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The sirens wailed louder, and Jennifer pointed to the side of the house. “Should we meet them?”
Her neighbor Stephen called over the back fence, “Is that you, Jennifer? What’s going on?”
She yelled, “Fire in the front bedroom. Everyone’s okay. I think the fire department just got here.”
“Oh, my God. Mikey’s room?”
“Yes, but he’s fine. We’re going out front now.”
She led Miguel to the front of the house on the other side of where the fire was blazing.
Mikey lifted his head when they got to the street, now bathed in red light. Neighbors clustered on their porches in their pajamas. The firefighters started working before the trucks even came to a full stop.
Jennifer waved at a police officer getting out of his car, and he approached them.
“Is this your house, sir?”
Miguel pointed to her.
“I rent it. I live here with my son.”
“Is the boy okay?”
“Scared but not injured.” She shifted Mikey to her other hip.
“What happened?”
She felt Miguel stiffen beside her. They hadn’t discussed what to tell the authorities. The truth?
“I—I’m not sure. We were talking in the living room, heard a crash from the front bedroom window and smelled smoke. I heard my son cry out, and my...friend went into the room and grabbed him. We all ran outside to the back of the house then, and I called 9-1-1.”
“A crash, like a broken window?”
Miguel cleared his throat. “Like somebody threw something through the window.”
The cop narrowed his eyes. “You know anyone who would do something like that, ma’am?”
“Of course not.”
Taking out a notebook, the officer asked for their names.
Jennifer didn’t blink an eye when she heard Miguel identify himself as Mike Esteban.
As they continued talking to the police officer, the firefighters seemed to be making short work of the fire that had engulfed Mikey’s bedroom, where flames were shooting up to the roof through the broken window.
Mikey squirmed in her arms, kicking his legs against her hip.
“We need to stay here, Mikey.”
“Do you want me to take him to watch? He seems interested, not scared.”
Miguel hadn’t even formally met Mikey yet. This was his first real contact with his son, and it couldn’t be more disastrous.
With her throat tight, she spilled an all-too-willing Mikey into Miguel’s outstretched arms and murmured, “He likes action. He’s his father’s son.”
Miguel wandered to the other side of the house where Mikey could get a good look at the firefighters at work.
“Ms. Lynch, is that the boy’s father?”
“N-no.”
“Where’s the boy’s father?”
Was the officer trying to imply some former husband had a motive for firebombing her house? A case of jealousy while she enjoyed the company of another man?
“His father’s dead.”
“I’m sorry.” He scratched his chin. “If what you heard is accurate, this sounds like a deliberate act. The arson investigators will do a full analysis, but I’m just trying to get as much information as I can from you to assist them.”
“I understand. I’m a fifth-grade teacher at Richmond Elementary. I don’t have any enemies that I know of and no irate parents that would go to these lengths.”
“You never know what lengths people will go to—until they do.”
Jennifer crossed her arms and shivered. “I suppose I’d better call the rental management company and let them know what happened.”
The cop looked up from writing in his notebook, peering over her head at the house. “You won’t be staying here tonight.”
About an hour later, the fire chief on the scene allowed her to go into the house to collect some of her things.
Miguel joined her inside the house, a sleeping Mikey nestled against his shoulder.
She touched Mikey’s cheek. “Thanks for sitting in the car with him while I talked to the police and firefighters and called the rental agency. You even got him to sleep.”
“After the excitement of watching the firefighters at work, he conked out.” With one finger, Miguel pushed a lock of dark hair from Mikey’s forehead. “He’s incredible.”
“You can put him on my bed while I pack up some of my stuff. The fire didn’t get much farther than Mikey’s room, but I’m going to have to replace his clothes. What the fire didn’t destroy, the water did.”
“It’s just stuff.” Miguel walked past her into the bedroom and put Mikey’s head on the pillow.
A firefighter called into the house from the front door. “Folks, you’re going to have to hurry it up.”
“Just a few more minutes.” She wheeled a suitcase from her closet and shoveled clothes into it. She dumped Mikey’s dirty clothes from the laundry basket into a plastic bag and shoved that into the suitcase.
When she came out of the bathroom with a bag of toiletries, Miguel was on his knees by the side of the bed studying Mikey’s face, stroking his hand with one finger.
Her nose tingled. Miguel’s introduction to his son might not have been ideal, but Mikey had his father back and that’s all that mattered.
“I’m ready. Did you come in a car?”
“It’s a few blocks away.” He slipped his arms beneath Mikey. “You can give me a ride to my rental and then follow me to my motel.”
“I didn’t even ask where you were staying.”
“I think we had other things to talk about. The motel is here in Austin.” Miguel put a finger to his lips, as they walked into the living room where the firefighter still hovered at the front door.
“Everything okay, folks?”
“Not perfect, but we’re all safe.” Jennifer grabbed her phone and laptop from the kitchen counter, and then shoved the computer into her school bag.
She still had to show up for class tomorrow and get through two more days of school.
With one arm still holding Mikey, Miguel took her bag from her and slung it over his shoulder.
When they got to her car, Miguel placed Mikey in his car seat and she buckled him in. “This takes some practice.”
“I want to learn everything. I want to do everything, everything I missed.”
She slammed the back door of the car and kissed Miguel. “Thanks for getting Mikey out of that room.”
“We got lucky. That was a small Molotov cocktail, never really exploded and didn’t project far into the bedroom.”
“We’ll be in touch, ma’am.”
She jerked her head to the side to acknowledge the firefighter. Had he heard Miguel? Did it matter? One of the firefighters had already mentioned something about a Molotov cocktail.
They weren’t the suspects here.
She drove Miguel to his car a few blocks away and then followed him to his motel near the university.
He waved her into a parking spot in front of the two-story building while he swung into a space in a lot at the end of the building.
She waited in the car until he walked up to it. Then she released the trunk and he hauled out her suitcase and school bag.
She followed him to his room on the first level, carrying Mikey in her arms. She eyed the king-size bed and put Mikey in the middle of it.
The motel room had a little kitchenette and Jennifer wedged her back against the counter, folding her arms. “Now that we have some privacy, what do you think happened back there? Who’s responsible?”
Miguel collapsed in a chair, his legs stretched out in front of him. She’d noticed the weight loss before, but his gaunt face and lanky appearance really hit her. Miguel had played baseball in college and had kept himself in peak condition throughout his navy SEAL training and beyond. The months in captivity had taken their toll on his body. What about his mind? How did anyone go through that without requiring psychological help to recover? Was that why the people in DC hadn’t wanted him to leave?
He ran his knuckles along his jaw, which now sported a scruffy beard. “I don’t think that was the government.”
“You don’t think? Would a government agency toss a Molotov cocktail into a child’s bedroom?” She pressed her folded arms against her belly and the knots forming there.
“The FBI? No.”
“But you weren’t being debriefed by the FBI, were you? Or the CIA?”
“No.”
“Would this...other agency do something like that?”
“That room in the front of the house could’ve been any room. Maybe Mikey wasn’t the target.”
She pushed off the counter and did a quick circle around the dumpy room. “That excuses them? They knew there was a child in the house. You said that’s how you found out about Mikey—from their files.”
He held up his hands. “I’m not excusing the inexcusable, but it would be easier to believe this other agency tossed that Molotov cocktail into a house without targeting a child, but...”
“But what?”
“What would be their motive? They want me to come back, for sure, but they don’t want to kill me.”
“Then who?” Jennifer hunched her shoulders. “Who would want to kill you...or us?”
Miguel jumped from the chair and perched on the edge of the bed. He placed a hand on Mikey’s back. “I’d never let anything happen to you or Mikey. You know that, don’t you?”
“You didn’t answer my question, Miguel. Who?”
“There’s only one person I know who wants me dead.”
Jennifer licked her lips. “You don’t mean Vlad?”
Mikey stirred and flinched in his sleep, and Miguel rubbed a circle on his back.
How did he instinctively know what Mikey needed? As far as she knew, he hadn’t been around small kids much. He’d been a younger brother, and while his older brother, Roberto, was married and had children, Miguel hadn’t seen much of his niece and nephews.
“Vlad.”
“That doesn’t make sense either. Vlad had you, didn’t he? You said you were captured and the rest of the team was killed while on a mission to find Vlad. It must’ve been his people who had you imprisoned.”
“At that time, I was more valuable to Vlad alive. He probably thought he could lure the rest of my sniper team out and pick them off one by one.”
“That didn’t happen.”
“My team thought I was dead. It almost worked once when Austin heard some chatter about Vlad’s whereabouts.”
“Austin Foley?”
“Yeah. He still thought I was dead, but Vlad’s people were responsible for an IED that killed Austin’s brother. He was all-in to track down Vlad, but the navy nixed the mission.”
“Now that you’re not useful to Vlad anymore, you think he’s out to kill you? In Texas?”
“He has operatives working Stateside now. You know the incident at the JFK Library a few months ago?”
“That was Vlad?” She plopped down in the chair that Miguel had vacated. “He’s built himself a terrorist network, hasn’t he?”
“It wasn’t just the attempt at the library. We destroyed a training camp he was running in Somalia, and he had entered into a deal with a Colombian drug cartel to exchange drugs for weapons and passage into the US.”
“Oh, my God, Miguel. This is bad. And this is the man who’s after you? After us?”
