Page 39 of License to Kill

“Pardon?”

“You’re old school. You’re the type who doesn’t believe women have a place in the field, that they should be doing quiet, safe desk jobs. Well, you can put your worries to rest. My career in the FBI is over.”

“Upper management thinks otherwise.”

I had to give her credit; Pauline Thomas didn’t know when to quit. At least Mellisa had already given me every piece of the puzzle I needed to put any delusions of me returning to the service to rest once and for all. “Upper management is wrong. I have no desire to return to the field. I have no desire to continually watch my own back. I have no ambitions to return to CARD. I also have no ambitions for working as a desk jockey. If I’m going to work as a secretary, I’ll find a better paying job within a corporation.”

“Would you care to elaborate on your lack of ambition?”

“No, but I’ll tell you exactly what will happen if you put me in the field. I’ll do my job. I’d probably do it well, since that’s a part of who I am. In that, they’re right. But one day, I’ll just get tired. I’ll see the gun pointed at me, I’ll be ready to fire, too, but I won’t. I’ll wait. One, two, maybe three seconds. That’s all it takes. I’ll wait, thinking it’d just be better for everyone if I hadn’t gone back into the field in the first place. Then everyone will find out if I was right or wrong.” I mimicked holding a gun and firing. “That’s the problem with you old school agents and shrinks. I’m just a statistic.”

“I see we’re going to have a lot of work ahead of us.”

“That’s your second problem. This only works if your patient wants help. It works a lot better when your patient actually wants to return to the field. I don’t. I want a life where nothing reminds me of anything dealing with the FBI.”

Alone in the woods was far better than solitude in a crowd. I could be alone as a human, too. I’d only be hunted as a fox. I’d adapt, somehow.

“Humor me, then. I’m here. You’re here. It’s not like either of us has anything to lose.”

“You’re right. I don’t have anything left to lose. Maybe you should ask me a better question. What do I have to gain? What do I have to gain that I actually want? Not what your employer wants—what I want. If I’m actually something more than a statistic to you, you’d care about me, the person, rather than your goal, the result you’ve been hired to achieve. Until then, don’t waste my time. That’s the only thing I do have.”

“So, what would you like to do with your time?”

I gave his question some thought. The days of wanting to be useful were long behind me. While I’d never fully abandon the idea of helping children return to their families, the thought of even trying to do the work was enough to sicken me.

Those days were gone.

I wouldn’t be the one to change the world one violent crime at a time, not anymore. What did I want to do to fill the minutes, the hours, and the days? I doubted I’d ever step into a kickboxing ring again.

There were too many memories on the mat, and all of them hurt.

“I’d like to go to the library and read books.”

“Then we can help each other. You can talk to me, and I can arrange for you to do just that. It’s a fair bargain.”

It’d probably be the only bargain I’d get, so I shrugged. “It’s not my problem if you don’t like what you hear.”

“That’s fair.”

I shrugged. Fair or unfair didn’t matter; nothing would change because circumstances were unfair to someone.

“While I’ve read your file, I think I’m going to change my initial thoughts for how to address your circumstances. Why don’t we start at the very beginning?”

“I was born, and then I was abandoned.”

If the psychologist hadn’t wanted the details, I could have told him the entire story of my life with those eight words, but since the nitty-gritty was so important to men like him, I started all the way at the beginning and explained how a black couple from Georgia had wanted a child to replace the son taken from them, and they’d gotten me.

I kept to the old story instead of talk about how my ma had probably gotten rid of her boy because he, like me, had been inconvenient due to a disease she could have treated if only she’d loved him a little more and her picture-perfect life a little less.

It was easier than I thought to cut away the emotions and report the circumstances leading up to my enrollment in the FBI, every gunshot, every rape, every failed partnership, and every last failure. The successes made their way in, too, but like with everything else, I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything at all for what I had done.

It took a week to tell him everything, and when I finally finished, he left me with a promise to return, one I didn’t believe for an instant.

I waited in silent solitude.

Dr. Howards returned the next day, and his presence startled me enough I stared at him, wondering what else he could possibly want from me. As he had every other session, he set his briefcase on the table, opened it, and pulled out papers.

“You weren’t expecting me.”