Hopefully he’d been informing his commander that Miranda only worked for the NTSB: past, present, and future.
Where did she want Jon?
Jon was an able crash investigator, but so were she and Holly, and they’d both be in California. Mike’s specialty was people, not aircraft, and Jeremy still suffered from her own old failing of too narrow a focus.
“I need you with Jeremy and Mike.” He frowned for a moment, but then he glanced at Jeremy and it switched to a broad smile almost immediately.
“Got it! Wherever liberty is threatened, you will find—”
“—The Three Amigos!” They all shouted it in unison and fired pretend guns made of fists and fingers into the air. Their bright HeliSee hats looked nothing like Mexican sombreros despite their oversized brims.
“No, I don’t want you to fight. I want you to…”
Holly rested her hand on Miranda’s arm just long enough to stop her. “It’s a quote from a comedy movie named The Three Amigos. They’re just big boys. Let them have their moment.”
“Let’s ride!” They shouted again, grabbing their packs and storming aboard one of the airplanes. They jostled each other like five-year-olds as they struggled to all go up the narrow gangway together.
Jon, last aboard, blew her a kiss from the entry before ducking inside. One of the pilots rolled his eyes as he leaned out to pull up the gangway from inside—yet another misdirected expression. In moments, the plane was taxiing toward the runway.
She and Holly climbed aboard the second plane like normal people.
Once they were seated and their plane was moving as well, she asked Holly if she should watch the movie for cultural reasons.
Holly snorted, “Are you kidding? I’d rather watch a water buffalo sleep in the sun.”
Miranda thought about that as they lined up for takeoff.
Why would anyone want to watch a water buffalo sleep in the sun?
28
Pierre Jones checked the hospital hallway in both directions. He felt like a geriatric patient. His entire body was mostly a big bruise. The docs couldn’t believe he’d survived his low-altitude jump, never mind without serious injury.
No guards. Good sign.
He peeked into Rosa Cruz’s room—the number he’d gotten by total subterfuge from the nurses’ station…he’d asked.
She was awake.
Her smile lit brightly when she saw him in the doorway. It was a very powerful weapon on a lovely woman clothed in almost nothing and already lying in a bed. A sling held one arm, completely immobilized with a crossbody strap just below her breasts. That was something of a deterrent. And she wasn’t his lover, but rather Tango’s…and Gutz’s.
“What are you in for, Rosa?” He hadn’t heard she was injured.
She flinched briefly and that lovely smile wavered for the length of a single heartbeat before she covered it.
Please don’t let that flinch be because of what he expected it was. What he knew it was. He wished he’d phrased his question differently so that he could deny noticing anything. But he hadn’t…and she’d flinched.
Rosa knew that he knew something. But instead of addressing that, she shied off and answered the hospital question.
“I was the last one they picked up. They said they hadn’t even been looking for me until after they found the ‘last person out’—which must have been you. I was in the water long enough to become marginally hypothermic. And the shoulder.” She raised her arm ever so slightly, winced more understandably this time, then lowered it again. “Dislocated. Fixed, but I’m strapped in for a week. I didn’t know it was possible to be so cold. I’m warmer now, but still under observation. They said I should be free in a few hours. You that sent them back for me?”
“Of course.” He himself had been picked up by a group of jet skiers, making the seventeen-mile crossing from the mainland to Catalina. They’d spotted his chute and pulled him out of the water. The instant he’d come to, he’d called in his best guess at Rosa’s position.
“Are you okay?”
He shrugged yes, then wished he hadn’t. Wouldn’t surprise him if his whole body turned black-and-blue from how hard he’d hit the water.
As to Rosa, there’d been a long gap between the cluster of gunners and her own departure from the plane. Long enough for them to end up in a brief clench and—
Pierre cast the thought aside and took another step closer, both physically and to the elephant question in the room of her being a conspirator in a hundred-million-dollar hijacking.
“What did you tell them?” He knew that she would have been through the same level of debriefing he’d faced. Two officers and a video camera, cross-questioned on every moment from the first alert until they were hauled from the water.
She looked aside quickly and spoke low and fast. “That I don’t know what happened to the plane. That you helped me with my chute and pushed me out the door before going to help the pilots. Which was incredibly brave.”
“You heard?” He tipped his head toward the sea. They were in LA’s main VA hospital. The Pacific lay just a few miles away across Santa Monica.
She nodded and that’s when he saw how red her eyes were.
“Did you love him? Them?” Not that it was any of his goddamn business. But maybe it was. “Is that why you were helping them?”
Rosa nodded. Then shook her head. Then shrugged helplessly. “No. That’s not why I was helping them. Love them? I… They were both very good to me…in different ways.”
“But they didn’t know about each other.”
She shook her head. “Neither one would have liked it. I don’t know what I was doing. Mama always said that my older twin brothers and I were like three puppies in a pile.”
“So you tried to recreate it with Gutz and Tango?”
“Maybe. Mostly I was just not thinking. Life by default. Neither of them would ever have accepted another man. I was juggling them but it was close to coming apart. I knew that if they found out it was going to be ugly.”
He was on the verge of telling her just how ugly, brains spattered in the cockpit of a crashing hijacked plane, but thought better of it. In fact, he hoped that she never read the official report because he’d told the investigators about it—saying he hadn’t heard what woman they were fighting over.
Then he noticed the position of her hand. Her fine fingers, that were never still as they danced across the keyboard of the HEL-A laser firing console, lay on her abdomen just below the sling.
Perfectly still.
29
“Who’s is it?”
“Who’s is what?” Rosa jerked her hand aside but she knew it was too late.
“Neither one knew.” Pierre said it as a flat accusation.
She wilted. “I don’t either. It was a birth control failure, not a plan. I guess now, without a DNA test that I can’t ask for, I never will.” She wanted to cry again, but she’d done enough of that. And that hadn’t even been for Tango or Gutz, not really. It had been for the overwhelming madness that her life had become.
Her hand returned to her belly of its own volition. She’d heard about that, but never really believed. It was ridiculous.