CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Journey
I’d gone between bouts of wakefulness and sleep, but I didn’t know for how long. But when my eyes opened again, I felt clearer.
Maybe that was what pain did. Made everything more alive.
I groaned when I tried to move, and my vision pulsed. So did my arm.
Jasmine appeared in my field of vision. She’d been crying. “Are you okay?”
I wasn’t sure yet but I smiled. I didn’t want to lie, but she didn’t need to know the whole truth either. “I don’t think today is going to be my most epic-est.”
She squeezed my hand. “But it will be your okay-est?”
I laughed but pain cut it off. What had happened to me?
“Miss Walker?”
The other voice startled me, making me jump. I winced, and Jasmine yelled, “Don’t scare her. Can’t you see she’s having a bad day?”
Slowly, because it felt like my neck and head might fall off if I moved them too fast, I looked over at the person on my left. A severe looking woman wearing a navy pantsuit and her hair pulled back from her face nodded, then she smiled, and the gleam of her white teeth against her mocha skin changed everything about her, and I relaxed a little.
“Hello, Miss Walker. I’m Agent Denise Greene with the FBI.” She flashed her badge to prove it, but my vision was too blurry to read it. “I know this is a difficult time, but I need to ask you some questions. And I need you to make some important decisions. You have a head injury, so we’ll go slow, but we need to have this conversation now if possible.”
I nodded and lifted my right hand to my temple because my left arm was strapped to my body. “What happened to me?”
Her lips pressed into a thin line. “You were lucky. You caught a bullet in your shoulder, and when you fell, you hit your head. A doctor will be in shortly to give you additional details about your injury, but I can assure you that you’ll be okay. The bullet was a clean in and out, and it missed bone. No surgery was required. Like I said, lucky.”
I would have been luckier not to have gotten shot in the first place, but I didn’t see sense in arguing the point. I was alive. Jasmine was alive. Our mother…
I licked my dry lips. “What about the woman who was with me?”
“Rachel Walker.”
“Yes.”
Agent Greene’s lips pressed together again. “I’m sorry. She didn’t make it.”
Jasmine spoke up. “I’m not sorry. She was a bad woman.”
She was right. Rachel Walker was a bad woman. A woman I never expected to ever see again.
“What happened?”
I stared at Agent Greene as she told us of a dangerous motorcycle club the FBI had been trying to nail down. “Think Hell’s Angels then multiply that by eleven.”
“They don’t sound very nice,” Jaz said.
Agent Greene smiled at her. “They’re not. We’ve been after them for years, but they’re like cockroaches. They are very hard to kill.”
“What does that have to do with me? With Jasmine?”
“Miss Walker—”
“Please, call me Journey.”
She nodded. “Journey, we’ve had you and your sister’s information on file for a very long time.” She looked at Jasmine. “Eighteen years. We believed then, and it was confirmed today, that your mother was involved in this gang, and their primary purpose was child trafficking.”
I closed my eyes.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know how much you know about the circumstances of your birth, but it appeared that around that time was when the gang added child porn to their menu of services. We believe that was why you were retained and not sold.”
I nodded. I’d heard this before.
Agent Greene looked at Jasmine and then me. “Is it okay to have this conversation right now, or do we need, um, additional privacy?”
I looked at my sister. Most people considered those with Down Syndrome as forever children. It was true in some ways. Untrue in others. But did Jasmine need to hear this? She’d asked me so many questions over the years, questions I couldn’t answer, that a part of me thought it would be healing for her to know the whole truth. The big protective sister blanched at the thought of her knowing the filth I knew was involved in this story. I wasn’t sure what to do.
Jaz made the choice for me. “I’m not leaving.”
I took a deep breath, winced as my shoulder sang with the movement, and slowly rotated my head back to Agent Greene. “Tell us.”
She pulled a small recording device from her pocket. “Okay to record?”
I nodded.
She clicked a button and spoke into the recorder, giving her name, the date, time, and place of the interview. “Do I have your permission to record our conversation?” she asked, holding the recorder out.
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes,” Jasmine said, “I swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth so help me God.”
Agent Greene and I both smiled.
Soon enough, she was all business again. “After Jasmine’s birth, and you and she were found, a woman… a Jane Doe… had been admitted to the hospital. She was in a coma for several days. She’d obviously given birth recently, but she wouldn’t speak to anyone after she woke up. There had been a frantic search for a baby, but none was found. At least not until you were discovered going through a trash can.”
I nodded. I couldn’t eat a banana to this day.
“Before a connection was made, your mother—”
I held up a hand. “Don’t call her that.”
Agent Greene cleared her throat. “Sorry. Before the connection was made, Jane Doe had escaped from the hospital. Even under an extensive manhunt we were unable to find her. When you were found however, there was one piece of mail in the apartment that linked you to Melinda Walker.”
Mee-maw. My heart squeezed.
“That’s how we learned who Jane Doe was. DNA tests confirmed that Jane Doe was related to Melinda Walker and to both you and Jasmine. Rachel Walker has been high on our most wanted list for years because we believed she was connected to The Skulls.”
Memory jolted me. “That’s who my m…” I cleared my throat. “That’s one of the people Rachel said was after her. Skull and Cross.”
Agent Greene pulled out a notepad and jotted this down. “Skull is the leader. Cross is close second.”
“And Rachel knew them? Worked with them? What?”
Agent Greene glanced up at Jaz again. “She was part of them, yes. My theory was that she had aged out of her usefulness.”
She couldn’t have more babies. I shivered. I had many more siblings out in the world. And I couldn’t even imagine what their lives had been like.
“She probably knew her time was up, and she ran. She ran to the only place that was familiar to her.”
“Mee-maw’s apartment.” I’d already guessed that.
“Yes. Jasmine has given me her account of what happened when Rachel approached your apartment door. Can you give me your account too?”
I did, telling her every detail I could recall up to the moment the bullet hit me.
“That’s very helpful, Journey.” She leaned closer to me, her expression intense. “Do you think you could recognize the man who pulled the trigger?”
I closed my eyes and his face appeared. “Yes.”
Agent Greene smiled again. “That’s good. If that man is who I think he is, you might be the key to finally taking this MC club down. Or at least help us cut the head off the snake.”
I thought about that.
I’d lived under the shadow of that club without knowing it all of my life. And I’d been lucky. My brothers and sisters had had it so much worse.
Before I even knew they were coming, tears burned then spilled in hot streaks down my face. In sympathy, Jaz began to cry too, and I held her hand, waiting for the emotion to pass.
“I want to help take them down,” I finally said. “I want them to pay.”
Agent Greene didn’t smile like I expected her to. Her face grew even more severe. “That’s good. But I need you listen to me.”
A snake of fear traveled up my spine at her intensity. The dark eyes peering at me with such intense focus made me think of Grant.
Pain so much worse than my shoulder wound began to burn in my stomach, and I would have curled into a ball if I could. “Can I have some water?”
“Of course.”
Jasmine got it and held the straw to my lips. I sipped and sipped, the cool water easing some of the ache in my throat, if not my heart.
“Ready?” Agent Greene asked.
I nodded, even though I wasn’t.
“When The Skulls learn that you’re alive and are a possible witness to your… to Rachel Walker’s death, they will come after you. They will come after Jasmine. They will come after anyone they think they can use to get to you.”
I shivered.
Grant. Nash.
I pressed my hand against my chest. No, they weren’t part of my life anymore, that much was clear.
“I want to put you and Jasmine into protective custody.”
“That sounds good,” Jazzy said, her voice quiet.
“That means we have to leave everything behind,” I said, staring at the FBI agent for confirmation. “We have to disappear and tell no one where we’re going.”
“That doesn’t sound so good after all.”
I turned to face Jasmine, looking into her precious face. “No, it doesn’t.” I looked back at the agent. “Is that our only option?”
Her eyes transformed into a look of sympathy, and I had to glance away. “The only safe option. The only option that will also help us put this bastard away.” She opened a briefcase on the bedside table. “Journey, I’m going to show you five pictures and I want you to pick the one you believe is the person who shot you.”
“I’ve already picked,” Jasmine said proudly.
My eyes widened. “You did? Did you see the shooting? The car?”
She frowned, and her chin dipped to her chest. “Yes. I saw everything from the door.”
My stomach rotated in my belly. “I didn’t know that.” Jasmine could have been shot too. And I couldn’t imagine the horror she experienced when she witnessed me bleeding on the ground. I squeezed her hand harder.
“Are you ready?” Agent Greene asked, and when I nodded, she placed the eight by ten images on the bed in front of me.
I saw him at once, and tapped it with my finger, although I waited until I’d studied them all to confirm it. “This one.”
“For the record, Journey Walker has identified the photograph of Jericho “Skull” Kolenda.”
Jasmine beamed. “That’s who I picked too.”
Agent Greene’s face had transformed again. Not by a smile this time. It was hope.
“Yes, you both have visually identified the leader of The Skulls. And that puts you in grave danger. Do you agree to go into protective custody knowing you cannot communicate with anyone in your former life? By doing so, you put them in the same danger.”
Grant.
Nash.
Pain nearly doubled me over again.
Not that it mattered. They were plotting to get rid of me anyway.
I thought of my life. My friends from work. My patients. The ones in my yoga class. That was it. Jasmine had many more friends than I did. This would be much harder for her.
“Do you understand all this?” I asked my sister.
Tears formed in her eyes. “Yes. I can’t see my friends anymore. My boyfriends. My teachers.” She looked up at Agent Greene. “For forever?”
Compassion oozed from the woman’s dark gaze. “I don’t know. I hope not forever. We are going to catch this man, and if you and your sister agree, you’re going to testify against him. Maybe after that, after we put him in jail for a long, long time, you can have your old life back.”
I thought of school. My job. How and where would we live? I had so many questions, but the answers would come with time.
“Can we get some of our things from our apartment?”
Agent Greene shook her head. “I’m sorry. It isn’t safe for you to go back there, but if you tell me what you want… the most important things you want… I’ll have someone get them for you.”
I nodded and was about to tell her to get Mee-maw’s tapestry from the wall, but there was a knock on the door. Agent Greene straightened, and her hand went to her waist. A gun appeared, and adrenaline shot through my system. “Who is it?”
A man in a navy suit opened the door. “Doctor’s here.”
Agent Greene relaxed and holstered the pistol. “Send him in.”
A harried looking man in a white coat stepped in, followed by a nurse. He looked around the room before focusing on me. “Good evening, Miss Walker, I’m Dr. Howard. Would you like privacy before we discuss your health?”
I shook my head. “No. It’s okay. They can stay.”
“Very good.” He reiterated what Agent Greene had told me about my gunshot injury and concussion, with more medical jargon thrown in. As a physical therapy assistant, I had no trouble keeping up with the lingo, although my head was starting to ache more from listening to his nasally voice drone on.
He listened to my heart and lungs and admitted that I was doing well, and he saw no reason that I wouldn’t have a full recovery. “Just a little scar on your shoulder.”
Grant.
The ache reappeared.
He turned to go, then flipped through my chart again. “Oh, and the baby is fine too. We’re lucky we didn’t have to do surgery to remove a bullet or that might not have been so lucky.”
I froze.
“Baby?”
Jasmine said it too. “Baby?”
Agent Greene just stared.
Dr. Howard frowned and looked directly at me. “You didn’t know?”
I covered my belly with my hand. “I’m sorry… are you sure?”
He blinked rapidly and flipped through the chart again. “Yes. We did blood work when you were first admitted to the ER. It’s quite positive. When was the first day of your last period?”
My eyes were blinking as rapidly as his. I didn’t know what year this was, let alone the days.
“Tomorrow,” Jasmine filled in, her chin dropping to her chest. “We’re on the same schedule and it’s supposed to come tomorrow.”
Dr. Howard looked at me with sympathy. “Well, don’t expect yours. Based on that schedule, I’d put you at four weeks pregnant, two weeks post conception.”
Two weeks.
That was about right.
“But… but… we used condoms.”
He gave me a little shrug. “Sometimes you can do everything right, and one of those little suckers gets through.” He shot me a little smile. “Well, good luck to you.”
I thought of Nash. I thought of Grant.
They were both so viral, their swimmers were probably Olympic Champions. But which one took the gold? I covered my face with my hands.
The door clicked closed, and when I looked again, the doctor and nurse were gone.
Agent Greene still looked stunned. I was sure Jasmine’s expression mirrored mine.
The agent broke the silence first. “Well, this might change things. What about the father? You didn’t mention anything about a relationship earlier?”
I stared at her and her face blurred. “It’s over. I’m on my own.”
Jazzy patted my shoulder. “No, you’re not. You have me.”
If I wasn’t mistaken, Agent Greene misted over a little at that. She recovered quickly. “So, you’ll still go into protective custody, the two of you?”
I covered my belly with my hand. The three of us.
I nodded.
She asked more questions. She took down our lists of things we wanted from our apartment. When she left, Jasmine plopped down in a chair. “This has been a crazy day.”
Only my sister could make me smile in that moment.
When she opened her mouth again, I anticipated that she’d ask about the father. Instead, she said, “Do you think I need a pregnancy test too?”
In cartoons, when any character gets hit by something hard enough to cause them to vibrate, there was usually a “boing” sound that accompanied it.
I thought I heard that sound.
Boing.
Instead of a hit, I thought it might be the sound of a prism turning, showing the world in a different light.
I stared at her, and I asked gently, “Did you have sex at camp?”
She began to duck her chin but stopped and looked at me full-on. “I touched his penis. Stuff came out. It was kinda gross.”
I took a deep breath. I needed to see this conversation through. “It came out in your hand, or it came out inside of you?”
“My hand.”
“Jaz, did you and Jesse do more than that?”
She shook her head, then her chin dropped all the way to her chest. “But me and Kyle did.”
Boing.
My sister and I had been having similar experiences while she was away. Maybe not completely the same, but similar enough to make goose bumps raise on my arms.
“Did Kyle put his penis inside you.” The head went down farther. “Don’t do that, Jaz. You can tell me.”
She was practically glowing red as she finally looked up at me. “He put it in my mouth.”
Boing.
I inhaled deeply. “Okay. That wouldn’t make you pregnant. Did he put it anywhere else?”
She shook her head. “I wanted him to, but he said no. He said I had to decide between him and Jesse before we went all the way.”
Boing.
“He seems like a very smart man. What choice did you make?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t. They got into the fight and got sent home.”
I struggled to remember the other man’s name. “What about David? Did you do more than kiss?”
She threw up her hands. “No. I was completely done with men by then.” She leaned forward. “So, who is your baby’s dad? Grant or Nash?”
Boing.
I was so ashamed.
I didn’t know.