“You’re right… Fuck.” She staggers around to the passenger side and opens up the door. “Just keep to the limit now we’re on the main road, parcera. We don't want to attract attention.”
“Fine. Now get in.”
It’s been years since I drove a manual, but the simple action of wrapping my hand around the stick brings it all flooding back. As soon as she’s safe in the seat, I slip the car into first and hit the gas.
“How’s your head?” I ask, chasing the speed up through the gearbox until I’m hitting fifth.
“Pounding,” she whispers. “Stay on the right side, like in America… Did that really just happen? Did we really kill Alberto Fernandez and two of his men?”
It’s the inclusion of herself in my crime that makes me hate her even less. If we go down over this, we’re going down together.
“Yep,” I say grimly, clutching at the steering wheel like it’s the grip of that gun again. I steal another glance at her through the darkness. She’s staring straight ahead, her mouth working hard to hide her emotions. Her forehead is a bloody battlefield of cuts and grazes, but there’s no way we can visit a hospital.
“Do you believe me, parcera?”
“I believe in your guilt,” I tell her. “I know you were trying to make amends by offering yourself in exchange for me.” The same way I know the friendship we struck up in that restroom was the real deal.
“That’s not good enough,” she says. “The only way we’re getting through this is if we start trusting one another again.”
“Fine, I believe you. I don't know why, but I do. Maybe because I don’t have a fucking choice anymore.” My shock is sounding more like belligerence now.
She takes it with a pinch of silence, digesting my words slowly. “Keep heading straight. We need to get to Leticia as quickly as we can. It’s the southernmost city in Colombia, and it’s about a six-hour drive from here. I know a place we can go. No stopping, except for gas.” She pulls out her cell and starts fiddling around with the GPS, and then slots it into the vent mount. “Okay. We’re on the map and we have a route.” There’s a pause. “The deadline to deliver you to Fernandez was tomorrow evening. I was going to drive us down to Leticia first thing. He must have guessed I was planning to renegade on our agreement.”
“Yeah, he seemed a real untrusting asshole like that.”
“What the hell are we going to do, Anna?” She sounds scared suddenly.
“We’ll figure it out, okay?”
Call him.
No.
Call him.
I don’t have his number.
Liar. You have it memorized...
“What’s in Leticia?” I ask her, ignoring my bat-shit crazy inner monologue. It’s driving me close to the edges of a ravine that’s filled with shadow. If I fall in now, I’ll never climb out again.
“It’s where my aunt lives.”
“Can we trust her?”
“With our lives. Her estate is a fortress.”
“Tell me everything about the debt you owed. No more secrets, Vi.” I bite down on my lower lip to stop myself from screaming out the word hypocrite.
She rests her head against the window and sighs. “The night we buried my cousin, I had a visit from Fernandez. Manny had been working overseas when he died and he’d fallen behind on his payments to the cartel. He owed close to twenty thousand. We just assumed he’d have some kind of immunity because of who—look out!” she shrieks.
I brake hard as an unknown creature scuttles across the road in front of us.
“Oso hormiguero. Anteater.”
We sit there, hearts hammering, watching the strange mammal slither into the undergrowth. When it’s gone, I blow out a breath and set the car right again, the rhythm of our unspoken fears falling in sync with the sound of the tires on the asphalt.
“I’ve never seen anyone kill like you did back there,” says Vi after a couple of miles grace. “I saw your face when you pulled the trigger. There was no hesitation. It was a dead calm behind your eyes, parcera.” She sounds scared again, and a little in awe.
“The dead calm before the storm,” I drawl, feeling that weird sense of detachment again. Is this what he feels when he kills? There’s a beat. “Do you think I’m an evil person?”
“No. Not evil,” she says. “You saw an opportunity and had the guts to take it. You knew what they were going to do to us because you’ve lived it before. That’s the other thing I saw on your face, Anna. I saw your past, as clear as day.”
I try to swallow down my next words but they spew out of me anyway. “Two men tried to rape me last night… And you know what the most messed up thing about it is? I didn't even try and fight them off.”
“What stopped them?” she asks quietly.
“Someone stopped them.”
There’s another pause. “You’re not running from a man, are you? You’re running from so much more.” I feel a warm hand slipping into mine. “Do you think you’re the storm, Anna? Like one of those American twisters that rips up everything in its path, and wipes everything clean again?”
Do twisters even have shadows?
I let go of her hand and nudge the Renault up to sixty. “I’m just a woman trying to survive in a messed-up parallel universe, Vi. I’d never fired a gun before tonight. I’m making up the rules as I go along.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Shock studs her voice like the bullet holes in my victims. “You were like a machine back there.”
“I saw red.” Crimson. “I was done with men treating us that way.”
“Men will always treat us this way.”
“Maybe we need to kill a few more to even that shit up.”
“Maybe we do,” she mutters.
Did I just say that?
Did those words feel as right on the inside as they did spoken out loud?
“A friend once told me that some crimes deserve a different kind of justice. I know you agree with her, Vi. That’s why you offered to kill someone for me earlier.”
“True, but are you going to shoot up the whole of Colombia, parcera?”
“Just the ones who deserve it.”
We fall back into that rhythm again, our thoughts more vocal than anything. The next time I look across at her she’s fast asleep.
I let her rest. I let her have this time away from the violent uncertainty of our lives. We have a destination—a safe house—and I can tell she’s holding onto that with everything she has.
Not me. I’m eating up the white lines in the middle of the empty road like they’re my first meal after a hunger strike. I’m done playing the victim now. I know what I’m capable of. For the first time ever, I have a loaded gun in my hand and no desire to die, but that’s always a prelude to the inevitable.
Tick.
Tick.
Boom.
It hits us out of nowhere—an unforgiving beast made of steel and concrete. The steering wheel is ripped out of my hands as the Renault starts to flip, but there’s only one name on my lips as we hit the central reservation with our asses in the air…
And then everything goes dark.