Page 90 of Jessica, Not Her Real Name
This house could come down around them at any moment. If that were to happen, at least one of them should be sober. Plus, tomorrow they’d both be better off without hangovers.
So, yeah, that was a bunch of reasons. And yet, he couldn’t make himself get up and leave this damn table.
The more he looked at her, the more his impression of her seemed to shift in front of his eyes. He was finding it increasingly difficult to maintain his earlier conviction about there being no innocent witnesses in the program. About her deserving this transient, fear-filled life.
And he was becoming more and more convinced that he was a judgmental prick for ever having thought that.
She was still waiting for an answer to her question, so he cleared his throat and said, “My story?”
She shrugged. “Tell me about yourself.”
He swallowed and stared down at his glass, mystified how to go about doing such a thing. Small talk wasn’t his strong suit. “Uh, what do you want to know?”
She shrugged, “Tell me about your job. You work for the…Violent Fugitive…something, right?”
“Two Rivers Violent Fugitive Task Force.”
She snapped her fingers like that had been on the tip of her tongue. Then took another sip of her drink. “Hunting down violent fugitives. That sounds terrifying.”
He tilted his head. “Sometimes.” He took a sip of his own. “Most of the time, though, it’s as boring as any other job.”
She smiled and raised her eyebrows like she didn’t believe that. But he wasn’t just trying to sound modest. His job really was about ten percent beating down doors and ninety percent reading tedious case files and chasing down dead-end leads. Some fugitives he’d hunted had been on the run for over twenty years. They were living quiet lives in small towns, thinking the law had forgotten about them. But the USMS never forgot. It was a long game for them, not an all guns blazing kinda thing.
And that was the secret of their success: keeping their successes a secret. It was a company motto. If they did their jobs right, no one would even know they’d been there.
Overhead, the light flickered again, and they both cast their eyes ceiling-ward as if in prayer to the electricity gods.
“What’s the worst case you ever had?”
Ryan chewed his bottom lip for a moment, not looking at her. Then he exhaled and said, “Well, the first runner-up would have to be the angel-dusted Neo Nazi with enough homemade explosives strapped to him to blow us both to Jesus.” He shook his head at the memory. “Guy had more swastikas on him than brain cells, that was for damn sure.
“But the actual worst one was this house we raided in Jackson. This guy was up on a bunch of sex crime charges across multiple states. We finally tracked him down to this old shack on the outskirts of town. It was maybe five o’clock in the morning. We knocked his door down. Dragged the guy out of bed. He was pretty much as loathsome as you’d expect a guy like that to be. But it was what we found in the other bedroom that was worse. A girl, filthy and starving, tied to a mattress. She’d been locked in there for God knows how long.”
Jessica held her glass to her lips but didn’t take a sip.
“I say girl,” he went on, “but she was in her twenties. Although so malnourished, she looked about twelve. Turns out, he’d murdered her mother when she was a baby and then kidnapped her. He’d been living with her all those years. First as her father. Then as her husband.” He shook his head. “To say that was disturbing is an understatement.”
She said nothing for a long moment. Then she said quietly, “When I see those kinds of stories on the news, I never know whether those are good days or bad days for you guys.”
Inglis eyed her over his glass. “Yeah,” he said softly. “Me either.”
Then the lights went out without even a flicker of warning and the room plunged into darkness.
TWENTY-NINE
Jessica bolted upright,her chair toppling over behind her with a thud. The darkness was so complete it felt like she was blindfolded. Instinctively, she thrust out her arms, unable to recall a single thing about her surroundings. Another thud: a glass or the whiskey bottle falling over onto the table.
She felt panic crowd in around her, hot hands and breath, and the sensation that she couldn’t control any part of her body.
Bright white light burned into the backs of her eyeballs, and she shut them tight. When she opened them again, she saw Ryan holding out his phone.
He lowered the light. “Hey,” he said softy. “It’s okay. It’s alright.”
She was still breathing fast, her pulse beating in her jugular. It wasn’t just the dark that had frightened her. The similarities between the marshal’s story and her dream had also troubled her. She tried to shake the eerie feeling away, but it seemed to have settled in her bones.
He came around the table and gently pulled her into him in an awkward one-armed hug. She relaxed into it, into the solidness of his chest, the comforting bulk of his biceps. She could smell cologne on his shirt. Something fresh and marine.
“I’m sorry,” she said, panic giving way to a feeling of foolishness. “You must think I’m such a wimp. It’s just something happened to me in the dark a long time ago.”
