Fight For You (10 page)

And then he’ll do whatever it takes to keep himself safe and I’ll never finish what I’ve started.

“He’s here,” I say, breath coming in harsh gasps as I draw up beside Danny. “He’s here. On the beach.”

Danny’s smile fades. “Who? Todd?”

I nod, as frantic as if I’d spotted a shark in the water near my board. “What are we going to do? There’s no way back to the car without going by the beach. He’ll see my face and he’ll know. He’ll know Danny, he’ll—”

“It’s going to be all right.” Danny squeezes my hand, holding tight as a wave washes over the top of our boards. “We’ll paddle around the cliff. Maybe there will be a smaller beach on the other side. If not, at least we’ll be out of sight while we hang out and wait for them to leave. They won’t stay long. There’s no beer for sale here and frat boys on vacation are going to need a beer in their hand before five o’clock.”

“Okay,” I say, pulse slowing a bit in response to the calm, logical tone in his voice. “I’ll follow you.”

“We’ll go together,” he says. “I’ll stay between you and the beach just in case. They’re not going to see you and they’re not going to hurt you, Sam. I promise. I’m never going to let anyone hurt you again.”

“Let’s go,” I say, paddling toward the cliff, knowing now isn’t the time to have an argument with my knight in shining armor.

I love Danny for wanting to stand between me and danger and have always admired his brave heart. But he doesn’t understand how dangerous Todd can be. He didn’t sit in the courtroom and watch the monster lie with such conviction that the jury believed his outrageous falsehoods over my simple truth. He didn’t see the look on Todd’s face as he watched his friends take turns with me. Todd was the only one who wasn’t afraid to look me in the eye, who was capable of staring straight into my tear-streaked face and smiling.

He craved my pain. It was my suffering that got him off, not my body.

Todd is a menace, an evil thing set loose on the earth, and the biggest threat to my future. Only when Todd is dead, when I know I’ll never have to see his face and never have to fear his touch, will I be able to truly move on.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Danny

“We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.”

-Goethe

Sam and I spend a tense half hour floating in the increasingly dramatic waves rolling into the shore before I paddle back around the cliff to find that the red jeep Sam saw has been replaced by a beat up blue pickup truck. By the time I paddle back to get Sam, we carry our boards in, rinse off, get her board returned and mine strapped to the top of the rental car, there is barely time to get back to the compound before my meeting with the staff.

I hate leaving Sam alone in the cabin, even for an hour, but I have to do the job I came here to do. If I don’t, we’ll lose our safe haven from the hotel maids. And I still believe the overnight training session could be important for establishing an alibi.

I know Sam and I will both be careful, but when it comes to a murder charge, an airtight alibi can mean the difference between life and death.

Death.

The entire time I’m talking ropes and harnesses and demonstrating the backup security procedures for lashing a sleeping ledge to a cliff face to the other guides, I’m thinking about Todd Winslow. The lag while I wait for what I’ve said to be translated into Spanish, for the staff members who don’t speak English, gives me plenty of time to remember the terror on Sam’s face when she realized he was on the beach.

He’s the ringleader, the one who set this nightmare in motion. Without him, the other three might have wanted to take turns with a girl, but they wouldn’t have dared to do it.

Todd is a sociopath. Maybe even a psychopath. At twenty-one, he led the gang rape of an innocent woman and walked away from the trial without a smear on his reputation. Who knows what he’ll be doing by the time he’s thirty. I know he won’t get better with age and that Sam will never fully recover as long as that evil shit is walking the earth.

He has to die and I’ll have to be the one to kill him.

I know Sam’s physically stronger than she was and insanely good with a gun, but she shook for a good ten minutes after we’d paddled out of sight of the beach today. She isn’t as ready for this as she thinks she is.

But why should she be, after what they did to her?

I think about it every time I see a guy in a fucking polo shirt with Greek letters on his ball cap. I think about a bunch of smug, entitled assholes ganging up on my girl, holding her down while they use her for a night’s entertainment, not giving a shit about the life they’re ruining or the good person they’re tearing apart.

Fraternities should be burned to the ground. They bring out the worst in people who aren’t that enlightened to begin with. Any prick who needs to spend a shitload of money to buy “brothers” is only half a man, and people who aren’t whole too often fill the void inside of them with dangerous things.

During the year Sam and I spent apart, I almost picked up a bottle at least a dozen times.

On those long nights, when I lay in bed feeling so lonely and sad I wasn’t sure I wanted to be alive anymore, the oblivion I knew I’d find at the bottom of a fifth of Jack sounded pretty damned good.

But then I would think about that last night with Sam in New Zealand and all the cruel things I said to her after I drank those bottles of wine and I would go for a run or a swim, instead. And while I ran or pulled hard through the water I would think about luring Sam’s attackers into the middle of nowhere and torturing them to within an inch of their lives.

That is how I filled the hole inside of me and I will use that hatred now, to end Todd before he can hurt anyone else.

“Do you think so, Danny? That harnessed is the best way?”

I turn to see Paola, the trilingual Italian girl serving as my translator, looking up at me with an expectant expression. Knowing I’ve been caught zoning out, I grin and run a lazy hand through my hair.

“I’m sorry, P.” I play up the dumb surfer bit, wanting to make sure the other tour guides remember me as a laid back guy way too chill to have killed someone. “I was already halfway up the mountain in my mind and missed the question. What was it again?”

Paola repeats the question, we chat with the other guides for a few minutes about the importance of keeping all campers in their harnesses and secured to the rock face, even when it’s time to head into the tents for the night, and then we break for iced coffee and Galletas Maria cookies. I spend another thirty minutes hanging out, shooting the shit with the other guides, pretending to be psyched about our first training expedition tomorrow.

Only when most of the others have retreated to their cabins, do I grab extra cookies for Sam and head back across the compound.

The sun has set, but pale orange light still lingers in the air, illuminating the dust motes drifting by on the breeze, giving the three monkeys hanging out in the tree next to our cabin a glowing, fuzzy halo around their little heads. I pause to watch them, amazed all over again at how strange and exotic this part of the world feels to a person who has never spent time in this kind of tropical rain forest.

I’ve been all over Europe and spent every summer since I was a kid on Maui with Sam, but I’ve never been somewhere that feels so wild and primal. Costa Rica is beautiful, but it’s also a place where it’s easy to get in touch with fears and desires that have been lingering below the surface, ignored until they’re sweated out in the jungle heat.

It is the perfect place to commit a murder.

It’s also the perfect place to fall in love again.

I head up the stairs to the cabin, wondering if it’s possible for me and Sam to have one without the other, if we will be able to recapture what we’ve lost if we fail to finish what we’ve started.

“I brought cookies.” I swing through the front door, forcing an upbeat note into my voice, pretending I haven’t been dwelling on the best way to murder a man for the past hour and a half.

But my performance plays to an empty room.

Fear that Sam has changed her mind about being a team and left to do something crazy on her own makes my stomach clench, but then I see the note on the dining table.

I went down the river trail to that hot spring they were talking about. Come join me when you’re through. I have towels and bug lanterns.

Just bring yourself.

Swimsuit optional ;).

Aside from when we were kissing in the car earlier, my cock’s been fairly well-behaved the past few days. I know Sam’s not in a good place and as much as I want to be with her again, sex is pretty much the last thing on my mind. I’m more preoccupied with revenge and wondering what it’s going to feel like to become the latest Cooney to kill another human being.

Now, my body responds to those last two words and wink face like I just watched a twenty-minute strip show.

But even as my blood rushes and my mind fills with images of Sam naked in the water, her breasts bobbing close enough to the surface for me to see her nipples pulled tight, something cold snakes up my spine from the opposite direction, warning me not to get my hopes—or my cock—up. I don’t know how to be with her now.

We’ve been together since the rape but we haven’t had sex since I
knew
about it, and I’ve spent a good amount of time since last summer beating myself up for not reading the signs and knowing something was wrong. I would have been so much more careful if I’d known. We could have gone slow, checked in more, made sure it was the polar opposite of what happened at that New Year’s Eve party and stopped the second she felt scared or uncomfortable.

I’ve wondered that too—was she scared when we were together but hiding it, the way she hid so many other things?

She seemed to enjoy making love, but I don’t know for sure. I don’t know anything for sure except that I can’t keep her waiting. I don’t like the thought of her out in the jungle alone, even here on the compound where we’re surrounded by a bunch of nature nerds, hippies, and health nuts more into sunset yoga than grabbing a few beers after dinner.

I meant my promise today—I’m never going to let anyone hurt her again. I’m going to stick to her like glue and be there whenever she needs me.

After changing back into my mostly dry board shorts, I tuck my cell phone and cabin key inside my pocket, grab a pair of pajama pants and a tee shirt from Sam’s bag, in case it gets cooler and she decides she’d rather walk back to the cabin in something more than a swimsuit, and head out.

I start down the trail, passing the monkeys in their tree on my way.

These three are part of a larger capuchin group that live near the waterfall where the adventure tours break for lunch. They’ve become so accustomed to the people on the compound that they sometimes roam close to the boundaries, looking for food. I was warned not to open my windows too wide or they’d find their way in, clean out my mini-fridge, and let themselves out through the front door. This particular species is so smart that they rub herbs on their fur for medicine and use simple objects as tools and weapons. Paola said she once watched a mother capuchin beat a snake to death with a stick to keep it away from her baby.

Animals have no moral issues with killing the predators among them. I can’t say I’d enjoy being a monkey—the social structure of the white-headed capuchin sounds pretty messed up if you’re anything other than an alpha male—but I envy them their moral simplicity.

And lack of law enforcement worries.

With that thought in mind, I tug my phone from my pocket, doing a Google search for American arrested in Costa Rica on drug charges while I walk. There’s only a one line mention on a local news station’s website, but I know the twenty-two-year-old arrested by National Police today at the airport is Scott.

One down. The easiest one, but still, the ball is in motion and once we come to a firm decision on what to do with J.D. and Jeremy, things are going to move fast.

All the way to the hot spring, my mind is churning, brainstorming and discarding various ways to get Todd’s followers out to our pit without leading them there myself. But then I reach the turn off to the pool and see Sam’s bikini top hanging from a limb—the sign that the spring is in use and anyone hiking by should come back later—and thoughts of anything but the woman waiting for me vanish.

I duck under the low-hanging leaves shielding the pool from the trail and tread carefully through the ferns covering the ground. I’m wearing my tennis shoes without socks instead of sandals, out of respect for the snakes that might be coming out to play now that the light is fading, but a bite on the ankle could still send me to the hospital.

Though at this point, I’d probably try to put it off for at least half an hour.

After all, what’s a potentially deadly snakebite compared to the possibility of seeing Sam without her top on?

CHAPTER TWELVE

Danny

“This is the true measure of love:

when we believe that we alone can love,

that no one could ever have loved so before us,

and that no one will ever love in the same way after us.”

-Goethe

I hold my breath as I round the curve in the trail and the river comes into view.