Ambush (Michael Bennett #11)(40)

“I’m in over my head, Grams. I don’t know who these guys are, or how many of them there are.” I flashed to the Mexican police. “They’ve got resources. And they play for keeps.”

“That knife wound a warning?” she guessed.

“Yes.”

“Is this why you told me a year ago not to go home?”

I nodded. “I don’t think the Alpha knows about you. And definitely not about Ellen Ann. But if he managed to follow me this morning, he knows now. You and Ellen Ann have to go. Get away somewhere until this blows over. I can help pay for it.”

“Comes a day I can’t pay my own way, we have a different set of problems.” She was quiet a moment. “There’s no reason for us to stay, necessarily. And seems like there’s plenty of reason to be scarce for a while. Ellen Ann has been pestering me about visiting Gentry. Might be a good time for us to finally do it.” She glanced at the clock. “We can head out almost as soon as she’s home. Which should be any minute.”

“That’s perfect. Thank you.” After the Elise Hensley case, Gentry had moved away from Denver, eventually settling in a small mountain town on the Western Slope. “I’ll get a message to you when this is all over.”

Grams continued to study me. “You’ve got it back.”

“What are you talking about?”

“There’s something bright and strong in you again. Haven’t seen it since before the war.”

I pushed away from the table. “There’s something rotten in me. That’s why I’m in this mess.”

“Don’t go feeling sorry for yourself, girl. There’s something rotten in all of us.”

“But bright and strong?” I shook my head. “Not feeling it.”

“We never do.” She reached out and smacked my arm hard enough to sting. “The important thing is, can you clean up this mess?”

I looked down into my empty coffee cup. “I don’t know. They want something from me, some intel they think I have from Iraq. It might be a video recording. Might be something else.”

“And you don’t have it?”

“Not as far as I know. I’m hoping I’m wrong. Do you remember that luggage I brought over here?”

A flicker of amusement. “Your old Superman suitcase.”

“The one Dad gave me.”

We both laughed, but there was a burn beneath the laughter, like still-raw skin beneath a scab. The suitcase was emblematic of a familiar battle from my childhood. My dad had pushed to let me be as “masculine” as I chose—video games, Superman comics, toy guns. My mom had been determined to feminize me, and not in a girl-power way. More a doll-on-the-shelf way. Isabel had been a poised beauty who believed that the only way for a woman to survive in a man’s world was to charm the pants off those guarding the glass ceiling until they relinquished whatever you wanted at the moment. Anything from a free drink to a corner office.

In Isabel’s mind, you were just being smart to utilize the only assets a man wouldn’t ignore. But I still struggled to forgive her for seeing the world in such a narrow way, and for trying to get me to jump in with both feet. One reason I’d signed up with the Marines was to prove to myself that I could handle male superiors in my own stubborn, nonsexual fashion. Joining the railway police had been an extension of that.

The battle between my parents reached a low point on my ninth birthday. Isabel had given me a Barbie suitcase. Inside was a makeup kit and a little mirror and a certificate to get my ears pierced.

My dad had given me Superman luggage and a fishing rod.

Apparently my parents had agreed on what I needed. But not the form it should take.

I’d been especially angry with my mother that day because she was in one of her sloppy moods. Sloppy words, sloppy kisses, sloppy steps. It was around then that I’d begun to understand that her long afternoon naps, her shaking hands, her slurred words, all fell under a new term I’d sounded out after watching a television show.

Al-co-hol-ic.

That day, I’d made Superman my hero and refused to have anything to do with Barbie. I don’t think Isabel forgave me for that.

“The suitcase is still in Gentry’s old room,” Grams said. “Right where you put it.”



Clyde followed me down the hall. He plopped down on Gentry’s blue braided rug while I set my duffel on the bed, pulled the blinds closed, and flipped on the light. Gentry had moved out of his parents’ home years ago, when he went to Denver University and eventually took up law. But his room was still all boy—blue paint, plaid bedspread. Posters of rock stars and Halo on the walls. I pulled the Superman case down from the high shelf in the closet and set it on the bed. My fingers lingered over the latch.

After Sarge’s visit last winter, I’d taken the few things Dougie had given me, packed them into this harmless-looking case, and smuggled it over to Ellen Ann’s, where I’d repacked it, hiding the items beneath Gentry’s childhood clothes. I’d considered and rejected both Cohen’s personal safe and a bank deposit box. Somehow those seemed of little use in the face of a man whose powers mystified me. I could not build a barricade against the Alpha. I could only hope to outwit him.

If the Alpha had learned about this house and sent someone to search it, I’d hoped a boy’s suitcase in a boy’s room wouldn’t cause a second glance. My version of Poe’s purloined letter.