Fierce Protector: Hard to Handle trilogy, Book 1 Read online

  “Doo, doo, doo looking out my back door.”

  Bacon, eggs, muffins and coffee got the day started. Tyler was like a jack-in-the box, rising every few minutes to pack something in his bag, add a note to his ever-present legal pad list of ‘things to do’, or fetch more food. Eva found she was starving and shyly requested seconds of everything.

  “Got to get myself going,” Tyler told them. “Whatcha got going on today, ladies?”

  Trish brought her plate to the sink. “I don’t have to be at the school until one. I thought I’d give Eva the dime tour, maybe see who’s hiring.”

  “Good idea!” Tyler agreed, and slung his bag of tools over his shoulder with practiced ease. “I’ll call Jessie and tell him to expect Eva with the Pontiac. Back around six, honey,” he said, kissing Trish and giving Eva a friendly, encouraging smile before he jogged down the yard to his faithful Ford Taurus.

  Eva patted her friend’s shoulder and said, “You got yourself a keeper, there.” Trish smiled, very obviously proud of her man, and even more so of the relationship and home they had built together. “And he’s nuts about you, of course.”

  “Well, he’s only human,” Trish replied with a sassy wiggle. “Some nights, maybe just a little super-human.”

  Eva blushed slightly. “He’d have to be, to keep up with you.” Trish feigned a horrified gasp, hands to mouth, and then tickled Eva until she dashed across the room to get away. Laughing and catching up, the two young women washed the dishes together, straightened the house for a few minutes and got dressed, ready for an important day.

  “You still like to get flour on your hands?” Trish asked as they walked to the Pontiac.

  “Sure,” Eva replied happily. “Not been doing much baking lately, but I still love it.”

  “Let’s see what old Cheryl thinks of you. I know she needs someone part-time.” Cheryl’s Coffee Shop and Bakery was an institution in the little town of Stockdale. Only three blocks from Trish’s school, it seemed the ideal place for Eva to make some friends, get some experience and make a few bucks. As a regular customer, Trish hoped her say-so might smooth the hiring process.

  By the time they reached the intersection which took them east down Route 87, clouds had gathered in a suddenly leaden sky, and just as Trish shepherded Eva into Cheryl’s little coffee shop, the heavens opened, dousing the town with rain not seen for three weeks.

  “Bless me if the Lord don’t always know when we need a drop o’ rain!” Cheryl exclaimed as the young duo bustled in, closing the door behind them to keep out the abrupt downpour. “How are you, sweetie?”

  Cheryl was perhaps sixty but looked ten years younger. Her dirty-blonde hair was tied up beneath her ever-present hairnet, and she sported the ample figure of a woman who spent her life baking. With five tidy tables, a muted TV in the corner and the rich, stomach-growling scents of cookies, bread and cakes perpetually wafting through the place, it was a favorite hang-out for many in Stockdale, especially for a mid-morning “li’l somethin’”.

  “I’m just great, Cheryl. Managed to dodge the rain, I guess.” Cheryl set out coffee in a ritual so often repeated as to have become automatic. “I want you to meet a great friend o’ mine. Eva, this is Cheryl Cunard, baker to the stars. Cheryl, meet Evaline Montgomery. Be nice to her, now. She just drove down here from Illinois.”

  “Well, by the heavens above, there’s a long way for a little thing!” She extended a hand and smiled with motherly affection.

  “Cunard?” Eva wondered. “Is that maybe a French name?”

  Cheryl poured thick, black coffee. “They tell me we all started out in Nova Scotia, but heavens knows how we wound up down here! My momma said it ‘kew-nard’, like the old ship company which had the Titanic, back in the day,” she confirmed. “And if anyone wants to make a joke about the size of the proprietor,” she warned the six other regulars at their tables, “now would not be a good time!” There was a gale of laughter; this well-worn trope was a crowd favorite, Eva could see.

  Trish waited for things to settle before asking, “Cheryl, I’m wondering if you’d still be needing that help you were advertising for?”

  The older lady cleaned her hands with a sack-cloth towel and sat heavily on a tall, wooden barstool behind the counter. “Would this be how it is that I’m coming to meet the lovely Miss Montgomery this mornin’?” she asked with a glint in her eye.

  Trish took Eva’s hand. “She’s a fantastic baker, just the best I ever knew.” She caught herself. “’cepting you, Cheryl. You’re just a miracle with a bowl o’ dough.”

  “I should say!” Cheryl replied with a surfeit of self-respect. “But yes, Lord knows I could use a hand around here. The last girl . . . well, she just up and left after three weeks! Didn’t even wait for her last few days’ pay, so we can all draw whatever conclusions we might.” Two customers nodded sagely; this too, Eva saw, had been thoroughly mooted in the coffeehouse courtroom. She looked Eva up and down. “Would you be OK with waiting tables, honey?” Eva nodded, still shy of Cheryl’s no-nonsense air. “And can you be here for 5:30AM on a weekday?”

  Trish interjected with enthusiasm. “My Tyler’s sure to be up. You two could have some breakfast and leave ’bout the same time,” Trish noted. Everything about it sounded perfect. Eva kept nodding, somewhat thunderstruck.

  “Well, are ya gonna say yes, or what?” Cheryl wanted to know. “I got dough back there which ain’t gonna roll itself, you know?”

  Eva smiled shyly and said, “I’d love to, Ms. Cunard. It sounds just great.”

  The two shook on it. “First rule: everyone calls me Cheryl, ’cluding you.” Eva nodded for the eighth time. “Second rule: there ain’t no one here above anyone else, so you see something needs changing, go ahead and speak up, you hear?”

  “I will, for sure,” Eva promised.

  “Well, whatcha waiting fo’? Get your sweet ass back there and wash those hands ’til they shine. We’ll see how your first batch o’ oatmeal raisin turns out.” She opened the hinged counter and waved Eva back to the kitchen, scooting her along with big hands and a bigger smile.

  “Cheryl, you’re doing the Lord’s work, I know that to be true.” Trish lowered her voice. “Our Eva, well . . . she ain’t had it easy.”

  Cheryl nodded compassionately. “Hard work and good people will see her right,” Cheryl promised. “Stop by when that nest of squawking terrors has finished with you,” she said with little sarcasm, “and I’ll let her go for the day.” The old baker’s dislike of school children was fierce and total; they had been banned from her shop since the early 1990s, and avoided it as though Cheryl were an ogress who might simply broil them for lunch.

  Trish finished her coffee but Cheryl waved away her dollar bill. “On the house, for finding me a good pair o’ hands. And don’t you be worrying ’bout little Evie. She’ll be just right as rain.”

  Chapter 3 – Home Improvement

  Sutherland, Texas

  The same Wednesday

  Zachary Norcross felt the steady build-up of discomfort in his forearm as he stirred the thick paint to the right consistency. He bit down the urge to grunt in frustration, re-focusing instead on the neat paint-job which was nearing a very satisfying completion. The front porch to his home would finally gleam as it had in the past, before its months of shabby disrepair and neglect, and it filled him with pride to be bringing this house back to a livable state. Entirely, he recalled with a self-congratulatory smile, on his own.

  Sutherland had been the Norcross home for as long as any of his relatives could remember. Though no one had ever found concrete proof, Zack had always been told his family were among the first to settle in the area, right back in the 1870s when the healthful hot springs had begun to bring tourists on the new railway. This had been boom time in Sutherland Springs, as it was then known, with thousands of people flocking to take the waters and to bathe in the hundred or so springs which welled up all along the river and around the town itself. Zack’s grandfather
had even claimed that a Norcross had managed the grand Sutherland Hotel back at the turn of the century, but like everyone else had suffered terribly from the great flood of 1913. The springs had been filled with mud, the hotel and town overwhelmed, neither tourism, nor the once-burgeoning town, had never recovered.

  Leaving the paint to dry for the rest of the morning, Zack turned back to the unforgiveable apocalypse that had been his mother’s garden. She would have wept, he knew, at its deplorable condition; weeds grew rampant, almost as if they owned the place, and the local buffel grass – thick, spindly and embarrassingly unkempt - had decided to compete. Zack spent an hour of each day pulling up these unwelcome invaders and had cleared much of the acre since his strength had returned.

  His days followed a quiet routine. Slowly building up his fitness regimen, Zack now ran four miles each day in a long circuit around the town, and then worked on his upper body fitness. Weekly check-ups in San Antonio ensured he was on the right path, and the medics had praised his disciplined attitude, if not his occasionally short-tempered dismissal of their insistence that he slow things down. His initial workout routines had been over-confident and excessive, leading to long bouts of exhausted coughing and the humiliation of once having to flag down a passing driver to bring him home after an ill-considered run. He had pulled muscles in his weight room, bringing a stern chastisement from his doctors, and would hear nothing of the ice baths on which they insisted.

  That was six months ago. Now his routine truly fit his body’s needs: strength work for his legs and arms, steady, twelve-minute miles to give his damaged lungs the workout they needed, and a carefully controlled diet to ensure his digestion was not overly taxed. Only recently, but to Zack’s immense relief, the doctors had signed off on the ‘modest and infrequent’ imbibing of alcohol; this advice he had taken seriously, adopting a ‘little and often’ attitude which made each cold beer wonderfully refreshing.

  Zack ate a small lunch of chicken salad and then returned to apply the second coat of paint. Working outdoors was a genuine pleasure after being cooped up for months in Walter Reed, surrounded by others who were struggling with their own injuries, the vast majority far, far worse than his own. Within minutes of the explosion, all those months ago on a freezing Afghan hilltop, other SEALs had applied tourniquets, called for a medevac chopper and funneled Zack into a system of medical care so well organized that, if they made it through the doors of the NATO Role 3 Hospital in Kandahar, the serviceman had a 98% chance of survival. Initial surgery had repaired the life-threatening damage to his lungs, and by the end of the same day, he was on a flight to Landstuhl, Germany where his treatment would continue.

  He was training himself not to think about it, but it was hard not to concede he had been incredibly lucky. Nick Vines’ mother had visited Zack at Walter Reed; the painful confluence of emotions had been so intolerable that he had, for days after, wished he had not survived. The psychologists warned him that there would be a period of wracking guilt as he processed his own answer to that eternal survivor’s question: Why me?

  He shrugged it off for the ten thousandth time as his careful, painstaking work came to an end for the day. The sun was an hour from setting when he put aside his paintbrush and climbed into the shower. Twenty minutes away was the bar, some dinner and his old high school friends, the only two guys left in the area from his graduating class. Looking around as he drove through town to Route 87, it wasn’t hard to see why; the flood was a century past but Sutherland had still yet to find a way of attracting investment or creating significant work. Even the old hotel, derelict for decades, had been razed; some ruins outside of town were the only signs that prosperity had ever visited Sutherland, however briefly. It truly had been a long time ago.

  Mitch and Flynn were waiting by the bar, beers in hand and shirts still marked with the day’s sweat. “All hail the conquering hero!” was their traditional welcome, however many times Zack ordered it to cease.

  Zack slapped his friends on the back and took his usual seat at the bar. In many ways they couldn’t have appeared more different; Zack’s neat, short, black hair contrasted with the habitually unkempt Flynn and his pony-tail, and Mitch’s explosion of nut-brown curls. Flynn needed a shave, too. Zack made a mental note to give them both a hard time. “Hey, guys,” he said, taking his bar stool.

  “Evenin’, ZackAttack,” said CJ the bartender; his own customary greeting went all the way back to high school. “Slinging paint again today?”

  Zack kept his friends informed, though each nugget of news would only bring more ball-busting and jokes at his expense. “Finished the porch,” was his description of ten hours’ meticulous labor. “The garden’s still a mess.”

  They loved the notion of ‘Farmer Zack’ and ribbed him mercilessly about his newfound green fingers. “He’s gonna show up here one night with a nice big basket o’ squash and carrots,” predicted Flynn.

  “Then it’ll be selling his fruit jam, door to door like a girl scout,” offered Mitch. Zack slapped his oldest friend robustly around the head.

  “A trained killer, a decorated veteran,” marveled Flynn, “reduced to planting potatoes and dolling up his stoop.”

  “Fuckin’ give it a rest, you assholes,” Zack growled in almost entirely mock anger. Only these two men were permitted this kind of needling; anyone else making fun of Zack’s Afghanistan experience would have found themselves on the wrong end of a ferocious beating. “What have you knuckleheads achieved today?”

  Guffaws hid their embarrassment. Neither Mitch nor Flynn could be considered high-achievers. They had graduated from high school ‘the way an egg graduates from a hen’, as Zack’s mother had put it. Flynn ran a small and unspectacular second-hand car dealership, while Mitch called himself a ‘landscape architect’, although everyone knew he dug drainage ditches and similarly unedifying features for a local construction company. College had been a fairytale notion, and neither had been attracted to joining the armed forces, even when their friend Zack made a bee-line for the recruiting office immediately after 9/11. Neither were married. Flynn had an on-off relationship with a mail lady, which made him a figure of fun just as much as Zack was for his patient gardening.

  “Sold me a Buick to a guy from Floresville,” reported Flynn, without further elaboration.

  “Dug me a fuckin’ big hole near Stockdale,” added Mitch, without any need for further elaboration.

  “Stellar, gentlemen, just stellar.” Zack knew how easy it was to hit too close to the bone, and reigned in his admonishment of his two school friends, lest they blame themselves for their economic woes. “Sutherland provides, yet again, boundless opportunities for those prepared to work hard.”

  All three men got a laugh out of that one. Zack ordered beers and took a look around. Thursday nights weren’t exactly the peak of the week, and this place was seldom crowded, even on a weekend. There was a girl shooting pool with her guy, a noisy drunk with bad cue control; two old-timers played checkers in their usual booth, and a dude in a cowboy hat was eating a steak at the end of the bar.

  “There ain’t no jobs in town,” Mitch admitted. “You could always rejoin the service. The money was OK, wasn’t it?”

  “Sure,” Zack conceded. “They’re nothing but generous to the people they accidentally blow up.” His friends treated the actual incident itself with more circumspection; Zack wasn’t over it, they could see. “Or at least, I think they blew me up.”

  “Still can’t remember nothing, huh?” asked Flynn gently.

  Zack shook his head. “Don’t even remember coming back down from patrol, but I’m told we did.” Zack took a moderate sip of his beer, nursing the pint which he knew could be his only one tonight; the local cops had no sense of humor about drunk driving, and besides, his doctors had been explicitly clear on the importance of taking it easy.

  “They need to court martial that dude, the flyer.” Neither Mitch nor Flynn understood how the F-16 pilot had escaped official sanction.r />
  “Can’t. No point.”

  “Why not? He pressed the button, right? Caused the whole thing?”

  Zack drew a diagram on the bar-top condensation. “He’s getting instructions from the squad on the ground, right? They call him in, and he uses a mix of GPS co-ordinates and his own eyeballs. He saw an encampment, was told there were enemy in the area, and attacked.”

  “Don’t a SEAL camp look a little different from a towel head camp?”

  Zack flicked Mitch’s forehead really hard. “Racial slurs, man. Don’t.”

  From the pool table in the far corner came a loud, “Fuck!” as the drunken guy missed another easy shot.

  The three tried to ignore the interruption. “Sorry, Zack” muttered Mitch.

  “The flyboy couldn’t see shit,” the ex-SEAL explained. “Think about it: he’s going at 300 knots, maybe faster. He’s got one second – at most – to make a decision. The squad were calling him in fast and hard. He just made the best call he could. Fact is, if his aim had been better, I’d not be here today.”

  “So, he’s an idiot, and he can’t put ordnance in the right place? The one thing he’s paid to do,” Flynn pointed out.

  “It’s like an NFL kicker who goes wide. All that training and he fucks up the money shot.”

  “Well, I’m glad he fucked it up, or I’d be lying next to Nick Vines at Arlington and you assholes wouldn’t have me to make fun of anymore.” The three clinked glasses and resolved to change the subject.

  There was a sudden crack to their left. The guy playing pool had just up and smacked the cue on the table so hard it had broken in half. His girl, terrified but cowed into silence, cringed at the far end of the table.

  “You’s cheating,” he snarled. “You’s been moving the fuckin’ eight ball when I weren’t looking.”

  “Billy, I never,” she began. She was perhaps twenty-two, a slender brunette in skinny jeans and a thin, white blouse. Her aggravated pool opponent was a burly twenty-something in a plaid shirt and a dirty baseball cap. He hadn’t shaved in days and tottered unsteadily now that his pool cue could no longer hold him up.