He was looking pretty rough, between the remnants of bruises that still remained from whoever gave him a beating at the cop station, and then the disoriented and glazed-over look that lingered from Adam’s wallop; Rob looked as though he needed about ten days of solid sleep. He also looked frozen since we had pulled him right from the precinct in his uniform and didn’t have the foresight to bring him anything more than just a winter coat. Hopefully his toes survived being dragged through miles of snow.
“I told you to leave,” Rob said. “You were supposed to be long gone by now and living a new life somewhere else.”
He looked a bit exasperated with her, but he also had a touch of fondness in his eyes.
“That was our rule,” he said.
“Oh come on,” Stacy said as she walked over toward him with a blanket in her hands to wrap around his shoulders. “You know as well as I do that you would have broken the rule too if the situation were reversed, so don’t even try to make me feel guilty about it.”
“You’re right,” Rob smiled at her. “Thank you.”
“Eh, nothing to thank me for, just doing my job,” Stacy winked.
“What about the rest of you?” Rob asked as he looked at Lisette, Adam, and I. “I did everything I could to let you guys know to stay away from me and leave me there. You were supposed to come here, find the information, and get out with Stacy while you still could.”
Lisette made an angry huffing sound as she added more wood to the fire and took a steel mug out of a nearby pack to fill with hot water for tea.
“How dare you even think that we would do that and leave you behind. I’m angry with you for trying to act like a lone martyr instead of working with us,” she said as she tried to warm all three of us with blankets, dry socks, and hot drinks. I knew that she didn’t pack all of this from the cabin, so I assumed that Stacy had a trove of supplies in her tent. She was mad, not at me but at Rob, which was something unexpected. I had thought she would just be happy that we were all back safely. I hadn’t stopped to think about the fact that our current frozen and exhausted condition, along with the fact that we probably should have been shot or lost in the woods by now, might have upset her to the point of anger.
“Lisette,” Rob said as gently as he could through shivering teeth. “If I hadn’t stayed at the police station, none of us would still be alive right now. Those cops were microseconds away from figuring out everything and coming for you. Every time they were about to come for you, I concocted something else for them to stick their noses into instead. It was a necessary sacrifice to make.”
Lisette looked at him without saying anything, and for a minute I thought that she was getting ready to scream. But then, tears welled in her eyes and she threw her arms around his shoulders to hug him.
“Don’t you ever do anything like that again,” she said as she pressed her cheek against the side of his face.
10
Rob told us a lot about what had been going on inside the police force and how deeply it was rooted and how far it stretched up the east coast. It was even worse than what Stacy had told us before. It also seemed as if they were trying to corrupt as many precincts and jurisdictions as possible in order to have enough force to attempt some sort of martial law in exchange for sizable sums.
“Damn,” Adam said as we all finally started to warm up around the fire. “It sounds a little bit like the mayors are trying to form their own little individual armies.”
“Yes,” Rob said. “That’s almost exactly what they’re trying to do. They infiltrate the precinct and buy out all the dirty cops. Then once the precinct is corrupted, they approach the city governance and offer unilateral protection and allegiance in exchange for large sums of money.”
“How large?” Michael asked.
“Large enough that they are able to keep spreading their reach. The entire eastern coast is under their influence. Granted, there will be rogue counties here and there who have declined involvement with something as shady and immortal as this. But those counties will be few and far between, and they won’t last long before they are either swayed to give up their principles and join them or be eliminated. Either way, this is much bigger than any of us thought,” Rob said as he planted his forehead in his palm. “We need to leave now before the rest of them come for us and find us here.”
“Can they find us here?” Stacy asked. “This place is pretty well-hidden and not everyone can make a trek through the wilderness like us crazies.”
“Trust me,” he answered. “They’ll find us, and they’ll make it here. And it won’t take them long to figure it out. We need to put as much distance between us and them as possible—and fast.”
I leaned my head against Michael’s shoulder. It finally felt as though his body temperature had gotten warmed back up to normal. He wrapped his arm around me as we listened to the conversation being had.
“How fast?” I asked.
“One day,” Rob answered. “Maybe two.”
“So we can stay here tonight then?” I asked, noticing his skeptical look. “You three really look like you need to rest and stay warm for a night. It won’t do us any good to try to run tonight if you can’t actually run.”
I was pretty sure my logic convinced him because Rob slouched even further back against the wall of the cave and sighed.
“Yeah, one night here. But then we need to leave first thing at morning light, and we need to make good time and leave no tracks,” he said in a sleepy, fatigued voice.
Stacy went back inside the tent and Adam followed in after her with a blanket wrapped around him. Michael was tending to the fire as I helped Rob get to his feet to go inside the tent too. It was warm in there and everyone would sleep soundly and get much needed rest until morning.
“Hey Rob,” I asked, just before he walked into the tent.
“Yeah?”
“Why are you so afraid of these guys?”
“I’m not afraid,” he said as he straightened his back and stuck out his jaw ever so slightly.
“Yes, you are,” I said. “I’ve seen you in enough situations now to know that you’re afraid of all these cops and the officials they’re controlling.”
“You don’t even know what I look like when I’m afraid,” he said as he tried to brush it off.
“You’re wrong,” I said. “I do. I saw your face the night of that party. The night that you pulled Michael away and left me there after I had been shot. I looked at Michael’s face first and I expected to see anguish there. But when I glanced up and saw your face, that surprised me. You were afraid. Not for yourself, but for me. We barely knew each other, and I didn’t even know whether to trust you or not then, and yet I knew that you were pulling Michael away, not to save yourself but to save us all. And the reason that I knew that was because I could see the fear on your face. You were afraid that I was going to die.”
“You almost did,” he said flatly as if trying to move the focus off of himself.
“That was the only time I’ve ever seen you afraid,” I said, not letting this go. “Until now. You’re afraid now, Rob. You’re afraid of these cops and from the sounds of it, all the cops up the eastern seaboard. I want to know why.”
For a moment, Rob looked like he wasn’t going to answer me. He took a step closer inside the tent and I sighed thinking that I wasn’t going to get an answer to my question, at least not tonight. But then he stopped. He turned back around to look at me and met my eyes.
“The guys are bad, Lisette. I know that you and Michael and Adam have seen ‘bad’ before. I’ve heard the stories about your father, and about some of the things that you guys have endured. But I’m telling you that these guys will stop at nothing to continue what they’re doing and to amass untouchable power and wealth. They will do more than just find us and kill us. They’ll make us watch as they dismember us in front of each other piece by piece. These guys are the stuff of horror movies.”
