Beautiful Lies

frozen.

“Put your hands where I can see them or I’m just going to unload, asshole.” His voice was flat and hard and I had to look at him to be sure it was actually coming from his mouth. He sounded like a stone-cold killer. We waited a moment and then I watched as Jake’s finger started to tense around the trigger. I have no doubt he would have opened fire, but then two hands reached above the screen.

“Don’t shoot,” said a voice I recognized. The shadow stepped out where we could see him. The tension of the moment drained. Fear, anger, and relief vied for their positions in my chest.

“What are you doing here, Zack?” I asked from behind Jake, surprised that my voice sounded so steady.

“I’m trying to save your life, Ridley.”

“How’s that?”

“There are people looking for you…people who are very curious about what you know. I’m trying to figure it out before they do.”

“The same people who killed Alexander Harriman?” I asked.

He nodded. “You’re in real trouble. Both of you. But I can make it all go away. I can make it so both of you walk away from this safely.”

His face was a mask of earnest benevolence. I wanted to believe that he was trying to help us, but I was having a hard time trusting people. Imagine that.

He moved closer to us. Jake and I backed up. “Stay where you are,” said Jake, and Zack froze.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “Just hear me out.”

“We’re listening,” I said.

“All Jake has to do is disappear. No one will look for him if he stops digging around, if he stops making inquiries. There’s money for him to set up somewhere and start over, anywhere in the world. Just not here.”

He nodded over to a duffel bag that lay on my bed. “Go ahead,” he said. “Take a look.” I walked over to the bag and pulled the zipper. It was packed with bricks of cash. I couldn’t even guess how much. A lot, seriously.

“Unmarked. Untraceable,” said Zack.

I saw Jake’s eyes rest on the cash for a second. I tried to read his face but it was hard and expressionless. He kept the gun on Zack, who still had his hands in the air.

“And what about Ridley?” Jake asked. I felt my stomach flip at the question. Was he considering the offer?

“They just want my word that she’s not going to pursue the matter, that she’s going to come back into the fold of the people who have loved and cared about her, and as long as it stays that way, she has nothing to worry about. She’ll be fine. Her family will be fine.”

“So why will they take your word?” Jake wanted to know.

He laughed a little. “Because I’m in this so deep, they know they own me. And my mom, too. She’s been in this since the beginning. You’ve probably figured out as much.”

“So it still exists. Children are still being abducted and sold.”

“Don’t make it sound so sinister, Ridley,” said Zack defensively. “We’re saving children that are being neglected and abused. Turn on the fucking television— every day you’ll hear about some animal who killed his girlfriend’s baby because it was crying too much, or some crazy bitch who thinks God wants her to save her children from sin by drowning them in a bathtub. We’re not the criminals.”

“You don’t have the right to make these choices,” said Jake. His voice was shaking. “We only get to make the choices for one life, our own.”

“Wrong,” said Zack. “If everyone thought like you, Ridley might be dead right now. Killed by her mother’s boyfriend. Even you, Jake, even you might not have survived your childhood.”

“My mother loved me,” said Jake. “I was loved.”

“That’s not enough,” said Zack. “Lots of people love their children and fail to protect them from harm. Lots of people claim to love their children and hurt them, neglect them, or murder them, anyway.”

There was a logic to the argument and I think we all heard it, even Jake. But it didn’t make any of it right. It didn’t make the fact that children had been abducted from their homes and sold to wealthy families the right thing. All the children who may have been helped didn’t make what happened to Teresa Stone or what had happened to Jake okay. Life’s not like that. We don’t get to make those kinds of bargains. No one has that right.

We stood in an awkward triangle. Jake looked at me and I was sad to see that he was wondering what my choice was going to be. I could see that if I chose to return to “the fold,” he would let me go and wouldn’t judge me. He would let me be safe if that’s what I wanted. Even though he’d said it last night, I knew in my heart at that moment that he loved me. I walked back over to him.

“I’m sorry,” I told Zack. “I can’t live with this.”

He looked surprised and sad.

“What about your family, Ridley? What about my mother? She’s always treated you like her own daughter. What do you think will happen to them if people find out about Project Rescue? Do you think anyone will believe your father wasn’t involved?”

I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t be concerned with the consequences of choices other people had made. Right now I could worry only about the consequences of my own choices. And the way I saw it, I was in a lose-lose situation. I couldn’t go back into the fold. It wasn’t an option for me; I’d seen everyone and everything too clearly. We’ve already talked about how you can’t go dark again. If I left with Jake, the consequences were impossible to predict. I could hurt a lot of people I loved. I could be hurt myself. I walked over to the closet and got a pair of sneakers, sat down on the bed next to that pile of cash, and laced them up.

“Let’s go,” I said to Jake, rising.

“Are you sure?” he asked. “It’s not safe. I don’t know what we’re up against and if I can protect us.”

I nodded. “I know.”

“If you leave here, Ridley, I can’t be responsible for what happens to you,” said Zack. All the concern had left his voice and there was just a petulant anger there. I wondered if he realized that it was the second time he’d said that to me in two days. “Even if you’re not interested in protecting your family, I’ll do what I have to do to protect my mother.”

Jake and I left Zack standing there with his arms outspread. In the hallway, Jake took me in his arms and kissed me hard on the mouth. I clung to him for a moment, and when I pulled back I could see the relief in his eyes. He wasn’t alone anymore and he knew it. We ran down the remaining flights of stairs and Jake headed toward the front door. I pulled at his arm.

“There’s another way out of this building,” I told him, and showed him the way to Zelda’s tunnel.

thirty-four

I was clever but not clever enough. We had made it east to Avenue C before we sensed rather than saw that we were being followed. The silent street around us seemed to darken with menace as we passed an abandoned lot filled with garbage, a burned-out car, some junkies huddled in a corner with a pipe glowing between them. I think we felt rather than heard the low rumble of the engine of a car that was following us without headlights. Jake took my hand and we started to run. We ran hard, expecting at any second to hear the sound of gunfire, but there was nothing. The only sound I heard was our footfalls and our breathing. The city seemed to draw a breath and hold it.

On Avenue D we turned the corner. We looked around and there was no one in sight. We ran up the front steps of a condemned apartment building and slipped through the triangle of space where someone had pushed back the piece of plywood that acted as the door. Inside, we peered through the window that was black with soot from some long-ago fire and saw a Lincoln Town Car come to a stop on the avenue. Men wearing ski masks emerged from the vehicle and I swear my heart almost stopped. I felt as if the city was an alien world where all the rules had changed. It was like Escape from New York or something, only there was no escape. Jake put his hand over my mouth against the cry of panic he must have sensed coming.

“Stay with me, Ridley. Stay calm, girl.”

I nodded and together we made our way through a ruined foyer that reeked of smoke. I pulled my shirt up