Because yeah, this idea that she needs to be cured is nuts. But it doesn’t matter. If she believes it to be true, it’s true. So I was on board. I came up with a plan. We were gonna hook up with Megan via Johnny Boston. I was gonna put everyone who owed me on this mission to find Wendy’s cure.
But that wasn’t what she wanted.
Oh, she made promises. She said we’d meet up but after we hung up that night, she disappeared for eighteen months.
Not exactly disappeared. She’s not like Indie. She doesn’t flip out, go insane, and then go rogue. No. Wendy Gale is far, far, far too professional for shit like that.
She just ignored me. Completely.
It wasn’t until last Christmas, #24, that I finally convinced her to see me again.
This was when I made the real promise. The one she believed.
Because this plan would work, and she knew it.
It wasn’t gonna be easy, and she was gonna take all the hits, but she didn’t care.
Once I told her my plan, she was on board.
I had the cure.
Or, at least, I had access to it.
And even though, in my eyes, Wendy Gale is the most perfect woman I’ve ever known, I was gonna get that fucking cure and then we were gonna be together forever.
Right now I’m in the parking lot of the Mount Pleasant Americana Motel. My convo with Indie was yesterday and the moment she hung up on me, I drove here.
Wendell had a package waiting for me, a large padded yellow envelope. And inside was a phone. The phone had one programmed contact.
I press the screen and call the number.
A voice I recognize answers. “Very, very interesting life you’re leading… Nick.”
It’s Merc.
And there is only one way he would know how to contact me at the Americana.
Indie was right.
He’s the reason Wendy is missing.
CHAPTER NINE - WENDY
FOUR DAYS AGO
Transcendent, everlasting, whole, perfect, beautiful, sweet.
I am on the hunt for Nick Tate.
He’s not taking my calls. He’s not picking up my messages, he’s not on the board, and he didn’t leave me an envelope in Mount Pleasant so I had no choice but to come all the way out here.
It’s a nice summer day. Bright blue sky for as far as the eye can see. It’s not even that hot today, even though it’s August. There are wheat fields swaying in the wind, row after row of corn fields, and lots of other fields with short plants I can’t identify. This is why they call it the breadbasket, I guess. Food just coming up out of the ground everywhere you look.
I am in Nebraska. Perkins County, to be specific.
This part of the state butts up against the very eastern edge of Colorado and just the mere fact that this is where Nick bought land is enough to trigger me. Because he’s not fooling anyone, is he? No one says ‘I think I will buy a twelve-thousand-acre farm in Nebraska worth almost twenty million dollars’ when they are twenty-eight years old and need to disappear.
You go to the Seychelles, the Maldives, or fucking Thailand like every other on-the-run rich asshole in the world. You do not buy a farm. He’s not even a farmer. He’s just an owner. And he doesn’t even live in the main house—which is a mansion, by the way. No. He lives in one of the falling-down shitholes typically reserved for farmhands.
The only possible reason he could have for buying this massive working farm that produces like a billion pounds of food every year is its proximity to Colorado.
And we all know who lives in Colorado.
Sasha. Cherlin.
I can’t even think her name in my head without the full stops. And when I picture her face, I want to give up my recently acquired Zen lifestyle and slip back into full-on assassin mode. I don’t even understand why she makes me feel this way. I’ve never met this woman. I haven’t even seen a picture of her since her face was in the fucking newspaper for shooting ‘Nick’ in the head nearly a decade ago.
Of course that wasn’t Nick. It was his twin brother, Santos. But that’s not the point. The point is, why do I care about her? Why? Why do I get so angry when I think about this stupid farm? It’s not that close to where Sasha lives. She’s in Fort Collins. It’s a three-hour drive away.
But come on. Three hours? Are you kidding me? Three hours is nothing. Hell, I’ve been driving for thirteen right now.
Three hours. He practically moved next door. And yeah, I get it. His daughter lives there too. So I’m sure he does want to be close to Lauren. And Lauren lives with Sasha, but that’s another thing. I practically raised Lauren until she was six. And fine, I was only nine when she was born, but by the time he shipped her off to Sasha, I was fifteen. She was like my baby sister one day, then the next—gone.
Living with Sasha. In Fort Collins. New life, new name. She even got a pony.
You know what I got? A front-row seat to a shadow government global war, that’s what I got.
“Yeah,” I mutter, taking a turn too fast so the tires of my truck skid sideways across the loose gravel. “I’ve got issues.” I straighten out the wheel, barely avoiding a slip into the ditch, and then press my foot down on the accelerator. I’m not really sure where I’m at and the cell signal out here is spotty. So I sit up in my seat and peek around, trying to find a landmark.
Nick’s house is between two fields. If this were winter the fields would not matter. They’d be empty and brown like all the others. But it’s summer and that means the two fields on either side of Nick’s shitty house are filled with sunflowers.
I scan the horizon for any sign of yellow, but there’s mostly corn out here now and it’s that super-tall genetically engineered kind, so I have to travel past two more fields before I find what passes for a hill in Nebraska. I stop at the top, which is like twelve feet above sea level, get out of the truck, climb into the bed, then onto the roof, and scan in every direction.
My lips creep up in a small smile when I spot it. A blanket of yellow off in the west.
But I don’t get down right away. I stay there on top of the truck. Not a sign of life—other than grasshoppers and birds—for ten miles, at least. I guess it’s nice out here. I can see the attraction of emptiness. It’s a lot easier to live in your own skin when no one’s looking at you all the time. And isn’t that why Chek and I called Kentucky home? It’s a different kind of emptiness, but it’s all the same in the end.
Nick makes them plant the sunflowers for me. He told me that three years ago. That’s the last time I was here. And every year, on my birthday he sends me a picture of them. And if he knows where I am, he sends a bouquet.
Nick Tate has been giving me sunflowers on my birthday since I was six years old. He graduated up to bouquets when I turned ten. I guess I was worth more than a single flower that year because Nick, Lauren, and I had been travelling the southeast coast of the USA like we were permanent tourists for almost eight months before that day.
Then Chek came and got me. I balked a little in the beginning, but once I was back I was back, ya know? I missed training and jobs. But I had already fallen in love with Nick Tate by that time. No, not that kind of love. I don’t know if Nick and I will ever have that kind of love. Our love is something else. Something huge, and real, and even though we’re almost never together, we’re getting better at it.