Page 146 of The Fourth Option
“There is another option,” Walker said slowly.
“Why do I get a feeling I’m not going to like it?”
“This stopped being about Leigh Ann, Connor, or even John for me. Now it’s about protecting you and Gloria.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that after we map out this organization, everyone who’s involved, I can do what I do best.”
“What’s that?”
“I can kill them all.”
She bit her lower lip and slid her hand across the table, resting it on top of Walker’s.
“Chris…”
“Like you said, I’ve already killed three cops. Dirty or not, they are not going to just let me walk, even if we expose this, and we don’t really know what ‘this’ is yet. And if we do figure it out, the guilty might walk between the raindrops. People get off on technicalities all the time.”
She squeezed Walker’s hand.
“And all those books in your van on logic, reason, and meaning?”
“I’m using logic. I have reason. And meaning?” He paused. “You’ve given me that.”
She brought Walker’s hand to her lips, closed her eyes, lightly kissed it and then pressed it against her cheek, her tough exterior melting away.
“Belle, I…”
“Shhh… give me a second.”
She held his hand to her face for another moment and then opened her eyes.
“Maybe one day you’ll play a guitar for me,” she said.
“Belle…”
“Come with me,” she said, standing and walking into the dining room, her emotional armor back in place.
“I think I worked some of this out while you were swimming in the Mighty Miss.”
“That’s not funny.”
“It’s a little funny.”
“Maybe a little.”
“I’ve been working through these binders and cross-referencing them with Connor’s decoded journal entries, searching for commonalities.”
She leaned over the table and flipped open a binder; her dark nailpolish−painted index fingernail stopped at a line and tapped. Then she opened another folder where she had highlighted a line on another page.
“See these? They are different. They aren’t letters. They’re numbers.”
“Okay.”
“You said you saw sacks of sugar at Dorado Freight.”
“I saw sacks. The foreman I talked with told me it was refined sugarcane, on its way to distributors.”
