“You are sure he will stop?” Jai asked, displaying only a mild curiosity.
“You got your seat belt on?” Ace asked. His was on, like it always was, because speed limits were more of a suggestion for the faint of heart than a rule.
“Da,” Jai said.
“Then, sure. He’ll stop.”
And with that, Ace zoomed past the laboring RV, then up the road a quarter mile, where he jammed on the brakes, hit the emergency brake, and allowed the resulting skid to carry the car 180 degrees around in a circle and land on the dividing line between both lanes.
He and Jai had about three heartbeats to regard the oncoming vehicle before the guy at the wheel—eyes looming like boiled eggs, even from the closing distance—swerved off the road and halted, skidding to a stop in a cloud of dust on the side of the road to Ace’s left.
“I’ll talk to him,” Ace said. “You reconnoiter.”
“I don’t even think you know what that word means,” Jai said.
“It means you circle around and bash him on the head,” Ace said.
“Apparently you do,” Jai murmured and slammed the door shut so Ace could pull to the side of the road and out of traffic.
As he was getting out of the car, he noted the driver of the RV had recovered a rifle from somewhere in his nightmare-mobile and had it cocked and ready as Ace stepped out.
“The fuck you doing!” he demanded, his accent thicker than Jai’s and sharper somehow. Provinces, Ace thought. Countries he wasn’t versed in. He’d been enlisted in the military. Nobody’d paid him to learn languages, but he knew this guy and Jai were two entirely different creatures.
“You were dragging something,” Ace said, hands up, keeping his spine loose. “In the back. Looked like your tailpipe was about to fall off. Just being friendly, right?”
The coyote was wearing jeans that had been ready for the hamper five-to-ten wears ago and a T-shirt that had lost its original color pulled tight enough to expose a potbelly. His hair hung in lank strands across a pink, balding head. Ace bet that if he got within five feet of the guy, the smell would knock him flat.
“I do not hear anything,” he said, not moving his eyes from Ace. “Get your fucking car out of my way, or I shoot you here and leave you and your….” His piggy eyes narrowed. “There were two of you.”
“There were not,” he lied. Ace had a face that did that well—he was aware. He didn’t lie to Sonny or Sonny wouldn’t ever trust him again, but this guy got no fucking loyalty from him.
“I….” Pig-eyes probably hadn’t slept in a very long time because he squinted and looked away as though trying to remember. “I do not care,” he decided, and then he cocked the shotgun and fired.
Ace had dropped to the ground before the thing was done cocking. He gave a quick roll, putting him up against the Sentra, slightly angled away from the man with the gun, and pulled his own service pistol from the back of his pants. Squinting against the flurry of dust, he swore. Jai could be back there, just beyond this asshole, and if he missed the bad guy, he could kill his employee, who was also his friend. That was no damned good.
The guy cracked the shotgun to load it, and that gave Ace time to scuttle backward like a crab and duck behind the car. The coyote fired again, twice in quick succession, and the front window of Ernie’s car disintegrated.
“Who the fuck are you?” demanded the driver.
“Like I’m gonna tell you now?” Ace snapped, checking under the car to see which way his feet were going.
“Who sent you? Are you trying to steal my product?”
“What product?” Ace screamed, still telling lies. “All I saw in the back there was a bunch of kids!”
“Who sent—” The man’s scream—Ace could imagine spit flying from his lips as his voice broke—cut off abruptly with a thud and a sort of groan and a crunch.
“Ace?” Jai’s voice said clearly. “You are not dead?”
“Nope,” Ace said, climbing out of the dust and gravel that littered the roadside. His work overalls were covered in sand, and the palms of his hands were cut up some by the small rocks in the roadside gravel, but he was relatively unscathed. He dusted himself off and went to smooth his short black hair back from his brow when his fingers encountered small sharp pebbles.
“Ouch,” he mumbled, drawing blood. “Is that glass?”
“Ernie’s car.” Jai sighed.
As Ace approached he could hear the gurgle of blood their friend with the shotgun was making through a nose that had been turned to powder.
Ace hunkered down by the feebly struggling meat sack, wondering what was broken in him that he didn’t feel like this person was human enough to deserve pity.
“How you doin’?” he asked, not particularly caring one way or the other.
“Mng mnib mmm….”
Ace blinked and translated. He’d been in enough fights as a kid and had seen enough violence as an adult to figure it out. “Yeah, I know he hit you. You were shooting at me. You’re lucky your brains aren’t leaking on the sand.”
The writhing figure on the ground suddenly ceased struggling, and Ace used the Beretta still in his hand to gesture, making his point.
“So, you see, we need to know where these kids were goin’, so we know to give them a special delivery of their very own. Don’t worry, kids’ll be fine. I know that was a problem and all since you probably left them locked in there with no fuckin’ water. This way, you won’t have to worry none, and you can just slither off into the desert and find another way back home.”
“I’ll… mmm….”
Ace rolled his eyes. “He won’t kill you if he can’t find you. I’d just make sure he can’t find you. Maybe change your name, wash your pits, change your clothes. I’m pretty sure they’ll be looking for an entirely different person.” Some of the whimsy went out of his tone. “One who wasn’t trafficking kids for God knows what to God knows where. Which you will tell us right—”
The sound of chopper blades took him by surprise. He and Jai looked at each other and then up as the small black helicopter that had suddenly appeared above them began a slow circle and started to lower itself to the ground.
And the guy on the ground took advantage of their inattention and grabbed Ace’s gun—and pulled the muzzle into his mouth while Ace gave a jerk with his hand to pull it out.
He’d had the safety on, but the man’s scrabbling hands clicked it off, and as Ace jerked, the gun went off, and gore spattered up Ace’s arm and onto his coveralls.
“What the—” He stared, appalled, as a loudspeaker from the chopper began to blare.
“Put down your weapons and stand, hands over your heads. Put down your weapons and stand slowly, hands over your heads.”
As Ace stood, horrified, he and Jai met eyes.
“The actual fuck,” Jai said.
“You are telling me.”
This was it. He was going to be arrested for a murder he hadn’t really committed and let off for one he had. He knew it. In his head, he was reciting Ellery Cramer’s number, because Cramer was a lawyer and knew about the worst thing Ace had ever done.