Edge of Midnight (McClouds & Friends #4)(107)

“I’m sorry if it makes you nervous, but we got into this thing together, and we need to figure it out together.”

He forestalled the rest of her bracing inspirational lecture by tossing the e-mail from Con onto her lap. “Read me the directions.”

“Why should I, Mr. Photographic Memory?”

“You wanted to make yourself useful? Be useful,” he growled.

They pulled up in front of a seedy-looking grocery store. Sean parked and got out, turning a slow three-sixty. He grabbed Liv and hustled towards the store. He didn’t want her out in the open. Not that she was recognizable in that blond wig, but even so.

A pimply teenaged boy manned the counter. Sean gave the kid a bland smile. “I’m looking for a man named Mr. Trung.”

The boy went motionless, eyes big. He scampered out of the room.

That was unnerving. He slid his arm around Liv’s waist while he waited. She was so soft and warm and vibrant. It made his breath snag, his chest tighten. Awareness of her throbbed in his groin. In spite of how tense he was. In spite of the fact that he’d been at her all night. He couldn’t get enough. He craved that sensuous dream world they slid into when they got it on. He could live in that world with her forever.

A middle-aged Vietnamese man came out, followed by a fortyish woman. They regarded Sean and Liv as if they were poisonous snakes.

The woman spoke mechanically, as if she’d rehearsed the words. “I am Helen Trung. This is John, my husband. My father is not here. He is gone back to Vietnam six months ago. He is not come back.”

Sean looked at the blank wall of the couple’s faces, tightening his arm around Liv, and followed his first impulse. “Fifteen years ago, I believe there were people who threatened Mr. Trung,” he said. “These same people killed my brother, and are threatening me, and her.” He nodded at Liv. “I want to find them.”

The man and woman looked at each other. The woman turned back. “My father is gone. He is not come back,” she repeated.

Sean waited, letting the silence speak for him.

The woman began to mutter angrily in Vietnamese. He dredged up his memories of the language that Crazy Eamon had drilled into him and his brothers, the language his father had learned in the four tours he’d served, in the war that had broken his mind.

“Please help us, if you know about these men,” he said, in halting Vietnamese. “My wife is in danger from these men. We will not endanger your family. You have my word.”

The couple’s eyes widened. He was startled at the impulse that had moved him to identify Liv as his wife. “Girlfriend” sounded frivolous. And he didn’t have a word for that concept in Vietnamese anyway. He hadn’t used the language since he was twelve, when Dad died, and the word girlfriend had not entered his active vocabulary, in any language.

The word wife had such a different weight to it. “Wife” made it sound like her welfare and safety was his, by God, business. He liked it.

He was just about to give up and leave when a wheezing voice came through the curtain that divided the store from the back room.

“Bring them in to me,” someone said, in Vietnamese.

They followed the woman through the curtained door, through a cramped hall and into a small kitchen. A swift glance around revealed a oneway mirror to monitor the shop outside, and a wizened guy in his late sixties, sitting at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette. He flicked an appraising glance over Liv, and then fixed his gaze on Sean.

Sean waited patiently for the older man to speak first.

“I thought they had killed you,” he said slowly.

Sean suppressed a surge of wild excitement. “Perhaps you mistake me for my twin brother,” he said. “He was killed, fifteen years ago. I wish to find this killer, and avenge my brother.”

Trung’s face twitched. “You sound like my old great-aunt from Khanh Hung,” he wheezed. His laughter turned to a coughing fit. He rapped a command to his daughter, who hurried in with a fresh pack of cigarettes. She looked like she was trying not to smile, too.

Liv nudged at him. “What’s so funny?” she asked.

“Me, I guess,” he said ruefully. “My backwoods yokel accent.”

“Those who are curious about death often find more than they wanted to know,” Trung intoned, his head wreathed with smoke.

“So be it,” Sean replied quietly.

The daughter whispered furiously into her father’s ear. He shook his head. “Sit down,” he said to Sean, gesturing at the table.

There was only one chair, and Sean gestured for Liv to sit. The man’s daughter made some explosive comment under her breath, and disappeared into the other room, coming back with folding chairs.

She crowded them into the narrow space around the table.

“Coffee,” Trung said to his daughter.

The old man hunched over the table, staring at the smoke curling up between his gnarled fingers. “I never saw you,” he said slowly.

“I understand.” Sean shot a reassuring glance at Liv, wishing he could translate for her, but he needed all his concentration for this.

“I thought you were your brother,” Trung said. “He always spoke to me courteously, in my own language, when he saw me. He was a good boy, kind and polite. I will tell you what I saw, for his sake.”

“I thank you,” Sean said, inclining his head.