Reckless (15 page)

I grab the empty bottle containing the poison and toss it under the bed. I don’t see any point in cleaning up. Now I just need to get out of here.

After putting my robe back on, I open the door.

Two guards are standing outside.
 

They look at me and smile.

“Was Mr. Peña too rough for you?” one of them asks.

I curl one end of my mouth and answer him in a sexy, raspy voice. “I think I was too rough for
him
.”

I start down the hall.
 

One of the guards spanks me on my ass.
 

I ignore him.
 

All that matters now is getting out of here before they discover Peña. I want to break into a full sprint and run out the front door to the awaiting SUV and into Diego’s arms.
Yet
I have to be calm. This is the part where most undercover operations go wrong, because it’s when officers and agents let their guard down.

The man with the cigar is standing at the front door. “We already arranged payment with Eduardo.”

I nod to him as he opens the front door.
 

“I thank you for your hospitality,” he says, shutting the door.

I move under the portico and down the front steps.
 

The gate begins to open.
 

I see the Lincoln waiting outside. I’m almost there. This harebrained scheme actually worked.

I’m halfway down the path when I hear shouting from the house.
 

“Detengala! Detengala!”

I don’t look back.
 

I run
.

My heels stamp across the uneven path.
 

Doors to the Lincoln burst open. Diego and his men pour out, taking crouched positions and aiming their muzzles. The quiet neighborhood, cradled by posh surroundings, becomes a battlefield.
 

The clamor of automatic weapons rattles the ground beneath me. Bullets whiz in both directions. They sound like angry cicadas buzzing by my ear.
 

Diego shouts to me, but I can’t understand him.

My heel catches a crevice between two bricks and cracks. I don’t have time to stop and remove the strappy heels. I continue hobbling. I have to hurry. The gate is starting to close. If it shuts, I’ll have no way out.
 

The bullets strike closer. The ring of gunfire becomes terrific. The herringbone-patterned brick explodes.
 

I run through the airborne shards of debris. I’m almost there. A few more steps before I’ll be in Diego’s arms.

The cracked heel breaks lose.

I fall to the ground.
 

Knees and hands slam onto the pavement.

I only know to keep moving, to give them a harder target to shoot than an immobile one.
T
he gate is almost shut. I rip the broken heel off my foot and try to get back to my feet, yet the uneven stride throws me off, and I fall back onto the shattered brick.

I’m not going to make it.

Diego plugs the gate by wedging his M4 lengthwise into the dwindling gap. The gun holds. He swings under the carbine and rushes toward me.

“I’ve got you,” he shouts
.

He throws me over his shoulder and runs for the gate. The roof of Peña’s home is covered
with
soldiers firing and reloading.
 

A slug strikes Diego in his leg. He stumbles, but remains on his feet. He passes me through the gate and into the hands of his assistants
.
 

They
grab me and carry me inside the vehicle.
 

Diego grabs his gun. Blood trails his staggering feet. He collapses against the back door and has to be pulled in the rest of the way.
 

The driver doesn’t wait for him to get all the way inside. The Lincoln rushes away with his legs still hanging out, tires and gunfire screaming into the night.

I’m asked if I’ve been hit.
 

I tell them I don’t think so.
 

Diego writhes in pain. His pants are removed so the bullet wound can be examined. His pant leg is soaked in blood. More pours out from the wound on his calf. If they don’t stop the bleeding soon, Diego won’t make it.

I discard my robe.
“Tie this around his leg
.
”
 

I instruct
them to place the tourniquet a few inches above the wound. The act may cost him
his
leg, but at least Diego won’t lose his life.

The back window explodes.
 

Shards of glass blast across my face and hair. The SUV swerves, the driver almost losing control.

I stare over my seat. A vehicle is following with a gunner hanging out of the window.

“Get down,” Santos yells, pushing my head behind the seat.
 

I cover my ears as the awesome clatter of exploding gunfire rattles my teeth. The sulfuric smell of spent munitions fills the air. Hot casings drop on me.

Tires screech.

I don’t know if it’s our vehicle or not.

“Got ‘em,” Santos yells. “Hit the gas. Get us the hell out of here.”

We’re several blocks away from danger before anyone realizes that a young guard in the back of the Lincoln has taken a fatal shot to the neck. The rest of the ride is quiet save for Diego’s occasional groans.

When we arrive at the dock, the driver says he’ll take the vehicle somewhere to be destroyed.
 

Diego is carried onto the yacht and laid upon the dining table. He isn’t going to survive, and none of his men know what to do.

“We have to get the bullet out,” I say.

 
I check his pulse. It’s weak but still beating. His face is pale; his eyes flicker.

I grab one of the guards. “You see this?” I point to Diego’s femoral artery. “I want you to press here until I tell you to stop.”

He nods and does as I say.
 

No one asks me how I know any of this. I yell for a small knife of some kind as I wash my hands in the kitchen sink. I’m handed a steak knife and a paring knife. Neither are great options, but I take the paring knife. “Hold him still.
”
His limbs are held down. I begin fishing for the bullet. The blade slicing into already mangled flesh has Diego screaming and resisting. Good. As long as Diego is kicking and hollering, he isn’t dead.
 

After opening the wound further, I remove the knife and stick my finger inside and feel around. From my brief medical-emergency training with the CIA, I know bullets undertake odd flight paths in the body. Someone shot in the chest might have the bullet lodged in their ass.
 

I use my middle finger to search as deep as I can. The tip of my finger grazes something hard and smooth. Diego’s lucky. “I got it
.
Roll him over so the bullet will come toward me.”
 

The men push his body onto his side. The bullet shifts enough to where I can pull it out. The tiny slug rings against the table and rolls into a pool of blood.
 

I cover the wound with some dressing from a first aid kit. I don’t know if it’s enough. Diego has lost a considerable amount of blood. Whether he needs a blood transfusion is beyond my limited medical training.

“We need to get him to a hospital,” I say.

The guards look warily at one another.

“He’s going to die without a doctor. I’ve done what I can to keep him alive for the next twenty minutes.
Maybe not even that long.
”

“What if we brought a doctor out to the island?” Santos asks.

“He isn’t going to live that long, and you don’t have the necessary equipment
.
You all are supposed to be his protectors. If you don’t pull this yacht around, he’s going to die on this table.”

Santos relents and changes our coordinates to a hospital close to the shore. A cache of money is taken out of a hatch in the floor.

“We’ll need to pay the hospital staff to stay quiet,” Santos says. “Word will still get out, but we’ll do our best to protect him.”

The rest of the night is a blur.
 

Diego is taken through a back door
of the hospital
and quickly rushed to a private room. Santos hands a surgeon a stack of bloody hundreds
.
T
he doctor refuses
the bribe
and pushes him out of the room.
 

Nurses try to stitch my busted li
p.
I ignore their aid. As the tequila and coke wear off, I go in and out of sleep during Diego’s surgery. Somewhere between midnight and dawn, I’m told that he’s alive and resting.
 

I sleep in a chair next to him. Armed guards stand sentry inside and outside of the room and more patrol the hospital’s parking lot.

Away from the hospital, I learn that a war ensues. Santos pays Carlos and Ivan to hunt down the rest of Peña’s men. The body count is forty by breakfast. The bloodshed has spread all the way to Medellin.

***

In the afternoon, Diego opens his eyes for the first time. I rush to his side. He leaps into a sitting position, his eyes wild. He shouts something in Spanish.

“Shhh,” I say. “It’s okay. You’re safe. I’m here.”

He looks at me and begins to cry. I tell the rest of his men to leave us. I know he can’t be seen like this. I crawl into the bed and hold him and kiss him. I don’t mind his tears. Diego has nothing to prove to me. I only want him to get better and for us to move far away from this.
 

I tell him we’ll move to New Zealand and settle in Auckland and have lots of babies and watch them grow up playing cricket because rugby is too dangerous.
 

He nods to each of my fantasies and tells me it sounds wonderful.

1
4

Diego slowly recovers and is released from the hospital the following week. He’s given a pair of crutches, but he doesn’t use them. While I tell him to rest in bed, Diego isn’t one to embrace convalescence. A fever seems to have taken hold of him, and it’s one that can’t be measured by any thermometer.

“Where’s Peña’s son?” Diego asks.

“The University,” Santos says. “Though, if he has half a brain he’s gone into hiding.”

“I want a bomb in his dorm room. Let that be a message to everyone. Where’s the boy’s mother?”

“Dead.”

“Where’s his lawyer? I hear he fled to Finland.”

“That’s what some are saying
.
I have a hard time believing it. He’s probably still in the country or has fled to Brazil until he thinks it’s safe to come back.”

“Make sure it never is.”

I rub his arm.
“Diego
, i
s all this really necessary
?
”

He flinches away as if my touch burns him. We haven’t made love since he returned from the hospital.
 

He tells Santos to leave us alone.

“Don’t ever question me in front of my men again,” he
says
. “They already look at me differently.”

“No one looks at you differently. You’re imagining things.”

“No. I’m not. They’re talking among themselves in hushed voices. They’re deciding whether I’m staying in the business or not. They’re plotting their next move.”

“So tell them the truth.”

“Are you insane? What do think will happen? That they’ll throw me a retirement party? If they sense any weakness, it will be a bloodbath.”

“Then let’s just get in your yacht and go.
I’m sure you have your money put away somewhere
. It will still be accessible. What’s stopping you?”

Diego walks to the window and looks out at the beach and the ebb and flow of the morning tide. “And what happens when we get to New Zealand? What will I do?”

“Anything you want. Retire and go fishing all day, start a real estate company.
Anything
.”

“Sounds thrilling.”

I fight the urge to yell. “You still enjoy it, don’t you? After everything, you want stay in. Even after we almost got killed. I did what you promised would end this.”

Diego doesn’t answer.

“I’m leaving tomorrow morning with or without you. The choice is yours. I can’t sit around here waiting for another retaliation. Because you know there will be one. This isn’t over. It will never be over until you walk away or you’re dead.”

***

I spend the rest of the day avoiding Diego.

A
storm has brought persistent rain that continues into the night. I watch it from the kitchen window while Diego is on the phone.

Santos enters and tells Diego that he needs a word with him.
 

Diego covers the phone.
“Just a minute
.”

“I need to talk now, sir.”

Diego tells the person on the phone that he’ll call them back.
 

They
walk up the stairs.
 

I don’t care what crisis has hit. Tomorrow I’m leaving. My mind is made up. I can’t do this anymore. If he doesn’t come with me, then I’ll somehow make my way to a phone and call for help. I’ll tell Nick and
José that Diego got tired of me and left me stranded and that I didn’t get any good evidence.
 

I make a mental note to get the mic and recorder from under the bed before I leave. I’ll throw it into the water and tell Nick and José that it was too dangerous to carry and that there was nothing worthwhile on it anyway.

I don’t want it come to that. I still have hope Diego will decide to leave with me, but from the way he’s been making calls and ignoring me, I’m beginning to have doubts.

Diego comes down the stairs alone. He crosses the kitchen and stands beside me. “Watching it rain?”

“There’s nothing else to do.”

“Let’s go out there.”

“Now? It’s pouring.”

“It will be romantic. Besides, when was the last time you just ran out into a storm and felt the rain drops fall on you?”

Diego doesn’t even grab a coat as he opens the door. “Come on. It will be fun.”