Taming Cross (Love Inc.) (16 page)

My scalp stings, and I have to squint into the afternoon sun. I see two enormous cacti a few feet to the left of the road, and my heart trips. I tug Evan's right arm and lean my lips up near his ear. “We're stopping up here! Take a right beside those rocks over there and follow the path through the weeds.”

Evan looks curious, and I nod at the rocks. “Trust me,” I tell him.

He nods once and speeds up.

The house we're going to should be a total secret. It's partway built under a dirt mound, with only small parts of stucco showing, and they blend in with the dirt.

This was one of Jesus's love nests. I know about it only because, in the months I spent as his beard, he took me here a few times for a long weekend—a weekend he really spent with his lover, David.

David Perez. He was a short guy, buff with a shaved head and a half-moon tattoo on his left arm. I liked him okay until the last week I was with Jesus. After that, I hated him.

As we round the corner and get to the house, Evan gasses the bike and I hold on tighter. Even if this is the most we’ll ever touch, it's nice to be close to a man this attractive for a little while.

I'm thinking lustful thoughts when we near the mound, and David steps out from behind a small tree and points a pistol at us.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Meredith's arms tighten around my waist, and she yells, “Go!” But it's too late.

We're going so slow that when I gas the bike, I can't maintain our balance and we fall to the right. I catch us with my leg and balance the weight of the bike and our bodies as I reach for the gun, then realize I can't hold the handlebar with my right hand
and
grab the gun.

Fuck!

“EVAN, GO!” she screams, and I want to go, I want to get her out of here so fucking bad, but I'm too late.

The bald dude with the gun is walking toward us as I try to push off with my leg and get us vertical enough that I can gas it without falling over. I try for half a second, which is as long as I need to know that I can't pull it off. I jerk my left hand out of its support system and yell, “Grab the handlebars!”

Meredith does, and I get my gun and fire a shot at homeboy's hip. It grazes him, and he shoots the bike's front tire.

“Shit!” Merri is off the bike, running, I assume until I feel her grabbing my left arm. “Come on!” she shrieks, and our friend shoots again. The bullet clears my blue jeans, then the tank, m
issing skin and bone by no more than an inch. I fumble off the bike and throw it in the direction of our friend with the gun.

He lets out a howl, and it's only then I realize that he doesn't look quite sane. His bald head, gleaming in the sun, is scraped and scratched: fingernail marks. I made the same ones on my own skin when I tried to kick the Dilaudid. His face is streaked with tears. He howls again and shoots at Merri, to my left.

“Fuck!” I yank her forward and lead her around the dirt mound, tugging her behind me, “Are you okay?” She must be, because she's running and I don't see blood.

Our would-be killer screams as he fires more shots. They’re wild, but I push Meredith in front of me just in case. We round the dirt mound, out of sight for a moment, but I can tell from his screams that he’s getting close.

Jesus, I’m so out of shape. Fucking accident. I was stupid. Can’t do this with one hand.

A close shot makes me jump; Meredith stumbles. She cries out as red blooms across her right shoulder. I rush her from behind, scooping her up with my right arm and throwing her over my shoulder, realizing belatedly that she's a sitting duck behind me, so I shift her to my front and hug her to me with my arm.

“Hold on,” I yell into her ear. “I've got to shoot again!”

I find him in the narrow, jolting frame of vision over my shoulder. I aim for his throat but I’m running and firing backwards, so the shot goes wild. He somehow manages to shoot—

SHIT! I wait for pain that doesn’t come, then look down and understand: It's my left hand. The fucker is spurting blood, but I can't feel it. Whatever.

He gets in one more shot, a crazy shot he fires with crazy eyes, and as he does I notice the handle of vodka sticking out of his pants pocket. I spot a bush and throw Merri behind it, and as I do, the bullet lodges in the sole of my shoe. I can tell because the bottom of my foot feels hot and I can feel a bump. I take one step toward him, aim, and fire two quick shots at his leg. The first misses. The second hits the bottle, shattering it. The man screams and falls to the ground, and I put two more shots in his head.

They’re grizzly, disgusting shots, and the fallout is something I'll be seeing in nightmares. Merri shrieks, then comes zipping toward me like a beautiful, girl bullet. She throws her arms around me and says, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God oh my God he's dead! You killed David! That's Jesus's boyfriend. Oh my God.”

Jesus's
boyfriend
?

“Evan, we need to move his body! Your gun is loud! Someone might have heard!”

“Yeah.”

“OH MY GOD, YOUR HAND!”

Merri grabs my left arm, and I flinch, not because it hurts but because it's weird when people touch it. It makes me feel...uncomfortable. But she doesn't let go. She gets a death grip on my wrist and holds the hand up to inspect.

It's a bloody mess, but it looks like the bullet punched out that little flap of skin between my thumb and forefinger. I've studied the anatomy of the hand enough in the last six months to know it's bleeding heavily because the radial artery is nearby. I'm feeling dizzy, but it doesn't hurt. I use my right hand to steal my left one out of Merri's grasp and whirl her around so I can see the back of her right shoulder.

“He got you, too.”

I want to rip her shirt away so I can really see the wound, but I can't do that one-handed...not unless I use my mouth to hold her collar steady.

“It was just a graze,” she says, fingering the bloody spot. The circle of blood hasn't grown much larger than a teacup saucer, but... “You’ve been shot before?”

“Of course,” she mutters. She turns to face me with her hands on her hips again. The look on her face is somehow a mix of gentle, frustrated, and sad. “Can you help me move the body? I don't think there's anywhere good to hide him out here, but I'll open the back door and we can leave him in the laundry room.”

“The back
door
?” I frown at the dirt mound, and that's when I realize... “That's a house!”

“Yeah.” She winces as she moves her right arm. Then she shocks me by pulling off her shirt.

Holy Jesus H.

If I was dizzy before, I almost pass out when I see her creamy skin. My eyes jet to her huge tits, spilling out of a silky-looking sky blue bra, and travel down her soft, slim belly to the waist of her pants. Oh fucking hell, I want to kiss her there. She looks so soft.

She steps closer to me, sending my adrenaline boner into overdrive, and rips the shirt in half, using one half of it to wrap around my hand, right where the gunshot was.

“Will this hurt?” she asks, looking into my eyes before she ties it.

“I can't feel the hand.”

“Well that's a good thing.” She's breathing heavily as she ties it. I brush her hair off her forehead to check her eyes.

“I'm not in shock,” she says. She touches my cheek. “Are you?”

“I don't think so. I don't need your help with David, either. I can drag him in if you open the door.” I might need her help, but I won't take it. I can't stand the thought of this beautiful woman touching a corpse.

“Are you sure? ’Cause I don't mind.”

I nod. “I'm sure.”

“You need to keep that left hand elevated. When we get inside I'll sterilize and do a proper bandage.”

I nod, because my head has started hurting and I'm feeling kind of off.

“The back door is right here.” She points to what looks like regular dirt, then lifts a tiny, dirt-colored plastic flap and punches in a code. Some dirt falls away, revealing a plastic-ish, dirt-orange door. She opens it somehow—I can't see from where I'm standing—and I turn to get the body.

I try not to look at him as I grab one of his legs, using all my strength to drag him through the square doorway. I’m hoping Merri’s gone further inside, but she’s right there as soon as I stumble through the door. She presses something on the wall, the way you might with a garage door, and I can hear the door sliding shut as we maneuver the dead guy into the first room on the right.

It’s a surprisingly normal looking laundry room with a stacked washer/dryer combo, a little brown rug, a shelf of laundry supplies, and a framed photo of two men embracing, holding martini glasses.

Merri and I settle the dead guy face-down on the rug, and my gaze returns to the framed photo. The bald guy at our feet is smiling in the arms of a well-worked-out Hispanic man with shoulder-length hair and a Hollywood-worthy smile.

“That’s him,” I mutter. The infamous Jesus Cientos.

Merri nods.

I glance down at the floor, where blood is pooling. “This shit is weird.”

She nods and grabs a towel off a shelf.

“Let’s go out into the hall now.” She leads the way, lightly touching my back as I step by her. Then she stuffs the towel underneath the door.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The inside of this place looks just how I remember, which is not really a surprise. Jesus and I picked out most of the décor online. From Pottery Barn, of all places. It was shipped to an empty building in Camargo, the next town over, and Jesus and David loaded it into a truck and brought it here and set the place up themselves, one weekend when Jesus pretended to be away with me. I stayed in the basement suite all weekend, cross-stitching some pillows Jesus wanted for the guest room and feeling buried alive. The basement of an underground bungalow feels really, really underground.

When I snap out of my memories and look at Evan, I find him holding out one of Jesus’s freshly laundered wife beaters. He's holding onto it with a dryer sheet because his hands are painted red. I wonder when he picked it up.

I slip the shirt on while he casts his eyes back at the door, and then I lead him into the half-bath behind the next door down. We wash our hands with pear-scented soap from Bath and Body Works.

Evan seems to be breathing hard. He looks kind of wide-eyed and is moving slowly. I wonder what the odds are that he was wrong earlier, and he really is in shock, but then I brush the thought away. This is his job.

Still, when we walk back into the hallway, I look him up and down and ask, “Are you okay?”

This makes him laugh. I laugh a little too. “Stupid question I guess.”

“Thanks for asking,” he says.

I'm leading him down the hallway, past the wine cellar and into the mouth of the kitchen, where I'm slightly amused to see surprise transform his face.

His blue eyes are wide. “Am I hallucinating?”

“Nope.” I pull out a chair at the weathered, white-washed breakfast table and move one of the blue and white breakfast mats so he doesn't get it dirty; old habits die hard. “Have a seat, I'll get the first aid stuff.”

Jesus's love nest is half underground, and it’s got central air. It feels good in here—probably seventy-three degrees, Jesus's preferred temperature—and the refrigerator is appropriately cold, so the antibiotic shots are still in good condition.

I find the first aid kit in one of the cabinets near the stainless steel refrigerator. There's an additional briefcase full of surgical supplies in the pantry. When I get back to the breakfast area, Evan has his right elbow on the table and his face propped in his hand.

Despite the shell I've tried to build around myself, I feel a bubble of concern form in my throat. Maybe it's the way he put himself between David’s bullets and me. I was running so hard I almost didn't notice, but I glanced behind me and there he was, with both arms out. I don't care who you are or what your job is, that's pretty heroic.

He doesn't move as I approach the table, so I get the perfect chance to really look at him. His shoulders are so wide, it's almost a little ridiculous, like he might be wearing football pads—except of course he's not. Beneath his sweaty, blood-splattered black t-shirt, I can see every ripple of muscle, from the exaggerated roundness of his shoulders to that delicious indention that runs down his spine between smooth slabs of muscle. I'm checking out the bicep of his left arm, wondering how he keeps it so in shape if that hand can't move, when I notice a wicked-looking scar along his collar-line.