J Ward - Crave

Flipping through the photographs, she recognized each of the men now, because she’d gone through the pages over and over again while waiting for Daniel to show. There were a hundred or so pictures, but only a total of some forty men, with multiple shots illustrating them through the years. Out of the lot of them, there were five that she recognized-or at least thought she’d seen before. Hard to know… on some level, they looked so similar.

Isaac’s picture was in there and she returned to it. The photo was a candid, caught on the fly. He was looking directly into the camera, but she had the impression he didn’t know he was being photographed.

Hard. God, he looked so hard. As if he were prepared to kill.

The birth date under his name validated the age she knew him to be, and there were a couple of notes about foreign countries he’d been to. And then there was one line that she kept coming back to: Must be provided moral imperative. She had seen the phrase under only two other men’s profiles.

“How are you holding up?”

Grier jumped at the sound of Isaac’s voice, the chair under her butt screeching across the floor. Grabbing her chest, she said, “Jesus… how do you do that?”

Because, all things considered, she would have preferred not to get caught staring at his picture.

“Sorry, I just thought you might like a coffee.” He came over, put a mug down, and then retreated back to the doorway. “I should have knocked.”

As he paused between the jambs, he was now just in the hooded sweatshirt he’d used as a pillow, his shoulders oh, so wide beneath its gray expanse. And considering what the last forty-eight hours had been like, he looked amazingly strong and focused.

Her eyes went to the coffee. So thoughtful. So very thoughtful. “Thank you… and sorry. I guess I’m just not used to…” A man like him.

“I’ll announce my presence from now on.”

She picked up the mug and took a sip. Perfect-with just the right amount of sugar she liked in it. He’d watched her, she thought. Saw how much she’d added at some point, even though she hadn’t been aware of it. And he’d remembered.

“You lookin’ at me?” When she glanced up, he nodded down at the dossiers. “My picture?”

“Ah… yes.” Grier tapped the phrase. “What exactly does this mean?”

He walked over and leaned in. As he stared at the details under his face, the tension in him was palpable, his big body tight all over. “They had to give me a reason.”

“Before you’d kill someone.”

He nodded and began to walk around, going over to the wine bottles. He took one out, looked at the label, returned it… moved on to another one.

“What kinds of reasons did they give you?” she asked, well aware that his answers about this meant way too much to her.

He paused with a Bordeaux cradled in his hands. “The kind that made it seem right.”

“Like what.”

His eyes flipped toward her and she had a moment of pause. They were so grim and hollow.

“Tell me,” she whispered.

He put the bottle back. Went a couple of feet farther down the wooden racks. “I only did men. No women. There were some who could do the females, but not me. And I’m not going to give you specific examples, but the political-affiliation nonsense just wasn’t enough for me. You kill a bunch of people or rape some women or blow some shi-er, stuff… up? Very different story. And I needed to see some proof with my own eyes-video, photograph… bodies that were marked.”

“Did you ever refuse an assignment?”

“Yes.”

“So you wouldn’t have killed my brother.”

“Never,” he said without hesitation. “And they wouldn’t have even asked me. The way Matthias saw it, I was a weapon that worked under prescribed circumstances, and he took me out of his holster at appropriate times. And you know… I realized I had to leave XOps when it dawned on me that I was no different from the people I was killing. They’d all felt as if whatever atrocities they were committing were justifiable. Well, so did I and that made us mirror images of each other really. Sure, an objective viewpoint would have agreed with me over them, but that wasn’t enough.”

Grier let out a long exhale. He was what she’d always believed in, she thought.

“How so?” he said.

With a flush, she guessed she’d spoken aloud. “I always told Daniel…” She paused, wondering if she had the stuffing left in her to go there. “I told him that it was never too late. That the things he’d done in the past didn’t have to define his future. I think toward the end, he’d given up on himself. He’d stolen from my father and me and his friends. He’d been arrested burglarizing a house and also on felony theft of an auto and then while trying to hold up a liquor store. That’s how I got involved with doing pro bono. I was in and out of various jails for the five years before his death. I felt like I wasn’t helping him-but maybe I could someone else, you know? And I did… I did help people.”

“Grier-”

She waved him off as her voice hitched. She was finished with crying. There was going to be no more of that and no more dwelling on what couldn’t be changed. “Do you want to go through this now?”

As she indicated the dossiers, he shrugged and went to the door, settling into a lean against the jamb. “I really just came to check on you.”

In the still air, his low-lidded eyes warmed her from the inside out. Such a contradiction he was… between his trained-killer job and his Boy Scout heart.

She glanced down at his picture. “You look like you’re tracking something here.”

“I was about to get on a plane, actually. I had the feeling someone was watching, but I couldn’t tell from which direction. I was waiting at an airbase to go overseas.” He cleared his throat like he was sweeping the memory from his mind. “Your father’s passed out upstairs. He spent about two hours on the phone, as far as I can tell.”

“It’s been that long?” She glanced at her watch, and as she shifted her wrist around, she became aware of all the kinks in her body. Stretching her arms over her head, her spine popped. “How are things going?”

“I don’t know. Before he lay down, he told me that as long as we can make it until tomorrow night, we’re in business. He’s pulled multiple contacts from the CIA, NSA, and the presidential cabinet, and we’re meeting right here so that I don’t have to move. The missing piece is Jim Heron-we’re still waiting for him to get back-although if we have to, we’ll go forward without him.”

“Have you gotten a… response? You know, from them.”

“No.”

Fear tickled across her ribs and hit her heart like a battery charge. “Can you last until tomorrow night.”

“If that’s the way it has to be, yes.”

He seemed so sure, and she needed to believe in that confidence: It would be a tragedy beyond measure for him to be cut down now, when he was so close to the freedom he sought.

Strange, that someone she had met only days before suddenly seemed so important to her.

“I’m proud of you,” she said, running her finger down his photograph.

“That means a lot to me.” Pause. “And thank you for showing me the way. I never would have been able to do this without you.”

“Without my father, you mean,” she countered softly. “He has the contacts.”

“No. You’re the one.”

She frowned, thinking that was a funny way of phrasing it. “I want you to answer something for me.”

“Name it.”

Her eyes flipped up to his. “What are your chances. Realistically.”

“Of getting out of this alive?”

“Yes.” When he just shook his head, she frowned at him. “Remember, we’re so done with the whole ‘shelter the little woman’ routine.”