Ryan
The girl had no idea what failure was.
He’d made a promise.
Jessica was silent for a long time. Just promise you’ll get Polly and Adeline out of here.
And if a passing neighbor hadn’t come across Penelope stumbling down the road outside her house, bleeding from a hole in her forehead, the girl would have been even deader.
But they’d both dodged the scythe, Penelope and Ryan.
Penelope had been rushed to a hospital. Her survival was declared a miracle, a one-in-a-million parabellum trajectory, and it meant that Ryan could keep the single solitary promise he’d ever made in his life.
The minute they let him out of Huntsville last week, he’d gathered some gear and picked up a vehicle and headed back to Fort Stockton.
He’d pulled up outside Penelope’s school, met her eye through the window.
He’d patted the back seat of his bike. The girl had slipped outside without drawing much notice.
Penelope could sneak with the best of them, when she needed to.
She could also scare the shit out of him when she was bored. More than once on the long ride, Ryan had been certain he heard Franklin O’Shea on the back of his bike, berating his men for failing to make their numbers. “Enough of The Game,” Ryan had said.
Ryan had thought that Mexico City would have been far enough from west Texas to escape Stanley Holiday’s eyes—or, to be more exact, the eyes of Mister Frank O’Shea—but Ryan was never correct about much.
Stanley had not only known the hotel where Ryan was staying with Penelope: he’d known the fucking room number.
Stanley had crushed Ryan’s nose with the butt of a massive Desert Eagle magnum yesterday morning. If Penelope hadn’t started crying, Stanley would have probably done much worse.
But was that enough to stop Ryan Phan?
Now, as a funny flash of silver light passed over the Texas sky, Ryan Phan was behind Stanley Holiday’s minivan because he was an idiot with something to prove, if only to himself.
Ryan was going to keep the promise he’d made to Penelope’s mother.
He was going to get the girl out of here, whatever it took.
Not that he had any idea how to do that.
Stanley was no doubt still armed with that Desert Eagle.
Ryan wasn’t carrying any sort of weapon, not even a knife.
He’d crossed the border with a fake passport and a pocketful of cash and bag of decent cocaine in case he needed to grease any noses.
Thankfully, he’d found a friend at the Border Patrol station—one of the few men around here who wasn’t a fan of Franklin O’Shea or any part of his entourage.
Still, his friend on the BP didn’t like Ryan enough to give him a gun.
And he’d taken the cocaine. Ryan was armed with nothing but his wits and his tongue and his temperamental luck.
Ryan had no plan, no idea what he would do when he and that Honda Odyssey finally stopped moving. But when had that ever stopped him?
Ryan blew a clot of blood from his broken nose, let it whip away into the wind. Maybe he wouldn’t just get Penelope back tonight.
Maybe he could get some revenge.
Blood for blood. It’s the law of the desert. That’s what Jessica Holiday used to say. And she’d probably say it went double for her father.