Pandora's Box

by Camilla Porter

  While my instincts are signaling danger I can’t help but to feel sympathy for him as he closes his eyes and sighs when he asks me if I have the flash drive.

  “Yes, I do. Hold on,” I say as I reach into my back pocket and take it out. “Here.”

  I hand it to him and he close his eyes again, this time in relief.

  “Thank you. So much.”

  Suddenly, and quickly, I feel something hit me in my shoulder, and the next thing I know I am face down in the sand.

  What the hell was that?

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Elena

  I hear his voice, but my eyes refuse to cooperate. The pain…it starts in the back of my head and spreads out to the top of my skull. I can feel wetness. Blood I’m sure of it, but my body refuses to move to check.

  “Hey Miss…Miss? Are you okay?”

  I move my head up, and it feels like someone cracks me across the back of my skull again. I put my head back down and open my eyes. Travis is kneeling next to me holding a glass of water and a hand towel full of ice.

  “Travis?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Are you okay? There’s a lot of blood on the floor.”

  “Yeah, I’m okay. Just got knocked for a loop. I’ve only ever seen a person get pistol whipped in the movies, and I wish it had stayed that way.”

  I get up slowly and lean my back against the couch as he hands me the hand towel and wince as I hold it to the back of my head.

  “Pistol whipped? What does that mean?”

  “I hope you never have to know. Where is your mother?”

  “I have no idea. She left with my dad.”

  “Your dad? What do you mean your dad? Isn’t he…”?

  “He’s alive. He came in while I was in the bathroom and told me to go upstairs and he’d explain later. I heard the loud bangs, and I got scared so I hid under the bed until it got quiet then I came down to see what happened. There’s a lot of blood in the hall and over there,” he says pointing towards the kitchen. “But I don’t think it’s all from you.”

  “Listen Travis, I need you to do something for me,” I say as I take the ice off of my aching head. “I need you to go to your friend’s house next door, and I need to have you ask his mother to call 911. Tell them that some bad men broke into your house and took your mom.”

  I pull myself up off the floor, and steady myself when the blood rushes to my head. Closing my eyes I get my balance then walk carefully towards the kitchen sink. Reaching up, I find the gash towards the base of my skull and it’s deep. It’s definitely going to need stitches, but unfortunately that would have to wait.

  “But my dad took my mom,” he says sounding confused.

  “I know, but we need the police to come here as soon as possible so please do exactly what I told you and do it fast. Do not stop for anyone. Do you know where he took her?”

  I shake the ice out of the towel then wet it as I begin to wipe my face, trying to clear as much of the blood away as possible.

  “They went out back. Towards the beach.”

  I put the towel down next to the sink then take the glass of water that Travis had been holding and drink half of it.

  “Ok, now go do exactly what I told you. Go out the front. And please be careful. Go straight to the neighbor’s house, Travis,” I plead as I watch him walk out the front door.

  I pick Sam’s gun up off the floor and tuck it into the back of my pants as I walk slowly towards the back sliding doors, but as I go to open them a ghost greets me.

  “Bet you never thought you’d see me again did you?”

  “Isaac? How are you…you’re not…you’re dead. You’re supposed to be dead,” I stammer as I back up away from him.

  “Aww, Elena. You’re breaking my heart. Did you really think you’d get rid of me that easily? Come on now,” he says taking his gun and digging it into the soft underside of my chin.

  “Where’s Sam? What did you do with her?”

  “Unfortunately Sam is not available right now. You know, you offer someone everything they’ve always wanted: love, a family, money, and mind blowing sex, and some people just can’t be grateful.”

  “Is that why she had to drink a whole bottle of whiskey to fuck you?”

  “Sam loves me. She just doesn’t realize it yet. You’re just a minor setback. Once I get rid of you she’ll forget you all together. Unfortunately I can’t do that right now. My plan can’t be completed without the services of the Black Hat, and as much as I’d like to take the credit that you have so generously imposed on me in my absence, you and I both know that the title belongs to you.”

  “And why would I help you?”

  “Because if you don’t I will shoot you. And if that doesn’t work I will shoot Sam. Again. But this time I won’t aim for the shoulder.”

  “You shot her? Where is she? You need to get her to a doctor,” I shout resisting the urge to lunge at him due to the gun pressing into my jaw.

  “Listen bitch, you don’t tell me what to do. You do what I say, and I say that you are going to grab that laptop over there and you are going to help me open this program and then you’re going to help me make a copy of it. Do you have any idea how much this is worth on the black market? My buddy says it’s worth at least ten million, but I’ll find out for sure tomorrow and then, tomorrow night, I will be sitting on the beaches of Tahiti with a Mai Tai in my hand and my family, Sam and Travis, by my side. Now, move it,” he says taking the gun and waving me towards the laptop.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Sam

  20 minutes earlier…

  It feels like he hits me in the shoulder with a baseball bat, but I don’t immediately feel any pain as I’m knocked onto my back in the sand. For several seconds I feel a buzzing sensation all through my shoulder, and then a severe achy pain set in.

  “Isaac you son of a bitch,” I say through gritted teeth as I touch my shoulder and feel wetness. Blood has seeped through my shirt, soaked into the sand.

  He kneels down beside me and pushes my hair back from my face as I begin to writhe in pain, holding my hand tightly over the wound.

  “Oh my love, don’t worry. I have someone on his way to come and take care of you. But don’t worry, I will get our son right after I take care of some business, and then finally the three of us can be together.”

  “You’re fucking crazy,” I say wincing.

  “No, no. I’m fucking brilliant.”

  And with that he walks away leaving me under the pier just as I feel a strange sensation in my stomach then turn my head and throw up.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Elena

  I sit down on the stool at the center island in the kitchen, and immediately get to work. I don’t want to wait any time knowing that Sam is out there shot and bleeding.

  We take turns working at the program, and after what feels like hours we finally get the file to download. I rub my neck in exhaustion and suck my teeth in disgust at him as he kisses my cheek in celebration.

  “I always did like you, Elena,” he says as he pulls the flash drive from the computer and puts it in his front pocket.

  Suddenly, my head is swimming as I grip the edge of the counter and anchor my foot on the stool to keep from falling. I feel sick, and everything is blurry.

  “What now?” I stammer, struggling to spit out the words.

  “Now? I was afraid I was going to have to shoot you, but from the looks of it you’re about to pass out. That hit to the head earlier seems to have given you quite the concussion. But it saves me another bullet, and another body. By the time you wake up, or someone finds you, we will be long gone. But thank you. I couldn’t have done this without you.”

  I lower myself to the ground on my hands and knees and wobble back and forth afraid of either passing out or being sick. I lay down flat and put my head down on my arms, closing my eyes, but managing to keep myself awake. I hear him rustling around, and finally opening the front door.

  “Hey, boss. I
found him over by the neighbors before he got a chance to go in. We waited like you said, but it was starting to get dark so I figured we’d come by to make sure everything was going as planned,” a deep voice with a thick Spanish accent says.

  “Where’s mom?” Travis asks. “He said that she would be here.”

  “Mom is coming, champ. She’s going to meet us at your favorite place,” Isaac says.

  From where I’m lying I know that I am hidden from sight. I open my eyes as I go to say something but nothing comes out, and as I hear the front door close a sick feeling in my stomach tells me that it might be too late.

  Just as I close my eyes again and feel myself giving in to the darkness I hear a loud bang on the back sliding doors. I pick up my head, but immediately put it back down when I don’t hear it again, thinking it’s my imagination but out of the corner of my eye I see her.

  She’s slumped against the door, blooding streaking across the glass, as she lifts up her arm weakly and knocks on the glass.

  “Shit,” I say as I pull myself up slowly, the swaying of the room improving slightly, and walk over to the doors and opening them.

  “I thought they would never leave. I was hiding under the porch…”

  Carefully, I help her up and guide her over to one of the stools.

  “I need to find Travis. Now,” she says trying to weakly push passed me.

  “No, we need to get you to a hospital.”

  “No, no hospital. I need to find Travis,” she pleads.

  “What we need to do is stop your bleeding. If we don’t you’re going to pass out or bleed to death and then we’re not going anywhere. You’re really bleeding a lot. We really should get you to the hospital,” I say evaluating the amount of blood seeping through her shirt.

  “I’m not going anywhere without my son.”

  I sigh as she looks me directly in the eye, and I know that I am not going to win this one.

  “This is going to hurt, I know, but I have to lift up your shirt to assess your wound, okay? Just close your eyes, and it’ll be over in a few seconds, I promise.”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” she says. “First aid kit. In the panic room. The code is 975390. It’s in the first cabinet on the right in the kitchen. There is quick clot gauze.”

  I leave momentarily to grab the first aid kit and come back to see her slumped on the table.

  “Sam! Sam!,” I call worriedly then breathe a sigh of relief when she picks her head up. “Up,” I say as I sit her up and tug her shirt off slowly. She winces, and curses as I pull it over her arms only to see the small the entrance wound and the larger exit wound.

  “This is really going to hurt,” I apologize as I tear one of the packages open and immediately begin packing the gauze deep into the wound. She stifles a scream and squeezes the arm of the chair as I work as quickly as possible to not prolong her agony. When both sides are fully packed, I use the plain roll of gauze to wrap around her shoulder tightly to hold the packing in place.

  “Are you okay?” I ask finally, and she just closes her eyes and nods at me. “For the pain,” I say handing her an 800 mg Ibuprofen. “It’s no narcotic, but it should take the edge off.”

  “Is it true?” she asks as I begin cleaning the blood off her as much as possible with alcohol wipes. “Did you mastermind all of this? Was this really all your plan?”

  “No, I didn’t. But it was a plausible suggestion to get you to trust him I guess. To be honest, this whole thing? It was supposed to be an easy job with a million dollar pay day and then I was out. It all started with the fact though that Isaac was never the number one hacker. I was. I needed his help. And when we finally were able to break the code, he double crossed me and took the pay day for Pandora’s Box. But then he refused to play by the rules. After he gave the code to the money men, he took the payout then turned around and tried to sell it to the Los Desviados rivals for double the price. Only the flash drives contained no files, there was a firewall created as an extra layer of protection that caused the file to automatically erase when anyone tried to download it, but he didn’t know until it was too late. so his double cross led to a bounty on his head from both gangs so he had no choice but to fake his death which by the way was brilliant. I never saw that one coming.”

  She looks at me for a long time once I stop talking and I don’t say anything else, giving her time to process everything I just dropped on her knowing that it was a lot.

  “Okay, enough of this,” she says sighing. “We have to go. The longer we wait the further away they are getting.”

  “Not necessarily,” I say as I go to her front closet and take out a zip up sweatshirt for her.

  “I’m going to need my gun. Can you grab the lock box off the top shelf in that cabinet? And what do you mean?”

  “He hit me in the head pretty hard. After helping him figure out how to override the firewall I was feeling pretty dizzy, and while I was on the floor, struggling not to pass out, Travis came in and Isaac told him that they were going to meet you at his favorite spot. I’m assuming that you know where that is?”

  “Of course I do. My only question is why?”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Sam

  “So which one of us is going to drive? It’s kind of like the blind leading the blind at this point,” she says to me as we stand outside of her car.

  We both agree that she should probably considering I can barely move, and Rancho Memorial Skate park was less than a ten minute drive from my house. The bleeding had finally stopped, but the pain? The pain was excruciating.

  “How are you feeling?” she asks as we pull down the long road that leads to the front of the skate park.

  “Like someone shot me.”

  “Smart ass.”

  We drive the rest of the way in silence neither of us not really quite sure what to say.

  “Look Sam,” she finally says. “I’m really sorry that I got you into this.”

  “You didn’t get me into anything, Elena. It might just be the blood loss talking, but I think I would have been in this mess with or without your help. This was about me from the beginning. You were just a pawn.”

  “But it’s my fault for letting it get this far between us. I never meant for this…”

  “Listen, when this is over, and we’re both healthy and alive, then we can talk about this, and you can apologize to me all you want.”

  “Oh, I plan on it,” she says as she turns her head and smiles at me, and I can’t help but smirk back.

  We pull into the parking lot, and I’m kind of surprised that there are a few cars there considering that the park is closed for renovations. Isaac’s car is parked by the maintenance shed, and there are two more that I don’t recognize parked by the entrance.

  “Stay close,” I say as I take my gun out of the back of my pants and hold it down by my leg as we get out of the car.

  I look around, taking a quick surveillance, and immediately notice that Travis is in the front seat of Issacs’s car. I don’t see anyone else, and my first instinct is to go to him.

  “Too easy,” Elena whispers stopping me. “There has be to be eyes on him. I’ll go. You have the gun. Find Isaac. End this shit, once and for all.” And then she kisses me, hard and fast, before heading towards Issacs’s car.

  I watch her go, making sure she gets to the car, and when she opens the front door, giving me the thumbs up, I turn and head towards the maintenance shed.

  I can see two men just inside the doorway, one is Isaac, and the other is a member of the Cali Nine, a direct rival of the Desviados gang which I can tell by the mixture of black and white clothing, and the tattoos on the man’s neck and forearms.

  “Everything is on there,” Isaac says has he hands the man two envelopes. “This one has PDF files on how to open the encrypted files, and the other disk has all the bank files.”

  “And here is your eight million. Four for each disk,” the man says as he passes Isaac two large duffle bags.

 
; “Wait, wait, wait. The agreed number was ten. What the hell is this?”

  “That was until you got trigger happy back there and took out one of my biggest money men. Y ou ended up costing us so we took it off the top of your cut. I’m surprised that you didn’t know. Timothy was working both sides. Thought he was smart, but we knew what he was doing because he was sloppy. You kind of did us a favor because he was getting reckless bringing that Elena bitch in. Should have got rid of her when you had the chance. Now she’s fucking smart.”

  “I took care of her.”

  “If you say so. But unless she’s dead I’d still watch your back. She’ll fuck you and not in the good way that she’s been fucking your ex. Not to mention Los Desviados. When they find out about Javier…”

  “My son and I will be long gone.”

  “Over my dead body. Hands up asshole,” I say as I make myself known, pointing my gun at his head. “You too,” I add as the man raises his hands and takes a few steps back.

  “Come on now, Sam. Aren’t you glad to see me?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Oh, we already played that game sweetie,” he says as I move behind him and press the gun into his temple.

  “It only took and entire bottle of whiskey and me being blind drunk, but you go ahead and keep thinking it was that Vienna sausage you keep in your pants that did it.”

  “Don’t be so crude. We had some good times didn’t we? Come with me Sam. Me, you, and Travis. We can live out the rest of our lives on a beach somewhere, sipping rum out of a coconut. What do you say?”

  “I say she’s not fucking interested.”

  I hear Elena’s voice just as I feel the white hot lightning bolt of pain created by the back of Isaac’s head smash through the bridge of my nose. Then as I crumble to the ground, blinded by the pain, I hear two gun shots and then everything is dead silent.

  --

  I’m not sure how long I am out for, but when I open my eyes I am in the back of an ambulance strapped to a gurney. My head is spinning, and my arm is throbbing but I manage to focus through what feel like swollen eyes.