Chapter 18
CHAPTER 18
BLACK SWORE AND popped the bonnet then climbed out of the cab with me following. As I peered down into the engine, I didn’t need the years of knowledge imparted into me by Vinnie, the dude who taught me how to nick cars, to see the timing belt had snapped. That truck was going nowhere.
“Monkey-flunking shiznits.” I kicked the tyre, just for good measure.
“Well, that’s one way of putting it. A polite way. What’s wrong with your potty mouth?”
“Remember that bet we made?”
“Uh, vaguely?”
“Well, I’m winning.”
But only just. Now we were stuck miles from anywhere with a truck that didn’t go and a pregnant woman. When Mr. Murphy and Lady Luck duked it out to see who would get the spare seat in the back, it was obvious who’d won.
There was only one thing for it.
“I’ll go back.”
Black didn’t answer.
“You know I have to. We can’t ask Jane to walk far. It’s seven miles to the Ramos place, eight to the nearest civilisation, and there’s nothing else around.”
“I could go,” Black said, but his tone suggested he was offering more out of obligation than anything else.
“How much running have you done recently?”
“Not a lot.” A beat of silence. “Okay, none.”
So it had to be me, then. Seven miles, fifty minutes in this terrain. There was that other rust-bucket of a truck back at the compound, clinging onto the last of its mechanical life, and I’d have to fetch it.
“You need to stay and take care of Jane,” I told Black.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
He gave her that smile again, and hurt crackled through me before I locked it away and pasted on a mask of my own.
Together, we pushed the pickup down the incline at the edge of the track and into the undergrowth. Luckily, despite being a prisoner for so long, Black had kept some of his strength, because the monster of a thing weighed a ton and the cloying mud didn’t help. We shoved it until the bumper hit a tree, and although it wasn’t completely hidden, nobody would spot it from a quick glance after we’d arranged a tangle of vines over the top.
Before I left, I shed my excess kit—there was no sense in being weighed down by Hector’s paperwork. I gave Black my backup gun, keeping my favourite Walther P88 on my right thigh and a couple of spare magazines in the small of my back.
I was about to start running when Black called me over. “Diamond, do me a favour? Don’t die.”
Don’t die? Did he have that little faith in me? “I wasn’t planning on it.”
On my trek back, I tried to put Black out of my head. And Jane. I didn’t want to think of the relationship going on there. Or who the father of Jane’s baby was. From the size of her, she had to be at least eight months pregnant, and how long had Black been gone? Almost nine. Yep, a toddler could have done the maths. I felt sick.
Black was my husband. Mine . Yes, I know we’d never had that kind of relationship, but it would kill me if he’d fathered a baby with someone else. Still, I’d let him down so badly I didn’t have the right to expect anything from him anymore.
Mind swirling, I tried to refocus my emotions. Alex had taught me that trick when I needed to fight him in training and my head wasn’t in the right place. Instead of worrying about Black, I switched my attention to Diego. Where was he? I hated loose ends, and we needed to take him out before he got to us. I hoped Nate had been sensible enough to put Eduardo’s people on high alert in case anyone realised the connection. Who was I kidding? Of course Nate would have done that. He thought of everything. It was just me who kept screwing things up.
Once I settled into my stride, I made it back to the compound in forty-eight minutes. Not bad considering I was wearing boots and running through mud. Now I needed to get the other truck and return for Black and... Nope, still didn’t want to think about it. Or rather, her.
Sweat dripped from every part of me as I jogged past the still-smoking guard hut and cut left to the trees, keeping my fingers crossed that Hector’s men had been as lax with the keys in the second vehicle. I didn’t want more delays while I coaxed the flipping thing into life. I was sick of this place—the sticky heat, the squadrons of bitey things, the men with automatic weapons.
As I darted from one shadow to the next, I felt a prickle on the back of my neck. Another mosquito? No, something was up. I’d barely had time to process that when I heard the snick of a gun being cocked behind me.
F…fiddlesticks. I stopped and turned around, raising my hands above my head as I did so.
Well, the good news was I’d found Diego.
The bad news was he had a pistol pointed straight at my head. Not only that, two caffeinated gorillas flanked him, and they both held guns as well. Big ones. Oh, rats. I hated being in this position.
Recognition flitted across his face. “You were with Sebastien Garcia the other week.”
“Yes.” Wonderful, now I’d managed to bring the Garcias into this for sure. Well, I might as well admit who I was to try and take some of the heat off them. “Emerson Black. And when I said it was a pleasure to meet you, I lied.”
His eyes narrowed. “You killed my father, didn’t you?”
“I don’t know why you’re so upset. You killed Carlos.”
“That was an accident. It was supposed to be your husband, not my stupid stepbrother.”
Accident? Stepbrother? They weren’t full siblings? This circus got crazier by the minute.
“You tried to kill me too,” I said, stalling while I tried to work out what was going on.
“You took out fourteen of our best men. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get good staff nowadays?”
“Well, they weren’t that good, were they? They missed.”
I couldn’t help pointing that out, but it only annoyed him more. Fire blazed in his eyes, and his finger shifted on the trigger.
“A mistake which I do not intend to repeat.”
Great. I needed a plan. My pistol was still in my thigh holster, and by the time I reached for it, I wouldn’t have a head anymore. I was contemplating my options when something large and black leapt out of the trees and launched itself at Diego. He got a shot off, but it went high over my left shoulder. I didn’t hesitate. I drew my gun and fired into the men each side of him, then when the black thing rolled to the side, I double tapped Diego in the head.
What in the world just happened?
From the tangled mass on the ground wriggled what looked like a panther. It sat up and we stared at each other. Holy fudge, Bradley warned me there were big cats in the jungle, but I didn’t think they came out and attacked people like that!
Would I be next? What if it wanted dessert?
I trained my gun on it, not breaking eye contact. The sleek black cat was a beautiful creature, and I didn’t want to kill it if I could avoid doing so, plus it had just done me a massive favour. I took one step back, and it stayed still. I moved another foot, and it took a pace towards me.
Er, shoot.
I glanced to my right, looking for something I could use as cover. There wasn’t much, only trees and a few thorny bushes. Could panthers climb trees? I was pretty sure I’d seen a documentary a while back where they did exactly that.
And so our standoff progressed. The cat shifted slightly, and I glimpsed something around its neck. What was it? I risked a step to the side. It was a red belt. A red fricking belt.
Jane’s words came back to me: “He’s big and black, and he has a red collar on.”
This was her flipping pet? We definitely needed to work on her descriptive skills.
“Kitty?”
His ears pricked up, and he walked towards me. I stood dead still as he rubbed himself along my legs like a giant house cat. Kind of cute, kind of scary. I tentatively reached down and scratched his head. He started purring, a deep rumbling noise that sounded remarkably similar to a distant aircraft taking off.
“Well, Kitty, I guess Jane was right. You didn’t like Diego very much.”
Jane said she’d been feeding him, right? He didn’t seem so interested in feasting on Diego’s still-twitching body, so maybe he wasn’t all that hungry. We could leave that waste of space for Kitty’s wilder cousins.
With the big cat trailing after me, I walked further into the compound. Diego and his two buddies had to have got here somehow, and they didn’t pass us on the road. And there it was—a shiny red Eurocopter, glinting in the sunshine. Hallelujah! The devil had finally come through for me.
I hustled over to my lifeline, staying alert for any more of Ramos’s men. Kitty followed, his head swinging right and left, and I swear he was looking for bad guys too. I’d never been much of a cat person, but I was rapidly changing my mind.
When I opened the door to the helicopter, Kitty stopped and stared at me.
“What?” I asked him. “Do you want to come too?”
He leapt inside and sat in the co-pilot’s seat, staring out of the window. Guess that answered my question. I climbed in after him and gingerly buckled the seatbelt through his collar. Still purring, he expressed his gratitude by licking me, which felt like having my face sandpapered.
I shut the doors, strapped myself in, and warmed up the engine, the sound of the rotors sweet music to my ears. Once the turbine was good to go, I took off, following the road back to pick up Black.
To pick up Black and go home.
The trip was so much faster by helicopter, and I got to the dead truck in less than ten minutes. I had to fly a little further to find somewhere wide enough to land, then I hopped out and jogged back to find my passengers.
When Black saw me, he emerged from the undergrowth, holding Jane by the hand. A lump formed in my throat as he put his arm around her waist and guided her around the potholes, then helped her up into the back of the helicopter.
“Where did you find this?” Black asked, jerking a thumb at my new toy.
“I borrowed it from Diego. He won’t be needing it back.”
Jane’s eyes went wide. “Did you kill him?”
“Yeah.”
She nodded solemnly. “Good.”
When Kitty realised who’d joined us, he tried to leap over the seat, almost strangling himself in the process. I unclipped him and he made another attempt, this time landing in Jane’s lap.
“Kitty,” she cried out gleefully. “You found Kitty. Thank you so much.”
They both looked so happy, Kitty energetically taking a layer of skin off her cheeks and Jane laughing as she let him do it. Aw shoot, I might want to hate her, but I couldn’t. She’d looked after my beloved husband when I was incapable, and her oversized moggy had just saved my life.
Black glanced at the feline lying across the backseat, shrugged, and climbed in next to me. There was a spare set of headphones on the console, and he settled them over his ears. Just like old times. A minute later we set off on our way once more, and as the helicopter rose over the rainforest canopy, I couldn’t freaking wait to get out of that place.