Chapter Forty: After He’s Gone

Five words I hate with all my soul: You did everything you could.

A picnic on a grassy plane beside a lake in the San Gabriel Mountains. Even if tortured, I couldn’t say what we were doing right before it began. He took my left hand in his. I had been staring at his hands in class the day before. His fingers were long, tan and looked like they knew how to fix things. He slid them between my fingers before gently pulling my hand to his mouth. His eyes were dark and still as they stared into mine. He kissed the tip of each finger, pausing before each one as though he was making a vow and sealing it with a kiss. The slight pressure of his lips tickled. The feeling tingled along the nerves in my fingers, traveled my arms and made my heart beat faster. My palm turned into a puddle of warm honey and I died a little at the small, perfect pleasure.

I will never have another moment like that. I will never see him, touch, smell him again. I haven’t been able to dream about him. It’s impossible that he is gone. It’s beyond cruel that I am still alive. I’ve stared at the moon each night promising my soul to any deity or devil who would have it, if only Logan would come back to me.

Every happy memory is now a trap, a torture, a haunting that will never leave because I will not let him go. When I’m loneliest, when I feel the pain crushing the breath from my body, I’ll call up each one again. Each past, perfect moment hones his loss into a sharper, hotter blade. But I will do anything to make him live again, even if it’s just in my agony.

After she recovered from the bruised rib I gave her – she had been alone with me when I woke up from Sde-Or’s tranquilizer – Bennington filled me on what I had missed.

Once the Target’s bodyguards were knocked unconscious, my father turned off the surveillance jammer. The Target then admitted to killing his son and trying to kill Riley. Apparently, a screwdriver inserted in his nose was incentive enough given its foot long shaft.

The Feds moved in and “rescued” Riley, who was sitting calmly across the dining room table from the Target. Riley took credit for knocking out the four bodyguards. The Target refused to talk and was placed in custody until his trial. The reason the Target didn’t describe me or the Pater and our new-found friends was that the Target planned to take care of us himself. He didn’t like being embarrassed.

While I had been driving toward Florida, Mina’s family had flown to Switzerland and started putting down roots. Mina and her siblings were installed in private schools with the oil money pumping out of their land. The closest they got to going back to farming were the window boxes of herbs and marigolds Ophelia Reyes had attached to her kitchen windows.

While my father tried to track me down in Miami, Bennington and Sde-Or had gone through the Reyes farm for any evidence of me. My father had already confiscated the family’s mobile phones. Bennington and Sde-Or took the only computer hard drive on the farm and snooped through the farm hands’ belongings before they were let go. They also surveilled Javier and his posse with the usual methods of phone tapping and GPS monitoring. True to their words, Javi and his friends never spoke about me to others or even amongst themselves.

Riley went into Witness Protection with his mother. The Pater knows where he is but he won’t tell me – I’ll have to find him myself.

Riley did my father one more favor. He made sure that Eduardo Reyes, and by extension his family, could never return. Riley’s father had not been alone in growing marijuana on the Reyes land. Eduardo had been a full partner in that business. Riley’s father had the distribution network. Eduardo had the agricultural expertise. The business was profitable for years until Mina’s mother insisted that her husband stop and make an honest go of the farm. Riley’s father couldn’t find another supplier. Riley’s father shot himself in front of his ten year old son.

Mina had known about her father’s involvement because she had control over the farm’s accounting records. She provided historical financial statements to banks in an effort to get better loan terms for her father. She had wondered about the odd cash payments that helped keep the farm going and which stopped when Riley’s family was evicted. She figured it all out. She had not judged Riley for his pot dealing because she knew her own father had once been in the same business.

The Target. Riley’s testimony and the recordings taken by the federal prosecutor obtained a conviction against Michael de Martine. The death penalty was obtained. It was all overturned by an appeals court judge whose son’s Labrador retriever was slaughtered during the night as she slept beside her master’s bed.

I started making plans for another trip. But my father beat me to it. He disappeared for ten days while Bennington and Sde-Or moved me to a cabin in the woods above Big Sur.

One morning, Amelia came back from town with the New York Times tucked under her arm. On the National page was a short headline that read: Miami Magnate Body Parts Found Floating in Florida Swamp.

The front door had been left open. The rooms had been cleared weeks ago, while I was plotting to kill in Miami. His mother had been moved. Nothing remained except discarded rolls of packing tape.

I went to his room anyway. The blank spaces, bare walls and empty room slipped inside my grief and made it larger. I closed my eyes and imagined that I could smell his special scent. It was just an illusion that made me hate the world and myself even more.

Suddenly, I was drowning in air. I couldn’t stand or sit or fall. My body was a ridiculous costume that couldn’t hold any thing good or real or worth the burden of life. I wanted the world to end if Logan was no longer in it. I didn’t care anymore if anyone else existed. All I cared about was finding a way to make his death untrue or the pain go away.

When I came back to myself, I was curled up on my side and the carpet beneath my face was wet with tears. Voices came through from the floor below. My father and Sde-Or.

It was a tactical mistake to be here. Police tape still covered the front door. The Feds, local law enforcement or the Target’s remaining men could come back at any time. But I couldn’t stay away and my father had not tried to stop me. Instead, he and Sde-Or stood guard downstairs while Bennington waited and watched from inside a car outside.

If I had been less caught up with being a sixteen year old girl in love, I would have realized my father knew and trusted Bennington and Sde-Or. It was why he brought me to Chatham. It was also why he let me stay after I got involved with Mina’s mess and started falling for Logan. The history and shop-class teachers were his extra eyes on me, his insurance.

They were old “friends” of his, as far as anyone like the Pater could have friends. As he explained it, after I woke up from Sde-Or’s injection and screamed at him for a good twenty minutes, we needed help. My father and I had been running for eight years. Surveillance technology was improving exponentially. Time was not our friend. The additions to our fugitive family would help keep the wolves away for a little while longer. But not forever.

“Why didn’t you just let her kill him? He certainly isn’t worth the air he breathes,” said Sde-Or.

“One day her grief will subside,” said my father. “Once I deal with the Cabal, she’ll be free. She can find a way to be happy then – but not if she becomes a murderer.”

That made me want to scream at him. If he had really loved my mother, he wouldn’t say something so stupid. I would never be happy again. I wouldn’t survive the pain.

Sde-Or said, “Being happy is not natural for people like us. It may be too late for her. Happiness would probably scare the life out of her.”

“It’s what she would have had if I had kept her mother safe.”

“You gave her another nine years of life she would not have had otherwise. And a beautiful child. She was happy with you.”

I almost laughed at Sde-Or’s next words. “However, happiness saves no one. And it’s irrelevant in the long run.”

I curled into a tighter ball as another wave of misery flooded through. Waiting for the pain to stop was like waiting for the world to end.