Liberty Begins (The Liberty Series)

by Leigh James

  The weird thing was, I was starting to have fun. Some of the guys had started talking to me, cheering me on during our ever-increasing runs, sitting with me and John at meals. I felt like they were accepting me into their odd little group, and even though it was only temporary, it was nice to feel like I belonged to something. The fact that it was a group of crazy ex-military bounty hunters didn’t bother me, but I did miss the girls at the Treasure Chest. Every time I thought of them, though, my heart constricted. My old life. My apartment. I was going to have to go back, but when? How much longer did I have here? How much more time with John?

  Every day when we ran a little further. Even though my newly formed muscles were screaming and I still got cramps, I found myself getting into it in a way I hadn’t dreamed possible. I pushed myself everyday. I thought about John, his pain about his daughter, my fear of losing him, leaving here, and it made me run faster; I tried to outrun my own thoughts. That didn’t work, but it did make me push myself harder. At least it made it easy for me to sleep at night.

  For better or for worse.

  “Honey,” John said again, more forcefully. “We go through this everyday. Now get up and brush your teeth so Michael has time to tape you up.” He came over to the bed and softly stroked my hair. “We have some other stuff we have to do today, too,” he said in a serious, non-libido-driven tone. I popped one eye open and looked at him.

  “We have to do your interview,” he said.

  “Huh?” I asked, suddenly alert.

  “We have to interview you to get started on your asset’s case,” he said gently. “We’re wrapping things up with Darius and we have to get ready.” He noticed the panicked look on my face and stroked my hair some more. “It’s gonna be okay. It'll just be me, Matthew and Ethan. Just some general background and then some more specific details so we have an idea where to start looking.”

  I sat up and looked at him, a knot in my stomach. “Are you finally going to tell me who it is?” I asked, my voice flat. I hadn’t brought it up since we were on the bus. I was waiting for John to tell me; honestly, I knew that was the whole reason I was here, but I hadn’t wanted to think about it. It scared me, and I’d had enough of scared.

  “I'll tell you this afternoon. Let’s go get you some breakfast,” he said.

  * * *

  I ran my hardest that morning, my longest. Six miles, which would have seemed impossible only a week ago. We’d been building up to it. I was still running much slower than the others, and Matthew was still trailing me. “I’m gonna have to go on a diet unless we start picking the pace up soon,” Matthew had called to me, at mile five when I started to slow down, ready to give up. Hearing him say that put some wind in my sails; I wasn’t going to disappoint anyone.

  “Good girl,” he called when I picked up the pace. I smiled briefly, proud. Anytime they clapped for me, called my name and encouraged me, it made me feel better. I moved faster. Having people to cheer you on in life helped, I now knew.

  When we stopped to stretch and get water Matthew sat next to me. He wasn’t even breathing hard, and I would have been incredibly annoyed with him had he not been so consistently kind. “Good job today,” he said. “Something on your mind?”

  “Why do you ask?” I leaned and stretched over my foot, wincing at the pain that ran up my hamstring. I could smell myself — I smelled bad — but I was past being self conscious around the guys. Except for John. If he were sitting next to me, I would clamp my armpits against my sides and try to scoot away from him.

  Not so with Matthew. He had become like a big brother figure. Partly because he was literally big — at least six foot five, with a chest like a Greek god — but also because he was clearly meant to watch over me, to protect me when John was gone. He was married, he had told me; he had a young son, two and a half, at home in Florida. It made it easier to talk to him because I knew he had a family. He never got tired of telling amusing stories about what his son had been up to. I looked forward to them; his family sounded normal, happy and loving. They were a perfect antidote to the weirdness of bounty hunter boot camp.

  He was looking at me directly and calmly. For twenty-six years old, he was amazingly mature: I felt certain that he had seen a lot. Maybe too much. “You know what we’re doing this afternoon,” he said. “You don’t have to get worked up about it now. We’re going to go through some questions with you, and get some necessary information, and then we’re going to make a plan. Trust me, it will be for the best.”

  I kept stretching as I mulled this over. I had a lot of questions, most of which remained unanswered, many of which I wanted to ignore. “Is it the best for Darius?” I asked. There was a childish ring to my question that made me cringe, but still … I hadn’t seen him since we’d arrived in Rhode Island. John was out every night “working on” Darius’s case, but because I was so physically exhausted, I hadn’t been able to interrogate him about it, and during the day, he kept me moving. There’d been no time to talk.

  But I had wondered. Where was Darius? Were they feeding him? Was he cooperating? And if he wasn’t … What on earth would they do to him?

  Matthew shrugged but didn’t seem uncomfortable. “Don’t you have a concept of bad guys?” he asked, smiling at me. “Darius is a bad dude. He bought his ticket here. Actually, he’s lucky to be here, with someone like John, who bothers to ask questions first.” He looked at me and shook his head. “Don’t feel sorry for him. He would carve you — and me, and John, and whoever else he could get his hands on — up like a turkey if he had the chance. And he wouldn’t give it a backwards glance, trust me.”

  “I have a concept of bad guys,” I said softly, still stretching.

  Matthew coughed and looked down. “Yes,” he said, “of course you do.”

  * * *

  At five we had spaghetti in the mess hall for dinner; the best part of training was the carbo-loading we had to do to keep our energy up. But I couldn’t eat my normal extra large helping of pasta tonight. I was too nervous about what we were going to do. John was watching me play with my food and he reached over and squeezed my hand. “It’s going to be okay,” he said, kindly. “I’ll be right there with you.”

  “I know,” I said, and my eyes filled with tears. I looked down at the table so he couldn’t see them and I quickly wiped my face. “That’s just it.” Even though I didn’t know for sure who the asset was, I had a pretty good idea. I didn’t even want to think about him, let alone talk about him. Not in front of anybody, ever.

  And especially not in front of the man of my dreams. What if he doesn’t want you anymore, once he knows? I shuddered and dropped my fork onto the table. What had I been thinking? Of course I was going to have to tell him everything, every dirty little detail, and I bet he would never look at me the same way once I did. I warned you not to believe in fairytales, my inner voice said. Again, she was right. This was all too good to be true. Of course it wasn’t going to last.

  I’d blindsided myself. The fact was, I was here for a reason. Someone had hired John to kidnap and possibly really hurt someone who’d really hurt me. All I’d been focused on were the wrong things. The warmth and strength of his body in bed with me at night, the way his biceps bulged when he did a pull up, and how he threw back his head when he laughed. The blue color of his eyes. The glints of blond and grey in his shaggy, perfect hair. The lines in his face. How it felt when he put his arm around me, and I felt warm and protected, so happy that I could almost die. Like no one could ever hurt me again.

  But here was the reality: someone had hurt me once, and now there was a likelihood that he was going to hurt me again, take away the one thing in my life that I was beginning to think I couldn’t live without. John looked at me in sympathy, almost as if he could read my thoughts. He grabbed my hand and walked me quickly to my room. Once we were inside I buried my face in his chest, not caring that I was sweaty because I had run six miles and done more of a core workout than I cared to remember.

  “
I don’t know if I can do this,” I said and sniffled into his chest. I meant it. I didn’t know if I could do any of it.

  “You don’t have anything to be ashamed of,” he breathed heavily into my hair. Heat was rolling off of him, enveloping me. “But no one ever said the path to justice was easy.” He rubbed my shoulders and kissed my neck. Then he stopped, and just held me tightly.

  “You know I believe in what I do. Liberty, you need to be brave. There’s a bad guy out there. He hurt you, he hurt your mother. He could be hurting someone else right now.”

  I shuddered against him. Ray. John knew. And he knew about my mother. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  “Here’s the thing,” John said, holding me tightly against him, rocking me back and forth, trying to soothe me. “Right now I only know part of the story, the small part the client told me. You hold the other piece. Once we both know the whole truth, we can help each other. We can stop him, Liberty. You can stop him.”

  I looked up at him, tears in my eyes. My mother. I thought of her face when I was younger, her raven hair, her beautiful smile. I remember her hugging me and holding me close, like John was right now. She’d had so much love in her, so much light.

  Until Ray took it from her.

  “I’ll do it,” I managed to get out, the tears now freely streaming down my face. “I’ll do it.”

  An hour later we were showered, dressed in sweats and heading up to the big house. We were going to use the library. John had mentioned that Corey and some of the other guys were meeting with Darius tonight and “that it might get loud.” I shot him a look when he said this but he studiously avoided my stare; then I swear he pretended to get a phone call so I couldn’t question him about it.

  Mr. Quinn was in the massive granite kitchen when we went in. He was wearing blue plaid button down pajamas, a silk robe and fuzzy moccasins. He was waiting with a tray of lemonade, cookies and fruit. “I prepared this for you, Liberty,” he said, beaming at me, and motioned to the tray. “Don’t let the guys touch it.”

  “Thank you Mr. Quinn,” I said, beaming back at him.

  He shuffled off towards the living room. “I’ll let you take care of business, John. But Liberty,” he called, “if you get bored, come and watch SportsCenter with me.”

  I looked after him longingly. I wish. I would love to wear plaid pajamas, eat cookies, and watch cable with you, Ian. Unfortunately I have to go give sordid details of my life with my junkie mother and the guy who used to regularly dope her up and abuse her.

  I sucked in a deep breath; I needed to be brave. The others had already gone into the library. I grabbed the tray and followed them in. I’d only been in the room once briefly before, when John had taken me on a tour of the spectacular house; it had floor to ceiling built in bookshelves, all four walls filled with books. The interesting thing was, I’d noticed, there were all sorts of books: leather-bound series that looked antique mixed in with battered paperbacks of all shapes and sizes. Hundreds of them. “Who’s the reader?” I asked, setting down the tray and sitting in an enormous leather armchair.

  “My dad,” John said. He, Ethan and Matthew were also seated. “He used to go to the bookstore once a week and bring home boxes of them. Clearly, he read them all, more than once,” he said, picking up a particularly battered one and tossing it to me. The Color Purple. I loved that one: triumph over tragedy. I clutched it on my lap and grabbed a cookie.

  “Let’s get started,” John said. “Liberty, I asked Matthew and Ethan to be here tonight because that’s our company’s protocol. We don’t take notes or keep any records of interviews like these, so we’ve found it’s necessary to have three people. Every employee of my company is required to sign a confidentiality agreement, so you should feel comfortable to speak freely. The information you tell us tonight won’t leave this room.”

  I nodded at them. “I just have one request — actually, two,” I said, quickly chewing the bite of cookie I had in my mouth. “First, I don’t want you to feel bad for me. So many people have it so much worse. And second? Does your dad have any white wine chilled up here? I’m pretty sure I’m gonna need a drink.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  TMI

  First I told them what I knew about Ray: that his last name was Lawrence, he was about forty-eight, had grown up in Eugene, sometimes worked at a convenience store near our old apartment. His mother had an apartment in the city; when he wasn’t leaching onto someone else, like my mother, he stayed at his mother’s.

  “Not surprising,” Matthew said. “These guys are often parasites — living off their parents or girlfriends.”

  I nodded. “He never had his own place. He probably still doesn’t.”

  I took a large sip of the wine John had gotten for me and tried to tell my story as simply as possible.

  “My mother was a beautiful woman. She always had a drinking problem, but when we were little, she used to only drink at night, after we went to bed. Or maybe that’s just what we thought. I remember my sister Sasha used to go look under her bed every morning for empty bottles, to count them. There was always at least one, sometimes more. I didn’t know it at the time, but she was probably drinking enough on a weekly basis to kill a large mammal. Like herself. Somehow though, her body was able to keep up and keep going. Because she was so pretty, even without makeup, she looked like she was okay most of the time.

  As we got older, things started to fall apart more. She couldn’t keep a job. We’d find her passed out every morning and we couldn’t wake her up. You know, the usual. Then she met Ray and she started doing coke. I came home one day and there he was, sitting on the couch, feet up on the coffee table, right next to my mom. He had bright blue eyes but somehow, I remember they looked dirty. Cloudy, or something. He kept smiling at me. ‘I’m Ray,’ he said, and shook my hand.

  ‘Liberty,’ I said, and nodded at him curtly. I learned shortly that he was a dealer, and he had what seemed like an unlimited supply. He was always at our house. That’s when I was twelve or thirteen. I didn’t know what cocaine was but we kept finding razor blades and mirrors stashed around the house and Sasha told me.

  That’s when my mother started having guys come over. She said they were Ray’s friends. Sometimes she said they were her boyfriends but we usually didn’t see the same one twice. I think maybe Ray had her sleep with the guys for money or drugs. Or maybe he owed them a favor and she was it.

  After a while I started to piece it together. She made us stay in our room and lock it from the inside when she had someone over. We could still hear them, though. It was awful. They weren’t the nicest guys. My mom would cry sometimes when they left, if they’d hurt her, and Sasha and I would clean her up, brush her hair, try to make her eat. But you know what it’s like living with a junkie? They’re only able to focus on you for a second. In their mind, they’re always planning their next fix. It’s like you’re just an obstacle, talking at them, getting in their way. Even when you’re cleaning some guy’s semen off of them.” I shuddered.

  “She just didn’t care. I learned not to take it personally. But Sasha couldn’t — she fought with our mother all the time, screaming, begging. Sasha was very smart and pragmatic; she couldn’t understand that someone could be ruled so wholly by their cravings. She couldn’t tolerate it. She left when she was eighteen. She begged me to come with her, but I couldn’t leave mom. She was in bad shape. Sasha almost couldn’t bring herself to do it, but I pleaded with her to go. ‘Make a life and save some room for me,’ is what I told her. I meant it.

  Someone had to stay and I knew it was going to be me. I only felt sorry for my mother. I remembered what she was like when we were younger, and I knew that she wasn’t happy living the way she did. She was a prisoner. Sometimes she would hug me and cry, not saying a word. I knew how much pain she was in — how else could you do that to your body? So I couldn’t hate her, and I wouldn’t leave her. Somehow she had managed to bring me and Sasha into this world on her own and sh
e had managed to keep us safe, or at least alive.

  Safe I wasn’t sure about: some of the guys, including Ray, were starting to try to talk to me and were looking at me a lot. It scared me.

  I was going to school and working as much as I could. I was in high school. That’s when I remember the heroin starting. I came home one day and my mother was laying on the couch, and Ray was there, holding her hand.

  ‘Mom, are you okay?’I asked.

  She looked up at me then with eyes that were filled with wonder, like she had just seen Jesus, or something. My stomach dropped to my knees. I didn’t know what she’d done, but I knew in my heart that something was wrong and that it wouldn’t ever be right again. Whatever it was, it was going to possess her. I could tell that just by looking at her. And I knew I was never going to see my real mother again.”