Beyond Revenge (The Ransom Series) (8 page)

There are no words to properly describe
what I feel inside.  They seem irrelevant, not up to the task of conveying the
full weight of what Leo has carried on his shoulders for so long.  He has spent
the majority of his life standing up in the face of evil to shield someone
else.  He tried to protect me from Mark just as he protected Stella.  He was
willing to sacrifice himself for me just like he made sacrifices for her all
those years.

His scars.  His pain.  Everything he’s
been through.  It’s all been in the name of making someone else’s life better.

“He never mentioned her,” I manage to
say, still in shock from Jack’s revelation.

“Some things are too painful to
remember.  He cared about her deeply.  He was devastated when she died.”

I wish Leo was here, not so that he
could
hold me, but so that I could hold him
.  I want to
comfort him, grasp his face between my hands and kiss every aspect
of his skin to tell him just how much he is loved and how much he should be
appreciated for his selflessness and sacrifices.

Jack wipes the
fresh
tears from my cheeks with the backs of his fingers.  “He was a
strong kid.  He still is.  If anyone was going to live through the shit that
Mark dealt, it was Leo.”

My attempt at a small laugh comes out
as a half-sob.  “He is amazing, isn’t he?”

Jack smiles at me, and we continue to
talk about Leo.  For hours we sit there as Jack tells story after story of
Leo’s adventures growing up that all ended in a home doctor’s visit: the time
he was showing off for Stella on a skateboard and broke his arm after spilling
off a railing,
a stop for ice cream ending
in a brawl
and a broken nose, a motorcycle ride in the rain landing him with severe road
rash and a mild concussion.

We don’t talk about the injuries that
Mark inflicted upon Leo that required Jack’s attention.  We focus on all the
crazy
and
exciting things Leo did that
brought
Jack
in for a visit,
and the stories only
make me love Leo more.

Her Screams

∞

In all the horrors
I’ve seen,

through pain and
death.

Blackness.

Nothing compares
to that sound,

the haunting sound
of her screams.

Terror spun into
vocalization.

Piercing, echoing
into the world.

Siphoning life.

And I am helpless.

∞

The sound of clinking glasses
reverberates between me and Robert.  I’ve missed that sound.

I’ve had my share of celebratory
beverages before, usually after Mark and I closed a significant deal or when we
successfully
moved an impossible
shipment.  We shared
drinks when Mark was released from prison and a few days after that when he
congratulated me for holding up the business while he was locked away
, though
I didn’t know at the time that he planned to take Morgan from her family and
her life only days later.

These successes were miniscule compared
to the victories Robert and I have achieved in
the last month
.  One by one we’ve taken down the distributors and key players who
are vital to Mark’s business, the people on the ground who
sell
for him, move his products, and collect from his debtors.  We’re
chipping away at Mark’s organization and financial stability from the ground
up, one bit at a time.

Robert grabs my glass and pours me
another shot of bourbon before refilling his own.  We’re sitting at the dining
room table while Cindy busies herself in the kitchen, insisting on making us a
home-cooked meal since we’ve been on the road so much
lately
.

With a tip of his glass toward me,
Robert smiles slightly and makes yet another toast.  “To being one step
closer.”

I raise my glass to his with a grin. 
“One step closer.”

The chiming sound of our glasses coming
together again reminds me that I spent time drinking happily with another
Whitford not that long ago.  Morgan and I enjoyed a bottle of wine together
on
our day
off
over a month
ago, the
evening
we found out that our precarious happiness in Mark’s crew was
about to plunge into disaster.

To anyone else a month would not appear
to be a long time, but to me it’s eternity.  Time seems to move painfully slow
when you’re spending it without the most important person in your life.  When
you’re constantly worried and wondering where she is, what’s happening to her,
what she’s thinking, how her life and her body and everything about her is
changing while she’s gone from your grasp, time moves at a fucking snail’s
pace.  That’s where I am right now in my life, but not at this moment.

At this moment I’m drinking, and I plan
to continue to do so.

Sitting back in the chair at the table,
I let the alcohol rush through my body, buzzing my brain but numbing me slightly. 
The liquid smoothes over me in its blissful, calming way.  For five whole
minutes I sit back and observe Cindy talking to Robert like it’s any normal
day, as if he just got home from work and they’re catching up, a perfectly happy
married couple in the suburbs
of Phoenix
living their
lives.

You’d never know their only daughter
was currently in the possession of a madman.

The
house
phone
rings.  Cindy casually picks up the cordless device from its base and throws
her long brown hair back to hold the phone between her shoulder and her ear.

Her face blanches.

The phone falls from her ear to the
counter, clattering loudly on
to
its surface.  Robert
and I both stand up
as
our chairs fly backward.  Robert
is closer to the phone
and
grabs it first,
putting
it on
speakerphone
so that
the sound
s
of the call fill the room around us.

The waves of pain and suffering
echo
off the walls
.  I know th
ese
sound
s
too well.  I’ve heard
them
too many times
before. 
They’re
the sound
s
that haunt me at night, the culmination of all my failures.

Her screams.  Morgan’s screams and
cries pour out of the phone, and I feel them squeezing relentlessly and
viciously at what’s left of my heart inside my chest.  She’s begging now,
barely able to speak, pleading with him to stop, and I almost can’t take it.  I
can’t physically withstand the crushing weight of helplessness her sounds
create in me.

My
hands
fall
forward onto the table, my body shaking and my mind swirling from the
adrenaline and the alcohol.  My eyes can only focus on the table in front of
me, the lines in the wood so straight and calm then jutting out into chaos
where there is a cross-section of knots in the
material
, the imperfections that make us appreciate the beauty
and
good in what
we have.

With one final muffled scream, the
audible suffering is over
, t
hen there is silence.

I look up to see Robert’s whitened
face, his body completely still.  Cindy braces herself against the fridge with
a shaking hand covering her mouth.  I can’t move or think or even begin to
process these last seconds we’ve experienced, the hell that has just been
brought down upon us again.  I feel anger and hatred and sorrow all wound up in
my chest, secured there by my guilt in a tight knot around my heart.

“You will stop your crusade against
me,” the voice says through the phone.  Mark’s voice.  The voice of evil.  “You
give up even one more of my men, hint anything about my suppliers to the authorities,
stop even a single
ounce of product
from reaching its
destination, and I will start sending her back to you, piece by piece, and there’s
plenty to go around.”

The
re’s a
sharp click followed by dial
tone.
 
It’s over.

It takes only a moment for Robert to be
at Cindy’s side.  He’s forcing her to look at him, but I can tell she doesn’t
see him.  He’s calm and offering comforting words, and eventually he gets
through to her.  She collapses into his arms, sobbing against him, then looks
at me over his shoulder.

In
that one
devastated
glance
from her,
I stop breathing. 
Everything comes to a screeching halt, and I have to leave or the guilt will
destroy me.

With a quick turn, I run to the front
door, throwing it open and launching myself out into the driveway.  The waning
sunset behind the houses across the street creates the perfect setting for my
misery, the sky’s final grasps at sunlight before the imminent darkness
consumes it.

Except I am already consumed.

I walk in endless circles on the
pavement, my hands on my head squeezing my skull to make the sounds of Morgan’s
screams go away, but they remain, louder and louder until I realize they’re
blending with Stella’s cries and I can’t handle it anymore.  The people I’ve
let down scream at me relentlessly, and I’m completely helpless to silence
their reminders of my failures.

My body stops, collapsing me to my
knees against the rocky pavement.  My hands fall forward
,
and the rough surface digs into my skin as I stay there
,
motionless.  A strange calm settles over me before the rage builds
up again and bursts out of me in a cascade of human emotion.

My hand balls into a fist a
s
I slam it down against the pavement, over and over again until I’m
painting the ground red with my blood.  When the pain in my hand finally makes
it through to my brain
,
I stop
what I’m doing
, pushing myself to standing before backing away from the site of
my mental and emotional breakdown.

I turn to see Robert watching me from
the open doorway, Cindy not far behind him.  For a moment I worry about how
much they’ve seen
,
and then I realize it doesn’t
matter.  I’ve just shattered into a million pieces all over their driveway
,
but they aren’t looking at me like I’m crazy.  They know this
feeling.  This has been their reality for much longer than it has been mine.

I rub my uninjured hand over my face
and realize I’ve been crying.  The sleeve of my shirt becomes convenient for
casually
wiping the tears from my face, though I’m not sure I’ll ever
get the stain of them off my skin.

Sunset is over now.  Darkness has set
in, and I
feel like
the sun will
n
ever rise again.

“Come inside, Leo,” Robert calls from
the door.

I know I should move.  I know I should
go to him, but
my body doesn’t
follow through.  My
eyes can’t let go of that place in the sky across the street where the last of
the sun’s rays were holding out
in a final stand
against
the night.  They were just there.  It was only minutes before.

“Leo,” Robert says, much closer now,
and then a hand touches my shoulder.  “Let’s go inside.  We can regroup.  We’ll
figure this out.”

“How do you do it?” I ask without
thinking.  “How have you and Cindy gone months like this and not lost your
minds?”

Robert looks away and clears his
throat.  It takes him a moment to answer.  “We have to be strong for her.  The
moment we give in to weakness, we’ve lost her.”

“You’re both great parents,” I say out
of nowhere.  The alcohol is talking
for me
.  “She’s so
lucky to have you both.  I know everything you did for her before was just to
protect her.  I think she knows it, too, but she’s a stubborn teenager.  She
admitted it to me.  She’s too stubborn.”

Somehow Robert manages to smile at my
drunken
ramblings, and I’m jealous.  I want to be smiling like him,
and not from the alcohol.

“Come on,” he says, and I follow him
inside.

Cindy gives me an ice pack for my
throbbing hand, and the three of us sit together quietly in the living room,
dinner left forgotten in the kitchen, our appetites lost.  It seems pointless to
do normal things like eat and sleep and breathe when you know that someone you
love is suffering.

“We got his attention,” Robert says
after what seems like endless silence.  “I’ll see if my guys can trace the origin
of the call.  They have to be able to get something from it.”  He
glances
to the side, picking up a framed family picture sitting on
the
end
table
as he looks at
it intently.  Without seeing it, I already know they look like such a cohesive
and happy
family
in that picture.  I’ve studied it for
hours in the downtime I’ve spent
in this house
.

He sets the picture
back down
on its stand, and I can’t help being drawn to Morgan’s smiling face
there.  A wave of chills runs through my body at the thought of how far she
must be from smiling at this moment.

I need distraction, and looking forward
is the only direction I can face right now.  “What’s our next move?”

Robert leans back in his chair and
kicks his feet out in front of him.  His brow furrows slightly as he thinks. 
“We’ll have to come at this from a different angle.”  He holds that position
for just a moment longer before abruptly standing up and walking to the dining
room.  Within moments he returns with our glasses and the bottle of bourbon. 
“For right now, we drink.
”
 

He pours some in each glass, handing
one to me and the other to his wife before taking the rest of the bottle up in
the air in a silent toast.  We all know who we’re toasting to.  It doesn’t
need
to be said out loud.

It’s all for Morgan.  Every single
thing we do and everything we try is all for her, even when it fails and all
we’ve done is caused her more pain and plummeted ourselves further into
darkness.

I suck down the bourbon, the alcohol
almost
instantly caus
ing
that
perfect warmth and fuzziness within me again.  I extend the empty glass to
Robert for a refill, but he’s still drinking straight out of the bottle.

The moment the
rim
of the bottle leaves his lips, I see the flash of fear on his
face, the tiniest moment when the strong and hopeful detective is gone and
replaced by the grieving father who is desperate for his child.  It’s
comforting to see the truth behind the facade, to know that I’m not the only
one crumbling internally with each passing day of her absence.

Robert pours the liquid numbness into
my glass again, and I drink.

I drink and let the darkness take me.

I drink until I’m no longer here, and
in th
e
se moments I can
temporarily
forget.