“What, you don’t want any more helpings from the gravy train?” Gooney set down his bag and started inspecting the guns, testing slides, checking sights.
“Not if it means I have to throw you under the bus over and over again.” From the corner of his eye, he saw Malcolm’s hands move carefully through the signs. The movement of tossing unmistakable. “Once to get the job was bad enough. Once should’ve been enough.”
Gooney’s eyebrows rose. He took the handgun he’d been examining. “Means you’re staying here, staying with me?”
Grant shook his head. Now they came to it. “Go home, Gooney. Get on that helicopter and go.”
“Because some drug princess wants revenge?” He snorted. “Gimme a break, man.”
Pam’s phone weighed a thousand pounds in Grant’s palm as he removed it from his pocket.
“What’s on there?”
When Grant didn’t answer, Gooney pulled the strap of an automatic rifle over his shoulder, and came to stand next to him. “You shouldn’t have to see this. Nobody should.”
Lexi shook her head, speaking urgently, and Gooney took her in, then looked back to Grant. “My daughter already has, hasn’t she?”
Finally, Grant passed him the phone, the video playing in his peripheral vision, alternating white lines of text, red swathes of blood, and worse.
Gooney stared, then whispered, “Oh, Christ.”
“Well? When is it my turn? I deserve to know why you’re acting like this,” Pam demanded. “It’s my phone, after all.”
With a hard pivot, Gooney handed it over. “Might as well, you’ve been wanting to do it to me for years. Decades, maybe.” Her shoes clicked over, and his hand fell as she must have taken the phone.
Shoulder to shoulder like this, facing two different directions, made Grant feel like a lightweight. A few inches shorter, several pounds lighter, several years younger.
“I’m getting serious flashbacks to Arizona, Chief, and not the good parts.” He pitched his voice very low.
Grant rested his hand on Gooney’s shoulder, solid as steel, a high-tension cable. “Go home, Gooney.”
Across the room, Pam said, “Oh, god.” Then made a choked retching sound all too familiar.
“The bathroom, right here,” Eleiua said over the sound of rushing steps.
“I can’t keep up wth all this,” Malcolm said. “What do I tell Lexi?”
Grant cast a look over his shoulder. “Tell her we’re sorry. That we’re doing our best to get everyone to safety, including her father.”
“We can’t let those people get their hands on the drugs,” Gooney murmured. “Whatever they want to do to me, imagine it tenfold. We can’t let those people run this town. Stopping them is the right thing do to.”
“I know. Doesn’t mean you have to be the one to do it.”
“And you are?” Gooney was staring at him.
Out the windows, the ribbon of dawn expanded slowly under an ominous sky. “I watched it twice, scrolled the thread. As far as they know, you acted alone at the church. I can still get in with them and take down the principals. It’s taken years, and the daughter of the old kingpin, for the gang to get organized. Take the head off the snake, and it loses power. They don’t know that I’m on your side.”
“Are you?” It was as if Gooney’s armor had been stripped away through this harrowing night, leaving him exposed. All these years, what if Gooney’s strike-first attitude had just been the result of him getting hit first, getting hit over and over again, to the point where the only way to protect himself was to be the one doing the hitting?
“All the way, Gooney. I’m sorry I let anyone believe otherwise, least of all you.” He gripped Gooney’s shoulder. “Go home.”
Gooney knocked his hand aside. “You’re not the boss of me.” His expression was dead-serious. “You’d say anything to make me go, wouldn’t you? It’s like I can see behind your eyes, a thousand calculations. What do I have to say to make him go, so I don’t have his blood on my hands?” He wound his finger in a tight pattern as if he could turn the gears inside Grant’s mind.
Wow, that backfired. Now Gooney thought Grant was just playing him, saying whatever it took to manipulate Gooney into doing what he wanted. Just like his ex-wife had. Lying to his face. Everything they’d been through, and Gooney still believed Grant was his enemy. Time to make the truth so obvious that even Gooney couldn’t miss it.
Grant turned a sharp pivot, face to face. “I let you down. I’m trying to make it right. You can question my authority and you can challenge my choices — that’s one of the reasons I keep you around — but you do not question my commitment to my people, Gooney, is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.” He slashed a salute and stepped away, but Grant wasn’t finished yet. A movement toward catching his arm, and Gooney pivoted back, bracing for a fight.
“All of my people. And you’re one of them.”
“Yeah, right. Whether I like it or not.” Gooney drew a few sharp breaths, then his eyes narrowed. Lowering his hands, he straightened up, regarding Grant as if he’d just made a startling discovery. “Do you?”
Grant’s lips curled. “It’s growing on me.”
CHAPTER FORTY
* * *
Lexi couldn’t follow all that passed between her father and Ray, and Malcolm’s apology — both for his own interpretive skills, and on behalf of them — wasn’t really enough. The tension bubbled in their faces and bodies until she thought it might come to blows, then, at the very moment her father seemed most likely to knock somebody’s block off, he saw or heard some little thing that changed his mind or touched his heart — how could she ever think that phrase without remembering what she had seen and imagining it was him bound to that altar? Ray said he was making things right. She was the one who needed to. He had come a thousand miles for her sake, the time had come for her to close the gap: it didn’t wash away the hurt of his seven-year absence, his willingness to give up fatherhood, but it offered the hope that he wanted to make amends. A hope that survived only as long as he did. Once before, she had asked her father to come home, and he had done it. Would he again?
Her mother returned from the bathroom. She always looked a bit like a doll, perfectly coiffed, perfectly painted. Now she resembled the porcelain in one more way: she looked fragile. She started toward Lexi, signing, “Wait outside.” She extended her hand, willfully ignoring the man she once married.
“Go on, I’ll join you.” Lexi signed. She pulled up her backpack. They’d found it in the footwell of the truck, mostly intact. Dressed in a borrowed huipil — a brightly embroidered tunic from Eleiua — and a pair of her mother’s crisply fitted slacks, that didn’t quite match Lexi’s shape, Lexi once more looked like a proper tourist, about to take a helicopter tour of the jungle with her mother and boyfriend — and two heavily armed former soldiers. Yay?
“Do you want me to carry that?” Malcolm asked.
She motioned him a little to one side, and he complied, looking a bit confused, then, in the privacy between them, she signed, “Can you use a gun?”
Eleiua carried one of her own. Two, actually, belted on either hip as she turned and escorted Mom toward the door, talking as they went. Instead of a carry-on or a purse, Eleiua carried a lumpy bag containing extra magazines for the weapons the two men had selected.
Malcolm arched his brows. He signed, “My parents didn’t want me to learn,” then indicated the color of his skin. “Black boy with a gun, bad idea. Now, I’m sorry.”
Her father strode out the door while Ray moved to a ladder secured against one wall. A pair of binoculars hung nearby, and he slung these around his neck as he started to climb. Lexi cruised the line of weapons remaining. She picked up a knife and handed that to Malcolm. He took it gingerly, giving her the side-eye.
“For ropes.” She held her hands as if bound, and he nodded, clipping the weapon to his belt and pulling his shirt over it. Ray’s shirt, actually. One of the dark ones that made hi
m look like management. Today, he looked more like a guerrilla fighter. Two handguns remained, one smaller and more sleek, maybe intended for a woman’s hand, the other brawny and somewhat familiar, like her father’s service weapon, or the one he’d used to teach her how to shoot. She remembered the argument with her mother following that activity, mostly through Kyle’s hands as he tried to explain what the fight was about. “Why does my daughter need to kill people? That’s what police are for.” One of the last straws that led to the divorce.
The last twelve hours, since he appeared in the church, threw a different light over so much of her past, and the contrast between her parents. Confronted with a deaf child, her mother hired a signing au pair and treated her like an interpreter, learning the minimum ASL, while her father became fluent in his own right. Her mother put a fence and a gate around the property, her father taught her how to scan her environment, how to defend herself if she got into trouble. Her entire childhood felt like a war between two people who wanted to keep her safe in two very different ways, one by protecting her from anything that might happen, the other by preparing her for it. Right up until he had apparently abandoned the fight and surrendered the field.
She picked up the big gun and slid it into her backpack, then smiled at Malcolm. “Remind me to take it out before the airport.”
He managed a startled laugh.
The door flew open, and her father signed, “It’s coming.”
Something gold glinted at her from the end of the line of weapons, and she picked it up, pocketing her lucky coin before heading outside. On the far horizon, the direction her mother and Eleiua were looking, a speck of darkness detached itself from the cloud cover and grew steadily larger. Maybe the coin was already working? Lexi glanced at the ground, then her head whipped toward the gate. Under her feet came the low thrum of approaching vehicles. “Dad!” she shouted, and he spun about, following her hand, already preparing his weapon.
Once you flipped a coin, it was out of your hands, turning through the air. Coins had nothing to do with choice, and everything to do with chance. Their lives hung on a literal toss-up as to who would get here first: the copter, or the killers.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
* * *
In the sniper’s nest — what probably started as a copula to help with the summer heat — Grant scanned the horizon and saw the approaching chopper. Thank God. The tracker app on his phone showed the cup on the move after a couple of pauses. Gathering reinforcements, most likely. But now it had veered away from them, circling around?
Down below, Gooney came suddenly alert. “Chief — we got incoming!” He aimed his arm toward the gate.
“Still clear.” The driveway emerged into that wide circle of cleared land, but plunged into the jungle beyond. He might not see them until it was nearly too late.
“Lexi feels it!”
“Maybe it’s just my truck?” Eleiua indicated her farm vehicle idling near one of the outbuildings with one of her cacao workers behind the wheel.
Lexi shook her head, her gesture mirroring her father’s. Uphill from the house stood the old well, and beyond, a flat patch of ground now bearing a giant “H” formed out of twisted bedsheets held down by rocks. Good job.
The hum of the rotors grew from that direction, coming in a little faster now, and under that, the sound of other engines. Grant pinned his gaze on the jungle as it climbed the slope. How many engines? Hard to tell with the interference of the chopper on the air. The two dogs started barking, not toward the sky, but toward the gate.
The chopper closed in. Just another minute or two. The first truck burst from the tree cover. Not a regular jungle vehicle, this one looked like a Humvee refit, with a heavy front end — for bashing through police barricades and international border fences. Hell.
Rushing over his head, the chopper slowed to hover, then descended toward the makeshift landing pad.
“Go go go!” Grant signaled. Lexi’s eyes were on him, Gooney’s on the gate. She tapped her father, and turned the group. Time to go, for sure.
The Humvee roared along the gravel drive, and crashed into the gate. It scraped and groaned — and held.
Eleiua did or said something, sending the dogs racing away around the perimeter fence and out of danger.
Grant grabbed the ladder rails, tucked his feet to the outside and slid down, catching himself lightly on the floor. He snatched an old fishing hat from the hooks by the door and pulled it on, tucking the chin strap. The longer he could delay his own identification, the higher the chance he could actually pull off an op against the stash itself. Still couldn’t think how to get Gooney to let him do it alone.
The blades chopped at the air, tossing the passengers’ hair and the grasses growing high around the old well with its metal winch. Grant ducked, rifle held low, waving the others toward the helicopter. “Eleiua in front to talk to the pilot.” She flashed him a thumbs up, and Gooney helped her into the seat, the front bubble swallowing her as he shut the door. In the passenger compartment, Pam tried to hold a scarf over her hair, scowling behind sunglasses while Lexi helped Malcolm with his headset.
“We’re in — come on!” Gooney added a wave, in case Grant couldn’t hear the message.
The truck carrying Eleiua’s three friends bounced hard down the track toward the lower farmland. Everybody accounted for — shit.
“Right there!” Grant started running toward the outbuildings.
“Where the hell’re you going!” Gooney roared from behind him.
“Ramon!” Grant kept moving. Three in the truck, the rest in the copter, so focused on the objective they’d forgotten their prisoner.
“Leave him for fuck’s sake, Chief! The damn gate’s buckling!”
“Get in the bird.” Didn’t matter if Gooney could hear him now. He kicked the first door. Open, a shed with scuba gear, tarps, farm equipment. Kicked the next door, then heard a pounding from another and ran to it. A metal bar closed it from the outside. Grant heaved it off and ducked inside.
Ramon recoiled at his entrance, then eyed him sharply. “Zorro.” He cowered away, his feet roped together, his hands bound more loosely than before through a loop meant to hold livestock.
Grant dropped to one knee and whipped out a knife.
“Don’t kill me.”
“Have you given me reason?” Grant cut the rope at his feet, then more carefully cut through his wrist restraints. “Raxha’s coming. She killed the other survivor.”
Ramon’s eyes swam with fear. “Jesu Cristo.”
“Find a place to hide. Stay quiet, then get the hell out. If you can reach the plantation, tell them Eleiua sent you. Okay? You understand?”
The kid nodded quickly, rubbing his wrists.
From the road came the smash of metal on metal, then a grinding of automotive gears, and another crash. Gate crashers. Literally.
Grant jumped up, already running, keeping low. Another smash, this one followed by groaning. Shit — they had a breach. As he ran the chopper blades sped up.
“Come on, Chief! Come on!” Gooney leaned partway out of the compartment.
He pushed harder. The chopper started to lift. From behind and down, a rattle of gunfire. So exposed, a hundred yards from the bird and no cover, just as Hernan planned it. But he had planned to be safely inside, not fleeing for his life across no man’s land.
Fifty yards. The truck engine roared.
Twenty yards. His lungs burned.
Another round of bullets, so close that dirt sprayed up around him. From the chopper, Gooney returned fire.
Ten yards, five, his hand reaching He grabbed the strut as the bird surged from the ground. Bullets pinged off the metal, his feet dangled, and he crunched every damn muscle, getting one foot over the strut as the bird turned, rocking with his weight but still rising. It wheeled sharply away from the gunmen, wrenching Grant’s arm, making it hard to swing himself up.
Gooney’s hand wrapped his forearm. “Help me, god damn it!” he s
houted over his shoulder.
Grant seized his arm. Gooney was pulling. Grant found purchase for his dangling foot, pushing upward.
Gooney reeled him in, his knees hitting the deck, then a final heave, and he was inside, Gooney’s arm wrapping his chest, the both of them breathing hard. Malcolm and Lexi held Gooney’s belt, anchoring him for the rescue. They eased back, Gooney scooting further inside, not letting go of Grant until the flight leveled, and they were centered in the belly of the copter.
Reaching out, gratified that his hand wasn’t shaking from adrenaline alone, Grant slammed the door, sealing them away from the wind, and some of the noise.
Pam sat in the furthest seat, utterly astonished. “My god, you really are an action hero.”
“What the hell did you think I was, a contract killer?” Gooney rested his head back on the seat and blew out a breath as he aimed a finger at her. “Don’t answer that.”
“I don’t know,” she said, disregarding him as usual. “Green beret, something like that? The way you shoot, I thought maybe a sniper.”
“So basically yes.”
From the front seat came a stream of excited Spanish. Grant grabbed the nearest headset and pulled it on, jacking himself up onto the seat opposite, Gooney’s long legs sprawling across the narrow aisle.
The Spanish came into focus. “— guns and armed men. This is not in the contract.” The pilot glared as he steered the copter over the jungle canopy.
“It was unexpected,” Eleiua told him. “We never meant for this to be dangerous.”
“Let me out,” Grant said in the same language. He leaned forward. “Find a clearing, you don’t need to land, just hover down low, I’ll jump.”
“The White Way, the path on the cup,” Eleiua said, pointing. “You can see part up there.” The jungle foliage fell away around a patch of stones.
“You about to push me out of a moving aircraft?” Gooney asked.
The Maya Bust Page 18
