The Masked Truth (13 page)

And Mom
was
right. I might long for a saber in my hand right now, but what I have is even better: the ability to deal with this situation. My confidence has taken a beating in the last four months, but even at its lowest, it’s enough to let me believe we can get out of this, to keep going, not curl up and pray for rescue, divine or otherwise.

My parents taught me that life—and God—helps those who help themselves. If I’ve gotten any divine boost here, it’s the guy walking beside me: Max. He’s exactly the partner I need to keep my spirits and my confidence up, keep me calm and keep me moving with a clear plan in mind.

That plan is getting our asses to the back door. Finding it takes some work, but Gray and Predator seem to have retreated upstairs, possibly in pursuit of Aaron or Brienne, and I don’t want to be glad of that, especially when both tried to help me. But the truth is that each time I hear a noise upstairs, I think,
Good, it’s not us
.

We find the back door. It’s locked.

“Bang on it?” I ask.

Max purses his lips and runs his hand over the steel. “It’s thinner than the front one. It’ll make more noise. But will anyone be back here?” He puts his ear to the door. “I don’t hear anything. I did out front—not much, but I heard noise.”

“Most of the activity will be at the front,” I say. “But they’ll cover all exits.”

“Then we have to risk knocking. If I ask you to find a room and lie low—”

“No.”

“All right, I won’t ask. This time, though, I want a plan, because if it’s only a couple of officers covering the back, they might not hear us. Gray and Predator will.”

We whisper out a plan and then locate a safe room. Then Max bangs on the door. The boom reverberates loudly enough that I jump and so does he, and he turns with an “Oh, shit!” look on his face. We both go still, waiting to see if anyone comes to the door. When he notices I’m still standing guard, he waves frantically for me to get to the safe room, but I turn away and watch down the hall.

After five seconds of silence, there’s a reaction … footfalls pounding overhead.

Max’s gaze swings up, tracking the sound. The footsteps are running toward the stairs. Then they’re on the steps, the cadence changing to the
boom-ba-boom
of someone racing down. Max tenses, still tracking that sound, knowing we have only a few moments, but we need every second we can steal, to see if there is a response from outside, to make sure they know we’re here, that it’s not a random banging, that something is going on and—

The stairwell door slams shut. Max grabs the letter opener from my hand and raps it hard against the steel back door. Three quick raps, three slower, three quick, a pause, then again. I recognize the sound, but it’s not until he turns back toward me that I recall a fifth-grade project and realize it’s Morse code for SOS.

We get to our safe room and hide behind boxes to catch our breath. I grin at him again and whisper, “You’re
a genius, you know that?” and he hesitates, with this look as if not sure he’s hearing right.

“Morse code,” I say. “I would have never thought of that.”

“I should have thought of it sooner. Now we have to hope
they
know what it means.”

“They will. They’ll realize something’s wrong, and whatever Gray has been telling them, they’re not going to believe him now. They’ll insist on talking to one of us, and he can bluff all he wants, but they’ll know it’s all gone to hell, and this will become a rescue mission. Which means”—my grin broadens—“we just need to lie low and wait it out.”

A few minutes later, we overhear Gray and Predator discovering Cantina, bound up. Their curses ricochet through the empty building. We’re three halls and about a hundred paces from the therapy room, so we sneak to the door of our safe room and crack it open to listen. They’re too far away for us to catch more than disjointed phrases:

“…  the Mexican girl and the British kid …”

“…  say anything …”

“…  looking for my gun, I guess …”

“…  taken down by a couple crazy kids?”

Crazy kids. Not wild and crazy. Nuts crazy. That’s what you get when people find out you’re in therapy. Most don’t say it outright, but you can see it in their eyes, that wary look, as if you’re going to start ranting or muttering to yourself. Some will say it, like my aunt, when she thought I couldn’t hear.
Why does Riley need therapy? She’s just having a rough time. She isn’t crazy or anything. Take her on a vacation and let her relax and everything will be fine
.

Mom says that’s just plain ignorance. She’d know—she needed grief counseling after Dad died. My aunt probably told her she just needed a vacation then too.

When Gray accuses Cantina of having been taken down by “a couple crazy kids,” the injured man defends himself. Gray tells him to shut the hell up, just shut the hell—

Silence. Then Gray snorts a laugh and says, “Well, that works,” and Predator says, “I thought it might. Should have done that earlier. Once this is over, I don’t plan to spend my day finding him a doctor.”

“I suppose you expect part of his cut.”

“Fifty percent.”

“That’s why I like you, buddy. You’re a fair man. Now let’s find those kids.”

Max pulls the door shut, and it’s only now that I realize what happened. That Predator shot Cantina.

Put him down like a dog.

I’ve heard that expression too, and again it’s not until now that I realize the full horror of it. I know what Cantina was. I wouldn’t have given a damn if we’d walked in there earlier to find him dead. Succumbed to his injuries.

But this is different. This is cold, and it is pointless, and it is callous. It is shooting another human being just because you can.

Well, that shut him up, didn’t it? Ha ha
.

Put down like a dog.

“Riley?” Max whispers, his breath warm against my ear.

I imagine Predator casually firing his gun at his partner’s head.

Brains splattered on the wall
.

Put down like a dog
.

Should have done that earlier
.

Ha-ha
.

“Riley …”

“I know.” I take a deep breath and struggle to focus.

“Why does everyone call you Mexican?” he asks.

My head jerks up. “Huh?”

“I’m distracting you with an unrelated and potentially rude question. Aaron called you Mexican. So did they. But you don’t have an accent, and I knew a guy at school named Vasquez who was from Spain. So as the foreigner who hasn’t quite figured out your country, what tells them you’re Mexican?”

I want to brush off the question. Really not the time. But that’s the point, isn’t it? I look down at my quavering hands, and when I squeeze my eyes shut, all I see is Predator, pulling the trigger.

I can hear Gray’s and Predator’s footsteps. They’re far enough away and we’re well enough hidden that we’re safe here. For now.

I glance at Max. “I don’t have an accent because my family has been here for three generations. My father’s family comes from Spain. My mother’s is from Cuba. That makes me Hispanic, and the presumption here—far enough from the border that there aren’t a lot of Latino immigrants—is that Hispanic equals Mexican.”

“So Hispanic and Latino mean the same thing?”

I shake my head. “Hispanic means you are descended from a country that speaks Spanish. Latino means you’re descended from a country in Latin America. Some are both, like Cuba. But if you come from Brazil, you’re Latino and not Hispanic, because the official language is Portuguese.”

“And if it’s Spain, it’s Hispanic and not Latino. Excellent. My lesson in American terminology for the day.”

We both listen. The footsteps remain distant. My heart is still thumping, though, so I whisper, “I’m presuming that accent’s real and you
are
British.”

“Through and through. There might be a hint of Irish thrown in, but” —he lowers his voice to a conspiratorial whisper— “we don’t talk about that.”

When I raise my brows, he says, “I’m joking. Mostly.”

“I’ve heard you mention your parents. Any siblings?”

“Not a one. Mostly it’s just me and Mum. My parents never married. Both on the far side of forty when I came along. Quite the surprise, I’m sure. They decided to just get on with it. Co-parenting and good friends and all that.” Another conspiratorial whisper. “I try not to think about the ‘all that’ part, but they’re responsible adults and I doubt another slip is likely at their age.”

“Uh-huh.”

“A very odd parenting arrangement, I know. But it works. And returning to the question about siblings, I believe you have a sister?”

“Sloane. She’s a year older.”

“Good friend or pain in the arse?”

“Somewhere down the middle. Closer to the latter.” I think of Sloane and of Mom. Have they heard what’s happened yet? I hope they haven’t. As disappointing as it will be to get out there and not run into Mom’s arms, I hope they know nothing of this.

“All right, then,” Max says, slapping his thighs and rising. “I do believe we’ve chatted and stalled quite long enough. As lovely as it would be to stay here until the cavalry arrives, our intrepid captors seem to be searching the building. Best to give them a moving target. Let’s head out, troops.”

Max is right. If they’re systematically hunting for us, we can’t stay where we are.

“We need a cell phone,” I say as we leave the room.

Max frowns over.

“Yes, I know that’s why we went into the therapy room,” I say. “But if Maria’s phone isn’t there, then Aimee left it upstairs.”

“Or the bad guys found and took it.”

True. “But Aimee thought she left it up there. Besides, Gray and Predator just came from upstairs, meaning it’s the last place they’ll look again. We can hunt for the phone and then hide while we wait for whoever heard your SOS.”

“Presuming someone—”

“I know it’s not a given that
anyone
heard,” I say. “Which is all the more reason we need a cell phone. And your meds. You don’t keep backup ones anywhere, do you?”

He shakes his head. Then his eyes go wide. “Wait. Yes. There are two in my other jeans. I was wearing them yesterday, stuffed my pills in, got distracted with a book and took two from the bottle instead. Then I found the pills later and meant to put them back but got distracted again.”

“Well, it’s a good thing you’re easily distracted then, right?”

I’m teasing him, but his smile falters and he mumbles something as we head into the hall.

“I do that a lot,” I whisper. “Get distracted when I’m reading.” When his cheeks flush, I say, “And the whole I-know-what-that’s-like thing is never helpful, is it? Which I should know from therapy.”

He manages a smile. “I hope no one would dare say that to you.”

“Actually, yes, my last therapist did. He said he had some idea of what I’d gone through, because he’d seen his dog get hit by a car.”

Max’s brows arch.

“I’m serious. I walked out and told my mother. She fired his ass on the spot. Mom’s not the type to cause a scene, but she still knows how.”

“Sounds like my mother,” he says, and we both smile and then fall to silence as we make our way to the steps. There’s little danger of our whispers being overheard. We can hear Gray and Predator, and they’re heading the other way. Toward Aimee. Toward Lorenzo too? It’ll be easy enough to find him, with the blood in the hall. And when they do, if he’s still alive …

Put down like a dog.

I tell myself they won’t waste the ammo, because their supply is limited and he’ll be smart enough to fake dead.

If he isn’t already
.

I don’t think about that either. We reach the stairwell and slip through the door, shutting it behind us. Then we climb to the second floor. We’re still in stockinged feet. We’ve abandoned our footwear—too much to haul around. So we move silently, and when we come out into the hall, it is
not
silent.

There’s someone in Lorenzo’s bedroom.

His is the first past the stairway door. Aimee had pointed it out as we’d passed.

You and Sandra share a room. So do Brienne and Maria. The guys are on the other side of my room, Max in one and the two other boys in the second room. And Terry
—
that’s the other counselor—is at the end
.

She’d stopped and shaken her head.

No, not Terry. It’s Lorenzo. They swapped at the last minute. Not that you know either. But they’re both good guys
.

Max hears the noise from Lorenzo’s room as soon as I do, and he performs his usual shoulder-check, to be sure we both caught it. I nod almost before he looks over, my gaze fixed on the closed door. Then I do a check of my own, moving closer to whisper, “I’m sure I heard two sets of footsteps downstairs. You?”

His turn to nod now. We both ease forward. Max covers me. I turn the knob. It clicks louder than I expect, and I wince as noise erupts from inside, a scampering and scuffling. I open the door a crack, just as Aaron dives behind the twin bed.

“It’s us,” I whisper as I open it, and Brienne pops up from the bed, her eyes bright with terror. She blinks it back and then exhales and whispers, “We were sure they both went downstairs.”

“They did,” I say as I slide into the room, Max following.

Aaron’s up now. He sees Max, and his eyes narrow. “Didn’t get far, did you, asshole? Took off and left the rest of us to fend for ourselves.”

“Actually, he took me with him,” I say. “But there wasn’t any other choice or I would have—”

“We know,” Brienne says. “Aaron’s just being cranky.” She lowers her voice to a mock whisper. “Being shot at does that to him.”

Aaron rolls his eyes, and she shoots him a smile, and I know that we aren’t the only ones getting along better. Fighting for survival together shows you what counts and what doesn’t, and all that counts, really, is
Do you have my back?

“We’re looking for a cell phone,” Brienne says. She turns on a penlight. “Aaron remembered this was on his key chain. Luckily, it was still in his room. Now we just need a phone.”

“Lorenzo confiscated Maria’s,” Aaron said. “So we were hoping he left it here.”