17. Miguel
17
MIGUEL
I sabel ran. Just like she had when I’d found her out on the beach, she sprinted over the sand.
Always running.
Always escaping.
Once more, I was treated to her backside as she fled. From me. But she did so under my instructions now.
Whipping my head back and forth, I watched her as she hurried along the retaining wall along the beach. My goal was to cover her as far as I could, but even that was a crappy, hopeless idea. Someone was prepared to take her out with a sniper. Standing on the ground near her, I would be no help if a bullet were to come from above and afar.
Still, I had to stay close as she retreated, physically blocking her the best I could.
As soon as she was gone, running too far ahead, I kept my face trained in the other direction. Scanning the beach, I saw no one who could be alerting a shooter in the distance. And searching the line of businesses from where those shots had come from, only one structure was a possibility.
Analyzing the angle and calculating precisely where a sniper would have been set up indicated that there was a single tall building that could have been used.
Narrowing my eyes at the office building that stood out among the others, I ran out into the dissipating rain and planned to assess what I could learn.
The shooter wouldn’t be there. I didn’t have a single doubt about that. By the time it’d take me to run along the street that was half trees and park area and half low buildings, the shooter would have had more than enough opportunity to pack up their gun and scope to leave.
Through their eyepiece, they would’ve seen how we’d taken cover. They had to have watched how Isabel got away. And I bet they would have seen me running in their direction.
Still, I had to try. I needed answers with such an intensity that I felt like my brain would explode. I was sick of this confusion, tired of this feeling that I was missing something critical about what should’ve been so simple. One last job. One minor target. Already, those two conditions had been blown up beyond my control. Isabel wasn’t one last job. She was the job I feared I’d fail to complete. She wasn’t one minor target like many others. She was the woman I wanted to protect and keep safe from whatever dangers had been set on her shoulders.
Ten minutes later, I skidded to a stop at the building I was certain the shooter had taken his shot from. Graffiti coated the surface of the exterior wall. Busted windows and cracked-off doors and shutters gave it a more depressing appearance. It was a rundown, piece-of-shit building that wasn’t good for anything but squatters and vermin.
And snipers.
I heaved in a deep breath, ignoring the small gathering of hookers and druggies at the corner. They moved to music, butchering what was supposed to be a version of jingle bells. Their laughter wafted over to me, mixed in with the sweetly pungent stink of their weed. Ignoring both, keeping a steady look on my surroundings, I entered the building, gun in my hand and ready to use.
The second I entered, I knew he was gone. No one was here, not even the homeless and hopeless who might often call this a sanctuary. Now that the rain had stopped, they’d moved back out into the fresh, still muggy air, but air that was breezier and cooler after that storm.
Sprinting up the stairs, taking them two at a time, I checked the whole building. Every floor, each room, and all the stairwells.
No one was running out with a rifle. They were gone. No loitering bums were hanging out to tell me anything, either. I checked it all, knowing with every step I took that the odds were low that I’d find anything.
Up at the highest point, on the rooftop access area, I looked out over the wet beach. Waves crashed at the shore, frenzied and wild from the cold air front that had moved through with the rain and lightning. Down below, no one hung out on the beach.
I saw the spot where I’d taken Isabel down on the sand and fucked her like I’d fantasized about. Hard, relentlessly, without pausing. We’d come right over there, and before we’d had a chance to even come down from that high, someone stood here, where I placed my feet, and tried to kill her.
Why? Who?
Competition wasn’t unheard of. It was more common than not. When someone had a hit on their head, contractors could start a bidding war for who’d get the most for that specific kill. I couldn’t understand how that was happening with Isabel. Drago hadn’t even asked me to kill her at first. He’d asked me to kidnap her and relented to my protest, only telling me I could kill her after the fact, as if it hardly mattered whether she lived or died.
Isabel was only supposed to be targeted as a way to lure Louis Flores out of hiding. But was it so important that someone else could be dispatched to get her too?
I ran my hand over my hair, sighing heavily at more questions and fewer answers. Dropping my gaze, I found the still-smoking tip of the cigarette the shooter must have left in their haste. It wouldn’t do me any good. Nothing here would. All I could do was return to Isabel and demand that she open up—not sexually, not yet. I needed information. I couldn’t keep going at this need to protect her without all the facts.
I left the building slower than I had entered it. Out on the sidewalk, the hookers and druggies danced and moved to their music, drinking and sharing a joint.
One approached me, though, a tall woman with a lopsided Santa hat on her head.
“Whatcha lookin’ for this Christmas? Hmm, big boy? Lookin’ for a treat for yourself?” She grinned, showing off surprisingly pearly white teeth. They had to be fake, too clean in this dirty part of town overruled by gangs and violence.
Christmas was a week away, but that hardly mattered. I wasn’t looking for any treats or gifts. I was coming to the slow realization that I’d found the best one I could ever want—Isabel. I just had to keep her with me and alive long enough to enjoy her.
The hooker eyed me up and down as I considered walking away. She didn’t just look at me as a potential customer, though. She looked at me as a source of what she wanted. Money.
“Because you know how Santa’s elves work. We got eyes and ears everywhere.”
Now we’re talking.
I reached for my wallet.
“You a cop?”
For fuck’s sake. I was really losing my edge if people would keep asking me that. I wasn’t a cop, never had been, and would never want to be one. Both sides of the law were corrupt, and my side, this side, paid better.
“No.” I opened my wallet so she could get a peek of the bills I had. “You see anyone come out of that building?” I jerked my head toward it.
“How much you got?”
I held up a substantial bit of money.
“I sure did,” she replied, taking it. “Headed out to Locust Street. I heard them say they were going to Omar’s apartment.”
I had no clue who he was, but it would work. Names worked. I peeled off another bill.
“He had a buddy come pick him up. They argued as they got into a blue truck.”
Nodding, I gave her another bill. “What’d he look like?”
She sauntered closer. “Tall, built like you.” She squeezed my bicep. “Black hair and a little here.” She pinched my chin to suggest a goatee. “And a long line, right here.” She trailed her fingertip from the corner of my eye over my cheek.
“Thanks.” I gave her another bill and took off.
Locust wasn’t far. I only knew of where it was because I’d scoped it out earlier in the hopes that Isabel might show up at the small art gallery there. She hadn’t. But I’d familiarized myself with the area and knew it was a short alley of shops and businesses rather than apartment complexes. Best of all, it wasn’t far away. I ran there, damning this stupid stubbed toe that still ached.
Finding the area easily, I sought out the truck first.
Bingo.
It was parked near a rear entrance to what had to be a pair of small apartments over a bakery. Passing the truck while scoping out the area for anyone watching, I placed my hand on the hood of the old vehicle to see if it was still warm.
It was. It was hot, actually, proving that it had been driven and parked here very recently.
Once more, for the second time tonight, I climbed up a stairwell. Gun in hand, heart pounding in that regular uptick of pending action, I stuck to the wall as I hurried up the exterior staircase. Metal shook and pieces ground together, but I placed my feet as quietly, carefully, and strategically as I could.
Relying on stealth, I crept up close to the two men arguing in an apartment right at the top of the stairs. Their voices weren’t reaching me clearly enough for me to understand what was being said, but I intended to find out what was going on.
Answers were within my grasp. I felt it. I tasted the anticipation of finally getting some damn solutions and clues.
I set my foot down on the last step, getting to the landing, and a loud creak sounded.
Goddammit!
The voices stopped. They’d heard.
Fuck this. I was a sitting duck out here. They’d run or shoot, which meant I had to beat them to it. I pulled off both, running and slamming the closed door open as I fired.
Someone else fired a gun too, but it wasn’t me who bled.
The man the hooker had described staggered back. His hand was pressed to his chest as he tried to stem the blood from where my bullet had punched through him.
“What is this?” the other man roared. He was lankier and taller, but no less effective of a foe.
He turned his gun to me, and within the small apartment, too many shots were fired at too close of a range. We fought, two against one, until I killed the sniper who’d fired at Isabel on the beach. I wanted to keep him alive for answers, but it was impossible in this tight mess of fighting off both of them without being killed myself.
I ended up taken down, caught trapped against the floor as the taller man tried to choke me out. My gun lay inches from my hand as I struggled to keep him from squeezing my throat and ending my life.
Muttering and grinding his teeth, he stared down at me. Muscles bulged in his arms as he shook with the force of trying to overpower me, to override my will to survive.
I groped for my gun, swearing to myself that this couldn’t be it. I’d only just found Isabel. I’d only just found something to fill my days with, to resist this loneliness that crept into my mind far too often.
I couldn’t die. Not like this. Not yet. I had to live to protect her. To?—
“We need to end her. End Flores’s woman.”
Trying to balance the urgency of fending off this man and listening to what he said, I felt torn in two.
What?
What did he just say?
I stretched further to grab my gun. The barest brush of metal touched the swipe of my fingertip.
“Need to end his femme fatale,” he muttered.
Black dots danced in my peripheral vision. My body screamed for oxygen.
In a desperate last thrust of my arm, I shot up to get my gun. The instant it was in my hand, I turned it on him and shot him in the head. Once. Twice. He flung back, and I gasped and coughed, wheezing for air as I scooted aside.
For good measure, as I sat on the floor and dragged in ragged breaths and deep sucks of air, I shot him once more.
Staring at him and realizing I’d done it, I’d survived, I thought back to what he’d muttered.
Louis’s woman? Like a girlfriend?
His femme fatale?
I shook my head as the most obvious answers hit me.
Isabel.
Was he talking about Isabel?
Horrified by the possibility that I could’ve been duped, that I’d been led by my dick to believe her when she said she knew nothing, I stood with staggering, weak steps.
No. He couldn’t have been talking about her. It was clear someone—besides me—was trying to kill her, but I couldn’t wrap my head around the thought that she would be a target, not as a pawn to lure her father out of hiding but because she was her father’s…
Femme fatale?
I left in a rush to get back to her.
Isabel was a mural painter. Nothing more.
But on my return trip to my hotel, I had to admit that I didn’t really know her that well. I saw her file. I read up on her. I fucked her. I knew what she felt like, gripping my dick so perfectly, but past that? I had no clue what was going on.
“Goddammit. Damn it all,” I muttered to myself, rushing back to the hotel as quickly as I could, convinced every step of the way that she could be working with Louis. That she could be a player in this, not a pawn.
I had no business wanting her. I knew better than to fuck a target, to get involved at all.
Regret crashed over me as I rode the elevator up to my floor. Still breathing hard from the running, fighting, and almost being choked to death, I sagged against the wall of the elevator car. Berating myself for thinking with my dick and not my head, I worried that she wouldn’t be waiting in my room.
That she’d played me.
That it was all a twisted game to throw me off from finishing one last job.
Narrowing my eyes at the numbers lighting up on the elevator, I counted down the time to see whether she’d stayed or she’d left. It would be the last time I’d have to wonder about this very thing. Because if she was in my room, I wouldn’t be letting her out of my sight ever fucking again.
Not until I knew which way was up.
Not until I could relax in knowing I was doing the right thing to defend her and protect her.
Not until I understood why I would have to fall for the last woman in the world I should even consider to be mine .