Chapter Fifty-Three
Nathan
I crumpled up the last wrapper from my dinner and made a long shot across the motel room into the small, wire wastebasket. Then I checked my watch for the hundredth time.
Bree still wasn’t back.
The small hope I had that she was running an errand or just trying to teach me a lesson had ebbed over the last few hours.
Bree was gone, and she wasn’t coming back.
I had let the food sit untouched for the first hour as I paced the small motel room. As many times as horrible possibilities jumped into my head, the same hollow thought rang out: Bree had finally made a smart move.
For all her innocence and naïveté, Bree was a smart woman. I had no idea why she had stuck it out so long with me.
She’d made the right decision. Too bad that thought brought me no comfort. It occurred to me that leaving might not have been her choice at all. What if the cartel had found us and taken Bree?
I hauled myself off the bed and began to pace again. It was one thing to wait and to hope, but it was another to just sit around while Bree was in trouble. Why hadn’t I turned around and gone to find her the second I realized our motel room was empty?
“Bree’s smart. She’ll make it,” I said. The words sounded so implausible out loud.
I balled my hand into a fist and punch the mattress as hard as I could. I had to clear my mind. Every sign pointed to Bree getting fed up and leaving me. She didn’t want me screwing up her life anymore. Or protecting her. I punched the air, pretending to knock down every horrific scenario I imagined Bree would get caught up in.
“And she calls me reckless,” I muttered.
I dug into the brown paper bag of supplies I had bought, but whiskey just didn’t seem right. I needed a clear mind to think about what to do next. Now that Bree was gone, I could focus on my plan without worrying about keeping her safe.
The last thing I needed to do was run out the door in the middle of the night and go stumbling across the dark field in the hopes of catching Bree before she was back across the border.
I didn’t need her. All I needed was a plan.
I turned the TV off and sat down at the small motel desk with a resolute sigh. I took three more deep, long breaths, but nothing came to me but the urge to pace. I stood up so fast that I almost knocked the desk chair over backward.
My first lap around the tiny motel room forced me to admit that I wasn’t leaving Mexico anytime soon. That was the reason I hadn’t rushed out the door to try to intercept Bree. Now that I was across the border, I was too close to Maggie and the cartel to turn back.
I still needed to find out more about Adrian Juarez and this was the best place to do it. What kind of deals did he make? What was his rank in the cartel? What connection, if any, did he have to Maggie?
And why would I owe a man like that anything?
I ran my fingers through my hair and almost pulled out a clump. The only thing that calmed me was taking apart and cleaning my gun. Besides a wad of cash, the gun had been the only thing on me when Bree and I had abandoned our car.
I checked the gun and wondered again what I had gotten myself into.
Did it matter now that Bree was gone?
I felt the reckless impulses leap inside me again. Without Bree to rein me in and make me see reason, I wanted to stride into the first open bar and announce I needed to see Adrian Juarez.
I put the gun down and looked at myself in the mirror. Just how far had I gone and how far was I willing to go?
My eyes zeroed in on the Seals insignia on my upper arm. I should have gone back to base weeks ago. As soon as I woke up with holes in my memory, I should have called in.
Memories knocked me down to the foot of the motel bed. I sat there and remembered an extraction mission we’d managed our second tour out. It was similar to my situation in the fact that we had headed into enemy territory blind. Landing with no contacts and no resources, we had still managed to locate our target. The mission had been a success.
I hadn’t been alone then. The Seals worked as one fully integrated team. And I had turned my back on that.
Suddenly my body felt heavy, weighted down. I couldn’t think straight, and I needed to sleep. I kicked off my shoes and settled back on the motel bed but my mind wouldn’t quiet down. Bree, the little girl in the photograph, my Seal team, and the long string of anonymous motel rooms we’d seen over the past few weeks all spun together.
I turned on the TV just to hear a coherent thought. It didn’t matter that the first thing I saw was a flashy and confusing commercial for laundry detergent that involved an elephant and a woman in a bear costume.
That small voice in my head, the one that told me I could still call my team, the one that nagged me to run out and find Bree, kept telling me I was close. But close to what?
I was in Mexico, but that didn’t mean I could stroll into the cartel’s stronghold in the morning. I needed to get my bearings. I was useless without a concrete target.
I squirmed, uncomfortable alone on the bed. Bree had somehow made all the motel rooms and bad mattresses bearable.
I changed channels and forced my body to stay in one position no matter how much the worn spring poked into my back. The channel was playing the local news but it was all in rapid-fire Spanish. I strained to hear anything that might help me.
Bree had always been better at scanning the local news for clues.
I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to concentrate on what the newscaster was saying. It didn’t work. She was in my head, and I had to open my eyes again to get rid of her image.
“Bree, where are you?” I asked the empty motel room.
I could have strangled myself for acting so pathetic. Instead, I struggled to find a more comfortable position on the sagging motel bed and focused on the local news.
The reporters introduced a video with grim faces before the on-the-scene cameras cut to an eruption of violence. People ran as two groups fired at each other.
I studied it with a tactical eye. It looked like two groups having a territory dispute. Innocent bystanders ducking behind cars; men shouting in the streets; gunfire popping chunks out of the buildings on either side of the street. And from the flashes of map graphics, I knew it was somewhere nearby.
I sat up, surprised I hadn’t heard the gunfire earlier, then my heart stopped. It only started again when I studied the graphics again and concluded the fray was in the opposite direction that I knew Bree was heading.
I leaned back again the thin motel pillows and bumped my head on the headboard. I was glad when the news changed to a story about a monkey in the local zoo. It would be hours until I managed to fall asleep. Every time my muscles started to relax, I thought about Bree on her own.
That gunfire could have been the cartel. But who was firing against them? Bree could have been caught in the middle. I could almost see her, ducked behind a parked car, her hands hovering by her ears as the gunfire rattled around here.
The dream morphed into my memory of when the gunmen found us outside the bank. My mind canceled out the sound and replaced it with the background noise of detergent commercials and the late, late show. In my memory, Bree was in my arms, in another motel, but that didn’t matter.
I clung to the dream, wanting Bree with me just a little while longer.