Note: Hey there! Did you notice? It only took me two months to get this chapter up instead of five! Don't count on the next one being ready in a month though. Thanks for waiting. Hope you enjoy.
Not my characters, they belong to Janet Evanovich, but as long as Ranger can come out and play I can live with that.
The Right To Remain Silent
by
SueB
Chapter 37
"She's here."
Bobby walked in without knocking.
I'd asked the Control Room to let me know as soon as Steph hit the garage.
"OK. Thanks." I gave him a quick glance without making eye contact. Maybe he'd go away.
In my dreams. He stayed put. Looking like he'd eaten something spoiled for breakfast. Damn it.
It was hard brushing Bobby off. Better to meet him head on.
"What, Brown? You got something to say. Spit it out."
He opened his mouth, but Santos barged in before he could speak.
"She know Dolan's here? Whatcha tell her? Anything? He a real bad ass?"
Lousy way to start the day.
"You ever shut up, Santos? Try it. Ya might live longer."
When he realized I wasn't planning to answer his questions, Lester's expression soured too. Made him look a lot like Bobby. Not easy to do if you thought about it. His banter disappeared.
"Hell. You didn't tell her jack, did ya? What the fuck!"
Bobby weighed in, "Thought we agreed back when this mess started that Steph deserved full disclosure."
"My call. I didn't want her to bolt."
"Bolt!" Lester exploded. "Com'on, give her some credit."
"She's made of stronger stuff," Bobby said, "and you know it Tank."
He fixed me with the stare he usually reserved for new hires who'd done something incredibly stupid.
"Dolan just wants to talk to her," I said in an attempt to defend my position. "It's not like they haven't met before."
"Yeah," Santos came back, "cause I'm sure a friendly Hi, how are ya? happened in the middle of that fire fight...especially with Ranger down. Some meet and greet."
They were right and I hated being on the defensive.
"Dolan respects Steph. She saved Ranger's life."
"So what's he want?" Bobby asked.
Leave it to Brown to dig deeper. Nosy bastard.
"Her help."
"With what?"
I hesitated. Deciding what to tell them.
"Don't know...exactly."
Lester's eyes narrowed. "I think," he said, "you're a lying sack of shit."
I could tell Brown agreed with him. Bobby is most dangerous when he's calm and quiet. Like now.
"Exactly...what do you know?"
I closed my eyes.
When I opened them again Santos said, "We're waiting."
I sighed. White flag time.
"Ranger gave Dolan an ultimatum. He wants back in the field."
The ramifications of that happening shut them both up. Briefly anyway. I took advantage while it lasted.
"Look, I'll tell her about Dolan before I put them together. I promise."
"And Ranger," Bobby insisted.
"All right...and Ranger."
Hal stuck his head in. "On her way up."
I nodded. The elevator dinged its arrival.
We heard the doors swish open.
Heard Steph's voice. Strained. Worried.
"It's Ranger isn't it?"
"Ms. Plum, we need to talk."
Bobby and Lester turned on me.
"You're too goddamn late." Santos growled.
Thank you, Captain Obvious.
"He was supposed to wait," I mumbled.
Harry Dolan.
The son-of-a-bitch.
#####
Something was wrong. I knew it when Tank called me to come to Haywood. He sounded weird.
Now I understood why.
When the elevator doors opened to nothing but Harry Dolan, my heart hammered and my breath caught, but I refused to panic.
Nope...not gonna panic.
Not in front of Harry Dolan.
Only my knees weren't working and I couldn't move.
I didn't really need to ask and I wasn't at all sure I could talk, but somehow I managed to say, "It's Ranger isn't it?" as the elevator doors began to close with me still on board.
Actually, heading back to the garage might not be a bad idea. Lately I'd had plenty of dreams, nightmares where Dolan didn't show and I watched Ranger die. This was a dream and I knew how the script went. When the elevator touched down I'd jar awake and remember Ranger was alive. Maybe not completely well, not yet. But alive and healing.
No such luck.
An arm snaked between the doors, followed by a shoulder strong and solid enough to reverse the closing process.
Harry Dolan's shoulder.
"Ms. Plum," he said, "we need to talk."
Apparently waking up to make this scenario go away wasn't happening.
He reached for my arm, tugging me out of the elevator and into the hallway.
At the same time Tank barreled out of his office, backed by Bobby and Lester.
One look and you knew they had murder on their minds.
"Dolan!" Tank roared. "You said you'd wait."
Tank's deep voice was a force of nature even when it wasn't raised in anger. RangeMan lore had it that a rookie once passed out cold when all Tank said to him was 'Pass the salt.'
But it didn't faze Ranger's handler. Unimpressed, he answered without bothering to turn around.
"No, I didn't. You told me to wait. There's a difference."
"Wait now," Tank demanded. "In my office." He threw his thumb back over his shoulder to point the way.
Dolan, more inclined to give orders than take them, ignored him. A move that didn't help to ease the tension.
Bobby looked disgusted, Lester, mad as hell. Tank's expression turned into a mixture of misery and regret. Ranger would have fired all of them for failure to maintain a blank face.
"There somewhere we can have a word in private, Ms. Plum?"
Before I could answer Tank tried again, "Dolan..." This time it sounded more like a plea than a command.
What the hell was going on?
"Ms. Plum?"
Dolan was my best shot for unvarnished information. Looked like he had come to see me and Tank was keeping secrets...again.
For reasons I didn't care to examine, I'd kept my key to Ranger's apartment.
"Yeah," I said, "there is."
"Steph...let me..." Tank's words followed us into the elevator. I looked him in the eye and shook my head. The doors closed. Cutting him off.
#####
Alone with Harry Dolan.
Who studied me like I was a specimen on a slide and said precisely...nothing on the short trip to the seventh floor.
I wanted to study him in return with the same sharp, all-seeing eyes.
Yeah, right.
Since my knees were still jelly, I opted instead for casually leaning against the wall panel, hoping he wouldn't notice it was the only thing keeping me upright.
Our arrival at the apartment presented yet another bad moment. Like everything else about RangeMan, the lock on the door was high tech, the key electronically coded. Haywood security was tight. Just because I had the key in my possession didn't mean it would still work. Had Ranger locked me out?
That possibility triggered a painful ache in my heart and I couldn't help an audible exhale of relief on hearing the familiar opening click.
With my outstretched hand as invitation, Dolan went in first.
"He's not dead," I said as he walked past me.
A small, mocking smile accompanied his words as he turned around, "Because you'd know if he was."
This guy was starting to piss me off.
"That's right." I punctuated my reply with a challenging lift of my chin.
He didn't disagree, but his quiet response was hardly reassuring, "Trouble is...he's not really alive either."
That didn't sound good.
He walked on down the hall without elaborating leaving me no choice but to tag along.
Ella cleaned Ranger's apartment every day whether he was in Trenton or gone somewhere only Harry Dolan and possibly God knew. She kept it spotless and oh so tidy laughing good-naturedly at my not-so-tidiness. Once or twice...well, maybe more than once or twice...I'd seen Ranger grimace when he found my toothbrush on the bathroom sink, my shoes kicked off beside the front door or my jacket slung over a chair in the kitchen.
A place for everything and everything in its place. I tried, but regularly failed, to meet Ranger's neatness standards. I accepted it as a true measure of his affection that, although it disturbed him, he never complained.
That being said, I wasn't sure why Harry Dolan's perusal of the apartment made me so angry. Maybe because he didn't just look around. He touched Ranger's things, moved them and didn't put them back.
Ranger didn't do family photos except for one small picture of Julie at four or five years old. You couldn't mistake her parentage. She was the image of her father. The frame had its own little shelf in the living room where Ranger could see it if he sat on the couch. Dolan picked it up and ran his finger across the glass.
That was going to leave a smudge.
He left it lying on the coffee table.
Not...where...it...belonged.
At least my neatness indiscretions involved my own stuff. This felt like a monumental invasion of Ranger's privacy.
I'd call Dolan on it. Just as soon as I worked up the nerve. Only he disappeared into the bedroom before that happened.
Really? The bedroom? What did the bedroom have to do with anything? The bedroom was none of his business.
I started after him. Pulled up halfway there.
Ranger and I had been intimate in the bedroom...in ways that went beyond physical. We'd been learning to live together. To love each other. We'd been happy, even with the weight of his contract hanging over us.
It was also where I realized I couldn't live with some of his secrets. Not the national security ones. I got that. The ones he kept because he didn't trust me.
I couldn't face Harry Dolan in the bedroom. No way.
Until I heard him rattling hangers in the closet. Opening dresser drawers. Shutting the door of the medicine cabinet.
Okay, buster. That's it. Enough.
I charged after him outrage fueling my courage.
"What the hell do you think you are doing?" I yelled.
The toilet flushed. The faucet went on and off. He emerged from the bathroom. Nice try, but he'd been doing more in there than just taking a whiz. I stood with my feet planted, blocking the bedroom door.
"What are you doing?" I repeated, in case he hadn't heard me the first time what with all that running water.
With no sign of embarrassment or apology he said, "Getting the lay of the land."
I guess it was an honest answer. More so than if he had said 'Nothing.' Too bad I had no idea what he meant by it.
"I thought you wanted to talk," I said.
"I do."
"Then quit snooping and talk. I know you're here because something's going on with Ranger. Tell me what it is."
He was silent for a second.
"Now," I insisted. "Tell me...now."
"What if I'm here because you killed Whitehall?" he responded.
Making my stomach turn over with a sickening lurch.
According to Tank, Dolan had erased any connection between the two of us and Whitehall's death. We simply hadn't been there. Just like Ranger wanted. Apparently you could do that when you were a spooky scary spymaster.
Although no one ever said so out loud, I knew it was my shot that took Whitehall out. Killing a man didn't make me happy, but I could live with it. What I couldn't have lived with was watching Ranger die without trying to help him. I didn't relish the thought of spending the rest of my life locked up in some government black site, but...
I looked at Dolan and shrugged.
"Then do whatever you have to do," I told him. "Lock me up, make me disappear, whatever. Just tell me about Ranger."
Was I imagining things or did he give me the slightest nod? I felt like I'd passed some kind of test, except for the next thing he said.
"Why did you leave him?"
"Excuse me?"
"You lived here with him. You moved out. You left him. Why?"
Did this man know everything? I couldn't imagine Ranger's sharing all that personal information. Ranger wasn't a sharing kind of guy. Ask anybody. Ask me. So how did he get it? By osmosis?
There were other options. Tank or Ranger's grandmother for instance. Still, I wasn't ready to admit to anything.
Delay.
"What makes you say that?"
He raised his hands. One held my favorite green and purple scrunchy, the other an unopened packet of birth control pills.
Damn. The medicine cabinet. I'd packed in a hurry.
Dissemble.
"Maybe those aren't mine."
"Never seen Ranger use something like this," he said, jiggling the hair tie, "and, if he did, it'd be black."
To further demonstrate my stupidity, he made a point of looking at the pill packet before turning it so I could see.
Even from ten feet away I could clearly read Stephanie Plum on the prescription label.
"So I spent the night. Big deal. We're adults. It happens."
He heaved a long-suffering sigh.
"Ms. Plum, it's been my experience that a woman who's only 'spending the night' keeps birth control necessities in her purse, not in the gentleman's medicine cabinet."
Rats.
"So stop wasting my time and answer my questions."
His voice took on an edge that hadn't been there before. Our exchange was sounding less like a talk and more like an interrogation.
In that case, I had questions of my own.
"How is my relationship with Ranger, or lack of one for that matter, any concern of yours?"
"Everything about Ranger Manoso is my concern," he said, his words measured and deliberate.
Scary. Beyond scary, but I wasn't ready to back down.
"Because you think you own him? Thought you two had a deal. Whitehall's dead. World's saved. Case closed. Ranger should be free and clear."
"We did have a deal," he agreed, not asking how I knew. "and, for the first time since I've known him, Ranger's reneged on his end."
"Reneged? Ranger reneged?"
Not possible. Ranger never reneged on anything.
Dolan spelled it out.
"He has refused the revocation of his contract. He wants back in the field."
My heart stopped. I'd found Ranger in Georgetown, or he had found me, only we hadn't talked. Gunfire and blood will trump conversation every time. Nothing had changed. Why would it?
I took a shaky breath, choked out, "He can't do that."
"No, he can't."
"He'll be killed."
"As soon as he steps on that stage."
I was still angry. Taking it out on Harry Dolan worked for me. I damn sure was not going to cry. I'd be sarcastic instead.
"Well, gee, you can't use that? I'd think you'd be jumping for joy to have Ranger back. His death could be the highlight of some other grand mission. I bet you have a whole list of possibilities. He goes out in a blaze of glory...you get the credit."
If I'd given in to my tears, I'd have missed the pain flashing across Dolan's face.
It was a second before he said, "I don't want him to die for the wrong reasons."
He almost sounded human, but staying belligerent kept my tears at bay.
"What? Saving the world's not enough for you?"
"If I thought that's what he was doing, I wouldn't be here talking to you."
I couldn't answer and keep it together at the same time. Didn't have to. He took up the slack.
"You objected when I asked why you left Ranger. I apologize. It was the wrong question. The right question is why were you so anxious to find him?
It was definitely the right question. Whether I'd answer it was still in doubt, but Harry Dolan hadn't spent years in covert operations without learning how to turn up the heat.
"Your shot not withstanding, you know he'd be dead except for the ring. Right?"
A voice started screaming in my head. Ring? What ring? What damn fucking ring?!
"I...don't...know...what...you are talking about?"
"Didn't think so," he said. "The ring Ranger had on a chain around his neck. The one with the diamond big enough to finance a Third World coup. The one that kept Whitehall's shot from going straight to his heart. That ring."
Oh. That ring, the voice said. I still had no clue.
"...Ring?"
A different man took up the story. A kinder, gentler Harry Dolan.
"You don't make friends in our business," he began. "Against protocol for one thing. Too easy to pack on emotional damage for another. But you don't work with someone and have each other's backs without forming a bond."
He looked at me. His eyes sad and weary.
"I've worked with Ranger for a very long time," he said,
Protocol and emotional damage be damned, Ranger was his friend. He wanted me to understand, but that was as close as he would come to saying it.
I nodded and he seemed satisfied.
"Chechnya was the last big mission on his contract. He didn't give his reasons, but he'd already told me he wouldn't be signing another. When he called to say he'd changed his mind I didn't ask why. I should have, but you're right, I was jumping for joy.
"Whitehall had been on my radar for years. I knew he was a problem. Chechnya confirmed it. Ranger was already involved. Who better to finish the job. I needed him. When my men started dying, I needed him even more. My mission plan was designed to convince Whitehall it was safe to show his true colors. Every move had to look real. I was the only one with all the pieces.
"Ranger knew the murdered men. He accepted the mission without hesitation. With one condition..."
I filled in the blank. "That when he was done, his contract was too."
Dolan nodded.
"He said it was non-negotiable. I knew it was about you although he wouldn't discuss it. I agreed to his terms. He wanted out. I wanted Whitehall. Win. Win."
"Unless he died," I said.
"It was a risk he was willing to take."
My tears had started sometime during Dolan's account. Now my knees crapped out on me too. I sank down on the bench Ranger kept right inside the bedroom door.
"I had something to tell him," I said softly.
Dolan didn't hear me. "I'm sorry?"
I swallowed. Wiped my face. Still couldn't stop the tears.
"The answer to your question. I'd made a huge mistake. Couple of them actually. I had to tell Ranger. Face to face. That's why I had to find him."
I stopped there. Dolan waited, the patient interrogator.
I could have used a half-dozen Boston Creams as fortification to continue, but had to settle for a deep breath.
"No sense in boring you with the sordid Stephanie Plum/Joe Morelli history. You probably know more about it than I do.
"Ranger signed that new contract no more than an hour after I told him Joe and I were determined to make a go of our relationship. By now, I'm sure you know that too. What you don't know is while I was telling Ranger about my plans with Joe, I was praying he would stop me. Only he didn't."
Damn. I was going to cry again. I felt a sob building in my chest. This time it took more than one deep breath to get control.
When I could talk I said, "I overlooked the best and most important thing about Ranger...he always put me first. If I wanted Joe, he wouldn't stand in my way. He made sure of it with one stroke of his pen."
"We all make mistakes," Dolan observed. "Mistakes can be forgiven."
"No, I cried. "You don't get it. I made the same mistake twice.
"You wanted to know why I left Ranger. I left him because I thought he didn't love me enough to trust me. Truth was, I didn't trust him, but he was only doing what he always does, risking his life to make things right for me. It almost killed him.
"Abuela Manoso told me Ranger loved me because I accepted him for the man he is. I lost sight of that man. How can he forgive that?"
"I don't think Ranger sees anything to forgive," Dolan said. "Otherwise, he wouldn't have been wearing that ring around his neck.
"Abuela Manoso is a wise woman. I'd listen to her if I were you. She asked me to give you a message."
No... I'd disappointed Ranger's grandmother. Hell, I'd disappointed myself. I wasn't at all sure I wanted to hear her message. I held my breath, ready for a verbal blow.
"She said, Ask Stephanie please to give my Carlos another chance."
"Another chance? She doesn't hate me?"
"On the contrary. She knows what a bonehead her grandson can be. She thinks you're the only one who can knock some sense into that hard head of his. She and I have tried and failed. And, trust me, we are a formidable duo."
Now there was a statement I could believe.
I frowned. "What if that ring wasn't meant for me?"
Harry Dolan, the spooky scary spymaster, laughed out loud.
"Ms. Plum," he said, "you are a piece of work."
Terrific.
"Is that a good thing or a bad thing?"
"In Ranger's case, I'd say it is a good thing. A very good thing.
"You know, I watched you that day at the jail. You're good in the field. If I didn't think Ranger would take my head off, I'd consider offering you a job."
He smiled again. "Here's what we're going to do."
TBC