The Voice inside My Head (19 page)

There’s utter silence for the next few seconds. Zach and his attackers stare at the wreckage and I slither on my belly toward the runway, trying to get close enough to signal Zach. I’m dimly aware of a quiet dripping and the strong smell of gasoline. I don’t realize the implications until I hear a
whoosh
and feel the heat of flames. I look back to see the plane ablaze and shudder to think of the pilot trapped inside. My attention is drawn back to the drug runners, as gunfire rings out from the darkness behind them. They hear it, too, and are thrown into panic, shouting as they race toward their burning plane. I have no choice — I have to run into the line of fire to save Zach. I scramble to my feet and am immediately thrown to the ground again by a deafening explosion, followed by snow falling everywhere.

The snow seems to confuse the drug runners as they halt in their tracks and put out their hands like they’re trying to catch it. Zach does the same thing. Only when he licks his hand do I realize what it is.

“Zach, get out of there!” I scream.

Another shot rings out and the bad guys resume their sprint for the forest, completely ignoring Zach and me. The sound of an engine draws my attention to the far end of the runway, where a truck is just emerging into the light. Armed
men in military fatigues clamber off the back. All at once, a second beam of light shines down from above. Looking up, I track the source to a helicopter hovering just overhead.

“Put your hands behind your heads and lie down on the ground!” a voice booms.

More gunfire rings out. I hit the dirt and am relieved to see Zach doing the same. “We should have run while we could,” I mutter.

“Are they going to arrest us?” Zach is on the ground next to me. We can barely hear each other over the chaos of shouting, chopper wings and pounding feet.

“No. We didn’t do anything wrong. But let me do the talking.”

Zach nods. I don’t know how I’m going to get us released if we do get arrested. Neither of us has enough cash for a lawyer. Would Dr. Jake bail me out? He’s going to regret ever offering to help me.

Three heavily armed guys are bearing down on us from the copter, and a dozen or so men are making their way over from the truck. Every one of them has a weapon trained on us.

“On your knees,” orders one of the copter guys. He’s close enough now that I can read the logo on his shirt: DEA. I’m not sure if I’m reassured or scared that he’s a fellow American.

“You don’t understand —” I start but he cuts me off.

“Do you boys realize you’ve just destroyed weeks of surveillance? Do you have any idea what the consequences are for impeding an ongoing investigation? If it was up to me, we’d have let the traffickers have you. Did I see one of you actually licking this stuff?”

Zach stares at the ground while I look around at the circle of furious faces.

“S-sorry,” I stammer, not sure what to respond to first. “My sister, Pat —”

“I know all about your sister,” he snaps. “We’ve had a dozen e-mails from her since she picked up on the drug trade passing through here. She even called a few times after we forced down the plane that dumped its cargo in the ocean. Your sister was pretty worked up about that. It wasn’t our fault, of course, but your sister wouldn’t let us hear the end of it.”

“But how do you know who
I
am?”

The DEA guy nods to the guys who came in on the truck, local police by the looks of them. I follow his gaze and my jaw drops as Reesie steps out from behind the throng.

“I knew you were planning to come up here, so after you left me, I went straight to the police. It took some convincing to get them to call reinforcements, but it was that or spend the night listening to my nattering.”

“I’m surprised they took so long,” I say.

Reesie gives me a small smile, but Zach frowns. “We could have escaped on our own.”

“So did the drug lords have something to do with Pat’s disappearance?” I turn back to the DEA guy.

“We don’t believe so. All I can tell you for certain is, she wasn’t kidnapped and taken off the island. We’ve been monitoring them too closely for that. But I have to say there were a lot of people who would have liked to shut your sister up. Someone on the island could have done something to her.”

“Didn’t you investigate?”

“This is a foreign country, son. Our operations here are limited to monitoring the drugs making their way onto U.S. soil. If we had some proof your sister’s death was drug-related, we could request an investigation, but all the reports we’ve had so far make suicide more likely.”

“You can’t believe my sister committed suicide!”

“No.” He shakes his head. “Personally, I don’t. I’m just telling you that unless we have evidence her disappearance is directly related to our work here, there’s nothing we can do.”

I hang my head in disappointment. I know I should be grateful Pat wasn’t kidnapped by drug traffickers, despite her best efforts to antagonize them, but all it feels like is another dead end and more reckless behavior I can’t make sense of.

“You kids need to go home now,” says the DEA guy, gently but firmly.

I look up to find both Zach and Reesie watching me. Reesie steps forward and takes my arm. Zach grabs the other one, more forcefully than necessary, and with me awkwardly sandwiched between them, we lumber off the airstrip. The local military have mostly dispersed into the bush to look for the druggie ground crew, and the DEA guys are heading over to the remains of the plane. I hope I haven’t really messed up their investigation. I’d like to think some good came from my sister’s relentless pushiness.

“I don’t get it,” I say to no one in particular as we turn onto the road heading back to town.

“What’s that, Luke?” Zach asks.

“Before she came here, Pat was vegan, clean living, hardworking, ambitious. She put my mom to bed when she’d
had too much to drink. Made sure we always had some kind of dinner on the table, nagged me about my homework, even got me to bed on time before I was old enough to stand up to her. She was always doing the right thing and pushing everyone else to do right as well, me especially. So I understand why she’d take on drug dealers, particularly if they were endangering the reef. But I don’t get the other stuff. Pete and Tracy said she was slutty, and Zach, you said she drank, and Mini Mike said she was eating meat. And, on top of it all, she was planning to give up her education, everything she’d been working toward her whole life. So why would she let go of some of her standards but hang on to the one that could get her killed?”

“Maybe because she could,” says Reesie.

I give her a questioning look.

“From what you’ve said, your sister took on a lot of responsibility in your family. Maybe because your mom wasn’t looking after you properly, your sister felt like she had to set a good example. It sounds like she was tryin’ real hard to be perfect. But here no one was gonna get hurt if she let go a bit. She only had herself to be responsible for. I’ve told you before, tourist kids go a little crazy down here.”

I nod, trying to fit this idea into everything else I never understood about Pat. “Then why is it that the only thing she didn’t change was being a pushy, meddling, know-it-all?” I demand angrily. “Wouldn’t you think if she were going for a total personality transplant, she could have dispensed with the one quality most likely to get her killed?”

Zach and Reesie are silent for several minutes.

“She didn’t drink that much,” says Zach finally.

“And I don’t think my brother would have been planning to marry a girl with loose morals,” Reesie adds. “Maybe the change wasn’t as big as you think it was. Maybe she just loosened the jib a bit, let the sails out.”

“I didn’t want her to come down here,” I confess, glad for the cover of darkness so I can’t see Reesie’s face. “But I knew she had to get away. Pat and I aren’t like the usual kids you see here who’ve never had anything bad happen to them. I know you’ve both had your troubles, but I think most kids can jump into the ocean and really believe nothing’s going to go wrong. I envy them their naive optimism. I wish I was that way. But the weird thing is, Pat wasn’t naive. She knew as well as I did that the worst-case scenario was the one most likely to happen. Yet no matter how many times our lives came dangerously close to going off the rails, she never faltered. She lived her life in defiance of our reality. I loved that about her. I hated it, too.

“Then some stuff happened with my mom, and for the first time, I could see Pat losing her nerve. It’s not that she didn’t believe in herself anymore, but she didn’t believe in us, or maybe just me. She didn’t think we could survive without her. She started talking about deferring her scholarship and maybe taking a year off.”

“So how’d she end up here?” asks Reesie.

I hesitate. I want to tell her the whole truth, but I’m really starting to like this girl. I don’t want to disappoint her. I’m sick of disappointing people. “She got offered the internship,” I say simply. “It was too good to pass up.” I stop and we walk for several minutes in silence. Once again I’ve taken the coward’s way out and left my sister holding the bag.
“She tried to talk it over with me before she accepted, but I didn’t let her.”

“How’d she feel about that?” asks Reesie, and I can hear the smile in her voice.

“She was pissed. I didn’t even say good-bye.”

“That must have made it easier for her to leave.”

“She never looked back.” My voice is tight, the memory still painful.

“There’s some who see a problem and walk right on by. But others are always gonna look for a way to fix it.”

“I know. That was my sister all over. I was her project for a lot of years. I guess it’s not so surprising she found something else to get worked up about when she came down here.”

“It’s not surprising,” Reesie agrees. “But I wasn’t talking about your sister.”

I stop walking and turn to her. Zach drops my arm and, for a moment, it’s like Reesie and I are the only ones here. The clouds have cleared. Her face glimmers in the moonlight.

“What do you mean?”

“Your sister never could have left if she thought you still needed her. You made sure she knew you didn’t want anything from her anymore.”

“Then it’s my fault she came down here?” I find it ironic that even when I don’t tell Reesie the whole truth, she arrives at the same conclusion.

“You did the right thing, Luke. You had to let her go. Something tells me you spend a lot of time trying to make things right for other people.”

“Ha! You really don’t know me. I hurt everyone around me.”

“Really? The only one I’ve seen you hurting is yourself.”

“Whoa,” exclaims Zach, making us both jump. “This is like ‘Dr. Phil,’ where people have all these secrets and stuff gets revealed, like affairs and children no one knew about, and Dr. Phil has to tell everyone what’s really going on in their own lives because they don’t even know until he tells them. It’s really deep, like magma-deep. You should be a doctor, Reesie. You could go on TV and everything.”

Reesie rolls her eyes, smiling. “We best be getting home,” she says. We continue down the road, turning into her street without even discussing whether we’re walking her home.

“Do you ever think about going back to school?” I ask tentatively. I remember the last time I asked her about school, it didn’t go down too well, but we’re almost at her gate so if she goes ballistic this time, I won’t feel badly about leaving her to go the rest of the way herself.

“All the time,” she admits. “But Jamie’s already working as hard as any man can and, sooner or later, he’s gonna want a wife and family. Whatever Mama and Nanny think, I want him to have his own life. He can’t be supporting all of us forever.”

“So I’m not the only one who spends too much time trying to engineer other people’s happiness.”

Her hand brushes my own and I think it’s deliberate. I wish we were alone. We walk in silence for the next few yards till we’re in front of her house.

“We still on for going to the police station tomorrow?” I ask, facing her as she leans on her gate. In fact, it’s already tomorrow, I think guiltily. She’s got to be at work in a couple of hours. Of course that’s true of Zach, too, rocking on his heels behind me, eager to get going.

“Twelve sharp,” confirms Reesie. “Outside the Shark Center.”

“Twelve sharp,” I repeat.

“Outside the Shark Center,” Reesie repeats.

“We go to the police station,” Zach adds.

Reesie and I both look at him and back at each other. I love the way her eyes look right at me, like she’s seeing all of me. I want to be that guy I see reflected in her eyes because anything less wouldn’t come close to being worthy of her. My eyes travel to her mouth, her lips curved in a tiny smile. I want to kiss her so badly, I find myself leaning forward and almost lose my balance. This girl unbalances me. But how do I kiss her? She’s not like any girl I’ve ever been with. She’s not drunk or stoned, for one thing, and she’s not just out for a good time. To kiss her would mean something. I’d want it to mean something. But I don’t know how to kiss a girl like that.

“So, we’ll see you tomorrow then,” I say, wanting to prolong the departure.

“Cosmic,” adds Zach, grabbing the back of my shirt and giving it an insistent tug.

I exhale in frustration and start to turn away when Reesie suddenly cranes up and grazes my mouth with her lips. It happens so fast, I could almost believe I imagined it, and she’s disappeared through her gate and into her house before I have time to react. I put my hand to my lips and imagine I can still feel her warmth, which I know is totally lame.

“Did you see that?” Zach squeaks. “Reesie just kissed you! That’s like nuclear. What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know,” I say, watching her house, hoping she’s peeking out from one of her darkened windows. I give a small wave.

“Okay,” he says, struggling to sound calm, but his voice is still several octaves higher than normal. “I’m sure there’s a way out of this. We’ll talk to Jamie. No, wait, that’s a bad idea. Reesie’s his sister, he’ll kill you. Maybe we could disappear for a while, until things cool down … but then how are we going to search for Tricia? Oh, man, this is so bad. It’s like when Catwoman flirts with Batman and you know she’s just toying with him, only this is so much worse because I think she’s serious and Reesie is way, way scarier than Catwoman.”