Hawk: A Stepbrother Romance Part 94

He snapped back, startled. "What?"

"I need to call my sister."

She swung her legs off the bed, and yelped when her heel touched the floor and she yelped and pulled her foot back up.

"You need to stay off that for a day or so."

Jennifer shook her head, and pushed her hair away from her face, causing the bandage to pull on the skin. "I don't know what's going on here. I can't think."

"Take a minute to breathe and clear your head. I'll get you something to eat."

He was gone before she could protest. She gingerly tried to stand up, but the sharp pain from her ankle made clearly stated she wouldn't walk for days. Now both her ankles would trouble her. Hopefully this one was just a simple sprain.

The scent of something sweet cooking wafted through the room from downstairs. Jacob came back with a silver tray a few minutes later. Jennifer snorted at the extravagance until he set the tray with pancakes and orange juice on her lap.

He sat at the foot of the bed as she picked up a fork in her trembling hands and began tearing her food into bits.

Jacob threw a handful of pills in his mouth and downed a gla.s.s of milk, wiping his upper lip on the back of his wrist. Jennifer felt a strange chill spread through her.

"How did you know I like pancakes?"

He looked genuinely confused. "Everyone likes pancakes."

It had to be the drug he gave her. She shook her head. "Jacob, don't lie to me."

"I'm not-"

"You're not a math teacher. Okay, dealing with a punchy eighteen year old is one thing, but you beat down Grayson like he was a child. I've never seen anyone move like that in my entire life."

"I study tae kwon do as a hobby. I started when-"

"I said don't lie to me," she snapped. "I want the truth."

He looked at the floor. "It was just a hobby. Started when I was sixteen. I did two years of TKD before I joined the Army. I was already good. I got better."

"You were in the Army?"

He nodded. "I joined up and was deployed to Iraq. My uncle spent my college fund and I didn't have anywhere to go. I wanted to be part of something. I was in the s.h.i.+t for about two months when we ran over a bomb. Flipped the Humvee over and set it on fire. There were two survivors. Then they started shooting at us."

"They who?"

"Local group that ran the town where we were on patrol. They took me prisoner. I don't know what happened to..." he trailed off. "I was taken. I was pretty banged up. It got worse from there. They patched me up so they could torture me."

Jennifer swallowed.

"Tortured you how?"

"They cut me. My cellmate was a doctor, or I'd be dead. He patched me up. I think they did it in purpose. He had information they wanted and it was too valuable to risk killing him for it. He talked to me while he worked on me. Told me things."

"What kinds of things?"

He sighed. "The doc worked for the Ba'ath party. He came into possession of account numbers and access codes. Anyway, I was there for about nine months. They were going to start in on my face. That's where this came from," he drew his finger down his cheek.

"Oh my G.o.d." Jennifer could almost feel the knife.

"I lucked out there. They bombed the compound. The Air Force, I mean. It was a British unit that actually found me. I was in the hospital for another two months before I was sent home. They did their best to patch me up, but..."

"But what?"

"Can I show you?"

Jennifer nodded.

Jacob stood up, took a deep breath, and pulled off his s.h.i.+rt by the collar. The shocking sight almost caused her to dump the plate of food on the floor.

His entire body was covered in scars. There was a smooth, tight scar across his entire stomach, probably a burn, but there were others. Dozens criss-crossed each other in silvery ridges on his chest and back, and he touched a crater that puckered his right shoulder.

"I took a bullet after the explosion. It went right through. If it hit the bone they'd probably have cut off my arm."

She swallowed. "Do those hurt?"

"Every day."

He pulled the s.h.i.+rt back on and tucked the hem around his waist.

She had an overwhelming urge to reach out to him, but kept her hands still.

He looked away. "Not pretty, I know."

"When I ran off, it wasn't that. I have problems with people touching me. I got scared."

"I didn't mean to scare you."

"You didn't," she said, shaking her head. "I know it's not rational, but I can't make it go away. I'm trying. I like you."

She just blurted it out.

"Christ," she muttered. "I sound like a twelve year old. I didn't run off because I felt your scars. I went too fast. I shouldn't have kissed you like that."

"I'd say you should have." He was looking at the floor, but she could see his smirk until he drew in a breath and let out a deep sigh.

"I didn't plan on any of this. I thought you'd have moved away by now."

"Why did you come back here? I want the real reason, not something about giving back or some nonsense like that."

Jacobs s.h.i.+fted on the bed and rubbed his hands together. "After I was discharged I went to the Caymans. The money was still there. I opened my own accounts and transferred it over. From there I went to Switzerland and then on to a dozen other tax havens. All numbered accounts. The total was... the total was impressive. Enough for me to do whatever I wanted. I wanted to know what happened to my family."

"We all already know that."

"Do we?" he said.

Cold flared through her chest. "Yes. There was an accident. They died. That's what happened."

"Wait here."

Her injured legs didn't have much of a choice anyway. Jacob returned to the bedroom with manilla folders tucked under his arm, and walked to the other side of the bed to sit next to her. He propped the folders on his outstretched legs, and held one open to show her photocopies of a book.

"What's that?"

"The annual report of the a.s.sociation of American Civil Engineers. It's from five years before the bridge collapsed."

"I'm, not much of an engineer."

He sighed. "I'll give you the gist of it. There were a lot of issues with the bridge, but the main one was fairly simple. It was an eye-bar chain suspension bridge, built when this town was a lot smaller, there was less traffic, and the trucks were much, much lighter. The civil engineering report recommended it be torn down and replaced."

The chill deepened. Jennifer set the tray of pancakes aside. She didn't feel like eating anymore.

"There was a problem with the load bearing cable on the south side of the bridge, but there were other problems. The footing on the east side was unsound. The soil beneath it had s.h.i.+fted and the s.h.i.+ft put a kind of torque on the footing and it made the concrete crack. The pressure built and built. When one part of the system failed, all the rest failed. The weight of the cars on the bridge combined with snow and ice from the bad winter was too much. The cable snapped and the footing couldn't hold the weight, so it collapsed."

"I didn't know that," Jennifer said. "I didn't want to know the details. It was an accident. That's good enough for me."

He dropped another folder on her lap. It was a Senate bill.

"Look at the list of sponsors."

Above all the legal gibberish was a list of names, and the first one listed was her father-in-law, James Katzenberg.

"That bill was pa.s.sed a year after the report. Senator Katzenberg managed to secure appropriations to repair the bridge."

"How much?"

"Three hundred and twenty million dollars."

Jennifer flinched. "That's a lot of money, isn't it?"

"As road projects go, yes. For something like this, definitely. Do you know where that money went?"

She shook her head.

"There was a bidding process. The contracts were doled out to local construction companies. It was part of the bill, supposed to stimulate the local economy, right? I have a list of all the companies that got contracts."

Jennifer shrugged. "So?"

"Not a single one existed more than six months before that bill was pa.s.sed, and they all folded. Every single one. Concrete companies, construction equipment rental and repairs, even the food trucks. Every single company blipped into existence right before this bill was pa.s.sed and shut down when the work was done. Now there's this."

He put the last folder on her lap.

"This the National Transportation Safety Board's report on the collapse. The description of the flaws that caused the collapse and the flaws were the exact same issues cited in the original report that called the bridge unsafe and in need of total replacement."

"What's your point?"

He sighed. "You're smarter than that."

She s.h.i.+vered. "I don't see what you mean."

Jacob shook his head sadly, s.h.i.+fted on the bed before spreading out the folders in front of them.

"You see, but you do not observe."

"Sherlock Holmes," Jennifer said.

"Look. We start here." He pointed to the first report. "Then we're here, in the middle." He pointed to the funding bill. "We end here." He pointed to the final report. "Put them all together and they tell a story."

"They didn't do it right," said Jennifer. "That doesn't mean..." She closed her eyes and forced herself to stop shaking. "I'm not hearing this."

"Do you know how much I wanted to hear it? It's there and you have to see it. Listen to me. Do you know how much James Katzenberg is worth?"

"No."

"Almost two hundred million dollars. If he kept every penny of his Senate salary it would take him a thousand years to save up all that money. Where'd he get it?"

"This is a conspiracy theory. It's just paranoia."

"It's not," he insisted. "He took office twelve years ago. Before that he was the mayor of Paradise Falls. Before that he was a city councilman. Where did all that money come from?"

"Where?"

"Lots of places, but most of it filtered up from stealing the money to repair the bridge. They made it look like they were fixing it, but didn't, and kept the rest. I think your brother-in-law was in on it, too."

"I wouldn't put it past him," she said. She felt so cold. Shouldn't she be angry? "So what does any of this have to do with us? What are you going to do about it?"

Jacob stood up and walked to the window. "I'm going to bring them all down. I'm going to make them all pay the price for what they've done, starting from the ground up. That's why I came back here... that and I hoped you'd be here. No matter how much I try to convince myself that's not true, it is."

"Me?" said Jennifer. "Why me?"

"You don't remember me from when I was in school, do you? I was in Miss Garrison's... Rachel's cla.s.s. I used to see you every day. You were so beautiful... and then it happened. I saw you trying to throw yourself into the river. All I could do was watch." He turned around to face her. "When they were cutting me, I'd see your face and remember that there was still beauty in the world and it gave me something to fight for when I wanted to just die."

Jennifer's jaw dropped.

"I shouldn't have told you that."

"I'm not that person," she said. "You don't know me. I'm not good enough for that."

"I want to know you. I really do. When I first saw you again I couldn't believe you were real."

She couldn't hide her surprise. Did he actually say that? He sounded so sincere about it.

"I'll get your phone, so you can call your sister."