CHAPTER TWELVE
Boomer was led up the trail, by Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb, the names he’d given two of El Jefe’s goons. One was about his size and build and could be formidable if it turned out he knew how to fight. The other, about five inches shorter, with muscles that had gone to flab and one of those tight potbellies that made him look like he was about to give birth to a basketball.
The going was steep and slick from the rain. There was a flat spot farther ahead with a bunch of dark green canvas tents that made him think of little boys and fathers, and swapping lies around a campfire.
But these men around him…they were no Boy Scouts.
To his right, not far off trail, two other men were laughing it up about something, when the shorter of the two pulled a good, long swallow from a silver flask. The sun glinted off the metal, catching Boomer’s eye.
Not a flask. His flask.
With the custom band of skull and crossbones around the middle. It was one of a kind. Mac had given it to him.
He shook off Dee and Dumb, who merely had a hand above each elbow, and stormed over to the lying, stealing sack of shit.
Okay, so the lying part was more of an assumption, but the stealing was a fact.
Boomer bumped the thief with his chest and had the satisfaction of watching the man stumble.
The man came at Boomer, but Dee and Dumb had their paws on Boomer again and pulled him away. “That’s my fucking flask.”
The man chuckled, his dark eyes cold with merriment as he stepped close to Boomer and looked up at him. “No, compadre. Es mi—”
Boomer head butted the guy, dropping him as surely as if Boomer had shot him between the eyes. He regretted it the moment his head made contact. His own head swam and his vision doubled for a few seconds. That blow to the back of his head had really rattled his brain.
Dee and Dumb shoved Boomer up the trail into one of the tents, but Dee had a shit-eating grin on his face.
With their hands clamped firmly on his shoulders, they manhandled him into a folding camp chair, the kind baseball moms and dads hauled to all their kids’ games. El Jefe hadn’t made it back yet. At least he assumed that was who they were waiting on.
“You know, you could just let me go. Save yourselves some heartache, a few broken bones or death.”
Dee slapped him upside the head. “No, English.”
“Like hell,” Boomer said, but he didn’t push it. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Dee grunted. That was all the recognition his warning was going to get.
El Jefe parted the tent flaps and Dee wrenched Boomer to his feet. The boss stepped inside, his hand resting on Boomer’s Glock neatly holstered on the man’s right thigh.
Boomer’s eyes flicked up to the boss man and couldn’t miss the smirk on the man’s face. “I need to take a piss.”
“It can wait.”
“No,” Boomer said with cold certainty. “It can’t. If you prefer, I can piss my pants in your tent—” He would have raised his hands, as if to say “your funeral,” metaphorically speaking, but his hands were tied behind his back so that wasn’t going to happen.
El Jefe waved his hands at Dee. Boomer guessed that was the signal for the men to take him somewhere other than the tent to relieve himself.
“My hands?”
“So you can escape?”
“So I can piss. Unless one of your fine gentlemen here wants to hold my dick for me. I’m not into the guy-on-guy thing, but if that’s what gets their rocks off…” Boomer shrugged.
El Jefe ordered his hands cut free. Dee and Dumb marched him out to the nearest tree at gunpoint. The way both men had their fingers tight on the trigger, Boomer didn’t dare put one boot out of place, and he hoped like hell neither one of them had allergies, because he was one sneeze away from a bullet burying into the back of his brain.
When Boomer returned, El Jefe was seated in a folding chair facing the one Boomer had been in before. Boomer retook his seat and worked his sore shoulders with his hands. His arms and hands burned and tingled as blood returned to his extremities. Dumb made a move to retie his hands, but El Jefe waved him off.
“Behave,” El Jefe ordered. The “or else” was implied as Dee and Dumb flanked their boss, pistols in hand, but lowered.
If Boomer had been in top form, he’d have a good chance of rushing and disarming one and shooting the other before El Jefe could get out of his chair. Might as well make a wish and sprinkle it with fairy dust for all the good that would do. He was about as far from his peak performance capability as he was when he’d wheeled himself out of the VA hospital post-amputation.
He glanced down at his right hand resting on his thigh. The numbness had gone away, but the shaking had returned and someone had relieved him of the last of his pain pills back in the cave.
“Where is the woman?” Boomer tried to make it sound impersonal, play down the fact that she had somehow come to mean more to him than anyone had in a very long time.
“Your girlfriend is safe. For now.”
“She’s a colleague.”
El Jefe shrugged. “If you say so.”
They stared at each other across the few feet of tent. If El Jefe thought a staring contest would intimidate him, the man obviously hadn’t had his ass handed to him in a cave high in the Wyoming mountains. Boomer could stare all day. Better than getting the shit beat out of him any day.
In the corners, some packs were piled. No opulent desk, or even a folding table. Nothing that screamed “camp headquarters.” Just the two folding chairs and a cot. Considering how far they’d packed everything in, he gave them props for having a pseudo roof over their heads.
El Jefe said, “The package.”
“Yeah, about that…” Boomer’s words dripped with an apology as fake as the toothy smile on the other man’s face. “I want to talk to the boss.”
“I am the boss.”
“And I’m Michael Jordan.” Boomer grinned. It was the kind of grin that always made Mac ask what he was up to.
He stood, and the pistols leaped up, one centered on his chest, the other between his eyes. “Easy, boys.”
It looked like Dee had some sort of professional gun training. Dumb held his gun sideways, his stance all wrong. He looked like a wannabe gangster. All he needed was a teardrop tattoo below his eye.
Boomer held his hands up, then slowly folded his hands behind his back to signal he was done talking and ready to be tied back up. “Ready” was too strong a word. “Resigned” fit better. The muscles and tendons in his shoulders bitched and complained, and he steeled his expression to keep a grimace from screwing up his face. Dumb got to work with a new length of paracord. If the cord was the real deal, he’d need a blade to get out of it.
Before the men could lead him away, Boomer said, “If El Verdugo wants the package, then you have him come to me.”
El Jefe’s eyes narrowed, but otherwise his features remained unchanged. Even so, it was enough to tell Boomer his assumption about El Verdugo’s involvement was correct. Dumb finished tying his hands and they immediately started to go numb again, his pulse thrumming in his fingertips. The kid was much better with the cord than a gun. Maybe he tied up little kids and tortured them for fun.
“El Verdugo is not close by.” El Jefe didn’t insult Boomer’s intelligence by feigning ignorance.
“I can wait. Seems I’m all tied up for now anyway.”
“Or I could beat it out of you. Save us all a lot of trouble.”
It must have been the pain that had short-circuited his brain, because he couldn’t stop the words from falling from his mouth. “I’d like to see you try.”
As El Jefe stepped toward him, Dee and Dumb tightened their grip on his arms, and he knew one thing for certain—when the last of the Vicodin wore off, he was going to hurt like hell.
* * * *
Camp was quiet. Cue Ball whittled on a stick as he sat on the stump across from the shed, but other than that, there had been little traffic pass by―except for Pepita who, from what Sidney could tell, was the camp’s mascot, who fetched this and that for whoever called for her. From Sidney’s limited viewpoint, Pepita was the hardest working person in the camp. Vital and invisible.
Whose kid was she? Did she belong to one of the men or women in the camp? Was she an orphan?
Was she here against her will?
The hair on the back of her neck stood up. A coldness settled in her chest. The girl wasn’t tied up or stuffed into a shed, but a child that age didn’t need to be locked up. Not when their other option was facing the wilderness alone.
Cue Ball jumped up and shuffled toward the shed doors. Sidney couldn’t see anything out the front so she shifted to the view out the side. The largest gap was down low and she got on her hands and knees to see out. Luckily she was already on the ground when she caught sight of Bryan, because her stomach dropped like a skydiver in free fall, but without the thrill or the excitement, only a dread that made her limbs shake and gnawed at her marrow.
Down the hill, two men carried Bryan. One man had him under the arms, the other walked ahead of them, his hands looped around Bryan’s knees. It was a slow, painful journey. Then one of Bryan’s legs fell free, the other man lost his grip, and Bryan crashed to the ground.
While the men regathered their grip and hefted their cargo again, Bryan did nothing. He didn’t move or cry out in pain. Was he even alive?
Sidney lurched to her feet, her heart vibrating in her chest. Tears flowed down her face but she stubbornly swiped them away. Bryan wouldn’t want her crying over him, he would want her to think, to do something.
What could she do? She couldn’t overpower them. Not without some sort of weapon. Her mind flashed back to Pepita. As dangerous as it was for the girl to help them, Pepita could be their chance to escape.
The doors opened and they tossed Bryan in like a sack of horse feed. Bryan landed at her feet and before she could say anything, they slammed and locked the doors.
She dropped to her knees and gently patted his cheek. “Bryan. Bryan, can you hear me?” Pat, pat, pat. “Bryan!”
She put her head to his chest. Beneath her ear, his heart beat and his breath was raspy, but steady. She was afraid to move him, but she placed his head in her lap, wetted his T-shirt, and carefully mopped away the dirt and grime. All the swelling and bruising on his face was what he’d left with, which didn’t account for his present condition. She worked her way over his body, starting at his legs and working her way up. When she ran her fingers over his lower abdomen, she got a strangled “fuuuck.”
“Where does it hurt?” When he didn’t answer immediately she said, “Bryan.”
He waved his hand, as if he wanted her to come closer. She crawled to his head and pressed her lips to his cheek. “Tell me where it hurts.”
“Ev…” His eyes fluttered, then rolled closed.
She patted his cheek until he opened them again and he said, “Every-fucking-where.”
* * * *
Boomer lay there on the rocks and dirt in what looked like a shed for an hour. Two maybe. Long enough that he wasn’t floating in and out of consciousness anymore.
“So now what?” Sidney asked.
He didn’t have an answer. Not that his head was empty―his brain hurt too much to be empty. But he didn’t have any brilliant ideas either.
As it was, the way his neurons were scrambled, he’d thought he’d done well to come up with the idea to demand to see El Verdugo to buy them some time. If they were lucky, El Verdugo was closer than El Jefe let on. In a few days, without alcohol or his pills, he wasn’t going to be much good to himself, much less Sidney. Fat lot of good it would do them if he was medically incapacitated.
“Run. If we can. Or we wait on El Verdugo and try like hell to negotiate our way out of this mess. Or…”
“Or what?”
“Or wait for rescue.” If Mac was looking, the chances of her finding them…well, frankly there probably wasn’t a computer that could calculate numbers that tiny.
“What are the chances of that?”
He didn’t want to lie. “Remote.”
“Fan-freaking-tastic.”
Sidney sat, absently brushing her hand against the ground until it hit something. “Oh my god, I forgot to give this to you.”
She brushed whatever it was off on the leg of her jeans and handed him a floppy, circular shaped object. “Tortillas. Sorry about the dirt.”
His stomach rumbled. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about dirt. There were two. He rolled the two tortillas up together and went at it like a hot dog. They were cold and stale, gritty and delicious.
As he swallowed the last bite he said, “Where did you get these?”
“There was this girl that brought the water and the ‘baño.’” Sidney made air quotes with her hands. “She came back later and found a hole in the wall and handed them through. Her name’s Pepita. You should have seen—”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” His words came out angry, accusatory even. “Sorry.”
She stared at him and pursed her lips, then calmly said, “I’m telling you now.”
“This Pepita. Do you think she’d help us?”
“I don’t know. She’s a kid. What if they caught her? What if they hurt her because she was trying to help? I don’t know if I could live with that.”
“Better than not living at all.” The words were a mistake, he knew that even as they passed his fat lip.
“Pretty cold, considering we’re talking about a little girl’s life.”
He dropped his head against the logs a little too hard and pain radiated around his skull. “I didn’t mean that the way it came out.”
Her face was partially lit by one of the shafts of light coming through the roof, and even though the sun had started to fade, he saw her eyes narrow. “How did you mean it?”
He sighed. No way to win this. The truth was…the truth... He looked at her then, really looked at her, this fierce, strong, amazing woman who was more worried about a kid she didn’t know getting hurt than her very own life.
The truth was…he loved her.
His chest constricted, making it even more impossible to breathe than the cracked ribs did.
With his inability to focus, he didn’t understand what his feelings for Sidney meant. He shifted his thoughts back to the kid. He would rather die himself than hurt an innocent kid, that wasn’t a question for him either, but if he must choose between the kid and Sidney…well, he’d have to pray he would never have to make that decision.
“I mean…” He struggled to his feet, sucking in a tight breath as he slowly, painstakingly, lowered himself onto the ground beside her and twined his hand with hers. “I’m going to get you out of this, somehow, someway.”
She opened her mouth and he knew she was going to argue.
He brought his lips down to hers, ignoring the ribs and the lip and the eye and the head, and sunk himself into the kiss.
Before he lost himself completely, he broke the kiss. “One way or the other.”
* * * *
Sidney and Bryan woke later that night to the sound of the padlock being unlocked. Sidney had fallen asleep sitting up, her head on Bryan’s shoulder. Scrambling to her feet, she wiped the slobber from her lips and helped Bryan up.
As the doors opened, Bryan stepped protectively in front of her. More instinct than plan, she surmised.
One of the men who had carried Bryan down, Tweedle Dee, Bryan had called him, tossed him a blanket and Pepita scurried in and handed Sidney a plate of food before running out. The doors slammed and the lock clicked and Sidney and Bryan were left standing there in the darkness.
“What? No pillow, no mint?” Bryan hollered.
No water.
Someone chuckled, but she didn’t know who, or if it was even Bryan they were laughing at.
The night wasn’t that cold; a sweatshirt and a fire would have kept them warm enough, if they’d had access to either. As it was, she suspected their clothes and the rest of their gear were being passed around or stockpiled.
He tried to bend over, but he stopped short and hissed in a breath. “Can you set the food down and help me? I need to bind my ribs.”
“You, sit.” Sidney ordered.
When he landed heavily on the ledge, he said, “Check my right boot for my knife. They might have taken it, but maybe they weren’t very thorough when they found out I have a prosthetic. Freaks some people out.”
“And here I thought the carbon-fiber print on the socket was badass.”
She palpated down his leg until she got to the cuff of his jeans, mostly doing everything by feel because either the moon wasn’t high enough or it was hiding behind cloud cover. She easily slipped her hand into his boot because there wasn’t any muscle there to take up the space, just the narrow stalk of his prosthetic.
She fished around until her hand hit on something hard. “Bingo.”
“Thanks be.”
She handed it to him, as well as the blanket. He cut what felt like three-inch strips down one of the long sides, laid the knife on the ledge next to him, stood, and handed her the strips. She tied them all together to make one long bandage.
He offered brief instructions, then raised his arms to the side. She started at his waist and worked her way up.
“Tighter,” he said.
He stiffened and grunted as she restarted.
“Tighter.”
Pulling tighter, she continued her way up his chest. He groaned and blew out air in short, hard, repeated bursts.
“You all right?”
“Fuck…” Pant, pant, “…tastic.”
She tied off the end and gave it a light tug to make sure it was secure. “Done.”
It took him a few seconds before he could talk. “Thanks. Dinner?”
“You want the ledge or the ground.”
“Ground,” he said. “Once I’m down there I don’t plan on getting up until morning.”
She laid out the remains of the blanket for them and then settled beside him, their legs outstretched, the plate balancing between their laps.
“Let’s see what the waiter brought.” Bryan investigated the content of the plate with his fingers. “Biscuit at twelve o’clock. Something mushy at three. Hunk of mystery meat at six and…I’m pretty sure those are beans at nine.” He licked his finger clean. “Yep, beans.”
She made a grab for the biscuit, tore it in half, and handed him a piece. It was stale and…really, really good, and not because she was starving. “I think this is one of the biscuits we packed in.”
After biting off a hunk, he said, “Definitely Lottie’s biscuit.”
They settled into the meal. Sidney choked on the spice of whatever was at the three o’clock position and suffered because they were conserving the last of the water. Her nose ran and sweat popped on her brow.
The meat was fist-sized and tough, and it was easier to take turns biting off pieces than bother getting up to get his knife off the ledge. The beans were a challenge. Not exactly finger food, but they were hungry and managed without complaint.
She gave him the last bite of meat, the dregs of the beans, and whatever that was—pureed habaneros came to mind—that was too freaking hot for her to eat, though Bryan had no problem with it.
Bryan laid the plate aside. “I feel like I should leave a tip.”
“Better than I expected.”
His stomach grumbled even after the meal. “Not enough for two.”
“It’s a good sign they’re feeding us. I mean, if they were planning on shooting us and dumping our bodies, why feed us, right?”
“Sure.” The word sounded a little patronizing, but he was in a lot of pain, so she cut him some slack.
Then she had a terrible thought. “Unless it was our last meal.”
In the darkness, there was a darker blob where his head should have been. He bumped her shoulder with his. “It can’t be our last meal.”
“Why’s that?”
He took her hand and tucked her against him. “Because I promised I’d get you out of this.”
“Yeah…”
He chuckled, then groaned when the pain hit him. “I hear a big, fat, fucking ‘but.’”
“But, this isn’t like you promised to fix my flat or get me out of a ticket. This isn’t your everyday situation.”
“Irish.” The word came out the way other men say “honey” or “sweetheart.” “Every day I spent in Iraq wasn’t an everyday situation.”
Crap. Not the guy to bemoan bad days to. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. All I’m saying is I’ve been in some hairy situations and managed to get out of them intact.” Then he bumped his prosthetic against her leg. “More or less.”
“How is this situation like anything you’ve dealt with before? How can you joke at a time like this? Aren’t you concerned? Aren’t—”
Sidney cut herself off, not liking the pitch to her voice as the hysteria crept in. She gave him bonus points for not slapping her across the face to knock some sense into her.
Bugs buzzed in the trees. Laughs and hoots and hollers came from up the hill. There must have been a breeze blowing their way, because she smelled meat cooking on the fire, the smoke thick with the aroma of cooking peppers. The words didn’t carry, but it sounded like people at the end of a long day, around a fire after a good meal.
“When people are trying to kill you, they—” His voice was loud enough for the guard to hear, if he was still there.
Sidney remained mute.
“They are trying to kill you.” He was quieter, but no less passionate, when he spoke again. “It doesn’t matter if it’s an insurgent, a civilian, or a drug cartel. They want you dead. Your job, your mission, is to get out alive. Period. ‘Damn the torpedoes!’ and ‘full steam ahead!’ and all that fuckery. You survive. End of story.”
He’d stopped talking, but by the tension in his body, he wasn’t finished speaking.
“The difference between then and now, and I mean the only difference, is that the men and women overseas were soldiers who went in with the training and the guns and the expectation of having to fight for their life.
“They were my brothers and sisters. As I much as I loved them, and as much as I was willing to die for them, I never had…”
His voice faded to nothing. Reaching down, he found her hand and twined his fingers with hers. In the void, his breath wheezed in and out, short and harsh.
He cleared his throat a couple of times, and then he said, “I never had someone that I…that mattered as much to me as you do. So yeah, I’m fucking concerned.”
“Bry, you know I like—”
“Stop right there.”
“Bry—”
“Stop.”
She stopped.
Sidney felt like the little girl telling the boy at recess she only wanted him to push her on the swing. No kickball, no jungle gym, no sharing the cookie on the lunch tray.
Had she been leading him on? Hadn’t she made herself clear? They had an agreement. A few days on the trail, they would ignore their pasts and their problems.
However, their capture was a stark reminder that they couldn’t live in Fantasy Land. Their actions, their choices, had consequences, and she didn’t think she could get past his. Not if he was unwilling to get past them too. As much as she hated it and wished otherwise, the pills, the alcohol, they were a deal breaker.
“We should try and get some sleep,” he said at last.
He unbuckled his jeans and slipped them off, taking his prosthetic off with them. “Can you remove the ACE bandage?” he asked.
He grunted as he lay flat and she went to work removing the wrapping as best she could, going almost completely on feel. When she finished, she rolled the bandage up on itself so it would stay clean and he could use it again in the morning.
“Give me that,” she said as she reached for his leg. “Is it still sore?”
“The end is, but it isn’t any worse.”
Gently, she rubbed the skin on his leg, starting at the end and slowly working her way up, kneading the sore muscles. She worked her way higher to his knee, where she worked the tendons, then up his lower quads.
“Jesus,” he groaned.
He sounded muffled and she heard the scrunch of his beard, as if he were running his hands down his face. She hit a knot at the back of his thigh and added more pressure until it released beneath her hands.
“Holy mother of God.” He slapped at the blanket with his palm.
She stopped what she was doing. “You tapping out, Marine?”
“I’m pretty sure that was better than sex.”
She playfully backhanded his leg, then stretched out on the blanket beside him and snuggled her head against his shoulder, careful not to bump his ribs.
Teasing, she said, “That was better than what we—?”
“What we shared was different,” he said, all trace of humor gone.
Amazing? Earth shattering? Life changing? For a guy she claimed to like as a friend, what did it matter what he thought the sex together had been like? She didn’t know why it mattered, but it did. “How?”
Beneath her head, his shoulder moved. A slight shrug she never would have noticed if she weren’t touching him. “Just different.”
He reached down and wrapped what was left of the butchered blanket around her. It barely covered her. It didn’t do a damn thing for him.
She didn’t know what to do with her top arm—normally she would have draped it across him, but she didn’t want to cause him any more pain—so she tucked it up under her chin. Instead, he picked up her hand and brought it across his abdomen rather than across his ribs.
“You good?” he asked.
She was lying in the arms of a man she had grown to care for much, much, more than she’d ever imagined possible. She was also in the middle of a drug cartel’s mountain hideout, with the question of survival looming over their heads like a razor-sharp guillotine.
She’d been better. But this very moment wasn’t so bad. “I’m good.”
They lay there in the dark, the camp quieted down enough that the chatter no longer masked the sounds of the animals up at the corrals. Bryan’s breathing slowed, but by the tension in his body, there was no doubt he was awake.
“Off the record,” she said, “you matter to me too. More than I expected. More than I want. The pills, the alcohol…it’s—”
“I know. It’s okay. I didn’t tell you what I did expecting you to tell me anything in return. That’s not why I said it.”
“Then why did you?”
He kissed the top of her head. “I thought it was important that you knew.”
* * * *
The next morning, Boomer woke up next to Sidney in the shed. Ropey saliva pooled in the back of his throat, thick with the taste of bile. Swallowing it back down fueled the burning cauldron of acid bubbling in his gut. He spat it out and groaned with the effort, his arm draped protectively across his ribs.
“Are you okay?”
“Probably something I ate or drank.”
“I ate and drank the exact same thing you did. I’m fine.”
He was afraid to look over at her, afraid to move. He was doing everything in his power not to puke his guts out. As it was, every breath was pure agony, sharp, stabbing pain in his lungs that stole what little breath he’d taken.
Sidney shifted and then loomed above him, a steep frown marring her pretty face, her eyes narrowed with concern as she searched his face for answers.
“You’re pale,” she said. Then she touched her hand to his forehead. “And clammy.”
She vanished from his view but her hands roamed his body—his chest, his abdomen, his legs. Then she slipped a hand beneath his back. “You’ve drenched the blanket with sweat. What’s going on, Bryan?”
He lifted his head to look down at her and his stomach revolted at the movement. The toxic brew boiling in stomach lurched with a violence he’d only witnessed in the truly damned. His stomach convulsed, and he hollered out in pain as he clambered to his hands and knees.
Then the baño bucket materialized under his face, empty but reeking of stale, stagnant urine. His stomach heaved and heaved. His ribs felt like they were caving in, his lungs caught in a hydraulic vice gone awry, his heart kicking inside his chest like a battering ram.
Every muscle, fiber, cell, neuron was ablaze. Even when he’d been shot, he hadn’t felt this kind of sheer torture. At least then the adrenaline had damped the pain down to merely excruciating until the morphine from the medics had kicked in.
His adrenaline failed him and every last gram of Vicodin had long left his system. He tried to breathe through the pain, but that pissed the pain off more, like slapping it in the face.
Stars blurred his vision and his arms shook with the effort to hold himself up. Right before he collapsed on his face, Sidney pulled the bucket away.
He didn’t move for the longest time, even to move his cheek off the pebble that jammed into his flesh. The immediate urge to puke had subsided, and he wasn’t going to do anything to jeopardize his stomach’s tentative cease-fire. If he had to stay facedown on the rocky hillside of a mountain for the rest of his life, he would do that if it meant he never hurled again.
Slowly, he caught his breath and the world around him came into focus. Sidney knelt beside him, her palm on his back, with the gentle strokes one might give a baby as it fell asleep.
“Better?” she asked.
His abdominal muscles were tight, and his stomach still churned, but he was past the eruption phase. At least for now. Even with the sickly sour stench of piss and puke embedded in his nostrils. “A bit.”
“Still think it was the food?”
“That would be the best option.”
“And the worst?”
“Acute alcohol and opiate withdrawal.”