Chapter Four
By the time I got my ass planted in the passenger seat, Pete had the engine running.
“Hold tight,” he warned.
I looked over my shoulder to make sure Cat was secure, or as secure as someone in the back of a van kitted out for transport, not passengers, could be.
She was eyeing her pack behind Pete’s seat. I bet she was still trying to puzzle out how Mason had gotten it off her while I’d had her arms pinned to her sides.
She reached out, grabbed a strap, and had her answer.
“You cut my straps,” she muttered.
“I’ll buy you a new one,” Mase told her.
Pete hit the gas. Fallon grabbed Cat by the back of my vest as she pitched to the side.
“Might want to brace, he’s taking out—”
Fallon didn’t finish, mainly because Pete crashed through the garage door, rendering his warning moot. The van veered right and Pete corrected. I turned to face forward and grabbed my RXM from the glove box, leaving my M4 wedged between the center console and the seat as my last resort.
“I’ve got four at our nine,” I said, calling out the four men to the left of the vehicle.
Pete would have to take care of them. I couldn’t shoot across him. He swerved the van to the left, gunned the engine, and played chicken with four Honduran gang members who would rather be run over than go back to Lopez and explain how they pussied out and ran for cover.
I scanned to the right, found the two others, and engaged, sending warning shots instead of taking them out.
“Brace,” I called back to the team.
A second later, Pete hit the chain-link gate. Mangled metal scraped the side of the van as he drove through.
I pulled the barrel of my RXM back into the vehicle and out of sight. The road was empty of pedestrians, but in this neighborhood, that didn’t mean shit. Lopez had scouts everywhere, peeking through dirty windows, sitting in cars, on the rooftops . . . Anywhere someone could hide, they did.
“One of you call in to Shep. Have him run the footage and catalog. We also need a new safe house,” Pete instructed.
“Shepherd Drexel?” Cat asked.
I clamped down on my molars in an effort not to growl my frustration and focused on watching the road.
I wasn’t surprised Cat knew who Shepherd Drexel was.
Shep was a well-known hacker. He also skirted the boundary between morally gray and morally bankrupt.
It wasn’t that the man didn’t know right from wrong—he did.
He just lived by the code of: by any means necessary.
Whereas most people had lines they wouldn’t cross, Shep would back up and take a running start before he leaped over them.
So Cat knowing who Shep was wasn’t what had me struggling to keep my attention on my surroundings. It was the wonder I heard that was borderline giddy. The last person Catarina Keys needed to have contact with was Shepherd Drexel. The two of them together would do my head in.
“Yeah,” Fallon answered. Now I wanted to turn around and punch my teammate. “He runs intel for us.”
“Seriously? I thought he—”
“We got a tail,” Pete thankfully cut in. “White Honda.”
I glanced in the side mirror and spotted the old hooptie.
“Driver and passenger,” I confirmed. “I can’t see if there’s anyone in the back.”
Pete made a sharp left, narrowly missing an oncoming car, taking us closer to the end of Lopez’s territory.
One of the unusual things about Tegucigalpa was the pockets of gang presence.
Some of these pockets were only separated by a street.
You could cross over into a rival gang’s area simply by crossing the intersection.
The city was a maze of violence, some areas worse than others, some relatively safe if you stayed in the center city by the malls.
Relatively safe, meaning it was relative to the daily murder count that happened in the barrios.
Safety also depended on if you were a man or a woman.
Women were never safe in the Northern Triangle of Central America.
“One block until we’re clear.”
As soon as the words left Pete’s mouth, bullets peppered the back of the van.
“Motherfucker,” Mason groused. “You had to say it.”
More bullets peppered the side of the van.
“Hit the floor, Kitty. The van’s not bulletproof,” Fallon informed Cat.
Jesus fuck, I was totally punching my friend in the mouth when we got out of the van.
“Should we be shooting back?” Cat asked.
“This is just the Calaveras boys’ way of asking us nicely to leave,” Mason informed her.
More rounds popped off.
I heard the familiar whiz-crack of a projectile snap past my head right before the windshield spiderwebbed.
The high-pitched ringing started immediately. I heard loud but muffled sounds and couldn’t make out words over the painful buzzing. I reached up to touch the side of my head, ear, neck. Nothing felt sticky.
More loud pops, these coming from inside the van. I turned to look into the back and died another thousand deaths, courtesy of Catarina. She was on her knees at the back of the van, and I could tell by the jerk of her shoulders she was returning fire, along with Mason.
“Pull her the fuck back,” I shouted.
Either no one could hear me over the ringing in their ears, the gunfire, or both, or they were ignoring me.
I was getting ready to crawl into the back and remove Cat from the direct line of fire myself when Pete made another turn, and the shooting stopped.
“Driver’s out,” Mason yelled, or at least that’s the best I could interpret.
The silence that ensued only exacerbated the incessant ringing that I knew from experience we’d be suffering for at least the next hour, if not two.
There was a tap on my shoulder. I glanced over to find Fallon shoving his phone at me. I grabbed the device, looked at the screen, and read the message on the opened Notes app.
Texted Shep. Waiting to here back.
If it hadn’t felt like an ice pick had punctured my eardrum, I would’ve made fun of him for his typo. I’d file that away for later. I kept reading.
Your woman’s a badass. I think we should keep her.
I was going to need dental work when I got back to San Diego, or I was going to give myself TMJ from the jaw clenching.
I shoved the phone into Fallon’s waiting hand and looked for a landmark.
Mas X Menos supermarket, next to a sketchy-looking auto repair station.
We were officially in a gang-free zone. Or, an area that wasn’t fully controlled by a gang.
The US Embassy was two blocks down. The politicians weren’t the only ones who played politics in Honduras.
Just because the gang leaders were ruthless criminals didn’t mean they weren’t smart.
They’d agree to keep the area around the embassy neutral for a payoff.
Fallon shoved his phone back through the space between the seats. I glanced at it and felt a headache blooming.
Three words that had me wanting to scrap the mission until I could safely escort Cat home.
San Pedro Sula—the hub of drug trafficking.
If there was one city in all of Honduras I didn’t want to take Cat to, it would be San Pedro Sula. If Shep was sending us there, that meant he’d located our target. And of course, Berta ‘the Angel of Death’ Lanza would be in San Pedro Sula. Where else would a woman on the warpath be?
Good Christ.
I jerked my chin. The phone disappeared.
I pulled mine out of my pocket, opened the Maps app, and put in the city name.
It was a minimum of a five-hour drive to the northern coast, closer to six if we avoided the toll roads.
Not to be confused with traditional toll roads like the Jersey Turnpike or bridge tolls.
These tolls were nothing more than a money grab from the police.
They’d set up checkpoints for the sole purpose of extorting a few bucks.
The problem wasn’t the money, though it was annoying as fuck to have to stop every twenty kilometers to pay off another cop; it was that each time we got stopped, we courted an issue with our documents.
Not that they wouldn’t hold up under scrutiny, but getting hauled in for questioning was out of the question.
It was better to take the long route, avoid the tolls and possible side-of-the-road battles.
Traffic was a nightmare in this part of the city. Instead of silently showing Pete the map on my phone, I told him where we were going. I saw him wince, then jerk his chin in recognition.
One problem solved.
Next up, Cat.
I turned in my seat.
I don’t know what I thought I would find her doing, but sitting on her ass, knees cocked up, leaning up against the side wall of the van next to Fallon with her head bent to his phone and smiling, shards of broken glass littering the scarred and dirty floorboards, was not it.
I glanced at Mason. His position was the same, but his legs were stretched out, ankles crossed, armed folded over his chest, eyes firmly on Catarina, checking her out.
I knew that look. I’d spent the last nine months with my new team.
Six of those months were spent training at Pete’s compound in the Jamul Mountains south of San Diego.
It wasn’t battle tactics we practiced. We all had the same training from the SEAL Teams. The six months were spent team building, learning how to work together in flawless synchronicity, learning how to read each other, learning strengths and weaknesses.
I’d studied them, and they’d studied me.
To the average observer, Mase looked like he was checking out a hot chick, but the once-over had nothing to do with her good looks.
Just because I didn’t see it didn’t mean I didn’t know that when Mason deemed it was time to return fire, Cat scrambled—maybe even shoved Fallon out of the way—to get into a firing position.
That was Catarina, always in the mix. Brave, skilled, fearless, and bold. Damn fine qualities—if she’d learn to protect herself.
I let out a sharp whistle. Three heads turned my way. I pointed at Cat and crooked my finger, motioning her to come to me.
The squinty-eyed gesture in return was lethal and hot. I wondered how she’d respond to the demand if she was naked. If I ordered her on her hands and knees and told her to crawl across the bed, would she throw attitude or would she be a good girl?
Knowing her, she’d make me work for it. There was no chance Catarina would bend unless the man in her bed had earned it. And the thought of bending Cat to my will never failed to make my cock hard. The fuck of it was, it had more to do with earning her than getting her to submit.
Submission was easy. I didn’t want compliance. I wanted Cat’s surrender. I didn’t want to just fuck her, I wanted to fuck her until the rest of the world was erased and I owned her—body and soul. I’d never met a more frustrating woman. A woman who, if given the chance, would own me.
I watched Cat push away from the wall. Mason shifted his legs out of her way. And either to tease me or infuriate the hell out of me, she crawled—fucking crawled—the short distance to the front seats. I glanced at Mason, then to Fallon. Both men had their eyes glued to her ass.
I felt the rumble in my chest, though it didn’t register over my ringing ears, but I knew the men heard the unhappy sound.
Mase looked up and smirked. Fallon smiled and went back to looking at his phone.
Cat held on to the back of the seats and pulled up on her knees, bringing herself to my eye level.
“You summoned?”
I was going to do a lot more than summon her if she pulled that shit again.
“Do me a favor and don’t swing your ass in front of my team.”
Lethal and hot morphed into fatal. A lesser man would’ve withered to dust under her stare. Unfortunately for me, it was a turn-on.
“You know, telling me not to do something is only going to make me want to do it more,” she informed me.
I’d already lived that nightmare, so I was well aware Cat did shit out of spite. If my ears weren’t throbbing I would’ve pointed out the idiocy of her statement.
“Do you have anything important in your hotel room?”
I didn’t miss the small grimace; no doubt her ears hurt worse than mine.
“No.”
“Nothing? Electronics? Files? Passport?”
“I know what important means, Jack. I don’t need an itemized list,” she sassed.
Good Christ, I wanted to kiss that attitude off her lips.
“We’re headed to San Pedro Sula,” I told her.
“Why?”
“Do you want to have this conversation now, or wait until the buzzing’s stopped?”
Cat thought for a moment, undoubtedly weighing the pain in her ears against her impatience.
“Wait.”
With that, she pushed away from the seats, swiveled on her knees, and crawled back to her spot next to Fallon. Her ass was on display, her hips were swaying, my dick was getting harder by the second.
Goddamn woman was going to be the death of me.