“Why me?” he asked under his breath.
He unclenched his jaw and allowed oxygen to reach his brain. Two breaths. Leaning down, he touched the edge of his toe and nearly took a chunk out of his tongue it hurt so badly. He felt a contusion on the top of what felt like a broken bone. Crap!
He couldn’t waste more time. He restarted his trek, hobbling on his heel while clutching his arm against his chest.
Another glance over his shoulder. A flash of light bounced off a nearby cliff, and his breath caught in the back of his throat. They had followed his trail and were getting closer. He picked up his pace, willing his body to ignore the agonizing pain shooting up his leg. Distant voices echoed off a nearby formation of rocks, and his pulse redlined. A tingling sensation raced through his limbs. It felt like his veins might explode and he’d bleed out under his skin. It must be the coke.
He cut forty-five degrees to the right, then stopped for a brief moment and ran his hand across the dirt until he found a rock the size of his palm. Turning to look over his shoulder, he could see the haze of more lights at the lip of the horizon. The herd was coming after him, all six undoubtedly seething at the prospect of hunting him down, finishing him off. Opposite his position, he could make out a cluster of miniature mesquite trees. He cocked back his arm, took three running steps, and hurled the stone as far he could throw it. He couldn’t see it flying through the air, but he could hear it crack and rattle off the trees. Not sure if that would do a whole lot of good to alter their hunting rampage, he flipped around and started running again. His toe throbbed with every bounce, and his arm felt like the final thread of ligament connecting to his shoulder was about to tear away and drop to the dirt right before his eyes. But he kept running, torquing his body to make each step longer and faster.
His wheezing had returned, but he couldn’t stop now. To escape the Gang of Six, he’d run all the way to the ocean. Was he even running east? Who the hell knew? Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw more lights now flickered against the slate backdrop. They were closer. He squinted his eyes. Was that a figure in the distance?
He turned at the exact moment he heard the clopping of hooves. Dirt sprayed into his face, and he tripped, tumbling onto his injured shoulder. A horse whinnied and snorted, and the college kid could feel the earth around him shake from the tremendous pounding of hooves on the ground.
“I found the little fucker!”
The kid peeled open his eyes and spotted the man in the leather vest, one hand on the reins, the other used to curl fingers into his mouth. He released a high-pitched whistle that forced the kid to cover both ears.
“You scared little brat. You should have never run from us.” He spit some type of chewing tobacco right into the kid’s face. The kid gagged, wildly flailing dirt to rid his mouth of the sickening substance. The man on the horse just chuckled.
“Hombres! Get your asses over here. I found him,” he yelled again.
With the man scanning the prairie for his comrades, the kid took his last chance. He quickly found a good-sized rock and grabbed a fistful of dirt. He leaped to his feet and flung the dirt into the eyes of the horse and its rider. The horse whinnied and jumped back onto its hind legs as the man screamed out, cursing in Spanish, frantically pawing at his eyes while trying to control the pissed-off horse. The kid waited a couple of seconds, trying to aim as the man and horse jumped around. He could hear other voices yelling, heading his direction. He had one shot, and he took it. He knew the rock had connected when the man cried out. The horse bucked again and the man listed left. He’d been stunned. The kid tried to get closer, to pull the man off his ride, but the horse kept bucking wildly, nearly trampling the kid twice.
Without any other option, he took off running again, hoping the man would just pass out and fall off his horse or have a heart attack from all the drugs he’d taken. Twenty yards out, he mowed through yet another cactus. The razor-sharp daggers sliced his skin. He cried out, but he didn’t slow down. In fact, it only infused him with more energy, and his pace picked up, even as brush slapped his thighs and arms. He began to have hope.
It lasted just a few seconds.
The galloping thud rumbled in his chest. Again looking over his shoulder, he could see the man slapping the side of the four-legged creature, and the horse responded with vengeance. In two quick breaths, the horse was practically even with him. The kid shifted his sights to the man in the vest. He wiped his forehead and showed his hand to the kid, then he licked it and chuckled.
The kid backpedaled while holding up his arms.
“I’ll pay you. My dad’s loaded. How much do you need? I can just call him and he’ll wire—”
The ground disappeared, and he fell straight back, dropping about six feet. Turning over, he realized he was being poked in the back by rigid objects. He had fallen into a trench and couldn’t see a damn thing. The horse plodded closer, and the kid looked up as one of the man’s compadres ran up and shined a flashlight on him. He spotted the man’s gnarly smile, four or five fangs and some metal, with blood curling around his crusted lips.
“You just made our job that much easier,” the man in the vest said.
The kid was confused. “What?” He tried to get to his knees, but he lost his balance and fell back to the bottom of the trench, face down. And what he saw nearly stopped all blood flow in his body. He’d landed on another person. A dead man with a prickly, heavy beard, whose eyes were stuck open. The kid felt like he was lying on a porcupine. He frantically pushed off the corpse and then fell onto another dead person. This one had a gaping hole in the side of his neck.
He was in one of those mass graves he’d seen pictures of online. “What kind of perverted, sick bastards are you?”
“The kind that will kill to get our way. We don’t take shit from anyone, especially some college punk who thinks he’s the next Heisenberg.”
Now joined by his five buddies, the Gang of Six howled with laughter, and the kid’s mind drifted to another place.
Fuck it. Fuck the drugs. Fuck these damn thugs, and fuck this entire idea he had of becoming the combination of Mark Zuckerberg and Pablo Escobar. It had all been an unmitigated disaster. An egotistical mistake of epic proportion.
He had lived a brief twenty-two years on this earth, but rarely admitted wrongdoing, let alone taking responsibility for anything he ever said or did. He had never been held accountable by any adult figure in his life: parent, coach, or teacher. No one stood up to him; he was too good an athlete and able to charm his way out of any situation, or into any girl’s pants. He was wittier and more charismatic than anyone he knew, and frankly, he could outsmart every person he’d encountered.
Until now. He had been blinded by the trappings of power and money. And he had no one to blame but himself.
He looked up at the man atop his horse, wondering how much he would suffer, wondering what his last thoughts would be.
“You’re just going to let me die in the middle of this shit hole? No one will ever find me. Are you that fucked up?” The kid had no filter, not as the clock ticked away the final few seconds of his life.
“We were going to draw this out, play a little game, and make an example of you. But we have important things to accomplish, my friend.” The man in the vest produced a large handgun and aimed it at the kid.
“Money?” was all the kid could say, as if he were offering a treat to a pet dog.
“I don’t need your stinking money. Go fuck yourself.”
The man fired the weapon, striking the kid between the eyes. He crumpled like an accordion, falling on top of the other dead bodies.
The only thing left to decide was whether the grave would be covered or the buzzards would have a massive feast at dawn.
The Gang of Six ruled this barren land, and the trade that flowed through it. And they had twenty-six dead bodies in the grave to prove it.
2
A toddler in a soggy diaper scampered across the wet sand, his tiny feet leav
ing brief footprints that eventually dissolved beneath the water’s edge. As his chubby legs fluttered quicker than a sand crab’s, he outpaced my jogging speed—at least for a few yards—until his infectious giggle got the best of him. Even with music playing through my earbuds, I could discern what his mom was yelling while in hot pursuit: “Alshon Elijah Wiggins, stop running from me! Stop or no snack for you.” At no more than two years old, and widening the gap with each miniature stride, it appeared Alshon couldn’t help but bask in the glory of his little victory.
In a full-on chuckle, he glanced over his shoulder at his mom. He then learned the hard way that the matted sand on a beach has undulations. With his very next step, he tripped and—without understanding the defensive method of holding out his arms to brace his fall—face-planted right into the muddy sand. I winced a bit as I watched his face turn upside down, but his mom got to his side in no time and wrapped him up in her arms. She happened to look up just as I passed, and we exchanged knowing winks.
I’d been there with my two kids, Erin and Luke, although neither had experienced the sheer exuberance of running down the beach on a hot summer day with nothing but the wind in your hair and ocean water spraying your face. I hoped that would all change with this vacation.
A rubber football tumbled just in front of me, and I juked to the right just in time. A throng of kids descended upon it as if it were an autographed Cam Newton football. Fully expecting the unexpected on a crowded South Padre Island beach in mid-July, I was able to keep my pulse in check. And even smile.
I’d made this jog up and down the beach a thousand times in my teen years, back when my dad occasionally challenged me to be my best, all in a quest to make it on the professional tennis tour. I had some success as an amateur—some might have said I kicked ass—but my journey to be the best also taught me important life lessons. I was naturally drawn to the mantra of No Pain, No Gain. I learned that if I wanted to be good…no, make that great, at anything, I had to out-work, out-hustle, out-think the next person. And that competitive fire was even more evident whenever I had the chance to take on the boys. Superior sex, my ass.
I released a quick grin as I dodged yet another object, this one a red Frisbee that caught too much wind and veered right into a blanket where two teenage girls were setting up their vignette for the day—a red, white, and blue umbrella donning the American flag, flanked by red beach chairs. The brunettes wore matching red sunglasses and patriotic-themed bikinis. They were obviously older than my Erin. They had curves on top of curves.
“Brat!” one of the girls yelled as she snatched the Frisbee off the blanket before a skinny, hard-charging young boy could pick it up. She held it above her head as he tried to jump and grab it.
“Run for it, kid.” She laughed as she spun around and hurled it inland toward the sand dunes. The Frisbee landed in a yellow sea of beach morning glories. Having spent ten years of my life on these beaches, I’d learned there were seventy-five types of plants. For some reason, I found that more intriguing as an adult than I ever did as a teen.
The girls gave each other high-fives while the kid ran off to fetch the Frisbee. Like so many other teens who had adult-like bodies, their maturity level had not caught up by a long shot. I thought about saying something, but the kid was already hightailing back to his friends with a smile on his face.
Another thirty seconds, and I reached the levee. Back in the day, I used it as nothing more than a launching pad to propel me back north up the island beach. This time, I climbed the five-foot-high embankment made of gigantic stones and watched a tourist boat pitch upward as it chugged against small whitecaps through the Brazos Santiago Pass—the channel of water that connected the bayside with the Gulf.
I inhaled three deep breaths, the salty air mixed with gritty sand and the smell of fish from a nearby open ice chest. The warm wind whipped my face and shoulders, drying some of my perspiration. I could have stood there for hours. Even in the middle of a hot summer, the Texas beach and everything about it infused me with a healthy energy. I felt more alive than I had since my husband Mark had died at the hands of a cold-blooded killer months back.
“Here, son, it’s more of a flick of the wrist, like this.” A man cast his rod into the channel, and his son responded with a “Wow, Dad. That’s the best you’ve done all day.”
My Luke would never experience that—not with his own dad. And that saddened me, even though I’d learned that Mark was not exactly Husband of the Year material.
Another breath, and my mind was flooded with a hundred images of Brad, a coworker of mine at the FBI office in Boston. His dimpled smile, his broad shoulders, the slight wink he offered when he connected with me on a topic. We’d worked together a good couple of years, but it was about six weeks ago when I began to see him in a different light. He’d stepped in and helped Luke deal with some bullies at school, in a way that I just couldn’t do as his mom. It frankly shocked the hell out of me. Well, what followed his act of chivalry shocked me more—he found me in the garage, told me that I was beautiful and that he cared about me as more than a friend, and then gave me the most passionate kiss I could recall.
Before I lost myself in everything Brad and started feeling like a silly little girl, I jumped off the levee and began the trek back up the beach, the southerly wind mostly at my back. It didn’t take long for the sweat to pour down my face. It felt like I was taking a shower in my own sweat. I didn’t have on a stitch of makeup, and I didn’t give a rat’s ass. I was all me…one hundred percent Alex Troutt, on my own turf, and it felt like a two-thousand-pound weight had been lifted off my back. The stress of the job, of trying to be the perfect double-parent, of trying to win against all that was evil had taken its toll.
Yet the thought of Brad holding me tightly against his hips in my garage still popped in my mind at various times during the day or night.
“Are you running to something or from something?”
Those were the direct words of my wise and, at times, wise-ass nanny, Ezzy, whom I loved and respected dearly—except when she tried to read my mind. While part of me was okay with avoiding reality and ignoring my true motivations, as a thirty-nine-year-old mother of two, I knew I couldn’t play those games for long. Erin and Luke were too important to me to not evaluate everything in my life, and that was exactly what I’d told Ezzy two weeks ago in the kitchen, when I’d finally made the decision to take a much-needed vacation. She’d planted a hand on her Guatemalan hip and stood stock still…well, except for a little toe-tapping.
“What?” I finally looked up from my laptop. “I’m trying to get some work done here, Ezzy.”
She strummed her fingers on the kitchen counter and took a sip of her herbal tea. Then her lips pressed together, but her forehead stretched to the ceiling.
“Okay, okay. I hear you…even though you’re giving me the silent pressure treatment.”
She sipped from her mug, but her sights remained fixed on me.
“Look, as my memory has gotten better over the last few months, I see a lot of Mark everywhere I go…the person I knew, the person I didn’t. There are still days when it’s not easy.” I wrapped my locks around my ear, then folded my hands just in front of my laptop.
“So it’s Mark you’re running from?”
“What? No, I didn’t say that. I might have been an assistant DA in a former life, but you’re acting like an attorney, Ezzy.”
“You know I’ve only seen Dad for about ten minutes since my wreck. And I can’t wait for the kids to experience the beach the way it should be.”
She nodded twice. “So that means you’re running to your daddy?”
I blew out a breath. “Okay, you’ve got me on that one. I’ve told you he’s a drunk, Ezzy. Who knows if he’ll even sober up long enough to see us? So, scratch that one off the list. It’s all about the beach and finally unwinding a little. And that’s the absolute truth…so help me God.” I raised a hand as if I were taking an oath, then shot her a wink.
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Ezzy was almost seventy, but she was still quite pretty. The lines in her bronze skin only added to her natural beauty. She put little effort into her hair. Shades of silver and gray framed her face perfectly, and I couldn’t recall her last perm. Because of a heart condition, she had recently started whipping up much healthier dishes, many from her Guatemalan recipe book.
The edges of her full lips turned upward when she said, “Remember, I was here the night after everyone left, Dr. Alex.”
That was her affectionate nickname for me. It had something to do with a doctor on a Spanish soap opera she used to watch. I couldn’t help but smile almost every time she said it. Her comment was in reference to the night that Brad had kissed me. Even speaking about it made me tingle all over and perspire at the same time.
She then asked me if it was the kiss or how Brad interacted with Luke that might have warmed my heart, and other regions. My response was direct and truthful. “Yes.”
We both giggled.
Despite some gentle pressure from the man with golden locks and a chiseled jaw to go out on multiple dates, I’d met him just once before vacation, a quick coffee one morning to let him know about our upcoming vacation. His response? “You’re drawn to the water, Alex. It’s what you need to recharge your batteries. Go and enjoy yourself with your family. And know when you get back, I’ll be waiting for you.”
I hopped over a half-deflated float, circled three kids working on a castle that might have rivaled Downton Abbey, and then I picked up the pace. I could see our rainbow-colored umbrella in the distance, and I wanted to redline my pulse in a natural way. Well, in a natural way that involved one person.
Ezzy was right. While I couldn’t wait to feel the salty breeze in my face, I had used this vacation as an excuse to run from Brad, even though I wanted him—badly. But that was part of it. I wanted him too much, it seemed. And was it fair of me to pounce on him just because I hadn’t been laid in eons? On top of that, I used to think of Brad as a little brother. He had just turned twenty-eight—my oldest child was only thirteen years his junior. If I actually dove into a relationship with Brad, I’d be the biggest cougar out there at the age of thirty-nine.
The Alex Troutt Thrillers: Books 1-3 (Redemption Thriller Series Box Set) Page 76
