I still couldn’t believe it. Gus was my father. I had to say it to myself again and again. It’s not that it didn’t feel true, it’s just I had a hard time wrapping my head around what family meant.
Which, of course, is why I reached into the back and searched for a pistol until my hand closed around a .40 Glock. Gus and Camden were my family now and I had to protect them.
I opened the car door and climbed out, careful not to put any pressure on my bad leg, and limped swiftly and silently toward the house.
I turned at the neighbor’s yard and hid behind one of the lemon trees, peering around the trunk at the stash house. The lights in the house were all off and I couldn’t hear anything, not Camden or Derek, not Spanish. Just the sound of the breeze as it ruffled the leaves around me.
I took in a deep but shaky breath. The pain in my leg was starting to flare up again and I needed to push past it. I looked up at the second story of the house. Climbing was out of the question. Almost everything was out of the question.
That was until a light upstairs went on, streaming out the window between the cracks of a blackout curtain. In a stash house, its purpose wasn’t to keep out the sun, but to keep eyes from looking in. That’s where Gus had to be.
Before I could even formulate a plan or try and figure out how far Camden and Derek had gotten, voices rang out into the humid night air.
Yelling.
Spanish and English.
Camden.
The curtain at the window moved.
Shots were fired, echoing down the street.
It was all happening so fast.
I jumped away from the tree, wincing at my leg, just as there was a terrific crash and a man fell from the window in a shower of glass and onto the lawn below, landing with a thud.
Gus.
It was Gus.
I gasped, heart lodged at the back of my throat, and scampered over to him as quick as I could. Just before I reached him, I looked up at the window and saw a man with a gun pointed at him.
Not Camden. Not Derek.
And therefore he had to die.
I aimed just as the man spotted me and fired three times.
One of the bullets struck him in the chest, causing him to pitch back into the room.
I dropped to my good knee and rolled Gus over, holding my breath, holding onto every second that passed for fear of the next one.
He rolled onto his back. His eyes open. I hadn’t seen those eyes in years.
He blinked once. Twice.
Looked at me, face scrunched up, all beard and grey hair and friendly eyes.
“Ellie?”
“Gus!” I exclaimed.
He tried to sit up and then looked past me, his expression of terror. “Ellie!”
I twisted at the waist, gun out and was about to shoot without even lining up.
I was lucky I didn’t.
I would have shot Camden who was running up the side of the house toward me, weaponless.
He at least saw me and my gun clearly enough to drop to the ground and duck.
Leaving the man chasing him an easy target.
With Camden on the ground, I pulled the trigger and hit the man at the knees, bringing him down. He struggled, reaching for the gun that he dropped but I shot him in the head before he could even move.
I hated how easy this had become for me.
But then Camden lifted his head and gave me an incredulous look that said it all. That took my soul from black to grey.
“I promised to keep you safe, too,” I told him earnestly.
I turned back to Gus as Camden pulled me up to my feet. “Are you hurt?”
“Oh, I’m hurt,” Gus said, grunting as Camden pulled him up next. “But I’ll live.”
“Where’s Derek?” I asked.
Camden shook his head. “I don’t know. We have to go back to the car, now.”
I looked back at the house and still heard yelling inside, the breaking of glass. There was still chaos. Still a fight and someone was losing.
“We can’t leave him behind.”
“Ellie,” Camden said, sharp enough to make my head snap to him. “We have Gus. We have each other. We can’t lose that. We have to go.”
He was right. He was always right.
We took off running toward the Escalade, Camden supporting both me and Gus the best he could. Gus was bent over, the fall probably reopening the bullet wound in his stomach, wheezing for breath. It was so weird being with him now, knowing what he was to me. Did he know himself? I thought back to all our interactions over the years, the way he talked to me, kept in contact with me, watched over me. He must have known. All this time.
We got Gus in the back and I climbed in the front, just as Camden got behind the wheel and started to peel away. We drove past the house, an explosion now blasting open the front door in mess of flames, and it wasn’t until we were zooming halfway down the street that Camden’s eyes went to the rear view mirror.
“Shit,” he said.
As I turned to look, he popped the SUV in reverse and we started speeding backward toward a man running toward us, hell bent, Tom Cruise style.
Derek.
Camden screeched to a stop just before he collided into him and I leaned back to open the back door for him.
“Thanks,” he said as he jumped in beside Gus. His face was covered in a layer of soot, the gash on his face reopened and he smiled, widely, for the first time. “That was a rush.”
Camden shook his head and pressed his foot to the pedal. We roared away from the fire and destruction and though Gus was hurt and I’d been shot and Camden was missing his son, it felt good to have all three of them. They were my family. They were my home. And we were going to California.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
We ended saying goodbye to Derek in Acapulco. Even though we felt a camaraderie with him after everything we went through, he still wanted his money. All the money we had was still in checks that we hadn’t cashed yet, so we had to promise him an IOU through monthly PayPal installments. The funny part was that he trusted us to do so and I knew I would make good on my promise. Maybe I’d picked a lot of locks in the last few days, but the scamming days were truly gone for me. I had the second chance I asked for.
After we dropped him off (and after he bought us all clean clothes from a local Wal-Mart), we continued on with the Escalade to Zihuatanejo, a beach town that Gus had always wanted to go to because Morgan Freeman ended up there at the end of
The three of us were sitting on the patio of a restaurant that lined the silky sand beach, enjoying gigantic margaritas, when Camden got up to go to the washroom.
