Chapter Seventeen
Luke
We clear the gates of The Ranch without any trouble. And yet trouble has her sights on us and with such determination, we might as well be riding downhill with an overloaded eighteen-wheeler roughing up our bumper.
On that note, I’m fairly confident anyplace we go, and anything we can do could be a trap. Apparently, I’m not the only one thinking the same. My earbuds start to read a text in my ears: Message from Blake: I’m reviewing the camera feed for the gym, the hotel next to it, and the street around both. More soon.
We’re about five miles down the highway, headed toward town when Ana glances over at me. “I can’t believe he’s alive.” She glances over at me. “I can’t believe he’s alive, Luke.”
This, right now, I realize, is really the first quiet time she’s had to step back and take in the reality of the situation. “I can’t believe he’s alive either, baby.”
“And we drugged him,” she says. “Proof of how abnormal my life truly is. I shot you and drugged him.”
“The gun had a faulty discharge and Savage drugged him, but if he’s the man we both once knew, he’d approve of your warrior spirit. And as for normal, it doesn’t exist.”
“You had a normal childhood, Luke, and I swear that’s why you survived what you have with a level head on your shoulders,”
“My father died during active duty. My mother died a week before I enlisted. I guess it depends on how you define normal.”
“They were in love and happy.”
“If that was all it took to be normal, we’d be normal, Ana, and we’re not. But yes, my parents were in love. And the two of them together and happy, represent good memories for me that often get overshadowed by me losing them back-to-back, one year to the next.” As sure as I say those words, my mind is traveling back home, to a Christmas morning, with me, my mom, and dad around the tree. The next I know though, I’m remembering the day I left that all behind, and boarded a plane to leave for flight school, without my father around to see me do it. God, that still hurts. The only thing that hurt as much as losing my parents was losing Ana.
“I wish I would have met them, Luke.”
“I wish you would have, too, baby,” I say, shaking off the memories and refocusing on the here and now. “Kurt loved your mother. He spoke about her to me often,”
“We think,” she counters. “I don’t know, I barely remember them together. I was so young when they married, and she was gone not long after.”
I motion to the highway that is backed up with standstill traffic. “We won’t be going that way.”
“Wonderful,” she says. “Can we not just find answers and be done with this?” She shivers and reaches for her coat in the backseat, pulling it over her, and then cutting a sharp look in my direction. “You know, I just realized we never took our coats inside and The Ranch was warm. I keep the heat way down. Kurt had been at the house a while. Could he really have been living there?”
“I doubt he’s been living there the whole three years but the idea that he’s been using it, even off and on that entire time, doesn’t really shock me. He’s way more involved in this mess than we are, and we’re completely consumed.”
“And I never knew,” she murmurs.
“I wish I could give you answers, Ana. I wish I could turn back time and make everything wrong, right, but the problem with that premise is that we were never in control. At least not then.”
“You think we’re in control now?”
“These assholes are so desperate to find this package that they’re counting on us to deliver it, and we don’t even know what’s inside. When we’re the resource that allows them to get what they want, yes, wehave control. Unless someone finds the package before we do. Then we become disposable.” I turn us off the access road and begin the winding path toward downtown.
“Why are they this desperate now?” she asks, almost talking to herself before her voice lifts and she repeats, “Why now? I keep going back to that in my mind. Why now? Why go after Jake? Why use him to lure us together? And if Newman was their buyer, why kill him off when the package has surfaced and could be potentially sold for what is obviously a big payday?”
“Maybe someone really tried to sell the package. Or maybe there’s another buyer with a bigger payday which brought this front and center again.”
“Maybe they didn’t kill off the buyer. Maybe, it was always Phillips Senior who was the buyer.”
“Killing off his son isn’t exactly the way to win him over,” I remind her.
“Kurt said he heard the buyer hired his own team to find the package. What if Newman was trying to push out the middleman? Maybe it’s even Phillips Senior trying to push out the middleman, meaning the organization, so they killed his son?”
“I’d buy that as a big possibility, but right when we went to see him? That’s a big coincidence.”
“But possible.”
“I’m skeptical about the timing.”