Liars' Paradox

by Taylor Stevens

  He pulled the burner apart, took out the battery, and removed the SIM.

  Jill’s blood roiled in protest.

  Burners were one-time use. Jack would run the car over the phone, flush the pieces down a toilet, and Clare would never be able to call again.

  She couldn’t breathe. She needed air. She said, “Goddammit, John. Stop and think for a minute. The stuff that happened on her property and what happened to Raymond . . . Whoever has her is going to use her and then kill her. She’s just trying to keep us away from it.”

  Jack ignored her like she’d never spoken. More of the same. The way it’d always been. Soon as Clare offered an opinion or gave an instruction, his critical thinking stopped, and he did exactly what she wanted.

  But Clare was wrong. He was wrong.

  Jill’s senses shut off, and fear took over: fear that he’d abandon Clare, that he’d abandon her. A guttural scream rose from far, far away, and she lunged over the center console into his seat, into his lap, fists jabbing in the short, tight space. She knocked his head back and gripped the seat belt and twisted it around his neck.

  He bucked and flailed and hit her in turn, and she never felt a thing, until a knife jabbed through her shirt and broke skin. Face-to-face, breath to breath, she said, “I don’t give a fuck what you think Clare said. We’re going after her. We’re going to find her. We’re going to get her back.”

  His oxygen was cut off, and Jack’s face turned a darker shade.

  He twisted the knife deeper.

  “Fuck this,” she said.

  She let go of the seat belt, and he gasped down air.

  Her fingers caught the door handle, and she tumbled, shoulder first, down to the pavement, crawled to the bushes, and retched what little food she’d eaten right into them.

  She didn’t need to call the fucking Broker to find out if he knew anything about Clare. The Broker, through Clare, had just called her.

  CHAPTER 18

  ROB

  AGE: 23

  LOCATION: AUSTIN, TEXAS

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: USA

  NAMES: ROBERT PRESTON DAVIS

  THE DOORBELL RANG, FOLLOWED BY ANOTHER KNOCK, THIRD TIME in two minutes, and he stood in the foyer, bare feet against cracked, aging marble, with his back to the wall.

  He’d gotten this far and stopped short of answering.

  He’d hardly slept in days. Couldn’t remember when he’d last eaten. Hadn’t shaved or showered since he forgot when. He didn’t want to see people and yet desperately craved news, any news, so he fidgeted with his phone, too curious to walk away and too nervous to announce his presence by stealing a glimpse through the peephole.

  The chime sounded above his head again.

  Whoever was out there wasn’t a sales guy, anyone going door-to-door would have left by now. Wasn’t Girl Scouts or a school fund-raiser, either, wrong time of year for that. Probably wasn’t a reporter. They had a tendency to trample his lawn and go looking into windows to get to him, and there wasn’t any of that going on. His housemates had abandoned the place for safer territory, and none of their friends had come around since, so it wasn’t them, either.

  Indecision kept him frozen.

  A voice spoke from the other side, nothing loud that the neighbors would hear, more like the person had pressed their mouth close to the hinges.

  His stomach crawled up his throat.

  More like whoever was out there knew he was here, right here behind the door.

  The person said, “Just need to talk with you, Robert.”

  The tone was friendly, almost. Somewhere between “Let’s have coffee” and “Don’t make me come in there and get you.”

  “Come on, Robert,” the voice said. “Don’t drag this out all day.”

  His heart hurt. His mouth went dry. He wanted to fall asleep and wake up to a world where things were back to the way they’d been before he ever met Jen.

  He took a breath, and opened the door to two men in suits, big ole shadows blocking the afternoon sun. They were packing—definitely packing—and they wore the swagger of cop authority, but they looked more like younger versions of his dad’s Marine Corps buddies than any officer or detective he’d encountered so far in this nightmare.

  He hesitated for an awkward second, trying to place who they were and why they’d come. The smaller of the two stretched a hand forward and said, “Thanks for answering.”

  The guy had an accent, nothing glaring, just enough to point out that he was a transplant. He said, “We’re here about Jennifer. Mind if we come in for a few?”

  Robert shook the hand because it was there, but his palms flushed and his face burned and the world went a little dizzy.

  Jen was dead. That was what this was.

  They’d found her in a ditch somewhere. Assaulted. Decapitated. They believed he’d done it and were here to arrest him.

  His jaw clenched shut.

  Handcuffs and Miranda warnings would be next.

  The talker pulled out a notepad and took a step closer. “We have a few more questions,” he said.

  Robert blinked through a slow motion blur. The words reordered into a different meaning: More questions meant these guys weren’t here with answers. More questions meant Jen wasn’t dead. Not yet. And they hadn’t come to arrest him. Not yet.

  Relief and desperation collided with reality.

  More questions meant Jen was still missing, and what he needed now, most of all, was for her to be alive, very much alive, not just on the phone alive, but real-life, walk-into-a-police-station alive. For her sake and for his.

  The talker said, “We won’t take much of your time.”

  Robert’s lips pressed together. His feet remained planted.

  The talker tried stepping forward. “You mind?”

  Hand on the door, Robert moved to shut it.

  Yes, he minded. He minded very much. Going to the police had become a bad, bad idea. The asshole who’d taken Jen hadn’t left so much as a fingerprint behind, and the crime-scene techs who’d crawled over his house hadn’t found much to prove Jen had ever been there, either. Based on the way the questioning had gone, either the detectives were going to nail him for pulling a hoax or he was their prime suspect in her kidnapping.

  There was no way to put a positive spin on that.

  He’d told them about Jen’s call. He’d begged them for the umpteenth time to trace her phone. They’d told him to sit tight and wait, which he was pretty sure was their way of telling him they believed this new story was even more bullshit than the first and were dead set on proving it.

  The talker stuck his shoe over the threshold and blocked the door.

  Robert glanced at the foot, then the face. He said, “Already told you everything I know.”

  The guy looked up from his pad. “Different agency. We’re running a separate investigation from the outside.”

  Those ten words made the world tilt.

  Different meant another shot at convincing someone to take his version of the story seriously. Different meant hope for both him and Jen.

  “Texas Rangers?” Robert said. “FBI? You have a badge or anything?”

  The big guy, the silent partner, the Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson wannabe with huge arms and a shaved head, said, “Yep.” He reached for his back pocket.

  The talker moved forward to make space.

  Robert stepped out of his way, and somehow, they were all three inside the foyer and then standing in awkward silence at the edge of the living room.

  Robert glanced around, uncomfortably conscious of his unwashed hair, his clothes permeated with three days’ worth of wrinkles and body odor, and the mess of take-out containers and spills littering the carpet. The kitchen, piled with dirty dishes and half-eaten food, was worse, with nothing cleaned, nothing cared for, because it had taken every bit of energy he had to endure the flow of Jen chaos and keep from breaking under the stress of not knowing what came next.

  “Anything you need to help Jen
,” he said. “I just don’t know what I can say that hasn’t already been gone over a dozen times.”

  The talker shrugged in an almost apologetic way, which drained the tension from Robert’s shoulders and made it hard not to like the guy. “You might as well run us through everything from the beginning,” he said. “You know how it is between agencies. Not so great at communication.”

  Robert’s jaw relaxed. He motioned toward the cluttered couch.

  The talker said, “How about we start with your phone.”

  Robert’s brows furrowed. His gaze drifted to the device in his hand. “The forensic team already mirrored it,” he said. “You don’t want to copy what they’ve got?”

  Another disarming shrug, another self-deprecating smile, and the guy said, “It’s that other agency thing. We’re covering all the basics as a just in case. Want to make sure we’ve got Jennifer’s number correct, confirm the time stamps on calls and texts, and get a look at the actual words she used in communicating with you over the past month.”

  Robert glanced from the talker to the big guy, who stood a few feet away, expression grim, badge billfold gripped tight in a dinner-plate hand, and changed his mind about asking for a closer look.

  The talker said, “We’ll also need any pictures, notes, gifts, anything tangible you might have that you haven’t already turned over.”

  Robert rubbed his eyes. This was like swimming against a riptide, more and more of the same thing and still no progress. He was exhausted. He wanted this over. “Don’t have much,” he said. “We weren’t together that long before this all happened, and of course, the other guys took a lot. You’ll have to check with them for that.”

  The big bald guy looked at his watch.

  The talker said, “Anything you’ve got.”

  Robert sighed, slouched down the hall to his room, stood in his doorway, and sighed again. He’d yet to put anything back the way it’d been before the cops turned it all upside down, and didn’t have the energy to even think about it. He knelt and dug through a pile by the desk for the shot glass Jen had got him on some trip she’d made to Europe right after they first met and reached into the desk drawer for the Schlitterbahn receipt he’d stashed in with a few old bills.

  He couldn’t think of anything else that might matter.

  The suits were still standing when he returned to the living room.

  He handed his stuff to the talker and then unlocked his phone to open up Jen’s texts. Something stung his neck. He slapped his skin, jerked around, and came face to collar with the big guy. He hadn’t noticed the suit move, but the dude was way up in his personal space.

  Robert rubbed his neck, took a step away, and glowered.

  He said, “What the hell was that about?”

  Mr. Strong-and-Silent plucked the phone out of his hand.

  Everything went hazy.

  Robert struggled to stay on his feet.

  From out in the fog, the big guy said, “Some of this should be useful.”

  The words were warm and toasty.

  Useful was good. Useful meant maybe these guys could find Jen.

  That was his last thought before the room went dark and his legs gave out.

  CHAPTER 19

  JACK

  AGE: 26

  LOCATION: LA PORTE, TEXAS

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: PAPERLESS

  NAMES: JOSE MANUEL VALERO SANTOS

  HE SAT ON THE FLOOR BETWEEN BED AND BATHROOM WALL IN A room that stank of smoke and mold and cheap chemicals. Shotgun beside him, ice pack melting against lip and darkening eye, he studied the notepad on his lap.

  He needed sleep.

  What he had instead was the distraction of water rattling through the pipes in the wall at his back and a night of work that had barely begun.

  They were out of the public eye for now, just south of the ship channel, surrounded by industry and a permanent eau de oil refinery, in a motel that catered to day laborers and the chronically homeless, where customers paid cash, the desk clerks avoided eye contact, and a young man with a lost bar fight on his face could show up without speaking a word of English and fit right in.

  Where to from here was anybody’s guess.

  They were as close to Clare as he could hope to get them, and might as well have been a continent away. He and Jill had spent the past five hours dredging up memories that had taken them years to forget—every story Clare had told, no matter how bizarre, every motivation and excuse, every move they’d made and the reasons why, every person she’d named and every person they’d met, cataloged in a timeline of sorts—five exhausting hours, until Jill, in sullen silence, had retreated to the bathroom to wash off the road wear.

  He flipped through page after page of details that had, until two days ago, been delusional fantasy. If even half the stories were true, there were a hundred reasons for Clare to go missing, and he had to find one, just one, strong enough to reach out from the past to grab her. Trying to build off Raymond’s strange questions and a lifetime of Clare’s paranoia was like trying to build a life raft from baling twine and bubble gum.

  Thinking about it made his head hurt.

  What he really wanted was to let Clare sort this mess out on her own.

  She didn’t want their help, she’d made that clear.

  Thirty seconds on the phone had given him that.

  Jill wouldn’t have any of it, wouldn’t listen to reason, wouldn’t acknowledge that by interfering they could make things worse. And so here they were. Not because of her fists or her threats to beat him half to death to force him to comply, which she was more than capable of making good on, but because Jill was panicked and slowly falling apart.

  If forced to choose between saving Jill or saving Clare, it always had been and always would be Jill. That’s what this really was: saving Jill.

  Clare could handle her own affairs. If there was a way to get loose, she’d find it with or without their meddling. The phone call had made that clear, too.

  You will no longer be paid for protection.

  That was so typically Clare: kidnapped—possibly tortured—in a position of weakness and at the mercy of people who hated her, and she still managed to spin bullshit into gold to get exactly what she wanted while giving up zip in return.

  She knew her kids were alive, and she had gotten her message through.

  In exchange, her enemies believed her kids were mercenary protectors. Even so, the second part of the guy’s sentence kept coming back.

  Any further action on your part will result in death.

  It was a brush-off that ranked their threat level somewhere between an irritation and inconsequential—bugs to be squashed if they got underfoot—and that kind of dismissal could cut two ways. Either the people who had Clare truly viewed her so-called protectors as extraneous enough to settle with a warning, or they’d let her make the call in reverse manipulation and there was more coming, he just couldn’t see it yet.

  Jack pulled the lamp off the cigarette-burned nightstand and, under its dim wattage, flipped through the pages of notes, hoping for the latter. This was kamikaze hide-and-seek, and anything the other side threw at him would be better than what he had at the moment. Shouting from beyond the front door broke the logic progression.

  He set pen and pad on the floor, gripped the shotgun, hugged the wall on the way to the window, and nudged the curtain just enough to get a glimpse of the lot.

  Three gangbangers in sagging pants and torn T-shirts pushed each other around in an unintelligible argument that seemed to go nowhere. He let the curtain drop.

  The car was still there, original plates swapped out for spares from his tool bag on the high chance a scanner-fitted patrol car rolled through the property, and the car was the only thing out there that mattered.

  He returned to his place by the wall and, attuned to the sounds in the bathroom, paused. He checked his watch. Twenty minutes since the water had turned on, and the only things he’d heard were the rattling pipes and a
constant spray.

  He swore under his breath and strode for the door.

  He’d known better than to leave her alone, especially now.

  Knuckles to the flimsy wood, he rapped and waited. He called Jill’s name and, with only more water and rattling for an answer, gripped the handle and heaved hard.

  The frame splintered, the door popped open, and steam hit him in the face.

  Jill, on the floor, with her back against the tub, looked up.

  Her eyes were red and mascara stained her cheeks. Her cavernous purse lay open beside her. Three empty mini vodka bottles littered the floor nearby, and her right hand, limp in her lap, gripped a pill bottle. She sniffed and ran her sleeve under her nose and smiled with the dead-sick glaze of narcotics.

  Jack knelt and unclenched her fist, pulled the bottle away, and read the label. Anger rose, fearful, vengeful anger—at her, but mostly at himself.

  He’d known this was coming and had still let her out of sight.

  He gripped her shoulder and shoved the bottle up in her face. “Is this what you took?” he said. “What’s on the label? Is this what you took?”

  Her drug-sick smile twisted and her eyelids drooped to half-mast in time with a slow-motion head drop.

  “How many?” he said.

  She struggled, elbows against the tub, to heave herself up off the floor and get away from him. Hand on her shoulder, he shoved her down.

  “How many?”

  She sniffed and wiped her nose again. “Two.” Her words were slurred. “Maybe three.”

  Given her habits, the opiate-alcohol combo wasn’t enough for an overdose, but she’d be out for a good long while. He stuffed the bottle into his pocket, got in her face, and searched her faraway eyes. He wanted to hit her. Instead, he grabbed her, shook her and, volume rising, said, “The fuck are you doing to yourself?”

  Jill sniffed. “You used a bad word,” she said. She giggled. “You never use bad words. Only I get to use them.” Her voice cracked. “I’m telling Clare.”