Matt—The Callahan Brothers (Brazos Bend Book 2) (5 page)

“But you look—”

“Just like her. I know. We’re sisters. Helen and I are sisters. I’m—”

“Victoria Bradshaw,” he breathed. “Holy crap. You’re the Evil Twin!”

***

Torie was too busy feeling afraid to let the old resentment linger for long, but she definitely felt a flash of it. Her father had tagged her with that nickname when she and Helen were in grade school. Her mother used to scold the general for it, but after she died, when the twins were twelve, he used it all the time. Torie admitted she was the more adventuresome of the girls and as such, she got into trouble more often. But evil? She’d never done a truly evil thing in her life!

“Where’s your sister?” Callahan demanded. “She’s in just as much danger as you are. We can’t leave the island without her.”

That sparked Torie’s temper. “You think I’d go off and abandon my twin to killers? Well, screw you, buster. Helen isn’t on the island. She’s gone shopping.”

He blinked. “And you just forgot to mention that little detail?”

She gave him a bitter smile. “Yeah. That’s right. Look, aren’t we in a hurry here? Or are you going to leave me to save myself now that you know I’m not the Bradshaw you came looking for? The general wouldn’t care, so it’s up to you. You have the memory card, so I’m expendable.”

She couldn’t quite read the emotion in his glare. Disgust? Fury? Insult? A little of all three, most likely. Shoot, it probably matched the look in her own eyes.

He snapped out instructions in a cold, hard tone. “When I say go, run for the bird. Try not to make noise, but if it’s a choice between loud and fast, pick fast.”

Torie’s pulse pounded as she bounced on the balls of her feet getting ready to run. She briefly considered removing her flip flops in favor of bare feet, but knowing her luck, she’d step on something that would cripple her with pain and she’d stumble and fall and miss her ride.

“Now!” Matt said. “Go. Go. Go.”

Torie sucked in a deep breath and took off.

Three years ago at age twenty-nine, Torie had completed a marathon, 26.2 miles, in just under five hours. Nevertheless, this thirty-yard run was the longest of her life.

She ran as hard and fast as she could manage, holding the automatic in a death grip, aware all the while that with his long-legged gait, Callahan could leave her in the dust. Instead, he stayed with her stride for stride. Every second, she expected to hear a shot or to see the spit of dirt where a round hit the ground, or, even worse, to feel one bite into her body. Instinct made her want to close her eyes, but she kept her focus on the goal—the open doorway of the red and white private helicopter.

Then, she was there. Alive and unharmed. Panting hard. She dived through the door and scrambled into the passenger seat while Matt started flipping switches before he’d even settled in the driver’s seat. The rumble of the turbine engines as they engaged sounded like rockets to Torie’s ears. Really loud, really slow rockets.

“They’ll be on us now,” he shouted. “Look sharp. We need at least thirty seconds.”

“Will bullets bounce off the helicopter?”

“Not the kind being shot from those guns.”

Her stomach did a slow flip.
 

Ten seconds passed before she spotted the first gun-wielding man, too far away, thankfully, for his bullets to damage. Another five seconds ticked by before she spied another one. He rounded the corner of the storage shed, and she recognized that he was close enough to kill even as she spied his ugly smile. Torie shuddered as he reached for his gun and brought it up. Her gun was pointed his way, her finger on the trigger, but she couldn’t quite manage to make her finger move. Callahan muttered a curse, his hand flew up, and his gun fired.

A bullet hit the side of the helicopter at the same time a splatter of red appeared on the thug’s chest.

Dear Lord, protect us.
“Let’s go, Callahan. Hurry up. Take off.”

He fiddled with some switches. “Almost.”

Then Torie spied the man who’d killed Marlow running from the direction of the house. He had an automatic pistol in his hands and he approached them from her side of the helicopter, out of Callahan’s line of sight. Beyond his firing line.

Oh, no. Oh no oh no oh no.
The whine of the engine was high-pitched now. Surely they’d lift off any second. Be safe any second.

The terror chilling Torie’s blood intensified when she got a good look at the gunman’s expression. Evil. Pure evil.
 

Running forward, the killer lifted his gun. Beside her, Callahan did something and the aircraft began to lift.

A fusillade of bullets struck the copter. One punctured the passenger door and lodged in the seat, missing Torie by a fraction. Torie squealed and Callahan cursed. “Shoot the sonofabitch before he brings us down! Give us some cover.”

She tried. She truly did. She pointed the gun, pulled the trigger, but couldn’t quite manage to keep her eyes open. More bullets hit the helicopter and Matt Callahan let out a string of vulgarly inventive curses. Torie clenched her teeth, pointed the gun, and pulled the trigger over and over and over. With the helicopter moving, her arm shaking, and her eyes closing each time, the chances of her aim being true ranged somewhere between slim and none. Then they were airborne, up and away, thank God. She sighed heavily. “We made it. I think we made it!”

“You all right?” Callahan asked.

Torie took stock. Except for her heart being lodged up against her back teeth, she believed she was okay.

“Yes, I think so. I think so. And you? Are you okay?”

“Got nicked, but it’s nothing.”

She glanced at him and saw the streak of red that sliced across his temple. “That’s your head. You got shot in the head!”

“It’s just a graze. I’m fine.”

“But you’re bleeding!”

“Yeah, hurts like a sonofabitch, too. However, bleeding like this under these circumstances is a good thing because it means I’m still alive.” Grinning, an adrenaline high glittering in his eyes, he spared her a glance. “We made it, Ms. Bradshaw.”

She dropped her head back, closed her eyes, and took two deep, calming breaths.
Thank you, God. And thank you, Double-Oh-Yeah.

As she took a third deep breath in an attempt to slow her pounding pulse, something landed in her lap. A headset. Callahan had already put his on, blood dribbling down the side of his face. She donned her headset; then spying a box of tissues in the console between them, she grabbed one and dabbed at his wound. “Wouldn’t want liquid to short out your headphones,” she murmured.

He accepted her ministrations without comment, his gaze on the gauges and dials in front of him. Torie settled back into her seat and steeped in the sensation of safety. What a day. What an awful, horrible day. She wondered how much longer it would last. “Where are we going?”

“Aruba. The U.S. military has an FOL—Forward Operating Location—there and I figure that’s the safest place to stash you while I collect your sister.”

“You’re still going after Helen?”

“Of course. I gave your father my word. I need to get to her pretty fast, too, because we can’t have her or any other members of her team returning to that island before we’ve dealt with this. Where is she?”

“Rio.” Torie’s teeth nibbled at her bottom lip. “She’s shopping for a wedding gown. She should be safe enough for now, shouldn’t she? In fact, the bad guys will think it was Helen on the island, not me. No one but Helen knew I was coming, and when Marlow called yesterday, I pretended I was her.”

Matt Callahan’s mouth settled into a grim smile. “That twins-switching-identities childishness really chaps my butt. I have twin brothers who used to pull that trick, but they grew out of it by the time they were ten years old.”

Torie’s chin came up. “We didn’t switch identities. Not this time. I just thought it was easier at the time to pretend I was her rather than explain that I’d come to the island to determine whether or not he really was the slime bucket I suspected him of being.”

“How far were you going to go to prove it?” he asked, his tone scathing. “Would you have slept with him as Helen like you were about to do with me?”

Torie sucked in a quick breath. “That’s an awful thing to say.” She crossed her arms and tried to ignore the hurt. “You don’t know me. Why would you say something like that?”

He stared straight ahead, a muscle working in his jaw. Silence stretched for almost a minute before he said, “You’re right. Sorry.”

Torie wasn’t one to let things go. She liked answers. She wanted to understand. “What exactly has my father told you about me?”

Though she wouldn’t have thought it possible, his jaw went even harder. “It doesn’t matter.”

“No, I want to know!”

“I don’t want to talk.”

She wanted to challenge him, berate him, hit him, even, but he was wounded and piloting the helicopter, so she refrained. She settled for drumming her fingers against her thigh and tapping her foot and grousing beneath her breath.

After not quite five minutes of that, he spit a curse. “I don’t like what you do.”

“Look, sometimes it’s simpler not to explain who’s who.”

“It’s not the twin thing. I don’t care about ... well ... yeah, I don’t like it, but that’s because of the stuff my brothers used to pull on me. I’m talking about what you do. For a living. Your father told me that. The paparazzi thing.”

“Oh.” Torie couldn’t say she was surprised. It was a reaction she’d grown accustomed to over the years. Sighing heavily, she answered the question everyone eventually asked. “I wasn’t anywhere near Paris the night the princess died. I was still a kid.”

“I didn’t think you—”

“What right do you have to judge me, anyway? It occurs to me that our jobs share some similarities. We both eavesdrop, snoop, invade people’s privacy. At least when I shoot I do it with a camera instead of a gun.”

“A camera can be just as devastating a weapon as a gun,” he snapped back, his voice all but vibrating with anger.

Whoa. Touched a nerve there.

“It’s a stupid way to make a living,” he continued. “Does the world really need to know when a celebrity couple buys a can of tuna?”

“The world may not need to know it, but it wants to know it. Half the time—shoot, seventy-five percent of the time—celebrities want the world to know whether they prefer StarKist or Chicken of the Sea. You wouldn’t believe the number of calls I get from publicity agents to tip me on the fact that one of their clients will be vacationing on Nevis or visiting a topless beach on the Mediterranean. It’s gossip and glamour. It’s entertainment. Paparazzi are a spoke in the wheel of a multi-billion-dollar industry. I do a good job that serves a purpose and pays me well. I won’t apologize for it.”

“Well, I think it’s B.S. that with all the troubles in the world, newspapers waste their space on drivel.”

“Oh?” Sweetness dripped from her tone. “Like the sports page?”

He shot her a scowl. “Sports is different.”

“Uh huh.”

“It is. Athletic competition is a noble endeavor. However, athletes themselves are no more deserving of adulation than the man who recites dialogue and looks pretty on a movie screen. All the bowing and scraping the public does to celebrities shows how screwed up most people’s priorities are. Actors aren’t heroes. They’re not working to cure cancer or develop alternative fuels or to protect and defend our country. They do what they do to get people to drop ten bucks a pop for a movie ticket.”

“And just what do you do for entertainment, Mr. Callahan?”

Ignoring the question, he continued his rant. “And don’t even get me started about celebrities and politics. Why should anyone give a rat’s ass about who Andy Actor thinks we should vote for? Celebrity worship is shallow, stupid nonsense, and you pander to it with your pictures. It’s disgusting.”

Torie clenched her teeth. She was willing to cut the man some slack because he had, after all, just saved her life, but she’d never been a doormat for any man.

He fired off a few questions about Helen and her exact whereabouts. The respect in his voice when he spoke of her sister grated on Torie’s nerves, and despite her best intentions, the old childish jealousy rose up inside her.

Torie loved Helen more than anyone on earth. She truly did. Sometime during their teenage years, she’d come to the conclusion that the reason the egg had split in their mother’s womb was because someone special like Helen was going to need someone to watch over her. That’s why Torie existed.

For the most part, she was happy with her role. She honestly didn’t begrudge Helen her brilliance. It wasn’t as if cell division had given her twin all the brains. Torie wasn’t stupid. She’d seen up close and personal what a burden superior intelligence could sometimes be, and most of the time, she thought she’d been given the better end of the deal. Pretty much the only time she’d gone green-eyed over the subject was when her father was involved. His favoritism had been a big old bitter pill to swallow for as long as she could remember. Their mother had recognized it, too, and she’d always made sure to counter the effect with a little extra attention for Torie.

The worst time came following their mother’s death when General Bradshaw turned to Helen to share the grieving and left Torie out in the cold. Her life had teetered on the edge of real trouble for a few years after that. She’d dabbled in drugs, lost her virginity way too soon, and flirted with a life of crime—all the while making sure Helen never came near any of it. She had a few minor brushes with the law, but it wasn’t until she landed in some serious trouble that she finally caught her father’s attention.