Catherine Coulter – FBI 4 The Edge

Unless I hadn’t been the one drowning. Suddenly, deep down, I knew. I hadn’t been the one to drown, but I’d been there, right there.

I looked around expecting someone to be there, close to me, right behind me, ready to tap me on the shoulder. For over two weeks since I’d been pounded into the desert sand by the bomb blast, there was always someone there just beside me, speaking quietly to me, jabbing me with needles, endless numbers of needles. My arms ached from all the shots and my butt was still numb in places.

I drank more water, then slowly raised my head, careful as always not to move too quickly. I stared at the man in the mirror above the sink. I looked like oatmeal, gray and collapsed, like I wasn’t really alive. I was used to seeing a big guy, but the person staring back at me wasn’t at all substantial. He looked like a lot of big bones strung together. I grinned at him. At least I still had my teeth, and they were still straight. I felt lucky my teeth hadn’t been blown out when that bomb exploded and hurled me like a bag of feathers some fifteen feet across desert sand.

When my friend Dillon Savich, another FBI agent, saw me in the gym, he’d probably just shake his head and ask me where I’d stashed my coffin. I knew it would take a good six months before I could go toe-to-toe with Savich again and have a slim prayer of holding my own with him at the gym.

I took a deep breath, drank more water, and switched off the bathroom light. The figure in the mirror was shadowy now. He looked a lot better that way. I stepped back into the bedroom, to the stark outline of the single bed and the huge red digital numbers on the clock some friends had brought me, wrapped with a bright crimson ribbon. I looked at the clock. It was just seven minutes after three A.M. I remembered Savich’s wife, Sherlock, also an FBI agent, telling me when I was floating between pain and the oblivion of morphine that every minute that clicked by on the clock meant I was that much closer to getting out of this place and back to work where I belonged.

I walked back to the bed and slowly lowered myself down on my back. I pulled up the single sheet and thin blanket with my left hand. I tried to relax, to settle and ease my muscles. I wasn’t about to go to sleep again. I closed my eyes and tried to think logically and clearly about the dream. Yes, I’d felt water, but not really drowning, just a shock of water pouring into me. Just a taste of water. Then nothing at all.

I raised my left hand and rubbed my fist over my chest. At least my heart had calmed down. I pulled in more deep breaths and told myself to stop the drama crap and think. Think cold, that was the rule at the Academy. I had to stop the panic and think cold.

It took me another couple of minutes to wonder whether it hadn’t been a dream at all, but something else. As clearly as I saw the face of the digital clock on the utility stand beside my bed, I remembered seeing Jilly’s face.

I didn’t like that at all. That was nuts, plain nuts. A strange dream where I was drowning, only not really, and for some reason Jilly was back there somewhere in my brain. I’d last seen Jilly at Kevin’s home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, at the end of February. She’d acted a little strange, no other way to put it, but I hadn’t really paid all that much attention, just tucked it away. Too much other stuff going on in my life, like going to Tunisia.

I remembered talking to Kevin about Jilly the day after she had flown in from Oregon. Kevin, my older brother, had just shaken his head. Living on the West Coast was making Jilly a little eccentric, and don’t worry about it. Nothing more than that. Kevin was career army, had four boys, and not a whole lot of time to be thinking about the oddities of his three siblings. It had been just the four of us for eight years now, since our parents died in a car accident, hit by a drunk driver.

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