SEAL Firsts Read online

“Apparently small cell, they’ve taken responsibility.”

  “All the more reason. I need you to stand guard over Shannon and be extremely picky about who she talks to. Be rude if you have to.

  “I can do that.”

  T.J. knew she definitely could.

  Chapter 30

  Courtney was resting comfortably in Shannon’s arms when Shannon’s mother and father arrived. The baby had been transferred to a regular nursery crib, which was sitting nearby.

  “Oh, hi, guys,” Shannon called out to them. She hadn’t expected them until this evening.

  Her mom gave her a hug and kiss, and sat for a minute on the edge of the bed, brushing her fingers over her granddaughter’s pink fuzzy head. “She’s really beautiful, Shannon. Ears are a little big.”

  This tickled her. Long past caring about this little feature of her anatomy, Shannon was happy the baby was going to be allowed to go home with her today. When she told her mother, they were thrilled.

  One of the nurses came in after Shannon buzzed her.

  “Yes?”

  “Say, I’m wondering how soon before we are allowed to leave?”

  “Leave?”

  “Well, the doctor said he was going to release me. My parents are here to help me. We’re ready now if everything is okay.”

  “Let me check. Is she nursing or just sleeping?”

  “Mostly sleeping.”

  “You want her to nurse, honey. She’ll get comfortable and all warm and snuggly, but she needs to eat so you keep your milk in. You’ll have problems when you get home if not.”

  “I think she’s getting plenty. But this is my first.”

  “All right.” The nurse came over to the bed and addressed Mrs. Moore, “Excuse me, honey.” When Shannon’s mother stood next to Mr. Moore, the nurse leaned in. “I’m gonna take the baby, get her weighed, take a final blood test and get her cleaned up for you. Then I’ll bring her back. She’ll be good and fussy when I get done poking around with her.”

  “That woman is rude,” said Mrs. Moore.

  Nothing could dampen her mood, except she hadn’t heard from T.J. She’d gotten the message he’d landed safely while she was resting. But his call was overdue, and she needed to hear his voice, curious how the meeting with his dad went.

  “I wish T.J. would call,” she said to her mother.

  “He didn’t call you? That’s why we came right over. He’s coming home tomorrow, he said.”

  She wondered why he’d not called her directly, but instead called her mother. “Hope everything went well.”

  Mrs. Moore glanced at her husband, and then added, “Honey, I’m afraid his father passed away this morning.”

  “All the more reason—”

  “He should be home with you and the baby,” Mr. Moore asserted. “You are unprotected here. and I don’t like that. With that reporter yesterday and all the questions the police are asking. T.J. felt it too, asked your mother and me to come over and stand guard. We’re not leaving until they release you, Shannon.”

  An attractive male intern in scrubs, a stethoscope draped across his neck, popped his head inside. “Can I have a word for a second?”

  “They can stay here,” she answered.

  “Sorry, confidentiality rules. I’m really sorry.” He smiled at her parents who looked at Shannon for direction and when she shrugged, they exited to the hall.

  As the door to her room closed, he came over to Shannon’s bedside and sat down, which alarmed her.

  “So, where’s your husband?”

  “You guys know he’s—” All of a sudden it began to dawn on her there was something wrong about this man. He had a faint accent, which normally wouldn’t bother her, but the nametag on the scrubs identified him as being with housekeeping. Why would he need a stethoscope?

  He was drawing something from his pocket. She saw the flash of a syringe containing a light yellow liquid. Adjusting her weight, she pushed back away from him just before he lunged forward attempting to inject something into her neck. She wanted to scream but his hand covered her mouth. With a quick kick to his hip, he was thrown off balance and fell to the floor, scattering her IV and several other items, including a plastic water pitcher on a nearby stainless steel tray, all over the ground.

  But the kick had had also thrown off her balance, and she found herself reaching for anything to avoid falling from the hospital bed onto the other side. She clutched the air, knocking over a vase filled with flowers, sending it shattering to the floor as she fell hard. She tried to scream but found the air had been knocked out of her. Pain seared her abdominal area.

  At last she found her voice and screamed.

  The next instant, he was around the end of the bed and, reaching over her, attempted to grab her hair. Her hands swept the floor. She felt the wetness of the broken vase as well as the sting of a piece of broken glass that had gotten stuck in the palm of her hand.

  In the meantime, something was happening outside the door. She could hear her mother shouting for help. Sounds of a struggle, with something heavy being thrown against the door. Was there someone else outside? She remembered the warning T.J. had given her mother.

  Hopefully Courtney is safe. Please, let her be safe. She has to be safe.

  She heard a definite gunshot sound and screaming. Her assailant yanked her hair, pulling her head up like a rag doll with a jerk. Now he wasn’t holding a syringe any longer. He held a heavy knife like T.J.’s KA-BAR, the one she had looked at several times. She knew where his intended trajectory was. Her legs flopped and scraped on the wet, slippery floor as she tried to throw his balance off from the lethal crouch position, a tight tripod. His center of gravity was too low, she realized.

  This is not acceptable. This is not going to happen. Never. Not at any time. She was not going to die, wind up another statistic on the evening news.

  He was twisting her head to get a lethal angle at her neck. She knew what he was after. She remembered something T.J. had explained to her.

  Sometimes when you’re in a struggle, best to stop fighting. Go in the same direction as the attacker, because if you resist, you cause them to use deadly force to restrain you.

  Instead of pulling back, trying to avoid his body and the knife that was gripped in his right hand, she leaned forward into him. He lost his balance for just a second, enough time for her to bring up her palm, drawing her arm over and outside his left. The glass wedged there hurt like a son of a gun, but as her fingers gripped it tightly, cutting her further, she drew strength from the pain. She hoped it was big enough to do what she needed it to do. Using her own fist as the hilt of the glass blade, she swung upward and rammed it into the assailant’s neck, remembering to throw whatever weight she could muster from her own body following behind, and then pulled down.

  She felt the satisfying crunch of cartilage and muscle tissue being sliced open, followed by a warm spray of his blood, covering her face and chest. He tried to adjust, dropping his knife in order to hold onto his neck, but his knees slipped in the pool of blood. Shannon seized another opportunity, drew one knee up to her chest and then pushed with everything she had, her bare foot landing square in the middle of his chest, sending his body backward.

  He was skidding across the bloody floor when the heavy door swung open and knocked him solidly in his head.

  Seeing her parents in the hallway, worried but apparently unharmed, the bevy of staffers behind them and the two uniformed guards hauling up the unconscious assailant by his armpits, she allowed herself to collapse and breathe. Other than the pain in her palm, and something intense burning in her lower belly, she felt pretty good, considering.

  She looked at her bloody hands, the sloppiness of the mortal combat she’d just engaged in, her heart pounding so hard it nearly exploded her chest, and she discovered something.

  It felt damn good to be alive.

  Chapter 31

  “You like living out here, don’t you?” T.J. asked Travis.

  “
Yessir, I used to. It does me good to be in this beautiful part of the world. And the cost of living is a lot less than other places. I won’t lie, part of the charm, part of the charm.”

  Travis’ gold tooth was glinting in the sunlight. “So you gonna tell me about that tooth?”

  This gave the big man a belly laugh. “You’re gonna think me quite insane. Maybe a bit more eccentric than you like.”

  “But you forget. I’m in the military, and let me tell you, I see stuff all the time on deployment that is pretty fuckin’—sorry, man, just force of habit.”

  “It’s all right. You’re an all right dude, Mr. T.J. Talbot. I think you’re one of God’s warriors. And God’s warriors get to take special liberties with they language.” He smiled broadly and then swung his eyes back to the road.

  He sucked in air as if he could create a vacuum in the old Chevy, then blew it out so hard T.J. thought the windshield might cave.

  “Okay, here goes,” Travis started.

  T.J. could already tell he was going to dig the hell out of whatever the man was going to say.

  “I met this lady when I was twenty-five, over a decade ago now. We didn’t obey any of God’s commandments, in fact, I think this woman was hell bent on breaking jus’ about all of them.”

  Travis stopped and threw out a throaty laugh, his belly rubbing against the steering wheel of his car. If it involved a woman, now T.J. was even more sure he was going to like the story.

  “I’ve known a few of those,” he admitted to the preacher. “They don’t interest me any longer either, but man. I haven’t thought about those days for a while now, but that’s all I used to think about.”

  “You was just finding your way, son.”

  “That’s a fact. Not there though. It was never there.”

  “No, it never is. And that kind of relates to this story. See, she and I, we got married. The woman was one of those who would get something into her mind, and then she’d never let up, you know what I’m sayin’? She was one wild child. I thought at first it was cute. I mean, at twenty-five, she was the most exciting thing to ever come my way, and I wanted excitement.”

  T.J. remembered the hundreds of girls he’d slept with over the years. Luckily, most of his liaisons he couldn’t remember. He couldn’t even remember their faces. Maybe that was a good thing.

  “Well, Mr. Talbot, that woman wanted excitement too. And when I was no longer her drug of choice, she moved on. And when I say she moved on, I mean she took it upon herself to sleep with anything that would walk, know what I’m sayin’?”

  “I do.” T.J. felt sorry for the man.

  “It cost me every penny I had, which wasn’t much, just to complete the divorce.”

  “You married now?”

  “Nope. Not looking yet, either. I’m still wearing off the effects of my last one. Some days, T.J., the sight of a woman scares me all the way down to my toes.”

  “I understand.”

  “When it was all said and done, I was left with two gold wedding bands. And that’s where they is,” he said as he tapped his gold tooth with his forefinger. “Right there so every time when I looks in the mirror I gets to remember I’m a survivor, and I’m never goin’ down that rabbit hole again. I gets to smile and look back in the mirror at the face of a free man.”

  T.J. was smiling and he knew Travis was interested in hearing what he thought. He kept looking over at him as they turned off the highway and onto a small single lane country road. In the distance a small town took shape.

  “You know, Travis. I think that some time soon you’ll meet the right woman, and she’ll want you to get that tooth fixed. I think the sight of her will light that golden path to heaven itself for you.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so. Yup. I know so.” T.J. was feeling more comfortable with the preacher the more time they spent together. “I sure found the right gal.” He told Travis about the baby, about Frankie.

  “You’re a good man, Mr. Talbot.”

  “You know, I almost didn’t want to come here at all. It took a while to shed off all that dead skin. I was worried it would suck me right back into that angry place I grew up in. God, how I hated that man. And today, I just realized I didn’t hate him at all. I hated myself. I was exorcising demons.” He watched Travis’ face in profile. “You’ve done that too. So now you can give that to someone else, or rather, let someone else give that to you. You help everyone else. You tend your flock. Time to let someone tend to you, my man.”

  “You could be right. I’d like to think you are.”

  “And speaking of which, I need to give my intended a call.” T.J. dialed Shannon’s number and got her message. He dialed his mother-in-law and got the same. He double checked to see if he’d missed anything and found he hadn’t.

  They drove into the little town with one stoplight.

  “Kind of peaceful here. This a nice place to live?” T.J. asked.

  Travis bobbed his head. “Yes and no. We got something strange goings on here. I notice it because I see the change in the prison population, which comes more from this area than any other. Lot of poor folks here. But a lot of angry folks coming in from other places. Big cities. I’m just one preacher at Riverbend. They’s groups here that send their guys in every day.”

  T.J.’s attention was sparked. He had to ask, because they’d all been talking about it on the Teams. “Religious types?”

  “Doing the conversions, yessir, but I don’t take my flock out and do no target practice. They have a big communal camp right here in this little town. News media says there are known camps operating, dozens of them, and we got one right here. Can you explain to me why no one is asking questions? And I see men I grew up with changing, becoming hard. Mostly I see strangers in this area where I used to know everyone’s name. So, if you ask me, T.J. I say no. Not any longer.”

  “I’ve seen the bloody effects of fanatical groups overseas. A lot of people are getting killed. A lot of innocent people, and that’s just wrong.”

  “Sort of feels like it’s all coming to this country, don’t it?”

  T.J. knew for a fact it was.

  Connie drove up just as Travis and T.J. were getting back in their car. They’d been standing on the porch, knocking on the painted old screen door of a bungalow that could have been in any small town in America. The birds were chirping, and there wasn’t any traffic noise or car horns blaring. A single airplane overhead made its way across the sky, leaving a white tail behind it.

  She was holding a bag of groceries in one arm, shielding her eyes with her other palm. “Can I help you?”

  T.J. figured she was about his age. He could definitely see a family resemblance to his own face.

  “Holy Mother of God. Is that you?”

  “I think so,” T.J. started. “You’re Connie?”

  “Yes. Yes. I’m your sister. Your twin sister.” She set her package on the hood of her car and ran up to him, but stopped just in front. They both took a tentative step toward each other and embraced safely. She had lighter brown hair than his, but the same light blue eyes.

  This was another surprise in a day of surprises. His father hadn’t mentioned anything about him being a twin, so T.J. was skeptical. “We came from the hospital, and I’m sorry to say, Dad has passed on.”

  He expected a different reaction than the one he got.

  “Well, that’s done, then.” She returned to the car, closed the door and picked up her packages. “Come on in, and we’ll toast to dear old Dad.”

  As T.J. passed Travis, the preacher’s eyes got wide.

  Over the next hour, Connie told him she’d been raised in Colorado and had been adopted into a good family. T.J. let her know his was quite a different path, but spared her the gory details.

  “When my mother died last Spring I figured that would free me up to go looking for my birth parents. I got here just in time to see Mom before her passing, and I took care of her a bit in the end. She told me her fa
ther forced the adoption, and it was one of the biggest regrets of her life. I’m glad I got to tell her I had a good upbringing. Now I’m glad she never found out about yours.”

  T.J. remembered what Kyle told him, about living with the hand he was dealt. He realized that that was the life he was supposed to lead, just like he was supposed to be Courtney’s father.

  “She lived in this very house her whole adult life. Never married again. Never had any other children. And she never went to visit him, even though she was a couple of hours away all that time.”

  “Wonder why?” T.J. pondered.

  “I don’t think we’ll ever know. They weren’t married, you know.” She brought out pictures to show him what his mother looked like, and she gave him a smiling photo of her that was his favorite. “Here, so you can show your little girl, someday.”

  “Funny how that happens. Now I have something physical to show of the past I never had. Thank you.”

  Connie then pressed a small envelope into his palm. “Keep this too. Open this after you’ve gone.”

  T.J.’s cell phone rang. It was Shannon.

  Chapter 32

  “Oh God, T.J. It’s so good to hear your voice,” Shannon said. She’d told herself she would be strong, but upon hearing him, she lost all her composure. He began firing questions at her, and she lost the ability to speak all of a sudden. “You have to come home. Please come home now.”

  “Is everything okay with you and the baby?”

  “Yes. But almost no.” She told him about the afternoon’s events, explained that her parents took her home, and that Kyle had insisted a couple of Team Guys stay with her until T.J. could get home. “I know you said tomorrow. I need you here as fast as you can get here.”

  Shannon was relieved T.J. headed straight for the Nashville airport where they determined he could catch a flight back to San Diego that would get him home near midnight.

  Just over an hour later, he texted:

  Made the plane. Taking off soon. Coming home to you. Get ready. Love you more than I thought possible.