Blood Line (A Tom Rollins Thriller Book 1) by Paul Heatley (korean ebook reader txt) 📕

back up the stairs, returns to his room. He doesn’t watch her go. His eyes return to the wall. He can’t sleep. He doesn’t deserve sleep. Doesn’t deserve anything good. Earlier, after dinner, when Carly tried to initiate sex, he couldn’t. Physically and mentally could not participate. He apologized. She kissed him on the cheek and said it was fine.

So as not to make her worry further, he goes upstairs to the bedroom. She’s already fast asleep by the time he gets there. He slides into the bed next to her, lies flat on his back, and stares at the ceiling.

14

Tom stands out on his father’s porch. It’s dark out. Jeffrey and Sylvia are inside, sleeping. Tom looks beyond the hastily erected chain-link fence to the trees. There’s a breeze. The branches sway in it. There are men in the trees, too. From the commune. To an uneducated eye, they would be invisible in their camo and their face paint, but Tom can pick them out. He counts three, spread out in the area he can see. They’ve seen him, too. Tom waved, and they retreated deeper into the trees, where they thought they would be out of sight.

There are sentries patrolling the grounds beyond the fence, too. They clutch their guns and look stern, taking their jobs very seriously. Tom has recognized one of them as the man he earlier choked at the gate to the commune. He saw Tom on his first loop around, quickly looked away, hurried past. Every subsequent time he’s come around, he’s wearing his best war face, almost snarling, staring straight ahead. Tom can’t help grinning to himself.

He’d asked his father, earlier, if they’d thought about just upping and moving the commune.

Jeffrey rolled his eyes. “You’d think so,” he said. “But no, they wanna stay here, stand their ground, show they ain’t afraid to fight, no matter who knows they’re here. You know what these guys are like. They wanna play soldier.”

Tom turns away from the trees, distracted by the men there. He looks away, to the side, to the woodland further off, where his eyes can’t strain to pick out the men, if any, who are there.

He thinks about Alejandra.

The first time he met her.

He was still in the army back then. Back from his first tour of Afghanistan. He hadn’t yet been recruited into the CIA, hadn’t been disillusioned by the things he saw whilst running black ops missions around the world, though usually in the Middle East.

By that time, too, his father had married Sylvia, moved here. Tom had no fixed address. Overseas most of the time, and unmarried, single, no kids, he saw no need for maintaining a home. He stayed with either his father or his brother, or checked into motels or hotels. On this occasion, he was staying with Anthony, down in Harrow, Texas.

One night, while Anthony was doing whatever it was he was doing (Tom knew it was better not to ask), Tom went to a bar. He found a quiet place playing country music as he walked in. Johnny Cash first, then Merle Haggard. Tom’s taste in music was broad. He’d have preferred Springsteen, but he didn’t mind some country. He took a stool and was promptly served by the pretty young waitress behind the bar.

“What can I get for you?” she said.

What caught Tom’s attention first were her eyes. Big, round, brown, like something out of a cartoon. They stunned him for a moment, took his breath away, almost took him too long to answer. “Just a soda,” he said.

She cocked an eyebrow. “That all?”

“All I’m in the mood for.” He smiled.

She shrugged, got him his drink.

Tom watched her. Couldn’t take his eyes away. Her black hair was tied back, showed every angle of her face. Her cheekbones, her delicate jawline. She poured the soda into a glass with ice, slid it across to him. “You take it easy,” she said. “Go slow with those things. I don’t wanna have to call for the doorman.” She spoke with an accent.

“I’ll do my best,” Tom said. “Say, where you from?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your voice, I notice you’ve got an accent.”

She stiffened.

“I’m gonna guess Mexican, right?”

“What’s it to you?” Her big round eyes blazed; she was suddenly defensive.

Tom stayed cool, undeterred, could guess at her reaction. Looking like she did, sounding how she did, she probably got this kind of question a lot, and likely not from people speaking with genuine interest and curiosity like himself. “Just asking,” he said. “It sounds familiar is all.”

She remained standoffish, but he thought he saw her soften somewhat. “You go to Mexico a lot?”

“I get around,” he said.

“Guaymas?”

“Can’t say I’ve been to that part.”

“That’s where I’m from,” she said, softening more, but not completely, a conversational tone in her voice.

“So what brings you up here?” he said.

She remained wary. “Why do you ask?”

“I told you, I’m just asking. I’m curious. I’m making conversation. I’m on leave, I come to a bar, I see a pretty girl serving, and I figure I’ll talk to her.”

“Leave?” She spoke fast, disguising her blush. “Are you in the army?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“How is it?”

He shrugged. “It is what it is,” he said, not wanting to share stories of shooting, and being shot at, and worse.

“I’ve been in America a year,” she said, finally.

“A year, huh? Well, that explains how you speak such good English.”

“I practiced before I came, and I’ve practiced since.”

“What brought you up here?”

“I have an aunt lives here.”

“You still got family back in Guaymas?”

She hesitated, then shook her head. “No,” she said. There was a sadness about her suddenly.

Tom picked up on it. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

“My parents died,” she said. “That’s why I came here. I had nowhere else to go.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It was nobody’s fault,” she said. “It was an accident. A stupid accident.”

“What happened? You don’t have to say if you don’t want to.”

She shook her head, like it was fine; she could