Page 75 of You Can Run
When he spoke again, his voice was steadier, but only barely. “Where is she taking him?”
“I don't know yet.”
“You don't know.” A pause. “So what are you going to do?”
This was the moment. She felt it arrive—the fork in the road that had been waiting for her since she'd watched Dante walk down the path and disappear. She could say the safe thing. She could tell Santiago she was going home, going back Corpus Christi, going back to the careful, small life that Dante had paid for with his own. Santiago would accept that. He might even be relieved. One less person to worry about, one less variable in a situation that had already cost him more than he should have had to give.
But the woman sitting at this counter was not the same woman who'd hidden in a crawl space three days ago.
“I'm going after him,” she said.
Santiago didn't respond immediately but she heard the silence shift.
“Jessica—”
“I'm going to find him, Santiago. I don't know how yet. I don't have a phone, I don't have a car, I don't have a weapon. I don't even know where she's taking him.” She heard her own voice, and it surprised her, how calm it was. Like something that had been forged in the last seventy-two hours and was only now cooling into its final shape. “But I'm not going home. I'm notgoing back to Corpus Christi to sit in my apartment and wait to find out whether he's alive or dead.”
The silence that followed was the longest yet.
“You'll get yourself killed,” Santiago said.
“Maybe.”
“You don't know these people. You don't know what they're capable of.”
“I shot one of them in my apartment,” she said. “I know exactly what they're capable of. And I know what I'm capable of. That's new information for all of us.”
“What do you need?” he asked. The question came out differently this time. Like finally he was engaging with her in a way he hadn’t in years.
“Money,” she said. “Enough to get started. I need to buy a weapon, and I need to be able to move without leaving a trail.”
“You know how to use a gun?”
“I learned.”
Another pause. Then: “There's a Western Union on Seawall Boulevard. I can wire you five hundred dollars. It'll take about an hour.”
“Thank you, Santiago.”
“Don't thank me.” His voice was quiet, but there was something in it that hadn't been there before, a grudging recognition, the first crack in thirteen years of resentment. “You bring him back, Jessica. You hear me? You bring my brother back.”
“I will.”
He hung up.
She stood with the dead handset in her hand and stared at the sea and felt the weight of what had just happened. Santiago had spent over a decade blaming her for what Chicago had done to his family. He'd looked at her on that porch in Agua Dulce like she was a wound that wouldn't close. And just now, on aphone call that had lasted less than five minutes, something had changed. It wasn’t forgiveness, that was too big a word for it. But the beginning of something that might, eventually, look like it.
Because she wasn't running. For the first time ever, she was the one moving toward the danger instead of away from it, and Santiago had recognized that, because Santiago had spent his whole life watching Dante do exactly the same thing.
She set the phone down. She walked out of the house into the heat of the morning and started toward Seawall Boulevard.
She didn't have a plan. She had a direction, and soon she’d have five hundred dollars. Most of all though, she had the unshakable knowledge that the man she loved was somewhere out there and she was done being the person who got left behind.
At four in the afternoon, The Pelican Club was doing modest business—a handful of men at the bar, a couple of tourists groups who'd wandered in.
Jessica pushed through the door and stood for a moment while her eyes adjusted from the afternoon glare.
The gun was in the inside pocket of the denim jacket. A Ruger LCP, small enough to disappear in a palm, bought forty minutes ago at a pawn shop on 61st Street from a man who hadn't asked her anything except whether she wanted a box of ammunition with it. She'd said yes.
