Driven

by Robert J. Crane

  Hell, that was fine. I had other plans for finishing this, anyway. Maybe Harry had packed the extra mag because ten was an even number.

  Putting my hands behind my head, I strolled down the hill toward the quarry below, hoping some rogue asshole I’d wounded didn’t decide to put a bullet in me before I could get down there and officially surrender to my inescapable fate.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Isauntered down the long slope of the hill, cool night air tickling my skin, all my disguises gone, the temporary tattoos rubbed off my face. My hair, back to its natural color save for the remnants of an old dye job at the tips, hung to the back of my neck, stirred by the breeze. I held my hands straight up, my empty bag left behind me, Sig Sauer holstered on my hip, shotgun slung behind me with a strap over my shoulder, and the Walther hiding in my waistband just behind my right kidney.

  Just a normal walk, if you were Sienna Nealon of old. Armed to the teeth, out for a stroll, mayhem in mind. Whee.

  When I reached the bottom of the hill I was met by a couple of very hostile guard types who pointed their weapons at me. They looked like G36’s, German-made assault rifles with a full auto setting that my AR lacked. Not that it had mattered, and now the ground was littered with so many G36’s that I’d have my pick of ‘em if I needed to go for that kind of firepower again.

  “Hands up, hands up!” one of the mercs shouted, covering me from in front in a South African accent as we started to descend down the long gravel path into the quarry where Adoncia waited with Angel. I was taking my time, and they were wisely walking down the little dirt ramp in front of me, covering me carefully from ahead. Casting a look around, I found they were two of about eight guys still on their feet that I could see. The other six had all come bursting out of the trailer.

  That didn’t mean there weren’t more lurking around the edges of this quarry or that some hadn’t been playing dead to avoid catching bullets in the other quarry. But these were the only ones I could see that were up and moving around here. Others were groaning, their audible noises of pain carried on the evening wind as I walked slowly down the gravel road carved into the side of the quarry toward the trailer. Adoncia waited with Angel, both lit by the fluorescent lights within, casting a long shaft through the open door. Angel was slouching, hands bound behind her back, and Adoncia was close enough that a quick glance in Angel’s direction would pretty much be the end of mi amiga.

  One of the mercs started to circle alongside me and I chuckled as he did so. I knew what he was trying to do; he was going to come around behind me and cover me from that direction, which would be bad in that it’d reveal my shotgun to him.

  “What?” he asked, his own South African guttural accent deep and suspicious.

  “Nothing,” I said, clearly suppressing another chuckle. “If you want to form a circular firing squad with your buddies there, it’s no skin off my nose.” And I added another sneering chuckle for fun as I nodded to Adoncia’s guards waiting ahead of us.

  That sobered him up real quick. Smart people don’t get downrange of the pointed and loaded weapons of seven of their friends. “You just keep taking it slow,” he said, moving back to in front of me with his buddy, apparently re-considering the wisdom of his maneuver.

  “It’s cool,” I said. “You want me to pirouette so you can see I’m clean? I’ve got a gun at the hip, obvs—”

  “Just keep walking, hands in the air,” he said, and I bet he was blushing in the dark, though I couldn’t see it. “We’ll deal with you when you get down to her.”

  “You got it, big guy,” I said, because when you’ve got a bunch of guns pointed at you, there’s really no reason not to be a hugely patronizing ass. I mean, self-preservation might be reason enough for most people, but me? I like to live dangerously. And insulting people with an obvious advantage in numbers and weaponry?

  Well … it was definitely dangerous, I thought as I saw the guy’s finger tighten around the trigger. He held off from shooting me, probably not by much margin, though. After all, I’d just killed or wounded over forty of his comrades. Putting me down would have been wise.

  Because I was damned sure going to kill his ass as soon as I had an opening.

  “I love what you’ve done with the place,” I said as we reached the bottom of the road and my shoes splashed in the light layer of water that covered the bottom of the crater. “I wondered where you’d gotten the rocks in your head, Adoncia, and now I know—you went direct to the source. Discount pricing, I’m sure—”

  “Who do you think you are?” Adoncia hurled at me as my two captors joined their six buddies in a half-moon firing squad with Adoncia at the center, holding Angel by the back of the neck in front of her.

  “Who, me?” I asked sweetly. “I’m Death, swift and sure. And you are …?”

  “You’re a coward,” Adoncia growled at me.

  “Says the woman hiding behind a hostage, dudes with guns, and her very own laser eye beams,” I shot back, excessively chipper for a person walking into the teeth of danger. “Go ahead, close your eyes and stand there for a minute, see what happens to you and your merc scum buddies.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to me and my ‘merc scum buddies,’” Adoncia said, “now that you don’t have a gun in your hand anymore.” She looked at the mercs, then nodded at me and the Sig on my hip. “If she reaches for that … shoot her. Dead.”

  “Why, that would be murder,” I said, listening. Sirens were definitely going, somewhere out there in the distance. Maple Grove city hall and the police station weren’t that far away, so my guess was that someone had heard the shots, and now they were trying to figure out where exactly they’d come from. A renewed burst of firing would help with that, but if it came in the next thirty seconds, it wouldn’t help me much, cuz I’d be good and dead by the time the cops got here to bust the party up. Not my preferred exit scenario.

  “Murder is what I do, sweetheart,” Adoncia said.

  “Yeah, well,” I said, then hummed a few bars of “Nobody Does it Better,” by Carly Simon. She didn’t get it, so I shrugged at her, taking the lay of the land. There were a few stubborn rocks here and there that hadn’t been busted up that might offer reasonable cover. The nearest was about twenty feet away, but it’d be damned near impossible for me to break Angel loose of Adoncia’s grasp and haul her over there—because she didn’t look like she could really move on her own—without being riddled with bullets long before we reached it. “Trust me when I tell you … no one’s going to remember you for murder in a year or ten.” I smiled. “But they’ll remember me for a lot longer than that.”

  Adoncia rolled her eyes. “Who cares what anyone remembers? You’ll be dead.”

  “If you wanted to dethrone me as the killer queen,” I said, “you should have packed a lunch.” I glanced at a dead body lying facedown in a puddle only a few feet from Adoncia. “Also, maybe I should have brought some cannon fodder for you to rack up your kill count with.”

  “I don’t need cannon fodder,” Adoncia said, waving a hand. “I’m about to kill Sienna Nealon.” Her grin was wide, confident—the stuff of idiots who sacrificed their desire to kill me, the most dangerous person they’d ever met, in favor of gaining a little emotional satisfaction via monologue first. Classic mistake; you should really just shoot the superwoman killer in front of you, peeps, rather than try and soothe your pride by getting one over on her verbally. It never works. I’ve been abused by people who cared about me; the number of damns I give about the opinions of random strangers like Adoncia was less than zero. I could stand here all day and take insults from her without getting upset.

  Meanwhile, she wanted to hear me beg or something before the end. They always did.

  And I never begged.

  “That’s what they all say,” I muttered under my breath, trusting she could hear me. I looked away casually, as though I were just waiting for my ride to show up or something. “Nobody remembers them, either.”

  “Yo
u’ll remember me before the end,” Adoncia said, voice going hard. “You’ll be screaming my name.”

  “Geez, lady, way to make things extra perverted,” I said, snapping my attention to her. I had two more possibilities for cover, but each was farther away than the first. One at my two o’clock, thirty-five feet away and shorter than my original, preferred cover, which was to my right. The other was at my seven o’clock, and smaller still but only about thirty feet away. “So you’re into murder and sex crimes? Super creepy.”

  Adoncia did not take this well, face rippling with anger before settling back into a sweetly menacing mask. “Thank you for giving me more ideas how to pain you especially before you die screaming.”

  “Ew,” I said. “And also … ewwwww.”

  She rolled her eyes at me again. “Let’s get started on—”

  “Hey, why haven’t you asked me about the blackmail papers?” I fired that shot across her bow, causing her to turn back to look at me, face half-silhouetted by the backlight of the trailer. I’d been saving it for when she moved past the desire to piss me off and got into torture and murder talk. “You know … the ones Miranda put together to expose your money laundering operations?”

  She was still as a statue, and that was the moment I realized … yep, this was in fact a point of leverage for Adoncia. She might have been doing this at least in part for revenge, but money and power and keeping her Cartel running was clearly still a strong motivator as well. “Well … where are they?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” I asked, putting a little sugar of my own into it. “It’s cool, though. I’m sure that you’ll definitely torture the answer out of me before the cops find them … unless—” and here I grinned, because this was the fun part of being the ass that I was, “ —I left them in a car illegally parked on the road just outside the quarry where the cops would see it when they came driving by.”

  I couldn’t see the look on her face because of the shadows, but her voice sounded stricken, beautifully so. “You … wouldn’t. If the police get here … they will catch you, too.”

  “But Adoncia,” I said, so innocently, so dryly, such an asshole, “I was walking into a cartel ambush. I didn’t have a hope of surviving anyway, did I?” Twist the knife. “I mean … you didn’t intend to let me walk away from this … did you? I assumed you were going to torture us to death … so I planned accordingly.”

  The sirens were getting closer. The mercs were trading looks. The uncertainty was so thick you could smell it. They’d walked into this knowing there was a fight coming, but they probably figured it’d stay low-key, because one of the entrants was a dangerous, wanted fugitive who’d been on the run (successfully) for almost two years.

  Dumbass miscalculation on their part. And now they were finally considering the possibility that they might just get caught, trespassing with fully automatic and very, very illegal weapons at the scene of about forty or so murders.

  Mercenaries they might be, but even they could calculate their odds against a whole army of suburban cops.

  And those sirens … just kept getting louder.

  “Man, that money doesn’t do me any good if I get caught here,” one of the guards said, throwing down his weapon and booking it up the ramp past me. He shed his tac gear as he went, dropping a pistol behind him as he hauled ass.

  “I got priors, man,” said another in a southern accent, ditching his guns and gear and heading after the first. “I didn’t know we were going to be doing this kind of high-key illegal shit! I’m out!”

  “Same!” Another bailed. And another.

  “What the hell?” said one of the guards nearest Adoncia, taking all this in with something that sounded like raging disbelief. “You chickenshits—”

  A rifle round cracked out in the night and opened his head to the elements as someone opened fire with my AR-15 from the elevated perch at the top of the hill, using the last of my mags. Bullets roared, and everything seemed to break loose at once—

  Angel swung her hands back and knocked Adoncia aside—

  I pulled my shotgun and drilled two nearby mercs who had yet to throw down their guns, turning and trying to draw a bead on Adoncia, but Angel was in the way—

  Other shooters, probably five or six around the lip of the quarry, opened up on whoever was firing my rifle, and no more covering fire came immediately from my friend on the hill—

  “MOVE!” Angel screamed, hauling ass toward me. We both broke for cover and ran for the boulder to my right as the sound of gunshots and sirens was suddenly drowned out by something more intense, more terrifying—

  A blast of ruby red light screamed through the night as Adoncia turned loose those eye beams again, sweeping them toward us like deathly weapons, seeking a final target—

  Us.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Angel

  Four Years Ago

  Flames were spreading everywhere in the restaurant as Angel stood there, as still as if she’d died on her feet, as her dream began to burn.

  Then, “No! No!” she shouted, and this time—

  She sprung into action.

  Snatching the nearest tablecloth she started to beat the flames, smothering them as best she could. She plunged into the midst of the fire, dropping the cloth over it, trying to keep it from spreading to—

  “Oh, my, this is terrible.” A calm voice spoke, and a long leg stepped into the restaurant over the shards of broken glass that still stuck up in the window. “Whoever would have done such a horrible thing?” The voice was soaked in irony, leering, and when she saw the face, Angel almost gagged.

  Jorge.

  “You did this,” Miranda said, glaring him down.

  “Why … no,” Jorge said, putting a hand on his chest and speaking in feigned sincerity. “I would never do such a thing.” His grin widened. “And you certainly can’t prove it, Miranda. Why, I was just passing by and got concerned when I saw the fire blooming out.”

  Miranda shuddered. “You’re a liar … and a criminal … I can’t believe I slept with you.”

  “But it was such a good time,” Jorge leered at her. “Come on. There’s no need to play coy. You like me. Why would you be this way about it?”

  “Because you’re burning my cousin’s restaurant and acting like nothing has happened,” Miranda said, backing up as he took a step toward her. “Because you tried to kill her!”

  “Is that what she told you?” Jorge threw a thumb at Angel. “Pfft. She’s a ditz. An idiot. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

  Angel had almost put out one of the fires, but the fact that all of this was happening as others spread …

  As her restaurant burned …

  “You sent men to kill me,” she said, rising to her feet. “Two of them. They said things that you would have said. About me being weak.”

  Jorge shrugged. “You are weak. Anyone who has met you would know this.”

  Angel’s eyes flared. “You tried to have me killed because I overheard you talking about drug trafficking.”

  He just rolled his eyes at that. “You’re a little bug to me. You would not be worth killing. No one would believe you if you overheard anything. My word against yours, who do you think anyone would believe?”

  “I believe her,” Miranda said.

  “Then you’re stupider than I thought you would be,” Jorge said.

  “Maybe,” Miranda said. “After all, I did help you and your cartel set up a money laundering network without realizing what I was doing.”

  “Is that what you think happened here?” He waved her off, too. “No. No, no. You can’t prove any of that. And therefore … anything you say doesn’t matter.” He looked at Angel, then Miranda, with a glint of triumph in his eyes, as the fire burned all around him.

  “I don’t have to prove it,” Miranda said tautly. “How about I just turn over my files to the FBI? Let them see for themselves what I did for you.”

  Jorge’s smile faded. “That … w
ould be very unwise.”

  Miranda cocked her head at him. “I thought you were innocent.”

  Jorge’s face was lit by the orange flames as they grew wild behind him, climbing up the wall. There was no way for Angel to stop them now, and instead, she stood frozen in a new way—waiting to see what Jorge would do next. “I have … very powerful friends … who will not like to see any aura of suspicion fall upon me—or our businesses here. They will come for you—if something else didn’t happen to you first.” Here his expression turned very dark indeed.

  “What else would happen to us?” Angel asked, causing Jorge to round on her.

  “I think … you might fall and cave your damned head in trying to escape this fire,” he said, and started to reach for her. Angel slapped his hand aside, and Jorge’s face lit with surprise. “Que?”

  “I’m not who you think I am anymore,” Angel said, and shoved him roughly against the wall, which cracked as Jorge hit it.

  Jorge shoved himself upright, pulling himself out of the fire that was spreading up the wall. “No … you’re not who I thought you were.” He brushed a little ash and ember from his shoulder and stuck his finger at her. “You’re—” He flinched, then jerked, then seemed to spin around as though his tail was on fire. “Ah—ahhhhhhhhhh!”

  Flames jumped and swirled around him, crawling up his body in an impossibly fast scramble. They seemed to almost exude from his pores, running over him as he spasmed. They engulfed him, burning him for several long moments. His screams were terrible, loud, furious. He managed to get out a strangled, “Adon-cia!” his fingers pushing out toward Angel blindly, his eyes sightless and burned to black.

  Then—in a flash—the flames were gone, and Jorge, blackened and charred from head to foot, toppled over as the fires all over the front of the restaurant seemed to simply ceased to be.

  “So, I caught the bit about him saying you’d never prove him guilty of anything,” came a dry voice from back by the restrooms. Angel whirled to find Sienna standing there, dabbing delicately at her right eye. “It sounded like that guy had some serious juice on his side. Lawyers, cartel allies—why, he was a real, formidable, dangerous foe. Scary.”