Liberty Begins (The Liberty Series) (20 page)

Then there was target practice. I’d never shot a gun. I’d never wanted to shoot a gun. I
didn’t
want to shoot a gun, but I would be doing it shortly. Good thing I was having such a hard time running that I couldn’t focus too much on all the other stuff going on in my head.

Finally, just when I was absolutely sure I was going to die, the evil run was over. Matthew patted the ground next to him, so I could sit and stretch and we could talk. “That sucked,” I said, flopping down on the ground next time, completely slick with sweat, barely able to breathe.

“Wait till we do ten,” Matthew said, playfully, but I didn’t even have the energy to smile.

I watched him as he stretched out his hamstrings. Tall, muscular and blonde, he was perfect looking, all-American, usually smiling, with perfectly white, straight teeth. I knew he’d seen a lot in the service, and certainly working for John, but he didn’t seem affected by it.

“How do you do it?” I asked, still breathing hard, wiping the sweat from my brow. One thing I’d learned since we started training was that exercise made me think more clearly, more able to see the issue and be direct. That was the one benefit of blisters, sore muscles, and extreme fatigue: mental clarity.

“Do what?” Matthew asked, with a perplexed look on his face, as he stretched out his arms behind his back.

“How do you do such gruesome work and still be so normal?” I asked, bluntly. Darius and his water-board were still nagging me from the back of my mind. Seeing Matthew, clean cut, joking, and stretching in the sunlight seemed like the opposite of what we were really doing here.

He laughed. “I’m not sure that I’m normal. But I told you, Liberty, I fight bad guys. Just like John,” he said, and shrugged.

“It’s that simple?” I asked. “For real?”

“For real,” he said. “I don’t have a moral crisis about what I do. I’d have a moral crisis if I
didn’t
do what I do.”

I sat still and pondered this, letting my breathing return to somewhat normal, drinking some water. I believed him, believed that he believed it, and I understood what he was saying. It was just difficult for me to trust his confidence.
How could you be sure,
I wondered.
How could you be so sure that what you were doing was the right thing?

He seemed to know what I was thinking. “Run into a couple of more Rays,” he instructed. “Then throw in a Darius or two, and some suicide bombers, and you wouldn’t blink,” he said. “You wouldn’t think twice, either. Seriously.” He shrugged and went back to stretching, and I did the same.

“Sorry,”’ I said. I had overstepped my bounds. Matthew was the last person I wanted to offend; he’d been nothing but kind to me since I’d come onboard. “I just keep thinking about Darius, and what we’re going to do to Ray if we catch him…”

“Good,” said Matthew, looking at me directly. “You should think about it. You have to know what you’re committing to. But trust me: once you get your hands on him, once you look him in the eye, you won’t feel the way you think you will. Sometimes you can’t see the right path until it opens up in front of you.”

The right path
, I thought, wistfully. I wish the right path would open up in front of me and be visible, like the yellow brick road in
The Wizard of Oz
. Life would be so much easier if I had a map.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said to Matthew. “And thank you. You’ve been a good friend to me since I’ve been here. I appreciate it.”

He smiled at me. “No problemo,” he said, and I could tell the discussion was over. “Now, let’s get to the good stuff: what on earth did you do to John last night? I’ve never seen him this chipper before!”

It was extremely lucky that I was so red from running: for once, I couldn’t blush. I started laughing. “I guess, umm … I guess John took the r
ight path
last night,” I said, laughing, and managed to give Matthew a wicked grin. That was the thing about losing your virginity. You were finally in on the joke.

“You two,” Matthew said, shaking his head, getting up and walking towards the others. “You’re like two lovestruck teenagers. Just keep him happy — maybe he’ll let the rest of us sleep in one of these days!” He trotted off and I let myself sit there with my stupid grin on my face for one more minute.

John sauntered over, his grin mirroring mine. “Hi honey,” he said, dropping down to plant a kiss on top of my sweaty head. “Great job today.”

“On which thing?” I asked, wagging my eyebrows at him. Seeing him all sweaty in his running clothes with his ropey muscles showing made me feel even more giddy, more naughty. Even though I was totally sweaty and sore.
Biology conquers all, I guess.

“Don’t get me started while we’re in public,” he growled at me, kissing the side of my face. I swatted him away. I really was too disgusting to touch.

“Okay,” he said, “We have work to do. The good news?” he asked. I looked at him expectantly. “There’s a couple of things: You did awesome at your run this morning — fastest mile yet. I’m impressed,” he said. “On top of that, you were really hot this morning. And last night. Again, I’m impressed. And I am looking forward to more of that later,” he said to me lowly, forcefully, and a delicious wave of heat rolled through my belly and thighs.

“The bad news?” he asked, looking at me sympathetically. “We need to go brief the team about Ray. It’s time we made our plans.”

I got up, painfully, and followed him. I really hoped this was the right path.

The room we were using was in the big house, in the basement. There were long tables, folding chairs, and a huge, dry erase board mounted on the wall. Ian had sent down drinks and snacks; he had stopped me on my way in and handed me a very large glass of white wine.

“ESPN’ll be on if you get bored, my dear,” he said, and winked at me.

Once again, I would have vastly preferred to watch ESPN with him, safe on the couch, than face another discussion about Ray. At least this one wouldn’t be personal. I hoped.

Corey had set up a laptop and a projector; the lights were dimmed and a map of downtown Eugene sprang up on the board. Another one of the guys, Sean, who had a brown buzz cut and a smattering of freckles, went up to the board with a laser pointer. Next to the map, a fairly recent picture of Ray materialized. I winced, sucking in a breath. John put his hand on my back and rubbed it.

“Raymond Lawrence is forty eight, an on and off convenience store worker,
here
—” Sean said, using his pointer to show the Quik n E-Z Mart where Ray sometimes worked. “He is also a drug dealer: heroin, cocaine, crack cocaine, marijuana, ecstasy, and sometimes prescription drugs. His major clientele is a group of heroin junkies that have been buying from him for years. His legal address is
here
—” he said, pointing to another city street, “in an apartment between the university and the downtown area. This area is known for its vagrants, a high volume of meth-amphetamine related crimes, as well as a high level of unemployment.”

Ethan raised his hand. “Does he deal meth?” he asked.

“Not to my knowledge,” Sean said. His freckles made him appear younger and more easy-going than he actually was. He sprinted the last mile of every run, trying to beat his time, and he was always the first one to hit the weight room. “Ray appears to be old school. He’s been doing this for a decade, with mostly repeat clients, many of whom are aging hippies. Also, he lives with his mother. Rosario Lawrence. Perhaps he can’t pull off the manufacturing component necessary for meth production because of his living situation.

“Liberty,” Sean called, in a professionally neutral voice, “do you know anything about Mrs. Lawrence? I couldn’t find too much.”

“I never met her,” I stammered, and then cleared my voice. Everyone turned, looking for me, so I shakily stood up. “From what I know, she didn’t have any family left besides Ray. Her husband died a long time ago, and her sister, too, if I’m remembering right. She used to take in sewing and mending from her neighbors. My mom sent a dress to her once to have the zipper replaced. Ray used to leave our house sometimes to go have dinner with her. He said she was lonely, and that she worried about him.”

Sean nodded at me and I sat down. I could feel myself blushing; I wasn’t used to speaking in front of a crowd. I took a long sip of wine and mentally sent a thank you to John’s dad. John reached over and squeezed my hand under the table. He knew this was hard on me, but he wasn’t going to stop just because of that.
He really wants to get him,
I thought, and this sent a cold shiver down my spine. I was afraid. Now that this had been set in motion, and all twenty of John’s employees were down in this briefing room, talking about Ray, it seemed real. It was go time.
They were going to get him. They were going to make him pay.
Unlike Darius, though, Ray had no information that they wanted: they just wanted
him
, his head on a platter. John must have sensed my discomfort; he looked at me steadily, holding my hand firmly, trying to comfort me. His face, which had become so dear and familiar to me in such a short amount of time, reassured me.

He was doing this because he loved me.

He was also doing this because someone had hired him to.

My heart started racing. Maybe he would tell me tonight; maybe I would finally hear the client’s name. In my heart, I knew who it was — it could only be one person, the one person I had left in the world.
Sasha.
How she had acquired the money and the knowledge to hire John was beyond me, but I was dying to find out. Any time I’d tried to bring up the subject with him, he’d just told me that we would discuss the client at the right time, when we were wrapping up training and getting ready to go to Eugene. That was now. The only training left was me learning to shoot.

I couldn’t really focus on the rest of the meeting; my thoughts kept bouncing around between Ray, my sister Sasha, the idea of going to Eugene again, Darius, images from last night, and John.

John.
So much pleasure and so much pain coursed through me when I thought about him. Pleasure came from thinking about last night and this morning; heat shot through me when I pictured him naked, above me, the muscles in his chest straining and pulsing. Sitting this close to him now literally lit my body on fire. Even though there were other people around, it didn’t matter. I twined my fingers through his and he smiled, even though his eyes were trained on Sean.
I love you,
I thought.

That’s where the pain came in. I
did
love him; it was as natural as breathing for me. I had as much faith in my love as I did in the belief that I would wake up tomorrow and it would be morning; my love for him simply
was
, like it had been waiting to happen, waiting for an eternity to spring to life. It had been so easy for me to give myself to him, when I had never dreamed that would happen for me. It was yet another thing that had been set in motion that I was powerless to control. Now it was part of who I was. It always would be.

Deep down I knew I would always love him. But the part of me that was guarded, that guarded my heart, told me we wouldn’t be together forever. He would soon see through his haze of lust — see that I wasn’t from his world and would never be good enough to fit in.

All I had to offer him was my youth, my body. I had learned in Vegas that not only were these commodities a dime a dozen, they didn’t last. Real love, real families, must be built of stronger stuff: similar upbringings, education, values, life experiences. Parity. I had no parity with John. Even if I quit stripping and managed to scrape together enough money to go to community college someday, we were countries, continents, worlds apart. The fact that I was here now was just a crazy coincidence.

He said he loved me. I believed him. I trusted him innately, reflexively, without stopping to think or doubt. I believed that he believed it; I believed it was true for him
right now.
I just also happened to believe in the long view, which told me that if something seemed too good to be true, it probably was. Millionaires did not rush in on white horses to save strippers. Fairytales were not real. No one was coming to rescue me: this was a lesson I’d learned a long time ago.