White Shotgun

I wake up in the middle of the night with the heart-stopping knowledge that there is a man in my room. The shutters are open and cool air is pouring in, along with monochrome brightness that shows the shape of someone near the door. Seconds go by. I don’t move. I still don’t move. Can he see that my eyes are open? Sweat builds under my back. He has the advantage.

A silent contest of wills. He is lifeless. I am frozen. My eyes adjust to the half dark. No weapons. Attack first. Bad hand. Let him come to you. Grab his head, break his nose across your knee. I smell him before he gets close. Metal. Dirt. Heavy sweat. The sense of coarse fabric and leather. He steps from the shadows and the stench becomes awful. Excrement, earth, and decomposing bones. In the anti-light his face is stubbled and dark, his eyes colorless. The rucksack drops to the floor. It’s what we call in the Bureau a WTF moment.

“Sterling? Is that you?”

He sits heavily on the bed.

A hoarse whisper. “Hello, cupcake.”

TWENTY-TWO

Sterling unties the bandanna around his head.

“Don’t turn on the light.”

My heart skips. I don’t need light to see that the gorgeous blond hair has been shaved off, and the bare scalp is impacted with dirt. He unfastens the field jacket with trembling fingers. Dried flakes of mud that have been carried who knows how many miles, across how many time zones, scatter over the linen sheets. The smell of recent death is undeniable.

He unfolds a rain poncho, meticulously spreads it on the floor, then empties the contents of the rucksack.

“What are you doing?”

“Better wash this stuff out,” he says slowly, as if in a dream, taking off his shirt and Under Armour.

“I’ll take care of it.”

Heeding the silent message, Don’t touch me, I slip off the bed and retrieve a robe from the bathroom. He continues to face away, as if he doesn’t want me to see his body. He used to eat breakfast in the nude, not give it a thought. Has he been wounded, a ladder of sutures up his chest?

Gently I slip the robe over his shoulders. I bend down, draw up the sides of the poncho and shoulder it, maybe too fast, because suddenly he is suspicious.

“Where’re you going with that?”

“I’m going to the laundry room to wash your stuff,” I reply patiently. “It’s in the family quarters, in the main building. Are you hungry?”

“Yes, ma’am, I am hungry.”

“I’ll bring you something. There’s soap and shampoo in the shower. Is it okay if I leave?”

“Go on.”

“You’ll be okay?”

“I just said so, didn’t I?”

In the night, cold wind rakes through my hair. I carry Sterling’s combat clothes in the poncho like contraband. I would rather burn them, but they are crucial to him, to his other self. As I cross the torchlit courtyard, goose bumps rise at the thought of the silent monks who would have been at prayers in a few hours, shuffling through the dark to kneel on the unforgiving floorboards. The workings of the human mind haven’t changed over the centuries: in the perilous hours just before dawn, everything our rational minds have been telling us flies up and away to the realm of the gargoyles.

Shoving rancid woolen socks and bloodstained camos into the washer, and later, assembling a he-man sandwich out of a kilo’s worth of salami, mortadella, mozzarella, and roasted peppers on an entire loaf of bread, I try to draw the shredded realities of the present together. As relieved as I am to see him whole, I know something has happened to Sterling. I have no idea how deep it goes, or how he found me, why he came back, or how long he will stay. It could be overnight. He could have deserted and be on the run, or about to be reassigned. Putting all these unidentified conditions alongside my sister’s disappearance makes my knees go weak. I sit down on a kitchen chair, immobilized.

I suppose it is something like panic. It makes no sense to start evaluating a relationship at four in the morning, when the man has shown up out of nowhere, hostile and disoriented and not himself, but that’s where my stubborn mind keeps going. True, I had become impatient with his comings and goings, but there was something comforting, even pleasurable, in the delayed satisfaction of his return. Until tonight, his reappearances had been smooth and hearty — he had been as happy as I was to recharge with some robust sex, bittersweet chocolate cake for breakfast, the afternoon in a hotel bed, sleeping, reading newspapers, watching movies, staring idly into each other’s eyes. From the glimpse of the bones poking through his back, it looks as if he has dropped ten pounds, which is a lot when you weigh one-fifty. From the deadness in his voice, it sounds as if he’s not feeling the deprivation in his body — or very much at all.

I had a bad gut reaction when he took off the bandanna. He looked less like a warrior than a hardened killer. Security operatives are hired to protect, not fight — although it doesn’t always work that way. Some of my best friends at the Bureau are snipers, but lord knows, they don’t do it for the money. How well do I know Sterling McCord and what kind of assignments he will accept? How long and hard will I stand by? It is troubling to realize these are the same irksome questions I’ve been asking myself about Cecilia. She made a deal with the devil when she married Nicosa, and a deal with the mafias (same thing) to keep her clinics alive. Maybe she’s escaped to a safe and happy place in the arms of ’Ndrangheta. How well do I know her? What makes me qualified to save her from her own life?

When I get back to the room with the food, Sterling is clean and showered and dead to the world, lying across the bed in the bathrobe as if he’d literally just dropped. Wedging into a valley at the edge of the mattress, I try to roll him over, but he kicks out, slashing my leg with a jagged toenail. I debark to the chaise. It isn’t much of a sleep, awakening with the roosters and the light and filled with a million questions.

All of which will have to wait, because Sterling sleeps for the next sixteen hours. I dash to get his stuff out of the dryer before anyone else wakes up, and I keep the bedroom door locked. Finally, sometime around sunset, I return to find him fully dressed — and from the lavender vapor in the room, having showered again — wearing clean jeans that fit too loosely, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap, and buckling on his watch. The sandwich has evaporated. My laptop is open on the desk.

“Don’t you get Internet in this hooch?”

“Depends on the time of day.”

“It just cut out on me,” he says sullenly. “We’ve gotta go.”

“Where?”

“Meeting a buddy.”

He slips on a pair of blue Oakleys the color of the Florida gulf. We exit the room into the billowing evening.

“Are you okay? Are you done with the mission?”

“Yes to both.”

“I won’t ask a lot of questions, but I’m curious to know how you found me,” I say, as we hurry down the marble stairs.

“Word got through.”

Instead of crossing the courtyard he grabs my arm, and we go the other way, ducking underneath the staircase and around the back of the family quarters where the pine forest comes down to the stone wall. Following in his careful footsteps over the scrub, it occurs to me that maybe Sterling believes we are on reconnaissance, that