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“I sent me,” Delgado answered through bated breath. He looked haggard. Unsteady.
“Come on. I know you have orders.”
“I do. And you had orders too. You shouldn’t have gotten involved. There was no reason for you to go poking your nose around places where it doesn’t belong. You know that.”
“Taylor was my case. I was responsible for what happened. I couldn’t just walk away,” Leaf said, following Delgado’s directions to sit on the bed. He could hear him breathing.
“You were supposed to walk away when they told you to walk away. But you didn’t listen. I told you—I tried to tell you to just leave it alone.” That heat Delgado had felt in his stomach after drinking Mama Fee’s tea was now lava flowing through his veins. When he left the house in Atlanta, he knew he had to get to Leaf before Val did. He drove north at top speed with the windows open, telling himself he wasn’t as sick as he felt. He popped one of his blood-pressure pills; said he’d give it time. After a few minutes, he felt a little better, but then the heat started its havoc again and when he got to the dirt road leading to the cabin where the ping the Bureau had surreptitiously hidden in Leaf’s second secret phone sent out a signal, the pulsating and throbbing had overtaken nearly every sense and function he had—all but duty. He had to finish the job.
“Leave it alone?” Leaf shook his head. “This was the one time when I couldn’t. You know, I keep thinking about that. Why I couldn’t. Why I can’t just walk away. And I’m realizing that after all my years in the Bureau, all my calls, all the secrets, all the lies I’ve kept under lock and key, I couldn’t do it with this one because of how anxious everyone seems to be about me doing just that—letting it go. It’s almost like they assumed I wouldn’t. Like they knew I couldn’t. That promotion. The office. The accolades. All to try to pacify me. And then I’m like—why? What’s so important that the man tracking a man had a man tracking him? You ever wonder who’s tracking you?”
“Cut the shit,” Delgado said. “No one’s tracking me.”
“You sure? Or you just think you’re sure? Want to believe that?”
“Maybe someone is.” Delgado wiped his forehead and then readjusted his grip on the gun. “Why does it matter?”
“Because this can’t fail. Because something big—bigger than me; bigger than you—is at stake. I read through all those files. Every one. Mine and yours. This has nothing to do with Taylor or Cade. This isn’t some sting or probe. That’s just a show to get you and me going. Get us to lock people up. Shoot each other and walk away thinking we really did something,” Leaf said and added sarcastically, “That we contributed to our society. Saved our society from each other. But that’s not what this is. See, we’re really saving their society for them.”
It was impossible for Delgado to unravel these high ideas, speculations based in an untenable mythos that was in no way a part of the very solid foundation that structured his thoughts. That wasn’t helped by the foggy mind where Leaf’s speech sounded something like an old black woman humming. Delgado blinked. Pointed the gun and nearly pulled the trigger.
“Stay still,” he ordered, though Leaf hadn’t moved. Delgado staggered left and right.
“You okay?” Leaf asked, watching his captor and trying to figure out when and how he could make a move to turn the tables and get away.
“Shut the fuck up!” Delgado spat. “And stay still!”
The gun waved at three and four different versions of Leaf moving around in the room.
The heat in Delgado’s veins pushed up, over, around, and through his heart and made it shudder like he’d just jumped off a building.
“Get up!” he said to Leaf.
“What? Where are we going?”
“I need the files. The ones you had stolen from my computer,” Delgado said. “Where’s the zip drive?”
There was no sense in denying having the files. Of course, Delgado knew Leaf had access.
“Downstairs,” Leaf said, remembering where he’d set his shotgun. “In the cellar. Follow me downstairs and I’ll give you everything.”
Kerry and Val passed Delgado’s abandoned car on the side of the road a mile from Leaf’s cabin. It looked odd, sitting out there in the dirt on a road that was populated only by sky-high Georgia trees and signs warning of deer. Kerry noticed the Fulton County, Atlanta tag on the car, but had no true purpose in considering how that clean Pontiac had come to be left in the dirt. Not wanting to alert Leaf of his presence, Delgado had left it there and cut through the woods to get to the cabin.
The Jaguar’s GPS led Val to the driveway with the thrice-painted and chipping metal mailbox. She turned into the property and all the chatter in the car stopped as she and Kerry surveyed the winding path through a small grouping of trees that led to an open area, which featured in its center a little cabin that had obviously passed its days of beauty and glory twenty or so years ago. This and that was broken and tacked back into place. The flower beds were overrun and only made apparent by slanted bricks that had been pushed into the ground to create enclosures. The face of the cabin had either never been painted or every inch of color had faded. The front door was wide open.
“You think this is it?” Kerry asked Val, who looked just as worried by the sight as she felt.
“GPS says so,” Val said and then she pointed to Leaf’s car that was parked right in the grass on the side of the house. “There’s his car.”
“Why is the front door open?” Kerry pointed to the front door.
“I don’t know. We’re in the country. You know people do things like that. Maybe he left it open because he’s expecting us.”
Val had driven as close to the cabin as she could and then turned off the car. Neither she nor Kerry moved, though. They just looked out at the cabin like it was a haunted house.
“Guess we need to get out,” Val said soon, as if it had just occurred to her.
“Maybe we could just blow the horn or text him—let him know we’re out here,” Kerry suggested.
