Liberty At Last (The Liberty Series) (31 page)

“Take him out,” Matthew said. “And to try to get any intelligence we can so Cruz has a picture of what’s going on. Then we’re out. The only reason we’re still going, to be honest, is that Cruz is paying us a fortune. And John believes that Darius is going to hurt innocent people. You know him. He can’t walk away from that.”

“I know,” I said softly.
I didn’t know if he was ever going to be able to walk away from that.
What I
did
know, what I
was
sure of, was that I had to take really good care of John. Especially right now. He had so much going on with Catherine, and now this case.

“In other breaking news, John told me he talked to you about Ray,” Matthew said, studying my face.

I shrugged it off. “He did, but I don't see what the big deal is,” I said. “So Ray slipped away. It’s not like he’s gonna come up here, in his tank top, with a carton of cigarettes and Swiss Army knife, and try to shoot me. Right?” I asked.

Matthew looked much more serious than I felt. “It would actually be awesome if he came up here, because then John could shoot him, and that would really make him happy,” he said.

I glared at him.

“But I don’t know, Liberty,”’ he said. “The fact that he ran away? That’s not a great indicator.”

Now I just looked at him blankly.
A great indicator of what?

“We don’t care if he’s dealing drugs and couch surfing,” Matthew said. “Our surveillance never contacted him, never interfered with him at all. That’s why the fact that he ditched us could be a bad sign.”

“A bad sign of what?” I asked. I felt slightly exasperated. Ray was a low-budget criminal who only really cared about his self-preservation. I couldn’t understand why Matthew was concerned in the slightest.

“I don’t know,” Matthew said. He looked thoughtful. “It’s just out of the norm for what I expected from him. My gut says:
bad.
Like he’s got something up his sleeve.”

“Your gut sounds like a caveman,” I said.

Matthew nodded. “That’s about the size of it,” he said, closing the conversation. “Let’s go gather some meat, nuts and berries, so we can eat and then run ‘till you puke.”

“Awesome,” I said, and followed him out.

“Why are we running for an hour, when it’s only day
two
?” I asked later, incredulous, as I looked at my watch. As Matthew had predicted, I’d thrown up about a half-mile back.

“That’s gnarly,” Matthew had said.

“Then maybe you should give me some freakin’ privacy,” I moaned, resting my head on a birch tree.

“I am so mad at you guys,” I called weakly. “You shouldn’t have made me eat so much meat.”

“I know. But we don’t have much time to get ready,” Matthew said. “And when we’re out there, you’re going to have to eat whatever we have, and you might have to run, fast, right afterwards. As in, run for your life. You need protein, and the fastest way to deliver that to your muscles right now is meat. Don’t pull that fake vegetarian crap on me, like Mer does. She always eats veggie burgers at home and the second we go out to dinner, she’s ordering steak. I don’t get you people, sometimes.”

“Don’t stress your brain trying,” I said, making myself walk. I picked up the pace and started running again, slowly.

“You need to find your inner motivation,” Matthew said. “You’re never gonna get faster and stronger unless you really want to.”

“I DO really want to,” I said. How could he not know it?

“I don’t see it,” Matthew said. “And in order for you to keep up with us, and not weigh us down, you need to start. You need to bring it. Now.”

“Otherwise I’m just dead weight?” I asked.

“Yeah, you will be. Literally. I know John promised you that you could come, but I’m telling you straight up: I will strongly advise him against it if I don’t see you give one hundred percent. It’s not safe, Liberty. It wouldn’t be safe for any of us.”

I kept running, going faster even though it hurt. I was completely fuming so I kept my mouth shut. I was worried what I might say. Matthew looked at me sideways as he kept the pace easily. “Think maybe you found your motivation?” he asked, and smiled a shit-eating grin.

“You’re really annoying sometimes,” I said.

“Thank you. I work at it.”

I gave him the finger. If I was stronger, I would have just sprinted away from him.
Another great reason to get and stay obsessed with fitness,
I thought.

If we stayed behind, it would be warm and safe,
my inner voice chimed in.
With cable, Ian and tea. No tents. No hairy spiders. No large guns.

Enough,
I thought at her.
You think I’m letting John out of my sight again? Maybe he’ll be more subdued if I’m with him on assignment. Maybe I can help keep him out of trouble.

There better be a good reason
, she said.
I freaking hate spiders. And so do you.

Tonight, I was ordering an iPod and headphones. I was going to tune them all out — Matthew, my inner voice, all of them. I wasn’t letting John go get shot at all by himself and just sit on the couch, left behind. No way, no how. I liked the couch, but I vastly preferred John.

He was back. Eva stayed in Boston; he told me she sent her regards and her congratulations to us. “Finally,” she’d told him. “I thought you were going to die an angry bachelor.”

I had to laugh at that one. “My fiancé, formerly known as
The Angry Bachelor
.”

“Sounds like a good
WWF
name,” John agreed. “Thank goodness I won’t be needing it.”

“How did you leave things with Catherine?” I asked. He sighed deeply and went and rummaged around in the liquor cabinet. When I saw the bottle of bourbon, my stomach dropped.
Uh-oh.

“They’re running some more tests, and she’s agreed to do some therapy. But they’ve determined that she’s not psychotic and she’s not a suicide risk. She’s completely lucid. So we can’t have her involuntarily committed,” he said. He took a large gulp of the amber liquor.

“So what happens next?” I asked, fearing the answer.

“We have no grounds to hold her. If she decides she wants to stay and do group therapy and yoga, she can. She won’t though. Tops, she’ll voluntarily stay for a week.” We just looked at each other. “And then she’s back to Angel,” he said, looking at the counter. “Back to cartel life, I guess. She’s twenty-four; she’s completely emancipated. She’s completely…lost to me,” he said, and finished his drink.

“What about criminal charges?” I asked. “If she has something pending against her, could she leave the States?”

John unexpectedly threw back his head and laughed. “She calls you the
vanilla ex-stripper
,” he said, still laughing, “but she has no idea how brilliant you are. And how lethal your loyalty can be.”

“I wasn’t trying to be lethal,” I said. “I was
trying
to be helpful.”

“I know honey, and I love you for it,” he said. “And to answer your question: yes, we could submit charges. Multiple federal ones, most likely, that the government might want to bring. They’d probably love to get someone who’s close to Angel Morales.” He poured himself some more liquor and stared at it.

“It would buy us some more time with her,” I said.

“Except she’d be in jail,” he said.

“But she wouldn’t be on a crime spree in Mexico,” I said. I honestly didn’t know which was worse.

“But she would be away from the person she loves,” he said, “and she would hate me more than she already does. If that’s possible.”

I nodded at him. I got it. But the alternative was…
just letting her go?

“What does Eva think?” I asked him. I hadn’t had enough of a chance to interact with her to gauge her attitude.

“She thinks we should let her make her own choices,” he said. “Which was what she always said, and it always drove me nuts. But now that Catherine’s a grown woman, I don’t really think we have a choice,” he said, looking up at me. He had dark circles under his eyes, unusual for him, like he’d been up all night trying to figure out the right thing to do.

Except, there was no right thing. It was only loss after loss after loss.

I went to him and wrapped my arms around him. “I’m so sorry, honey,” I said, as he buried his head in my chest. “I feel responsible. I’m sorry for that. But I’m even more sorry for the way it’s turned out. I had no idea what I was getting us into.”

“You’re not responsible. I never stopped looking for her,” he said. “But I don’t know if I’m better off having found her the way she is now.”

“You know she’s alive,” I said. “You know she was strong enough to survive.”

“She might be a monster,” he said. “She’s certainly in love with one. Angel Morales and his crew have probably killed a thousand people. And I only know a part of what she’s been a party to,” he said, eyeing my arms. I quickly put them behind my back. “Who knows what else she’s done?

“And why?” he asked. “That’s the part that bothers me the most. Part of me thinks that it’s the money. The crazy way she is about expensive clothes, the power she has over other people. Like she’s a modern-day queen. It’s sick. You saw the way that people live down there, and she’s prancing around in designer high heels? It’s fucked up,” he said, and ran his hands through his hair so it stood up askew, mimicking his internally distressed state.

“Maybe the why is more simple than that,” I offered. “Didn’t she always like nice clothes? Some girls are just like that. She told me that Angel saved her. She said that the men who originally kidnapped her were brutal, and that Angel came and took her away. He punished those men. You could love someone for that, couldn’t you? Especially after everything she’d been through?”

He took another swallow of his drink. “You could forgive her for that, couldn’t you?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t think it matters if I forgive her or not. She certainly hasn’t forgiven me. It’s more of a question of what happens next. If she leaves and goes back to him — which she will — then what? Am I supposed to just act like I never had a daughter? Am I supposed to just turn a blind eye to what she’s doing down there? Drug trafficking? Murder?”

He would have to leave them alone,
I thought.
What was the alternative?

“Are you suggesting that you’d go after them? The Morales cartel? And your own daughter?” I asked. John was crazy, and he had a very black and white idea about right and wrong, but I couldn’t picture even
him
going that far. I’d convince him to have her arrested before I let him go down there and start shooting people.

“Maybe,” he said.

“Don’t you need a client for that?” I asked, gently. I rubbed his back, trying to calm him down. “And maybe an army?”

“I have an army,” he said, looking off into the distance. “I could be the client.”

“John,” I said, my voice laced with worry.

He put his hand up as if to stop me, so I shut my mouth. “We don’t need to go there right now,” he said, and he sounded weary. “I’m just feeling a little desperate.”

I hugged him to me and rubbed his back some more. “It’s okay, baby,” I said, even though I knew it wasn’t. “It’s gonna be okay.”