Learning to Trust: Curtain Falls (6 page)

"Fuck you, Roland!" I said. "You're such an asshole."

What a nightmare! My life was again flashing before my eyes. I couldn't read Roland, couldn't tell if he was just trying to confuse Frederic or if he was being serious.
He obviously knew that his
gigantic bomb
would kill more than just Marcus. What made this moment any different?

"Don't fuck around with me, Roland. I'll do it!"
Frederic's grip was shaky, wavering, uncertain.

"Okay,
big tough man with the gun
, go ahead. Kill her if you're up to it."

The gun hurt against my head, the pressure flaring up as Frederic's emotions did. Everything was so unpredictable, so chaotic. This could go a million different ways. Adrenaline surged in me as I felt Frederic's heart pound against my back. He was weighing his opt
ions, a man presumably discovering
that he had nothing
else to bargain with. It became
obvious that he
was now fully aware
that he had made a grave mistake by coming here.

"Damnit," he whispered under his breath, only loud enough that I could hear it.

"What are you waiting for, Frederic? It's your big moment—everyone is watching. You've got all the power now. Make the decision."

I was shaking rapidly. Sweat trickled down my brow
, salty, nervous drops
. And then
,
I figured out what was going on—Roland's eyes seemed to be watching something behind us with great interest. He was being very subtle about it.
What was it?
I could only assume some sort of ambush.
The gun kept digging into my scalp as Frederic weighed his options probably more carefully than he had ever weighed anything in his life.

Slow motion suddenly became a mere fraction of its own speed. There was a struggle behind me and then I heard the sound of a silenced pistol firing
several times
, Frederic's body lurchi
ng as each shot tore through his body. Frederic's gun pulled away from my scalp and
fired a stray shot next to my head, a sound that made me fall to my knees, screaming as my ears rang. I was totally disoriented, the world a blur that I could barely comprehend.
Was I dying?
Had he shot me?
I wrapped my hands around my ears and kept screaming. My dreamlike state was interrupted by a distant shouting, a voice that sounded so familiar.

"Put your fucking hands in the air! Drop your fucking weapons! The building is surrounded."

I could feel
a
faint trickle of blood coming from my right ear.
Maniacal laughter seemed to be filling the air.
Was it my own or Roland's
? I fell to the ground and laid there, the ceiling spinning as I heard the
bang-bang-bang
of even more gunsho
ts. None of this meant anything;
it was all just random sensory data that was going nowhere. I was in an absolute daze, my head matching every
stabbing
throb of my heart.

The bright lights of the ceiling gave an ethereal tint to the world as hell raged on around me. I turned my head and saw Frederic's face
staring at me with weakness, with regret
.
He barely seemed real.

His lips formed the words carefully. "I didn't mean to do it." There was no sound
until a moment later when I was watching his lips
mouth
"I'm sorry." His voice was so booming and low. Blood trickled from his lip toward the floor. It moved like
plants did in those sped up, stop-motion science videos of seeds sprouting and taking root. The redness spread
in myr
iad directions across the floor, a macabre, yet beautiful spectacle that reminded me of new life despite the fact that it was indeed the very opposite.
Frederic's life was spilling out of him and pooling on the floor.

I was livi
ng a very slow, disoriented existence
. Suddenly there was a rush of sound, a ro
ar as real-life
came back to me like a jab to the
stomach.

"Marisa! Marisa! Are you okay? It's
Ramón
! You're alive!"

I'm Marisa Taylor, right?

"What?" I shouted, my voice much louder than I expected it to be.

"I'm going to get you out of here," he said. "Are you
seriously
hurt?"

"I don't think so," I said. He was hoisting me to my feet, lifting me toward the bright lights that had kept me company during the madness. There were bodies all around me, the product of a real-life warzone.
Was everybody dead
? Was
Roland
dead?
I couldn't tell a thing, nor d
id I really want to investigate.

By the way that
Ramón
was carrying me, I assumed that the battle was still raging on around me. His strides were firm, determined. He was trying to
get
me to safety.
How long was in a daze
?

"You're lucky as hell," he said. "I'm not sure how you got out of that one unscathed.
" He looked at me with tired eyes, still pulling me away from the warehouse insanity.
"
Christ, I don't know if I can do this anymore." I didn't respond then. H
e continued to lug
me
in his arms
until
we reached that
ambulance stretcher, the hands of paramedics checking me, testing to see if I was a
defective model
.

"I don't understand." I sat there playing with my hands, fascinated by how they felt. My head still hurt, the ringing in my ears doing very little to provide any comfort.

"What are you talking about?"
Ramón
asked.

"I don't understand what happened. Frederic was gonna kill me and then everything went crazy. I'm actually not dead, right?"

"Jesus,
kid
," he said, his voice weathered and
impersonal—like a guy that had been at this far too long to remember what it was like for the rookies. It was weird that he had called me
kid
, as if it was a telltale sign that I wasn't cut out for this. "Sometimes I forget that not everyone is equipped to deal with the horrors of
war
. You're alive, trust me." His hair stuck to his brow in
disheveled
clumps.

I felt my head impulsively after seeing his,
curiously
running my hands through my hair. I could feel the mats around where Frederic had held the gun. It was probably
blood
. I felt so slimy suddenly, so desperately in need of a shower. I felt so weak and pathetic, so humbled and small. "Did I do a good job?" It was the only thing I cared about in that drawn-out moment.

"You did great," he said. He awkwardly gave me a h
ug, a professional courtesy
he didn't seem that sure about. Even though I noticed his timidity, I grabbed him with all of my might and began sobbing against his jacket.

"Oh god!" I wept. How could I even sort out what I was feeling? Everyone I knew only a few short hours ago was probably dead. And even then, I had been working around the clock to bring th
em down. I never thought that this
would result in so much bloodshed, so much loss. Should I mourn their deaths
? C
urse their dead bodies? They exploited people, hurt them in the name of profits—and they hurt me too.

Still, something lingered, a fragment from those initial times with Roland—Frederic as well to a lesser extent—
that made me hurt, that made me cry out in agony like a wounded animal. There had been
real feelings
, there was no do
ubt about it. I had trusted
both so extensively, giving myself to them and drowning in the confines of Roland's world.
Where had that gotten me
?

"It's okay,"
Ramón
said. It was such a boring platitude, but I didn't fault him for using it in that moment. "I don't think you realize how big of a deal this is. You're the one that ended all of this."

"I did?" I asked between sobs. I let him go and supported myself with my hands on my thighs.

"You led us here, Marisa."

What the hell was he talking about? I led them here?
"B-b-but my phone was..."

"The pen,"
Ramón
said. "It was the pen."

"Pen?"
Shit, how had I forgotten?

"That GPS pen I gave you the first time we met. After I got all of your calls, I figured something was up. I followed the coordinates of the pen until I got here. When I saw all the cars and the location, I called for backup."

I had been so obsessed about keeping my phone intact that I forgot about the very thing that had saved my life. It had been in my purse the whole time, the beacon that had led him right to me.
My
miraculously unscathed
purse was sitting beside me
—
I pulled out the pen and rolled it between my index finger and thumb, like I was trying to prove to myself that it was real. It
felt like
an ordinary ink pen. "Wow." I sat there mouth agape, amazed by such a simple object.

"Comes in handy. You can keep it, if you like."

"Yeah," I said. Uncertainty crept up on me again. "Why did you shoot in there?"

"They shot first." As he said it, I recalled those words in my dream.
Put down your weapons!
The voice had seemed so omniscient in my dazed state, like God himself had entered the room and made his demands. "I hate it when things turn out like this. I'd rather see them behind bars than in the ground."

"So they're all dead?" I fell silent again, my eyes still moist from the former cry.

"
Roland's unconscious," he said softly. "I don't think he's going to make it."

"Was he
shooting
?" I asked. I just couldn't imagine Roland holding a gun, even though I was sure he had plenty of times. He was definitely a
get someone else to do it
sort of person, Roland
Delegate-whatever-you-don't-feel-like-
doing
Starland.

"He didn't have a gun, but he's also kind of a magician so..."
Ramón
trailed off, realizing his joke was falling flat. "I think he just got hit in the cross fire. Like I said, you're lucky you were on the ground."

"Frederic?" Despite his cruel actions, I still wanted to know.

"He's alive, but barely."

I was staring as
Ramón
talked, the circus of people coming and going intensely distracting to my worn mind.
I wondered how long until the media got wind of this. I imagined myself running onto the scene, armed with a camera crew and a microphone. I'd go straight for
Marisa Taylor
, the young, naive reporter that fell for a billionaire murderer.

"Ms. Taylor," I'd ask myself, "did you know that Roland Starland was involved in an international weapons smuggling scandal
..on top of all the other horrible stuff he's done
?"

I would smile and say, "
No comment
." The crowd of reporters would be growing by this point, and their voices would swell up together as so many people fought to ask me a question at the same time. In my vision, they were all
me
, all incarnations of
Marisa Taylor
that just needed to know more. And by the time I snapped out of it, there
was
a reporter standing in front of me, microphone thrust in my face. I started crying again, not even aware of what I had been asked.

"Get away from her!"
Ramón
yelled
. "Go to the hospital and get some rest, okay? I'll come see you when the dust has
settled
."

"Yeah," I said. I climbed onto the ambulance bed and allowed them to lift me in to the vehicle. It would be my very first ambulance ride
—
how exciting
. I watched as
Ramón
pushed away the reporters, herding them like sheep until they were out of the way.
I frowned at them, the people in the trenches, the people that were
just like me
. They just wanted
the best story possible—and this would be a
helluva story
.

I passed out on the way to the hospital.

***

I awoke to the sterile interior of a hospital bedroom. They had dressed me in a loose-fitting hospital gown, one that felt very similar to the blankets
that covered me.
My eyes were fixated on a wall-mounted TV that was off. I looked for the remote, but I couldn't find it and didn't feel like climbing out of bed.