“Ford.”
Great.
He strides in, pauses, and says, “VoiceAssist: Lights on, sixty percent. It’s after eight, Dax.”
Shrugging, I head for the kitchen. The few people I let into my inner circle all know how to work around my blindness. How to turn on the lights in my apartment, how to describe a plate of food using clock time, when to touch me and when to leave me alone.
“Beer?” I ask with my hand on the fridge door.
“Sure.” There’s a strain to Ford’s tone I’m not used to. He’s one of the calmest guys I’ve ever met. Hell, the only time he’s lost his temper in the past couple of years? The other day when we fought about Ry.
“What’s wrong?” I pass him a bottle and head back to the couch.
He sinks down into the chair across from me with a quiet groan. “You’re scary, you know that?” A swig of beer, and he sighs. “I thought I was hiding it pretty well.”
“It’s in your voice. Spill.” With my arm draped over the back of the couch, I let the cold beer soothe my nerves. My phone is still on the cushion next to me, and I feel its presence. Like a physical weight that won’t go away until I call Ry.
“Joey’s missing.”
“Joey?” I wrack my brain, unable to think of anyone Ford and I know named Joey. “Sorry, but who is he?”
“She.” He rises and starts to pace, the angle of his voice changing with every few steps and his hazy form dizzying. “Josephine Taylor? The woman I was dating when I joined the marines?”
Bits and pieces of past conversations coalesce. “Don’t you mean the woman who dumped you when you joined the marines?”
“Well, sort of. I mean…no.” A pause, another hard swallow, and Ford clears his throat. “Her sister called me. No one’s heard from Joey in ten days. She was working for Doctors Without Borders in Turkmenistan, and the whole group’s just…gone.”
“Shit. Turkmenistan’s a war zone, Ford. If she got caught up in a local gang war, she’s not missing. She’s in a shallow grave somewhere.”
I cringe as soon as the words leave my lips. Get it together, you insensitive prick.
“Don’t you think I know that?”
Throwing up my hands, I try for apologetic, but given my track record lately… “Sorry. Is the CIA involved? Any demands for ransom?”
“The CIA won’t investigate. Something about not wanting to upset the fragile peace in the region. Total bullshit. And Doctors Without Borders doesn’t even know where the group was before they went missing. Their last known location was somewhere outside of Sayat, but they were packing up and preparing to head south. Once they found a good spot to camp, they were supposed to check in.”
The leather chair squeaks quietly as Ford sits back down, and his voice is muffled, like he’s leaning forward, elbows on his knees. “I can’t just leave her out there, Dax. I owe her that much.”
“You don’t owe her anything. She couldn’t handle dating a marine on active duty and she bailed.”
“No. She didn’t. Not exactly.” Ford makes a low, frustrated sound in his throat. “She stayed with me for almost a year. We wrote letters, even talked on the phone a couple of times. But…then my squad got three days leave. Back home in San Diego. And I didn’t call her.”
Arching a brow, I huff out a breath. “So, let me guess. You were out with the guys, drinking until you were shit-faced, wearing your whites to impress the ladies, and she just happens to walk into the bar with her girlfriends to find you with a pretty little thing on your lap.”
“I wasn’t shit-faced. That came later,” he says quietly. “Never touched another woman. Never even looked. All my mates were trying to hook up with anything that moved. Me? I just sat at the bar. Nursing a beer. For three fucking hours.”
“Why?” I can hear the sadness in his voice, and while I’m still confused—and a little mad at him—he’s one of my only friends. I can’t…not listen. Even if all I can think about is Lucy. Her tears, sliding hot and fast over my hands as I cupped her cheeks the day I came home. How strange it felt to lie in bed next to her at night, wearing a t-shirt and pajamas to hide my scars. The day she left, telling me she couldn’t stay with a man who hated himself.
Another sigh, and the angle of his voice changes again, almost bouncing off the ceiling. “It was Desert Storm, Dax. We were dropped in country after only six weeks of basic. The day before we got the news they were rotating us home…I killed six hostiles. After watching a target take out a public market. Kids. Babies. Innocents. Joey didn’t deserve thirty-six hours of me crying and asking her why.”
“And did you tell her that?”
“Nope. I fucked up. Wrote her letters trying to explain, but she returned every damn one of them. Unopened. Eventually…I stopped writing.”
A long swig of stout doesn’t wash away the bitter taste of my own memories, but it gives me a chance to form a reply not colored by my own bullshit. “What are you going to do?”
“I have a contact in Uzbekistan—Nomar—who’s trying to slip unnoticed into Turkmenistan. If so, he’ll check out their last known location, retrace the route they were supposed to have taken. He’ll contact me tomorrow.”
