Heartbreaker (17 page)

A cigarette would go a long way toward calming her, but she didn’t have a cigarette. Shifting so that she was sitting cross-legged, her hands resting in her lap, Lynn closed her eyes and resorted to the next best thing.

“Om,” she chanted softly, concentrating. “Om.”

“What the hell is that?” Jess demanded.

Lynn opened one eye. “I’m meditating.”

“Jesus Christ.”

Lynn opened both eyes. “Do you have a problem with that?”

“Loonies to the left of me, loonies to the right …”
he sang under his breath, to the tune of “Stuck in the Middle with You.”

“Are you implying that meditating makes me a loony?”

“Not just meditating, no.”

Lynn absorbed the implications of that. “Oh, yeah? Well, if you ask me it’s better to meditate than to spend your life swaggering around doing a bad imitation of Little Joe Cartwright, complete with boots and a big ole cowboy hat.
Like a rhinestone cowboy
…” She launched into an abbreviated, barely-above-a-whisper rendition of Glen Campbell’s song to retaliate for his earlier stab at musical entertainment.

“Are we talking about truth in advertising here?” he asked when she was finished.

“I’d say that’s what we’re talking about, yes.”

“Then let me say this: At least I don’t wear a Wonderbra.”

“What?” Lynn’s jaw dropped. “Are you implying that I do?”

“I’m not implying anything. I’m saying I know what I saw. It works great, by the way. Makes you look like you have a lot more up top than you really do.”

“I have plenty up top!”

“You do?” A hint of amusement in his voice stopped her cold. Lynn realized that she was being led down a path she didn’t want to travel.

“Why don’t you just shut up and go to sleep?”

“With pleasure.” Jess shifted and was obediently silent. Lynn closed her eyes again and tried to meditate—making sure this time that the chant was inaudible—but she couldn’t get into the spirit of it.

Loonies to the left of me, loonies to the right …
The ridiculous paraphrase kept running through her mind, interrupting her concentration.

The state of relaxation she was striving for wasn’t going to happen, Lynn realized. Not tonight, not under these conditions. Her eyes opened, to see exactly nothing.

She was all alone in the cold, scary dark, with both her companions asleep.

Maybe.

“Jess?”

“Are you still there?”

“Are you still bleeding? Can you tell?” she asked.

“I’m
sleeping
.” There was a pause. “The bandage is dry.”

“Good. We can’t get out of here without you, you know. I don’t know where we’re going.”

“Or you would have left me back there when I got shot. I know.” There was grim humor in the words.

“Well, no, of course not. But I have to take care of Rory. She comes first.”

“Motherly love.” He shifted. “You love her, she loves you. So what’s this thing you two have going on where you’re always fighting?”

Lynn shrugged, then realized again that he could not see in the dark. “She’s a teenager. What can I say?”

“So?”

“You don’t have kids, do you?” It was a world-weary query from a seen-it-all mother to a non-parent.

“Actually, I do. I have two girls, eight and ten.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Don’t sound so surprised. I’m thirty-five years old. How many men get to be thirty-five without having kids?”

“You’re thirty-five?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t look it. You don’t act it either.”

“Thanks. You don’t look thirty-five yourself. But you sure do act it. Fifty-five, more like.”

“Meaning?” Lynn bristled.

“You need to lighten up—especially on Rory. For Christ’s sake, you dog every step she takes.”

“I do not!”

“You’re here, aren’t you?” He said that as if it were incontrovertible evidence; Lynn knew he referred to her presence as one of the chaperons.

“That’s because—” she began heatedly, then stopped.

“Because …”he prompted.

“Because … nothing. You’re not really interested, and I don’t want to talk about it.”

“If you’re not going to let me go back to sleep, we’ve got nothing better to do than talk for a while. And I
am
interested. Tell me, why would a woman like you come on a trip like this when you didn’t have to?”

“What do you mean, a woman like me?”

“Christ, you have a manicure! You put on lipstick every morning before we head out! You powder your nose before you get in the saddle! And you can’t even ride a horse! I bet you’ve never camped out before in your life.”

“So?”

“So why’d you come?”

“I came for Rory, of course.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s my daughter, and I love her!”

“And?” Jess probed.

“And because we haven’t been getting along well lately,” Lynn said, finally giving up. It was a relief to admit it. Since she couldn’t see him, since he was nothing more than a low, rough-edged voice in the dark, he was surprisingly easy to confide in.

“My guess is you haven’t been getting along because you overprotect her.” Jess’s summation was dry.

“It isn’t that so much as it is …” Lynn hesitated. “I’m gone a lot. I have to work.”

Lynn heard the defensive note in her own voice, and flinched.

“Everybody has to work.” Jess’s tone was surprisingly understanding. “So she’s mad at you because you’re gone a lot. What do you do, leave her alone?”

“No! My mother lives with us—Rory’s never left alone.”

“So what’s the problem then?”

The truth came out in a rush, exquisitely painful. “She blames me because her father’s not in her life. Sometimes I think she hates me for it.” The total absence of vision was seductive. Never in her life would Lynn have imagined that she would confess that to anyone—much less to Jess Feldman, super-stud.

“Ah.”

“She never knew her father.”

“You divorced him when she was a baby?”

Lynn’s voice dropped until it was just above a murmur. Rory’s breathing was even and untroubled. The sound of it reassured Lynn: Rory had always slept the sleep of the dead.

Lynn didn’t want her daughter overhearing this.

“He walked out on me when I told him I was pregnant. He’s never even seen her.”

“She blames you for that?”

Lynn moved, pulling her legs up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. Her chin dropped to her knees. She had a sudden, intense craving for a cigarette.

“Yes.”

“Is it your fault?”

“No. Well, maybe. Some.” Lynn took a deep breath. “I’d only known him six weeks when we got married. I don’t know what I was thinking. I was young, you know? And stupid Just twenty-one, just getting ready to graduate from college. He was a med student, in his first year. He was smart and handsome and he was going to be a doctor—who could ask for anything more? We were really happy too—until I found out I was pregnant. Kids weren’t on his agenda right then, he said; his whole focus had to be on getting through medical school, and mine had to be on supporting us financially until he got out and we got on our feet. The bottom line is, he wanted me to get an abortion. When I wouldn’t he walked out. I got a divorce, I had Rory, and I went to work. My mother—my father died when I was in college-moved in with us to take care of Rory. And that’s the way it’s been ever since.”

“Does he pay child support?”

Lynn shook her head, then realized again that he could not see. “I never asked for any. Of course, he couldn’t have paid any when we got divorced; I was the one with the job. He was in school. But I didn’t want to see him—and I didn’t want him to see Rory. Not that he ever tried. I never realized how it would affect her—until she was about nine and started really asking about him. Finally I got in touch with him. He was a doctor by then, with a new wife and a new family. He said he didn’t want to hear anything about Rory, that I’d chosen to have her without his consent and she was mine, not his. And he hung up. I’ve called a few times since, and written too. He doesn’t want to know.”

“So how can Rory blame you for that?”

Lynn shut her eyes. “I couldn’t tell her that her father didn’t want to see her, didn’t even care enough to speak to her on the phone or send her a birthday card. If she knew that it would crush her. She has this fantasy built up—this fantasy that he loves her, that the only reason he hasn’t contacted her is because he hates me.”

“So you’re the bad guy.”

Lynn grimaced. “I’m what’s standing between her and her fantasy father.”

“So she comes on to men old enough to be her father, trying to replace him.”

Surprised at his perception, she opened her mouth to ask how he could possibly know that—then realized that of course he would know. He wasn’t stupid, and the psychology of it was obvious. Besides, Rory had been coming on to him. Lynn had merely filled in the
why
.

“Yes,” she said miserably.

“And to punish you, I’d imagine.”

“I think that’s part of it, yes.”

“You need to tell her the truth.”

“I can’t!” Lynn shuddered at the prospect.

“Suit yourself. But she’s carrying around a whole wagonload of anger, and it’s not going to just up and vanish one day. You need to tell her the truth and let her deal with it. Accepting the world as it is, instead of as you wish it were, is part of growing up.”

“Thank you, Dr. Feldman,” Lynn said. “What are you, some kind of lay psychiatrist?”

“Actually, I minored in psychology. I just never got around to hanging up my shingle.”

“In college?
You
went to college?” Lynn was glad to be distracted from talking about Rory.

“Why does that surprise you?”

“I just never knew there was a college for turning out fake cowboys.”

“Ha, ha. That’s very funny.”

“Seriously, where did you go?”

“Brigham Young.”

“You’re joking.”

“I am not joking. Why should I be?”

“Somehow I just can’t picture you … never mind. You went to Brigham Young University, and you minored in psychology. What did you major in?”

“Criminal justice.”

“Criminal justice?” Lynn’s voice rose with incredulity on the last word. “Did you get a degree?”

“Sure I did.”

“And you became a fake-cowboy tour guide?” Incredulity still colored her voice.

“Actually, the first thing I did was go to work for the federal government.”

“Doing what?”

His answers were coming slower now, and Lynn got the impression he was in some way reluctant to continue.

“I was an ATF agent.”

“A what?”

“An agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.”

“For how long?”

“Nine years.”

“Then you quit being a federal agent to become a fake cowboy?”

“Would you please stop with the fake-cowboy crap? It’s a business, okay? Owen and I make a good living at it. I quit … because I didn’t like what I was doing anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Can we just forget this? I don’t feel like talking about it.”

“Hey, I told you my life story. It’s your turn. Why didn’t you like what you were doing anymore?”

Jess took a deep breath. “Because I was at Waco, okay? I was one of the agents at Waco. All those people died—our people, their people, women, little kids—and I was part of that. Was it our fault? Did we make the wrong call? Or did the chief nut case plan to whack his own followers all along? Who the heck knows? All I know is, I just couldn’t stand the thought of dealing with the nuts of this world anymore. I had to get out. So I came back here and went into business with Owen.”

“I
see.”

Lynn did a quick mental review of what she knew about Waco. Cult leader David Koresh and a bunch of his followers had died in an apocalyptic conflagration after a standoff with federal agents in Waco, Texas, in April 1993. The ongoing confrontation and its fiery denouement had been broadcast on worldwide TV. She had anchored parts of the story herself for WMAQ. Some blamed the agents for what happened, calling it a case of government-sanctioned mass murder. Others blamed Koresh and the cultists themselves, saying they set the fire that consumed them. Whatever the truth was, the fact that Lynn remembered the case so well three years and countless other national nightmares afterward was a testimonial to its enduring horror.

“If you want to know, that’s what the nightmare was about. I have it sometimes, the same thing every time: I keep seeing that complex go up in flames with all those people inside. I keep thinking about the little kids.” The lack of emotion in his voice told its own tale. The scar obviously was deep, and painful. “I keep wondering if they knew what was happening, if they were afraid, if they suffered.”

“I remember. I was anchoring for WMAQ when it happened. It was all over TV.”

“Hell, we’d been planning that raid for months.” Jess made a sound that was part laugh, part snort. “It was called Operation Trojan Horse. We were going to rush in there with no warning, corral the men in one place, the women and children in another, and hustle Koresh out of there. Take out the chief wacko and it was over, we thought. End of raid. No casualties. It was supposed to be a surprise.”

“Something went wrong?”

“
Everything
went wrong. We went in in trucks—cattle trucks, mind you—covered with canvas, three of them, just went bumping up that long, dusty road in front of the compound overlooked by their watch-tower with a three-hundred-sixty-degree view. What was Koresh supposed to think when he saw those trucks coming, that’s what I want to know.
Oh, lookee here, somebody’s sending me a stockyard’s worth of cows?
Right. Then, while we were parked in front of the compound, still playing at being cows, three freaking Blackhawk helicopters carrying federal bigwigs came flying in from the north and started circling the buildings to
observe
. You ever seen a Blackhawk? Nobody’s gonna miss one, that’s for sure, much less mistake it for a mosquito. So even if the people inside hadn’t known we were there—say they were busy throwing up fences to hold all those cows—I’d say they kinda got the picture then. But we kept on truckin’, business as usual. What do you do, right? We jumped out of the trucks and started throwing flash-bangs—concussion grenades—while one of our guys was at the door trying to tell ’em we had a
warrant
. They blasted the shit out of us, and all hell broke loose. They had more gun-power than we did. They even had a machine gun with armor-piercing slugs. We lost four agents in the first five minutes. Talk about a freaking comedy of errors.”