Nolan: Return to Signal Bend (29 page)

Her nose had stopped bleeding, finally. Pattie cleaned her up and gave her a couple of pills and some ice packs, then got her as comfortable as she could on the examining room table, with a pillow and a blanket. She dimmed the lights and said Tasha would be in as soon as she could.

Knowing that she wasn’t the biggest worry, Iris didn’t protest, but she hated being alone in that dim room. Without any other stimulation, her brain played its most classic hit on a loop. Never in all the years since it had happened had Iris been so tortured by that reality as while she lay alone in the clinic.

She needed Toby. She needed her daddy. She needed Nolan.

Hugging the paper-covered pillow, she rolled gingerly to her side and cried some more.

The lights came up. “Are you still hurting? Do you need something stronger, honey?”

Tasha came over and stroked her head. Iris wiped her eyes. “No. I’m just…I’m sorry. Is Gia okay?”

Anger clenched Tasha’s face. “She’ll be okay. She was dosed, but you got there before anything worse happened. She’s sleeping. We’ll get it out of her system, and she’ll be fine. Grounded until she’s forty, but fine. You’re the one who’ll be healing for a while.” She patted Iris’s leg. Can you sit up for me? Let’s see if we need to do X-rays.”

~oOo~

She did get X-rays, but nothing was broken but what they’d already known was broken. While Tasha was setting her nose, somebody knocked, and the door swung open. Her father stood there, looking ruffled and exhausted, but not hurt. Iris felt better just seeing him.

“Hi, Daddy.”

He smiled sadly at her and turned his eyes to Tasha. “She okay?”

“The nose is the worst of it. She’ll be ready to go in a few minutes.”

With a nod, he said, “I’ll be outside, flower. Ready when you are.”

“Daddy, no!” Both Tasha and her dad got worried brows at the strength of her plea, but she didn’t care. She didn’t want to be alone. “Stay. I need you.”

He came over and picked up her hand. “You hurting, baby?”

Tasha finished setting her nose and stepped back, out from between Iris and her daddy.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Her father cast that aside with a shake of his head. “We’ll talk about what happened later. I’m just glad you’re not worse hurt.” He lifted her hand and kissed it. His hands were bruised, the knuckles scraped. One of his rings, an ornately carved horse’s head, had red in its crevices. Iris didn’t have to ask to know it was blood.

“You can take her home.” Tasha shook a pill bottle. “Two of these every four hours as long as the pain is bad. I’ll come by in the afternoon and see how she’s doing.”

“What are they?” her dad asked, frowning.

“Just Darvocet. Nothing too strong.”

He nodded and turned back to Iris. “Can you walk, baby?”

She could; she’d walked through the bar, she’d walked to Lilli’s truck, she’d walked into this room.

She nodded. “Yeah, I can walk. But…I don’t want to. Will you carry me?”

For a heartbeat or two, her father simply studied her. Iris couldn’t see any particular thought or emotion on his face beyond the love that was always there and the worry he had for her hurt. If he were to ask why she wanted to be carried like a child, she would have no answer to give him. She had no answer for herself. She knew only that she wanted it—she
needed
it.

“Of course I’ll carry you, baby flower.” He slid his arms around her and lifted her off the examining table, and Iris laid her head on his strong chest while he carried her out of the clinic.

~oOo~

He carried her when they got home, too. All the way up to her room. There, he set her down and kissed her head.

“Go ahead and change into some clean clothes. I need to go back down and talk to Shannon, and I’ll bring you up some water for your pills. You need anything else?” When she shook her head, he kissed her again. “I’ll be right back.”

She collected a clean set of pajamas from a drawer and took them to the bathroom. There, she shed her bloody, beer-stained, reeking clothes—which she planned to burn during the day—and washed as well as she could, using the fingernail brush everywhere. She hadn’t been raped or even close, but she felt almost as if she had. Every inch of her skin crawled with revulsion.

Her freshly-splinted nose meant no shower, so she couldn’t wash her hair, but she brushed and brushed until it was as clean as she could make it that way. She brushed her teeth and used mouthwash until she stopped spitting the ruddy brown of old blood into the sink. Then she got into fresh pajamas and went back to her room, leaving the pile of gross clothes where they lay. She couldn’t bear the thought of touching them again.

In her room, her father was waiting, with the promised water, as well as a little plate of chocolate cookies. He smiled as she came in. “Shannon’s gonna leave you alone tonight, but she says she loves you and she’s just down the hall if you need her.”

Fighting tears yet again, Iris nodded. She loved her stepmom, but it wasn’t her she needed tonight. The person she needed was away, maybe hurt, and nobody seemed to care.

Her father picked Toby up from her bed and held him out to her, and Iris broke down. She grabbed her bear and clutched him close, burying her face into his fur, trying to be careful of her nose, and she cried like the lost little girl she felt like.

When big strong arms came around her again and lifted her up, Iris leaned in. She let her father pick her up again and set her on his lap as he sat on her bed. “Shhhh, baby,” he murmured, rocking her. “It’s okay. It’s over now. It’s taken care of. You’re okay. Gia’s okay. Shhhh.”

It hurt her face and her throat to cry so hard, but she did until she’d spent all her tears, and he rocked her all the while, muttering those little reassurances. But he was wrong, and Iris knew then that he had to know. She couldn’t keep the secret any longer. “Daddy. Daddy, I remember.”

Still rocking, he nodded. “I know, baby. But it’s over. They can’t hurt you.”

“No, Daddy. I
remember
. I remember it all. I always have.”

He rocked for a few more seconds and then stopped, and his body stiffened. Iris could feel the dawning of understanding come over his body.

“Iris.” The word had no strength or sound. Just air over her head.

“I don’t want to talk about it. Just…I can’t stop thinking about it now, and it hurts. I don’t want to be alone.”

“I’ll stay with you, baby. I’m so sorry. Goddamn, I’m sorry. Ah, baby. Ah, baby.” His voiced cracked.

“No!” she cried. “I need Nolan. I need Nolan. Daddy, why don’t you care? He’s hurt, I know he is. He’d be home if he was okay. He’d be with me if he was okay. Why won’t anybody help him? I need him. I need him. Please, Daddy. I
need
him.”

She didn’t know what she wanted her father to do. She didn’t know if there was anything he
could
do. But she didn’t care. She was lost and afraid and trapped in her eight-year-old head, and she wanted Nolan, and that was all she knew. She needed him, and he needed her. They made each other okay. Everything would be okay if he would just come home. She needed her daddy to fix it.

He held her tightly. “Okay, flower. Okay.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Vega wrapped Nolan’s wound in fresh gauze. “Fever’s finally cleared, and you’re healing well. How’s it feel?”

It felt significantly better, except for a deep, maddening itch. “I’d know better if I wasn’t tied up most of the time.”

“You wouldn’t be tied up if you and I could come to an understanding. I’m not going to let you kill me.” He handed Nolan a couple of Tylenols and his water bottle.

Nolan swallowed down the pills. “You’re just gonna keep me prisoner until I fuckin’ rot?”

Not sure how it had happened, he’d lost track of the days he’d been here. He saw the sun rise and set in the windows, yet he’d lost count of how many times that cycle had occurred. It felt like he’d been trapped in here, bound to a chair or the bed except when he had a gun aimed at him, for weeks, maybe months. But the healing progress of his wound suggested much less time. A week, maybe two?

“Rot or see reason, yes. I don’t have anything better to do, and even your company is better than none.” He stood and put the medical supplies away.

Nolan watched him carefully. Vega kept the medical kit in the same locked cabinet he kept his ammunition and small arms. Every day, Vega left the cabin to do a perimeter check and was gone for upwards of an hour, Nolan thought. If he could work his way free and get into that cabinet somehow, then he could be ready to shoot Vega in the face when he came back.

But he was always so damn tired.

“I need the toilet.”

Vega nodded and locked the cabinet. Putting the key in his pocket, he got his revolver from the table and came back to Nolan, sitting at the other side. He cut his bonds.

“You know, I have to fly down to Winnipeg in a few days. If we’re good, I’ll fly you down there and leave you to find your way home. If not, then I’m going to have to keep you up here, tied up for the whole day. If something happens to me then—plane crash, who knows—you’ll die of thirst and starvation, tied to the bed. Or you could just stop this bullshit.”

Ignoring him, Nolan walked to the bathroom, Vega behind him, pointing that gun. He’d tried to take it from him once, and had ended up getting pistol-whipped for his trouble. Vega was trained in combat styles Nolan couldn’t even name. Even if both his arms were working perfectly well, he would only be able to take this guy by surprise.

More than once, it had occurred to Nolan to simply lie. To pretend to forgive Vega and set aside his need for revenge—but he couldn’t do it. The lie would just not come.

More vexing than that was the way his need for revenge remained acute and compelling, but the sense of its rightness kept slipping. He’d been in this cabin for however long, and he’d been a prisoner, tied up almost the whole time. But Vega had taken good care of him, and he tried every day, throughout the day, to talk. Nolan clung to his hatred like a shield, but Vega battered at it with the weapon of not being the monster Nolan had imagined for so many long years.

He was a man. Just a man. He talked about his wife, Dora—whom Nolan had known as La Zorra, the head of the Águilas cartel—and his children, sharing memories of them, and lamenting all the years he’d been away from them. He’d even cried over their deaths a couple of times.

Nolan hated him all the more for shaking the foundation of his need. He’d put everything on the line to be here, for a single purpose. He couldn’t leave unless it was done. He had to see it through. For Havoc, and for himself. Past and future.

But against his will, despite his intention, he was getting to know the man who had killed his father, and he couldn’t keep a firm hold on his certainty that what he meant to do was right.

As always, Vega stood and watched, gun aimed, while Nolan used the weird toilet and then washed his hands.

He turned and stared at his father’s killer. “I
am
gonna kill you. You think you’ve got me bent over, but you’ll slip, and I’ll be ready.”

Vega sighed. “Come on. I need to do a check. Chair or bed?”

“Fuck you.”

Vega’s grin showed his irritation. “Bed, then. Let’s go. Maybe you can take a nap while I’m gone.”

Once Nolan was stretched out on his back, Vega tucked his gun into his holster and pulled fresh rope. Nolan had learned the hard way that this moment, while he was being tied up, did not provide an opportunity he could exploit. The time he’d tried, Vega had barely reacted to the kick Nolan had landed, except to have his gun in his hand and in Nolan’s face in the very next second.

As Vega tied down his left arm, and the pulling pain wasn’t so bad, Nolan wondered whether now, after more healing, he might be able to change the outcome of a hand-to-hand fight. He was young and strong, though these days in the cabin had sapped him noticeably. Still, he should be able to take down a guy at least twenty years older than he.

His energy was too low, however. He had to fight his mind to keep his focus on finding an opportunity. He’d refused painkillers except for Tylenol, but he wondered if Vega weren’t drugging him some other way. Except that he made a point of eating and drinking from the same source, so Nolan couldn’t figure out how he was doing it.

Nolan needed to fight. He needed to get the job done and get out of this mess.

But when Vega left, Nolan felt his eyes droop.

~oOo~

When he woke up, the sun was nearly down. Vega had lit the lanterns, and all that remained of daylight was a greying orange glow in the windows. Nolan lifted his head to get his bearings and scratched an itch over the bridge of his nose.

He’d dropped his hand before he’d realized what he’d done. He lifted it again. And his other. He moved his legs.

He wasn’t tied down.

Quickly, he came up to a sitting position and swung his legs over the side of the mattress, ready to fight if he needed to fight. The room swung with him, and he took a breath to settle his head and his focus.

Vega sat at the table, in his usual place, watching him. His revolver sat before him, framed by his hands.

“What’s going on?” Nolan asked as he stood up, slowly now, keeping his brain oriented and letting his body get used to its freedom.

“Have a seat, Nolan.”

Nolan glanced over to the weapons cabinet. It was closed and locked. The guns that normally rested on the rack above it were gone. Unless he wanted to throw a lighted lantern at Vega—a possibility, but a dire one—the weapon situation wasn’t good. Except for the gun Vega had.

That gun might have been intended for him, but Vega had had limitless opportunity to kill him, so Nolan doubted he would just aim and shoot now.

He went and sat. “What the fuck?”

“It’s in the Tylenol, kid.”

Every time Vega called him ‘kid,’ Nolan felt it like a spike in his skull. He hated being called kid, and not just because it called out his youth and comparative inexperience. Havoc had called him ‘kid.’ It hadn’t been an endearment, not like the way his mother called him, to this day, ‘kiddo’; it had been merely a word, much the way Vega had just said it. And yet, in Nolan’s mind, the only voice he wanted to hear that word in was his father’s.

Now, though, he focused on the other words Vega had said. “What?”

“A little cocktail keeping you mellow.”

Motherfucker. Nolan tried not to react. He wanted that gun, so he had to stay cool. He nodded. “Why tell me now?”

Instead of answering his question, Vega said, “My grandfather was killed by a drug cartel. My grandmother was raped, but she escaped and got to the States with her four kids. That’s how my family came to be there. Not long after they came over, she had a baby from that rape—a boy. It didn’t matter how he’d come to be—everybody loved him.”

“Why do you think I care about that?”

Vegas eyes shone with irritation, but he didn’t answer. Apparently, he had a story to tell. “My father was the oldest of her kids. He was fifteen when they came over the border. He was a big kid and looked older than he was. He started working right away—day labor. Never went to school again, not that he’d gone much before.

“The other kids all went to school. The US was good to my family, even as illegals. But when my uncle, the youngest one, was ten, he didn’t come home from school. They couldn’t go to the police, because everybody was illegal. So my Tio Julio just disappeared.

“I was born by then, but I don’t remember him. But I do remember what it was like for my father, and my uncle and aunts, and especially my
abuela
, to have him gone. My father insisted all his life that it was the cartel. He didn’t know how, but he was always absolutely certain that Felipe Santaveria had come for his son.”

Nolan reacted to that name, and Vega stopped talking and regarded him with quiet interest as his—apparently drugged—brain put pieces of information together. “You’re saying Julio Santaveria was your uncle. The one who disappeared.”

Vega nodded. “My father was right. He died not knowing that. He was obsessed, and it gnawed at him every day. Nobody believed him, not even me. I went into law enforcement because a cartel had broken my family, and to make my father proud, but I was shocked when Julio’s name started to show up. By the time my uncle was ten, Felipe had risen to the head of the cartel. By the time I was a special agent, Julio was making noise himself. But Julio is a common name, so I told myself it was a coincidence. It was easier to believe it was coincidence. When I knew it wasn’t, my father was dead. We’d all let him believe the truth alone until even he thought he was crazy.”

Vega was quiet for a few seconds. Nolan sat and tried to sort through the barrage of shocking information.

“I volunteered to go deep cover. We started off as a unit with ‘any means necessary’ clearance. Eventually, even that was too restrictive, and we went off the grid completely.”

“Why?” Nolan had forgotten that he was facing an enemy; he was wrapped up in the story the man was telling.

“At first, I wanted to bring my uncle back to my
abuela
. Pull him in peacefully. Prison in the States was better than nothing. But the deeper I got, the more I understood that Felipe had warped him too much. Julio Santaveria was not my Tio Julio. Then I wanted to end the culture that had hurt my family so much. Take the whole thing down.”

“Did he know you were his nephew?”

Vega nodded. “That was how I got so close. Unprecedented access and latitude. And yet, he’d have opened my throat in a blink if he’d even suspected that I’d crossed him at all. I did a lot of horrible shit at his side. I saw him do a lot more.” He laughed without mirth. “I spent my life trying to end the brutality of the cartels, but all I’ve done is participate in it.
That
is what ‘any means necessary’ gets you.”

“Why tell me this?”

“Because I’m tired, Nolan, and we’re out of time. I earned protection, and the facts in my head are valuable, so I have a detail on me—as you know. I have to go to Winnipeg. If I don’t show, that’ll set an alarm off, and the agents who come looking will kill you on sight. I like you, and I’m sorry for what I did to your family. We can’t seem to come to an understanding. You need to balance a scale, so let’s balance it. But I need to say some things first.”

Nolan blinked. “You’re what—gonna let me kill you?”

Again, Vega didn’t answer him and instead continued with his own agenda. “You came here through the woods, and you saw the bear and her cub. I suspect that you saw or heard some of the rest of the population out here. All manner of bears, moose, elk, coyotes. And wolves. The wolves will avoid you if you’re moving—most of the animals out here know enough about humans to know we are higher on the food chain than they are. But if you’re still long enough, they’ll come out and see if you’re dinner. Don’t bury me. Don’t burn me. Dig out the bullet and drag me out to the woods, eastward, and the wolves will come. If my detail finds me like that, any risk to you and yours will die with me. If they find me shot on the floor of the cabin, or buried in a grave, or even simply missing, they will investigate.”