Dirty Angels 02 Dirty Deeds (13 page)

I was standing there a second ago.

That bullet was meant for me.

I couldn’t even process it. Derrin was pulling me along the square, racing for the cover of trees, while people screamed and scattered in all directions. I tried to run as fast as I could with my cast but it wasn’t cutting it.

Derrin knew that but did what he could to keep me going. Pigeons took flight as we made our way past the gazebo, where a band had paused and was looking around in horror, and we scampered toward the road.

Another shot rang out through the air, hitting one of the gazebo poles and ricocheting off. I would have screamed again if I had any breath left in me.

“We’re not going to make it on foot!” he yelled at me. He yanked me behind a tree, leaving me there to tremble like a dog, while he leaped out onto the road. A small motorbike was puttering past and he quickly knocked the man off of it. The man fell, crying out as he hit the road, narrowly being hit by an oncoming car and Derrin hopped on the bike, wheeled it around and jumped onto the curb beside me.

This all took place in the space of five seconds.

“Get on!” he yelled at me, his eyes blazing. But they weren’t afraid. They were determined.

I did as he said, leaning on him and awkwardly trying to get my leg over the back of the bike. The man who owned the bike was getting to his feet, yelling his head off, while another bullet hit the sidewalk. I whipped my head to the square to see two men running for us, guns drawn.

This can’t be real. This can’t be real.

But it was. Derrin gunned the bike forward and I quickly wrapped my arms around his waist, holding on for dear life.

Who was that? Who was that? Who was that?

I kept wanting to ask, to yell, to scream but I couldn’t. I could only hold on and try and catch my breath. My heart was playing drums in my chest and the city I knew and loved was zipping past me in a blur. In seconds it had turned from a warm safe place to one that wanted me dead.

Why?

We zipped along the street, Derrin handling the bike like it was second nature, dodging pedestrians, over taking cars, hopping on and off the sidewalk when we had to. All I could do was grip him and try not to fall off. Fear was in every part of me, begging me to pay attention to it, but I couldn’t. Once I did, that would be the end of me.

I put fear in a box and managed to look over my shoulder. You would think that after all of Derrin’s fancy maneuvering that we would have lost whoever it was. But there, in the distance, I could see two motorbikes. They looked bigger. Faster. They were gaining ground.

“Shit!” I screamed, finding my voice. It practically tore itself out of my throat.

Derrin quickly looked over his shoulder and only raised an eyebrow at the discovery. The bike went a little bit faster, but only a little.

We swerved to the right heading down a narrow lane, nearly taking out the patio seating area for a restaurant, while people shouted and yelled at us. The sound of the bike’s engine was deafening as it bounced off of the close walls, then multiplied.

I dared to look behind me again. Through the haze of hair blowing across my face, the two bikes entered the end of the lane, gunning toward us.

“Faster!” I yelled at Derrin. “They’re coming.”

“I’m trying!” he growled. “Hold on, put your head down!”

He rounded the corner and then jumped the bike up onto the sidewalk where we proceeded to head right through a restaurant. We crashed through a table that went flying to the side, then zigged and zagged around people, waiters, tables. Broken glass and dishes ricocheted through the air. I kept my head lowered, pressed against his shoulder blades, my eyes shut tight. I didn’t want to see any of this.

Derrin swiftly maneuvered it back and forth and then we were in what sounded like a kitchen and then we were airborn, weightless, and I had no idea where we were going to land. I opened my eyes just after we hit the ground with a jolt, biting down on my tongue by accident. My mouth filled with copper pennies.

We had soared over the kitchen’s backsteps and now were twisting right onto a different road, Calle Santa Barbara, and heading up the hill that lead to most of the tourist apartments on the south end of town. We had a bit more distance behind us now, but the bike wasn’t built for two, especially not someone as heavy as Derrin and it wasn’t made for hills either.

It sputtered, the air filing with the coarse smell of an overworked engine.

“I don’t think we’re going to make it,” I cried into Derrin’s neck.

He didn’t say anything. We kept going up the curving road, wheels bouncing over rough cobblestones, then a shot rang out. Then another. They hit the stones beneath us. Derrin jerked the bike to the left and another bullet hit a parked car. They were gaining.

“Keep your head down,” he said.

I did as he asked and felt him reach into his shirt. He pulled out a small gun then twisted at the waist. I twisted with him, out of the way. He quickly pulled the trigger, firing two shots, and hit one of the guys. He went flying off the bike and the bike fell to the side, just in time for the other assailant to crash into it.

One bullet, two down.

Despite being scared to fucking death, my adrenaline feasting on my veins, I was in awe.

I swallowed hard, trying to think of something to say to him.

“Buen disparo.” Nice shot.

His eyes smiled at me before looking to road in front of us. “I like it when you speak Spanish, babe.” Then his eyes looked back again and this time they were cold.

I turned my head to look. A black SUV was thundering up the road toward us. They weren’t tourists out for a Sunday drive.

“Fuck,” he swore. “Are you ready to get a little wet?”

I stared at him blankly. “What?”

He whipped the bike to the right and we went thumping down flights of cement stairs, nearly knocking over an elderly couple walking up them.

“Lo Siento!” I yelled at them before I bit my tongue again. At the top of the stairs, the SUV paused then drove off. I knew the road curved down and met with the one we were about to land on. Sure enough, as soon as we had hit the road, the SUV appeared at the end of, turning toward us. Derrin yanked the bike into a condominium driveway then down a brick path that traced the edge of the building, trees and bushes reaching out for us, snagging our clothes and our hair as we whipped through them.

Suddenly it seemed like it was the end of the line. There was a pool and beyond the pool there was blue sky.

“Hold on!” he yelled back at me.

I couldn’t hold any tighter. I let out a cry as the bike lifted off the ground, bounced on a lawn chair and then bounced off the edge of the patio.

We were flying. I kept my head down but my eyes open.

A sandy beach passed underneath our feet.

Then next thing I knew we had hit something hard, cold and my arms were ripped off of Derrin’s waist. Salt water burned my eyes, filled my lungs and nose and I tried to breathe, to swim, but I was sinking, drowning. The cast was weighing me down.

Suddenly a strong arm was wrapped under me and my head broke the surface.

“Breathe, it’s okay,” Derrin told me, gasping for breath just as I was. “Try and swim, I’ve got you.”

I tried to nod but couldn’t. I focused on my breathing and moved my arms and legs as much as I could but he was doing most of the work. When my eyes eventually stopped burning I was able to see where we were.

We were in the ocean, a few meters off the shore. The handles of the motorcycle were just beginning to disappear into the waves, sinking. Beyond that, sunbathers on the beach gawked while people ran to the edge of the condo’s pool area, to see where we had fallen. On either side of us there were outcrops of stone and rock where the waves gently crashed. We’d been lucky. We could have landed on those instead and neither of us would be alive.

“Right here,” Derrin said as he hauled me up to something. I floated around and saw that we had reached a jet-ski that was bobbing in the shallows, clipped to a buoy. I could barely process it.

He swam around me and tried to hoist me onto the edge of the jetski. I don’t know how he was able to do it while swimming and unable to touch the bottom but he was. I grasped for the jetski, trying to pull myself up as far as I could without hurting my wrist. The shouts from the shore were softening and there were some splashes, a few people coming into the water, maybe to help us.

I don’t know if the fall knocked something loose in my head or I took in too much saltwater, but I had a hard time focusing. All I knew was that Derrin was getting on the jetski. He pulled me up so I was in his lap and stabbed something metallic, like a small knife, into the ignition switch then hit the button. The jetski roared to life and he quickly unclipped it from the anchor before we peeled away from the shore.

I was staring blankly up at the patio where the crowd had gathered when I saw what looked like one of the men who had been chasing us, the guy on the motorbike who had crashed into the one who got shot. He was wearing dark aviator shades but the length of his mustache was memorable. But when I blinked, trying to get my eyes to focus as we moved further away, the man was gone.

“I think I saw one of the guys,” I managed to say before having a coughing fit.

“I know,” he said. “Keep holding on.”

“Where are we going? How did you start this without a key?”

How did you shoot someone while driving a motorcycle?

Holy fucking shit. He just killed someone back there. It was in self-defense and I’m glad he did it but oh my god.

Oh my god.

What was happening?

My breath was coming shorter and it felt like I couldn’t breathe.

“Hey, hey,” he said, taking his hand off the bar and tilting my head gently so he could look at me. “We’re okay. You’re okay. We’re going to drive this back to the hotel. It’s faster than they are and we have no reason to think they know where we are staying, okay?”

“How do you know that?”

“They would have killed us earlier.”

“They would have killed me. They’re after me.”

He nodded. “And now they’re after me because I shot one of their men. It doesn’t matter. We’ll go back to the hotel, get in the car and we’re out of here.”

“We can’t just leave the city!”

“Alana,” he warned just as we passed over a large wave, landing hard on the other side. My whole body was starting to ache. I was so battered as it was. “If you want to live you’ll do as I say. And you’ll answer my questions honestly, okay?”

If you want to live you’ll do as I say
. “Who are you?” I asked incredulously. He sounded like an action hero. My life just turned into an action film. None of this could be real. This couldn’t be real.

But I had said that about my parents, Violetta and Beatriz, too.

“An ex-solider. And I want answers from you.”

“What answers? Derrin, I told you everything I know. I don’t know who those men were. I never saw them before. I don’t know why they want to kill me.”

“How did your sisters die?”

I felt sick. “Oh, come on.” I rattled off a few swear words in Spanish.

“Tell me how they died. Tell me exactly how they died.”

He suddenly switched off the engine and we came to a stop, bobbing up and down the waves. There was no one behind us and the only thing in front of us were banana boats. I could see our hotel from here, maybe just another two minutes of boating and we’d be on the sand. It didn’t feel safe enough. Derrin knew that.

“I will start the engine when I know the truth.”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Because the truth could save us,” he said, exasperated, and his jaw began to twitch. I had never seen him so bothered before. Part of me wanting to savor the fact that for once he wasn’t being so cool and calm but that stoic demeanor of his was probably the thing that kept us alive.

I tried to look over his shoulder, to see if anyone was following us again, but his fingers under my jaw kept me in place. “How?”

I swallowed hard then coughed up a bit of seawater. I spit it into the ocean and realized there was no use pretending to be a lady around him anymore. Finally I seemed to catch my breath and I willed myself to feel numb. Luckily, after what just happened, I was half-way there.

“Violetta died in a car bomb,” I said simply. “It exploded with her in it.”

“Was it meant for her?”

I bit my lip and looked forward, trying to concentrate on the white sand. So close, so close. “From what I understand, no, it wasn’t. Wrong place at the wrong time. But she was definitely with the wrong people.”

“And Beatriz?”

“She was … it was on the news. She was beheaded. So was her husband. And my niece and …” I sucked in the air, trying not to cry, “nephew. Their bodies were burned. Their heads displayed in public.”

Derrin squeezed his arms around me tighter but didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.

When he finally spoke, though, his voice was a bit cracked. “Who is your brother? Who is he really? Is his name really Juan Bardem?”

“No,” I said. “His name is Javier Bernal.”

He immediately stiffened. I craned my neck to look at him. He was slack-jawed.

“You’ve heard of him, haven’t you? Of course, everyone here has.”

“Yes,” he said slowly. “I’ve heard of him.”

“So that’s the whole story. Violetta died in a bomb I think was meant for him. Beatriz and her family were tortured and killed and publicly shamed by Travis Raines, some sick fuck druglord who is now dead himself. Courtesy of my brother.”

Derrin was staring at me with the most rigid, unblinking eyes, like he couldn’t quite process this information. Wheels in his head were spinning.

I knew what was going to happen. He was going to take me to the beach. Then he was going to get the fuck out of there, leaving me to fend for myself. I was more trouble than I was worth. He was probably going to do that already, but telling him that my brother’s enemies were probably my enemies really cemented the deal.

I was pretty much a walking dead woman.