“Alana,” he said. “No matter what happens with your brother, you have someone here that has your back, all the way, to the end.”
“To what end?”
“To the end of it all,” he said, his voice grave. “And I’m not going to let you go so easily. I want you to figure it out with Javier, see what he knows, see if he can help. But if he has no ideas, if he doesn’t seem to care, you’ll be better off with me.”
“How can you say that?”
“Trust me.”
“I want to,” I automatically said. I corrected myself. “I do trust you.”
“You don’t. And I don’t blame you. But if you stay with me, I can make a better life for you. It doesn’t have to be with me but … I can get you out of here.”
“How?”
“Come up north with me.”
I curled my lip. “Too cold.”
“The west coast isn’t cold at all, you’d love it,” he said. “But if not, then Europe. Some small island in the Caribbean. South America.”
It was sounding tempting. But then the whole thing was absurd. “I barely know you.”
“I know. And I barely know you. But this is what is going to keep you alive.” Now he was cupping my face with both hands. “Alana, unless the men who are after you are killed, unless the person who wants you dead is found out and then taken out, this isn’t going to stop. There is a lot of money on your head.”
I frowned, feeling icky at that assumption. “How do you know that?”
“I just do.”
“Like you know how to kill a person and ride a motorbike at the same time?”
“Yes.” His grip tightened, his gaze more intense. I felt like he was going to devour me. “Your life as you’ve known it is now over.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “You said that I could talk to Luz –”
“I did say that. And I meant it. But I also said not now. They’ll be in danger too if they talk to you, so leave them out of it. Send them a postcard from a random place. Alana, you’re going to need to say goodbye to the person you were. Alana Bernal ended when she was hit by a car.”
I felt like a force field went up around me. I wasn’t feeling any of this. It wasn’t sinking in. No. This wasn’t the way. My brother would fix everything.
I looked away and pulled out of Derrin’s grasp. “I need to talk to Javier.”
“And you’re going to. And I’m going to watch the whole thing,” he said, straightening up. He started the car. “Let’s go find us a place to stay for the night before he gets here and everything changes.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Derek
Being Derrin Calway was becoming harder and harder. I messed up once, telling her about Minnesota when I should have said Winnipeg, but I don’t think she thought anything of it. But other than that, it was getting increasingly hard to pretend I was just an ex-soldier. She knew I was something more and I knew in the future I was going to have to tell her the truth.
The question was, how much truth. It’s one thing to say you have experience in “getting shit done” for people. It’s another to say you’re a professional assassin, one that put a bullet in Travis Raines’ head at the request of her brother. It’s another to say you were the vigilante who shot the driver in the head, only after you failed to kill her to begin with.
Where did the truth end and where did I begin? When did the lie end and I begin?
I’m not sure if I would ever figure it out and not come out even more of a shell than I was going in.
I didn’t trust her brother at all. I knew Javier enough that she did mean something to him but a man changes when he comes into power and I’ve seen him change a lot. I wasn’t even expecting him to show up to meet her. He was the man in charge of the seedy underbelly of half the country, he wouldn’t want to risk anything by going after his sister.
Then again, there was the chance that his marriage had softened him. That’s why I wanted Luisa to be there. Alana would be able to get a better read off of her. She wanted to believe the best of Javier a little too much.
While we drove around looking for a cheap, simple motel that I could pay cash out, I thought about how Javier could be behind any of this. The man who had called me and ordered her hit definitely hadn’t been him. Javier’s voice and mannerisms were far too distinctive. But could it have been someone working on his behalf? Perhaps it was the man Alana had talked to on the phone, even though he pretended not to know who she was.
Who was Javier’s right hand man these days? Esteban Mendoza. Could it have been him on the phone? I wasn’t sure. I never paid too much attention to Este back then because he was a bit of a chump, a surfer dude that didn’t do shit but wanted to weasel up the ranks. He was proficient in survelliance and electronics – when we did the raid on Raines’ house, we were able to all because of him. But Este didn’t seem to have the chops for much more than that.
Then again, being second to Javier meant doing a lot of dirty work. An order was an order. But why would Javier want his own sister assassinated? That’s what didn’t make any sense at all. I didn’t trust him and with good reason and I thought if she went off with him it would do her far more harm than good. But I didn’t know if he’d want to kill her.
I started thinking that even if she did go off with him, maybe I could put myself back in the picture somehow. Ever since I defactoed from him after the Raines’ takeover years ago and helped Ellie Watt out of Honduras to rescue her father – for a price higher than Javier’s of course – I’d never seen Javier again. I couldn’t just stroll up to him and ask if he needed any help. Javier held grudges like nobody’s business, especially those that concerned his ex-lover, and he’d shoot me on the spot.
I guess the problem now was how far I was willing to go for Alana. She’d said again and again how much we didn’t know each other and she was right every time. But even then, I couldn’t stay away. I couldn’t from the moment I saw her in the airport parking lot. Just one real look at her and she’d done something to me, stirred something that had been dormant for so long.
I couldn’t leave her. I just didn’t know how to get her to stay with me.
Eventually we found a nice enough hotel. We had an hour to kill before I drove us back to the Wal-Mart and I wished we had more. On the chance that she would leave with her brother and never see me again, I wanted to remember exactly how she felt to touch, to hold, to kiss, to be deep inside of her.