Full Throttle (Black Knights Inc. #7)(47)
It hadn’t worked, of course. Sugar was no substitute for high-octane grain alcohol when it came to staying obliterated for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. But Dan gave the guy massive points for trying.
“Penni.” He drew her attention away from the maid. Her brown eyes were wide and glassy, revealing how exhausted she was. And the bloodshot red tinting the whites was evidence of the tears she refused to shed. She was one tough cookie. He’d give her that. Because if all his friends had suddenly and brutally been taken out, he’d probably be blubbering like a goddamned baby, not sitting there all ramrod straight and quietly stoic. “We really can handle the rest of this interview if you’d rather not hear—”
“No.” She shook her head. “I-I’m okay.” The ends of her dark ponytail slipped over her shoulder, and for a moment he was reminded of how lovely she had looked with her sleek, chocolate-colored hair fanned out across his pillow. How sultry and soft her mouth had been as she watched him slip on the condom Ozzie shoved in his pocket before leaving the dance floor with Julia on his arm—the condom he had not had the chance to use, since the incendiary devices exploded a split second later. Still, Ozzie’s last words whispered through his head. Yo, man. This is just in case you start thinking with your downstairs brain instead of your upstairs brain. And for all the shit he dished Ozzie, and all the shit Ozzie dished him right back, it killed him to think of the guy losing his leg. The job was everything to Ozzie, and if he couldn’t do it…
Dan squashed the thought before he could finish it.
“I’m serious, Dan,” she insisted when he’d been quietly staring at her for too long. “I’m fine. Really.”
And, yeah, he suspected she was trying to convince herself more than she was trying to convince him. “If you’re sure?”
She nodded again, the movement a little odd and jerky. And when she lifted a finger, running it quickly down the bridge of her nose—something he’d noticed she did when she was feeling particularly vulnerable—he decided not to press her. “Okay.” He dipped his chin and turned back to the phone lying faceup on the table. “Go on, Vanessa. What’s wrong with Jaya and what the hell does he hafta do with her planting the bombs?”
For nearly twenty minutes, Vanessa—taking her cues from Rock on which questions to ask and in what order—had conversed in Malay via the open line with the wailing maid. And little by little, the woman had settled down. Now she was slumped in her chair, her head bowed, her tears silently falling onto the white apron tied around her waist. Dan experienced a twinge of sympathy and also a twinge of foreboding. He could tell by Vanessa’s tone that whatever she’d discovered, it wasn’t anything he’d want to write home about.
“First of all,” she said, “her name is Irdina, and she’s a single parent. Her husband died in a trucking accident six months ago, right around the time Jaya was diagnosed with a treatable form of leukemia.” Dan glanced down at the photo lying atop the table. That poor, emaciated little body. Those soulful, suffering black eyes. His stomach turned over, and his diaphragm decided to become a steel vice, squeezing his lungs into his throat. From the corner of his eye, he thought he saw Penni’s lower lip tremble. “The doctors told her Jaya had an eighty percent chance of survival if he received the right therapy, but Irdina didn’t have the money for it. So she took the job at the hotel. Unfortunately, she has yet to save enough to start his treatment and in the meantime Jaya has taken a turn for the worse.”
“Lemme guess,” Dan said. “She was suddenly approached by someone working for the JI. And this someone offered her the money she so desperately needed in exchange for one teeny, tiny favor. In order to save her son, she just had to tape some explosives beneath the beds of a few Americans.”
“To make a long story short,” Vanessa concurred. “But Irdina swears she didn’t know they were bombs.”
Dan snorted. “Come on. Didn’t she see the wires attached to electronic timers? What the hell else would they’ve been?”
“She’s poor and uneducated,” Vanessa said. “And I may not be as fluent in Malay as I am in some other languages, but I’m still good enough to pick up on the sound of bullshit when I hear it. I think she’s telling the truth.”
“You okay, mon cheri?” Rock’s voice drifted over the open line, and Dan could picture the man brushing Vanessa’s ink-black hair over her shoulder. The love those two shared was as obvious as the noses on their faces. And for some reason, Dan’s eyes were pulled over to Penni. The muscle twitching beside her pinched mouth made his heart ache.
“I’m fine, Rock.” Vanessa’s whispered words drifted over the airwaves. “It’s so sad. So unbearably sad.”
And, yeah. That was it in a nutshell.
Still staring at Penni, he admitted, not for the first time, that he hadn’t a clue what to do with her, for her. Did he go with his gut and take her in his arms? Did he leave her alone to courageously endure? What did she want from him? What did she need from him?
Her statue-like stillness, her stubborn silence offered him no direction. And for a few moments, the only sound to break the tense quiet of the storage room was Irdina’s soft sniffle and the hard rumble of a cat’s purr rolling over the open phone line.
Peanut, the fat, mangy tom who was the Knights’ unofficial mascot, always seemed to know when one of the women was unhappy. The feline offered comfort by way of curling his rotund self upon whoever’s lap and starting his engine. Obviously, he’d seen Vanessa’s distress and was proving true to form.