South by Southeast (45 page)

“Come, Tennyson,” Escobar urged. “If you love her, fight for her.”

He would fire as soon as I took a step, and Escobar was deluded if he thought a shot at close range with a Mossberg would leave him a living toy to play with. I might be able to exchange my life for April's, but I couldn't trust Escobar to let her go after I was gone.

“We both know that's a losing game,” I said. “The first move I make in that direction, I'm dead.”

Escobar's gun never wavered, and April was too off-balance to resist him; her head flopped like a rag doll's under Escobar's death grip. He teased us both, bringing her face closer to the water, then away again. My adrenaline tapped out, leaving only a blind panic I wasn't sure I could shut away.

“You've surprised me, Tennyson,” Escobar said with a resigned sigh. “I expected you to be more impulsive. More eager to play the hero. If this woman isn't worth it to you,
pues
 . . . I understand.” When he shrugged, the gun's aim shifted from my waist to my face. “Help will come sooner if I shoot you, but you'll live longer if I don't. That's your own decision. Truly, all that matters to me is that you watch this woman drown before I kill you.”

A man of his word, Escobar plunged April's head into the tar.

APRIL HAD KNOWN
she needed her own plan as soon as she saw Tennyson—especially after he stripped off his clothes and she realized he hadn't brought a weapon. Tennyson
was
a weapon, but a short-range one. He couldn't get past the shotgun and planned to sacrifice himself to try to save her. She could see it in his every motion, hear it in every word. His plan was in his eyes as he gazed at her.

It's up to me
. She could jolt Escobar in some way, kick him, butt him with her head. She just had to find the right time, the right way; that was all Tennyson needed. She had to show him that she could fight with him, that he didn't have to die for her.

But Escobar wouldn't give her a chance to think. Every time she tried to map out a plan, he hurt her. Pain scattered April's thoughts.

She'd ignored the pain from having her arms twisted behind her back while Escobar walked her like a dog on a leash. But a sharp
crank
made her realize he would try to break her left wrist, and then hot, sharp pain flared when he finally did. Her wrist was a twig to him. While he distracted her with agony, he walked her closer to the water. More pain, and her knees were sinking into the damp, cold bank. He was moving too fast.

She inhaled, held it. Exhaled hard. Inhaled deeply. Packed the air down, compressing it in her lungs. Exhaled hard. Repeated.

You'll have to hold your breath. Pretend to struggle. Pretend to pass out. Hold your breath—

Then the world was gone. Only water, and something like sticky thin mud, everywhere.

Escobar's sudden motion took April by such surprise that she almost lost her breath. The water was so cold, the darkness so sudden and complete, that April forgot her plan. She forgot everything except the need to stay calm, as she appeared to be consumed with panic.

Instinct made her try to raise her head, but she couldn't move against Escobar's grip of stone.
Struggle, but don't burn up too much oxygen.
She let a trickle of bubbles escape her mouth.
He'll be watching for signs that you're losing control.

Pretend to struggle. Pretend to drown.

Her writhing felt real, tiring her. The water was absurdly shallow over something the consistency of oatmeal. Only inches separated her from living or dying, and she tried to free her mouth and nose from the liquid cage. She felt the air on her shoulder, the back of her neck. Once, her ear broke the surface, and she heard Tennyson shout, “Don't do this!”—more a roar than a shout—with so much alarm in his voice that she knew he was on the verge of charging into Escobar's shotgun blast.

Go limp. Pretend to suffocate.

Even as her lungs screamed for air, April forced herself to flop forward, paralyzed. Her neck drooped, no longer pushing back against Escobar's palm. How many seconds had she been holding her breath since he'd pushed her in? Twenty? Thirty? How long would Escobar think she could last? Did he know she was a swimmer?

She had to take a chance. If he had contempt for women, he could easily underestimate her capacity. He had felt her struggle. Mightn't he believe she was exhausted, done?

April went limp.

One one-thousand, two one-thousand—

Escobar shook her, as if to test her, and she didn't move despite his claw grasping the hair on back of her head. As her face sank deeper into the pool, she felt the water's texture change, thickening. Her nostrils felt plugged with cold, oily asphalt. Her heartbeat sent tremors throughout her joints. Escobar would never believe she was unconscious if he felt her move.

April tried to lie perfectly still
. Seven one-thousand . . . eight . . .

Escobar only had to loosen his grip for an instant. That was all she needed.

But could she wait long enough?

April was dying while I watched.

She had stopped fighting. Had she gotten a good breath? Was she drowning or playing possum? I'd seen the rush of bubbles. Water invading her lungs? Escobar kept his eyes on me, grinning. Only his clamped teeth showed his effort to hold her face beneath the water.

My muscles ached from being spring-loaded, ready to leap at him. But Escobar never stopped watching me. If I shifted my shoulders right or left, Escobar's gun followed me, waiting. Even in the dark, he saw every move I made, as if he knew my mind.

“You stand there and do nothing?” Escobar said. “You're so weak, Tennyson?”

The simplistic-minded confuse weakness and strength every day.

“Look at her, dammit!” I said, pointing. “You killed her!”

I'd seen April swim underwater from one end of a pool to the other without taking a breath, so I didn't believe she was dead, even if I was setting myself up for a nasty surprise.
Look over there!
was a child's game, a transparent ploy. But my words nearly choked me. I
let Escobar hear my sorrow and resignation, allowing tears to run down my face. I swayed as if I might swoon, powerless hands posed on top of my head. For good measure, I pretended to sob.

And then . . . it wasn't entirely pretense.

Escobar's face softened to a kind of rapture as he studied me. My grief delighted him. His teeth unclenched as he loosened his grip on April. He shifted his weight slightly, easing his knee's pressure from her back. Escobar had kept too many photographs as trophies; I knew he wouldn't be able to resist a peek at a fresh kill. His eyes glanced away from me, toward April's submerged head. Would he pull her face out to check his work?

I never found out what Escobar might have done.

Because suddenly, my angel thrashed hard, bucking against Escobar with so much force that his gun wobbled an inch or two beyond me while he regained his balance.

I acted a millisecond later, flying at Escobar with maniac speed, but I dove instead of leaping high. Curled tightly, performed a shoulder roll, and came up from below. Praying it would take him a moment to adjust his aim.

Did I mention that I'm fast?

Before Escobar could get his shotgun in line, I was coming up, kicking from below, aiming at his groin and stomach, hoping I'd miss April. He lurched backward, but I got a grazing shot in and heard him gasp in pain. Then the three of us were a tangle of arms and legs and ankle cuffs and shotgun.

I wrapped one arm around Escobar's neck and tugged at his death grip on April with the other. She bucked again, struggling to free herself from his weight. Her head was still submerged, and then her face came free with a sucking sound, black with tar.

Escobar waved his shotgun, unable to find a way to contort his arm to hit a target. I didn't have an arm free to grab the gun, but I heaved hard away from April, and my weight landed on Escobar's shoulder with a
crunch
.

April's legs kicked at Escobar as she tried to curl herself away from the pit. I kicked, too, pushing Escobar's legs away from April's midsection to release her.

A heaving gasp came from her, followed by frantic choking and spitting up, the sound of a ferocious fight for life. April flopped herself away from the pit like a beached fish. April could win her battle to live as long as I kept Escobar away from her.

I wrestled Escobar for his weapon but he held on, and the barrel was too long to turn around on him the way he had turned the handgun on my father. He would shoot April out of spite if he could. I kneed Escobar in the thigh and, as he grimaced, found the leverage to twist and fling the shotgun out of his grip, sending it flying into the water with a near-silent splash ten feet from us, beneath the frozen mastodon's tusks.

But the price was steep: Escobar mule-kicked me with the soles of both shoes on my upper thigh, barely missing my groin. That would have finished me, but the pain still exploded a bomb in my gut.

Gustavo Escobar and I were a long way from finished. He knew how to fight, too.

My brain's messages to my muscles slowed, and Escobar wriggled away from me. Maybe I'd hoped he'd go after the shotgun. That little mistake would have mired him in the tar, and April and I could have sat on the bank and watched him become a paleontologist's wet dream.

But no, instead, he came at me. I'd gotten to my feet and instinctively tried to kick, ripping my own leg out from under me when I yanked on the ankle cuffs.
Damn!

Tottering, I was a sitting duck as his shoulder slammed into me, going for a single-leg takedown that came right out of a college wrestling playbook.

“April, run!” I shouted.

“Help us . . .” I heard April try to shout, but it was little more
than a hoarse whisper. She sounded as if she was still at ground level. She wasn't on her feet yet.

“April,
run
!” I yelled again.

I was down on my back in the shallow muck at the edge of the tar pit, and we were rolling, too close to disaster for either of us to gain advantage.

A few inches of water over a tarry abyss. With the water's oily texture, I could barely keep a grip on him. Escobar wriggled like an eel, adjusting easily to every grip and grapple. I sucked in two lungs full of air before he pinned me under the water.

Shit,
I realized.
He's a wrestler
. Some scrap of information about his college wrestling scholarship had emerged in the tabloids, but I'd forgotten when it mattered most.

I've studied half a dozen different fighting arts, and every single one of them was pugilistic, dammit. At ground-and-pound range, in the slippery muck at the edge of a lethal tar pit, shackled by ankle chains, I was about as screwed as a guy could be without getting kissed first.

Another knee to my gut, and I coughed out my air. Some body responses are involuntary, even when they're deadly. I saw Escobar's pale face above me, the ancient mastodon above him. I saw his teeth when he smiled.

I'd only faced off with one true killer before Gustavo Escobar. The rest of the men I'd fought had been desperate; killing wasn't natural to them, even if they had killed others. My last dance with a death merchant had ended so improbably that I still didn't understand how I had walked away from Spider and his deadly knife.

And now Gustavo Escobar was killing me with his bare hands. Drowning me. Even when I heard Dad's voice—
Get him, Ten
—I couldn't catch my rhythm, couldn't break his advantage. The realization became clearer, the voice of defeat louder in my ears and my mind.
You're going to die tonight.

He could catch April. He would go after Chela next. He would
kill all of us. My last thoughts in the tar pit would be self-loathing and shame.

Escobar had slithered behind me as I thought of Chela, his arm slipping around my neck, as mine had once slipped around Spider's. I got my chin down and defeated the worst part of his naked strangle. He'd left me enough room to get my teeth into his forearm, and Lord, I bit him as if I were one of his movie undead.