Max sighed. Then nodded. “I know I fucked up. No doubt about that.” He was silent for a moment. “I’ve been doing that a lot lately.” He glanced over to where Jones was pretending to sleep, arm up and over his eyes. “I’ve been playing God too often, too. I don’t know, maybe I’m starting to believe my own spin, and it’s coming back to bite me.”
“Not in the ass,” Jules said.
Max smiled but it quickly faded. “Yeah, I think it’s got me by the throat.” He rubbed his forehead as Jules sat and watched him.
“It’s always in my head,” Max continued quietly. Almost too quietly for Jules to hear. “All the things I need to do. Everything I’m not doing. I can’t leave it behind, like files on my desk, and just go home without it.” He glanced at Jules and there was serious pain in his eyes. “How could I ever expect someone like Gina to put up with that?”
Whoa.
Okay. They weren’t just talking now, they were
talking.
“How did you expect Alyssa to put up with it?” Jules countered. “You asked
her
to marry you.”
Silence. It stretched on, and Jules was just about to bitchslap himself for bringing up Alyssa Locke—his friend and former FBI partner and obvious sore spot—when Max spoke.
“She used to put in even longer hours at work than I did,” he said. “There were times she made me feel like a slacker.”
Jules could relate. Whenever he’d gone in to work, no matter how early, Alyssa was already there. “For a while, I thought she was saving rent by living in her office.” He laughed. Then stopped. “All kidding aside, you know that she was using work as a distraction, right? I mean, now that she works in the civilian sector—which she loves doing, by the way—she actually takes vacation days. Weekends. She and Sam just bought a new house—a total fixer-upper. They’re going to do all the work themselves.”
“That’s . . .” Max laughed. “How would Sam put it? Un-fucking-believable.”
“She’s really happy,” Jules said.
Max nodded. “I’m glad. She made the right choice—by not marrying me.”
“Because . . . you didn’t really love her?”
“Christ, I don’t know,” Max said. “Does love make you feel like you might need serious medication? Like you’re going to explode because you both want this girl and you want to protect her—and it’s got to be one or the other and you can’t do either and it twists your gut into a knot and makes you act like a freaking crazy man and then everyone loses?
Shit.
”
Jules pretended to think about that, his finger on his cheek. “Hmmm. I’m going to take that as a no,” he said. “That you didn’t really love Alyssa, because when you say
girl,
you’re usually talking about Gina, and sweetie, hello, the Gina I know is one hundred percent woman. You need to start your metamorphosis into a real human boy by making yourself a little less nuts, okay? Please stop calling her something she’s not.”
Max gave him a look that was frosty. “So all I have to do is stop calling Gina a girl, and everything will be fine. Just like that, we live happily ever after.”
“You’re not going to be happy until you give yourself permission to be happy,” Jules argued, “until you accept the fact that you cannot save the lives of everyone in the entire world. People die, Max. Every single day. You can’t save them all, but you
can
save some of them. Unless you kill yourself working too hard. Then you end up saving . . . let’s see, do the math, carry the no one . . . The number I come up with is zero.”
“What if one of the people I want to save is Gina? What if I want something . . . I don’t know, better for her—damn it, that’s not the right word—”
But Jules had already jumped on it. “Better than what?” He made a thoroughly disgusted noise. “Better than sharing her life with a man who’s, in his own words, ‘freaking crazy’ about her? A man who’s earned the respect and admiration of every single person he’s ever worked with—including three different U.S. presidents? A man who manages to be sexy even when he smells bad? Max, come on, how much better do you need to be? IMO, you need some serious,
serious
therapy.”
“No,” Max said. “Not . . . I meant
different.
Less . . . I don’t know, hard. Less . . .” He closed his eyes. Exhaled. “I imagine the future and I see myself hurting her. And . . . God, I see her hurting me. It’s unavoidable. But I can’t stay away from her. I’m going to go in there—” he gestured to the still-silent house across the square “—and I’m going to get her out, and I’m going to bring her home and I’m never going to let her go. Until I have to. Until the inevitable heartbreak.”
Okay. Jules sat in silence for a good long time. “Well,” he finally said. “Way to go, Mr. Romantic. And they lived pathetically and disgruntledly not-so-forever after.”
The muscle was jumping again in Max’s jaw. “Let’s just stop talking about this, all right? It’s not helping.”
Jules let the quiet of the night weave its way around them for three whole minutes this time.
“You know, I spent years,” he finally broke the silence, because damn it, maybe it would help if Max heard this, “in this really . . . toxic relationship with a man named Adam who just . . . He kept ripping my heart out of my chest and . . . No. I kept
letting
him rip my heart out. I just kept taking him back.
“Thing is, I got to the point where I knew he was going to hurt me again. I mean, I did learn, you know. I just didn’t
learn.
And I made the same mistake over and over, because there was this undaunted part of me, this voice in my head that just didn’t accept the reality—like, ‘This time, it’ll be different. This time, he’ll really love me the way I want to be loved.’
“Eventually I reached this point where I had to silence that eternally optimistic, six-year-old, there-is-a-Santa part of me. I had to lock it away, and I did. And once I did, I could walk away from Adam. Screw it, I found out I could walk away from . . . anyone, if I needed to. Which didn’t mean I didn’t grieve the loss of that relationship, because shit, it sucked, and I did.”
Jules was silent for a moment, thinking about those movie billboards, those pictures on the sides of all those buses, everywhere he went. But then he said, “Except, one day, when I woke up, I realized I was grieving more for the loss of my inner child. I didn’t like the person I was becoming without that happy little voice—too grim, you know?” Too much like Max. He didn’t say it, but he knew Max got the message.
“So I spent some serious time thinking about what my six-year-old self really wanted,” Jules continued quietly. “And I discovered that it wasn’t Adam in particular. It wasn’t Robin, either—this other . . . Never mind. That’s not . . .” He shook his head. “What I’m saying is that I realized I didn’t want Adam—I wanted my
ideal
of Adam. What I wanted was someone
like
the Adam that I’d imagined. I wanted someone to love who would love me in return, according to
my
definition of love and respect.”
Max sighed. “Do you ever just sit? Quietly? Without talking?”
“You want me to shut up before I even get to the actual point of the story?” Jules asked.
“Oh, there’s a point? In that case—”
“Screw you. Sir.”
“—carry on.”
“The point is,” Jules said, “that I was able to take that clamoring, make some adjustments, and set my inner six-year-old free again.”
Max obviously didn’t get it.
“Instead of turning myself into some dark, grim, unhappy person,” Jules explained, “with no sense of hope—oh, say, like your father—I changed the message. It’s still a bonafide six-year-old war cry: Some day my prince will come. Which has certain problems, I know. I mean, hello. Looking for perfection much?
“Anyway. I’m a work in progress. But I’m telling you this because I know that somewhere inside of you, in some long-forgotten spider hole, is your inner hopeful child. You need to find him, sweetie. And you need to let him come back out to play. You don’t need to spend a lot of time psycho-analyzing what it was—your father?—that made you lock up that Santa-believing part of you, if you don’t want to. Although, it couldn’t hurt. I’m a big fan of self-reflection and self-knowledge. But even if you don’t, you can still give that part of you a new message: ‘I’m allowed to be happy. I’m allowed to let Gina love me.’ And maybe then, after we kick down those doors tomorrow, you
can
take her home without all that inevitable doom bullshit.”
Max nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Except . . . I think Gina’s pregnant.”
What?
“No, she couldn’t be,” Jules said. “She wasn’t seeing anyone. I mean, aside from the crush it sounded like she had on Leslie—Jones—when she first met him, and you
so
don’t want to hear about that . . . Seriously though, I got a letter from her, just a month ago. She would’ve told me. And you know I would’ve told you.”
“Yeah, apparently she was,” Max told him. “A Kenyan. Paul Jimmo. He was killed a few months ago, in a fight over water rights.”
“No,” Jules said, relieved. “You’re wrong. She mentioned him in one of her letters. He owned a farm about a hundred miles north of the camp. Where he lived with his wife and kids. Sweetie, he was married.”
Max stared at him.
“Apparently, he asked Gina to be his second wife,” Jules told him. “For a while it was kind of a running joke between them, because, well,
Gina.
Not exactly the co-wife type. And even if she liked him . . . Which she did at first, but then he started to get a little too persistent, which freaked her out . . . But even if, God, even if she
loved
him, which she didn’t, she wouldn’t have messed with a married man. Not Gina. You know that as well as I do.”
The look on Max’s face, as he took in that news, was terrible.
And Jules knew what he was thinking. If Gina hadn’t been seeing someone . . .
“How do you know she’s pregnant?” Jules asked.
Max took a piece of paper from his pocket, unfolded it. Handed it to him.
It was actually two pieces of paper. Some kind of letter and what looked like a receipt. Jules quickly read them both. “Did you call—”
“Yeah,” Max said. “They wouldn’t talk to me. I didn’t have time to go through the right channels. I don’t even know Germany’s privacy laws—if there are even channels to go through.”
“This is just a form letter,” Jules pointed out. “And as for the test, maybe she went in for a checkup. Women are supposed to do that once a year, right? She’d been in Kenya, and suddenly here she was going to this health clinic with Molly, so she figured, what the heck. Maybe this place gives pregnancy tests as part of their regular annual exam.”
“Yeah,” Max said. “Maybe.”
He didn’t sound convinced.
“Okay. Let’s run with the worst-case scenario. She
is
pregnant. I know it’s not like her to have a one-night stand, but . . .” Jules said, but then stopped. His words were meant to help, but,
Hey, good news—the woman you love may have gotten knocked up from a night of casual sex with a stranger
were not going to provide a whole hell of a lot of comfort.
It didn’t matter that the idea was less awful than the terrible alternative—that Paul Jimmo had continued to pressure Gina. And he hadn’t taken no for an answer.
Which was obviously what Max was thinking, considering the way he was working to grind down his few remaining back teeth.
“So,” Jules said. “Looks like our little talk didn’t exactly succeed at putting you in a better place.”
It was clear, when Max didn’t respond, that he was concentrating on not leaping through the window and flying—using his rage as a form of propulsion—across the street and blasting a body-shaped hole in the wall of that building where Gina and Molly were being held prisoner—please, heavenly father, let them be in there.
And Jules knew that if it turned out that Paul Jimmo had so much as touched Gina without her consent, Max would find his grave, dig up his body, bring him back to life, and then kill the son of a bitch all over again.
When Molly came out of the bathroom, Gina was taking apart the metal bed-frame, unfastening the nuts and bolts with her bare fingers.
“We’ll only have one chance for this,” she said, handing Molly an ungainly length of metal, complete with bed leg and little wheel on the end. It was L-shaped the long way, designed to hold the bed’s box spring, which made it hard to grip comfortably. “We have to be ready for ’em. You should definitely put your clothes on. They’re still damp, but we have to be prepared to run.”
“These people have guns,” Molly pointed out. She tried to hold the piece of metal up like a baseball bat, over her shoulder, ready to swing. It was heavy, but was it really heavy enough to knock a grown man unconscious?
“Gun, singular,” Gina said.
“We don’t know that.” The mattress was leaning up against the wall, so Molly pulled out one of the pair of chairs that were tucked under a small table, over in the corner.
“Last time Emilio came in here, his gun was nowhere in sight. You know, he may not have ammunition,” Gina, who had never had the not-very-fun experience of being shot by a gun, informed her. “He never fired his weapon, even when we were being shot at.”
“Or he might have lots and lots of ammunition.” Molly sank down into the chair, still wobbly-legged. Truth was, he’d only need two bullets to end three lives.
“But maybe not.” Gina was determined. “If he doesn’t, it’s only our fear holding us here.”
“That and the angry little man in the hall with the crowbar,” Molly reminded her.
Gina hesitated. “You thought he was angry?”
“Either that or badly constipated.” While she was showering—carefully, and only small portions of herself at a time, thanks to that biopsy—Gina had filled her in on both the world events and the more local newsflash that the mysterious “they” who wanted Grady Morant had kidnapped Emilio’s wife, creating a full-fledged chain of pain.
“Get dressed,” Gina ordered her again, definitely one-track. “Seriously, Mol, get your sneakers on, too. As soon as you’re ready, I’m going to open that door. For all we know, Crowbar Guy isn’t even out there anymore. If he is . . .” She hefted her own length of metal, complete with castor.