His words were woven with truth and commitment.
Again, he was determined to keep her safe. She had to let go of suspicions that jumped up and clouded her vision. Sam said he wouldn’t contact his team and he would stay with her to find Phoebe.
Hallene had to show him she could be trusted, too. “I do have a sort of safety button, but that would only send someone to track me to the last location I was at based upon what I know of finding Phoebe. My techie is funneling information to me as often as possible. He knows I’m in Virginia right now and would have no reason to send anyone to Clercville. If he doesn’t get a reply to one of his messages in six hours, he’ll contact someone I know in the UK.”
“Someone connected to your MI6 friend?”
“Yes.”
“But that would mean you were likely no longer alive.”
“Exactly. Phoebe would probably not be alive either. At the point I stopped replying to my techie, he would know to alert an elite contractor, tell him I was dead, and activate him to track down the people responsible. Even if it took years to find and annihilate them, that contractor would not stop until taking down the killers. I funded an account for my techie years ago to cover that type of cost. But my resource guy knows about you. He would make it clear you were helping me.”
Sam studied her a moment while that sharp mind of his did some calculating. “Speaking of this techie, he helped you find me, right? I need to know how that happened so I can plug holes when we finish this.”
She could understand Sam’s concern for Angela down the road. “He started with an image I gave him for facial recognition.”
“Where’d you get that?” He tilted his head toward her when he’d whisper shouted.
“When you took your mask off and followed me as I backed up in the basement.”
“Son of a bitch,” he murmured. “That would only get him to where I went to school and entering the military.”
Even she had been shocked at Midnight Ferret’s ability to find Sam. “Right. He’s truly a ferret when it comes to any electronic detail. He did a lot of searches and found an old picture of you and a boat in your backyard. Someone had painted the nameLe Jolly Clercon it. He pulled crumbs together and came up with Clercville. What’s with the boat?”
Sam leaned back with a distant look in his eyes. “I bought that just to piss off my old man. I’d worked every odd job you could imagine and fixed cars for people I knew to earn money. Bought the boat from a hurricane sale. Engine was trashed and it had holes in the hull.” His gaze came back to her. “Old man beat the shit out of me for holding out on money he said belonged to him for keeping me fed and a roof over my head. What I had for food and shelter was the same as tossing a rotten apple to a rat and throwing a ripped-up sack over its head.”
He didn’t whine or make it sound as if he wanted sympathy, just again stating facts about what his life growing up had been like.
That deep-blue gaze swept away, missing nothing, then back to her. “That damn boat.” He let out a sad laugh. “Angie must have had it hauled away from that shack after I had to go into the military. She shocked the hell out of me when I saw it in Clercville.”
Hallene caught something in his speech. “Youhadto go into the military?”
“Yeah. I put my old man in the hospital. I was seventeen and came home from working three days straight on two demanding labor jobs to find my mother unconscious. She was strung out on drugs. She’d done pot before that but never hard drugs. She was in constant pain from the times he’d hit her when I wasn’t around. She found a stash of hard stuff the old man had hidden.”
Hallene had no words to ease his misery. Listening was the best she could offer, which Sam seemed to need.
“I should have known the old man was dealing, but I was gone a lot that month. Any minute I was not working or at school, I tried to be there to keep him from beating on her and my little sister. Ishouldhave been there all the time. He walked in while I was trying to wake her up. He kicked her.”
Sam’s chest rose and fell with fast breaths as if he relived the moment all over again. “I lost it. Must have grown stronger than I realized from the hard labor I’d been doing. I broke his jaw, his arm, and two ribs. I left him bleeding when I carried her to the hospital. She died that night. Angie sent a lawyer who negotiated a deal to put my father in prison for my mother’s death and cut a deal that I went into the military. He died a year later.”
Pain stabbed Hallene just hearing his words. “What about your sister?”
Sam’s eyes lowered and the life drained from his face. “Angie did her best to help us growing up, but my dad hated her. Thought she filled my head with stupid ideas. My sister, Sissy, had been living in a dysfunctional nightmare for so long, she was beyond help. She’d been making bad choices the last year leading up to our mom dying. Me constantly telling her she was putting herself in danger did little good. I had no idea what to do. I just did not want her to get hurt. Then I barely sidestep going to jail for taking my dad down and got shipped out. The day after I finished basic training, they sent me home for Sissy’s funeral. She’d left a bar with some scumbag who raped and gutted her.”
Hallene covered her mouth. A tear spilled down her cheek. She could see how so much of what happened had shaped Sam. He could have turned out to be a monster like his dad but took the opposite path of protecting others.
Easing back, she lowered her hand and gave him space to talk or not.
The low hum of dialogue in the restaurant filled the vacuum when Sam stopped talking. He scrubbed his hands over his face. “I’ve never talked about that. Don’t know why I did now. Angie pokes at me sometimes to talk, but I avoid opening that mental box. My fault my mom died and that I wasn’t there to watch out for Sissy.”
“That’s not true, Sam.”
“Has to be someone’s fault.”
“It was. Your dad caused all of that. If he’d been a strong man inside like you are your family could have been happy.”
Sam didn’t show much on the outside. It took someone watching closely to see the tiny slips on his stoic face.
