“You, too.”
Andie noticed that Cara kept her eyes on the man until he headed back to the door and left the café, then stepped around the counter and walked all the way to the windows, as if she were looking to see what vehicle he climbed into.
The young girl picked her rag back up and headed up to the front to start wiping down tables. Cara kept her eyes out at the parking lot, and Andie followed them, seeing the man with the coffee and Danish climbing into a white F-150 pickup.
As the Ford pulled out of the lot and disappeared up the street, Cara stepped over to her. “Was that guy bugging you?”
“No, he’s nice. Just a talker, I guess. Every day he leaves like an eight-dollar tip.”
“Something’s weird about him,” Cara said flatly. Then she added, “If he comes back tomorrow, come find me. Let me handle him.”
“Okay. Sure.” Andie didn’t see what the big deal was, but she headed off to clean another table.
—
A minute later, the white F-150 nosed into a parking spot in a leafy park across the street from Cara’s Bakehouse, just a two-lane road and a sidewalk separating it from the front door, and the driver turned off the engine.
The big bearded man sat still behind the wheel for a moment, and then he grabbed his coffee from the cup holder, took off the lid, and blew on it a moment. He took a sip before reaching into the paper bag; he pulled the Danish out and took a couple of bites while looking across the street at the café.
Andie Delaney appeared in the window, wiping down a table; he watched as she picked up some ceramic plates and mugs and headed back towards the kitchen.
He did not take his eyes off her the entire way.
When she was gone, the man closed his eyes a moment, his hands in his lap, coffee in one and pastry in the other, and his mind drifted back in time, back to another life.
He didn’t let his thoughts creep back often, but when they did, they always took a lot out of him.
Zack Hightower slowly opened his eyes again, and his gaze went back to the café as he took another long slow sip.
A sudden pain in the back of his left leg jolted him upright, a nerve tingle that felt like electrified fire ants biting him, and he focused on this so that he could avoid thinking about his past.
The nerve pain subsided, and a dull ache that he’d almost learned to ignore returned.
Zack had been shot six weeks earlier; he was still recovering, and though his muscles were getting stronger each and every day, the pain lingered.
He had prescription medications in a pack in the seat behind him, but he’d forgotten to take them again.
His mind had been on other things of late. Other types of pain.
He saw the young girl through the window of the coffee shop again as she returned to the counter; he closed his eyes again, and the past flashed into his mind with the immediacy of the nerve jolt in his leg.
Thirteen years earlier he’d been an officer in the U.S. Navy, a lieutenant commander in SEAL Team 6. He’d led a counterterrorism hit into Eritrea to kill the head of Al Qaeda in East Africa, and he’d accomplished his mission, gotten himself and his men out alive and unscathed.
A few months after this, however, his name and his role in the op were leaked to AQ by an investigative reporter. Zack was living with his young family at the time outside San Diego, and Al Qaeda sent a cell of three operatives living in LA down to extract some payback.
The big American Navy man was with his wife, Tiffany, and his eighteen-month-old daughter, Stacy, in a shopping mall in La Jolla when Zack detected the trio of foreigners wearing backpacks following him. He separated from his wife and child in the food court and reached into a fanny pack just before the terrorist cell pulled folded stocked rifles out of their backpacks.
As the men leveled their weapons at the American, Zack Hightower drew a Glock 27 and opened fire.
The terrorists got off a few rounds, but Zack’s shots had been more accurate.
Two in the chest dropped one man; one in the face and another in the stomach killed the second; but the leader of the cell caught only a single round to the shoulder, dropping the twenty-six-year-old Moroccan to the tile, where he lay moaning on his back between a pair of overturned aluminum tables, his rifle just out of reach.
The Moroccan’s wound was survivable with care, but Zack walked up to him, scooped up the terrorist’s folded AK-74, stood at his feet, and fired once into the man’s crotch.
The Al Qaeda operative bled to death seven excruciating minutes later, long after Zack had left the scene with his family.
After the attack, Zack’s relationship with his wife, already hopelessly fractured by his constant absence as he fought in the war on terror, only deteriorated more. Even through the turmoil, however, husband and wife agreed on one thing.
