The Executioner (Professionals 10)

“This is Bob,” Bellamy informed me. “Who has more secrets than I realized,” he added.

“Oh, hi, Bob. Thanks for trying to save me. But I’m pretty good at saving myself.”

“See that. Go on. Go in. Get cleaned up. I got this,” he said, shuffling away with the body.

“Do I want to know?” I asked, not sure my mind could take another thing right about then.

“I couldn’t tell you even if you wanted to,” Bellamy said.

With the light on him, I could see the pain in his eyes. And, admittedly, now that I was safe, the pain was really starting to settle in on me too.

“You two go in,” Gunner said, nodding toward the cabin. “Get cleaned up, but don’t both fall asleep until we are back here to keep an eye. There are still two men out there.”

“Right,” I agreed, tensing again.

“I’ve got a gun this time, though,” Bellamy told me as we hobbled inside the bloodstained crime scene of a cabin.

“Good. Because if anyone else comes for us, I don’t think I have the strength to do anything more than raise my arm.”

“I’m right there with you, love,” he said as we made our way into the bathroom.

We decided to take turns showering. And because I was the one with little pieces of brain matter and skull fragments in their hair, Bellamy sat down on the closed toilet seat and let me go first, holding the gun on his knee as I started to strip.

“Hey, Bellamy?” I called as I got into the shower.

“Yeah, love?”

“Remember that thing I said about if you drug me again?”

“I believe it involved a knife and my urethra.”

“I take it back. When this is all over, drug me and take me away from all of this again.”

“Well, love, if there is one thing I can do, it’s that.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Shawn - 3 days

The answers weren’t as over-the-top and therefore satisfying as I guess I’d built the issue up to be in my head.

After we got back to New Jersey and Bellamy’s team really got to work, the truth came out in banal trickles of information that made the whole infiltration and attack seem a lot less crazy and unexpected.

See, it all came down to a few simple facts.

Bellamy was at the Adams estate the same night I was.

Bellamy was caught on the cameras.

Bellamy was a really rich, high-profile guy.

And because he was a rich guy, he had a private jet.

Private jets were great when you wanted to go somewhere at the spur-of-the-moment. But they still required one basic thing to take off.

A flight plan.

The pilot had to tell the FAA where we were going and where we would be landing.

And Brandon Adams, being a rich guy with few scruples, simply greased the right palms to get that information. From there, all he had to do was a little internet search to find the satellite image of the land, see the cabin, then make his way in our direction.

Not nearly action movie material.

But it gave us the answers we’d been seeking, the ones that had driven us a little crazy once we’d managed to get some sleep and food and proper medical treatment for our various injuries.

And it also made Bellamy and I realize that if you were going to head to a safe house, maybe doing so on your personal, private jet was not the way to go. Or if it was, you made sure it landed someone not close to the actual safe house, then you took another means of transportation the rest of the way.

I don’t think either of us planned to get into a safe house sort of situation again.

But it was always good to be prepared.

Who the hell knew what was ahead for us?

But I got the sneaking suspicion that whatever it was, we were going to be facing it together.

Bellamy - 3 weeks

After the bodies were dealt with, save for the two men who’d gotten away, Gunner and Holden shuffled us back to my private plane, leaving Bob to handle the clean-up of the cabin.

I took Shawn back to my main residence, a house by the shore just outside of Navesink Bank. And it was there that we both healed slowly as we lied relentlessly to her family about the tragic car accident we’d gotten into.

They were appropriately concerned, but it was clear that Shawn’s aunt was almost equally as delighted at the prospect of her niece finding a good man and settling down.

The part that I found extraordinary, though, was that Shawn didn’t correct her. She didn’t deflect or deny. She leaned into the idea.

I didn’t think it would be that easy with her. But then again, our ‘easy’ involved a shitton of bodies, a couple nights of terror, kidnapping, and hiding out in a safe house. We’d packed a hell of a lot into a short period of time.