TABOO: THE COMPLETE SERIES(46)

The snap resounded a lot closer this time, inside my own heart. But I didn’t let it show. “Sounds fair.”

Weldon clearly wasn’t done. “You’re going to let a man who just confessed to being a pedophile, call the shots?”

But Jake was ready for him. “If he was a pedophile, he would be taking your place,” he said. “Not trying to bring this operation down!”

“You don’t know that he’s going to do what he says,” Weldon raised his voice. “Maybe replacing me is exactly what he plans on doing!”

“If that happens,” Jake said, this time directly to me. “Then he’ll suffer a worse fate than you, I’ll make sure of that.”

He pulled the drive from the laptop and dropped it in his pocket. “First things first, Weldon. Where is my brother?”

“Colton’s my only leverage,” Weldon said. “I need assurance of my family’s safety before I can give it up.”

“Your father’s an old man,” it was my turn to speak. “Perhaps you shouldn’t be wasting time. The sooner we get Colton the sooner we can give your father the antidote.”

“Just let me talk to my father,” Weldon said. “Take a phone, let me see how he’s doing.”

“I don’t think that’s possible,” I started to say but Jake interrupted me. “Deal.”

“Jake, you don’t think he’s going to actually give you Colton if you do this for him?” I said, well aware of the reason behind Jake’s confidence.

“We’re not monsters like him,” Jake replied.

You don’t bring down The Devil. You rise up to him.

I wish Jake understood what he was doing had to have repercussions in the long run because it would look like weakness to someone like Weldon. I wish I could make him understand but I knew him too well to force him to rise up. That act would have to come from his own will, if it ever did appear. I wasn’t ready to make him come to this forcefully but if things went awry amidst the chaos then I was afraid neither of us would be left with much of a choice. In order to talk with Jake, I came out of the room and he followed me outside. We locked and shut the door so Weldon couldn’t hear us.

“Are you okay?” I wanted to know.

“I don’t know where my brother is and now I have to run through hoops to get Weldon a meeting with his father,” Jake said. “To answer your question, no I’m not okay!”

I hesitated for a long time before I could find the words to speak. “Jake… the things I said to Colton it was only to mislead them,” I explained. “You have to trust me.”

“Can we talk about that later?” Jake said. “We have more pressing matters at hand, don’t you think!” He took out the phone I had bought for him, no one could trace us on it. He used the burner phone to look at all the contacts I’d added into it after the purchase two days ago. “I have your number,” he said. “I’ll head to the hospital now.”

“If something happens you give me a call!” I said but Jake was already gone.





JAKE


This wasn’t happening.

I know I’ve been saying this for some time now, but I keep feeling like I’m being hurled into things that aren’t supposed to be here—like I was supposed to live a different life yet somehow these fucked up versions of it keep popping up and I’m helpless. A part of me felt it might not be real. But I couldn’t think about all that. I tried not to think about that video I saw, because thinking about Trey… and Colton… made me mad. All that was for later. Right now, I had a simple task—have Weldon see his father so he knows the older man is okay and then nothing will stop me from getting to Colton’s whereabouts.

But it was when I reached the hospital room that Weldon’s father was in, that I received the ultimate blow.

The atmosphere surrounding the room was filled with darkness. I could almost feel the pressure in my chest and knew something was wrong the minute I entered the general area of the private room. There was a familiar face on the bed, that of Weldon’s father, the man who had been nice to me and in all the shit that was going on it had seemed like a fucking life line. Surrounding him, was a horde of doctors and orderlies and another familiar face—Jackie. She wasn’t crying though, so I knew it couldn’t be that bad…

“I’m sorry Jackie,” one of the doctors said. “We did everything we could but we couldn’t save him. I’m really sorry.”

And that’s when I realized I was looking at a dead man.

Weldon’s father was gone.

But Jackie wasn’t crying…

“I don’t understand,” Jackie said. “I thought he was getting better!”

“He was,” the doctor responded. “We did a toxicology scan yesterday and it came out positive for Pseudo-nitzschia. It’s a toxic organism found in seafood but the probability of it happening to someone in the US is next to nothing.”

After that there were more words exchanged but I couldn’t listen to any of it. Nothing made sense so I rushed out of the room, unseen, and hurried outside. In the miserable light of the fading twilight, I dialed Trey’s number, but my hands were shaking. “Did you do this, Trey?” I asked the minute I heard his voice.