Page 197 of The 6:20 Man

CHAPTER

83

DEVINE LAY IN A HOSPITAL bed, but his mind was elsewhere.

The thump-thump beats of the chopper blades, the swirl of heated desert air, the taste of red sand in his mouth along with the biting fumes of aviation fuel in his bloody nostrils. None of those things should happen while you’re dying, because dying was enough of a bitch.

Ass over elbows, the IED had taken Devine, a 225-pound man, loaded down with fifty more pounds of gear, and launched him like a human cannonball across a rut-filled road fifty clicks outside of Kandahar. He hit the dirt unconscious. He woke up to a morphine-inspired fog. He endured multiple surgeries and a skin graft and did it all over again two years later when a badly aimed sniper round went through a defect in his body armor and ripped his shoulder apart instead of his brain.

Only this time it was the other shoulder, and he was nowhere near Kandahar.

Devine blinked himself awake and stared around the antiseptic confines of his hospital room. Just beneath the intoxicating shimmer of the morphine drip, he felt both the snakelike bite of the Sig Sauer nine-millimeter round and the surgery that had followed. Without painkillers he knew he would be shrieking in agony right now.

He flitted across time and space, and then his gaze lingered and stopped on twin figures.

Emerson Campbell was in a suit but without a tie.

Helen Speers was in a dark blue jacket and skirt with a red scarf around her neck. For a moment the drugged-up Devine thought she was an airline flight attendant.

“How is consciousness treating you, Devine?” asked Campbell.

Devine tried to form the words, but his mouth, along with his brain, was not entirely under his command.

Speers sat down next to him and took his hand, squeezing it in a firm grip. “I’m sorry, I should have been there sooner. I’m so sorry.”

And she did look sorry, Devine had to admit. Very sorry indeed. He thought he saw tears bubbling at the edges of those beautiful eyes. But perhaps that was the morphine talking.

“Who are . . . ?” That was all he could accomplish.

Campbell stepped forward. “She’s with us, Devine. Special Agent Helen Speers. She fired the shot on the football field that allowed you to escape from Eric Bartlett and company that morning. Of course, she would have further intervened if you had needed her assistance. However, with Ms. Tapshaw, she couldn’t take any chances.”

“D-dead?” said Devine.

Speers slowly nodded. “Yes. It was either her or you.” She glanced at Campbell. “Can you give us a minute, sir?”

Campbell nodded and stepped from the room.

Speers pulled her chair even closer and looked deeply at Devine.

“So . . . you were my g-guardian angel?” he said.

“I was supposed to be. When Campbell was thinking of recruiting you, he had me get a room at the town house.”

“Do . . . you sleep with all your . . . ?”

“No, I don’t. I made an exception with you.” Her face crinkled into a smile even as her eyes filled with tears. “I made some mistakes in my earlier career, Travis. I guess you did, too. I don’t know if you know this, but Campbell collects people like you and me. We’re sort of like the misfit toys on that island in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Damaged but capable of—”

“—re-redemption,” he finished for her.

“Yes, redemption.”

“So, you slept with me to show you were my ally?” he mumbled.

She stared at him for a long moment, something building in her expression that Devine’s drug-induced thoughts could not readily interpret.

“I slept with you, Travis, because I wanted to sleep with you.”

“W-why did you s-search Will’s r-room?”