Caleb
You get to thinking when you think you’re gonna die.
Free falling down through the floorboards, I prayed that maybe at the end of things, if this fall happened to split me open, whoever found me would see that I wasn’t like any of my brothers on the inside. Sure, all the blood and everything would be the same, but my head and heart wouldn’t be.
Maybe it’d turn out that I wasn't as messed up or crazy as they said I was, just running by a different set of rules, my rules, and there was nothing was wrong with that.
Ma used to tell me that the most important thing to a man was knowing he wasn’t broken. I believed in that almost as much as I did in her.
When she died, banked on the bad and put my money on things always going wrong. After tonight, bad was all I’d ever believe in—things going from wrong to worse, and from worse to unthinkable.
Everything hurt. Everything. The hollow quiet hung heavier in the air than the diseased smell of dead rats. I blinked through the blackness and waited on a change, but there was nothing to see, nothing but darkness.
Something soft moved around in the rotten hay under my back. Didn't feel like a body but lots of little ones scrambling for their lives. They weren't too different than I was, slipping through the cracks blind and afraid of everything.
The guys upstairs were still searching for us. Every other second, four or five sets of footsteps would clomp against the floor overhead. We must’ve fallen a good ways down ‘cause even the cops sounded far away.
But it wouldn’t take them long to figure out where we’d disappeared to. I needed to stop thinking and start moving before the suits found their way down to the two of us.
I slid my hands over the hay and waited to find another body nearby. I didn’t even know where Hailey’d ended up or if she'd still be breathing when I got to her. I held my breath hoping she would be, ‘cause I’d lost just about everything else.
Maybe Marcus had made out of his fight with Liam alright. They’d gone at it before, but this time felt different. Liam was different. He used to respect Marcus too much to hurt him like he did me.
Maybe he still did. Maybe the cops stepped in before things got bad between them. Marcus would cooperate if they asked him to. He was smart enough to know when to surrender.
Liam always looked for a fight, so I if they shot him dead I’d understand it. But Icouldn’t understand why Cillian had to take the fall out of the four of us. He died ‘cause of me.
If I hadn’t started shit with Marcus in the cold room, none of would’ve been standing in the line of fire. It should’ve been me. I wished it had been, ‘cause I didn’t wanna keep living with his blood on my hands.
I jabbed my fist into the bad side of my ribs, and a fiery familiar pain came roaring back to distract me from thinking too much about what I’d done. I called out for Hailey, hoping no one else would hear my voice.
Stumbling around blind had me feeling small again, weaker and slower than I had any other day in my life. But I wanted to come through on something, I wanted to find her and get her home, ‘cause keeping that promise was the last thing I had to live for.
But how do you keep a promise if the person you made it to dies? I remembered her eyes, her panic, her fear. I couldn’t get the sight of her out of my head, not from the first time I saw her or the last.
She’d turned whiter than paste and fell right out of my sight, like a ghost. What if that was all she was to me now? I held my breath while my fingers grazed across the rotten damp floor, and hoped I wouldn’t find hers cold and lifeless somewhere in the black.
And then I heard her.
Softer than a whisper at first, but I heard her crying no more than a few feet away from me. I never thought I’d find any comfort in hearing a girl cry ‘til then.
I followed the sound ‘til my hands found their way to hers. She wrapped her willowy arms around me the second she could. I pulled her up into my lap, like she was a broken bird, and let her cry.
No one should cry the way she did in front of me—with so much hurt I felt all of it but couldn’t do much to take it away. Could’ve been wrong, but for a spilt second she gave me the same blind trust she had when I met her at the train station.
She didn’t push me away or fight me, just let me hold her like she was the most fragile thing in the world.
But I had to break her. I’d pulled her too far into trouble to keep holding out on the truth. She probably thought the police had come to save, but they were only gunning to send her into a six-foot grave.
“You okay?” I asked.
“No,” she said, her voice raspier than a smoker’s. I cupped the side of her face in my hand to keep her calm. She started a little, but eased up once she knew I didn’t mean any harm.
“That makes two of us. Liam and the cops are a good couple feet above us, it’ll be a minute before anybody finds us down here.”
Her shoulders tensed up at the sound of his name.
“He’s dead—Liam’s dead isn’t he?”
“Hailey, I don’t know.”
“He could’ve killed me, Caleb. You saw it right? They all saw it. They had to have seen it. He shot at a hostage so they’d shoot him for that wouldn’t they?”
“I don’t think they’re planning to.”
Her eyes got wide enough to take in the whole world. She didn’t understand what I’d said. Couldn’t blame her. She still believed in fairytales. She still believed that shiny badges turned dirty cops into superheroes, and that the guys upstairs came in guns blazing to take her home.
Would’ve made a good headline, but headlines never tell the truth. Not a single cop up there stopped Liam from taking that shot at her. Not a single one of them wanted to.
Better him take out their target than a badge. Good cops wouldn’t shoot the doors off a place with a hostage inside. I probably was the only person in this house who would’ve taken a bullet for her.
Those guys were only looking for a clean shot and a quiet kill. Hailey had a price on her head, and they would’ve buried a bullet in her skull before she could ask why.
“My Dad’s got friends in the bureau, the CIA, the police, Caleb. They’d kill anyone he asked them to.”
“Even you.”
She slapped me so hard I had to blink away the sting. There wasn’t any right way to do this, except to tell her straight. I didn’t have to see her face to know how she was looking at me.
“What did you say?” She asked.
She’d found her voice again and it slipped out from her lips sharper than barbed wire.
“Before you go off on me, just try to listen for a minute, things are messier than you think.“
“Why would I listen to you? Do you really think I’m gonna sit here and take notes on your little conspiracy theory? All I have to do is scream and my dad’s guys will be down here so fast you won’t even have a chance to run.”
“Go right ahead. That’ll make two of us.”
I slid back against the opposite wall and put a little distance between us. Last time I let her get too close I ended up with broken bones and wasn’t too keen on that happening again. She sucked in a mouthful of dead air and blasted it out through her nostrils.
For a girl with a grazed gunshot wound, she sure could talk. Anger makes you numb, but not bulletproof.
“You’re not gonna get something out of lying to me, so stop. I’m not your family, Caleb. You can’t just say crazy shit and expect me to rally behind you without thinking.”
She went way too far with that. Had this conversation been between guys, I would’ve laid her out.
“You don’t know a damn thing about my family, Hailey.”
“And you don’t know my dad.”
I squeezed the hell out of my fist just to keep from punching something.
“I know him well enough. How else would I have figured out where to find you at Union? But you’re right. You and Liam know him even better than I do. ”
By some miracle, Hailey stopped talking. She scrambled to her feet and backed into the opposite wall. The fluorescent lights flickered on about two feet above her. I wish they hadn’t. Her eyes were even scarier in the light.
“He wouldn’t do that to me.“
“Think what you want, Hailey.”
“He wouldn’t hurt me. He’s never hurt me. You can’t blame your family’s mistakes on my dad, Caleb.”
She’d gab her way right into the grave if she didn’t shut up and listen.
“Are you gonna hear me out or should I just let you go on believing that your dad didn’t set you up and sell your life to Liam and the cops for a couple grand?”
I’d never seen her so still. She struggled to swallow what I’d said, eyes darting all over the place ‘til she focused back on me. I waited for her to say something, to snap back at me like she always did when she thought I was wrong, but some part of her knew I wasn’t.
As much as she wanted one, Hailey didn’t really have a reason to defend her father. He hadn’t done a damn thing for her since I stole her out of that train station. He never planned to.
He planned on winning an election and her kidnapping story would win him one. Her life wasn’t worth more than a seat to him. At least it was worth something to me.
She dropped her gaze down to her feet so I couldn’t catch her tears. She was too pretty of a girl to cry that much. I regretted opening my mouth at all, but if I hadn’t she would’ve run right back into the line of fire where Liam would’ve been the least of her problems.
“What do you want from me? I’ll do whatever you want, just don’t say things like that unless you mean them,” she said.
Her lips trembled at the corners while she waited for me to answer. I lost my nerve looking into those big brown eyes of hers. Hailey’s dad was gonna break her heart, but the worst thing about it was that she had to hear it from me.
The old bastard probably never even set foot outside of D.C. Instead, he’d left his daughter for dead while she waited for him to show.
“I don’t know much more than I already told you, but a couple months back, Liam started taking the bus up to D.C. to find work. Sometimes he’d go up there with a couple people from our county to protest outside the senator’s offices. There’s no jobs around here, Hailey, and most people who have jobs are getting sick at work ‘cause of the conditions. Liam thought he could change that, but he’d come home depressed every night he didn’t. He met your dad on one of his trips and Mitch offered to pay him to do a job under the table. I didn’t know too much of anything at the time, just that he’d talked to some rich guy who was gonna help pay off some debt we’d gotten into.”
Hailey leaned back against the wall and wouldn’t look at anything else but her fingers. She’d locked all ten of them together so tight the color had drained out of her hands. The quiet bothered me the most. At least when she talked I knew she was alright.
“Your dad didn’t tell me who you were, just what you looked like, and where to find you the morning you left for Charlottesville. When you said you shot him I thought you had guts ‘cause as soon as I saw his last name on the back of your sweatshirt, I knew what kind of a scumbag he was to do something like this to his own daughter.”
“But you helped him for dirty money, Caleb. How does that make you different?”
I hated the way that sounded when she said it, probably ‘cause at one time it was true.
“We needed it, Hailey. Mitch said he’d pay us if we helped him scare you out of leaving home or something crazy like that. I didn’t know he had political shit on the line or that he’d double cross all of us for it.”
“But you agreed to do it anyway.”
“My family was in bad shape, Hailey. We still are. At the time, I would’ve done anything to get us out of it. Getting paid to take the fall for a fake kidnapping, walking away with enough money to survive, and never seeing a day in jail was worth it to me. I didn’t think— ”
“No, you didn’t.”
Hailey’s stare was colder than the concrete. I knew that look. My Dad used to look at me like that, like I was the biggest screw up in the world. Every minute I lived and breathed made him regret having a fourth son.
I slicked my hands through my hair and tried to think of something better to say, but I wasn’t smart enough to lie. I never had been.
A dust cloud thick enough to dim the lights rained down from the ceiling. The footsteps upstairs shifted in our direction—bad news if we didn’t figure a way to the outside quick.
“We gotta move,” I said.
I kicked my legs against the concrete, got up, and grabbed Hailey before she could say anything else. An explosion rattled through the house and smoky light poured in just over of the place where we’d landed in the hay.
Ropes dropped down through the bigger hole in the ceiling the police blasted open, and four guys started their way down one after the other. I didn’t stick around long enough to see the laces on their combat boots. We should’ve been halfway out of the tunnel by now.
Lasers from the guns down the hallway found their way over to where we were standing. I pushed Hailey against the wall and covered her body so the red lights only fell on me. All the adrenaline burning through my bloodstream charred out the fear, and I made a decision, the only decision—to keep running.
We took off, her hand in mine, while some rookie cop fired out a few warning shots to scare us from behind. I didn’t stop or think about stopping, and Hailey didn’t let go of me.
She could’ve dug her heels into the ground, cut her losses and headed back to the cops that were on payroll to double-cross her, but she followed my lead.
Something changed because of that.
Couldn’t tell you what it was, but I was sure of the feeling. Maybe I was sure of her, or maybe I was jumping the gun looking for somebody to fill in all the places I felt lonely. Whatever it was, it had me thinking; that maybe, just maybe, I could turn out better than bad, or even better than broken.
But even the best men aren’t bulletproof, and from the looks of the brand new bloodstain streaming down the side of my t-shirt, neither was I.