My gun fired, the last bullet sailing through the air and suddenly scarface howled, lilting to the side. His own gun went off but at an angle, hitting the roof above the lane and then bouncing back down to the concrete.
I fucking shot him in the leg.
“We’re in!” Derrin yelled, now at the lock again and opening the handle. I was too stunned at what I had done – I’d actually hit the guy! – that I couldn’t help but be frozen in place, watching as scarface grabbed hold of his leg, grunting down his pain. Derrin grabbed my arm and jerked me inside the stairwell, the door quickly closing behind us. He immediately locked it, then turned to look at me, the light dim from only one bulb near the top of the stairs that led to another door.
“You’re full of surprises,” he said, looking joyous before kissing me quickly on the lips.
“Must run in the family,” I said blankly.
He nodded and said, “Come on, we aren’t out of the clear yet. You got his leg but that’s only going to make him angry. Leg wounds are like that.”
He grabbed my hand and we jogged up the stairs to the top. I held my breath and Derrin put his hand on the door knob but to my relief it opened into an empty marble-tiled office lobby. We ran to the front doors and suddenly we were outside, bathed in the brilliant orange of a slowly setting sun, the sky periwinkle and sprinkled with early stars.
Derrin took me down along the back of the building, away from the direction of Wal-Mart and the chaos, and toward the back fences of residential properties. He opened a back gate and cut through someone’s backyard before we found ourselves on a suburban road.
We stopped by a dark green 80’s Nissan that was parked by some shrubs and Derrin, with just a quick glance around to see if any neighbors were watching, opened the door the driver’s door. It wasn’t even locked.
I guess we were stealing this car. I couldn’t even protest at this point. I’d just shot somebody.
I got in my side and it took two seconds for Derrin to quickly cross some wires underneath. The car started without a problem and we were off, bolting down the road in a stolen car before pulling onto the highway and getting lost in a sea of traffic. We headed away from Wal-Mart, which was now covered in a sea of red and blue police lights, and toward the direction of our hotel.
“You all right?” he asked me as the sun slipped below the horizon. The car reeked of cigarette smoke, which was giving me a headache. I rolled down my window. I wanted to puke.
“I don’t know,” I said, my eyes trained to the dying light in the sky. It was the truth. I didn’t know if I was all right. I mean, I couldn’t be. How could anyone be? But at the moment it was all very numb. My heart was still drumming along in my chest, my pulse and breathe racing. I felt wired and alive but dead at the same time, like everything happened to someone else and I was just feeling the after affects.
I wasn’t as stunned as I was the other day though.
“I’m not about to slip into a coma,” I told him. “But I don’t think I’m a hundred per cent.”
He nodded, his grip massaging the wheel. “You’re doing good. You’re doing real good. We’re going to get us to the hotel, get our stuff and leave. We’re going to hole up somewhere with a lot of people, maybe Mazatlan. Find a nice beach hotel and hunker down for a few days. We’re going to work through what happened. We’re going to fix this.”
“I don’t think we can fix anything,” I said, almost to myself.
“We will,” he said, in pure confidence. “We’ve seen the enemy now.”
“And he’s seen us.”
“Alana, he’s always seen us.”
He was right about that.
It wasn’t long before we were at the small hotel and quickly packing up our stuff. We were in and out in minutes.
We threw our bags into the back of the Nissan and drove west.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Derek
It was a blindingly hot day, one of the ones that make you curse the country to the ground. The sun was so strong, so merciless, that it made you wonder how anyone or anything could survive here at all. It was like living on the sun and everywhere you looked, the glare of the sun burned right through your eyes. On those kinds of days, everyone was partially blind.
I had driven Carlos into town, knowing full-well what was going to happen. He was exchanging money with Matice Marquez, one of the most powerful men in the Gulf cartel. I knew the money wasn’t real. I also knew the drugs that Marquez was passing over wasn’t real either.
Both sides were screwing each other and they knew it. More than that, they welcomed it. This way, someone could be taken out with good reason. Even though the cartels were beyond the law, some of them had still run on an odd set of morals. There was a lot of pride and a lot of honor in the way that transactions were made, in the way businesses were taken over, in the way people were killed. No one was above a bit of torture but there had to be a good reason for the torture. They would tell themselves anything to make it seem like they were better than everyone else and still pure in the grace of God.