Strike (33 page)

“Patsy, I—”

“Hold that thought.”

I break away from him and run the last few steps to the car, where my mom is getting out of the passenger seat. She looks the same as she did last week, bloated and tired and worn down. But when she sees me, she lights right up, and I can finally relax.

I can't believe she's here. I can't believe she's still alive.

“Patsy!” she says, a little weakly, and then we're hugging and crying. I pull back and notice the deep hollows under her eyes.

“How do you feel, Mom?”

She laughs sadly. “Like crap. That Heather's a tight-fisted little thing with the Vicodin.”

I glance over her shoulder and am surprised to see Heather sitting in the back of the car beside Kevin. They look like they're arguing, but not a warden-prisoner argument. More like a big sister–little brother argument.

“Why is she here?” I ask.

My mom looks back at the car, then at Wyatt's gold Lexus just behind it. Chance and Gabriela are staring at us from the front seat, while Rex and Bea are tuned out in the backseat, him on his iPod and her staring out the window. Her eyes, as always, give the impression that no one is home.

“Heather wouldn't leave me,” my mom says, sounding fond. “When everything exploded, she grabbed my meds and dragged me out of the trailer. When your friends found us, she just came along.”

“And you let her?” I ask Wyatt.

He fidgets and frowns. “She's actually pretty nice, now that she's away from the Cranes.” He leans close and whispers, “And she knows how to help your mom and the kid. She's a registered nurse.”

“But what if she's loyal to Leon? What if she tells him how to find us?”

My mom shakes her head and tucks my hair behind my ear. “Nobody likes working for Leon, honey. He's not a nice man. Heather's on our side, I promise.”

“Is that true, Dad?” I turn to him, and he's looking at me and my mom with tears running down his face.

He just shakes his head and says, “Karen.”

My mom swallows hard and shakes her head in disbelief. “Jack?”

He nods. “I'm so sorry.”

“Why did . . . ? You were . . . this whole time?”

He shrugs and gives a weak smile. “Only to keep my girls safe.” When he steps toward her, hands out like he wants to touch her, I watch for a second but can't handle how my mom's mouth is shaking at the corners. Instead, I tip my head at Wyatt, and we head to the car.

I pull my gun and open Heather's door. She looks grim, like she was expecting this to happen.

“Do you have a phone?” I ask.

Wyatt holds out a burner phone, black and identical to all the others. “Already took it off her.”

“Do you have any other Crane tech?”

She shakes her head. “You think they allowed me to keep anything?”

“You were there that first night. You were smiling.”

She holds up her hands and rolls her eyes, looking much closer to twenty than she did in the Crane house. “Yeah, that's kind of the point. Leon needed a nice little blond girl to make people feel at home. I mean, would you have joined up if it was nothing but big dudes with Uzis?”

“So why'd you stay? Why were you mean to us?”

She gestures to the cooler at her feet. “I told you—I'm the nurse. Your mom, Kevin, anybody who got hurt. I was in nursing school, so I was the only person who could help. There are more than a hundred people currently on Crane land. It's hard to walk away from people who need you.” Her smile seems genuine, apologetic. “I was mean because if you didn't do what Leon told you to do, you'd get shot. It seemed better to pretend to be a bitch than have to patch you up later when you were full of bullet holes.”

“Why should I believe you?”

She throws her hands up. “Do you want to search me? I ran out of that trailer carrying your mom's meds, so it's not like I had time to grab all my stuff.”

I nod. She huffs and gets out of the car. I give Wyatt my gun and step close, running my hands down Heather's arms, over her ribs, around her waist, down her hips and legs and up her inseams. I've never searched anyone before, and I'm very aware of how awkward and intrusive it is and how uncomfortable it's making both of us.

“I'm telling you—I'm on your side,” Heather says. “Ask Kevin.”

I look to him, and he's already nodding. “Mr. Crane was really mean to her. He made her cry. She's pretty okay. Except for the broccoli.”

Heather laughs. “Yeah, I make him eat his vegetables. You can't heal if you eat nothing but Pop-Tarts.”

When I searched her, I found nothing. If she's hiding something, even a Post-it note, she's hiding it well. She sure as hell doesn't have a gun or a knife . . . and then I think of something.

“Wait.”

I drop to a knee and run hands inside her beat-up cowboy boots. Sure enough, I find a knife in a clip-on sheath.

“Were you going to tell us about that?”

She looks at me dead-on. “If you were suddenly taken hostage by a bunch of teen assassins with guns, in the world we live in now, would you offer up that you had a knife?”

I fold the knife up and put it in my back pocket.

“I don't know if I can trust you, but I know that we need you. So just remember that if you make one false move, if we catch you
with a phone or trying to contact the Cranes, I will shoot you. And not in the leg.” I look pointedly at Kevin. “I shot him for the wrong reason. It's a lot worse when I do it for the right reason.”

She sighs. “Look, I'm just here to help people who are hurting. So just know that I never took the Hippocratic oath, and don't piss me off.”

I hold out my hand, and she looks at it a moment before shaking it.

The morning's quiet is shattered by the sound of a slap. I look to my parents, and instead of the tearful reunion I'd kind of hoped to see, she's crying, and he has a red print on his cheek.

“You bastard,” my mom says, her normally frail voice loud and angry. “You could've stopped this. It's all your fault.”

“Karen,” my dad says, pleading.

“Go to hell, Jack.”

She walks to the car, gets in the front seat, and slams the door. Everyone is staring at my dad.

“Everything okay?” Wyatt asks. He steps behind me, a hand on my shoulder, and I want to melt into him, into the relief of a solid body behind me, someone I can trust completely.

My dad just shakes his head, so I answer.

“I guess when you walk out on your girlfriend and daughter and then show up thirteen years later working for the enemy, things aren't easy.”

“You can say that again,” my dad says, his eyes pinned to where my mom sits in the front of the burgundy sedan, carefully staring
straight ahead. I realize that it's the same car Wyatt brought back from his Wiper assignment. I didn't even think about that part of the plan—that if they managed to get everyone out, there was no way we would all fit in Wyatt's old Lexus.

“Dad, do the Cranes track their cars?”

He snaps out of his freak-out and looks at me in confusion. “Just the regular cars? No. Anything we can track, Valor can track too. They even switch around the license plates so that they're harder to find. Plus . . . well, you blew up all of their laptops.”

“I totally did.” I grin, remembering how good it felt to spray-paint the wall. “Did you bring my backpack?” I ask Wyatt. He nods. “And food for Matty?”

His face falls, and he shakes his head and swallows hard. “Yeah, but . . .”

“But what?”

He turns to look back at the cars, or maybe he just turns away from my stare. “We lost Matty.”

I go cold all the way down to my toes. How did I not notice it before? I guess I was so busy being totally overjoyed that my mom was alive and my dad was here that I didn't notice my dog was gone.

“What the hell happened?” I want to shove him, hard. But I'm not that far gone yet. “How the hell do you lose a dog? Is she dead? Oh my God.”

He turns back, hands on his head. “No. I don't think so. You don't understand. You weren't there. I had to get all our stuff, get rid of the last bomb, get Gabriela and Chance and the other kids, get in position so I could see everyone running out of the woods once the shit hit the fan. I had to look for your mom, just wandering around the woods in the dark. I couldn't find her. And I was holding Matty's
leash, and then the bombs went off, and she bolted.”

I take a deep breath through my nose. “She bolted. That's it?”

“You don't know how big the explosion was. I mean, they must've been hiding C-4 in one of those rooms, because it wasn't just, like,
BOOM
. It was this huge chain of explosions, windows blasting out and nails and wood and fire everywhere. People were hurt, kids were screaming, the old ladies in the kitchen were dragging themselves out the door with their bones sticking out. It was a nightmare. So I watched the crowd and found your mom, and we ran for the car. I had to hit the guy guarding the road on the way out. Like, I hit a guy with the car. There's a dent in the hood.” He walks over to the car, runs a hand over it.

I'm crying again. I used to fight tears, control them, tamp them back down. But now they just flow whenever they want to, hot rivulets down my cheeks. I wake up like this every night, crying before I even know where I am, but this is worse, because I can't count on Wyatt to stop it. I don't want him to touch me now.

“So what you're telling me,” I say slowly, “is that Leon Crane has my dog?”

He nods. “Maybe. I don't know. I'm so sorry, Patsy. I just—”

“You're driving the red car?”

“Yeah. Why?”

I walk to his gold Lexus, open the back door, sit next to Rex, and shut the door.

It's a tight fit, crammed in with Rex and Bea, and I put my arm along the window and my head on my arm. My dad and Wyatt are arguing outside, but I don't want to hear it.

“May I?” I ask, pointing to Rex's ever-present earbuds.

He shrugs, pulls one out, and hands it to me. I shove it in my ear and feel a wave of vertigo as pounding, thumping beats travel down my ear hairs. Normally, I would yank out the earbuds and enjoy silence instead, but I'll take techno, or whatever it is, if it means I don't have to hear Wyatt's voice right now. For good measure, I stick my finger in my other ear and give myself up to Rex's music.

The other car has my mom in the passenger seat, Heather and Kevin in the backseat, and Wyatt in the driver's seat. I'm too furious with him to even stare in that direction. I want so much to be with my mom, to hug her and never let her go, but at the same time, something holds me back. Does she know everything I've done? What will she think about the gun that's left a permanent indentation against my spine, the one I used to shoot Kevin? Does she even know that was me, or does she just assume he was the victim of another faceless monster?

What happens when she realizes that I'm the faceless monster, and that it was done out of love for her?

That's what keeps me in this car. The other one is too heavy with rage and love.

Chance is at the wheel, and he keeps giving me an apologetic
smile that just reads fake on his smug face. Gabriela's frown is real, though it could also be that she hates being the one holding Monty's aquarium. So he brought his snake but let Matty go? And he didn't find my mom before the bombs went off. Jesus. He messed up big-time. We almost lost them both.

I guess my dad would rather hold a snake than ride in the car with my boyfriend and my mom, as he switches places with Gabriela, sends her to the other car, and settles in with the snake box in his lap.

“Where to?” Chance asks, not even bothering with introductions.

“Start driving, and I'll tell you,” my dad says gruffly. “Take a right out of here.”

“You're a cheerful bunch,” Chance says as he turns the car around and leads the way. “Like, you survived a hostile takeover of the entire country and then you survived a crazy backwoods dictator, and then you instigated a bombing as cover for a rescue, and now you're all
boo-hoo, woe is me. I'm a little puss
.”

“Leon has my dog, you ass,” I mumble into my arm, “and, by the way, this is my dad, who abandoned me when I was four. It's complicated.”

He whistles. “Yeah, okay. I deem that a just cause for whining. Why's Wyatt so pissed?”

“Because he's an idiot who lost my dog.”

He starts to chuckle and clears his throat. “But he did save your mom, so . . .”

“Barely. So he gets to live, but he's not going to enjoy it for a while.”

I stick my finger back in my ear and watch the trees flash by. My dad gives terse directions to Chance, and even though I thought I knew everything about this area, the same ten square miles where I grew up, we take unfamiliar streets, back roads that keep us off the main highways. We hit a busier road, and I finally see what I've been hoping to find: evidence of anarchy. The windows of a Second Union are broken and covered in plywood. A check cashing store belches smoke through a door torn off its hinges. A church billboard reads
MONEY IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL. PRAY FOR REDEMPTION.