Free All Jacked Up by Penny McCall Page B

jeans, smoothing wrinkles out of her T-shirt, fiddling with hair she could tell was kinking from the humidity.
    She eyed his almost smile, her hands going to her hips. “Some of us ran through puddles last night.”
    “Some of us make bad choices,” he said. “Try to break the habit.”
    He followed her to the lone restroom, one step up from an outhouse. And not a complete step either, Aubrey thought, waving a hand in front of her face and trying not to gag. “No windows,” she said, almost reconsidering her intention to go inside—until her backside started itching again.
    “I’ll be watching the door,” Jack said.
    “Don’t worry, I won’t be shutting it.”
    “She’s safe, and I’ll keep her that way for as long as it takes to find out who the mole is.”
    “I thought you were trying to figure out what she knows about Corona,” Mike Kovaleski, Jack’s handler and best—okay, only—friend said.
    “Yeah, but it won’t make any difference.”
    “No.” Mike sighed. “I guess she’ll have to go into witness protection.”
    “Not my problem.” Although it would be nice to get her off his hands, Jack thought, his eyes on the bathroom door in case she tried to sneak out and slip into the woods behind. Saying she’d leave the door open wasn’t the same thing as saying she wouldn’t go through it.
    “She’d probably be safer if you brought her in and we put her in the program now.”
    “And that will help me how?”
    Silence for a beat. “So you’re keeping her out of protective custody until she gets you off the hook,” Mike said—not a question, a statement, and a deadpan one at that.
    Jack knew him well enough to read the disapproval anyway.
    “What if they get to her before you can pick her brain?”
    “If they get to her,” Jack said, “I won’t be in a position to care anymore.”
    More silence from the other end of the phone, Mike taking a moment to digest that. “You don’t have to do it this way, Jack. You could disappear, lay low until this all shakes out.”
    “No.”
    Aubrey came out of the bathroom just then, entering the little store without so much as sending a look his way. Jack turned to keep the store in his peripheral view without completely facing it. The phone was at the extreme front corner of the overgrown lot, and the only window in the store seemed to have a potato chip rack in front of it. The clerk inside wouldn’t see him unless he came to the door and looked right at him. Unlikely, but Jack wasn’t taking any chances.
    “Okay,” Mike said, “I get that somebody screwed with your life. And I get that you need Aubrey Sullivan to find out who’s behind it, and if she goes into protective custody you won’t have access to her because you’re out in the cold right now. But at least get her under cover, Jack. Stash her somewhere—”
    “I need her with me,” Jack said, eyes closed, faced screwed into a grimace, the words bursting out of him with the effort it took to admit that.
    “If you come through this and she doesn’t?”
    She came out of the store while Jack was mulling that over. She paused with one hand on the peeling doorjamb and turned her face up to the sun. Stopping to smell the roses. Jack snorted. The only roses she was going to smell would be the ones on her grave. Or his more likely.
    “Aubrey Sullivan is going to survive World War III,” he said to Mike. “Her, Twinkies, and cockroaches. I probably won’t make it through this in one piece but somebody watches over the truly clueless. Otherwise they’d never have a chance to reproduce, and there wouldn’t be so many of them around.”
    “Don’t tell me you’re getting religion.”
    “I wasn’t referring to God.”
    Mike laughed, but when he spoke there was no humor in his voice. “If you need anything . . .”
    “How about a suit of armor,” Jack said, flexing his shoulder.
    “I mean it. Don’t make a habit of calling here, but if there’s anything I can do—”
    “I