The Grave Between Us by Tal Bauer

Chapter Five

At seven fifteen,Cole started checking his phone every minute. No text from Noah, not since early afternoon when he said they were leaving a little later than he liked. Maybe they were in a dead spot or had hit traffic, but the drive from Sioux City wasn’t usually a long one. Had they stopped for dinner? No, Noah would have texted him if so. He texted Noah again, a question mark and a heart, and spun his phone on the kitchen counter. He’d fed Katie already, and she was upstairs, listening to music as she worked on her chemistry homework. He heard laughter now and then, a few shut upsand no ways. Homework with friends, or friends with a side of homework, perhaps.

Where was Noah? He spun his phone around again, end over end as he pursed his lips. Maybe he should text Jacob—

His phone clattered on the counter, and he snatched it before the first ring finished. Expecting Noah, he stuttered when he saw Sophie’s name instead. “Sophie?” he said. “What’s up?”

“Cole, are you at home?” She sounded serious. More serious than he’d ever heard her.

“Yes.”

“Is Katie there with you?”

“Yes, she is.”

“I need you to go to a private room for a moment, Cole. Away from Katie.”

“She’s upstairs.” His heart was a racehorse, thundering down the track. Heat and ice flashed through him. “What is it? What’s going on?”

“Cole…” She sighed, long and slow. He felt her exhale like it was a bullet. “There was an incident on Iowa 141 today. We don’t know exactly what happened or how, but Noah and Jacob were shot while driving back from Sioux City.”

He leaped to his feet, the stool careening backward. His hand knocked over his beer bottle, and he backed up a shaking step, then another, until his spine slammed into the cupboards and he dropped to the ground like his knees had been smashed in. He bit his tongue when he landed, hard enough he tasted blood. “They were shot? Are they—”

“They’re both alive, but they’re in bad shape. They were airlifted to Methodist downtown. We don’t know how long they were out there on the highway before a trucker saw the wreck and stopped to call for help. One bullet went through Noah’s chest and shoulder, and it did some real damage. He has a collapsed lung, and if it weren’t for the trucker being a Gulf War vet and knowing some emergency first aid…”

Cole dropped the phone and buried his face in his hands, screaming into his palms, grabbing his hair and tugging. Sophie’s voice was still coming from the phone, loud in the suddenly silent house. “Cole, I’ve sent a state trooper to get you and Katie and bring you both to the hospital. He radioed me he’d arrived before I called. Can you get your things and meet him at the door?”

Two things happened at once. The doorbell rang, and Katie appeared, rounding the corner in the kitchen with her eyes wide, tears cascading down her cheeks as she croaked out, “Dad was shot?”

“Who did this?” Cole growled into his phone as he pushed to his feet. He grabbed Katie and pulled her close, her face pressed to his chest as she started to tremble. Her tears soaked his shirt, and his soaked her hair, but he kept his hand on the back of her head, rocking back and forth.

“We don’t know. I have the state troopers and two FBI offices processing the scene right now. The highway is shut down for ten miles in both directions, and troopers have set up checkpoints. I don’t think we’re going to catch them that way, but we’re not taking the chance. The local sheriff’s office is waking the search and rescue team, and there will be dogs on scene in an hour. Omaha is flying in their own forensics team to rush the scene. Forensics, ballistics, trace, everything. I’ve got Megan and Dale back at the office going through all of Noah’s and Jacob’s cases, looking for suspects in anything they’ve done over the years. Did they put away a meth dealer who just got out and wants revenge?”

“This doesn’t feel like a gang-style hit, and meth dealers don’t ambush on highways—”

Katie wailed into Cole’s chest. Her fingers dug into Cole’s sides, bruising the skin over his ribs. The doorbell rang again. “Sophie, that’s the trooper. We’re leaving.”

“I’ll see you at the hospital.”

He hung up, took Katie’s hand, and ran to the front door.

* * *

Noah wasas pale as a funeral shroud when they walked into his hospital room. He lay propped up on a mountain of pillows, one arm wrapped in a thick bandage and lying across his chest on another thick pillow. Dark circles hung beneath his eyes, and bruises marred half his face. Blood clung to his hairline and matted his dark hair. His heart monitor beeped steadily.

Katie threw herself against her dad’s side, burying her face in his uninjured shoulder and grabbing his hand as she sobbed against his chest. Cole followed, one hand on Katie’s back and the other joining Katie’s iron-strong hold on Noah’s hand.

No one in the world could cry like a sixteen-year-old girl. Katie cried like her life was ending, like she was taking every fear she’d ever had and letting them all out, giving voice to all the days and nights her dad had said he had to go, had to work, had to sit a stakeout or serve a warrant. Moments that were risky but that he’d always come home from.

Who would have thought a drive home on a quiet backroad, empty but for the frozen ground and the decaying cornstalks, would bring Noah all the way to death’s gentle kiss?

Cole pulled a chair to Noah’s bedside, as close as he could get. Katie plopped herself down on top of his legs, not caring that she was too old to sit in his lap. They held Noah’s hand together, one hand on either side of his palm, fingers laced in a thick three-way braid, knuckles white and trembling. Katie leaned her head against Cole’s, the ends of her hair sticking out from her bun and tickling his cheek.

Noah’s heart monitor merged with the soft susurration of the oxygen piped through the nasal cannula. Noah was so still Cole almost couldn’t see his chest rise and fall, couldn’t see him breathing. If not for the monitors, he would have laid his head on Noah’s chest, rested his cheek over his heart, and stayed there, listening to his heart beat and his lungs fill until Noah’s eyes opened.

Shot. He’d been shot. Jacob, shot through the windshield. Noah, shot as he took cover by the car on the side of the road.

Sophie had texted him as they roared to the hospital, lights and sirens blaring. Looks like a hunting rifle. Still waiting on ballistics to confirm. The sheriff out there is digging bullets out of the SUV’s interior.

A few millimeters’ difference, and the graze Jacob suffered would have been an obliterating head wound. Another trooper had brought Holly and Brianna to the hospital.

Nothing so far on digging through their case files, Sophie said.

This was Iowa. Sure, there was crime, and it wasn’t all soybeans and meth, but Cole had seen more viciousness during his commutes on the DC Metro than he’d seen in six months working out of the Des Moines field office. His most serious case so far had been an interstate kidnapping. Murder happened everywhere, of course—he knew that more than most. Murder wasn’t just for the cities or the darkness. It happened on summer days and in suburban houses, in quiet neighborhoods, in basements and kitchens and cornfields. Predators were everywhere.

But… what were the chances that two FBI officers were shot at random, in their not-subtle-at-all government SUV? Blacked-out windows, blacked-out paneling, like Noah was some Secret Service agent escorting the president around Iowa’s backroads. On an empty, isolated stretch of road.

What was the antigovernment crowd like here? What was the militia movement like? There were conspiracy theorists everywhere who ranted about black helicopters and refused to pay taxes and thought the Constitution was the next best thing to the Bible, and they were especially prevalent where drug use was high and education was poor. Shoot-outs with the feds were great, until one of the shooters needed an ambulance. Then it was “Thank you medevac” and “Thank you Henry Ford” and “Thank you oil companies for the black gold powering the combustion engine.” And “Thank you government for transporting my loved one to the hospital.”

Could one of them have lain in wait for Noah and Jacob? There hadn’t been any reports of unusual chatter. It was a live-and-let-live philosophy for the most part, with the local sheriffs and police and even the feds taking a hands-off approach. No need to kick the hornet’s nest. So why would anyone start a war with the FBI by targeting two agents coming back from a soybean deposition in Sioux City?

Who knew about the deposition? Well, anyone who could read a court calendar and was interested in the case, he supposed. Anyone who followed the news and saw that Noah Downing had been the case agent on the illicit soybean blend bust, and that the case was slowly clunking its way toward trial.

Back to where he’d begun. The shooter could be anyone. Cole squeezed Noah’s hand and watched the fractional rise of his chest, the spike and dip of his heart monitor, as Katie’s storm of tears subsided to quiet sniffles and whimpers.

* * *

Two days later,they were no closer to answers.

Iowa 141 had been swept of its molecules in a thirty-mile radius from the crash site. They collected the dirt from around Noah’s car, inspected the mud for footprints and fingerprints. Lifted the SUV out of the ditch, set it in exactly the same position on the back of a flatbed, and carted it all the way to Omaha under armed escort.

No prints. No fingerprints on the car, or on Noah’s clothes, or on the shattered bullet fragments they pulled out of the frame of the SUV behind Jacob’s head. No footprints in the mud and frozen ground, other than Noah’s and a smear that could have been something wiped away or could have been Noah stumbling and falling.

Noah and Jacob had been shot with a .30-30 Winchester, a common rifle round in a region of the country where guns were as common as rolling pins. Maybe more common. Hunters abounded, and there was no way to search for and find one .30-30 rifle in all of Iowa. From the impact on the windshield and the damage to the SUV, it seemed to have been fired from about the limit of its range, two hundred yards. Two hundred yards from the crash site, there was nothing but asphalt, not even an oil drop on the old pavement. Search teams and dogs had scoured the fields and the highways, but the only trail anyone managed to scout ended right there, at the two-hundred-yard mark, as if someone had fired and then driven away, taking their scent with them.

But if the dogs could track the shot from the crash to that point, that meant the shooter had gotten out of his car. Walked to Noah and Jacob. Stood over them, maybe even gotten down in the mud and the snow with them.

Smeared boot prints, or Noah stumbling and falling? Cole stared at the crime scene photos for hours, trying to divine ridges out of the muck: heel strike impressions and tread patterns. He knew Noah’s shoes like he knew his own, saw them kicked off under the coffee table or on the floor beside the bed. Was that divot in the mud his lover’s wear pattern, or that of the man who had shot him?

And then there was Noah’s gun. Or, more accurately, there wasn’t.

It was missing. When Noah and Jacob were brought to the hospital, the police had secured Jacob’s gun, but Noah’s holster was empty. No matter, they thought. It was probably still at the scene. They’d radioed back to the crime scene unit to find and secure Agent Downing’s weapon.

It wasn’t at the scene. And it wasn’t in the SUV. It was just gone.

Had the shooter taken it? Shot Noah and Jacob and then walked to the crash site, stepped into the mud, and taken Noah’s weapon? Then erased his footprints and walked away, leaving Noah and Jacob slowly bleeding out in the ditch? Why?

He stayed at the hospital with Noah, leaving only to take Katie home to shower and get ready for school. She hadn’t wanted to go, but he told her she needed to stick to routine, and that she could come right back after school. Katie did her homework on Noah’s bed, balancing her textbook against his shins as she worked math problems to the sound of his heart monitor. Noah would have been proud. If he opened his eyes and saw.

They were keeping him under, the doctor said, to help his lung heal. To give him as much time as possible to recover before the stress poured back in and life sank its claws into him again, demanding answers to questions like who and how and why. For now, Noah’s job was to rest and be loved, while they tried to piece those answers together on their own.

Jacob woke, though, on the morning of the second day. Sophie texted Cole, and he kissed Noah’s hand ten times before slipping out of the room and padding down the hall. Jacob looked like an oversize doll lying on a cot, his feet and shoulders hanging off the sides of his bed. Even the gown was too small for him, more like a bib than any real kind of cover. Half his face was black and blue, and a line of stitches ran from his temple to the back of his half-shaved head, like someone had taken a hook to the back of his skull and pulled. Holly sat beside him, holding his hand in her tiny palms. Holly was a small, delicate woman, five foot two, maybe 120 pounds. Jacob could probably curl her one-handed. If they’d lived a hundred years ago, they could have made a killing as a circus act: the incredible strong man and his tiny bride.

He didn’t look strong then, though. He looked scared and hurt, and he clung to Holly’s hand until his big arm trembled. He answered Sophie’s questions with a voice thickened by pain meds and fear, his words catching on burrs of emotions lodged in his throat. He didn’t remember what happened, hadn’t seen anything. They’d been driving. They were talking, and then, nothing.

“What were you guys talking about?” Sophie asked.

Jacob’s gaze flicked to Cole, then away. “Marriage. What it was like. I was asking him—”

Sophie moved on, changing gears. “What was on the radio?”

“Classic rock. I think it was a commercial.”

“How were the fields on either side of you?”

“Cut down. Dead. It was just mud, really.”

Sophie nodded. She waited, letting the memories fill Jacob as much as possible, letting him slide back to the moment. Her questions bounced around in an effort to jog those memories, run him backward and forward in time, calling up sights and sounds and feelings to create a three-dimensional window into what had happened. “How many other cars had you seen on the road?”

Jacob shook his head. “Not many. Maybe half a dozen. We saw a few big rigs. Nothing special.”

“Pass anyone parked?”

Jacob shook his head.

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

“Fear,” Jacob whispered. “And then… heat. Something wet. Then nothing.”

“Fear? Did you see the bullet coming?”

Jacob shook his head. “No. It was the conversation we were having. What we were talking about—”

“Marriage?” Holly asked.

Jacob swallowed hard. His big eyes were oh so bright, huge and gleaming under the hospital’s harsh fluorescents as he turned to her. “Holly, this isn’t how I wanted to do this, and I know it’s the worst timing, but—”

She cut him off, squeezing his hand in her own. “Will you marry me, big guy?” She smiled as soon as she spoke, lifting her hand and cupping his cheek in her tiny palm.

Jacob crumpled, falling into her arms as she climbed onto his hospital bed. He buried his face in her chest and wrapped both arms around her, wailing as she cradled his huge head against her and ran her fingers through his hair.

Sophie and Cole stepped out of the room, and Sophie collapsed against the hospital wall, sighing. She pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes. “We’ve got nothing. No leads. No idea who did this. It’s like he came out of nowhere and then vanished. If it weren’t for the dogs catching his scent, I might not believe he was real.”

“Aside from Noah and Jacob being shot.” Cole’s voice came out sharper than he intended, harsher. Thirty-six hours watching his lover breathe in a hospital bed could put a man on edge.

Sophie opened her eyes and stared at him, long enough to make him look away. She didn’t say anything she could have, things like “I’ve known them both longer than you have” or “I’m working my ass off, and I called in every team I could.” She was kicking ass, and it wasn’t her fault that there was nothing to find.

“He’s good,” Cole said to the tile floor. “If he’s cleaned up all his forensics, if he knows about keeping his fingerprints off bullet casings and smearing away his boot prints, then he’s good. Knowing where two feds are going to be, all alone, with their guard down at the end of a day? And then setting up a shot on an empty highway? He’s very good.”

“Okay, he’s good,” Sophie said. “But why did he go after them? Who the hell is he?”

Cole didn’t know, and that, more than anything, set him adrift. His thoughts were echoing, like the sound of a seashell pressed to his ear, emptiness amplified on itself until he thought he would drown in it. His whole career, he’d been the man who knew, who could stand in a killing field and understand a predator’s motivations, stare at a meadow and a forest and point out where the killer had buried his trophies. He’d studied crime scene photos and found the symbolism, the hidden sacredness to the brutality. He’d been the one who charged into the shadows and found the monsters, and he’d torn them from their perches and their lairs.

He’d been the one the FBI had turned to to hunt the hunters, but now that his own love had been hunted, he was frozen. Impotent and unable to move, to see, to do. To think, even, or feel anything beyond the rush of pure terror. Even now, he itched to get back to Noah’s side and watch his chest rise that fraction of an inch. To know he was still breathing.

All his certainty, all his knowledge, all his expertise vanished when he pictured Noah’s ghost-white face. He’d never been powerless before. Even during the worst moment of his life, last year, he’d had a gun in his hands and been able to fire. He’d been able to save the people he loved, and that half second had changed the world from a place of out-of-control horror to one of relief, and he’d gathered Noah and Katie in his arms and rocked them both through the tears, until the sirens and the cavalry had arrived and they were safe.

Where was safety now? What good was his gun when Noah had already been shot? Noah would be dead if not for a trucker with Crohn’s disease taking the slow route so he could pull off and shit in a ditch if he needed to, out of sight of other motorists. When the first responders arrived, he was releasing the pressure in Noah’s chest manually, keeping his collapsed lung from building up too much spent air in his chest and stopping his heart. Thanks to diarrhea, Noah was still alive.

Cole’s doctorate, his research papers, all the court cases he’d testified in. All the accolades he’d received. None of that mattered when it came down to the love of his life lying in a ditch, his heart strangling under a collapsed lung.

Noah, dirt clinging to his tear tracks, Cole’s fingers pulling a paper crane from between his cold, blue lips—

He shook his head and pressed his fingertips to his eyelids, exhaling once, twice. Sophie gripped his arm, squeezing. “We’re still looking,” she said softly. “Someone has to know something.”

“Only if it’s connected to someone else,” he grunted. “Someone only knows something if this is a gang hit, or retribution for an arrest. If this is tied to drug operations, then maybe you’ll get someone to say something someday. Not anytime soon, though.” Sophie stared at him, frowning. “But if this is a lone predator, a solitary hunter…” He trailed off. “We may never find him.”

“You saying we may have a highway shooter on our hands? Maybe this is the first of many?”

Cole shrugged. “I’m saying nothing fits.” I have no idea what’s going on. “I’m saying this doesn’t make sense.” What would you think if this weren’t Noah? If this were happening in Kansas or Idaho or Ohio? “I’m saying I don’t know what to do.”

How could he be the seasoned professional, the FBI’s former number one profiler, the man who could dive deep into the filth and rage and endless screaming in the twisted minds of monsters, when he was just a shocked and shaken fiancé? When all he could see, over and over again, was Noah’s still, pale face? Every time he tried to think past Noah’s next shallow breath, his mind skipped like a needle scratching across a vinyl record.

Everything he had seen—the worst that one human being could inflict on another, the worst imaginable pain and suffering. The corpses he’d dug up. The murderers he’d faced. Even the one he’d stared down, gazing so deep into his mind that he’d felt a tear open up inside his own. None of it, nothing at all, compared to the precipice of loss he hovered over. Noah.

Sophie stared at him, squeezed his shoulder again. Jacob’s sobs had quieted, and they could hear the rumble of his deep voice, its rise and fall, his cadence broken as his breath hitched. Holly’s voice came in quiet waves, too. We were talking about marriage.

“I’ve got to get back to Noah,” Cole said. “Look, I’m going to stay here until…”

Sophie waved him off. “Don’t even waste your breath. Of course. You’re here, and don’t worry about a thing. If I need your help, can I call?”

“If it means catching the son of a bitch who did this, yes.”