Of course, like last time, I have a backup plan. I was concerned that you wouldn’t do the job I hired you to do, that’s why I had the man in the car on hand. His instructions were to hit her if you didn’t take the obvious shot and then drive away. I would have paid him the remainder of what I owed you.
I suppose the poor soul panicked. That’s what I get for hiring the locals. And I really didn’t see that vigilante side of you coming out. My, that was like something out of a movie. Well done.
Here’s what I want from you. I like you Derek. That’s why I hired you. I knew you were a man who got shit done and I’d still like to believe that, despite all your hesitations. It’s harder now, after all you’ve done, to still trust you, to trust you’re the man you’ve been building up all these years. But I like to believe the best in people. I like to believe that you still can come around and do what you were meant to do.
You have twenty-four hours Derek. Put the bullet in her head or something much, much worse will befall the both of you. You’ll still get your money, after all, I’m the one that’s fair here. You’ll get to walk away and then you can decide if you can be a better person. Though I suspect you’ll end up right where you started. That’s the thing about people like us. The people that do the dirty work, the dirty deeds. We can’t really escape what we are meant to do. All we can do is become better at it. In the end, you can be the best by doing your worse. In the end, I can do the same. In fact, I am.
Kill her and kill her now, like you had promised to do. It will all be over soon.
All my best,
A friend.
It was from one of those email addresses that was just a bunch of numbers. I was sure even if I replied, it wouldn’t go anywhere. There was nothing to say anyway, nothing that even surprised me about this, except that Esteban was even crazier than I thought he was. Of course there was nothing here to prove he sent it but I knew. I knew that face, that scar, that laid-back attitude that apparently harbored the world’s most dangerous grudge. I should have known the voice, too, from when I first talked to him but I’d never even imagined him in that position.
The man had ambition. Too bad I couldn’t find it admirable. I deleted the email and sat there for a moment, stewing over my options. It was an email and I had opened it. It didn’t say anything about where I was. I didn’t really think there was a chance he knew where we were.
I had twenty-four hours to kill her which meant we had twenty-four hours to get out of here.
We had to do better than that. When Alana got back from the pool, I’d tell her we were leaving tonight. Getting a rental car and heading up north. We’d figure out our steps with Gus from there. We couldn’t take any chances here. I didn’t know what kind of technology Este had at his fingertips but if there was even a chance that he could trace where the email was opened, I couldn’t take that risk. I’d obviously underestimated him before. I wasn’t going to do it again.
I went back up to the room and quickly packed all of our bags. Then I hopped in the shower and tried to think about what to do. I had only been there a minute when I heard someone in the room.
“Alana?” I called out cautiously, sticking my head out of the water.
“Yup!” she called back, her voice muffled. “Hey, why are all the bags packed?”
I quickly jumped out of the shower, dripping all over the floor and opened the bathroom door. She was wearing a houserobe over her bikini, a margarita in one hand, staring at the bags with worry.
“I thought we should move on tonight,” I told her with what I hoped was an easy smile.
“Why?”
“Better to be unpredictable.”
She chewed on her lip for a moment before sighing and taking a huge sip of her drink. “And I was just starting to like it here.”
“You’ll like San Diego more,” I told her. “Trust me.”
She smiled at that and I told her I’d be right out.
I went back in the shower and had just rinsed the body wash from me when I thought I heard a knock at the door. “Alana?” I asked again, turning the taps off and listening.
I heard the front door shut and then quickly wrapped a towel around me, heading out into the bedroom.
Alana was standing by the front door, dressed in jeans and a tank top now. She was holding a large envelope in one hand, a stack of what looked like 8x10 photographs in the other. Her hands were shaking.
“Who was that?” I asked, coming over to her. “What is that?”
She looked up at me in absolute horror. After everything we’d been through, I’d never seen that kind of look on her face. It was of utter destruction, of deepest, darkest fears coming true.