Hudson: SEALs of Honor Book 27 Read online

  “Well, let’s finish our meal then. We’ll have some good conversation, and then we’ll wander our way back there again.”

  “What are you doing these days?” he asked, turning back to look at her.

  “Still working in the medical clinic, keeping their books.”

  “Good for you,” he said.

  She shrugged. “Yes, and no. It’s a job, but it’s not anything I’m particularly committed to. And I would change jobs in a heartbeat if I found something interesting. I do have skills that I can transfer to other industries, so that makes it a little easier for me.”

  “Perfect,” he said, with a nod. “Then you can move to wherever it is that you want to go. You probably need to sell your apartment though.”

  “Yes, plus the market is strong, so I’d make money on the sale, which would allow me to buy something decent somewhere else. Especially if I go someplace not quite so crowded and so popular. If my new place wasn’t touristy, I could probably leverage this into a nice little country place.”

  “Ah! That’s what you’ve always wanted,” he said. “We both used to talk about it.”

  “Yes,” she said, with a nod. “That’s still what I’d really like to do.”

  “I’m at a point where I really need to think about these things,” he said. “I was pondering that myself not very long ago.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just the fact that I can’t do what I’ve been doing forever, so I have to look at other options too.”

  “Right. And you’ve been hurt several times too.”

  “Yeah, nothing serious, just a broken arm, another one was a wrist, my leg …” he said. “Just enough to make a guy remember he’s not invincible.”

  “In that case it’s a good thing,” she said, with a chuckle. “’Cause you’re not.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. I’m not exactly sure what I want to do next. That’s the problem.”

  “Well, you can continue being a Navy SEAL for a while though, can’t you?”

  “Yep, another five years. We’ll see.”

  “And from there?”

  At that, he gave her a big wince. “I don’t want to go to a desk job,” he said. “And I’m already at the top of my field. Unless I move up to brass level. And that’s largely a desk job too,” he added. “Not my style.”

  “So go into law enforcement or private security of some kind,” she said.

  “All good options. It’s hard because I’m not there yet. It’s just something that I’m contemplating.”

  “You and me both,” she said. “Which is pretty funny, considering how far away both of us are from the same issue.”

  “I don’t know about funny,” he said, “but it’s certainly worth considering now. Look at you. I mean, if you stay here for another couple years, that apartment of yours could turn into something very valuable.”

  “It is already,” she said. “It was one of the best financial decisions I’ve ever made. The location is superb, among lots of other yuppie places, and I’ve got an awesome view,” she said. “I only got it for a reasonable price at the time because somebody was in a spot and needed to sell fast, and I happened to be there with the opportunity to buy,” she said. “If all the ducks hadn’t lined up perfectly, I never could have gotten it.”

  “And that nest egg will take you into the big world,” he said.

  “Good thing, since God knows my salary won’t do it,” she said. “It’s nice to know that doing something correctly at the right moment once in a while can bring you this kind of return.”

  “You know what? You’re right,” he said. “And good on you for doing that.”

  “Did you ever buy?”

  He shook his head. “No, but I’ve been investing pretty steadily.”

  “Well, good for you too then,” she said in surprise.

  He grinned at her. “We both always used to talk about money.”

  “I know,” she said, “and you’re the one who used to do some crazy business investing.”

  “I still do,” he said. “Remember that Mensa brain?”

  She nodded. “Yes, I do, very much so.”

  He laughed. “Well, it’s held me in good stead, as I do a bunch of stuff like that.”

  “Good,” she said. “If you have any tips, you can tell me all about it.”

  “Well, it’s one thing for me to tell you about something, but it’s another thing entirely for me to tell you and have you end up losing money,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to be responsible for you losing anything.”

  “Have you lost anything yet?”

  “Nope,” he said. “Not yet. But I don’t do too much wild and crazy stuff.”

  “Oh, I’m never into wild and crazy,” she said. “And I don’t have very much outside of the apartment. It took pretty much everything I had to get into that.”

  “And that was your best possible investment,” he said. “You should come out of this with a hell of a deal.”

  “Only if I want to move, to cash in on all the equity,” she said. “But, if I’m planning on staying here, it’s not a hell of a deal at all.”

  He chuckled. “That’s real estate for you.”

  “I’m really torn,” she said. “I’m not sure I want to stay. Yet I don’t really know where I’d want to go either.”

  “I hear you,” he said. “But, like you said, it’s not a decision you need to make right away.”

  “I don’t,” she said, “but sometimes I think about that whole children thing and the family home with the white picket fence.”

  “Of course you do,” he said, “but you’ve got to find a good partner first.”

  She nodded and then looked out the window. “Honestly I’ve been wondering about doing it without a partner.” He stared at her in surprise. She shrugged. “Well, I haven’t found anybody, and that clock has started ticking.”

  “Is it ticking though?”

  “Since the minute I turned thirty,” she said. “It’s just so bizarre. But again I’m not making any decisions yet.”

  “It might be a hard road to walk alone,” he said. “Being a single parent is never easy.”

  “I know. I know,” she said, with a smile. And then she sat back, looked around, and said, “Well, we’re done eating. So let’s head over and take a look and see if they’ve got booths set up for information or anything.”

  He nodded, picked up his bag, and said, “Any chance I could crash at your place for the night?”

  “I told you to stay with me in the first place,” she said.

  “I didn’t want to impose,” he said.

  “Idiot,” she said.

  So much affection was in her voice—and at the same time a hint of mockery—that he laughed, wrapped an arm around her shoulders, and tucked her up close. That’s how they walked back toward the hotel. “So, in all this time, how come we never found each other?” he asked. “In all this time we’ve known each other, we’ve been friends but never more.”

  She stopped stock-still on the street and looked up at him. “Are you serious?”

  He winced. “Not a good topic?”

  “No. Yes. Honestly I’ve wondered the same thing.”

  “Neither of us seem to be finding anybody else,” he said.

  “Sure, but it’s not like we’d want to be leftover friends,” she added.

  “Leftover friends?” He tossed that term around in his mind. “I’ve never heard that before.”

  “No, but it’s kind of like, you know, we’re leftovers.”

  “Ouch,” he said. “Is that what we are?”

  “Well, I’ve heard that phrase used a time or two, kind of,” she murmured.

  “Well, I don’t consider you a leftover at all,” he said, “and neither the hell am I.”

  She smiled, nodded, and said, “Glad to hear that.” Turning their attention back to the hotel, they were nearly back at the scene already. She looked up and winced. “God, it looks way worse now.”

/>   “It does,” he said quietly, as he studied the area.

  She didn’t like anything about it.

  He could see the damage to the building much clearer now, as much of the dust and debris had settled. “Definitely looks like a blast.”

  “But, like Dennis said, it could have been a gas leak.”

  “Could have been,” he said comfortably, keeping her close in the ring of his arms.

  “Wow,” she said, “I sure hope not too many people were hurt.” As they joined the crowd, she asked somebody, “Were there any fatalities?”

  The man looked over at her and shook his head. “I don’t know, but I don’t imagine everybody got out of that. I hope they did, but I don’t know.”

  She turned to Hudson and pointed to where a booth of sorts was set up. “There’s an information table,” she said, walking closer with Hudson.

  He quickly identified himself. The people here smiled and said, “A couple people have checked you in.”

  He nodded, then asked, “What about an older lady, I helped down the stairs?”

  “I don’t know which older lady you’re talking about,” one of the women said.

  “She was …” Then he stopped, thought about it, and said, “She was in room 212, I think. Somewhere in that corner. I found her just heading down the stairs.”

  They looked at him in surprise. “We don’t have a room 212.”

  “Well then, I got the number wrong,” he said, frowning. And he gave a description of the woman herself.

  “Interesting,” the woman said, as she wrote it down. “We don’t have a record of anybody like that. But then, in all this chaos, who knows?”

  He nodded. “All I know is that I helped her down the stairs and out here,” he said, motioning with his hand. “So she’s got to be around somewhere. As long as you know that she’s safe, that’s what counts.”

  The women all nodded. “Thank you for helping her.”

  He snorted. “Are you kidding me? This is what I do.” They looked up at him in surprise. He shrugged and said, “Well, okay, maybe not exactly this, but I’ve spent a lot of time on large rescues.”

  At that, Dennis joined them again. “We’re missing some people, and the teams have been going in carefully on the one good side, checking out the damage to see if it’s safe enough to search for anybody trapped or hurt in the hotel.”

  “We have to go look for those people then,” Avery cried out. “Otherwise they’re waiting for a rescue, and nobody’s coming.”

  “I know,” Dennis said, “but we have to make sure it safe for our rescuers.”

  She nodded slowly. “I get it, but I don’t like it.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Hudson said. “It’s normal throughout the world. Standard practice. If we go rushing in, and a bunch of us get killed too, what good have we done?”

  She winced. “And that’s what happened on 9/11, isn’t it?”

  He nodded grimly. “And yet they saved a lot of people. And you know that, even if you had told those men they needed to stay out of the building and to not go up there, they wouldn’t have listened because everybody was trying to help.”

  She nodded. “Well, let’s just make sure that you don’t get hurt.”

  “I’m out here,” he said, looking at her in surprise.

  She snorted. “And you’re dying to get back in there. I know you are.”

  He looked at her, smiled, and said, “How’d you know?”

  “Because I know you,” she said. She turned to Dennis. “You know that you should be putting him to work, right?”

  “It was suggested by a few people actually, including Mason,” he said. “He said you also saw something odd.”

  “I thought so at the time, yes. But I don’t have any basis for it really.”

  Dennis frowned at him. “What does that mean?”

  Hudson quickly explained about the two men in uniform. “Like when you see something out of place or something in a picture that doesn’t belong?” When Dennis nodded, Hudson continued. “That’s what came to mind, that they didn’t belong.”

  “How far ahead of you were they?”

  “Literally seconds. They went up in another elevator, and I got on the one closest to the lobby. We were both going to the same floor too, which I thought was odd. They turned right. I turned left. But then, literally as I was opening the door to my room, I dropped my bag, and Avery called me. So I came right back down again.”

  “Did you see them again?”

  “Nope,” he said.

  “Did you see them go into a room?”

  “Not a room, but I saw them heading down to the far end—and, yes, the side where the blast was,” he said. “So I’m not exactly sure where they were going or what they were doing. It was just something that caught my attention.”

  Dennis looked at him soberly. “Any chance they were involved?” He kept his tone low, so nobody else could hear him.

  Hudson’s gaze narrowed, and he gave a clipped nod. “It has been on my mind.”

  “Any chance you would recognize them again?”

  “It’s possible, but, given that I only saw them briefly, I wouldn’t count on it. Think military. Short brush cuts, dressed in black from top to bottom, same set of shoulders, same jaw, ever-so-slightly different features of course. Both with dark brown hair and both not looking directly at me. They were on a mission, but what that was I couldn’t say.”

  “Right,” Dennis said, “so they could very well have been up to something.”

  “Or they could have been buddies looking to crash for the next hour or two,” he said. “It’s too easy to read something into it in hindsight now.”

  “Maybe,” Dennis said, “but we sure have to figure out something. And the best I can do, if I see them again, is let you know. There’s also a good chance they’re still up in that building.” Then his lips twitched. “But you and I know they’ll be the last ones to go down.”

  “If they’re military, yes,” Hudson said. He turned to look at the building and specifically the corner that was crushed. Dust still hung in the air, settling everywhere. Cops and ambulances and EMTs were still working in the area, and a massive crowd had gathered that the police were trying to keep at bay. “Let me go in,” Hudson said abruptly.

  “Nope, that’s not a good idea,” Dennis said. “I don’t have any clearance for that.” Hudson accepted that without argument. And, with that, Dennis turned and left.

  At his side, Avery whispered to Hudson, “But you really want to, don’t you?”

  “Something’s wrong,” he said. “I can’t quite feel what it is though.”

  “I don’t think there’s anything you can do though, is there?”

  “Well, I could go around the back and investigate,” he said.

  She winced at that. “Are they likely to think that you’re involved if you start getting in their way?”

  He gave a snort of laughter. “Well, that kind of a thought won’t get them very far,” he said.

  She looped her arm through his, reminding him why he’d come to Vail in the first place. “Not exactly how I expected lunch to go though.”

  “Hey,” she said, “I’m just glad we weren’t in the middle of this mess. It could have been so much worse.”

  “Me too,” he said. “Let’s get you home safe and sound.”

  “You mean, let’s get us both home safe and sound,” she said. With a nod, he grabbed his bag again, and they headed toward her vehicle that luckily she had parked in the little lot at the corner.

  As they got in, he tossed his bag into the back and said, “Let’s go.” She hopped into the driver’s seat and within minutes, they were at her apartment. As they walked up, he looked around and smiled. “This is nice, Avery. Nice area, decent security,” he said. “This was a really wise buy.”

  “I think so,” she said. “It’s always hard to know.”

  “That is very true, but, in a place like this, the real estate values aren’t g
oing down anytime soon.”

  “I hope not,” she said. “At least let me cash out first.” They both laughed. She walked up to the front door, unlocked it, and let him inside. “It’s a two-bedroom unit,” she said, “with two bathrooms, which is a little more unusual.”

  “I like it,” he said.

  She walked over to the hallway and said, “The spare room is in here.”

  He walked in, dropped his bag on the bed, then walked back out to the living room.

  “Are you going back?” she asked. He hesitated. She looked at him, smiled, and said, “Go on.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “You have to go and at least check it out,” she said. “Otherwise you’ll never relax.”

  He nodded, with a grin. “You do know me well, don’t you?”

  “After all these years, I should,” she said. “Go. Do you need me to drive you?”

  “It’s not that far,” he said, “and my rental is back there too.”

  “Right, we should have picked that up. Come on. Let’s go. I’ll drop you off at the rental.”

  He shook his head. “You stay here. I’ll be just fine.” He looked around and said, “I’ll be back in, say, four hours?”

  “If you think you can, sure,” she said. “Dinner?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Let’s plan for dinner at six.”

  “And that’s what, almost five hours,” he said.

  She nodded. “You got a problem with that?”

  “Nope, I’ll be here.” He pulled out his phone and checked the battery, saw that it was fully charged, and said, “You can always reach me on my cell,” he said. “I’ll put it on vibrate for now, but I need to keep the line open for Mason and Dennis, so don’t contact me in the next four hours unless it’s an emergency,” he said. “Feel free to after that.”

  *

  The hotel was only a few blocks away, and, even though she’d taken a little bit longer to get to her place while driving, that was because of the one-way streets and the roundabouts. But he quickly cut across each, taking as many shortcuts as he could, and came up behind the hotel. He stopped here and listened, studying the chaos. Some fire and smoke remained still, but it was almost out. The fire department remained here, as did the police, and the crowd was ever growing. But nobody was watching the back of the hotel. Everybody was in the front.