Stars & Stripes (Cut & Run 6)

There were some sore points you just didn’t poke. Ty stayed away from Zane’s, and Zane gave him the same courtesy. He couldn’t help feeling that Ty’s secrets were darker than Ty let on.

The other guys had taken up seats on some low rocks under the shade of a copse of trees and started unpacking their lunches, and Ty wandered over to sit between Joe and Cody, making a show of being sore and stiff. Zane knew he was trying to glean more information from the ranch hands, so he let him go alone. They laughed at him as he flopped down.

He was dusty and growing more and more tanned by the minute, and he wore that hat like he’d been made for it. It was enough to hold Zane’s attention as Jamie, Mark, and Annie sat around him, unpacking their lunches.

“Hey, Z. He seems like a good guy,” Jamie said.

Zane chuckled and turned to look at his cousin. “He is. But you haven’t even talked to him; how would you know?”

Jamie shrugged, glancing at Ty as if he was truly considering the question.

“What do you know about your partner, Z?” Mark asked after a few moments of silent shuffling with their coolers.

Something about that question made the hair on the back of Zane’s neck rise. “Excuse me?”

Mark glanced over his shoulder at Ty and the others, then leaned closer. “What do you know about him?” he asked softly. “Like, do you know anything about his past?”

Zane was tempted to tell Mark how inappropriate that question was, especially when asked in front of others. But it was so odd for Mark to bring up the issue at all that Zane was curious to find out what he was getting at. “We don’t talk a lot about the past,” he admitted. “Why?”

“I knew him when he was still in service.” Mark frowned. “Or, I knew about him. He was a big deal where I was. Lots of respect, lots of fear.”

Zane didn’t doubt that, not one bit. That was true even now. People respected Ty for his abilities, and feared him because of his attitude. Zane knew he was just a big marshmallow under all the gruff sarcasm and badassery, but no one else did.

“I know he was awarded the Bronze Star and a few Purple Hearts,” Zane said with a hint of pride.

Mark nodded. “He was an excellent Marine, no doubt about that. But there was a lot of talk too. He seems like a nice guy, so the rumors might have been just that, but . . . stories I heard about him and his team make me worry a little, is all.”

“Mark, what the hell are you talking about?” Annie asked, her voice hushed.

Mark cleared his throat and shook his head. “Guess it’s not the best time to discuss it.”

“Oh, it’s too late for that,” Zane snapped. He could feel an accusation coming, and he was already growing defensive about it.

“It’s just . . . out here with him and everyone armed like we are, I realized it was making me a little nervous,” Mark admitted.

“What is?”

“Him.”

“What? Why?”

“Because . . . word was, around the Corps, that your boy was crazy as hell.”

Zane couldn’t help it when the laugh popped out, and he had to swallow hard against more. “Mark, that’s not news to me.”

Mark didn’t crack a smile, though. “Like, Full Metal Jacket crazy. People said he was unbalanced, he was a hard-ass. And he was dangerous.”

Zane nodded. None of that was news to him or to anyone who worked with Ty.

“And there at the end, folks were afraid to work with him. They said he’d throw you to the wolves to save his own skin.”

“Bullshit,” Zane said.

Mark raised both hands to fend off Zane’s anger. “Hey, I’m just the messenger.”

“It’s bullshit. Ty took a bullet for his last partner.”

“Okay,” Mark said with a nod.

Zane gritted his teeth. It wasn’t the first time someone had warned Zane that Ty might turn on him to save his own skin. Serena Scott had said the same thing when they’d worked their first case together in New York City. Despite being used as a paintball shield once during a training mission, Zane saw nothing like that in Ty’s personality. If anything, he was loyal to a fault, and willing to risk himself for a stranger’s safety. Why the hell did people keep telling him to watch his back around his partner?

“He tell you why he left the Corps?” Mark asked.

Zane’s breath caught, and he found himself looking over Mark’s shoulder at Ty to see if he was paying attention to them. He wasn’t. He was eating his sandwich and smiling as Joe and Cody talked with him.

Zane shook his head. “No, he never told me. Do you know why?”

Mark glanced around again and slid closer to Zane, leaning in and lowering his voice. “We had our guesses. ’Round about when I was sent to Lejeune, Grady and his Recon boys were there, too. At that time, Marine Recon wasn’t considered Special Ops. They wanted all Marines to be elite, you see? So they didn’t class any of them as different. But Recon was missing out on the special assignments.”

They were all leaning in, giving their little group a conspiratorial look. Zane was hyper-aware of the others, praying Ty wouldn’t take notice of them. He hated that he was listening to gossip about Ty’s past, but he just couldn’t seem to pass up the opportunity to learn something without having to ask Ty again.

Mark paused to take a drink as Zane’s stomach churned with nerves.

“So around then, the Corps put Recon into the Special Ops ring. A few months after I got there, Grady’s group came home from a float. Two of them were real beat up. I mean beat all to hell. Grady was one of them.”

Zane swallowed hard. This must have been right after Ty and Nick O’Flaherty had been captured and tortured. He felt ill as he imagined the shape the two of them must have been in when they’d returned home.

“The story was they’d got into some sort of brawl in Spain and spent time in jail, but bar brawls don’t cause the damage I saw, and neither does a Spanish prison. There were rumors they’d actually been taken prisoner on a black ops mission and escaped. Now that, I believed. I remember running into Grady in the mess hall one night after he got back. He was ahead of me in line. He had this . . . vacant look, like he was lost in his own head. Wouldn’t meet anyone’s eyes, just looked right through them. Marines call it the thousand-yard stare. I remember it being pretty eerie to look at him. Lot of guys avoided him and his buddies.”

“Is that why Ty was discharged?” Jamie asked, frowning. “Battle trauma?”