by Karina Halle
There was no rule book.
No plan now.
I had to wing it and hope for the best.
I carefully pushed the door open, crouching low to the ground, figuring mothers were probably light sleepers and crept inside. She was asleep in her bed and turned over just as I came inside. Faint light spilled in through the window, allowing me to make out everything in fuzzy detail.
There was a lamp by her bed. I went to it, bringing out my gun and pointing it at her.
I flicked on the light.
Waited for that agonizing half-second for her eyes to open.
They did. Forehead scrunched. Eyes blinking at the light and at me.
And then at the gun.
Her mouth opened.
“Don’t!” I hissed. “Don’t you dare scream.”
I pulled back the hammer on the revolver. The sound that I meant business. Camden did it to me once. Scared the shit out of me.
Gotcha, he’d said.
This time I got her.
I smiled as the realization came into her face, flooring her with bewilderment. “You were … you had the facial. The redhead with the hot date.”
My smile twitched. “I was. I did. Two guesses to who my hot date was.” I stared down the barrel of the gun at her. “Where is he?”
“Who?” she asked innocently.
“You know who. Camden. McQueen. Your ex-husband. Where. Is. He?”
She shook her head and I suddenly jammed the gun toward her, the tip just inches from her face.
“Don’t you play fucking stupid with me,” I whispered harshly.
“Why are you whispering?” she said, her voice growing louder. “Afraid to wake up Ben? You don’t want him to see this? Let him. Let him know how psychotic his daddy’s new girlfriend is.”
She leaned forward and spit in my face. Laughed. Enjoying herself. It was all a game.
I slowly wiped her mucous off my forehead.
She said, “Cunt,” under her breath.
That didn’t get to me. “You can call me all the names you want as long as you tell me where your brothers are taking Camden. Where are they meeting Javier?”
She snorted and sat up, all attitude. “I’m not telling you.”
I cocked my head in disbelief and tightened my grip on the gun. “I don’t think you have any idea of how serious this all is. I will make you tell me.”
She gave me a blasé look. “Look, honey. I know all about you. You’re some white trash southern scum chick who pulled a fast one when she shouldn’t have and got mixed up with Camden. You’re both the same. Good-looking, maybe a good fuck in bed, but absolutely inept when it comes to getting anything in life. You can want to find Camden all you want, but really, you’re wasting your time. He’s as good as dead, a good riddance, and you’re not going to get a single thing out of me because you’re not built for it. You’re a scammer. A con artist. Look at your arms. You couldn’t even put a dent in the wall, what the hell are you going to do to me? Shoot me?”
“No,” I said through grinding teeth, feeling the rage build up.
“That’s what thought.”
I brought my gun across her face in one quick, violent and terrible motion, the end of the pistol smashing into her nose. She cried out and I grabbed her by the jaw, bringing her bleeding face up to mine. “I won’t shoot you, not yet anyway. But I will break your nose and your cheekbones and your jaw and every little pretty part of you that can’t get you a date with hot men. Let’s see how they want you after this, huh?”
Finally, I saw it. The fear in her eyes. She got it. She understood that there were some things out there far worse than death. For me, it was a life without Camden McQueen. For her, it was a life with reconstructive surgery.
I grabbed her by her arm and yanked her out of bed. Couldn’t put a dent in the wall, huh? She was making me tempted to treat her face like the Cooper’s window again but I didn’t want to do anything I didn’t have to.
I jabbed the gun into her side. “You’re coming with me.”
“Just take him,” she cried out as I pulled her along.
“Take him?” I asked, pressing the gun into her harder, my fingers gripping her elbow like I was trying to snap it in half. “Take who?”
“Take Ben!” she cried out angrily. “If that’s what you want so bad, just take him and leave me the fuck alone.”
My head shook ever so slightly, trying to comprehend this woman. “Oh. Believe me. We are taking him. The minute we step out this door, he will be gone. And you won’t see him again. Not that you care. But until you tell me where Camden is, until you show me, I’m going to take away all the other things you care about. I forgot to mention how nice your teeth are and how easy they would be to knock out. Think about that for a bit and then tell me where he is.”
I brought her out into the hallway, back out the door I came in and around the house. The sky was now violet and grey, the rising sun hidden by the hills and smog. Everything around us was monochrome and I was on autopilot, letting instinct and drive dictate each movement.
I shoved her into the front seat, my gun trained on her as I ran around to the side and hopped in. I held the gun low and instructed her to drive.
“Take me there,” I told her. “And if you try and fuck me over in any way, you’ll pay for it. But if you do as I say and you get me to Camden, before it’s too late, then you live and your pretty little face will remain intact. Except for maybe your nasal cavities. But your coke addiction and collapsed septum is your problem, not mine. Now, drive, bitch.”
I forced her leg down, pedal to the floor, and we zipped off.
“Where are we going?” I asked her.
“To the desert,” she said, looking annoyed, like my questions were bothering her. Perhaps it was the gun or the threats or the fact that she was driving in her underwear.
“Where in the desert?”
“Look, I don’t really know,” she said. “I didn’t ask.” She gave me a sidelong look. “I didn’t care.”
I jabbed my elbow in her face. She cried out, letting go of the steering wheel as the car wheeled into the opposite lane, the car slowing.
“Keep driving!” I screamed, bringing the car back into our lane again and then pressing her foot down with the hand holding the gun. “And tell me where.”
She sobbed, a few tears escaping. It tugged at me a bit, made me question what I was doing. Then I remembered who she was, what she knew, and who she was doing it for.
“Tell me,” I repeated more slowly.
“A place with planes. He said it was a place with planes.”
“Who said?”
“Vincent. My brother. The one in charge.”
I scrunched up my face. A place with planes?
“That’s all he said?”
“He said it was abandoned. And that it was easy to hide their men there. It’s a set up.”
Yeah of course it fucking was. But now Javier was on the other end of it.
“Where in the desert? What area?” I asked.
She shook her head, trying to stop the bleeding and steer at the same time. “The place that has the milkshakes. Near … Barstow.”
That was either route 66 or highway 58.
“Turn left onto 15 before San Bernardino,” I told her. I think I had an idea where they were going. There was the Edwards Air Force Base out in the desert but that was highly secure and not a place any cartels would go near. Then, there was also an airplane boneyard on the side of the highway between Bakersfield and Barstow.
The place where old planes go to die.
Shit. This wasn’t going to be easy.
But I had to try.
I nudged Sophia with my gun and nodded at the rising sun.
“Keep driving.”
The sun was a blinding fist in the sky by the time we passed Barstow and turned onto Highway 58 that would take us through to the airplane graveyard. Bleak, empty desert spread out for miles on all sides of us, ground the c
olor of bleached bones. The Cooper sped along, the air that was blasting in through the broken window was still cool at this time of morning, though I knew it would start baking soon.
I made Sophia drive past the Edwards Air Force Base, the only real pocket of civilization, until we came to what always struck me as one of the eeriest sights in the desert. Off in the distant, shimmering like a ghostly mirage, was plane after plane after plane. Jumbo jets, 747s, commuter planes – every plane you could think of in the commercial aviation industry were all cluttered together like sardines. Part of the yard, which stretched on for miles, was organized, with jets lined up in rows and the other part of the yard was like a dump. The boneyard.
“I’m guessing this is it,” I said as we drove closer.
“My brothers can be dramatic,” she explained. “This will make the world pay attention.”
“Looks like it,” I muttered. Cartels, man, always trying to up each other. Well I guess the Mojave Desert was a good place for a shootout, especially when you had massive airplanes to hide behind.
I asked her to slow the car as we came to the road that led off toward the yard. Dust was flying up from it as the car went down it, approaching a low building at the front.
“If they’re here, they won’t be coming through this way,” I said, turning to make sure we weren’t going to crash into anyone before I ordered her to make a U-turn. “I think the first part of the yard is just airplane storage. The boneyard stretches behind it.”
I jerked my head to the desert and pressed the gun into her waist. “Time to go off-roading.”
“Here?” she said.
I nodded. “Go straight to that clump of Joshua trees out there. Watch out for tumbleweed.”
She raised her brows and exhaled loudly but quickly turned the car off the road and straight into the desert. If we went straight we could go all the way around the boneyard and get in through the back. But the dust cloud that would follow us would be a dead giveaway that we were coming to spoil their party and alert both the cartels and the authorities who no doubt patrolled at least the airport storage area.
“Park it and get out,” I told her.
“I’m in my underwear.”
“And your nose is broken. Does it look like I give a fuck?” In my tired, delirious, adrenaline-ravaged state, I had no patience and no time to care. I wanted Camden back. He was the only thing on my mind, the only thing that put one foot in front of the other, the only thing that gave me strength to pull the trigger if I had to. “Now get out.”
She opened the door and looked at the hard earth of caked sand and rocks. “I don’t have shoes,” she said pitifully. She eyed a beach bag I had in the backseat that had a towel and flip flops spilling out of it. “Can I wear your flip flops? Otherwise it’ll hurt too much to walk.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake!” I leaned in the back to grab the bag.
Big mistake.
Stupid, foolish, Ellie.
Sophia slammed her arm into my head and I dropped the gun in the backseat. I cried out and quickly grabbed the gun, twisting back in my seat to see her running off into the distance, a small cloud of dust trailing her. Hurts too much to walk, my ass.
I jumped out of the car, my gun trained on her as she went. But I couldn’t just shoot her. I needed her. I quickly started booking it after her as fast as I could go. I pressed down on my shot leg, grunting through the pain until I didn’t feel anything anymore. I would get her. I would do anything.
Because she was barefoot and the terrain was anything but friendly, she was running slow enough that I was gaining on her. What a sight we would have been for any spectator to see; a girl in a tee-shirt and underwear running barefoot through the Mojave Desert followed by a limping chick with a revolver and a psychotic look on her face, dust rising up around us and floating to the blue sky.
It wasn’t long before I had her.
I did a running tackle and brought her straight into the dirt, slamming her face into the ground. She cried out in pain but I did not give a shit anymore. She used the last bit of humanity I had left against me and now I had nothing.
I yanked her up off the ground, so fucking tempted to smash my gun into her temple and drag her to the boneyard. But somehow, I don’t know how, I kept it all in and started marching her forward.
“Nice try,” I said, my nails digging into her arm until she winced. I looked down at her bleeding feet. “Even a pedicure won’t fix that.”
She whimpered and I paid no heed. We quickly scuffled ourselves along, trying to disturb as little sand as possible while still moving quickly. The sun hammered down on us, my eyes burning from the glare and dust, my throat raw and dry, but we soldiered on, step after step, until we reached the edge of the perimeter fence. We stopped and looked up. The barbed wire at the top was rusted to shit and tumbleweed blew past on the other side of the chain links, heading to a scrap pile of jet engine parts. They wouldn’t have scaled it and from the looks of the condition of this part of the yard, there was probably an easier way in.
I brought her around to the back and we walked down the fence, around Joshua trees, cacti and wild shrubs and heaps of scrap metal that didn’t quite make it inside the bone yard. Finally we spotted an area where the chain links had been cut. Our ticket in. Maybe our only way out.
I took a deep breath and walked us through the opening.
We were inside.
It was fucking eerie.
Up close the planes looked like an armada of plane crashes. Some of them were charred, some were broken into bits. There were flotation devices scattered around, oxygen masks hanging off of shrubs. Many commercial jets were decapitated, their severed heads lying about, stripped inside of all furniture and instruments. Some planes looked like they were about to fly away and some just had the seats left. Broken wings were stacked in piles.
No wonder they picked this place. It scared the shit out of you just being there.
We walked carefully out into the middle, between the giant wheels of a jumbo jet’s landing gear, standing up-right like a giant metal tree, and the severed tail end of a Cessna.
I stopped and pulled her back once we were in the open again. Planes surrounded us, each window an eye, watching our every move. I badly wanted to run and hide, to get out of harm’s way. But if they didn’t see me with Sophia, they wouldn’t know how damn serious I was.
“Hello?” I called out, my voice bouncing back from the motionless aircraft. I cleared my throat and yelled, “I have your sister. You know what I want.”
I looked around in circles, searching every creepy corner of the boneyard, as far as I could see. They could be everywhere.
And nowhere.
I put the gun to Sophia’s head. “If you’re lying to me …” I ground out.
“I’m not,” she moaned, obviously in distress. Good. “I told you the truth. They said planes. You brought me here.”
Shit. Fuck. Shit.
Was I wrong about this place? Were they somewhere else entirely?
Was Camden already handed over?
Already dead?
I swallowed hard and rubbed my lips together. I couldn’t lose it now. Not now. Not until I knew.
“Look,” Sophia whispered. I followed her gaze over to one of the airplanes.
There was a face at the window.
I let out a gasp and then started looking closer. There was someone crouched behind a lone passenger seat. There was another person behind a wing.
We weren’t alone.
There was a shuffle by one of the decapitated plane heads and someone that could only be Vincent Madano came out, gun held lazily to his side. Like Javier, he was fond of slick suits and he looked like a complete Mafia stereotype, from the Roman nose to the jutting chin and greasy hair.
“You must be Ellie Watt,” Vincent said as he stopped a few yards away, tumbleweeds rolling between us like we’d been placed in a Western TV show set. “Nice to finally meet you. I’ve heard many great things, al
l second-hand information, of course.”
“Where’s Camden?” I asked, my voice shaking against its will.
“Camden McQueen,” he said, his eyes darkening. “I don’t know. I expected to see him here, not you and not my sister.”
I pressed the gun into her head. “I don’t want to kill her but I will if I have to.”
He nodded as if he were impressed. “I can see that. Hopefully you won’t have to make such … tough decisions.” His eyes darted to the side. “And there’s the man of the hour.”
I whipped my head to look. Camden was walking toward us, Javier behind him with the gun aimed at Camden’s back. He was wearing a denim shirt, black shorts, hands raised above his head. I took in the details like I’d never see him again. Because maybe I wouldn’t.
We locked eyes and in his beautiful blues, he was telling me to stay calm. To stay focused. To not worry.
That made me worry.
Oh, god that made me worry.
Because Camden was the kind of person who would give his life for yours if it meant you getting out alive. And I didn’t want that. I didn’t want life if he wasn’t in it. I wanted he and I, with the waves crashing at our feet.
“Here he is,” Javier announced, pushing Camden forward, just for fun it seemed. Camden stumbled but righted himself, dust and rocks scattering at his feet. The sun continued to sear us, making the whole scene jump in contrast. Surreal.
Yet, this was reality.
Harsh, cold truth.
He stopped a little ways away and looked over at Vincent. “I brought him for you, the peace offering. Now I hope we can do business.”
Vincent nodded and wiggled his hand. “Send him over.”
“No!” I screamed, losing all control, like the devil was being ripped out of my throat. “Camden stays there, no one fucking hurts him or I will kill Sophia!”
Javier shrugged and pushed Camden forward until he was walking. “I don’t care if you kill Sophia.”
Sophia stiffened against me, feeling the fear. I stared at him, pleading with his blank, reptilian eyes for an ounce of humanity, of love, of compassion toward me. “Please, Javier.”
