Chapter 27
Crouched inside the cab of a rusted truck that, judging by its rounded grill and the holes in the floorboard, had been around since the fifties, Justice checked her ammo. Three rounds.
She was going to die.
She was going to die in a truck that smelled like goats.
She was going to die in a truck that smelled like goats on the Jordan–Syria border after failing her most important mission.
Who had betrayed her? Gracie, Tony, Dada, or Bridget? She didn’t want to die without knowing. Which meant, she wasn’t going to die today.
She threw out her senses, tried to hear beyond her little bit of street. There was only one way they could be tracking her. They were in direct contact with someone who knew exactly where she was. And the only way to know that was by the GPS in her wrist.
She’d take it out, but it required hands much steadier than the ones she now possessed.
Plus, kind of useless now. The group of men hunkered down outside the truck knew where she was.
Of course, they’d wait her out. Walid wanted her more than just dead. He wanted her in pain. She’d taken the one person the man actually cared about.
She knew the Brothers’ story. Two boys, orphaned on the streets of India—granted they’d made themselves orphans—and afterward they’d been trafficked to a man in England. They’d killed him too and taken over his business. Together. Two brothers with equally evil souls.
Now one was dead. And the other wanted her in pain. Normally she’d think of that as a bad thing, but now it meant opportunity. When they came for her, she’d have a chance to distract, deceive, and deliver her own special brand of justice.
Shit. She was really losing it. She hated puns that involved her name.
One of the men called out to her in Arabic, “Come now. You are endangering the people here. Come out. We will take you some place to talk.”
Oh. They just wanted to talk. Silly of her to think otherwise.
“How’s Aamir?” she called back. “Did I break his heart?”
They began to fire at the truck.
Chapter 28
Sandesh couldn’t allow himself to think of Justice in any way but as a target that needed to be acquired. He rolled down the truck’s window. She had to be close. Things were quiet here.
Most nights, men patrolled, but women and children had learned not to be outside after dark.
Tonight, with the gunshots, it seemed no one walked the dirt roads. He drove around with his lights off. The moon and some lights in the camp let him see enough.
He swung Salma’s old pickup around a corner.
His heart clenched with regret. He shouldn’t have let her go. He’d been so angry. And, he hated to admit, hurt. She’d lied to him. And so had Mukta.
Her mother had to know. It was the only thing that made sense. Or did it?
If Justice had people, if her mother knew, why wasn’t anyone coming for her?
There. Gunshots. He drove between tents and parked. He got out, scanned the area, and crept forward.
He stuck his head around the corner of a metal trailer.
The bam bam of gunfire. He ducked, though the fire hadn’t been directed at him. It had been directed at the rusty truck sitting twenty feet to his right.
He had no doubt Justice was in that truck.
What was it Salma had said about destiny? He could have gotten closer to where Justice hid only if he’d been airlifted in.
Justice didn’t fire back. Probably had low ammo. That might be a good thing. It was a huge city, where gunshots didn’t usually bring authorities, but a firefight might draw them over.
He doubted Justice or the IPT could afford whatever exposure came from messing with the Jordanians.
Weapon drawn, he belly-crawled along sandy dirt, dug his elbows into the gritty soil.
The crunch of tires on sand drew his head up, and the flash of headlights dropped it down. The truck rolled down the dirt street. Reinforcements or the authorities? Or some gang here to clear their territory?
A spotlight came on and began to sweep the area. The authorities. The light hit the men crouched on the other side of the street. With gun in hand, someone got out of the truck and called to the men.
This was his chance. And apparently that was exactly what Justice had been thinking.
She swung out of the cab. Crouched, she darted his way. He got to his feet, held up his hands. “It’s me. Me, Justice.”
She pulled up short, lowered her gun. Wordlessly, they ran.
He leaned closer to her. “Salma’s truck. There.”
They turned the corner in sync. He jumped into the driver’s seat and she into the passenger’s.
He backed up. The truck with the authorities swung around the corner; the spotlight landed on them.
He turned the wheel, threw the car into drive. Bam. The back window erupted.
Justice jerked and looked down. Tear gas began to pour into the cab. Before he could tell her what to do, she picked up the canister and tossed it out the open window.
They both started to hack. He wiped at his nose, tilted the wheel, and swung the truck down a side street. It was nearly impossible to hide here. The whole thing was a grid.
When she held out her hand for his weapon, he passed it to her. She fired through the back window. Once. Twice.
There was a crash, and the spotlight winked out. Nice shot.
Sinuses burning, he tore down the road. His eyes strained to make out any movement.
This was a shitty place to try and escape. Penned in like a damn prisoner on all sides, where people could pop out anywhere, and the boundaries of who worked for the government and who worked for themselves were murky. So said the fact that the authorities had joined with the others and were now chasing them.
Justice bent over, clawed at her eyes, took out her contacts, and flung them away. She spit into her hands and rubbed her eyes. “We can’t go out the main gate.”
“No shit.” He’d just rescued her ass. A little respect or “thank you” would be nice. He shook himself. Christ, he was still that guy.
With less bite but louder, since the wind whipped about them, he said, “How did you get inside?”
“Under the fence. I can show you.”
“Okay. Let’s ditch the car.”
She nodded, slid to her window, turned, and aimed her gun. After a moment, she coughed, spit, and said, “Slow down. They’re not following.”
He slowed and pulled over. “Why not?”
She bit her lip near in half, then, nodding to herself, held up her wrist. “I think…I think they’re pretty confident they can get me outside of this place. They’re tracking me. There’s a device under my skin.”
She picked up a penknife lying in a cup holder, along with a small woodcarving. He grabbed her hand. “Don’t. Let’s think about this for a minute.”
“Think about it? What’s there to think about?”
He rubbed a hand across his face. Tears and snot. Beautiful. He couldn’t believe he was about to say this. “Could they have ties to whoever put that thing in your arm?”
“Maybe. I think. Maybe. Someone betrayed me.”
“Someone? How did it get in your arm?”
She stiffened. “I was born with it. Like an electronic birthmark.”
He’d expected the lie and the sarcasm. “Okay, well, not telling me gets you nothing. And that someone might have betrayed you is not really the answer either of us is looking for. Someone is betraying you. Present tense. Someone is, at this moment, tracking you and reporting the information to whoever is chasing you.”
She flinched. Nodded. She looked shaken for the first time. “So we destroy it. We take it out. Toss it.”
“Not so fast. Let’s take a guess on what would happen. If you dest
royed that thing or took it out, the bad guys would go straight to the Mantua Home.”
She flinched, brought a hand to her heart, clasped something under her abaya. “Suggestion?”
“We could set up an ambush.”
Her eyes rose in shock. He’d actually surprised her. That shouldn’t have pleased him.
“You’d do that? Help me?”
Yeah, he would. And he had no idea why. Scratch that. He had a good idea why. And it wasn’t because the galaxies in her eyes held him as surely as the universe holds the sky. But because that girl she’d brought into the tent had been rescued. Justice and whatever she was into weren’t self-serving. It was a small comfort. But he’d take it.
“This one time, Justice. Then we go somewhere quiet and you answer every question I have.” He brushed his hand along her wrist. “Including how you got this.”
Her eyes, which had softened with his touch, narrowed.
She was going to fight him on this? Really? Chick had teeth. He was her only fucking lifeline here. “I could walk away, Justice. And you can avoid these men. Until they follow you home.”
Her eyes widened—which is to say they swallowed him whole—and then her rich lashes lowered. “Come on. I’ll show you the way out.”
Chapter 29
Outside Zaatari, at the start of a long road that connected the refugee camp with the desert, Justice found another truck. It probably belonged to the Koreans. They had a tae kwon do academy set up a short distance from here.
So many people had been drawn here to help. Like Sandesh. She hoped he could still help these people. She’d do whatever she could to make this right.
Removing her niqab, she used it to cover the butt of her gun. She was about to smash the window when Sandesh cleared his throat. She glanced back. He mimed trying the door. She did. It opened.
Huh. Trusting sort, those Koreans.
Sandesh had a big, not-my-first-rodeo grin on his face. Cocky. She dropped inside the vehicle and began to hot-wire it.
She sensed more than saw Sandesh reach inside, flick down the visor. A jingle, and keys dropped onto her hip, tumbled to the floor. She picked them up and refused to look in his direction. She could hear him smiling.
She put the keys in the ignition. She fully expected the car not to start. It started.
Really? They deserved to have their vehicle stolen. Sandesh tossed the large, black bag with whatever weapons he’d brought into the back seat, then started toward the passenger side.
No way. She couldn’t shoot if she was driving.
She waved him back to the driver’s side. Without objection, he reversed course. She climbed into the passenger seat, and he slid inside and began to drive toward Syria.
* * *
The truck’s headlights cut through the night like cones of yellow glass. The road was deserted. Not much call for traffic into Syria from Jordan these days, especially this late.
Except for the wind whining through the old weather strip, it was as quiet as a tomb in the car. Justice didn’t need a whole lot of empathy to feel the fury that rocketed off Sandesh. Even in the dim light, she could see his hands clutch the steering wheel. Yeah, the road was bumpy, but not that bumpy.
She wasn’t sure she wanted to know what he was thinking. He kept randomly hitting the steering wheel.
Anger at her seemed like it might be a good bonding experience between Tony and Sandesh. Note to self: Make sure that conversation never happens.
He probably expected an explanation. And the thing was, she really wanted to explain things. Unusual for her in many ways. First: She was brought up in a secret society of vigilantes. Not an open group. Second: She didn’t do relationships.
She bit the inside of her cheek. Something had to be said to fill the silence. Well, if he was anything like Tony, she knew how to get him to talk. “Stop pouting.”
He waited a beat or two. “Pouting? No, Justice. You don’t get to put this on me. I want an explanation. What are you doing here? Who were those men? Why were they after you?”
“I can’t answer those questions.”
Sandesh swung the car to the side of the road. She slid along the seat. Her wound shot off hot protestations. He threw the car into park. Plumes of gray dust mushroomed over light streaks from the headlights.
He turned in his seat. His blue eyes stabbed her with ice and steel and accusation.
“Actually, you have no choice. Says the only guy who can get you out of this desert alive. I need to know what I’m up against.”
Whoa. He was playing a dangerous game of chicken. If they were going to implement their plan, they needed to keep moving. She shifted, rolled her shoulders. The vast cold of the desert night quickly seeped into the truck. Sandesh kept staring. He really wasn’t going to budge. She shivered. “Drive. I’ll tell you what I can.”
He turned in his seat, shifted into drive, and kicked up sand as he accelerated onto the road. Justice listened to the wheels eating up ground.
“Let’s hear it, Justice.”
Oh hell. “I do what Salma does. Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
Her chest ached like someone had taken a scalpel and cut strips called loyalty from her heart. “Well, she goes after the girls who are being lured or sold or tricked into sex slavery. I go after the men who are doing the luring, tricking, and selling.”
In this instance, anyway. The League was just as likely to go after men who stoned women, burned them with acid, beat them, gang-raped them. Wherever society let bad things happen to women, the League was there. No need to tell him that.
He breathed out a sound that was part curse. “She saves girls. You aren’t saving these men.”
“No. I’m saving many girls and women by killing the men.”
He tapped the steering wheel. She wasn’t sure if she saw disgust or curiosity on his face or maybe something more complicated.
“Your mother obviously knows. Is this what she does? Is this why she covers her face?”
“No. She was a teenager, a preteen really, burned by acid. That man picked the wrong girl to attack.”
“I read she was adopted by two wealthy women. Brought to America. It would seem the happy end to a sad beginning, but she wasn’t satisfied. Was she?”
So not going to answer that. Subject change. “The men who chased us work for a sex-slaver called Walid. Earlier tonight, or I guess that was yesterday now, I killed his brother. Wish I’d gotten them both. The way they run their business. Stupid. It really is get the head of the snake and the rest collapses. I would’ve gotten away clean but for the girl.”
The sound of the tires spinning against the road filled the cab as they lapsed into silence.
“I wondered why your mother would fund my charity.”
Dude was like a dog with a bone. No matter how she tried to steer things away from Momma, he went back there.
“A start-up with no reputation. Obviously, that’s exactly what she needed. Give them money, use them, control them. And I played right into it. Idiot.”
Now she knew he was disgusted. With himself. She hated that she’d used him. She didn’t want him to be this angry. To feel suckered.
She glanced at the side-view mirror, at the darkness behind them. “Remember what I told you on the plane about Hope?”
A long pause. “Yeah.”
“The man I killed tonight. He killed Hope.”
Silence. She could practically hear him realize what happened tonight was very personal. A lifetime of plotting, planning, and pain. “You’re seeking revenge.”
“No. I’m seeking redemption.” She wanted to call it justice but wouldn’t. “So if you think about it, our goals aren’t really that dissimilar. You kind of want redemption for a military life.”
Sandesh scratched roughly at the back of his head, clearly annoyed.
“Redemption? No. Redemption indicates I thought what I did in the military was wrong. I didn’t. I don’t. And I don’t expect you to understand right now. You’re in the thick of it. But the kind of anger you have, the kind of anger I had, it doesn’t just go away when you take off the uniform or put down the gun.”
Justice leaned back and tilted her head toward him. She was so tired. “What do you mean? You’ve never struck me as too angry.”
“Trust me, if we had met a few years ago, it would’ve been one hell of an explosion. Because when I first left Special Forces, I had an excess of anger.”
He did? She knew the feeling. “I know that excess. I use it.”
“Sure. I get that too. As a Ranger, I had a place to direct it, a need to direct it, stoke it, but when I got out…it became wild. Everyday normal encounters would escalate. I’d find a way to fight my way through. Even if it was some dude trying to bring twenty items through the ten-items-or-less aisle.”
Justice thought about her day-to-day. How she yelled at people, her sisters, Momma, Leland. She fought a lot too. “Sometimes you have to fight.”
“Sure. And I know there’s a place where you can’t give an inch to the enemy. I’ve stood on that line. I’ve defended that ground, refused that inch, with every ounce of strength and courage and determination I possess. But once I no longer had to do that, I ended up trying to fight my way out of anger.”
“Can you fight your way out of anger? Is there an end?”
He looked over at her, must’ve read the sincerity in her face, because he shook his head. “No. I got out of it the opposite way.”
She waited for him to expand.
“A few months after leaving the service, my friend, the guy who’d eventually help me start the IPT, Victor Fuentes, asked me to go down to Louisiana and help in his childhood neighborhood. They’d been hit by a hurricane.
“From the moment I had boots on the ground, I felt useful. It was kind of amazing, seeing so many people with no idea what to do. But we were soldiers, we knew how to organize, keep calm, work in tough situations. I helped for weeks. Never once did I feel rage.
I Am Justice Page 9
