Page 108 of Existential

FORTY-THREE

Hooch

No water. No food. And I hear the weather is only going to get warmer. Wonder how long she’ll last?

I can’t look away. Yet I can’t look at her. My eyes rove the graphic picture of Dagne, settling on every detail except for the most obvious: her. Somewhere in this picture is the key to where she is. Cornfield. I focus on the color of the dirt, knowing it changes as you travel around the country. I’ve got a wide net, considering they’ve been gone the better part of a day now.

“What is it?” Crackers jerks his chin to my phone.

I glance up at my friend, my brother, and can’t find the words. I should pass it over to him and get him to work our contacts for anything we can extract, yet the part of me that likes to make my heart suffer looks down again.

At her.

At her naked body, tied to the post like a goddamn piñata waiting to be hit again.

My shoulders shake, my fist tight around the phone, but the rage needs another outlet. Without anything around me to transfer her pain and suffering to, I take it as my own.

And I cry, silent tears.

For the second time since my life fell apart outside Carlos’ compound, I give in and let the emotions out the only way I know how.

“Hooch, man,” Crackers says quietly as he leans across from where he’s seated on his bike next to me.

We rode to every known safe house and contact’s residence within an hour of the first location. Without anything else to go on, all we could do was canvas the area and hope that somebody saw them, that somebody had a clue as to where Digits would take her.

Because I had no idea.

And all the while, he was doing this to her.

If I knew it would locate her and bring her peace from what Digits did to her, I’d stab myself in the heart right now and take full responsibility for how I’ve failed her. I had one job, and I was fucking useless at it. One job.

To find the traveller.

“How do we do it?” I ask through broken chords. “We can’t do it.”

Crackers reaches across and eases the phone out of my grasp. We’re lined up outside a convenience store waiting on Murphy to return with something to eat.

“Fuck, man.” Even his face twists in pain. “Fuckin’ hell, Hooch.”

“Tell me what to do,” I beg. “How do I bring her home?”

He slips off the bike, taking the phone with him as he jogs into the store. I raise my hand to the pocket inside my cut and pat around, searching for the tinderbox. Yet it’s not there, and even if it were, what good would it do?

Would it fill this crack that snakes through the ice in my heart? Would it ease the fire that rages in my soul for how much of a failure I am to those I love? Would it bridge the pain that remains after losing those I love, that grows at the thought of losing another?

Because I do love this little woman. So fucking much. I just couldn’t tell her in case it scared her away. Ridiculous, right?

I broke her heart in the hopes it would keep her in mine. I held off from telling her the one thing she needed to hear in case it meant she told me the one thing I didn’t: that she doesn’t feel the same.

I couldn’t face the thought that she’d leave me, so I tried to deny I had anything to lose to begin with. I made her work to stay, when in reality I was pushing her away.

And now I’ve not only lost it all, but she’s suffered in the worst way because of my ignorance.

I should have shot Digits the second he pulled the trigger on Heather. I should have choked the life out of the asshole when Dagne first showed King and I the messages.

I should have done so much more.

Always too late.