“My name is Derek Conway,” he said and now, now I could see it was real. This was who he was. “I’m from a small town in Minnesota. I grew up playing hockey, had a few chances to make the leagues. Hockey, personal training, those things were my life. Then I decided to join the army. I needed to get away from home, out of the house, out of the life that was slowly killing me. I was shipped to Afghanistan. Everything that I told you happened there is true.” He paused, his eyes searching mine. Beads of sweat dripped off his forehead. I could taste his blood in my mouth. “Are you following?”
I stared at him but didn’t give him any other indication that I was.
“I came back home a changed man. I was disillusioned with my country, with everything. I packed up and left it all behind, came down to Mexico so I could start over. And I did. I fell in love with the place, the people. I fell in love with Carmen. I had run out of money and started working for her brother. He was in a fledging cartel. I was his bodyguard. It was great at first but then I became more than that. One day there was a showdown of sorts between two cartels. Carmen got caught in the middle. She was gunned down, repeatedly. I saw the whole thing.”
His eyes didn’t start to water but I could see the pain reflected in them. I knew he wasn’t lying about this. But I wasn’t about to let this affect me. This man once had a gun to my head. This man had tried to kill me.
“It was like a second war for me. Again I had changed. This time I let it ruin me even further. I became a gun for hire, an assassin, a mercenary. I would do the dirty work for whoever needed it, and I was loyal to whoever paid me the most.”
I felt like an idiot. I should have realized this all along. The fact that he was a white American, and one I was stupidly in love with, had thrown me off.
“And I did the work. I did bad things. Very bad things. I killed many people, most who probably deserved it and some who probably didn’t. None of it mattered as long as I got paid. A lot of the work I did for your brother, Javier.”
My eyes widened, not seeing this coming at all. It also scared me what he might say.
“When he had split from Travis Raines’ cartel,” he continued, “there was a lot of blood that needed to be shed. A lot of retaliation. Do you understand? For things that were done. What was done to Beatriz and her family was one example.”
Oh my god.
“I put the bullet in Travis’s head. It was Javier’s order but I carried it out. Justice aside, that allowed Javier to take over the business. After that, it was the last time I saw your brother. I betrayed him by helping his ex-girlfriend, Ellie, and her boyfriend escape the Raines compound. It was nothing personal, they were paying me well and my job with Javier was over.” He closed his eyes and his body relaxed slightly. I lay still, wondering if I should make a move.
He went on. “After I helped Ellie, her boyfriend, and her father out, I was in Acapulco for a few weeks, trying to figure out what to do with my life. I felt like I had done a good thing in helping them, even with the money, and I wondered if I had the strength to move on. To leave the life behind. To return to the US and find someone else to love, to marry, to raise a family with. I wanted to escape the death. I wanted to kill the person I had become. My own assassination. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was sucked back in for a few more years. Every day was another slog through purgatory and one step closer to hell.”
There was so much breaking inside of Derrin’s – Derek’s – eyes that it was making me hard to concentrate, to get away. But I needed to, I needed to. The more I heard from him, the harder this would be.
“So I did what I did. And one day, I was in Cancun, and I got a call from a man I didn’t really recognize. He sounded green, new at the game, though, which made me suspicious. He wanted you dead and for one hundred thousand dollars.” I gasped against his palm. “He didn’t tell me why. They never do. But I agreed to do it. I agreed to kill you.” He licked his lips, his breaths coming heavy now. “But then I saw you. I saw you that day and … I knew it was wrong. Then you were hit by the car and suddenly the job didn’t matter anymore. Only you mattered, Alana, you and justice and making things fair. So I drove after the guy who hit you. I made him pull over and I shot him in the head. I killed him because he tried to kill you and get away with it. I was your so-called angel.”
But if the car hadn’t hit me? If it hadn’t hit me, he would have killed me. The image from the photograph was burned in my mind. That was a picture of a man who aimed to kill.
“Obviously I was set up from the beginning, to be the fall if anything went wrong. And it did go wrong. I got another call and the man wanted to pay me twice the amount. Two hundred thousand dollars. Said I could even keep the deposit. I told him no, though. It was messy, it was wrong and I wanted out. He told me there was no out. Not for me. …” he looked away, “and not for you.”