Street Game (GhostWalkers, #8)(43)

“I know she has nightmares. Bad ones.”

Mack couldn’t think for a moment; the roaring in his head was so loud it drowned out his ability to reason. He got up abruptly and paced across the floor to stare out the window.

“You going to tell your sniper to stand down anytime soon?” Joe asked.

“I was.” Mack whirled around to face him. “I changed my mind. How the hell would you know Jaimie has nightmares?”

Joe shrugged. “A couple of weeks ago, she found a murder victim just a few feet from her door. It was pretty messy. A woman knifed just outside her doorway. She’d been stabbed multiple times. Jaimie hadn’t been home and coming home to that really messed her up.”

Mack kept his back to Joe, his gaze meeting Kane’s. “How many times?”

“What do you mean?”

“How many times was the woman stabbed?”

“Sixteen.”

Mack drew his breath in through burning lungs. “How old was she?”

Joe lowered the beer, aware of the rising tension. “The vic was thirty-one. Lisa Carlston. She taught at . . .”

“An elementary school,” Mack finished. “Third grade.”

There was silence in the room. Mack sank into a chair and put his head in his hands. “Ethan, stand down,” he ordered.

“You really did have a gun on me the entire time,” Joe said. “I never spotted him.”

“Ethan’s like that,” Kane said.

Joe looked around the room, into the shadows, and he still didn’t see the hidden GhostWalker. “You knew I would come.”

“If you were sent to kill her, you would have killed her,” Mack said. “Anyone who can make the shot you did would have gotten her a long time ago.”

“So all this was . . .”

“I don’t take chances with Jaimie’s life,” Mack said.

Joe handed him an opened beer. “What’s going on? How did you know the victim was an elementary teacher?”

“With dark hair,” Mack said, his voice heavy with a sigh.

“Dark curly hair,” Kane added.

“Like Jaimie,” Joe said and put down the bottle of beer.

“Like Jaimie,” Mack agreed. “Like her mother.”

Joe swore. “Who was an elementary school teacher.”

Mack nodded. “Jaimie found her just outside the door of their home stabbed sixteen times. It was Jaimie’s sixteenth birthday. She came home late from work, and there was her mother lying dead on her doorstep.” His voice shook. The memory still had the ability to shake him.

“No wonder she had nightmares,” Joe said. “I had been following her, so I was with her when the cops came. She held it together, but when we came up here, she went to pieces. I got her to sleep and I stayed because I was worried. There didn’t seem to be a connection and she didn’t say anything, not to the cops and not to me. Of course at the time, we didn’t know who the dead woman was or anything about her.”

Mack exchanged a long look with Kane. “Jaimie would have known the significance of sixteen stab wounds. She’s brilliant. Things don’t get past her.” Yet she hadn’t called him. Hadn’t turned to him.

“I don’t understand,” Joe said. “What the hell are we dealing with? I was asked to keep foreign governments off of her. Someone made a try for her a week ago, but he was no foreign government; he was one of ours. At least he appeared to be.”

Mack nodded. “One of my boys took a couple of them down the other day. Former Marines. They were both reported dead over three years ago. Neither had been in the GhostWalker program but they’d both seen plenty of combat.”

“Same with the one I took out. I did it quietly and Jaimie never knew,” Joe said. He sighed. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Black Ops,” Mack said. “This is no foreign government after her. It’s our own.”

Kane leaned forward to look into Joe’s face. “Our two were set up for torture and interrogation, not kidnapping. They were going to kill her.”

“She’s too valuable to kill,” Joe said. “She’s got too much training. Why would they put out a hit on her, and yet send me to guard her?”

“Because two factions are at work here, that’s why,” Mack said and stood up, pacing across the room, unable to contain the energy spilling out. Ordinarily he’d be talking it over with Kane. Jaimie had hit on something big and someone wanted her silenced, but now he didn’t know who he could trust.

Kane shot him a look as if catching his thoughts, but remained silent. Mack was grateful. He didn’t want to brawl in front of Joe, but the moment Kane said the wrong thing, there were going to be a few punches thrown.

Jaimie moaned softly and Mack immediately crossed to her side and sat on the edge of the bed. “It’s all right, honey. I’m here with you.”

He knew Ethan wouldn’t take his eyes from Joe and he could fully concentrate his attention on Jaimie. She was asleep. And she was weeping. He’d seen it before. Sometimes she even walked in her sleep, going from room to room, trying to find her mother. He’d had years of those nightmares, heartbreaking and far too frequent. The year they’d spent together, the nightmares had lessened.