“Huh?”
“Ask. I can see it in your face.” And I could. A million questions, and him not knowing if he wanted to really hear any of the answers.
“You really worked for Calder and Rizzo?” I admired his bluntness. Might as well get right into it.
“Work for. Yeah.” I wanted another Coke, but didn’t want to make him go run errands for me again. “They threatened to kill me, so I took the deal. Simple as that.” He soaked it in. “And I know it’s also not so simple. Don’t think I’m stupid, Blake. I know I did wrong.”
“Yeah. That’s about…as wrong as you can get in this job.”
“It was small stuff. Honest. I didn’t think it was worth losing my life over. Anything I did, any information I gave them, I worked extra hard to dig up some new angle to make up for it. I honestly feel like I didn’t set back the investigation at all. More like one step back, one step forward.”
“Did you, like, have meetings with them?”
I could see the disappointment on his face and it hurt me. Old Samantha, the one with the bad part still inside, would have lied. Made excuses. Done anything to keep that look off his face. And I know why. It wasn’t what was there, it’s what was gone.
The desire. The longing. He didn’t want me anymore. He wanted a past version of me, and he knew the old version was a lie. So thrown them both out. I’m sure if he had this much time to think about helping me before he went ahead and did it, he’d have left me behind hours ago.
“I only met with them the first time. The deal. Everything else happened through handlers. Middlemen. They would come sometimes with specific questions. Other times I’d be somewhere and a guy would just show up. I’d be out at a restaurant, this happened one time, I saw him come in and I knew who it was. I was by myself, they were good about never bothering me with other people around. I went over to him before he got to my table. He asked what I had for him. I said I didn’t have anything. He said to think about it and come with him.” I didn’t look at Blake. I stayed inside the memory, staring at nothing and seeing the past. “He said, ‘Let’s go’ and I had to leave without paying my check. That was nothing to them. He fished around for information and I told him about a stakeout taking place the next week and he dropped me off a mile from the restaurant. I walked back and snuck my car out of the parking lot. I could never go back there again.”
Blake leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees. “What stakeout?”
He had a good reason for his suspicious tone. He worked undercover, he’d run a dozen stakeouts. It could have been him.
“Yeah,” I said. “That one.”
“Tell it.” For the first time since I’d know him, Blake’s eyes went hard when he looked at me.
“I gave them a place and time. That’s it. I don’t even know exactly what the stakeout was for.”
“It was a drop spot. A shipment up from Mexico. A direct link across the border.”
Innocent information, so I thought. Turns out I’d handed them one of the biggest breaks they could get.
“I didn’t know that.” Excuses. Shut up, girl. Own it. “You know the rest. Four men dead. Their heads taken back to Mexico. Those photos we got…”
“You ever see them?”
“No.”
“I did.”
His words bore into me deeper than the pain in my arm, deeper than the hole inside where half of me used to live.
Thinking about my own pain reminded me of his. Also, it seemed like a good way to change the subject.
“How’s your shoulder?” I said as I slid off the bed.
He leaned back in his chair. “It’s alright.”
“Let me see.”
If there was anything left at all to his desire for me I’d know it as I unbuttoned his shirt and peeled it away from his chest. He remained stoic, hard to interpret.
I found both more blood and more muscle on his chest than I’d anticipated. I don’t know why I always thought of Blake as thinner, weaker. His shoulders were wide, like a swimmer, and his body sculpted all over. A workout fanatic. A lot of agency guys were. Unlike them, Blake never showed it off with shirts a size too small or tank tops in late October.
Our faces were inches apart, but we both looked away. I had his wound to concentrate on and he studied the awful decor of the Two Diamonds Motel.
The wound went through and through north of his lung, south of his collarbone. Not lethal, but painful. And lucky. He’d been hiding it so well I almost forgot he’d been shot. A tough guy. Daddy would have liked him. Much more than Lucas. Lawyers were the enemy.
“I bet you’d like a stiff drink about now,” I said.
“I’m fine.”
Fine, be that way, I thought. “Let me at least dress it for you.”
“Go ahead,” he said to the wall.
A REGULAR FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE
Everything I know about dressing a wound I learned from field stripping a deer. When Daddy first showed me how to skin and gut a buck I nearly threw up. Each time after it got easier and the clinical way Daddy talked about it as he worked made it easy to distance myself from it. So I can approach a gunshot wound, and I’ve seen my fair share—this made an even half dozen—I can see it for muscle, bone, sinew and blood. No person in the equation at all.
I made Blake wince a few times, but he never said a word. I felt fairly sure Sam was somewhere across town cursing a blue streak and biting down on a bullet as she repaired her arm from Blake’s shot. She must have been far away because I felt nothing, saw nothing. Maybe she was as tired as me.
“Were you ever planning on quitting?” he said, his voice so close to my ear he barely had to whisper.
“Yes,” I said, telling the truth. “With Lucas, he had to know eventually. Either I’d figure out a way to leave them or he’d find me on his trail of evidence leading to Calder and Rizzo’s door. I hadn’t quite figured out how to get myself free yet.”
“How hard were you trying?”
“Not hard.” I hated not being able to lie. Lies buzzed in my head like angry bees trapped in a jar. My tongue wouldn’t let a single lie out to sting anyone, so they all turned on me. My brain pincushioned with a thousand tiny pricks. Telling the truth is supposed to be cathartic. And for a secret I held in this long, I should be feeling a weight lifted off my shoulders, right? Wrong. I stood in a hole I dug myself and felt the growing weight of the dirt as it rose higher and I sank deeper.
“Blake, you’ve got to understand,” I said. “I’m going to try to make this right. I know I can’t make up for what I’ve done, and what’s happened over the last day and half. Nothing can. But, I’m going to make sure Calder and Rizzo go down and I know it will bring me down in the process. I don’t think it’s just because I can only do the right thing. It’s deeper than that. Or maybe it isn’t. The thing I do know,” I leaned back from his shoulder, a fresh bandage of torn Motel towels keeping the bleeding in check. “This side of me was always in there. It got covered over, or maybe beaten down by her. The other side of me. But, this Samantha, the good Samantha, the one you knew. She’s always been there.”