Page 60 of Constantly Cotton
She gave him a brief smile. “Well, I’m hoping I’ll get permission for two more week’s leave when this is over, sir.”
“Granted,” he said.
Her smile faded. “If I didn’t get that week, or that weekend, or that text, or that phone call, I wouldn’t be… human enough to do my job, sir. Pretty soon you’d have to send a recon and recovery unit afterme. Do you understand?”
Jason nodded, his heart giving a pained thump in his chest. “He needs to get his life together,” he said softly. “I can’t deny him a chance to see who he’d become without me.”
She rolled her eyes. “Fucking lonely. That’s what he’d become. But seriously, it’s none of my business. Call him out and we’ll go up to the cabin—Goldfarb is back with the coms, and Klausner started lasagna in your kitchen already.”
Jason grimaced. “I’m not sure if he’ll eat lasagna,” he muttered.
She gave a one-shouldered shrug. “He’s a sweet boy,” she said, her ten years of seniority over Cotton showing. “If a nice woman like Greta Klausner makes him lasagna, he’ll eat it. Trust me.”
“Yeah, but I hope she’s making salad too.”
“’Course. It’s what she’s gonna feed her kids when she leaves this gig and has twelve. Anyway, I’ll watch you from the porch, and you call him back. We got shit to sort.”
Jason sighed, then turned to see Cotton finish his first lap before waving him toward shore. As he eyed that lean body emerging from the water, the goose pimples apparent even from fifty feet away where Jason stood, he thought sadly that at least he got the last swim of summer.
At least there was that.
THE LASAGNAwas in the oven by the time they’d gotten back and changed, and they sat around the table with phones out, tablets at the ready, and the camera monitor on the counter behind the table.
Jason realized that the calm before the battle was over, and his troops were ready to go to war.
“So,” Trina said, pulling up the notes she’d written on the tablet, “here’s what we’ve learned. Briggs was in the officer’s club, because he rocks the Navy stripes, and he overheard a couple of people talking about a buddy of theirs who owes them money. At first he lets the chatter wash over him, but he hears one of the guys say, ‘Talbot has no idea how deep he’s in.’”
“Talbot?” Jason asked sharply. “So this guy works for my CO—”
“The one who tried to stop you at the hospital,” Cotton said.
“Yeah. The one we figured was a tight-ass but not a douchebag—he had advisors working for him who were probably steering him wrong.”
“Yes,” Trina agreed. “So Briggs starts listening harder, and he actually picks up on a name: Deavers. Turns out Master Sergeant J. Frederick Deavers, who works under Talbot and is responsible for gathering all his intel, has gotten in way deep in Vegas, and he owes not only his men money but some bad guys in Vegas as well.”
Electricity crackled along Jason’s spine. He knew this feeling from the hunt, and he’d been good at the hunt once upon a time.
“So Burton put Owens on Deavers’s coms…, Jason prompted, because Burton was whip-smart and knew how Jason thought.
“And we got to hear him get tongue-fucked via cell phone by a woman who purred in German,” Greta Klausner said, rolling her eyes. “She sounded exactly like my grandmother from the Old Country. It was fantastic.”
“What was so fantastic about it?” Jason asked, a little horrified.
“My grandmother was not a very nice person,” Greta said frankly. “Picturing her as a mobster’s moll trying to suck this guy in was really gratifying to a lot of my worst childhood memories.”
Next to him, Cotton hid an amused snort behind his hand. “I had one of those,” he said apologetically. “Not German, though. Just sort of awful.”
“Yeah. Not all grandmothers knit and give out cookies,” Greta said, nodding with all sincerity. “Some of them play ‘Only my favorite grandchild gets to lotion up my bunions.’ So hearing Karina whatserface—”
“Schroeder,” Cotton and Jason filled in.
“Yeah, that bitch. Hearing her promise this guy to lick him like a lollipop if he could only get them the guns early….”
Jason sucked in his breath. “Wait—is he going to do that?”
“No,” Greta said. “Because Medina and Daniels are genius. They tracked down the shipment of guns he was going to use to pay her with, like you said to. And then they rerouted it through Fort Dix. So the guns Deavers is going to use to pay off the bad guys are on their way. He has receipts, but….”
“Not getting to Southern California until after this is almost over,” Jason said. “Well done, team! How did Karina take that?”
