Karina Halle - Bold Tricks

“Ellie,” Camden said softly, sticking his shoulder under my arms and pulling me up to my feet. “The game is still in play and you’re shot. We have to get out of here.”

My heart was a stone, a brick, a mountain, weighing me to the ground. I looked at my mom, then over at the pool house, and I wondered how things went so wrong, so fast. They weren’t the constants in my life and they weren’t the good, but at least they weren’t always the bad. Like me, they were grey and they shaded every step I’d taken.

I moved like I was in a dream, the pain in my leg overshadowed by my sorrow. Camden helped me limp a few steps before he bent down and scooped me up into his arms, instructing me to put my hands around his neck. He ran forward but I stared backward until the bodies were further away.

“You two okay?” Derek’s voice broke through.

Camden stopped and I raised my head to look. Derek was standing at the corner of the house, a large gash across his face but otherwise all right. I wasn’t sure if we could trust him but he did just take out the sniper for us. Then again, he was wearing a bulletproof vest.

“She’s been shot,” Camden said, his voice on the verge of panicking. “In her leg.”

Derek gave it a quick glance and then looked at us gravely. In his vest, ammo and weapons, piercing blue eyes and shaved head, he looked like he was in his element. Nothing fazed him. This was routine.

“I can help you,” he said. “If you pay me.”

“What?” Camden exclaimed and his grip around me tightened.

Derek was motionless. “I know where Gus is. I needed to know how much he meant to you, what you are willing to give, Ellie. I can take you to him. I can fix you. But you have to name your price.”

“Fifty thousand,” I said, knowing how much Javier had given Camden for me. I was sure, even in death, Javier wouldn’t mind if it went to save my life. “Give or take.”

“I’ll give you a break and let’s call it thirty,” Derek said. “It’s still more than what Javier paid me to stick around and help take over this place.”

The words were stuck in my throat but they managed to come out. “He’s shot, you know. He’s in the pool house.”

He nodded. “I saw. I took out the original sniper as well. But whether he’s alive or dead, he owns the Zetas now and they’re coming. I did my job for him, now I want out.”

“And how are we getting out of here?” Camden asked.

The tiniest hint of a smile appeared on Derek’s lips. “I learned to fly a few choppers in Afghany.”

He jerked his head toward the landing pad.

“Shouldn’t we … shouldn’t we make sure Javier is okay,” I said, knowing it wasn’t the popular opinion.

Derek shook his head. “We don’t have time. You have no idea what that man is capable of, do you.”

“She knows,” Camden said quickly. “She just has a big heart.”

“A big heart will get you killed. If Javier’s alive, he’s at the top of the food chain now. And we’re all just chum.”

I let that sink in and tried to forget the guilt. He had left me behind to die. I would have to try and do the same to him. And hope that if he did pull through, that he wouldn’t come after me again.

Soon we were in the helicopter, Derek at the controls, Camden beside me in the back, ripping apart a first aid kit for pain medicine. I stared out the window as we rose from the ground and took off toward the horizon. We left my past, my broken, and sometimes beautiful, past behind me.

“Ellie, we’re here.”

I moaned and opened my eyes and saw a repeating shadow crossing above my head. Chopper blades. I had that one sweet moment between sleep and waking when you think everything is fine.

Then I was slammed with unbearable pain. In my leg, where the bullet went in. And in my heart, where my mom and possibly Javier had died. Grief for people who perhaps didn’t deserve grief but I was drowning in it all the same.

Camden was at my side, gently pressing his lips to my cheekbone.

I reached out and grabbed his strong face, needing to feel him, that he was here, alive. I had him. He had me.

“Where are we?” I whispered, my voice dry.

He put his arm under my shoulder and gently lifted me up. He quickly unscrewed a bottle of water and poured some of it in my parched mouth. I was sitting in a field right beside the chopper. In the distance was the barn we had parked at and the black Escalade was coming out of it.

“It’s just Derek,” Camden explained. “We’re getting you to a doctor and then we’re getting Gus.”

“We have to get Gus first,” I said, grabbing his collar.

He gave me a steady gaze. “No, Ellie. Derek says Gus is safe. You can’t save him if you’re dead and I don’t want you losing that pretty leg of yours either. It would be a shame to lose such art.”

“But who knows how much longer he’ll be safe?”

“Ellie,” he said sadly. “I couldn’t save your mom, even though I tried. Travis found us before I could even get a few rounds off. But I can save you. I will save you. I promised I’d keep you safe, even at the expense of Gus. You’ve been shot. You’re lucky to be alive and I’ll do everything in me to keep you alive. No ifs, ands, or buts.”

Derek pulled the car up to us and leaped out of the driver’s seat, quickly ushering us into the back of the car.

“Why can’t we take the helicopter?” I asked as Camden lay me down in the back. My jeans had been torn off at the knees and mounds of bandages had been wrapped around my calf.

“Out of gas,” Derek said as he got back in the driver’s seat. “And the Zetas would be coming by copter anyway. This is safer.”

He drove that Escalade like a rally driver, bounding us from rough road to rough road and after a few precarious turns on mountainsides, I wondered how much safer it could be.

The pain was slowly growing worse too, to the point where I had a death grip on Camden’s hand, body covered in sweat. It felt like my leg was on fire and stabbed with a million knives at the same time. It was all encompassing and all-consuming.

“How much longer?” Camden asked Derek.

“An hour,” Derek said. “Tops. I know a doctor right before the border into Guatemala.”

“Hold on, baby,” Camden said, squeezing my hand. “I’ve got you.”

Even Camden couldn’t save me from my agony. My eyes rolled back into my head and I tried to divert my attention from my leg. Questions. Painful questions. I had a lot of them. I had time to ask them.

“Derek,” I choked out. “If we’re paying you for all this, questions are included right?”

Silence. Then, “Yes. What do you want to know?”

“My mother. The truth. What happened to her? How did she end up married to Travis?”

“She wasn’t married. That’s not how Javier put it.”

Of course he knew.

He went on, “Javier recruited your parents to work for him right after Travis went and switched sides. I heard from different sources that it was so Javier could have closer ties to you. I heard from Javier it’s because they wanted revenge on Travis. They’d stopped conning at this point and had their hands in a whole bunch of work from the cartels already, so it was not a big career change for them. Then one day they left and Javier tracked them down to Veracruz. To Travis. He was angry. That’s where you came in.”

“His angel of death,” I muttered then groaned as another wave of pain went through me. “Why not kill them all with one stone?”

“To his credit, Javier seemed shocked when he learned you were going to Travis’s house back in Veracruz,” Camden spoke up, surprising me. “I don’t think he meant for you to kill them all.”

“What does it matter?” I snapped. “I was being used, just like I was used here. Javier got his way, he got his wish. Even if he’s dead, he’s still won. My mother is dead. And so is Travis. And I killed them both.” The tears teased me again, moisture swelling in my throat but I refused to give in. I grinded my teeth until my jaw was sore. “I was the fool who did as he asked.”

“Don’t say that,” Camden said. “You didn’t have a choice and you know it. You can grieve for your mother but I will not let you punish yourself for this. You don’t deserve this burden. None of us deserve what went on in there.”

The memory of the man dying by Camden’s hands filled my head and I remembered I wasn’t the only one who lost a piece of themselves back in the jungle.

“Then why would my parents go to work for Travis? What happened then?” I asked, wanting the distraction.

I saw Derek shrug. “I don’t know.”

My mother had told me it was revenge. For me. I wanted to believe that now, though it didn’t make things hurt any less.

“And she never married Travis. Travis took her in because he was obsessed with her. Killed your father, kept her as his own. Kept her is the key word that was thrown around a lot. I can’t say what went on. I don’t know all the facts, I only know what I read and what I’ve been told. I’m guessing it was something like Stockholm syndrome. If they were ever officially married, I never heard about it. I just know it was a fucked-up, messy situation.”

I had my fair share of that. I held Camden’s hand tighter again and hoped that the Watt cycle of being sucked into co-dependent, obsessive and unhealthy relationships was finally over. As long as I had Camden, I had broken free of that. I wouldn’t end up like her.

“Did you know that Gus was my real father?”

“I did,” he answered simply. “Javier was supposed to tell you, it was part of the plan. But he held off at the last minute. Maybe he was afraid that when the time came and you found out that he’d tricked you after finding out the truth about Gus, you’d come after him. I guess he was right about that, wasn’t he?”

Was he fucking ever.

“So what happens next?” Camden asked. “After we get Ellie fixed up and get Gus. What happens to us? And to you? How do we know you won’t kill us or come after us?”

Derek eyed him in the rear view mirror. “Because so far, that’s not my job. And, believe it or not, it wouldn’t become my job. I like you two. I fucking hate dealing with the cartels and yes I do it for a living but some jobs are better than others. I take what interests me and that’s it. I want you to get to Gus and I want you to get home to California. Then I want to take a nice long week of drinking and fucking tourists on a beautiful beach.” He paused and scrunched up his brows. “I will say this to you, man. Camden. When we took off in the jungle that morning, I was certain we were only leaving Ellie behind. Javier wanted to take you with him. I told him not to, that it would slow down our operation. So he left you behind. He didn’t want to.”

“Of course,” Camden scoffed. “He wanted to off me somewhere.”

“No,” Derek told us. “That wasn’t it. We all had specific instructions to keep both you and Ellie safe. But the emphasis was placed on you, Camden. You were the priority.”

I coughed at the tickle in my throat and threw a bewildered look to Camden. “What the hell does that mean?”

“I have no idea, honestly,” Derek said. “But that’s what we were told. There were too many other things to question than that.”

Camden looked at me, lips pursed and I could tell he had no clue either.

The next couple of hours were a blur. Instead of some farmhouse like the one that Javier had taken Violetta to, Derek drove me to an honest-to-god medical clinic. It was after hours of course since gunshot wounds attracted at least some attention but the woman who ran the clinic was quick, silent and efficient. And by efficient, I mean she pumped me full of drugs until I couldn’t tell what was up and what was down. Not quite morphine but something that made me stop wanting to chop off my leg.

She had no problems pulling out the bullet, least it didn’t seem that way in my drugged up head and said I was lucky it didn’t strike an artery. She gave Camden the medication, painkillers and antibiotics to fight infection, wrapped me up and I was somewhat good to go. Derek handed her a handsome wad of American bills for her effort.

“So,” Camden said as they put me back in the Escalade. “Now we’ve all been shot. You, me, Gus. Quite the team, right?”

I jerked my head. “We’ll be a team once we see him again. Derek, that’s our next stop.”

“Yes, m’am,” he said, seeming to lighten up a bit. “Back to Mexico you go.”

We drove through the night, passing through the Guatemalan and Mexican borders with ease. Now that my leg was fixed, we weren’t attracting any suspicion. Just three gringos with Mexican plates. And even if they did search the car and found the guns and ammo we still had in here, Derek was ready to bribe them. Or take them out. Whichever came first.