Page 59 of Constantly Cotton
Cotton laughed. “Perez and Klausner are women,” he reminded Jason. Trina Perez and Greta Klausner had come up with Collie Goldfarb to replace the first team. Cotton had been sorry to see Briggs, Medina, and Daniels go—Medina, in particular had been teaching him to throw a knife, and Jason knew they’d become friends—but he’d welcomed the second team with just as much graciousness and had been as helpful during the daily dinner/strategy meeting as well.
“Don’t care,” Jason said pertly. “I wanted to swim with you. That’s all.”
Cotton laughed, and Jason’s heart throbbed a little in relief. That sad, fraught moment in the bathroom had been sweated away with the run and then rinsed off in the lake, he hoped, although he knew that wasn’t possible. While he still wasn’t at 100 percent, that didn’t matter. All their intel pointed to the fact that their time here was coming to an end.
Cotton swam the length of the lake, but Jason knew he wasn’t going to make it that far. He clambered out and was drying himself off with his T-shirt when Trina Perez walked up to him, her easy, swinging stride almost an affront to how hard Jason had needed to push himself to get around the damned lake.
She barely refrained from saluting, and he grimaced. They’d covered the whole “covert” thing when the new group had arrived, and he’d once again asked them if they needed to bow out, like he’d asked the first group while Cotton had been napping.
The results were the same, but Jason wasn’t sure how to make the case that nobody was there in an official capacity; the military was still actively searching for him, and just because the mob was too didn’t mean he was out of the woods yet.
But Jason had first recruited Trina for his unit when she’d taken out her would-be rapist, who was, unfortunately, her CO. Jason had heard about the incident through the grapevine and had been appalled when he was told she was filing papers for a dishonorable discharge because she’d pretty much been told her career was over.
It wasn’t right. He’d offered her a place in his unit on the condition that she could opt out at any time, but he thought anybody who could dislocate both her attacker’s knees and then fireman carry him to the brig while he moaned was someone he’d want in a tight spot.
She’d been a natural at covert ops. She’d started out in coms but had eventually been running independent operations of her own. He’d acted as her handler until he’d been put in charge of Operation Dead Fish, and then she’d come on board working reconnaissance and action. This meant she was given a subject’s location and profile, and she’d go scope him out, looking pretty and sweet and like a tanned, sloe-eyed soccer mom, and then determine whether to take the subject out or bring him in.
She was adept at both. People underestimated Trina Perez at their peril.
“Sir,” she said briskly, that soccer-mom image not tarnished in the least by her terry-skirt wrap over a floral one-piece, like any woman on vacation.
“Jason,” he corrected. “We’re trying not to make me look like anyone’s CO.”
She rolled her eyes. “Have you tried body paint that says Don’t Look Here? Because otherwise you might as well send up a signal flare.”
He grimaced. “Yeah. Well, from a distance, I’m supposed to look like a guy recovering from a car accident,” he muttered.
She raked sharp brown eyes over his body, taking in the unbandaged wounds. Her lips pursed in a low whistle. “That was a bad wreck,” she said, a hint of gentleness in her voice.
“The ‘accident’ was through and through,” he told her truthfully. “It was recovery that was the wreck. Don’t get me wrong, I hate hospitals, but I gotta tell you, when it comes to fighting infection, they’re usually better than cheap apartments.”
Her eyebrows hit her hairline. “I just bet!” Her eyebrows lowered into a concentrated scowl and she got down to business. “Which brings me to why I’m here. We’ve got some urgent intel from Burton and Briggs. Apparently he’s put the guys on some incognito recon missions in the, erm, nearby social gathering place of other military personnel.”
Jason took a moment to digest this. “You mean after sending the guys on a week’s vacation in Tahoe, they got to put on a Navy uniform and go experience shore leave in San Diego?”
She grinned. “Yup. Apparently Medina got to the hotel unannounced the other night and found Daniels in a bondage threesome. I guess you could hear the screams of ‘My eyes!’ for two counties, sir.”
“Oh dear God,” Jason responded, horrified. “You assholes really do need me, don’t you?”
Trina looked serious. “Dead Fish isn’t the same without you, sir. And we’ve got maybe a week beforesomebodyrealizes you and Burton have been phoning the whole op in and they try to replace you, so we need to process this new intel, stat.” Her eyes drifted out to where Cotton sliced through the water with the graceful undulations of an otter. “Although if I may speak freely, sir, I think your nurse is going to miss you.” She gave him a shrewd glance. “And vice versa.”
Jason swallowed, and his face went cold. “We are both aware this is a temporary situation,” he said roughly.
“Well, that’s a shame, sir,” she said. “Sometimes civilians allow us to be human. They remind us of what we’re trying to do.”
Jason compressed his lips into a flat line. “We’re trying to keep killers away from the civilian population,” he said in measured tones. “Let’s start by keeping them away from our civilian here.”
Perez met his eyes. “Understood, sir. But you are our package.Youare the one we’re keeping safe.”
Jason shook his head. “I will be rendered obsolete if that civilian is neutralized,” he said. “Is that clear?”
She chewed her lower lip and spoke in the direction of the lake. “I have a boyfriend in Las Vegas,” she told him, shocking him badly. “He’s so sweet. He’s a high school science teacher. Can you imagine that?”
“No,” Jason said, smiling a little.
“I haven’t told anybody at Dead Fish about him. I haven’t told him what I do. But I show up one week a month, and we fuck like bunnies, and I cry when I have to come back, and he’s the only person who’s seen me cry since my mother died. If anything I ever did came back to hurt him, I would be ‘rendered obsolete.’”
Jason let out a breath. “And you spent your week off here?” he asked, horrified.
