Liberty At Last (The Liberty Series) (3 page)

And now I’d brought a whole world of hurt down on both of us, and I didn’t know if we’d ever recover from it. I didn’t know how we’d ever be together, be safe again. Thinking about John made something hurt worse than my arm: my heart. It wrenched as I remembered his strong arms holding me. I wanted to get back to him. I wanted to make it through this so I could see his gorgeous face again. I wanted to survive this.

I looked up at Catherine. “I’d like to go outside,” I said, finding my voice. I was going to make myself play ball. Maybe she’d keep me alive. Maybe I could escape. Maybe I could find my way back to John. A blind hope rose up inside me for a moment:
I hadn’t totally given up.
Not yet.

“You’ve earned it,” said Catherine, standing up and straightening her skirt. “We’ll pick this up again later. Think long and hard about that. Think about the pain, and what you could have instead. You do something for me, and I do something for you.” She led me out through the door.

I nodded at her, keeping my face blank, following her and carefully holding my damaged arm.
I know how this works.
I
briefly thought of Darius.
I know what it’s like to be on the other side, to have all the power.
Suddenly, it was clear to me: she wasn’t just asking questions and burning me with her cigarettes for fun, although she did seem to enjoy it. It was something more than that. She wanted something from me. Something specific, just like John had wanted from Darius and I had wanted from Ray.

Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good. The only thing I was trying to keep from her was the man I loved. I was going to have to pay attention. Even though I was dirty, starving, tortured and broken-hearted, I was going to have to keep up. I needed to take the advice John had given me, what seemed like a thousand years ago: I was going to have to play it out.

Catherine started letting me out in the yard twice a day. I used my time sitting on a broken bench, facing the sun, trying to absorb as much bright sunlight as possible into my pores. It was the opposite of the dankness of my cell, and it felt wonderful. Outside the walls I could hear dogs barking and children playing, and if I closed my eyes, I could imagine that I was someplace else, someplace normal.

When my eyes were open it was harder to pretend. The yard was dirt-packed, surrounded by a concrete wall. There were machine-gun armed guards everywhere, patrolling the perimeter and watching me.

I just sat on the bench and tried to enjoy my privileges. I didn’t look at the guards and I didn’t move too much. Moving too much was painful. I was stiff and sore, and my joints hurt. I was so hungry I was in agony. I wouldn’t even look down at myself anymore — my legs looked like matchsticks and my knees protruded awkwardly. My body looked older than its years, beaten.

My kingdom for a bowl of macaroni and cheese.

Being hungry and thinking about John were pretty much my full-time jobs these days, along with just staying alive. I wondered if he would ever, could ever, forgive me. Not only for running, but for what I’d uncovered. If I ever got out of here, which wasn’t looking too promising right at the moment, I was going to bring him so much pain. What I’d wanted to do was the exact opposite; all I’d wanted was to make him whole again, to heal the hole in his heart left by Catherine’s disappearance.

Now it was her reappearance that had me worried.

If I’d never found her like this, maybe he would have been able to eventually let her go. Instead I was faced with the prospect of him seeing her the way she was now, or the possibility that he might lose the both of us for good. Me, because I was going to die down here, and her, because she had been thoroughly converted and was never going back.
Please forgive me,
I thought, sending my wish up into the air, hoping it would somehow get to him.

I had been sending lots of thoughts to him lately. It was the only thing keeping me from going absolutely crazy.
I carry your heart in my heart,
I kept telling him, my memory of him.
So we can’t ever really be separated.
I put my hand over my heart and felt it beating: I wanted — I needed
—
to believe that it was true, that he was with me.

His imaginary voice was talking to me with an increasing frequency, too.
Liberty, I’m coming for you…
He’d been saying this a lot. It was my hallucination’s favorite phrase these days. Once he started talking, I didn’t care what the voice really was or where it was coming from. I just let myself relax and give into it. His deep, strong voice. I could picture his beautiful face, every line in it so dear to me.
John. My John, here with me, and in spite of everything, I’m not alone.

But even as I kept my hand over my heart and smiled, I worried
.
Maybe these hallucinations were my body’s natural response to extreme stress. Maybe his imaginary voice was the result of the release of serotonin or adrenaline, or whatever magic drug humans naturally produce when we’re afraid, to make me feel calm before I died. I’d read somewhere that your body had amazing ways of soothing you before you passed. Maybe soon I’d be seeing a long tunnel and a bright, white light. Part of me didn’t care anymore.
Not as long as he was there, someday. I’d wait for him. Forever.

Liberty,
his voice said suddenly and sternly.
Knock it the fuck off.

I’d never heard his imaginary voice sound pissed before. I sat bolt upright, delighted. It really sounded like him!

Now
that
I
have
your
attention...
I imagined him smiling down at me and I felt my heart stop.
You have got to ask that bitch for some more food.

Briefly, I wondered if John’s imaginary voice in my head was aware of the fact that he had just called his own daughter a bitch. But it was too complicated for my poor, dehydrated brain to try and figure out.

She won’t give me extra food — not unless I tell her about you,
I thought back at him. The only thing I hadn’t told her was about her parents. I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

I heard him sigh and I smiled. I didn’t know who or what I was smiling at. It just felt good to hear him be exasperated. It was just so
John
.

She already knows what you aren’t telling her,
he explained to me now, patiently.
She wouldn’t have the slightest interest in you otherwise.
I agreed with him. I wasn’t exactly your average threat to a Mexican drug cartel. I was American, female and completely clueless. The
Los Morales
soldiers had found me wandering around Matamoros, a town near the Texas border. I’d been asking anyone and everyone I met questions that no one was ever supposed to ask.
I asked about them by name.
The locals had looked at me, gaping at my brashness and stupidity. They’d refused to answer me. Only one woman was kind enough to tell me in English to bite my tongue and run. Fast. Otherwise I was going to see the devil himself.

I’d started out in Cabo San Lucas but hadn’t found a thing. That’s where Catherine had been vacationing with her girlfriends her senior year of high school, when she’d disappeared. It had been six years, and no one in Cabo had any idea what I was talking about.
White girl, young, pretty, long brown hair,
I’d said.
Disappeared.
A lot of the locals had laughed at me. This is Mexico, they’d said. Disappeared is sort of a popular description.

One man, a bartender, did help me. He didn’t know who Catherine was, but he knew a lot of other things. He had warm brown eyes and spoke excellent English. I could tell that he pitied me, sweaty, clueless and desperate, carefully counting out my money for my warm amber beer.

“I love my country, but there’s all sort of trouble here,” he’d said. “There are some bad things going on, and no one is stopping them. And everyone knows.”

I’d looked at him and nodded. Cabo was touristy and largely safe, but the travel advisories for other parts of Mexico had been plastered everywhere in Southern California.

“Your friend is probably dead,” he said, gently. “But if she’s lucky — or not, depending on how you look at it — I doubt you’ll find her here. There are places she might have been taken. Where not even the police would care if they found her.”

I felt my lip start to tremble. I was in another country — large, complex and utterly foreign. I didn’t speak Spanish.
I was a fucking idiot to think I could do this. To think I could do what John couldn’t do.

“Any recommendations?” I asked, trying to sound brave. “Where could she have been taken?”

Great Liberty, great question,
my inner voice sighed.
Let’s get into even more trouble. In fact, let’s get kidnapped and murdered! Because THAT would really make John’s day!

I was going to have to ask her to tone it down.

“The border states on the mainland are worst…they are failed states,” the bartender continued. “No real law enforcement, no real government. Those places the cartels have their own empires. They’re running the show. It’s not anywhere you should go near. You’re a nice girl. A good friend. Your missing friend would want you to go home and be safe. Because no one — no white girls, no Mexican girls, no men, no nobody — is getting out of there if they’re asking questions. Most people don’t get out anyway. But if you are asking questions and looking around, guaranteed, you are dead.”

I thanked him, tipping him more than I should. I only had a little money left. What I did have I’d cobbled together from a combination of Catherine’s mother (who’d thought I was absolutely crazy when I’d shown up at her door) and my sister Sasha (who was still feeling guilty as hell about not answering my emails and calls for so long).

As she should,
I thought, tears springing to my eyes like they did every time I thought of her.
I was not through with chewing my sister out. THAT was one thing I was really looking forward to when I got back. It was certainly a reason to not die down here. Although my tragic, untimely death would make her feel spectacularly guilty...

I shook my head to clear my thoughts. I would deal with Sasha later. The bartender left me alone to finish my beer and contemplate the choice in front of me. It had been rash of me to leave John and come down here. I knew that. I’d been crazy to think I would have the imagination and skills necessary to find a girl, missing for six years, in a foreign country. I didn’t even know if she was still alive.

But in my heart I still felt like I made the right choice: I would do it again. I came here to find out what’d happened to her. I loved John more than anything, anyone; I had to try for him. I knew he needed to know what had happened to Catherine, one way or another. Maybe I could still find a way. Maybe I had something that might help.

Catherine was a young girl and I was a young girl. I was alone here and she’d been alone here. Trouble had a way of finding me; maybe it’d been the same for her. Maybe, if I tried just for a little longer….

At least then I could go back to John and tell him that I’d done my best. That there was nothing else that could be done. That it was finally time to move on, heal the hole in his heart. Maybe I could tell him it was like he said, everything happened for a reason. And the reason I hadn’t been able to find her was because she’d gone on to a better place.

That’s a hole that can’t ever heal,
John’s voice said to me now. It jolted me from my reverie, back from that dark bar in Cabo to the blinding sun of Matamoros.

Ugh
. He didn’t even know the half of it. I sat there, considering my present circumstances. I was being held prisoner by a Mexican drug cartel. I was starving. Catherine, John’s daughter, was one of my captors.
She’d tortured me for sport. She was like a queen here; her boyfriend was Angel Morales of the
Los Morales
cartel. He was incredibly scary and appeared to run things.