Page 61 of Intrepid
I sniffed and wiped the irritating mist of tears coating my eyes. “You have to believe me. Every word.”
“What is it?”
“Promise me. You’ll believe every word I tell you. If you don’t, no one else will.”
He took a moment to contemplate it, and set his hand atop of mine, giving a squeeze. “I … I promise.”
“I wasn’t lying about Fox and Gideon. They’re real. They tortured Eli, and … some guy in a suit … he was there one night.” Clearing my throat failed to dissolve the croak in my voice, where the tears touched my words. “And he … did really bad things. Horrible things. He was someone Eli recognized. So they cut out Eli’s tongue, and Gideon shot him.”
“I want to believe you, Jamie. I do.” Eyes shuttered, he huffed, and opened them again. “But they got the guy who did it. He confessed to it.”
“He was forced to confess. They forced him, because the guy in that suit? He was a lawyer, or something. Maybe the one Jo works for, I don’t know. Eli knew him. I heard him talking about Fox’s brother and defending him. There’s a house on the corner of …. I think it was Medbury Street. There’s a yellow machine in the back. A wood chipper. They … after they shot Eli.”
The panic pounded through my veins, my heart echoing its pace with rapid thumps in my chest. That was the moment he’d see me in a different light. I’d no longer be his son, but an accomplice, as Fox had referred to me, to murderers. A traitor to my best friend. He’d never look at me the same.
A tear slipped free, and more followed in an unbroken stream, until I sobbed. Every breath I inhaled splintered with my cries. “They forced me. They forced me to do it. I didn’t want to, but Fox said he’d let me go. He’d let me come home.”
I glanced to the side, where my dad’s eyes glistened in the harsh fluorescent lights. I’d seen him cry only twice in my life—when my grandpa died, and when my mom left. A tear rolled down his weathered cheek like rain on an old cracked window pane.
“What happened Jamie?”
“They made me throw him into the wood chipper.” The punishing blow of those words was more than I could keep inside, and I finally let them break me, drawing my knees up to settle what felt like a hole in my gut.
My dad shot to his feet, wrapping his arms around me, the warmth of him settling my mind, and for a moment, I just wanted to stay there, in the silence. “Oh, God, Jamie. Oh … fuck!”
“And they filmed it. They filmed me doing it. Fox told me if I said anything to the police, he’d send them the tape.”
“No.” Gripping my shoulders, my dad looked me in the eyes, and the anger swirling in them wasn’t for me, I could see that much. “Don’t say anything to the police. Nothing about Fox, or Gideon.” He glanced up toward the door and back to me, lowering his voice. “You keep this between me and you. Just stick to the story you told them.”
“But, Dad, the man they arrested … he didn’t do it. They’re going to put him in prison, and he didn’t do it.”
“I’ll figure something out.” He gave a squeeze to my shoulders, lips pressed in a line of determination. “But you don’t say anything more about this. Understand? I’ll take care of everything.”
Relief washed over me. I’d purged my darkest secret to the only person I could trust with it. “Yeah. I understand.”
“Just hang in there. I promise everything will be all right.”
* * *
I lay on my side, tucked into a ball, staring through the window to where the tree outside had gone from a vibrant orange-red to a lifeless brown. Its leaves hung like a man dangling over a cliff, holding on with his last bit of strength, before falling one-by-one out of view.
The clear tube of whatever the hospital staff had given me cut through the scene, and I followed the path of the line to my hand, where the needle sat lodged, pumping the kind of drugs into my body that made everything feel like a dream. I twisted on the bed to find the curtain separating me from my roommate, who lay quiet. Only the flicker of his TV could be seen over top of the curtain hanging from the corner of the room, and I narrowed my eyes on the image of the burning house and the news reporter’s head bobbing beside it as she talked.
“A man trapped inside his burning home on the east side was discovered by police early yesterday morning. Investigators say David Cross, a forty-two-year-old ironworker, was home last Thursday—Devil’s Night, as it’s known throughout the city—when it appears his house was set on fire by arsonists. Gang members are suspected, and witnesses say, a group of four individuals dressed in black were seen lurking around the man’s home earlier that evening.”
A dream. That was all it was. A bad dream. I turned back over in my bed and stared out through the window once again. Another leaf wriggled in the wind, holding on.
And then it let go.
21
Ty
Present day …
It was Nietzsche who said, ‘Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings—always darker, emptier and simpler.’
If I lived on emotions alone, I wouldn’t be faced with the task of ruining the one thing alluring enough to save me. The single frayed thread somehow tethering me to a world I no longer gave a shit about. Because the hell of it was, Sera had crawled beneath my skin and set me aflame. Something about that kiss in the library had unhinged me, was all I could think about, along with the taste of her still lingering on my tongue. I craved more of it. More of her.
