her then and there. A car was approaching. She thought for a moment about dashing towards it but Hector was so close she could feel him, and the chance of the car stopping in time, if it stopped at all, was slim.
‘I’m sorry about being sick,’ she said, half turning her head.
Hector shrugged, head down, eyes looking everywhere but at her. ‘Don’t worry.’
Testing his reaction, she took a half-step to the side. He didn’t appear to notice.
How far? she asked herself. How much distance would there have to be before she could make a run for it? Too much of a gap between them and he would notice; too little and she would stand no chance of getting away.
She looked again at the crash barrier, the slope beyond. That was when she noticed the gap in the barrier — a gap big enough for the Escalade to squeeze through. Even if she ran, Hector could take the Escalade down there. She could outrun him, and Charlie if she had to, but she wouldn’t be able to outrun the vehicle. Her shoulders slumped. She felt like crying. Her stomach lurched. She started towards the front of the vehicle. Hector began to follow her. But as she doubled over to heave, she put out her arm to push him away. He backed off a little and she retched. A pathetic string of bile dribbled from her mouth. Something shifted in her mind. It was as if the fear she had felt all this time had been switched off.
As she groaned in apparent pain, signalling with her hand for them to give her space, she looked back at the road. On the other side of the road she spotted two sets of headlights in the distance approaching from the opposite direction. Between the side of the road they were on and the other there was another barrier with a gap, but it was close to a hundred metres away. On the other side, a matching barrier offered no such breach.
She straightened up for a second, hands falling to her hips. She tried to gauge the speed of the approaching vehicles by the ever-expanding orbit of their headlights. Hector was growing impatient. He was shouting to Charlie to join them. Then he turned to her.
‘Come on, we take a little walk. The air will be good for you,’ he said, his voice like an echo as she focused on what she had to do.
‘Give me a second,’ she said, losing the last of the sentence as she doubled over one more time, her right leg falling back a little to give her more of an explosive start.
Now, she thought, pushing off on her right foot, twisting round the front of the Escalade and hurtling across the blacktop, everything around her a blur. Pressing her hands down on the crash barrier, she vaulted over it, stumbling as her feet touched down on the other side but quickly recovering her balance.
She could hear the approaching vehicles, the roar of their engines, but she didn’t dare stop to check how close they were. Hector had reacted faster than she had anticipated. For a big man he moved fast. She couldn’t be certain but as she had run across the road she thought she had felt the toe of his sneaker brush the heel of her trailing foot. He could be only feet behind her, close enough that if she hesitated, even for a second, he would take her down.
She dashed straight across the road, white light enveloping her along with the nail-on-a-blackboard grating of brakes — more sensation than sound — and the chemical cloy of burning rubber. A gust of warm air dipped around her, so sudden and violent that her dress billowed. She felt dirt under her feet and the crash barrier on the other side loomed almost from nowhere. She started to vault it but her balance, thrown off by having been a split second from going under the wheels of what she knew now was a trucker’s rig, was off, and she half fell, half stumbled over it, landing painfully on her left leg, her ankle folding under the weight.
The slope on this side of the road matched that on the other. If anything it was a little steeper. Knees folding, she allowed gravity to take her, and rolled down, a good fifteen feet, bits of dirt and shale flying up into her face as she went.
She pushed herself back on to her feet as the whipcrack of a gunshot rang out close by. A warning shot to stop her?
Back up on the road, she could just about glimpse the truck jack-knifed across two lanes, the cab slicing across them, the trailer lying on its side. Rubber smeared the surface in two curved trails behind it.
She struggled to her feet. A jolt of pain surged up her leg as she tried to put weight on the twisted ankle. She hobbled forward. She had to keep moving. If she didn’t, she was dead. She broke into a jog. After half a dozen steps the pain levelled off.
Another gunshot. Then voices. She could hear Hector shouting, telling her to stop. She kept moving, and threw a glance over her shoulder. He had one leg over the barrier. He was heading towards her. He was moving faster than she was. Without the twisted ankle she could have outpaced him, but not now.
She bit down hard on her lower lip and propelled herself on into the moonlit desert. She had to be within range of his gun. She looked around for cover. A lone juniper tree stood about twenty feet to her left, its trunk barely thick enough to hide her, even if she could get to it before he pulled the trigger.
There was noise from the road now too. Men’s voices. She thought she heard Charlie shouting but she couldn’t be sure: the words were drowned by the blood pounding in her ears.
She kept moving. The pain was receding. Either that or she was simply becoming used to it. Whatever the reason, her strides were getting longer. The juniper tree was close now. When she got there she would find something beyond it to fix on. She would keep moving, keep running, until her back took a bullet and she went down. The thought gave her comfort and spurred her on.
She brushed past the outer branches of the tree, and moved left so that its trunk was behind her. It was only then that she noticed the man. Her breath caught in her throat as a huge hand shot out, grabbed her by the shoulder and spun her round a hundred and eighty degrees. She caught the merest glimpse of him. He had appeared from nowhere as his hand bunched the dress fabric at the back of her neck and held her in place, her back to his. It was like being taken by a riptide. A second later there was the ear-shredding sound of a gun being fired less than two feet from her and a bright yellow muzzle flash.
Time seemed to fracture as she was spun back round so that she was alongside the man, the fingers of his giant left hand grasping her elbow as he moved her back towards the road, circling wide where Hector had been only moments ago. She didn’t struggle against him but she was hobbling as he covered the ground in long, loping strides. He stopped for a second. ‘Are you okay to keep going?’ he asked, his tone, like his movements, strikingly relaxed, as if he had saved her from being pushed over in the playground, rather than from a midnight execution in the middle of the desert.
She nodded. ‘I twisted my ankle.’
‘Here,’ he said, picking her up as if she weighed nothing, and tucking her over his back with one hand while he held the gun in his other and broke into a run. ‘We gotta get you out of here.’
Fifty-three
Charlie Mendez opened the glove box of the Escalade and rifled through the contents, hoping to find a spare set of keys or, better yet, a gun. There were wads of receipts, and an owner’s manual for the vehicle, but no gun. There was no Hector either: he had disappeared. He slammed the glove compartment shut, panic threatening to overwhelm him.
He had to get the hell out of there before the cops showed up. If he was picked up it would complicate an already difficult situation. To take him from custody would involve a lot of explaining and there were limits — he had been told so when he’d got here. There was only so much the cartel could do to protect him, and there would surely come a point where he was more trouble than he was worth — even though he was worth a lot.
He climbed back out of the vehicle and looked around with pinprick pupils. On the other side of the highway, the trailer was lying on its side. Behind it a white SUV was inching its way through the debris. Hector still hadn’t appeared. There had been two gunshots a minute or so ago but then nothing. For all he knew Hector could be dead and he could be stuck in the middle of this mayhem, a sitting duck, with no idea where he was, never mind how to get away.
He was still debating with himself whether to sit tight or get out of the Escalade when he saw the girl being hustled towards the SUV by a tall man, who opened the vehicle’s back door for her. She got inside.
Charlie felt a breath of relief. The girl was gone. Alive. Whoever the guy was, he was obviously there for her, not for him. Charlie would wait for one more minute to see if Hector came back. If he didn’t, he would leave the
