I Told You, Eli Oxley

Chapter Thirty-Nine

It was kind of a good thing that I had went through all of that mess before talking with my dad – my adrenal gland was kaput, so I wasn't nervous, anxious or afraid.

"Eli! What the hell happened to your face?" My dad said when I came inside the house.

"Al punched me," I said.

"Why?"

"A story for another day," I said. "Today, we need to talk about you."

"Oh," he said, not sounding too surprised.

"What do you mean, 'Oh'?"

"I knew you'd be around eventually."

"Huh?"

"You want to know why I lied to you and your mother about my pay cut, right?"

"Yeah," I said, "but how did you know? I mean, how did you know that I knew about you lying?"

"You're not going to like this, but I've been watching you."

"Like, spying on me?" I said.

"Yeah, pretty much."

I suddenly felt violated. How long had he been watching me? How closely did he watch?

"Don't worry, though. I didn't get too personal," he said.

I wanted to know how personal, but I realized if I pursued that line of thought, I would be in a defensive stance. I came here for a reason. I needed to be on the offensive. "So . . . why did you lie?"

"Shame, mostly. Well, fear and shame."

"Could you be any more vague? Why did you feel shame and fear?"

"You've seen what I do, right?" he said.

I again felt naked, like he knew everything about me that I thought was hidden from him. "At work? Yeah, I've seen, but I don't understand exactly what you do. Who are the girls? Why are you injecting them and with what? And why did you kidnap them?" My questions came out in rapid-fire succession.

"Kidnap? Is that what you think?"

"Well, yeah." I said it almost as a question, now unsure. "They are obviously being held against their will."

"I can see why you think that, but––"

"Plus, Lacey said you kidnapped her."

"I'll get to Lacey in a minute," he said. "Okay, so yeah, we kind of kidnapped girls. But it was for their own good."

"Sounds like something a psychopath might say."

"It was – they were sex slaves, held captive by their reliance on their pimps to provide them with heroin."

"But who gives you the right to rescue them?" I said.

"The government, of course. That's what I do. I'm not just an analyst desk jockey like I've told you all your life. I mean, I was for a while, but for the past year I've been a part of a covert task force that specializes in rescuing and rehabilitating sex slaves. It's still in its beginning stages, so we've been trying different things, seeing what works best. Right now it's giving them injections of a secret cocktail we've mixed up. We've tried other medications like Methadone, but this seems the most promising."

Everything was moving too quickly. Too much information that I had to choose whether to replace or not with the knowledge that was already in my head. Was my dad a hero or villain? "Lacey didn't seem too appreciative of you." But just as I said that, I remember something Lacey had merely referenced – that she was no better off, except 'that other part'. Maybe my dad was telling the truth.