Page 16 of Shadow Man
“Miss.”
Hurry.My heartbeat is locked in a race with her crazy-ass tapping.
“Okay, Miss Jackson,” she declares, signing off her keyboard with a decisive click. “This is totally against the rules, but what the heck. It’s 3 a.m. and I’m betting all the airline ticket Nazis are fast asleep right now. There’s a flight departing in the next hour and I’m holding you a seat.”
My stomach lurches. “Destination?”
“Cartagena.”
“Colombia?”
“You did stipulate “anywhere”,” she says, sounding defensive.
“No, it’s not that, I just…” I trail off, my head in a spin. My last moments of happiness were with a man from that town, that country.
Is this a sign I can’t decode yet?
“Fine. I’ll take it.” I slap my passport down on the desk and dig out of my wallet. “How much?”
More tapping.
“That’ll be five-hundred and fifty-three dollars, including tax.”
I hand her my credit card.
Am I really doing this?
What the hell do I know about Colombia besides the fact it’s four hundred and thirty-nine square miles to lose, and then find myself in again? It’s also the country where the devil himself was born, raised, ruled, and then deserted a couple of years back. But the alternative is something I can’t even consider.
I’ll blend in…
Go incognito.
There’s no way my shadow will ever find me there.
7
Joseph
Past
She wore her kindness in a smile.
That’s the first thing I noticed when she walked into the diner that sold cut-price chili dogs in Hicksville, Utah, and into my life—or whatever the hell my father had left of it.
I couldn't stop staring at her. Her red lips were a soft touch I never knew I needed. The delicate Cupid’s bow promised a gateway to a place of new discovery. At seventeen, it took a whole lot of interesting to drag my mind away from tits and ass, and she’d achieved it in three seconds flat.
Rebecca was a survivor like me, but I never knew you could dress your pain up so pretty. Dogs, for sure... Maybe even horses. But since Pa went and murdered all the good, there hadn’t been much kindness shown to me by the system I’d ended up in. Beatings, nightmares, neglect... Every day was a new initiation into hell, until I bought my freedom the same way I’d promised myself all those years ago—by kicking the shit out of my foster dad and hitching a ride to a shiny new state.
And then there was a girl and a smile, and a glimpse of something better.
We talked.
She smiled some more, the small gap between her two front teeth opening up a path to a heart that was mine for the taking.
We married the day she turned eighteen. Four years later, we had a kid and a crappy apartment that felt like a sanctuary. We were teammates, taking turns to run marathons from our pasts. Mine took me to the front lines of Iraq and eventually Afghanistan. Hers took her deeper and deeper into herself, to a place I found harder to visit when I was on leave.
We bent and warped, until she broke first.