by Karina Halle
She had no problems pulling out the bullet, least it didn’t seem that way in my drugged up head and said I was lucky it didn’t strike an artery. She gave Camden the medication, painkillers and antibiotics to fight infection, wrapped me up and I was somewhat good to go. Derek handed her a handsome wad of American bills for her effort.
“So,” Camden said as they put me back in the Escalade. “Now we’ve all been shot. You, me, Gus. Quite the team, right?”
I jerked my head. “We’ll be a team once we see him again. Derek, that’s our next stop.”
“Yes, m’am,” he said, seeming to lighten up a bit. “Back to Mexico you go.”
We drove through the night, passing through the Guatemalan and Mexican borders with ease. Now that my leg was fixed, we weren’t attracting any suspicion. Just three gringos with Mexican plates. And even if they did search the car and found the guns and ammo we still had in here, Derek was ready to bribe them. Or take them out. Whichever came first.
Derek had told us that Javier kept Gus in the city of Oaxaca, a place we had already driven through on our way to Guatemala and Honduras. That fact made me rage inside, pushing away the euphoria that the drugs had laced my brain with. All this time I was wrong. All this time I was being led like a puppet on a barbed wire by Javier and Gus was alone somewhere, hurt, wondering if we’d ever come for him. We had been so close, so damn close and I believed Javier. I fell for his lies time and time again.
At least I wouldn’t fall for them anymore. My chest choked up with feelings of sorrow and fear. I didn’t know if I could ever find peace knowing he was alive. I didn’t know if I could ever be relieved knowing he was dead. There I was, still caught on the drifting cobwebs of the past.
It was the middle of the night when Derek pulled the Escalade into the suburbs of the city. Despite taking another dose of painkillers, I was wide awake, anxious to see Gus.
“I don’t understand why they even have Gus, though,” I mused. “Like, not that I wanted this to happen, obviously, but why didn’t Javier just kill him? He must have told you why?”
“I don’t know,” Derek said. “Though I wouldn’t be surprised if he had some affection for him. Maybe if you thought Gus was dead, you wouldn’t go with Javier.”
“Oh, please,” I said in disgust. “Like I would have anyway.”
“Javier is used to getting what he wants,” he explained. “I think in the end, he still wanted you.”
Camden stiffened and I put my hand on his knee to comfort him. We road in silence for a few moments and I did my best not to dwell on Javier, how he could both still want me and be someone who would leave me behind to die.
How the hell did his love for me get so fucked-up?
“Are you sure they’ll let Gus go willingly,” I asked Derek, shaking memories out of my head. “I mean, you’re not the one running this show.”
He eyed me over his shoulder and gave me a handsome smirk. “Who said anything about willingly? We’re taking him whether they let us or not.”
Oh great. Another one of these.
“Obviously you’re staying in the car,” Camden filled in beside me, stifling a yawn. “You’re not going anywhere on that leg.”
I cocked my head at him. “Oh really?”
His eyes were serious in the darkness of the car. “Really. Ellie. You need to stay safe. I’ll get your father back.”
Father.
My heart warmed.
And filled me with determination. I wasn’t letting the men do this without me. Gus had come for me now I was going for him. After everything I’d been through, I wasn’t leaving without him, the only family I truly had left.
We stopped on a quiet, wide road in the suburbs and Derek turned off the lights and the engine. He nodded at a house in the distance that had a few garbage cans knocked over in the front yard and a real estate sign. “That’s the one. It’s usually a stash house. Guess they’re stashing people there now too.”
He turned around in his seat and looked at Camden. “What guns do you have?”
“None. I had to drop mine back at the compound.”
Derek jerked his head to the back of the car. “Come around back.”
Camden put his hand on my shoulder and applied light pressure. “Stay here, Ellie. Please.”
I couldn’t promise him anything. I just watched as he got out of the car and went to the back. The trunk opened and Derek started going through the guns that the team had left behind before we went traversing through the jungle. I watched them with curiosity as Derek handed Camden a shiny new 9mm and picked up a sawed-off shotgun for himself, his eyes glinting feverishly at the weapon in his hands. Derek was in his element once again. I only hoped it was enough to get Gus out of there in one piece.
Derek and Camden both shot me one last look before they closed the trunk.
“Be right back,” Derek said. Then they ran off toward the house, their feet quiet on the street.
I waited a few moments, watching them as they split up and disappeared around the back of the house. In my emotional, drug-infused state there was something supremely romantic about the sight of Camden running off with a gun to save my father.
I still couldn’t believe it. Gus was my father. I had to say it to myself again and again. It’s not that it didn’t feel true, it’s just I had a hard time wrapping my head around what family meant.
Which, of course, is why I reached into the back and searched for a pistol until my hand closed around a .40 Glock. Gus and Camden were my family now and I had to protect them.
I opened the car door and climbed out, careful not to put any pressure on my bad leg, and limped swiftly and silently toward the house.
I turned at the neighbor’s yard and hid behind one of the lemon trees, peering around the trunk at the stash house. The lights in the house were all off and I couldn’t hear anything, not Camden or Derek, not Spanish. Just the sound of the breeze as it ruffled the leaves around me.
I took in a deep but shaky breath. The pain in my leg was starting to flare up again and I needed to push past it. I looked up at the second story of the house. Climbing was out of the question. Almost everything was out of the question.
That was until a light upstairs went on, streaming out the window between the cracks of a blackout curtain. In a stash house, its purpose wasn’t to keep out the sun, but to keep eyes from looking in. That’s where Gus had to be.
Before I could even formulate a plan or try and figure out how far Camden and Derek had gotten, voices rang out into the humid night air.
Yelling.
Spanish and English.
Camden.
The curtain at the window moved.
Shots were fired, echoing down the street.
It was all happening so fast.
I jumped away from the tree, wincing at my leg, just as there was a terrific crash and a man fell from the window in a shower of glass and onto the lawn below, landing with a thud.
Gus.
It was Gus.
I gasped, heart lodged at the back of my throat, and scampered over to him as quick as I could. Just before I reached him, I looked up at the window and saw a man with a gun pointed at him.
Not Camden. Not Derek.
And therefore he had to die.
I aimed just as the man spotted me and fired three times.
One of the bullets struck him in the chest, causing him to pitch back into the room.
I dropped to my good knee and rolled Gus over, holding my breath, holding onto every second that passed for fear of the next one.
He rolled onto his back. His eyes open. I hadn’t seen those eyes in years.
He blinked once. Twice.
Looked at me, face scrunched up, all beard and grey hair and friendly eyes.
“Ellie?”
“Gus!” I exclaimed.
He tried to sit up and then looked past me, his expression of terror. “Ellie!”
I twisted at the waist, gun out and was about to shoot
without even lining up.
I was lucky I didn’t.
I would have shot Camden who was running up the side of the house toward me, weaponless.
He at least saw me and my gun clearly enough to drop to the ground and duck.
Leaving the man chasing him an easy target.
With Camden on the ground, I pulled the trigger and hit the man at the knees, bringing him down. He struggled, reaching for the gun that he dropped but I shot him in the head before he could even move.
I hated how easy this had become for me.
But then Camden lifted his head and gave me an incredulous look that said it all. That took my soul from black to grey.
“I promised to keep you safe, too,” I told him earnestly.
I turned back to Gus as Camden pulled me up to my feet. “Are you hurt?”
“Oh, I’m hurt,” Gus said, grunting as Camden pulled him up next. “But I’ll live.”
“Where’s Derek?” I asked.
Camden shook his head. “I don’t know. We have to go back to the car, now.”
I looked back at the house and still heard yelling inside, the breaking of glass. There was still chaos. Still a fight and someone was losing.
“We can’t leave him behind.”
“Ellie,” Camden said, sharp enough to make my head snap to him. “We have Gus. We have each other. We can’t lose that. We have to go.”
He was right. He was always right.
We took off running toward the Escalade, Camden supporting both me and Gus the best he could. Gus was bent over, the fall probably reopening the bullet wound in his stomach, wheezing for breath. It was so weird being with him now, knowing what he was to me. Did he know himself? I thought back to all our interactions over the years, the way he talked to me, kept in contact with me, watched over me. He must have known. All this time.
We got Gus in the back and I climbed in the front, just as Camden got behind the wheel and started to peel away. We drove past the house, an explosion now blasting open the front door in mess of flames, and it wasn’t until we were zooming halfway down the street that Camden’s eyes went to the rear view mirror.
“Shit,” he said.
As I turned to look, he popped the SUV in reverse and we started speeding backward toward a man running toward us, hell bent, Tom Cruise style.
Derek.
Camden screeched to a stop just before he collided into him and I leaned back to open the back door for him.
“Thanks,” he said as he jumped in beside Gus. His face was covered in a layer of soot, the gash on his face reopened and he smiled, widely, for the first time. “That was a rush.”
Camden shook his head and pressed his foot to the pedal. We roared away from the fire and destruction and though Gus was hurt and I’d been shot and Camden was missing his son, it felt good to have all three of them. They were my family. They were my home. And we were going to California.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
We ended saying goodbye to Derek in Acapulco. Even though we felt a camaraderie with him after everything we went through, he still wanted his money. All the money we had was still in checks that we hadn’t cashed yet, so we had to promise him an IOU through monthly PayPal installments. The funny part was that he trusted us to do so and I knew I would make good on my promise. Maybe I’d picked a lot of locks in the last few days, but the scamming days were truly gone for me. I had the second chance I asked for.
After we dropped him off (and after he bought us all clean clothes from a local Wal-Mart), we continued on with the Escalade to Zihuatanejo, a beach town that Gus had always wanted to go to because Morgan Freeman ended up there at the end of The Shawshank Redemption. I’d put fake plates on the Escalade back in Acapulco, knowing now that I could never ever be too careful again, though we planned to steal a new car once we were heading up to California. For now, we needed to catch our breaths and take stock in the fact that we were still alive.
The three of us were sitting on the patio of a restaurant that lined the silky sand beach, enjoying gigantic margaritas, when Camden got up to go to the washroom.
“So, Ellie,” Gus said, sitting back in his chair with controlled movement. In the end, his gunshot wound was healing nicely. For whatever reason, Javier hadn’t mistreated Gus. After he’d been shot by Raul and after Camden came running for me, Javier took Gus immediately to a doctor who removed the bullet and stitched him up. Then Gus was knocked up full of roofies (Javier’s drug of choice, it seemed) and the next thing he remembered was waking up in the stash house where he was guarded by three formidable men and two idiots (according to him). He wasn’t allowed to leave the bedroom upstairs and was tethered to the first half of the room by a chain around his leg, thus not allowing him to reach the windows. He was permitted bathroom breaks though, he could watch TV and he ate whatever food the rest of his captors ate. He was more comfortable than I thought he would have been, certainly more than my mother was. If that was the way Javier treated the people he captured, he had shown he wasn’t as much of an animal as Travis was.
Of course, he’d shown he was an animal in so many other ways.
“So, Gus,” I said, pulling my shades on to my head so I could look him in the eye, even though the sun was setting, causing the ocean to refract in beams of light.
He gave me a smile that could only be described as shy. And Gus was not a shy man. Suddenly I realized why Camden had excused himself with a knowing look on his face. Gus and I had not discussed what I learned yet. But I had a feeling it was about to come up.
It made me feel as awkward as a child. I rubbed my hands on my linen pants and smiled back.
He rubbed at his beard and said, “I think you and I have something to … talk about.”
I nodded, waiting.
“I know what your mother told you back at … back where you saw her.”
Oh god. Don’t tell me he wasn’t my father.
“She said that I’m your dad,” he went on. He picked up a chip from the tortilla basket and started spinning it around on the tablecloth. “That we had an affair before you were born.” He looked up at me, his eyes sad.
Oh please no. Please don’t take this away from me.
“I loved your mother very much, Ellie,” Gus said. “I loved your father too. I never really understood how I could do that to my friend, but I did. And your mother stayed on my mind ever since. I was still allowed to see you from time to time. You remember me around. But I could never be your father. I hope I can be now.”
I exhaled, smiling so wide that my face hurt. “You really are my father.”
“There was even a paternity test. Your father knew of course. He was a good man, Ellie, he really was. And I regret what I did but I don’t regret the consequences.”
“You sound a lot like Camden, there.”
“Camden is a good man too. That boy, he’s so in love with you that he can’t even see straight. I can’t even begin to tell you how hard he fought to get you back. He never gave up, even when he was knocked down. You were the most important thing in the world to him, you still are. I hope you can give your heart to him, I know how hard that is for you, to trust, to let go.”
I gave him a reassuring smile, his words about Camden inflating me with joy. “He has my heart. He knows it. At least I hope he does. I’ll keep giving it anyway. I love him.”
I want to spend my whole life with him. I want to marry him, I thought. But of course I didn’t say that.
He gave me a quick grin and stuffed a chip in his face, talking with his mouth full. “Good. That’s what I wanted to hear. The boy drove me nuts for most of the trip to be honest. He just wouldn’t shut up about you. But he has moxie and I like that. You’re both perfect for each other. And if he ever wants to become my son-in-law,” he trailed off and looked over my shoulder. “Perhaps I should shut my big mouth now.” And in went another chip.
I turned in my seat to see Camden coming toward me. My god he was absolutely beautiful, knee-length ca
rgo shorts, a wifebeater that showed off his muscles and colorful art, from wrist to collarbone. He still had a bandage over his gunshot wound on the shoulder and his face was marred by a few healing gashes but that only made him look more manly. That man would kill for me. He would die for me. And he would fuck me to death if I asked him.
I was tempted. What a way to go.
He stopped above us and smiled, dimples and white teeth illuminating his face in the setting sun. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”
I shook my head, eager for him to join us, especially after I knew that Gus approved of him. I mean, how couldn’t he? This was a man I wanted to spend the rest of my life trying to make happy, trying to give him the life he deserved for the kind of good person he was.
Which is why I had to bring up a more serious topic, one we hadn’t discussed yet.
“So, what’s the plan after this,” I broached slowly as Camden sat back down beside me. “How do we get back Ben?”
Camden straightened up at the mention of his son’s name, his fingers gripping the end of the arm rests. He bit his lip, brows drawn together, and cast a furtive glance at Gus. Then he said, “I don’t know yet.”
Gus tilted his head sympathetically. “You’re still a wanted criminal in the USA. Maybe not as wanted as you were before. It’s probably all blown over. But if you’re ever caught by the police for something, you’ll be in big shit. If you’re ever recognized by anyone, you’re in big shit. If Sophia ever sees you again …”
“I’m in big shit,” Camden filled in.
“Or you’re dead.” Gus rested his elbows on the table and clasped his hands together. “So we have to do what we can to avoid that. You know this will be the hardest part, even harder than getting Ellie back. Sophia won’t give you Ben. You’ll never be able to get custody. You’ll never be able to see him. You’ll never get visitation rights. It’s either you take him from her or leave him with her. There is no in between here.”
“No grey,” I whispered, a sinking feeling in my chest.
“That’s right,” Gus said. “No grey. These aren’t the choices you’ll want to make but you’ll have to make them. Can you go on your way and let Sophia have him?”
