“Sure, if you think it would help.”
“I can think of a hundred veterans who would be greatly helped by getting out of the city for the Fourth of July and spending the night under the stars on a farm far away from fireworks, but a dozenreallyneed it.”
“We can pick up supplies at Costco.”
“Steaks, potatoes, corn, and salad would work for the first night. After that, maybe I could outfit a rotisserie on your grill for chickens.”
“Oh, my layers aren’t good for eating. They’re too old. It’d be like eating drumsticks made out of belt leather.”
“Oh, no. I didn’t meanyourchickens. We’ll buy some whole birds.”
She barely had the money to feed her stock and the two of them, and that was dwindling fast.
Sarah needed to find more money, a lot of it, to feed a dozen more mouths, and fast.
Madam Belova would have to start reading tarot cards on SnipSnap again.
But she’d have to hide her use of social media from Blaze.
9
MADAM BELOVA
BLAZE
The military enforces an early-to-bed, early-to-rise lifestyle, and Blaze hadn’t shaken it since he’d retired just a few years before.
Besides, he liked watching the sun rising out of Lake Michigan from his pool deck with his morning hot chocolate. The silent, deep water reflecting the fiery sky soothed him, a restful hour before the city awoke with its car engine growls, sirens, and random bangs.
The first day on Sarah’s farm, she’d retired for bedtime at nine after a hard day of reinstituting the farm’s rhythms, and he’d crashed beside her in the guest room’s firm bed and zonked straight out.
Waking up two hours later in the dark night disoriented him.
He woke with immediate operational alertness, registering all that had happened in the days before, but Sarah was missing from the bed.
The sheets where she should have been lying were cool, even in the Midwestern summer night.
Blaze rolled silently off the side of the bed, landing on his bare tiptoes and fingertips. His pistol was right where he had left it, just a few inches underneath his side of the bed, and its steel cooled his hand as he held his breath to listen to the summer wind sighing through the old wood of her ancient farmhouse.
He stalked forward, crawling over the worn-smooth wooden floorboards to the doorway and dark hallway beyond. Another pause to listen brought only quiet.
Muffintop the cat sauntered by him and nonchalantly stretched, sinking her claws into a braided rag rug and yawning.
Blaze had already proved that the cat’s instincts were faulty, so her lack of alarm did nothing to qualm his suspicion that the White Russians had found them. He prayed to Aries, Mars, or any war god that might hear him that Sarah was alive and had not been transported off the property yet.
As he crept around the corner, all his senses on high alert, white light drew a thin line under a door at the end of the hall.
Those White Russian bastards must be interrogating Sarah in her tarot card studio, the soundproofing muffling their quiet threats and her gagged cries.
Blaze rose to his feet next to the door, his weapon aimed low and in front of him.
With one devastating kick, the side of his bare foot splintered the wood around the doorknob and smashed the door in.
He was already advancing, peering down the iron sights of his handgun and checking all four corners of the room for intruders by the time he realized Sarah was alone and wearing her silvery psychic costume, reading tarot cards. “What the ever-livingfuck?”
“Darn it, Blaze! What are you doing here?”
A female voice whined from the phone suspended in the middle of a ring light. “Madam Belova? Is everything all right?”
