I swallowed hard, trying to think of something to say to him.
“Buen disparo.” Nice shot.
His eyes smiled at me before looking to road in front of us. “I like it when you speak Spanish, babe.” Then his eyes looked back again and this time they were cold.
I turned my head to look. A black SUV was thundering up the road toward us. They weren’t tourists out for a Sunday drive.
“Fuck,” he swore. “Are you ready to get a little wet?”
I stared at him blankly. “What?”
He whipped the bike to the right and we went thumping down flights of cement stairs, nearly knocking over an elderly couple walking up them.
“Lo Siento!” I yelled at them before I bit my tongue again. At the top of the stairs, the SUV paused then drove off. I knew the road curved down and met with the one we were about to land on. Sure enough, as soon as we had hit the road, the SUV appeared at the end of, turning toward us. Derrin yanked the bike into a condominium driveway then down a brick path that traced the edge of the building, trees and bushes reaching out for us, snagging our clothes and our hair as we whipped through them.
Suddenly it seemed like it was the end of the line. There was a pool and beyond the pool there was blue sky.
“Hold on!” he yelled back at me.
I couldn’t hold any tighter. I let out a cry as the bike lifted off the ground, bounced on a lawn chair and then bounced off the edge of the patio.
We were flying. I kept my head down but my eyes open.
A sandy beach passed underneath our feet.
Then next thing I knew we had hit something hard, cold and my arms were ripped off of Derrin’s waist. Salt water burned my eyes, filled my lungs and nose and I tried to breathe, to swim, but I was sinking, drowning. The cast was weighing me down.
Suddenly a strong arm was wrapped under me and my head broke the surface.
“Breathe, it’s okay,” Derrin told me, gasping for breath just as I was. “Try and swim, I’ve got you.”
I tried to nod but couldn’t. I focused on my breathing and moved my arms and legs as much as I could but he was doing most of the work. When my eyes eventually stopped burning I was able to see where we were.
We were in the ocean, a few meters off the shore. The handles of the motorcycle were just beginning to disappear into the waves, sinking. Beyond that, sunbathers on the beach gawked while people ran to the edge of the condo’s pool area, to see where we had fallen. On either side of us there were outcrops of stone and rock where the waves gently crashed. We’d been lucky. We could have landed on those instead and neither of us would be alive.
“Right here,” Derrin said as he hauled me up to something. I floated around and saw that we had reached a jet-ski that was bobbing in the shallows, clipped to a buoy. I could barely process it.
He swam around me and tried to hoist me onto the edge of the jetski. I don’t know how he was able to do it while swimming and unable to touch the bottom but he was. I grasped for the jetski, trying to pull myself up as far as I could without hurting my wrist. The shouts from the shore were softening and there were some splashes, a few people coming into the water, maybe to help us.
I don’t know if the fall knocked something loose in my head or I took in too much saltwater, but I had a hard time focusing. All I knew was that Derrin was getting on the jetski. He pulled me up so I was in his lap and stabbed something metallic, like a small knife, into the ignition switch then hit the button. The jetski roared to life and he quickly unclipped it from the anchor before we peeled away from the shore.
I was staring blankly up at the patio where the crowd had gathered when I saw what looked like one of the men who had been chasing us, the guy on the motorbike who had crashed into the one who got shot. He was wearing dark aviator shades but the length of his mustache was memorable. But when I blinked, trying to get my eyes to focus as we moved further away, the man was gone.
“I think I saw one of the guys,” I managed to say before having a coughing fit.
“I know,” he said. “Keep holding on.”
“Where are we going? How did you start this without a key?”
How did you shoot someone while driving a motorcycle?
Holy fucking shit. He just killed someone back there. It was in self-defense and I’m glad he did it but oh my god.
Oh my god.
What was happening?
My breath was coming shorter and it felt like I couldn’t breathe.
“Hey, hey,” he said, taking his hand off the bar and tilting my head gently so he could look at me. “We’re okay. You’re okay. We’re going to drive this back to the hotel. It’s faster than they are and we have no reason to think they know where we are staying, okay?”
“How do you know that?”
“They would have killed us earlier.”
“They would have killed me. They’re after me.”
He nodded. “And now they’re after me because I shot one of their men. It doesn’t matter. We’ll go back to the hotel, get in the car and we’re out of here.”
“We can’t just leave the city!”
“Alana,” he warned just as we passed over a large wave, landing hard on the other side. My whole body was starting to ache. I was so battered as it was. “If you want to live you’ll do as I say. And you’ll answer my questions honestly, okay?”
If you want to live you’ll do as I say. “Who are you?” I asked incredulously. He sounded like an action hero. My life just turned into an action film. None of this could be real. This couldn’t be real.
But I had said that about my parents, Violetta and Beatriz, too.
“An ex-solider. And I want answers from you.”
“What answers? Derrin, I told you everything I know. I don’t know who those men were. I never saw them before. I don’t know why they want to kill me.”
“How did your sisters die?”
I felt sick. “Oh, come on.” I rattled off a few swear words in Spanish.
“Tell me how they died. Tell me exactly how they died.”
He suddenly switched off the engine and we came to a stop, bobbing up and down the waves. There was no one behind us and the only thing in front of us were banana boats. I could see our hotel from here, maybe just another two minutes of boating and we’d be on the sand. It didn’t feel safe enough. Derrin knew that.
“I will start the engine when I know the truth.”