I can practically hear him frowning in the darkness; “Well what the fuck was she doing here in the first fucking pl-”
“Trying to save your ass.”
He lets his breath out in a stream; “Jesus, that fucking girl.”
“Tell me about it.”
I should tell him. I mean I’ve been to war for fuck’s sake. I’ve fought addiction, and I’ve been to the brink of hell and back. Why the fuck am I scared to tell the truth about the girl I- I- fuck it, the girl I love to the guy that’s been my brother through it all?
Because THAT truth might get every limb in your body broken by him, that’s why.
But more than that, and more realistically, it’ll lose me one of the only brothers I have.
“So what’s the plan now?” Logan’s voice is even, and I’m trying to calm the thudding of my pulse; the anxiety welling up inside.
“They- well, hopefully they come.”
“We might die in here, you know.” His voice is dark; measured.
Well, let’s lay the cards on the table then.
“Logan-”
“I’m just telling it like it is, man. They're not fucking around this time. Benson want’s something.”
I take a deep breath; “He wants what I found out in the jungle in Angola; what I’ve never told you about.”
He freezes; “What?”
I nod somberly; “It was right before we left, right before the Old Man got us out of there, when we were on contract to that Warlord.”
Logan makes a low growling noise, and I have to agree. Being a gun for hire is one thing, but doing it for the worst, most inhumane, corrupt, vile pieces of shit on the planet takes a chunk out of your soul. Pieces of shit like “General Rambo” in Angola; the one that had us on patrol near an archeological dig he’d “liberated” from actual scientists in the name of “freedom for Angola”, also known as “looting it for his own pockets.”
I rarely associated with Benson back then. He was just one of those over-the-top macho guys; loud, boisterous, aggressive, and all sorts of traits that really don’t mesh well at all with someone on heroin. But, I was on patrol with him that night; the night we found the car wreck.
I tell Logan about the military case stashed in the back, covered with tarp and handcuffed to a dead-man’s hand. He’s silent when I tell him about cracking it open with Benson and practically dropping to my knees at the sight of the absolute fortune in large, sparkling, uncut diamonds filling the case. Papers stashed with them have them coming from China, which is absolute bullshit, and pretty much the surest sign of them being conflict diamonds from the region.
My voice is icy as I tell about making the pact with Benson, as loathsome a person he is, to split it. This is pre-William, pre-sobriety, pre-new-life, and pre becoming the man I am today. I had two things on my mind back then: junk, and how to get money to buy more junk, and that case was my mother-load.
It’s barely a week later when William Archer shows up and changes fucking everything. Yeah, I’ve heard the story from Hudson and Logan a million times about how the Old Man “saw things” in people, but I’ll still never understand it. I don’t care how good a person is inside; a junky is first and foremost a junky, and by proxy, not a good person. Heroin exposes the worst parts of your soul and makes them your everyday, and what the fuck William saw in a cracked-out, strung-out, lying, broken, and abject waste of life like myself back then is Goddamn beyond me.
And then I tell Logan what I’ve never told anyone. I tell him about the night before we leave with William; the night before we just say fuck it and get the hell out of that hellish existence. I tell him about trudging out to the cave where Benson and I buried the case, half out of my mind with withdrawal already and somehow driving the case back to camp in the jeep; the case that’s under my feet when we leave the next day.
Logan swears; “Jesus fuck. Well let’s call them in here and just fuckin tell them! We’re literally billionaires, Bryce; we don’t exactly need the mone-”
“They’re gone.”
And now we come to the crux of it all.
There’s a beat; “What?
And then I tell him about the other shoe dropping. I’m clenching my fists tight as I tell him about detoxing, about screaming and sweating out my demons in order to come out on the other side, and how the case I’ve stashed under my bed at the Old Man’s estate is just one more thing to drag me back; one more thing that ties me to the worst parts of myself. Of course, the money comes later, when William puts us in charge of his company, but it’s before that, when I’m still a shadow of a person, when I go to see him with a request; a request for him to help me me make what’s probably the largest anonymous donation Doctors without Borders and the World Health Organization has ever even heard of.