CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In the shed, Sidney helped Bryan onto the blanket and off with his pants and prosthetic. The only good thing about being stuck in the shed and trying to heal from the beatings is that it kept him off his leg, which had allowed his stump to improve dramatically. It was a plus, even if you needed a microscope to see it.
The whole time she was getting him settled for the night, he rambled on about all the things he wanted to do to her, with her. She half listened to the monologue, not doubting it was the truth but seeing past it to the distraction he’d wanted it to be. To him. To her.
Even though it was hard to be distracted from the fact that the man you’d slept with a couple of nights before wanted you to promise to kill him if the buffalo chips hit the big-ass fan. About the most she’d promised other lovers was that she’d call them back. Even then she followed through half the time.
Man you’d slept with. Practical Sidney chuckled, though Sidney didn’t see the humor. You say that like he’s some stranger you picked up off the street for a quickie. He’s not just a man. He’s the man you…you…
Exactly.
What was Bryan to her?
Neither she nor Practical Sidney knew what to call him. “Boyfriend” wasn’t exactly right considering she’d made it clear his alcohol and drug issues were a nonstarter for her.
How many nonstarters do you unusually have stellar cave sex with that forces a ripple in the space-time continuum? Scientists everywhere are no doubt having to recalibrate all their fancy equipment.
He grabbed a fistful of her shirt and caught her attention. “You even listening to me?”
“Sure I am.” In her head, she sounded like her mother used to when she was little and going on and on and on about her pony. That way parents have of listening with only one ear and a couple of brain cells. She set his stuff nearby and lay down beside him.
“Then what did I say?”
Heat crept up her face. “I don’t think I can repeat that in mixed company.”
He chuckled, short and shallow to protect his ribs.
Then she leaned up and whispered in his ear. “That doesn’t mean I’m disagreeable to your plan.”
“I’m going to hold you to that if—”
“When.”
“When we get out of here.”
He was quiet after that, though it must have taken a couple of hours before he finally fell into a fitful sleep. Sidney, on the other hand, wasn’t nearly so lucky. When she couldn’t take lying on the hard ground any longer, she got up and covered Bryan with the blanket.
Back and forth she paced the shed, counting trips to give her mind something else to focus on besides THE PROMISE. In her mind, it loomed, in a bold, capital, Gothic font with the ominous duh, duh, dum in the background.
Her boot struck one of the rocks she’d found for Bryan to sharpen the knife. She picked it up, as well as the pocket knife, and sat down on the ledge to work. If she couldn’t sleep, she might as well use her time productively.
The cool night raised goose bumps on her flesh, but her anger toward Bryan rekindled and kept her plenty warm. As it was, if the opportunity presented itself, there was no question whose head was getting that bullet. Bryan could be mad about it later.
So, you’d leave Bryan to hang. Literally? For what, vengeance?
Crap. Her throat closed, making it hard to swallow when she sniffed. She dried her cheeks on her sleeve, caught a whiff of her body odor, and fought the reflexive gag. Though with the odor wafting off the baño/vomit bucket, she was shocked other smells could force their way through.
Her goal was to somehow make sure she and Bryan never made it to the worst case scenario. She couldn’t shoot Bryan.
Bryan called out in his sleep, moving fitfully. She stepped over and laid a hand on his forehead, his skin hot, feverish. She pocketed the knife, dumped the unusable ammunition from his T-shirt, and soaked the material with some of their water.
She gave him a sponge bath from head to toe, without waking him, which both surprised and concerned her. She smiled when she thought about how pissed he’d be to find out he’d slept through the whole thing.
Then she left him with the blanket off and returned to the ledge to put the finishing touches on the blade with the smooth stone.
She was almost finished when he started hollering and batting at his leg. “Get it off, get it off!”
Rushing over to him, she tried to shake him awake, but he was awake, his eyes open and wide with terror. He tried to sit up, but he fell back, groaning in agony.
Fisting his hand in her shirt, he jerked her down until her face was inches form his. “Get it off!”
“There’s nothing there.”
“Tarantula. On my leg. Get. It. Off.” He trembled, but let her go.
Were there tarantulas in Wyoming? She had to get him quiet before his cries brought the guards to check on them. With a stockpile of old ammo in the corner, she couldn’t take the risk they would come in and find their stash.
“Okay, I’ll get it, but you have to be quiet. Understand?”
He nodded, the moonlight glinting off the sweat pouring down his face.
She crawled down his body, swiping her hands over the tops of his legs and down between his body and the ground. There was nothing there.
“I don’t feel anything. It must have crawled away.”
“It’s right-fucking-there,” he said, his teeth gritted as he raised his head to stare down at her.
“Where?” The word rang high in the cold night air.
“Right there. On my right foot. It’s the size of a dinner plate, how can you not see it?”
Sidney froze. Cold, dank sweat formed a rivulet down her back. He didn’t have a right foot. He was hallucinating. Standing, she made a show of stomping the ground around where his foot should have been.
With forced triumph, she said, “Got it. I got it, Bryan. It’s dead.”
She scrambled up to his head and wrapped his hand with hers, his breathing shallow and rapid. Relief softened his face.
“That was a big mofo,” he said.
Sidney blinked the moisture from her eyes until it brought him back into focus. “Huge.”
As his breathing slowed, his eyes drooped and Sidney said, “Get some rest, I’ll stay on tarantula watch.”
His eyes were already closed and he didn’t respond. Sidney folded his hand over his abdomen and rearranged the corner of the blanket so it pillowed the back of his head. When she was certain he was asleep, she trudged to the ledge and palmed the rock and the knife. The few steps over felt like she’d walked through sludge as thick as a Wendy’s Frosty. Her body, her spirit, felt drained—the knife and rock weighed as heavily as fifty-pound weights in her hands.
For all intents and purposes, Bryan was incapacitated. Beaten, fevered, suffering from acute withdrawal, and now hallucinations. Could it get any bleaker?
Don’t answer that. She threw up a mental hand to stifle Practical Sidney. She had enough going on in her head without taking comments from the peanut gallery.
* * * *
Waking with a pebble digging into his shoulder blade, Boomer opened his eyes, but the filtered light from the shed’s slatted roof kept direct sun out of his eyes. He rubbed his face and slapped at his cheeks to knock the fog out of his head. Holding a protective hand to his abdomen, he raised up on one elbow. Moving still hurt like a bitch, but he couldn’t do anything but accept it.
Sidney lay with her head on his lap and stirred.
“Hey,” she said. Her voice was sexy when it was thick and raspy with sleep. “How you feeling?”
“Like I’ve been steamrolled and left to bake in the Iraqi desert. Got any more of that water?”
She retrieved the jug and assisted while he drank. When his stomach didn’t heave, he drank a little more. His mouth felt dank and dry and the water only helped to a degree.
He shook the jug. Almost empty. “What happened to all the water?”
“You were burning up last night. I gave you a couple of sponge baths.”
“Why didn’t you wake me?”
“You weren’t exactly all there last night.”
His abdominal muscles burned with the effort of sitting up, so he laid back down. “What are you talking about?”
“The tarantula?” She said it as if he should know what she was talking about.
With his head spinning and everything looking warped, like he’d been on a five-day bender, it was hard to figure out what she was going on about. “I’m not exactly functioning on all eight cylinders. You’re gonna have to give me a clue.”
“Last night, you thought you had a plate-sized tarantula on your right foot…”
His stomach flopped and his blood whooshed past his eardrums for a few too many beats.
The hallucinations had started.
“How long?” she asked. She sounded like she was on the far side of the shed but she couldn’t be more than a foot and a half away.
Even with wool on the brain he knew what she was asking: how long the hallucinations were going to last. Too long, was the short answer.
He hoped his lucid moments far outweighed the alternative. “A few days if I’m lucky. Longer if I’ve pissed off the man upstairs.”
She just rolled over on her side and faced away from him. His pulse slowed, dread weighing it down, down, down…down. He hadn’t felt such a sense of dread since that dark day in Iraq that changed the course of his life forever. Only this time he’d brought it on himself. In that moment of complete clarity, between what he knew would be longer stretches without it, he could no longer deny his substance abuse.
The worst part about it was that Sidney’s life was at risk because of his problem. Because of his addiction.
He wasn’t the man he once was.
Not by half.
He would make it up to her.
In this life or the next.
He ran his hand through Sidney’s hair. It was oily and gritty with dirt, fueling his self-recriminations. If it wasn’t for him, she’d be back on the ranch, clean hair, clean clothes, full belly, maybe about to throw her leg over the saddle for the first training ride of the day.
“I’m sorry,” he said for what little good that word ever did for anybody.
She rolled onto her belly, propped herself up on her elbows, and stared down at him with an expression that was more puzzled than pissed.
“You have nothing to be sorry about. The sooner you get that through that thick skull of yours, the better.”
“It’s my fault we’re in this mess to begin with.”
She patted his cheek, not hard enough to knock sense into him, but hard enough to get his attention. “You in la-la land again?”
He held her wrist and said, “At the stock pond, if I hadn’t been drinking, if I’d been on my game from the start, those guys never would have caught us in a bad situation. Never would have taken the horses. We never would have been searching for them and…”
“And what, Bryan?”
His brain must have fritzed out for a time.
“And they sure as hell wouldn’t have gotten the advantage back at the cave.”
“Finished? Because if you hadn’t noticed, we are up crap creek without even a log raft or a push stick, much less a canoe or paddle. There isn’t any time for blame or what-ifs or what-could-have-beens. All that matters is here and now.”
Matters.
Of all that she’d said, he didn’t know why his brain had focused on that one word. The day before he…it was the day before, right? Hell, he couldn’t keep track, but when he’d told her she mattered, it was a lie.
“I lied,” he said as he reached for her hand and stroked his thumb across her wrist.
She shook her head as if she could shake the words around until she understood. “How so?” If she was mad at his confession, she didn’t show it.
“When I told you the other day that you mattered.”
She schooled her expression. “You saying I don’t?”
He brought her hand to his lips, kissed her knuckles one by one. When he looked in her eyes, he expected to see censure, avarice, and a general frustration considering their situation, but all that he saw was that she was right there with him in that moment without prejudice. Just looking at him with an openness, an earnestness he didn’t deserve. That was one of the many things he loved about her. Her ability to live in the present.
“What I’m saying, or trying to say, is that I love you.” He didn’t stutter or stumble or hem and haw. “I wanted you to know that.”
She didn’t balk at the declaration like she had when he’d told her she mattered. She also didn’t say anything back, but she didn’t have to. He knew she cared, but he didn’t pretend to think she loved him back or that she could or would ever get there. It didn’t matter. That wasn’t why he’d told her.
When she still didn’t say anything, he said, “The time and place are probably inappropriate—”
She shut him up with a kiss so light it didn’t even make his lip hurt, but she didn’t take it any further. “Any time, any place, is always appropriate to find out somebody loves you.” She smiled, but he wouldn’t call it a joyous one. “Thank you for telling me.”
If she were a smart woman, she would throw it back in his face, but she didn’t, and for some reason that gave him hope. Hope that he hadn’t had in a very long time. A reason to want to get better. A reason to get back to the ranch.
A real reason to live.
“Come on,” she said, “Let’s get you dressed and rewrap those ribs.”
She helped him up and over to the corner, where he could prop himself against the wall with one hand and take care of business. He coughed and grabbed his ribs. The high concentration of ammonia in his urine singed the hairs in his nostrils and scorched his lungs. He needed to choke more water down before he became too dehydrated.
With an arm under his shoulder, she helped him back to the far side and got him dressed, including the ACE bandage on his stump. When he stood on his leg again, it almost felt close to normal. Either that or everything else hurt so damn much that his body didn’t bother registering the pain in his stump.
As much as he knew he needed to stay away from alcohol and drugs, there was this beast building inside him that craved them both with a gnawing, slashing need that struck a fear in him that burned with the inferno of Mordor. The good thing about their situation was he had no access to either. No way to fall back on using.
He stood with one hand on the wall so she could wrap his ribs. His quads shook with the effort to stand up for so long. Getting weaker by the minute, doubts crept back into that silent, simplistic part of his prehistoric brain that would find relief with that bullet.
Boom. Done. Over.
But it was the gut-twisting, heart-demolishing horror of letting Sidney down that kept him from reaching for the gun.
* * * *
A day and half later, things had gone from dismal to whatever it was that was ten hellish layers below that.
El Verdugo still hadn’t arrived, for good or bad. Bryan was going downhill fast, like a novice snow skier on the double diamond slope after losing two poles and one ski. His descent was completely out of her control—chaotic, dangerous, deadly.
She could hardly get him up except to relieve himself, which wasn’t often because he wasn’t drinking much, and most of what she could get him to swallow was immediately rejected by his stomach—do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars.
His color paled, his cheeks hollowed, and his skin seemed a size too large.
As time passed, the deep bruising worked to the surface. His abdomen and ribs were the worst, his torso sporting a rainbow of blacks and blues, purples and yellows. The swelling around his right eye had gone down, but that made it easier to see the hemorrhage in the white of his eye.
And there ended all the things that were good.
Mentally, he sank further from reality. How much of it was the withdrawal versus the beatings versus the dehydration and lack of calories was anyone’s guess. He slept more, but it was fitful. He thrashed about and verbalized. Some of what he’d said must have been from his time in Iraq. Other times, no doubt, about his ex-wife, reliving the fights, the heartache, like his soul had been filleted and left open for the vultures to pick over. Every bad moment he’d ever had in his life was on display in all its Technicolor glory and gore. The most frightening of all were the hallucinations, as if his mind had turned to the twenty-four/seven horror channel.
All she wanted to do was crawl up into one of the corners and disappear.
It humbled her, hearing fragments of his life knowing he’d lived them. If nothing else, it helped explain his drinking and the drugs in a way no words ever could. Hell, at that point, she was looking for a stiff drink herself.
Then he’d miraculously have a short period of deep sleep, sometimes followed by a brief period where he’d open his eyes and he’d be lucid, like a schizophrenic who’d finally gotten his medications right.
He slept quietly now, as comfortable as a man could in a shed on the side of a hill where it seemed he had two legs and an arm in the grave.
She sat beside him, her knees to her chest, the Glock in her hand, and she rhythmically pressed the magazine release, then punched it back home, then released it again and clicked it back home. The gun was both a blessing and a curse. She popped out the magazine and thumbed the spare round.
She rolled it beneath her thumb and the brass warmed to her touch, debating the wisdom of telling Bryan that earlier that afternoon, after she’d given Pepita all the rounds they couldn’t use and had showed her what worked with their gun, Pepita had snuck by and surreptitiously dumped another 9mm round through the hole.
A spare.
Or her salvation.
An extra round might change Bryan’s plan, switch his strategy, if he were capable of rational thought. In her mind, one bullet didn’t change anything except in one way:
It gave her an out.
As much as she wanted to cry, she almost had to laugh. Less than two months ago, her biggest worry was putting gas in her tank and hay in Eli’s belly. Now, essentially alone, she sat contemplating a promise she should never have made, while mentally writing a pros and cons list for a murder-suicide.
Mercy killing and suicide. Practical Sidney tried to put a more positive spin on it, but when your thoughts sank to that level, it was like putting lipstick on a semantic pig.
With two bullets, she tried to come up with another scenario that had them both surviving, but nothing in her head panned out beyond a miracle of them being found and rescued. If she kept her promise to Bryan, she could put the extra bullet in El Jefe’s or El Verdugo’s head. If she reneged, she could get both El Jefe and El Verdugo, if all the stars were aligned and the patron saint of ammo graced her with a speed and accuracy she didn’t possess.
Would killing one or both of the men in charge mean that their remaining men were now free to do with her what they wanted? From some of the looks she’d gotten from a few of the guards, having them off the leash wasn’t anything she wished to live through, if she lived through it.
Which brought her back to the stark reality of one bullet for him and one bullet for her.
Funny how that was starting to seem like the best option.
“What’re you thinking?” Bryan’s words lacked vibrancy, like an old red T-shirt that had been washed a thousand times.
He reached a hand up and brushed a thumb over the wrinkles on her forehead. She rested her chin on her knee and decided then and there that she’d keep the second bullet a secret. She knew that having her make that promise wasn’t easy for him to ask, but she’d witnessed the peace settle on his features when she’d acquiesced.
Yet, if he knew what she was contemplating, she didn’t think he’d give her the same grace she’d allowed him.
“A little bit of everything,” was the answer that was closest to the truth. “How are you feeling?”
“Never better.”
She smiled at the obvious lie, but the smile came slowly and only because she knew that’s what he wanted her to do. His lips moved in return, but it looked more like a grimace.
Slipping the gun back into her boot, she reached for the jug of water and said, “Do you think you can hold any water down?”
When he didn’t answer, she turned her attention back to him. He was staring right at her.
“Bryan?”
Again nothing. Then his stare went vacant and his eyes rolled into the back of his head and every muscle in his body went rigid and he seized. The convulsion started with his legs, then rushed up his body until his back arched, his teeth slammed together, and his lips stretched back into a dark caricature of a grin.
Adrenaline zipped through her arteries, capillaries, and veins, until her entire system vibrated, shaking all rational thought from her head. She jumped up and rushed the door, pounding it with her fists and yelling for help until the pads of her palms went numb and her voice went hoarse.
Behind her, she heard hollow thumps, and she turned in horror as the seizure intensified, racked his body, and slammed his head against the ground again and again.
She dove to his side, cradling his head in her lap. He foamed at the mouth like a rabid dog, and somewhere in the back of her mind she remembered that seizures could cause someone to vomit and aspirate it into their lungs. She struggled to protect his head while at the same time shove him onto his side to protect his airway if necessary.
By the time she heard the clump of heavy boots approaching, his flailing had eased to the occasional tremor. The seizure probably lasted a minute, but it was the longest, most terrifying sixty seconds of her life.
Bryan groaned as the key worked in the padlock, and Sidney laid his head down and swiped the saliva from his mouth with the corner of the blanket. When the doors opened, she launched over the threshold, planting her palms in the center of El Jefe’s chest and shoving with all her might and fury.
Unprepared for the assault, he stumbled back a couple of steps. Vaguely, she became aware of a group of men closing in on her, but that didn’t stop her attack.
“You son of a bitch!” She swung a wild punch that El Jefe side stepped with apparently little effort, and she stumbled.
El Jefe grabbed her wrists but she dug her heels into the ground and tried to bowl him over like one of those really big, beefy, Sherman tank-type football players, until her arms were grabbed and yanked back.
Pain exploded in her shoulder joints, dropping her to her knees and stealing her breath so she couldn’t even call out. She sagged, and what little strength and energy she had abandoned her, her chest heaving as she fought for every molecule of available oxygen. This high up in the mountains it was as if they were all having to share them. There certainly wasn’t enough oxygen to go around.
“Finished?” El Jefe said inanely, as if they’d been sitting around the coffee table and she’d filled in the last square of the New York Times crossword puzzle.
“He needs a hospital.”
“No.” There was no thought behind his answer. No consideration, just a quick, automatic response.
Sidney wanted to go for this throat and wipe the imperious expression off his face, but with a guard on each arm, that wasn’t about to happen.
Then in the distance came the faint growl of a heavy engine, the resonating whump, whump, whump of rotor blades as they whipped the thin atmosphere. Then a helicopter came over the ridge. Low and slow, as if they were looking for something or someone.
The relentless tightness in her chest eased, her heart weightless, like it had lost fifty pounds.
For the first time in days, she allowed a spec of hope to flourish. Someone was searching for them!
“Down here! Help us!” she called out, even as engine noise and concussion from the rotors beat back her words. She struggled against the hold the men had on her, kicked at shins and higher. If she could break free long enough to run into a clearing she might be spotted, but both men had a powerful grip on her arms and held her far enough away that the jabs from her boots were ineffective.
As the helicopter flew overhead, El Jefe remained unconcerned. She saw the tail rudder for a flash through the dense foliage. To anyone looking for them from above, she’d be invisible.
She shot a look at El Jefe, and he raised a single brow at her as if to say “are you done yet?”
“They fly over once or twice a week. They haven’t found us yet, they won’t find you.”
She didn’t reply.
Bryan shouted something from the shed. El Jefe jerked his head toward it and the men released her arms so she could go to him. She didn’t even bother to make a run for the clearing; she knew as well as they did that her chance at rescue was long gone.
It took a moment for her eyes to readjust to the low light in the shed. Bryan lay where she’d left him. He thrashed, talking mumbo jumbo that she couldn’t quite make out.
“What’s he saying?”
Sidney waved her hand at Bryan and let it drop to her thigh in frustration. “I don’t know. He’s delirious. He’s sick. He needs a doctor, a hospital. I told you that.”
Bryan mumbled something else, then clearly said, “the package,” then made a sweeping motion with his fist as if punching someone in slow motion, then said, “Get the fuck off me.”
“What was that about the package?” El Jefe said.
“I don’t know. He’s out of his head and not making any sense.”
“What else has he said?”
“Anything and everything. If you’re so interested in what he has to say, then you sit your ass in here hour after hour and see for yourself.”
El Jefe stepped up to her and grabbed her lower jaw in a tight grip, every finger mashing her skin against bone.
She looked him in the eye and her heart rate spiked. She was certain he would hear it. In his brown eyes, she didn’t see a dark, evil soul, or the picture of the devil himself. No, what she saw crystalized her blood while at the same time cold sweat dripped from her brow—she saw an ordinary man willing to do whatever was necessary to get what he wanted. He wasn’t misguided, insane, or out of his mind.
He was cold and calculating and wholly determined.
“You have a smart mouth on you,” he said as he leaned in close.
She saw it coming, but it was so fast, so unexpected, she couldn’t react quickly enough to stop him from kissing her. When he tried to force his tongue past her lips, she bit back the rising bile, her disgust, and his invading tongue.
He screeched and pulled away, but not before she tasted blood. The guards rushed her again but he waved them off. His eyes boiled with anger, but also what she could describe as begrudging respect. With his eyes never leaving hers, he worked his jaw, spat blood onto the ground, then gave his men a long list of orders.
One of the men left and she heard him repeating the orders to someone else. Then he was back and the two men each grabbed one end of Bryan and lifted.
Bryan cried out in agony, but he was still not entirely conscious of what was going on around him.
“Put him down!”
El Jefe didn’t bother to answer as the men carried Bryan. When Cue Ball and another man she hadn’t seen before arrived, El Jefe said in English, “Bring her.”
When they went to put their hands on her, she jerked free. “Don’t touch me.”
Cue Ball’s forehead glistened with sweat. It wasn’t hot out, but it seemed any kind of physical activity required effort. He looked to his boss, who looked at her and said, “Don’t do anything stupid.”
He waited while she preceded him out the door. El Jefe and her two guards followed behind as she trudged up the hill after Bryan. They were taken to a tent, the kind Sidney pictured the Boy Scouts from the fifties or sixties had used, with the tall poles in the middle and the sides triangulating down to the ground. Over the top was some camouflage netting she’d seen in the movies to make structures more difficult to spot. No wonder the people flying overhead hadn’t seen anything.
The men dumped Bryan on the ground. He groaned and rolled onto his back, which seemed to be the only position he could lay in and find any relief. His face and chest had slicked with sweat and she couldn’t tell if it was from pain at being moved or if his fever had returned.
“I need water and a cloth to bathe him,” she said to El Jefe, as if she were the one in charge.
He waited long enough until there was no uncertainty as to who was calling the shots, then said something to the Cue Ball that she assumed were orders telling him to get what she needed.
It didn’t take Cue Ball long to return, even sweatier than Bryan. She took the supplies. “Thank you,” she muttered.
Before El Jefe left the tent, he told the remaining man in English, “If he talks about the package, send someone to get me.”
“If he dies, you’ll never find the package,” she said.
He smiled at that. Not like he was happy, but like he knew something that she didn’t. Her stomach burned and churned with apprehension, knowing that while Bryan’s decision to say he had taken the package may have initially saved their life, at the heart of the lie there was something they’d missed. But what?
Then he cut his eyes to Sidney and said, “If she tries anything stupid, shoot her.”
So much for being a valuable commodity.
Sidney was more surprised that the guard understood English than the order, but she realized she shouldn’t have been. The man staying in the tent with them was the one Bryan had described as El Jefe’s right hand man. Tweedle Dee, Bryan had called him.
Dee settled into a folding camping chair at the mouth of the tent so he had a good view of what was going on outside as well as inside. He pulled the gun off his hip and set it in his lap within easy reach. Sidney didn’t doubt for one second that he would carry out El Jefe’s orders without blinking.
She dipped the dirty white T-shirt they’d brought her in the bucket of freezing cold water. The water turned brown as she wrung out the excess and started at Bryan’s head and mopped the sticky sweat from him face and chest. She rested one of his arms on her shoulder and cooled off the skin there.
Now that they were in the tent, she might have more of an opportunity to escape. She still had the gun in her boot, but shooting her guard would rouse the whole camp.
Bryan had also made her promise that if she could find a way to leave, even if it meant going without him, that she would go. With the pocket knife in her other boot, when night fell, she might be able to slice through the back of the tent and slip away unnoticed.
Dark was still hours away, and even though she’d made promises to Bryan, they were still promises she didn’t know if she could keep. So she did what she could think to do in a kidnap situation: She tried to humanize herself and Bryan to the guard. It might not do any good in the end, but if it made him hesitate to follow his orders for even a microsecond, it could mean the difference between life and death.
“What’s your name?” she asked Dee.
He stared at her while she wiped down Bryan’s other arm, then finally said, “Mario.”
“I’m Sidney, and this is Bryan.”
He didn’t reply, he just watched her ministrations.
Because she thought she’d go stark raving mad if she kept all her thoughts inside her head, she started blabbering. “You don’t have to do this you know. You don’t have to take his orders. You could leave. Work hard, make yourself a good life. Find yourself a woman, have some kids. It doesn’t have to be like this. You don’t have to hide out for the rest of your life, worried you will be found or sent to prison or killed, either by the authorities or maybe even one of your own men. You’re not like them, I can tell. You’re a good man in a bad situat—”
She bit the word off when the muzzle of his gun pressed into her temple. She’d been so focused on what she was doing for Bryan, she hadn’t even heard him get up.
“Shut up.”
One of Bryan’s hands rested on her knee and he gave it a faint squeeze. Okay. She was shutting up. She didn’t look at Bryan; she didn’t want Mario to know that he was coming around again.
“You won’t kill me,” she said with a laugh that held more bravado than she possessed. Bryan’s grip got tighter, but she ignored his warning. “Your boss, and, more importantly, El Verdugo, wants us alive.”
“Him,” Mario said with venom, indicating Bryan with a quick twitch of the gun muzzle. “You no matter.”
“You can’t shoot me for talking.”
“I tell them you try to escape.”