me, then added, “I didn’t want you in our lives, Sean. Not the way you were back then. Come on, don’t you remember? You were in a hell of a bad place. One big barrel of rage, all angry and bitter and consumed by guilt about what happened.”
All, sadly, true.
“It was a bad time,” I said, bitterly, as memories of that night, in that lab way out in the Mexican backcountry, came rushing back.
Memories of things I hadn’t shared with her.
Michelle wasn’t part of our task force—her deal was working the money trail undercover and taking away the drug barons’ easy cash—and she didn’t know the full story of why we went out there that night. I didn’t either. It had come out of the blue, an urgent, sudden rescue-and-retrieve op that I’d been drafted into. And when we got back, I was so torn up and felt so bad about what we’d done that I couldn’t face telling her about it. I couldn’t face telling anyone about it, least of all her. During those few turbulent days, all I’d been capable of sharing with her was that it all went wrong and that innocent civilians, including the guy we’d been sent there to bring back, had died.
I didn’t tell her I was the one who had executed him.
“I know it was,” she said. “But you didn’t have to bail like that. Maybe if you’d stuck around, I could have helped you work through it. And if you had, maybe we’d still be together now.” Her voice broke with a hint of some lingering regret.
I was feeling it, too.
She was right, of course. I should have told her. Maybe she would have been able to help me through it. Maybe I wouldn’t have had to carry it inside me all those years like I’d swallowed a nuclear detonator. But I could barely face myself back then, and I couldn’t bring myself to let anyone else know about it.
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling lousy.
She waved it away. “You know, the thing I never got was, yeah, he was an American civilian and he was forced to do what he did. But he still came up with some really nasty superdrug, right? I mean, that’s why you went out to spring him. And the fact that he died—sure, it was tragic. But maybe it was better this way. Who knows what kind of damage his drug would have done if it got out. No?”
I shook my head and let out a weary breath. “We never did see eye to eye on that, did we?”
“You know the damage he could have caused, the lives he would have wrecked, intentionally or not . . . maybe it was for the greater good.”
I shrugged, not wanting to get into it anymore. “Maybe.” Moving away from it, I said, “So, who else knew? About Alex being mine. What did you say when you told them you were leaving?”
“I didn’t tell anyone. I just said I needed a break and I just left. No one knew.” Then she remembered something and corrected herself. “Except Munro. The sleazoid saw me at the airport and just guessed. He even made a play for me. Knowing I was pregnant. At least I got to see the priceless look on that douche’s face when I shot him down. It was brutal.”
I nodded and looked away, and stared at the horizon, feeling the sun’s reflection on the water burning my eyes, wishing it could burn away the cascade of images from that day that were tumbling through my mind’s eye.
After a moment, I felt Michelle’s hand settle on mine.
“You know what? I’m sorry, too,” she offered. “Maybe it was a shitty thing to do.”
I turned to face her and shrugged. It was unfair of me to blame her. “No. I was in a really bad place.” I felt a need to move on, to get away from those memories. “Anyway, there’s no point stewing over it. Not now.”
Michelle just said, “Okay.”
I pulled out my phone. “I told my guys to sort out a safe house for you. It should be ready by now. I’ll give them a call to get the address and take you over there.”
“What about homicide? They need to know the details about what happened.”
“First things first,” I said. “Let me get you and Alex tucked away somewhere safe. Then I’ll go see them.”
“I don’t want Alex taken away from me, Sean. Not for a minute. Promise me you won’t let that happen.”
I looked at her and nodded. “It won’t.”
It wasn’t something I could definitely guarantee, not without having cleared it higher up first. Had we been in New York, I would have felt more comfortable making that promise. But out here, I was at the mercy of the local field office’s Special Agent in Charge, David Villaverde. I’d never met him, but he seemed to be a stand-up guy. So far, he’d been accommodating, but he hadn’t yet heard the full story. Whether or not he’d still be as accommodating once he had remained to be seen.
I made the call and got the safe house’s address. It was in a place called Mira Mesa, close to the Marine Corps’ Miramar airbase, about ten miles north of where we were. The plan was for us to take a taxi to the airbase’s entrance, where two agents would be waiting to escort us to the house.