Liars' Paradox

by Taylor Stevens

He shifted out of instinct, but a fractured second too late.

  The thrust missed his nose and crunched into his orbital bone.

  White pain and fire seared into his head.

  She grabbed his wrist and chopped down on him. The Baby Eagle skittered from his hand. She fisted his hair, kneed his groin, hit a jockstrap, and never paused, twisting and jabbing again before he had time to counter. Excruciating, brain-numbing agony ran up his arm, into his shoulder, and brought him to his knees.

  He swiped her ankles, pulling her off her feet.

  She tumbled onto him, and they rolled in the narrow alley, he struggling to use his weight and height against her, she too nimble, skilled, and aggressive to allow him the upper hand. He scrambled for the weapon.

  She climbed on top of him and got to it faster.

  Her hands shook for the same reason his lungs screamed.

  She pushed the barrel into his chest.

  He let go of her neck and froze, caught within the trap of unpredictability.

  She might not kill him, but he didn’t put it past her to put a few holes in him.

  “Clare wants to see us both,” he said. “Not just you.”

  Jill kneed into him, using his stomach for leverage to get to her feet and, for the second time, knocked the wind out of him. She stood over him, thighs scraped bloody, skimpy clothes torn, and lined the sights between his eyes.

  He put his palms out in surrender.

  Seconds of indecision ticked out long and broken.

  “Bang,” she said finally. “I win.”

  The air went out of him in a long exhale.

  She said, “But this still isn’t over.”

  She released the magazine, racked the slide, and caught the round. She dropped the bullet on his chest, tossed the weapon pieces onto the backseat and, without another word or even a glance, slipped into the car and slammed the door, leaving him on the pavement, staring into light pollution, alone.

  Silence descended, silence and thirst and throbbing pain.

  He knocked his head against the asphalt and swore between clenched teeth.

  Swore at that damn phone call and its monotone demand. Swore at Clare’s inability to value anyone’s interests but her own, at her paranoia and delusion, at her insistence they get there immediately, even though she knew full well what short notice would cost him. He swore at his inability to say no.

  Jill opened the window, rested her chin on the frame, and looked down. “You look like shit,” she said. “We’re late. Get in the car.”

  Jack dragged himself up and dusted off his jeans.

  He paused and smiled at her for no other reason than to unnerve her, then retrieved the vehicle plates from the backseat, secured them in place, limped for the front and, wincing, slipped in behind the wheel.

  The clock on the dash said 3:18 a.m.

  They still had more than an hour of driving.

  He smiled again, this time for real.

  They were late, and there’d be consequences for being late, and his shoulder was torn to hell, and he’d gotten his ass beat, but, God, that had all been worth every bit of being able to throw her in the trunk.

  He took the car from alley to street.

  Jill, beside him, sat sullen and quiet.

  In the silence and adrenaline dump, the road noise turned hypnotic, guiding them toward MoPac, where they could pick up speed on the usually traffic-clogged expressway, which this late at night might actually be an expressway.

  Ten minutes in, Jill ruined the trance.

  Arms crossed, face toward the window, she said, “I happened to really like that guy.”

  Jack kept his focus on the road. “Two weeks,” he said. “Two weeks tops before you ghosted and turned him into another casualty.”

  “He was different.”

  “Sure he was. They always are.”

  “I had a solid thing going, John. Then you come barging in like a violent ex-boyfriend and fuck it all up.”

  Jack reached for the entertainment system and drowned her out with Bach.

  He had no regrets.

  Pulling her off lover boy, hauling her out of that house, it’d been the biggest possible favor he could have done for the guy—that he could have done for any guy.

  Jill leaned toward the dash and shut off the music.

  He glared and turned it on again.

  She turned it off and placed her hand on top of his, preventing another yin-yang go-around. Tone soft, tender, she said, “John, come on, be serious for a minute.”

  He caught her in his corner vision.

  The jungle cat had morphed to mewling kitten, all big, brown, innocent eyes and soft, purring edges, the same manipulative act that suckered one boy toy after the next along her trail of broken hearts. Made him want to throw her out of the car.

  He swung hard to the shoulder and slammed the brakes.

  The seat belts grabbed, and her head whiplashed into the headrest.

  She brushed hair out of her face. “What the fuck was that for?”

  “How about you be serious?” he said. He twisted toward her. “Straight up, if I’d walked in and asked all nicey-nicey, you’d have come?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Exactly,” he said. “Therefore, conversation over.” He leaned back, checked over his shoulder, nudged the gas, and pulled onto the road.

  She said, “You could’ve called or texted like a normal person.”

  “Right. And you would have detangled from lover boy to answer.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Bullshit. Three hours driving from Dallas, and I still gotta deal with Clare at the end of this, and you think picking a fight was my first choice? Don’t flatter yourself. I tried calling all the way down and got nothing but voice mail.”

  She hiccuped for a beat, then reached for her purse and dug around for her phone. She tried to power it on, failed, and tossed the device back into her bag.

  The unspoken thickened the air like dark water vapor.

  Clare didn’t own a phone, and Clare didn’t make phone calls.

  Not often, anyway.

  Not unless it was urgent enough for a considerable trip to the nearest neighbors or town. But Clare had called and, unable to reach Jill directly, had sent Jack to do the fetching. Jill’s right knee bounced and her thumbs picked at her cuticles.

  Jack looked away.

  Vulnerability on her was such an ugly thing, and the lines in their relationship so much cleaner when she was a bitch.

  “There’s a charger in the glove compartment,” he said. “Use it. Odds are your boy’s already dialed nine-one-one. We don’t need the drama. Let him know you’re okay.”

  Jill shoved the bag down by her feet. “I’ll deal with it later.”

  “When?”

  “Later.”

  “When later?”

  “I fucking said I’d take care of it, okay?”

  A bark of laughter gurgled in his throat.

  That kind of offended promise from any other brazen flake would have been an insult to history and intelligence. From her, it was straight up button-pushing manipulation to grab control and hold him hostage.

  Engaging would only feed the troll, and then she’d win.

  He said, “Charge the phone.”

  She huffed and pulled the charger from the glove box, plugged the phone in, and shoved everything into her purse. Her knee bounced harder, and her fingers picked steadily at her nails. She said, “Makes no sense for Clare to go through all the effort of finding a way to call and then not tell you why.”

  “I gave up on trying to figure her out years ago.”

  “You’re hiding something.”

  He’d told her what he knew, which was all of nothing, but if she wanted to believe otherwise, he wouldn’t squander that opportunity. He said, “You should’ve kept your phone charged.”

  She turned for the window and watched lights and shadowed shapes go by. She said, “Tonight. I don’t get it. The Tesla
was clean. I got rid of the tracker.”

  “Put a new one in last time you took it in for servicing.”

  “Lies, John. I was there the whole time.”

  “Correction. You were there ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the whole time.”

  She turned toward him, eyes dark and angry, and it was hard to know if that was because he’d managed to stay a step ahead of her, which was the same as winning, which made her the loser, or if she was mad that he’d been tracking her movements.

  “Don’t get ass hurt and hypocritical,” he said. “I know you have my car wired.”

  CHAPTER 3

  JACK

  AGE: 26

  LOCATION: NEAR BLANCO, TEXAS

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: USA

  NAMES: JONATHAN THOMAS SMITH

  THEY PULLED OFF THE DARK COUNTY ROAD ABOUT SIXTY MILES northwest of San Antonio as the crow flew and rolled to the edge of Clare’s property at half past four. An unmarked turnoff nearly indistinguishable from the landscape led into 530 Texas Hill Country acres owned by a Belizean subsidiary of a Panamanian company established by a Swiss law firm in Liechtenstein on behalf of unnamed clients.

  Complexity soothed Clare’s need for anonymity.

  Jack followed the dirt and gravel track at a bumpy crawl, guided entirely by starlight and headlights through untamed woodland, past rusted cattle gates and multiple NO TRESPASSING signs, around potholed bends, and through thickening brush until a reflective gnome’s face lit up at the base of a bur oak.

  Those who belonged here knew what the gnome meant. Anyone else barreling up the dead-end private road ran a fifty-fifty chance of getting their tires blown out—or worse—depending on Clare’s mood and how well she could see the intruder coming.

  Jack slowed to a stop at the tree and flashed his high beams.

  Mirrors dangling beside the gnome served the same purpose for daylight hours.

  Time ticked on with no response.

  He flashed the lights again.

  Jill said, “Maybe she’s sleeping,” which was a stupid thing to say. Clare had triggers all across her booby-trapped land, ensuring there’d be no sneaking up on her, not by ground and not by air. They both knew she’d been alerted to their presence from the instant they crossed the property line.

  Another minute passed.

  In the far distance, a flashlight beam swung left and right.

  Jill said, “That was weird.”

  Jack searched through the dark to where the light had been, hunting for a plausible explanation for the change in routine.

  Instinct told him to abort.

  Without a way to contact Clare they had no choice but forward. Better, then, to abandon the car and opt for stealth on foot.

  He reached for the key to kill the ignition.

  Jill looked at him and laughed.

  His hand stopped, suspended between choices.

  Her laughter turned manic, desperate, and painful.

  She tipped her face toward the roof and between breaths said, “Late-night phone call. Urgent demand. No explanation. This is goddamn testing all over again.”

  He winced, unsure of which was worse: that even after so many years of knowing better, a small change in pattern had been enough to throw him right back into Clare’s paranoid-level thinking, or that Jill was probably right.

  She pressed palms to her head. Through clenched teeth, she yelled, “Motherfucking hell, when is she going to stop?”

  He shook his head, as much in answer to his own questions as to hers.

  Probably never.

  There’d been a time when he believed Clare’s decision to settle meant she’d finally let go of conspiracies and imagined threats— that her reality might normalize, if even a little—but no. Nine years later, and the only difference was she now stayed safe from the figments chasing her by entrenching instead of uprooting every few months and running her kids from place to place across the globe.

  Same tinfoil, different hat.

  Jack flicked the beams and nudged the gas.

  Adrenaline dripped into his system, tingling beneath his skin.

  If this was Clare returning to the old ways, anything was possible.

  Jill crossed her arms and kicked the dashboard.

  He said, “My car isn’t the one screwing with your head.”

  “There’s no point to this,” she said. “Just turn around.”

  He slowed and glanced at her. “You want out?”

  She howled through gritted teeth and kicked the dash again. Which meant yes, she desperately wanted out, but she couldn’t say no to Clare any better than he could. He would have raged right along with her if it’d have made any difference. Nothing made a difference.

  No matter how long they stayed away, Clare summoned, and they were both thirteen again, two kids trying to make sense of the world, two kids feeling the agony of abandonment each time she left to chase another pipe dream or bogeyman, two kids craving hard-earned approval and affection and remaining all too familiar with the pain of rejection that followed each failure in meeting her exacting standards. She’d claimed it was all for their own good, claimed it was because she loved them and one day they’d understand that everything was meant to keep them alive. He’d long since learned to write off anything that came out of her mouth as bullshit, but by then the damage had been done. And here they were again.

  The road wound up and around, stretching the distance between the glow-in-the-dark gnome and the point where the Earthship, half buried into the hillside, first came into view.

  Earthship.

  He still couldn’t say the word without conjuring mental images of UFO sightings, crystals, and aura readings.

  The house was anything but.

  To those who knew, Earthship described a self-contained home that captured its own water, generated its own power, and processed its own waste. Its outer walls, constructed of sand-filled tires, created a heat sink that kept the interior a steady year-round seventy degrees, no matter how hot or cold outside, and a greenhouse built into the design provided a year-round food source. But to Clare, Earthship meant a comfortable way to stay off the grid indefinitely while being surrounded by two feet of bullet-stopping power.

  Bio-sustainable genius deserved so much better.

  Wide south-facing windows came into view on the distant hill, glass eyes filled with clouded moonlight holding court above a long stretch of wild brush and thirsty trees. The road itself had another set of curves before it straightened for the front door, which allowed Clare plenty of time to sight in on any target dumb enough to approach by way of the easy route.

  Jill spotted the glint and groaned.

  Jack’s stomach clenched in the same way Pavlov’s dogs had salivated.

  The injuries, the scars, the competition, the hair-trigger reactions came rushing back, all the times they’d come close to dying and the times they’d killed, the hard-core training, the psych-outs, and the blindsiding tests in a childhood spent on edge, never knowing what Clare would throw at them or when.

  Jill said, “Right when I think I can forgive her and accept her for who she is, she pulls another stunt like this. . . .”

  Her words hung in the air, suspended by a blinding flash that lit the hillside.

  In the butterfly blink it took to process the light, the Earthship’s windows vanished in a fireball.

  Reflex took over, all those years wrapped into a single breath.

  Jack pulled the emergency brake.

  The shock wave rocked the car.

  Anxiety drained away like water through a plug. He rolled out the door and crawled for the backseat, where he’d stashed the tool bag. Sand and tires and burning wood rained down off the hill, crashing onto the road and into the brush, sparking mini fires.

  He reached the back door, yanked it open, and stared straight through to the outline of Jill’s torso—Jill, reaching in to take what belonged to him.

  He lunged for the tool bag.

  She sei
zed the strap and, riverbank predator snatching prey from the water’s edge, dragged the whole thing after her.

  Voices, indecipherable voices, carried low on the wind from the direction of the explosion. Priorities refocused.

  Jack grabbed the handgun and magazine from where Jill had tossed them, snapped the ammunition into place. On the other side of the car, Jill knelt, knife in hand—his knife—slicing fabric off the seat that had cushioned her seconds earlier, and his bag lay open, disgorging its contents on the ground beside her.

  He wanted to punch her in her stupid face.

  Not because she destroyed his car, but because, without any guidance from him, she knew exactly where to cut to access his stash and, without tools of her own, she’d stolen his to do the cutting.

  Footfalls on the gravel—boots in the distance—headed in their direction.

  Jill pulled rifle pieces from their foam-encasements.

  He hissed at her. “Hey, jackass!”

  She paused long enough to toss the knife his way.

  He snatched the blade.

  His fingers worked fast, fueled by repetition and training, freeing metal from the backseat cushions, assembling the pieces, twisting, inserting, snapping with the ferocity of muscle memory drilled into him year after year after year.

  Jill, rifle in one hand, purse in the other, scurried off the road.

  A fusillade of bullets responded to the movement, hitting the car, blowing out the windshield, then tires. Muzzle flashes placed the weapons in the thicket between Earthship and vehicle.

  Jack scrambled to the other side of the car for the tool bag. He stuffed the strewn contents in, swearing with each lost and wasted second.

  Staccato gunfire, louder voices, boot steps closed in.

  Jill’s distraught laughter rang in his head.

  This is goddamn testing all over again.

  Mind working faster than his limbs, he replayed the nuance in every word of Clare’s brief call and every action of the night. Thoughts and strategy seized up in a tangle of possibilities so convoluted that he could only make sense of them as two mutually exclusive extremes bolting in opposite directions: either Clare had blown her own house up or someone else had.

  Every tangent turned hard corners from there, and both roads led into hell.