by A. J. Thomas
Holland pulled at his own hair and groaned. “I will figure this out,” he hissed. “And if I can’t, when that maniac brings your cousin in here, I will torture him myself until you tell me how! I’m not going to die because you want to start a fucking gang war!”
“Want to bet?”
Ray stepped back and flailed as his step fell short. Massive black-clad arms wrapped around him, a gigantic hand covered his mouth. He was lifted off his feet as if he weighed nothing and hauled back into the darkness. He tried to reach for his gun, but he couldn’t free his arms. Despite his struggling, the man holding him quietly slipped down the road, in the opposite direction of the house, away from the car below and it’s still blazing headlights.
When he was pulled into a dark crevice along the road, he tried to fight harder. “Quiet, Raymond,” Alejandro chuckled against his ear. “I’m going to release you, but I strongly suggest you keep your mouth shut and don’t shoot me. Unless you’d like to get us both killed, anyway.”
Ray pulled out of Alejandro’s grip, spun to face the darkness, and caught himself with his gun half-drawn.
“What are you doing here?” Ray asked, forcing his hands to his side.
His cousin straightened and laughed. “There now, was that so hard?”
“Alejandro….”
“What? I’m just saying it shouldn’t take Sophia or Carmen being kidnapped for us to have a civil conversation.”
“Answer me, or I will shoot you.”
“I’m here to deal with this shit, the same as you.”
“So if you’re here… and I’m here… who’s in the car?”
In the darkness, the light reflected off Alejandro’s too white teeth. He checked his watch. “Esteban Garcia.”
Ray didn’t know if he should be panicking or calculating. Panic always made things worse, so he began to guess at how the presence of the Mexican drug lord, along with however many bodyguards the man travelled with, would affect his own plans.
“Why is Garcia here?”
“I thought he deserved to know that his pet has the person responsible for the unfortunate misunderstanding with his son, and for stealing six point eight million dollars of his money from me. It turns out that the pig promised to deliver your body, and Sophie’s, tomorrow. Garcia’s a grieving father, so I imagine his temper is strained.”
Ray felt his stomach plunge all the way down to his ass. “They’ll kill her. You heard what she said. She can’t get the money back….”
“Yes.” Alejandro’s constant smile vanished and a cold, rigid expression replaced it. “I heard her admit to destroying all of my profits from the last two quarters. I heard her admit that she set up the Garcia brat so he would get caught with the laptop and be blamed for the theft. I heard her admit that she set him up so I’d take him out, to get his father to try to kill me. I wish I could say I have no idea what was going on inside her head, but I’d be lying. It’s convoluted, ruthless, and manipulative. And almost effective. I feel like I should be saying I’m proud of her, but I’m just not feeling it. You?”
Ray forced himself not to reach for his gun out of frustration. “No. Proud doesn’t cut it.”
“Well, at least we’ve found one thing we can agree on.”
Ray heard a series of quiet pops from the other side of the house. He drew his gun and calmly checked the clip. “We can’t just let them kill her.”
Alejandro drew a massive .45 and loaded the revolver with a practiced ease. “No. No we can’t let them kill her. But if you go in there, you’re going to die. I won’t be able to keep you safe, Raymond.”
“You think I need you to protect me?”
Alejandro rolled his eyes and shoved him aside. He slipped back into the darkness, toward the faint glow of the house.
Too late, Ray analyzed the resigned expression on Alejandro’s face and considered the words his cousin had uttered. He couldn’t believe he’d been stupid enough to imagine that his plan to get Sophie safely out of the picture before the police and sheriff’s office descended on the house would also be on Alejandro’s agenda. Too late, he forgot that he and his cousin lived in two very different worlds. Alejandro had no intention of rescuing his sister. He just intended to make sure she didn’t fall into Esteban Garcia’s hands.
He staggered into the road, back toward the house. In the glow of the headlights and the dim light from the house, he saw Alejandro greet four men outside the front door. Two large men held Hathaway dangling between them, while an older, slender man in a brown suit stood talking with Alejandro, chatting amiably even though Alejandro held a pistol and the man held a small assault rifle.
He wasn’t close enough to hear whatever passed between them, but he saw the man with the assault rifle nod slightly. Alejandro set his hand on the man’s shoulder in a morbid display of sympathy. The slender man with the assault rifle raised the gun, shook his head sadly, and shot Hathaway in the head. The men holding him didn’t flinch, they just let his corpse fall to the ground.
When Alejandro turned toward the door, Ray broke into a run.
He didn’t know if it was the angle, or if the light from the laptop and flashlights inside had ruined Garcia’s night vision, but they didn’t see Ray until he nearly ran into them.
Garcia shouted something, but the words were lost under a din of gunfire. Ray brought his arms up to try to shield his face, even though he knew at just a few yards away, a bullet was likely to go straight through his arms. He ducked down and kept running, his heart hammering as he braced himself for the explosion of pain he knew was coming.
Another shape rose out of the darkness, moving with a terrible grace that was efficient, fluid, and deadly. Limbs moved, weapons spun, and two quick shots from a small automatic pistol dropped Esteban Garcia’s bodyguards. In another half second, the assault rifle in Garcia’s hands was kicked up, just to knock his finger from the trigger, before his body convulsed as the probes from a high-powered stun gun embedded themselves in his neck and chest, dropping him to the ground. Elliot pivoted as he completed the kick, then spun toward Ray, gun raised.
His eyes seemed to focus on Ray for the first time, and he lowered the gun slightly.
“Elliot?” Ray stared, open-mouthed, at the suddenly deadly man. There was so much Ray wanted to say, so much he knew he’d never find the words for.
Elliot lowered the gun but rotated the shoulder of his free hand fast. The punch connected with Ray’s cheek over the bone, hard enough to send him sprawling against the side of the house.
“Was that really necessary?” Ray fumbled his gun into his left hand and poked at his cheek tenderly.
“Yes.”
Overhead, Ray heard the rotary blades of a helicopter coming up fast. Red-and-blue flashing lights sprang to life on the highway below. “They’re early,” Ray laughed. “Thank God.”
Elliot glared at him. “You actually called for backup?”
“Uh, yeah. I don’t go out of my way to do stupid shit.”
“But you didn’t call me.”
“No, I didn’t. How’d you find this place?”
“I loaded that GPS app Hayes used to find you on my phone. You think, after the hotel blowing up, that I want to tell St. Claire I lost you again? But that’s not the damn point! You didn’t call me!”
“Of course I didn’t call you! I can’t fucking lose you!” Ray screamed, knowing how ridiculous it must sound. “I damn near had a panic attack this afternoon because I thought that I was about to lose everyone I have left in the world! I thought I’d lose Carmen, and Jose, and the girls, and you! I couldn’t move, I couldn’t react, I couldn’t even think! I was so fucking scared of losing you! I didn’t—”
The loud crack of a high-caliber gunshot was unmistakable. It shook the house from the inside out. Then came another shot and the clink of broken glass.
Ray crashed through the door, gun raised, and too late. Holland’s body was still hunched over the laptop, his eyes open and frozen. Sophie was s
till in the corner, still handcuffed like an animal. Her long hair had fallen over her face like a curtain, but it was wet with blood. Ray dropped his gun and checked futilely for a pulse, for a wound he could apply pressure to, for anything he could do at all.
Her limbs were still handcuffed together, and in the darkness the pen-style handcuff key he kept clipped to his holster didn’t seem to work the way it needed to. He dropped it twice, groped for it in the dark, and finally screamed.
“Here,” Elliot knelt beside the girl and opened each of the three sets of handcuffs quickly.
Despite being uncuffed, her body was stiff. Ray told himself it was from being restrained. He managed to roll her onto her back and press down on the wettest spot on her chest, intending to start CPR. As he pressed down over her tattered shirt, his hands sank in too deep and he recoiled, stumbling backward into Elliot. It felt like an eternity before he forced himself to move back to Sophie’s side. A white cloth, which he belatedly realized was Elliot’s shirt, found its way under his hands so he could apply even pressure over the wound.
Elliot set his hand on Ray’s shoulder and squeezed hard, trying to stop the other man from shaking to pieces. Ray glanced up at him, his eyes shimmering like glass. “He must have parked on the road up above. I’ll….” Elliot didn’t know what the hell he was trying to offer, what he was promising. Ray’s own cousin, a man who had once been his friend, had reduced Ray to this trembling shell hovering over Sophie’s body as if he could somehow bring her back to life. Elliot wanted to catch Alejandro and break every bone in his body. He wanted to kill him. “I’ll see if I can find him.”
“No!” Ray shook his head frantically.
Elliot knelt beside him and rubbed his hand. “Hey,” he palmed Ray’s cheek, “I trust you with power tools, don’t I?”
Ray was shaking too hard to answer.
“I trust you because I know you know what you’re doing.”
The trembling didn’t stop, or even slow, but Ray shut his eyes and nodded his head once. “I’ll send backup, tell them you’re in pursuit on foot.”
Elliot squeezed Ray’s shoulder again and left. The first police cars they’d seen from the highway were still making their way up the treacherous, winding road. In a flash, he was caught in the spotlight of a helicopter for a moment. He held his badge and ID toward the spotlight when the loud speaker blared to life and told him not to move. A four-man team rappelled down, surrounding him. Over the whoop of the helicopter blades, he tried to report everything fast, his words running together. In a frenzy of activity, Esteban Garcia was handcuffed while two of the crew went inside to help Ray.
“The last suspect fled that way on foot! There’s another road, up the embankment!” Elliot shouted. “He has to be looking for a way to climb up!”
The officer from the helicopter radioed up and, after a burst of static Elliot couldn’t make out, nodded. “Once we’ve got a unit on the ground, we’ll go after him!”
“I’m in pursuit on foot! Don’t shoot me!” Elliot shouted, taking off at a sprint before the officer could object.
He ran down the road, blinking fast to try to recover his night vision. Around the corner the road came to an end where the ancient concrete had cracked, broken, and been reclaimed by the slowly growing desert. Up the slope, a large concrete box, almost the size of a building, was half-buried in the hill. There were similar structures in the canyons behind his house, abandoned water cisterns that had made life away from the coast possible before water pumped in from the Sierra Nevadas had been readily available. On the far side of the concrete, gravel was trickling down the slope like water.
He held his pistol ready as he slowed down.
If Alejandro was going to climb up the crumbling embankment, the cistern was his only hope for a solid handhold.
“Alejandro Munoz! Drop your weapon and put your hands on your head and come down now!” Elliot shouted.
“Mr. FBI?” Alejandro stood up near the base of the cistern, smiling at him. In the darkness, Elliot could barely see if his hands were empty. “Or what? I saved your ass, saved him, and now you’re going to shoot me? You and Raymond deserve each other, Mr. FBI.”
“I’m arresting you! Come down and put your hands on the wall, then step back with your feet apart!”
“Ha!” Alejandro laughed and more gravel shifted. He made it to the middle of the cistern. “I was wondering if you’d be able to order me to spread my legs without cracking a smile! Are you always this serious?”
“I’m very serious,” Elliot growled.
“Eh, too bad.” Alejandro hauled himself to the top of the cistern, turned to face the slope and began to pull himself up with the few spots of solid rock that didn’t crumble under his touch.
“Why?” Elliot called up, hoping he could at least keep Alejandro talking long enough for the helicopter to get back into the air.
“Why? Because life’s too short not to laugh,” said Alejandro.
“Why did you save me? Why did you save him and then shoot your own fucking sister!”
“Honest? I figured you and Raymond were together. A few days ago, Carmen was upset. The news had her frightened, and Raymond was nowhere to be found. She called me to say Ray wasn’t going to find Sophie because he was too hung up on a lover to focus. She didn’t say anything else, but I know Raymond. He doesn’t fall in love. He doesn’t get hung up on people. But Carmen insisted it was serious, and she knows him better than me. She said he wouldn’t even call his contact in the FBI to ask about the investigation because he was so depressed. You showed up with him tonight. No cavalry, no other officers, just you.”
“We just got here first,” said Elliot, hoping the damn cavalry would hurry up.
“But you were together. You were with him when Sophie’s lover forced her to call him, yes?”
“Does it matter?” Elliot asked, taken aback.
“For me? Certainly. For Raymond himself, I’ve got no idea.”
“Why the hell do you care so much about his love life, anyway?”
Alejandro stopped climbing for a moment. “Do you have brothers?” he asked.
“No. I’m an only child.”
“You’re lucky. Brothers are a pain in the ass. Sisters too, obviously. Raymond and I were more than cousins growing up. We were friends. I’d have traded both of my actual siblings to have had him as a brother. But when we got older, I thought everything was a competition. I thought one of us had to come out on top, and I really thought that nothing else mattered. When I was young, it never occurred to me that our lives wouldn’t be us striving to outdo each other, but us against the entire fucking world. It should have been us against the world….” He shook his head sadly. “I let things get carried away. I betrayed him, and I drove him away. And when our parents and our uncles found out what happened, I let them shun him. I told them he betrayed us.”
“You lied to them?”
“Yes. I lied to them. But Raymond didn’t help. He’s always been so black-and-white, so fucking sure that there is only one path he can take in life. It’s all or nothing with him, and it always has been. I thought we were just kids playing a fucking game, and when things got personal, he decided the fastest way to win was not to play at all. He’s a hard guy to care about.”
“Some people might say that.” Elliot didn’t mean to smile, but he couldn’t wipe the expression from his face.
“But I still care about him. Since him leaving us was my fault, I took responsibility for it. I took responsibility for him. I put the word out that anyone who touched him, anyone who messed with him, would answer to me. And then I made sure that I had a reputation as the scariest fucker in this city so no one would dare try and take him out. I’ve kept an eye on him ever since. If someone threatens him, I kill them. If someone tries to hurt him, I kill them. If someone breaks into his place, or messes with his shit, I kill them.”
“Is there anything you don’t kill people for?”
“I don’t have th
e most creative approach to problem solving, but it’s effective.”
There were police vehicles on the ground now, but the helicopter was still hovering over the house. “I’m not going to kill you, though. Fucking with his life cost me my best friend. It cost my family more than I can ever say. It even cost me my own sister.”
“You killed her.”
“I did. But I made it quick. I promise you, Garcia wouldn’t have been so kind.”
“I have to arrest you.”
“You don’t think it’s a bit rude, to arrest a man who just kept your lover from getting killed?”
Somehow, Alejandro had found a solid surface to grab onto. He disappeared over the top of the bank in a flash.
Elliot scrambled forward, tucking his gun away and climbing up the gravel slope as fast as he could. He made quicker time than Alejandro, but Alejandro was already on the road above, already running. “Fucking hell….”
Elliot ignored the way the jagged rocks and thorn bushes cut into his hands, scrambling up the slope until he could pull himself up onto the concrete pavement above. Just twenty yards away, he saw Alejandro climbing into the silver Lexus. “Stop or I will shoot!” Elliot shouted.
Alejandro froze for a moment, his head peeking above the driver’s side door.
Elliot kept his finger on the trigger. “Step away from the car!”
“Do you think he would have survived the last twelve years as a police officer if it hadn’t been for me?” Alejandro sneered. “How long do you think your lover will last when I’m gone?”
A knife of doubt and fear cut straight through Elliot’s bravado with those words. For one horrible moment, he imagined walking into his house and finding Ray gunned down on the living room floor, just like the killers Alejandro had shot. The thought of losing Ray left him feeling hollow and dead himself. Bringing Alejandro to justice felt meaningless by comparison.
He thought about how desperate Ray had looked when Elliot had confronted him about taking off on his own. This, Elliot realized, was the fear that had paralyzed Ray that afternoon. This was why the other man had left him alone in bed without a word of explanation. Just as Elliot had come to care about Ray despite his best effort not to, Ray cared about him, too.