Liars' Paradox

by Taylor Stevens

  To the untrained eye, the dust, the tarp, the truck—the entire barn—had sat abandoned and forgotten, just like the burned-down ranch house and the land around it. But a closer look showed the vehicle’s registration was up to date, the engine had been rebuilt, and the tires were good—courtesy of Clare—who’d also left a tank’s worth of gas in old metal jerricans, and the keys stuffed inside a broken hay-filled mason jar on a pile of scrap. Folklore said the reason the Hatchers never rebuilt and why the land never sold was that the whole place was haunted.

  The gossips weren’t wrong, not exactly.

  As far as Jill was concerned, it’d been Clare who’d burned the place to the ground. Didn’t matter that the fire had happened when she and Jack were still learning to read, or that they’d been living in Beirut—or maybe by then it was Monrovia—nothing in Clare’s life was coincidence, especially not when it involved acquiring properties with connecting boundaries.

  Jack had once called her out for stashing things in the barn, had asked her what kind of attention she thought she’d get if someone discovered her stuff. Clare had smiled one of those sly “never really know what she’s thinking” smiles and had said the beautiful thing about trusts was the lack of public access to the details inside the trust documents.

  Jack had eventually figured it out.

  The Hatcher homestead technically belonged to Clare, even if no record of the sale existed, because she hadn’t bought the land. What she had bought was the Hatcher family trust or, more specifically, she’d bought a change of trustees and beneficiaries, and, by doing that, she’d also bought invisibility and silence.

  The Hatcher homestead would stay haunted as long as Clare was alive. By Jack’s reckoning, that might not be long.

  According to him, the signs all pointed to Clare getting ready to run again.

  The hides would have been her final move and she hadn’t gotten to them before whatever happened had happened. To him, finding the stashes and the truck untouched was one more indication she’d been taken off the property against her will.

  Jill didn’t buy it.

  Clare was known for stashing supplies in the same way squirrels hid nuts, and there were less than worst-case scenario reasons for her to have left the hidey-holes alone.

  Even in the remote chance this whole thing wasn’t Clare fucking with their heads, she had multiple getaway arrangements and owned other properties—probably some they didn’t even know about. In land alone, Clare had to be worth tens of millions, yet she lived like a hippie, and her cars and trucks were always pieces of shit.

  Like this one.

  Inconspicuous Clare would have said, “People would rather look away than see the poor. The poor are invisible.”

  Maybe out where she lived, or if she’d been trying to make a run across an unmarked portion of the Mexican border, but not in Snootsville, Austin, which was where Jill called home. So while Clare was off somewhere plotting her next move, her dear children were left to deal with the issue of drawing attention in a very visible truck.

  Jack turned down the street that led to her apartment.

  Joggers and dog walkers and moms out with kids watched, eagle-eyed, as they passed, as if home entertainment systems everywhere depended on them. He swung onto a side road and pulled to the curb, put the truck in park, and stuck out his hand.

  “Keys,” he said.

  She scrutinized him, half-convinced she hadn’t just heard what she’d heard.

  His fingers motioned “gimme,” and his eyes had that faraway look he got when his mind went into hyper-focus and he lost the capacity to see anything other than his way. She said, “My keys. My house. My tool bag.”

  He said, “Don’t trust you. No offense.”

  “Offense taken, anyway, jerk face. I’ll get my own damn bag.”

  He shook his head in a slow, self-righteous side to side that made it hard not to reach across the seat and slug him. He said, “You know I’ve got my own set. Give me yours. Make it legit.”

  No matter what else he thought was happening, if he believed she’d turned lapdog, he was sorely mistaken. She pulled the purse off the floor and pawed through its dark caverns in search of the clump of jingle-jangle, grabbed the keys, and thrust them high in angry protest. He grabbed them.

  She didn’t let go. He yanked them free and in that distracted second, her other hand stabbed the hypodermic into his thigh and pushed the plunger.

  His mouth opened, and his eyes went wide. From shock, maybe, that she’d done it, or that he hadn’t seen it coming. He said, “That was . . . how could . . . you’re a shortsighted . . . impulsive. . .”

  “This comes as a surprise?”

  She capped the needle on a syringe that had been meant for her. If he’d done a proper stock count in his bag, he’d have known she had it.

  He blinked, and shook his head, as if somehow that would clear the cobwebs.

  She slipped out of the truck, walked around the hood to his side, and opened the door. “Come on, big boy,” she said. “Let’s get you settled before it all kicks in.”

  He leaned away from her. She snagged his arm. “You’ll be just fine,” she said. “Think of all the fun we’ll have when you wake up.”

  She tugged him toward her and his body followed out of the truck, already uncoordinated and off balance but still trying to show her what’s what. She opened the suicide door and nudged him up onto the rear seat, pushed his shoulder and tipped him over, tugged a plastic-wrapped blanket out from beneath the seat, tore it open, and draped it over him.

  “Night night, John.”

  His eyelids drifted closed.

  He was so much easier to like when he was asleep, all sweet and relaxed and almost normal. She stuffed the syringe back into the pocket of his tool bag, the same pocket from which she’d swiped it while cutting weapons out of his car.

  Mr. High-and-Mighty wasn’t the only one capable of thinking ahead.

  He’d remember some of this and see her putting him out as dumb luck for the same reason he’d been disgusted with her by the bur oak. Yeah, she’d messed up the site around the tree—deliberately—after she’d done her own tracking.

  She knew there’d been only one guy. And she knew he’d headed north toward the Millers’ land.

  Jack would have known, too, if he’d bothered to ask. He never would. Smartest guy in the room was too dumb to realize how far his overconfident head was shoved up his own ass. Maybe one day he’d figure out the joke was on him. Jill closed the rear door, reached into the front and plucked the keys from the ignition, grabbed her purse, lowered the windows a touch, and locked him in.

  The day was getting hotter.

  Early fall was a joke when the cooler temperatures didn’t kick in till mid-November, but the truck was in the shade, and she’d be back before he overheated.

  She jogged for the nearest building, slipped around to the rear, through a privacy gate, and into a postage-stamp garden. This was home for now, the bottom floor of a three-story town house owned by a former friend’s mother, who considered six months’ rent in cash twice a year a completely valid reason for avoiding messy formalities like lease contracts and identity and income verification.

  She let herself in, shut the door behind her, and breathed in the fresh linen scent of privacy. Then dumped her purse out in the foyer, pawed through the contents for the lipstick tube, and pawed some more.

  Hands shaking, she turned the purse upside down.

  A paper clip, a gum wrapper, and a few stray pennies joined the pile on the floor.

  Mind disbelieving, she went through the items again, slowly, one at a time.

  The lipstick tube was gone.

  The pill bottles, gone.

  Everything, gone, gone, gone.

  She sat on the floor and howled.

  Motherfu . . . son of a goddamn . . . she was going to kill him.

  She stomped to the kitchen, pulled a chair from the table, and dragged it to the bedroom closet. Sh
e climbed to the highest shelf, pulled the blue duffel bag down to the floor, opened it wide for the dopp kit, hooked a finger into the kit’s smallest pocket and snagged the baggie. She tore a hole getting it open.

  Sweet relief spilled onto her hand, and she snorted it right up her nose.

  Focus and clarity washed into her.

  Her insides relaxed.

  She yanked clothes off hangers, tossed them into the duffel, dumped the dopp kit back in, and zipped the bag shut. As an afterthought, she dug through a pile of shoes on the closet floor for the tool bag at the back and pulled that out, too, then ran the shower, jumped in long enough to wash off the dirt and stench, and tugged into too-tight jeans that stuck to every inch of her wet legs.

  She checked the time.

  She’d been inside for more than ten minutes.

  She might as well have been away for an hour, but she’d still not done what she’d truly come inside to do. She pulled a phone from the duffel’s outer pocket, took a deep breath, and powered it on. Her idiot-savant brother had been right about one thing: she had been working favors. No apologies for that.

  Not after losing her entire childhood to a delusional mother whose version of a tinfoil hat was to drag her kids across the continents; train them to hide and hunt, kill and survive; put them in situations that tested those skills; then cut them loose to find their own way in a world they could never fit into.

  Now she was supposed to just what?

  Barista at Starbucks, like the past had never happened?

  Work for pennies when her set of skills could pull in the big money?

  No thanks. No thanks to Clare, and no thanks to asshole Jack, who’d bought into the delusion until they were sixteen fucking years old, always connecting Clare’s whacked-out they’re-coming-to-get-us conspiracies with random world tragedies, until Clare finally abandoned them for good and he had nothing but nothing as thanks for believing in her all those years.

  So yeah, she’d been working.

  She’d been careful in a way that only training under Clare all those years could make a person careful. There was no way she’d brought this back with her. Just couldn’t have. But Jack’s accusation needled and needled, and she needed certainty.

  Jill eyed the phone.

  She couldn’t call the Broker from here, not even with the phone encrypted and the signal bouncing around the globe. And she couldn’t do it with “Mom loves me best” breathing down her back, either, and she had no idea how long Jack would be down.

  Jill stuffed the phone into her pocket, jammed her feet into a pair of Jungle Glove slip-ons, grabbed the duffel and the tool bag, and strode for the door.

  Outside the garden gate she spotted spinning cherry lights and stopped short. A neighborhood patrol car had claimed one corner, and a city squad car the other.

  The cop, already outside his cruiser, was moving for Clare’s truck.

  Jill’s insides roiled, every cell screaming with memories from the past: attracting attention was the worst of the worst of the worst things she could possibly do.

  She breathed out one life and drew in another.

  Old Jill, the Jill who’d cared what Clare thought, the Jill who’d tangled herself into knots trying to please a mother who would never be pleased, the Jill who’d hurt and tried harder—that Jill had been killed dead at thirteen. In that other lifetime, an encounter like this would have been impossible because Clare would have never been foolish enough to let it happen. But this wasn’t then, and Clare wasn’t boss anymore.

  Jill jangled the truck keys.

  She started forward, calm and amused.

  Jack was out cold in a truck loaded with guns and money, and the bag slung across her shoulder carried at least five years’ hard time worth of drugs. Innocence and a beatific smile spread across her face.

  This was the type of shit she lived for now.

  CHAPTER 11

  JILL

  AGE: 13

  LOCATION: FORTUL, COLOMBIA

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: VENEZUELA

  NAMES: JULIETA MARIA SUAREZ

  SHE MOVED FORWARD, BELLY TO THE GROUND, INCHING TOWARD the pot and its precious water trove while the rich bite of living soil and earthy rot filled every breath.

  Footfalls a few meters away stopped her.

  She froze, head tucked beneath a hood for camouflage.

  She hadn’t realized the searchers were so close.

  No one had called her name today, there’d only been the whack, whack against the undergrowth, which was probably why she hadn’t heard him until he was right there. A stick slashed foliage to her left and then above her, knocking leaves aside.

  There’d been others who’d passed by her hide, but she could tell from the way this one moved with a shitty rifle slung under his arm, a machete in one hand, and a cane in the other that this was Santiago.

  She kept perfectly still, heart pounding so loudly she was certain he would hear it, too. The crappy rubber-soled boots moved on just a little more.

  She breathed soft and slow, waiting him out.

  He kept going, stabbing the ground, shoving into undergrowth.

  She slid a leafy branch aside, checked for poisonous creatures, and crawled again.

  Her shaking fingers stretched out and snagged the pot. She tugged it to her mouth, drank down the collected rainwater, and laughed on the inside.

  This was day eight, and he’d passed right over her.

  Her clothes were filthy, and she reeked, and she’d had to use a knife to cut the tangles out of her muddy hair. She was hungry—not too much, considering the stupid search parties had been tromping around like elephants, chasing animals away from her traps—but she would last another day, maybe another week, even longer if Santiago would call off the search and leave her alone.

  Because of him, she had to stay hidden most of the day, and because of him, it took forever to collect drinking water, but she was doing all right. She wasn’t one of those stupid kids she’d read about in books who ran away from home with the crappiest things. She had a weapon and enough ammunition to get her through a good fight. Not a lot, because ammunition was heavy and she was on foot. She’d brought fire-making tools and water purification tools and a canister and a tarp and extra socks and good boots and a map and a compass and enough food to last a few days and give her time to get her traps settled and filled.

  Trapping in the wet forest was a new thing she’d learned, thanks to Santiago.

  At least he’d been good for something.

  And now he was out here with a bunch of the rest of them, beating bushes, trying to find her and bring her back.

  If he caught her, she wasn’t going willingly.

  He’d have to drag her in.

  Anything, even starving out here, was better than going back on her own two feet.

  But if she could wait them out, then the fuss would eventually die down, and she could move more freely and head toward Fortul and from there make her way toward Europe. She knew Europe pretty well. Money wouldn’t be a problem because Clare had left drops in every city they’d ever lived in and had made sure she and Jack knew how to access them.

  The thought of leaving Jack made her sad.

  She would have preferred if he’d come with her, but she couldn’t risk him trying to stop her. She was done with suffering in camp.

  Clare had gone again—big surprise—handing them off to someone else for the second time in five months. “Safekeeping” was what she called it, same excuse she always used to abandon her kids while she jet setted across the globe.

  Last time she’d left them in Athens with Raymond Chance, which wasn’t so bad, because Ray was fun and they knew him pretty well already, and Athens was a cool place. But this time she’d hauled them into the Colombian interior, introduced them to the tyrant known as Santiago, and taken off fifteen minutes later.

  She’d been all full of fake smiles, too, trying to reassure them that while Santiago might be a stranger to them, he was
n’t to her, and that leaving them here was for their own good. She’d said that one day they’d understand, which was what she always said, and she’d hugged them good-bye, told them she loved them and to never forget it, and then left them to spend a month in the jungle with a jerk and his band of uniform-wearing, gun-toting gorillas.

  Yes, gorillas. She knew the difference between ape and rebel.

  Santiago was old, maybe around the same age as Clare, a round-faced guy with a big ole belly and a thinned-out beard. He looked like he should be jolly, not a dictator. But no, he had them up before dawn, out hauling water and collecting wood, and he kept them scrubbing, polishing, digging, and burying, like they were his personal servants. And God forbid they should finish early, because then he’d make them do drills until they puked. And at night, when they were wolfing down food, he still couldn’t leave them alone. He’d have to talk and talk, like they cared about anything he had to say. Worst was when he bragged about the times he’d worked with Clare, like that was some kind of special honor, and made up tall tales that anyone who knew Clare would know were lies. She and Jack would be too tired to argue, they just wanted him to shut up so they could go to sleep. Then they’d do it all over again the next day.

  It might not have been so bad if Clare had actually come back when she’d promised. Even a week after she’d promised would have been okay. Jill had kept a calendar, marking down days to escape, and the day had come and passed, and then passed some more, and then another month had gone by without so much as a note from Clare, and she’d finally asked Santiago if he knew anything. He’d answered with a laugh, like it was the funniest thing he’d heard all year.

  Late that night she’d rolled over, nudged Jack, and whispered her biggest fear.

  “You think Clare’s dead and we’re stuck here forever?”

  Jack hadn’t been sleeping, either. She could tell because he had that faraway look, like he’d been plotting his own escape. “She’ll come back,” he said.