Beard Up

by Lani Lynn Vale

  She stared into my eyes.

  “Did you kill a man this morning?” she asked warily.

  I could tell she really wanted to know the answer, so I didn’t bother evading the truth.

  “Yes,” I answered. “He was a sex offender, and raped his daughter.”

  Her eyes closed.

  “I worked that yesterday,” she answered. “And I can’t say that I’m upset that you did what should’ve been done.”

  Relief flooded through me.

  “I love you, Minnie,” I told her. “I’ve missed this.”

  “Missed what?” Her eyes started to fill with tears. “Because there are things that I missed, but I had no clue how much until I saw you. It’s almost debilitating.”

  I closed my eyes and pulled her into my chest.

  “I missed finding your hair on my shirts,” I told her, twisting one of the brown locks between my fingers. “I missed you sleeping next to me and stealing my covers. I missed you bugging me about dinner and what you were and were not willing to cook. I missed you staring at me until I paid attention to you.” I dropped a kiss to her nose. “I missed the way you smelled, and the way you brushed your hair. I missed the way you took long showers and left me all the lukewarm water that our poor water heater could muster. I missed the way you scattered your makeup all over the counter, and the way you left your toothpaste in the sink.” I halted. “But what I missed most of all was the way your shampoo used to scent my pillow. The way you looked holding our daughter. And the way you felt in my arms.”

  She was crying, but I couldn’t find it in me to brush away her tears.

  “I missed the way you left your trash everywhere,” she lied. “I missed the way I’d find bullets in the washing machine, and the way you always seemed to lose your wallet no matter what extravagant means I went to in order to get you to put it in the same spot. There is so much more that I missed, but you’re right. Being in your arms makes me feel like I can breathe again.”

  I moaned into her hair, then rested my forehead against hers.

  “You need to tell me everything,” she said finally. “I need to know. I need to understand…” she paused. “Did you have Lynn looking after me all these years? Is he your brother?”

  “My brother?” I shook my head. “No. Lynn’s just Lynn. The Joker. The guy that knows shit before it even happens. Not to mention that he works for the FBI. Plus, Silas vouched for him. Though, Lynn has his own agenda. He volunteered to watch over you, but there’s more about him than even I know.”

  “Where did the name Joker come from?” Mina asked abruptly, trailing her fingers lightly down my chest in an absent way that I absolutely loved…and missed. “He seems so normal.”

  We were avoiding the tough topic, the one where she demanded to know why the hell I left her and our child, and I couldn’t say that I wasn’t happy for the reprieve. The moment she knew why, she would flip her lid.

  “Joker is Lynn’s street name,” I answered. “He got that name during an undercover assignment. He’s somewhat of a criminal mastermind, but on the right side of the law, because of the way he gets down to a criminal’s level. He’s done several undercover operations, and many of them required that he commit some difficult tasks, tasks that no one in their right mind would ever want to do. He gets into an organization, he lives and breathes it, he busts his perp, then returns back to normal life for a while before he goes back undercover again. He’s like a chameleon, he changes his appearance, his demeanor, everything about himself, and he becomes exactly who he needs to be to get the job done. He’s a scary mother fucker.”

  “Wow,” Mina breathed, sounding stunned. “I never would have guessed. He comes off as so unassuming. I never saw that from him.”

  I hummed in agreement. “That’s his job, that’s why it’s so easy for him to get where he needs to be. He’s watched you for a very long time, but I feel like that is for an entirely different reason than he’s told me, but each time I asked him why he stayed to help for so long, and let the case continue for so long, he evades the answer. It’s quite annoying, honestly. But it worked out for me in the end because he kept you safe while I dug into my parents’ lives, looking for anything possible I could pin on them.”

  She took a deep breath.

  “What changed?” she asked hesitantly. “What made you leave us?”

  I looked at the ceiling and swallowed thickly.

  I’d known this question was coming as soon as I mentioned the case that I was trying to build against my parents.

  “When Sienna was almost two, she was taken.”

  I felt Mina’s body lock.

  “What?”

  The question was asked so quietly that I closed my eyes and tried to scrounge up the courage to tell her something I’d never been able to tell her before.

  This woman of mine, she was a hot Latina who had an even hotter temper when it came to something she was passionate about. Her daughter, for example, was one of those things.

  Where I’d been irate, this tiny woman in my arms would be incensed.

  “They took her,” I repeated.

  “What?” she repeated. “How do you know this? And why did I never know that she was?”

  “Because my parents threatened me with killing her—something they proved they could do when they stole her from us one night—if I didn’t help them.”

  She paused.

  “Okay…”

  I reached over and grabbed my pants, tugging them out from under Mina’s feet.

  She watched me warily as I got to my feet and donned them, then started to gnaw at her lip. It’d been a nervous habit of hers when she was younger, and she’d obviously kept that habit, though I hadn’t seen it firsthand in such a long time.

  Under any other circumstance, that would’ve turned me on. Now, no. I was too distracted with everything that was happening here, with Mina. And, I was about to tell her the worst thing that any parent could tell the other parent.

  “I didn’t know that they took her,” I swallowed, looking at the white curtains above the window. They were old and lace-like. They’d likely need to be thrown away if we were to fix this place up. “Not until I went into her room the next morning to find her there, as well as a stack of pictures to show that they’d had her.”

  “How…” Mina sounded so confused.

  “They’d bypassed the alarm,” I said. “While you and I had slept. She’d been gone until six forty-five that morning. They’d taken her around twelve AM. You’d gone to work, had even checked on her before you left, and didn’t ever realize that she’d just gotten there. She smelled like my father’s cigars.”

  Mina started shaking and I closed my eyes.

  “The pictures, though…those were what forced me to follow their orders.”

  “What were they?” She turned to face me, crossing her legs to allow her to get as close as she could without actually being on top of me.

  “Pictures of her…” I closed my eyes. “Exposed. They took shots of her genitals. Her nipples, and her face.” I swallowed thickly. “They were clinical, to me. But they wouldn’t be to someone else. Not to some sick fuck child porn addict.”

  Mina moaned and her chin started to wobble.

  “I took Sienna and the pictures and went straight to Silas. He set me up with a married couple that his son, Sam, lived with in their compound in Kilgore, Texas. They were good with computers,” I hastily added so she didn’t start freaking out. “Went there, watched them take down pictures from over forty sites. Took them over eleven hours, but they found every one of them…”

  “But…” Mina asked carefully neutral.

  “But my father and mother still have some on a jump drive.” I growled under my throat. “And this wasn’t the only thing the two of them found. They found hundreds of thousands of pictures, all of children.”

  She moaned beside me.

  I couldn’t look at her, my shame w
as too great.

  “And there were manifests. Times and dates that showed shipments,” I said. “Shipments that I found out later were of children who had been kidnapped from all over the country, sold and then delivered all over the world to buyers who had a desire for little kids.”

  Mina moved, ran straight to the bathroom, and threw up her breakfast into the non-working toilet.

  I stayed where I was, frozen in my own horror.

  “What else?” Mina croaked from the bathroom.

  “We took everything we found to Silas, who took it to Lynn. Lynn had already been investigating them, unbeknownst to me, but what we found on them wasn’t enough. The search, was done illegally, so it couldn’t be used against them,” I continued. “So I pledged to help them find whatever they wanted me to find. I started digging right away, and in doing so, I ruined our lives.”

  “How?”

  She was sitting on the tile floor of the bathroom, staring at me with her hands wrapped tightly around her knees.

  “I tried to help. I had no fuckin’ clue what I was dealing with at the time. I was so incensed and full of rage that I couldn’t see how far I was getting myself in until I was already at the bottom.” I looked away. “Then, not paying attention, I tried to help Rue that day.”

  She looked at me sharply.

  My club brother had trouble following his woman, and I’d been helping watch over her when someone had tried to set her house on fire with her in it.

  “While I was trying to help her, I got a message.”

  She sat up to her knees, reading the change in me immediately.

  I gathered her clothes, leaving her panties that had some questionable liquid on them, and handed them to her.

  She dressed without another word.

  “I was to either agree to help them, or they’d shoot you.”

  “But…”

  “They had a rifle pointed at your head. You were at work, in a room with a patient. You were smiling and had your favorite blue scrubs on with the white flowers. The ones I’d seen you leave for work in that morning.”

  Her eyes went huge. “I could see you through the scope. They’d taken a picture and had sent it to me. I was to agree to help them, or they’d kill you. Right then and there.”

  “And you faked your death?” she gasped.

  “Not intentionally, no,” I disagreed. “That was just how it worked out. I agreed, yes, and about that time a beam fell in front of me, blocking my exit.”

  “So, you really did die.”

  I nodded.

  “Twice, actually,” I said. “I was clinically dead. On the way to the hospital, it was just a formality since I was a police officer. They wanted to say that they did everything that they possibly could. With the brothers doing CPR on me, it’d gotten enough oxygen into my lungs that when they started CPR in the ambulance, it actually worked. I regained a pulse. I wasn’t going to live, though. My lungs were fucked up, and they weren’t sure if I’d suffered oxygen deprivation or not. I was on the road to death. But somehow…” I shook my head. “I don’t know how they did it. Falsified patient reports. Reported me dead. Nobody, luckily, requested to see my body.” I looked at her pointedly. “It all worked out perfectly for my parents to steal me away. They searched donor registries, and then killed him for his lungs…I had a lung transplant…”

  “The scar,” she whispered, eyeing my chest.

  I nodded. “The scar.”

  “They saved you.”

  I nodded. “They saved me…but only so I could live to kill for them. Be their puppet.”

  She sucked in a breath. “What’d they make you do?”

  “That first seven months I was little more than a bunny. I couldn’t do a damn thing because I was learning how to breathe again.”

  She waited.

  “The first job they sent me out on, they wanted to test my loyalty to their cause.”

  Her eyes closed, and she sat down on the toilet as she waited for me to say it.

  “They wanted me to assassinate Silas.”

  Her eyes snapped open.

  “You tried.”

  I nodded.

  “I was there, waiting to do it, with a man standing over me ready to blow my brains out if I didn’t connect.”

  My eyes lost focus as I remembered that day in such vivid clarity that it almost hurt to think about.

  I’d seen him, through the scope of my rifle. I’d watched him reach into his pocket, look at his phone, and smile, my finger caressing the trigger.

  “And…”

  “And I couldn’t do it. That man, he’d done so much for me. I couldn’t do it.” I closed my eyes. “I didn’t have you. I didn’t have Sienna. I didn’t care.”

  “You didn’t shoot.”

  I shook my head. “I shot, all right. But I didn’t hit him. I wanted Silas to know that someone was there. That someone was going to try to kill him.” I stopped. “The man at my back was charged with taking care of me, as well as taking care of Silas if I failed to do so.”

  “How are you still alive then?” she asked, staring at the floor in horror.

  “Because Stone was there,” I murmured.

  “Stone?”

  “Stone,” I said. “The president of our club that died some months ago. The police officer. He was there. Walking in the woods, doing shit that men do in the woods. He’d just come up behind me when I took the shot.”

  “He saved you.”

  I nodded. “He did. And almost killed me at the same time.”

  “So you went to this chapter, and left me alone.”

  I swallowed. “Essentially, yes.”

  “Essentially,” she said. “Why am I still alive, then? Why am I still here?”

  “Silas and Lynn,” I answered immediately. “After finally realizing it was me, Silas called Lynn. Lynn divulged that he was already looking into my family at that time, and I vowed to help him do anything he wanted.”

  “And that man that Stone killed?” she asked.

  “Dumped his body in the lake that Silas was visiting,” I answered honestly. “Also found a body that resembled mine from a morgue. Shot it in the head, and then left it in the woods. When they came investigating a few days later when they realized that Silas was alive and well, they found the body.”

  “They thought it was you.”

  I nodded.

  She breathed out.

  “Why has finding evidence on your parents taken so long?” she whispered into the hands.

  I walked toward her and dropped down to my knees in front of her.

  Then dropped a kiss to her hair before wrapping her into a hug, reveling in the way that she felt in my arms.

  “Because what they do, they’re good at,” I admitted. “They’re really good at hiding their tracks. Hell, there are only a few people who know that they’re such bad people. You’d never assume that they are who they are unless you caught them doing something—which most don’t unless they’re as bad as them.”

  “How did you find out your parents were that bad?” she asked.

  “I knew from a young age that they weren’t good,” I said. “But it wasn’t until I’d just come off my probationary period at the Benton PD, that they finally saw the value in having a cop—their son—as a member of their team.” I looked away. “I never told you, but they tried everything in their power to get me to do what they wanted, and not one of those things worked until they threatened Sienna and you.”

  “And I would’ve never known you were here if I hadn’t been so stupid,” she breathed, finally lifting her head to allow me to see her face. “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

  I stared at her intently. “I wouldn’t have left you alone.”

  Her eyes went wide.

  “I was holding on,” I admitted. “I tried so hard to let you live your life, and every time it looked like you were moving on too far, I sabotaged whatever you ha
d planned,” I hesitated. “It was what got me into trouble in the first place.”

  She tilted her head to the side.

  “I kicked Josh out of his house,” I admitted. “Showed my hand and fucked myself in the process.”

  “Why?”

  I sighed.

  “I didn’t like the way he was acting around you, nor the way having him around made Sienna cry,” I admitted. “I forced him to move out.”

  Her mouth stretched into a small smile.

  “What I didn’t know at the time was that Josh was already working with my parents,” I began. “He was present the day I arrived in my parents’ clutches, and he was the man that watched over me, though since I’d been in a fog of pain at the time, I hadn’t remembered,” I growled in frustration. “When I kicked him out because he was bothering y’all, he got suspicious. He moved, and then spent the next few weeks doing his research.”

  “He figured out who you were,” she guessed.

  “Got it in one,” I nodded. “Threatened to tell my parents that I wasn’t as dead as I’d made myself appear to be.”

  She groaned.

  “He was so freakin’ innocent,” she moaned into her hands. “I thought he was sad, like me. I should’ve never fallen for that act.”

  “You likely couldn’t help it,” I said, prying her hands away from her face. “He’s gotten four women before you. Trust me, he’s well versed in the act of conning women.”

  She lifted her gaze to mine.

  “What are we going to do now?” she asked. “He’s going to tell your parents that you’re alive. Then they’re going to start searching for you.”

  I grinned.

  “That’s where good computer wizards come into the picture,” I said. “The same couple that I told you about who deleted all of those photos off of the computers?” I asked. She nodded her head, indicating that she understood, and I continued. “They help women escape abusive situations,” I murmured. “They erased you and any signs of you. As long as you don’t register Sienna for school just yet, using her birth certificate, then there should be no threads that tie you here.”