CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“You think you’re having withdrawals?” Sidney dropped to the ground inside the cartel’s shed and drew her legs up to her chest.
“Maybe.”
“You could need a hospital.”
A harsh burst of laughter escaped him. “Ouch. Irish, I already need a hospital.”
“Bry—”
“I’m okay. Busted up pretty good, but right now, I’m okay.” He rolled to his side and reached for her hand. “Right now, we focus on this second, this minute, and making it to the next. That’s it. Don’t borrow trouble.”
He gave her hand a squeeze. His hands were cold, but held a strength in his grip that she hadn’t expected. Maybe he wasn’t so bad off.
She reached for the water jug. There was enough left to cover the bottom of the container, but not much more. “Here,” she said. “Rinse out your mouth.”
Scooting behind him, she helped prop up his head. He sloshed the water around in his mouth, then spat it out.
“More?”
“Save it.”
Voices approached. Sidney gently laid him back down before hopping up and peering through the largest of the front slits.
El Jefe and two other men came their way. They were the same men who had brought Bryan down the night before. She assumed these men were El Jefe’s preferred guards.
“They’re coming,” was all she needed to say.
“Help me up.”
“Maybe you should stay down.”
When he looked up at her, his eyes were steely dark with resolve. “Help me up.”
He rolled onto his hands and knees, panting with the effort. She put a shoulder under his armpit and stood, then helped him to the side so he could brace himself against the wall. She made a grab for his pants and prosthetic as the doors swung open.
El Jefe stood before them. His two men were about a yard behind, one to each side. He didn’t say anything at first, just drank in the sight. Her with Bryan’s jeans and the other half of his leg. Him slumped against the wall, in nothing but his blue boxer briefs, tattered strips of the brown blanket binding his chest.
“They have a knife. Find it.”
The men moved in for their search, tossed the tattered blanket out the door, checked under the barf bucket. In an empty shed the size of a queen-sized bed, a search doesn’t take long. One of the men wrapped his hand around her upper arm while the other started roughly patting her down. She didn’t move. Even when hands got gropey. Were they going to find the knife? Yeah. Didn’t mean she would make it easy on them.
When the guy grabbed her breast again, El Jefe chuckled and Bryan hollered, “Hey!”
The guy ignored Bryan and smiled up at her—the kind of smile the shark gives the seal.
“Sidney,” Bryan said with a calmness that surprised her. “Give them the knife.”
She shot him her best shut-the-hell-up look.
“Sidney.” Bryan used that fatherly tone men use when their kid won’t obey. She glanced back at him, the guard’s hands doing a slow, thorough search at the top of her thigh.
“Give. Them. The. Knife.”
Crap. “Fine.” She shook the guys off her. She pulled the knife from her boot and threw it. It stuck into the dirt two inches to the right of El Jefe’s foot.
One of the men reached down and handed it to their boss. Then a smile raised one side of El Jefe’s lips. More of a smirk, really. A slow anger simmered inside her, for their situation, for their brutality against Bryan.
“You sonofabitch,” she said as she lunged for El Jefe.
She hadn’t planned what she’d do when she got to him, but the guards snapped her up before she got the chance to find out. They shoved her back, the momentum dumping her on her butt in the doorway. Her teeth clattered in her head and she bit her tongue.
“A man who can’t control his woman is not a man,” El Jefe said to Bryan.
Bryan held El Jefe’s gaze, but he didn’t bother to reply.
Sidney stood and brought the water jug with her. “We need more water.”
El Jefe jerked his chin toward one of his men, who called out, like before, an order to someone she couldn’t see.
It wasn’t long before Pepita ran in. She retrieved the jug, glanced over at Bryan, and covered a giggle behind a dirty hand.
“Get him dressed,” El Jefe told Sidney.
“Where are you taking him?” When he didn’t answer, she said, “Look at him, this man needs a doctor, not more questions, not more beatings.”
“What he needs is to tell us what we want.” El Jefe then gave orders to his men, then turned his back and walked away.
She glanced at Bryan. His face was blank of emotion, as if he’d shut out the world and the two of them remained. She didn’t want to help him get dressed. It felt like a betrayal, that by helping him get dressed she would be El Jefe’s accomplice.
“Ándale,” one of the men commanded.
“Sidney.” Bryan’s voice was so quiet he was hard to hear. “Remember what I said, don’t—”
“Piss them off. Yeah, yeah, I know.”
She retrieved his pants, fished his prosthetic up through the leg hole, then helped him on with both the best that she could. His face twisted when he applied his full weight on his false leg—without his ACE bandage taking up the slack, his leg surely bottomed out.
Before he left, he put a hand to the side of her neck and kissed her forehead. Then one of the men grabbed his arm and twisted it around his back. He grunted as they bound his hands behind his back again.
Pepita returned, stumbling under the weight of the refilled water jug before they locked Sidney back inside.
She waited until her eyes readjusted to the light, then collapsed on the ledge with her head in her hands and fought back her fear and the tears. Helplessness crept in on cold, dank feet, stealing her heat and her hope. The tears flowed and her breath caught until harsh sobs racked her body. She wrapped her arms around herself, but she fell apart anyway.
Minutes passed before the sobs softened to sniffles and infrequent hitching breaths. Something touched Sidney’s leg. She glanced down at the hand sticking through the logs. She took it and slid down until she could see through the opening.
Pepita’s sweet face stared back at her, her brows angled sharply above her big brown eyes. The little girl straightened her finger and smudged the streak of tears that had run down Sidney’s face.
“You no cry,” Pepita said. “Pepita help.”
A smile slid across Sidney’s face. Pepita knew more English than she’d let on.
Sidney’s throat closed and for a second she couldn’t talk, overwhelmed by the bravery of a child willing to risk her own safety to help them. When she could speak, she said, “Can you get me a knife or a gun?”
“Pepita help,” she said again. “No cry.”
Someone called Pepita’s name. Fear flashed across her features and the little girl’s face fell.
How could Sidney ask a child to risk so much for them? It was stupid and selfish and reckless and, and…she couldn’t do it. It was too much to ask.
“Forget it, Pepita. No knives, no guns. Stay away.” Sidney waved her hand in a “skedaddle” motion, because she was afraid the girl might not understand. “Go on. Don’t come back.”
* * * *
On the hike back up to El Jefe’s tent, Bryan tried to minimize his limp, but to do that he had to tense his abdominals, which tensed the rest of his body, which made his ribs throb and his breath short.
So he limped.
He didn’t fight when the goons each clasped a hand on his upper arms, because the added support kept him vertical.
They put him back in the chair he’d been in before, then positioned themselves on either side of El Jefe, who sat across from him as he had before; it was like a bad, budget remake of Groundhog Day.
Boomer tried to lean back, but with his arms tied behind him it was uncomfortable, so, with what little strength he had left, he sat up straight.
“Why am I here?” Boomer tried to sound inconvenienced. Yeah, like he really had a lot going on right now, between the trying not to throw up and pass out from the pain. Little things like that.
“To talk.”
“You get El Verdugo. Then I talk.”
“He prefers you talk to me.”
The goons raised their guns and aimed at his chest and head, again like before. They didn’t have to rack the slide to chamber a round. These were not the type of guys who lumbered around with an empty chamber for safety’s sake. Good information to have. Bryan eyed Dee, then Dumb, then settled his attention back on their boss.
“Maybe. But I don’t think so.”
Boomer had only suspected he was right until El Jefe’s lips tightened a fraction. Nothing overt, but it had been there. Then, like someone had pressed the delete button, it vanished.
“Want to know what I think?” Bryan asked.
Bryan was about to spout his wisdom when El Jefe raised a finger in a gesture for him to wait, then dismissed the guards. Confirming Boomer’s initial belief in El Jefe’s duplicity. Inwardly, Bryan smiled at the shift in power.
“What do you think?” he said after the guards were clear of the tent.
“I think you’re power hungry. I think you think you’re better than El Verdugo. I think you think that if you can get the package before he does that it will put you in a superior position. And I think if I tell you today, I’ll be dead by tonight.”
“You’ll be dead either way.”
“Maybe. But not tonight.”
Boomer stood, and El Jefe’s hand slid to Boomer’s gun, which El Jefe still had strapped to his thigh. If Boomer had had his hands free, even with the ribs, he might have taken the chance that El Jefe couldn’t un-holster from a seated position and pull the trigger before Boomer could get it away from him. Right now, he’d sacrifice his left nut for a weapon.
Boomer called for the guards, stealing authority from El Jefe, even if it was fleeting. To his surprise, they came when called like the well-trained dogs they were. There was a reason the goons were sent out to begin with. Taking a calculated risk, he decided to undermine the boss man even further.
“You guys need to watch your backs,” Boomer said with a chin bob to El Jefe. “He’s going to get you killed and you won’t even know why.”
A red flush of anger roared up El Jefe’s neck until his entire face was infused. Something snapped. El Jefe rushed him like a linebacker, tackling him to the ground and knocking the wind from his lungs.
Boomer’s vision blurred, then starred, then went black. He writhed soundlessly on the ground, unable to gulp enough air, unable to scream out the agony while waiting for unconsciousness to pull him under. Then his breath came in fast gasps that he tried to slow. His vision returned and his world came into focus in time to see El Jefe’s boot drive toward his stomach.
Boomer tightened his abdominals to mitigate the damage, but the boot came again and again and again, until he lost all thought, all ability to help himself.
* * * *
Sidney didn’t know what Bryan was doing, besides trying to get himself killed one beating at a time. Since they’d brought him back from his last interrogation, Bryan lay on the ground in the shed with his head in her lap, conscious, but drifting in and out of fitful sleep. Even the insufficient lighting couldn’t hide the fact that his color hadn’t improved any from that morning when the guards had brought him back. If anything, his color was worse, and Sidney worried about internal bleeding.
She’d rewrapped his chest as best she could with him on the ground, but it was messy and not as tight as before and she wasn’t certain it did him any good. His lower back and abdomen had significant swelling and bruising. A whole herd of mustangs could have stampeded over the top of him and not done as much damage.
The shadows in the corners deepened as the afternoon edged toward night. No food since the one plate the night before. Her stomach had long ago caved in on itself, but her discomfort was incomparable to Bryan’s so she pushed it from her mind.
She had to do something. Bryan wouldn’t survive another beating. She wasn’t even convinced he’d survive this one. There had to be some way for them to get out of there.
All day long she’d replayed her conversation with Pepita over and over in her mind like an old record with a scratch, slipping the needle to the same sad song. As much as she didn’t want to endanger the girl, if she and Bryan didn’t get some sort of help soon, there was a good chance one or both of them was coming off the mountain in a body bag.
She slid her hand over the dark rash of beard to the pulse on his neck. If anything, his pulse had weakened, becoming thready. Sidney chewed on her helplessness like a rawhide bone and made a decision. She would take the risk and ask Pepita for help. She would do what she could to protect the little girl, but she couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t do everything in her power to save Bryan.
Not long after, someone unlocked the door. She gently laid Bryan’s head down and stood, twisting her head this way and that to stretch out the kinks. Her butt was numb and her legs prickled and tingled with sleep.
Outside stood a guard with a gun and Pepita with a plate. Pepita stared at Bryan’s lifeless form. Her eyes were round as she handed Sidney the food.
Sidney squatted until she was eye level with the girl. “He’s going to be okay.”
Pepita may not have understood the words, but Sidney hoped they were conveyed with her soothing tone.
Pepita’s back was to the guard, who gave them his half attention. When Pepita finally dragged her gaze off Bryan’s battered body, her chin came up and she amazed Sidney with the depth of fire and fortitude in such a tiny package.
Pepita held her hand in front of her chest with her index finger out and made a shooting motion with her hand.
“Rápido,” the guard said to the girl.
Sidney winked, even though it appalled her how quickly she accepted what Pepita offered. “Yes, yes. Thank you for the food.”
The girl nodded once with what Sidney took as understanding, then spun on her heel and scurried out the door. The guard got one door closed, but Sidney blocked the other with her foot. When she had his attention, she said, “Doctor. He needs a doctor.”
“No doctor.”
“Please,” she pleaded, though the word was sour on her tongue. “I can pay you. Help get us out of here. I’ll pay you whatever you want.”
“Your money is no good if I’m dead.”
“We can protect you. The sheriff—”
He laughed, the sound so caustic it could have eaten a hole through the hull of a battleship. “El Verdugo find you. El Verdugo kill you.”
He shoved her back and locked the door in her face.
“It was worth a shot,” Bryan said in the shadows behind her.
She spun around. “Hey, you’re awake.”
“Help me sit up.”
There were grunts and groans, splattered with a generous helping of curses, before she got him sitting with his back to the wall.
She pressed her hand to his forehead and it came away soaked with sweat. “Jesus, Bry.”
A shrug was all he managed. She sat beside him with the plate. The menu was almost a repeat of the night before, but instead one of Lottie’s biscuits there was a tortilla.
“Pick your poison,” she said.
He belched into his fist and wrapped a hand around his stomach. “Not too sure I’m hungry.”
“You have to eat something.”
“The tortilla then.” He ripped it in half and passed the other piece to her.
“You keep it. It’s bland. May stay down easier than the rest.”
He worked the tortilla, tearing it into tiny pieces before swallowing them, each bite a battle to get down. He’d swallowed the first half when he slapped a hand to his mouth and retched. Sidney bolted for the bucket and held the back of his head while the tortilla came back up with a big, fat “return to sender” stamped all over it. He washed his mouth out with a swig of water.
“That’s not good,” he said in a dry monotone that sounded remarkably like Ferris Bueller’s economics teacher.
“You still need this, or are you okay?”
He made a waving motion with his hand and she carried the bucket to the far side of the shed. Didn’t help much with the stench. The slatted roof provided surprisingly little ventilation.
“So, if it’s not bad food or a stomach bug…”
“Withdrawal,” he said with a certainty that frightened her. “I have abdominal pains that go beyond getting the shit kicked out of me. I’m nauseated, I’m sweating, and it’s going to get worse from here.”
She pushed the plate aside, her appetite gone.
“Eat,” he said.
“I’m saving the rest for you.”
“I doubt anything will stay down any time soon. So eat it. It won’t keep, and I need you to stay strong.”
She didn’t say anything, but she picked up the plate. All the taste was gone as she mindlessly ate with the enthusiasm of a person eating arsenic.
“What happened this morning?”
“Cliffs Notes version: it didn’t go well.”
She glanced over at him. There was either more moon or less clouds tonight, and she could at least see vague features. How he could be smiling at a time like this, even if it was part grimace, amazed her. He amazed her.
“Before that.”
“El Jefe wanted the skinny on the package. I told him no. Told him I thought he wanted the package himself and was looking for a way to make a play on El Verdugo. Then I told his goons their boss was gonna get them killed. El Jefe went apeshit.”
“I guess the beatings stole all the fun out of being right.”
“Mostly.”
“Pst. Pssst! Amiga!” Pepita whispered too loud.
Sidney pushed the plate aside, crawled over to the hole, and put her hand through. “I’m here.”
Pepita shoved something heavy and metallic into her hands and then the girl was gone, her feet pounding up the trail. Carefully, so she wouldn’t drop anything, Sidney worked her hand and the objects back through the hole.
“What is it?” Bryan asked as she settled back beside him.
“A knife. And a gun.”
She handed both to him. He held the knife up to the wan light. A pocket knife with a three-inch blade. Not exactly a replacement for the lost combat knife. When he unfolded the blade and tested the sharpness on the back of hand, he chuckled.
“What?”
He reached for her hand and ran the blade across her arm.
“That wouldn’t cut microwaved butter.”
Dropping it in her lap, he picked up the gun and caught a faint shaft of light. “Glock 17, looks like the original,” he said as the magazine dropped into his hand. “Magazine’s empty.” He racked the slide back, but no round popped out of the chamber. “Probably the only unloaded gun in a five-mile radius.”
He racked the slide back and forth, slowly, quietly. Even then, the sound of metal sliding on metal seemed to echo in the shed.
“So, for defense we can butter someone’s toast or hit them over the head with a pistol. Nice having options,” Sidney deadpanned.
* * * *
Boomer used a corner of their blanket to wipe the grime and rust from the gun’s surface. The moonlight shining through the roof of the shed lacked strength, and he couldn’t tell how much good he’d done.
“Think she can get us ammo?” Boomer asked.
“All we can do is ask. How do you say bullet in Spanish?”
“Bala.”
She repeated the word as he locked the slide open, then held the gun up again and sighted through the chamber and down the barrel. Debris. He tapped the tip of the barrel against the wall a couple of times and rechecked. Better.
“I think Christopher Columbus cleaned this thing last. The slide is sticky, the barrel has more dirt and crud in it than a gopher hole, and…” He worked the follower on the magazine. “And the mag spring is questionable.”
“Is it safe to fire?”
“Should be,” he said, fully aware of how noncommittal that sounded. “The Internet is full of fucktards doing idiotic things with their Glocks that no sane person would do, and the guns fire. So…” He shrugged, and the “we’ll have to take that chance” was left unsaid.
He handed the gun to her. “Hide that in your boot. I doubt they’ll search you again.”
“What are you going to do with the knife?”
He felt around, but there were no suitable rocks nearby. “See if you can find a coarse, flat rock. I might be able to put a little edge on this thing.”
On her knees, she searched the ground, choosing and discarding candidates until she had a pile she dumped into his lap. None of them were ideal, but a couple were serviceable.
“Pst. Amiga.” Again, the shouting whisper.
Sidney crabbed over to the hole. “Bala. We need bala.”
“Sí, sí.”
Boomer heard the unmistakable tinkle of brass hitting brass. He dropped his head back against the logs and huffed out a short breath. The tension in his shoulders eased. The Glock’s magazine was the extended type, like his, so the gun could hold sixteen rounds if there was a round chambered. With a fully loaded gun he had options, and if he could use the Glock to secure one of the AKs he’d seen floating around, their future looked brighter and brighter. In his mind, he started running through different escape scenarios, pushing aside the weaker ones to take a closer look at the ones that held promise.
When Sidney sat beside him, she had a fat ball of brass wadded inside her T-shirt. She placed it in his lap with a flourish. Her excitement wafted off her in sparks and waves. She crossed her legs in front of her like an overeager first grader waiting for the teacher to read One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.
She rubbed her hands together. “What do we got?”
He folded back the corners of his shirt and dug his hand in. “This might take a while.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I think this is a collection of every kind of bullet ever known to man. We’ll have to sort through each one to find what we need.”
She flattened out a corner of the blanket and said, “Hand me what we can use and put the others over there.”
The discard pile grew and grew and grew some more.
“Shotgun shell,” Boomer said as he tossed it into the discard pile. “Buckshot and maybe dove.”
He dropped some brass onto the pile. “7.62s for the AKs.”
When he added three more rounds so small, the brass barely made a sound, he chuckled. “.22s. Not good for much besides squirrels.”
“Holy cowboy, this one’s big,” Sidney said as she took one from his lap.
He felt the round. “.50 cal.”
He unloaded five more from his lap. “.45s long and short.”
“Last one.” Sidney handed it to him.
“Bingo. 9mm Luger.” And it wasn’t even a hollow point.
He scrubbed his hands down his face and shook out the tension from his arms and hands. He needed to move, to pace, to shout, to damn well kick something.
Instead he said, “We’re gonna have to make that one count.”
She blew out a laugh that sounded sarcastic. “Perfect.”
He loaded the round in the magazine, rammed it home, and racked the slide. The round failed to feed. The mag spring sucked worse than a dollar-store vacuum.
He dropped the mag and cleared the round and manually loaded the chamber. Hard on the casing extractor, but they were shooting one bullet if they were lucky―or unlucky, depending on how you looked at it.
Then, as another round of nausea built, he took Sidney’s hand and brought it to his lips. What he had to tell her wasn’t going to be easy to hear, or say, but it had to be said, had to be heard.
“If this is your way of trying to get lucky—” The teasing remark dropped from her lips when she saw his face. “I don’t like that face. That’s a your-dog-just-got-hit-by-a-car kind of face. What’s going on?”
She slapped her free hand on his forehead, then made a grab for the pulse point on his neck.
He pulled away. “Stop.” Her hand dropped and he held her other one in both of his. “I want you to look at me and listen closely to what I’m about to say.” If he didn’t know better, he’d have thought she’d stopped breathing. He almost put an ear to her chest to be certain. “Keep the gun hidden in your boot. Remember, no safety to disengage. Just point and shoot.”
“What do you expect me to do with one bullet? It’s not like I’m going to stage a revol—”
“Irish.” His stark tone got her attention back on him. “I’m going to lay this out straight so there will be no misunderstanding. If it comes out cold or harsh, I apologize for that up front.”
She nodded but didn’t say anything.
“We both know these next few days are going to be tough. I’m going to get worse. Much worse, before I get better. If there is an opportunity for you to run, you run. You don’t look back, you don’t think about me. We have no idea when or if El Verdugo is coming, or what will happen when he does. If we can’t get away before then it could get, especially for me…ugly,” was the word he decided on.
“What are you saying?”
He choked back an ironic laugh. For the first time since he’d returned to the states he’d found a reason to hope, a person that gave him a reason to put the bottle down and question his need for the pills.
And now he was going to have to ask her to promise something no one should ever have to ask of another. A soul-sucking promise that would end any hope of recovery.
Of a life together.
His chest tightened, but his heart rate didn’t spike with the certainty of what he had to say. “If it comes down to the choice of putting a bullet in El Verdugo’s head and letting me hang, don’t let me hang.”
“What?” She jerked her hand free and backed against the wall, rubbing her hand up and down on the seam of her jeans like she’d touched the living dead.
“Shoot me.” It was as plain and clear as he could say it. There could be no misunderstanding.
“You’re certifiable. I’m not going to—”
“If I hang, if you put a bullet in El Verdugo’s head, there will be nothing to stop his men from doing whatever they want with you… to you. With him alive, you are under his protection.”
“Won’t they just hang me too?”
“You’re much too valuable of a commodity to waste like that. Trust me, for men like him, you have much more value alive.”
“I’d rather be dead.”
He grabbed for her hand, but she pulled it away. “If they are going to kill you, they will kill me too.”
“No. A woman has value. They will keep you alive. Long enough for you to be found, for you to elude them.”
“Let me put this to you in a way that leaves no room for interpretation: Fuck. No.”
She turned to pace, but he caught her hand and sat her down. He slapped the gun in her hand and clamped her fingers around it. He pressed the barrel tight to his forehead. “You shoot me. Between the eyes. Not the chest. The head.”
She tried to pull her hand away, but he held fast.
“Got me?” His voice broke, not because he was sad.
He was furious. Furious that they were in this position, furious that he couldn’t get them out, furious that he had forced her to make a vow no one should ever have to make.
The gun shook in her hand. “You have no idea what you are asking of me.”
“I know exactly what I’m asking. Promise me,” he said. A wave of nausea hit and he swallowed it back down. “Promise me.”
She nodded. It was slight and hesitating. She gulped. “I―I promise.”
Her words came out stronger than he’d expected and it brought a smile to his lips. He removed the gun from her hand, laid it beside him, and pulled her to him. She clasped her hands behind his head, their foreheads together.
Then she kissed him on his cheek, on his jaw, on his lips. The pressure was painful, but he drank it in. The pain said he was alive. Right here, right now, in this moment, he was alive, and he was taking advantage of every extra second granted to him. Gently, she traced his lips with her tongue and he opened his mouth and invited her in. She tasted of charred meat and jalapeño beans, and that sweetness, that freshness, that was all her.
When he deepened the kiss, her breath caught and she pulled away.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, though by the flames in her eyes, things seemed alright.
“You aren’t exactly up for a vigorous workout.”
He pressed her hand to the bulge in his pants. “He’s up for anything.”
“Well, he may be, but the rest of you, not so much.”
Then she leaned in, her lips near his ear, and she whispered, “Just so you understand: when we are free, when we are home, for extracting that promise from me, you are going to pay.”