All of You (17 page)

One of the men shifted, jabbing an elbow into his side hard enough to shift a rib, probably to tell him to shut up. It sounded like a good idea but all of a sudden he had so much to say.

He wanted to call Lucas; tell him to stop pretending he wasn’t in love with Belinda. Stop taking no for answer or at least ask her the damn question. He wanted to tell his parents to take that Hawaiian cruise they kept putting off until next year when the market was better.

But most of all, he wanted to tell Jessica he loved her and that he knew she loved him too. Tell her that he’d wait until she was ready to say it, wait until she was ready for his dog and his house and his yard. Tell her he’d give them all up forever if she gave him a chance to be part of her life. He had so much to say and no one to say it to but Daniel and the four thugs preparing to kill him.

“Sorry about pushing you,” he said softly, knowing it was a lame start and even lamer last sentiments.

Daniel remained silent.

“And…you know…blowing your cover.” He looked around briefly at the dirty men, rough haircuts and various tattoos on bare shoulders or arms. A deep breath pulled in the scent of dust and sweat, among other things he didn’t want to identify. “Really sorry about that part.”

“S’right,” Daniel mumbled. What was he supposed to say? That he’d be holding a grudge?

The apology didn’t make Kyle feel any better, but at least it had been accepted. “Thanks.”

“Shut up,” Cody barked.

Kyle clamped his mouth closed. The elevator doors opened and they walked as one big block through the hall. Cody led the way, not through the main lobby but through a side door to the underground parking. There they made their way to a plain white van. Sliding the door open, revealing a stripped cargo bay with some blankets for seating, they pushed him and Daniel inside. Two of them climbed in next to them and slammed the door shut.

A few rough seconds later they were being searched and both Daniel’s gun and Kyle’s cell phone were taken, but Kyle didn’t care. All he could do was stare at the closed doors of the van and watch the curved walls lean in. After all these years, he was still going to die compressed into an impossible position in a goddamned car. If he could control the tightening in his throat, he’d laugh at the irony.

“Uh Daniel?”

He heard a grunt.

“Would now be a bad time to mention I’m claustrophobic?”

Kyle heard the sadistic chuckles from the others until Daniel asked, “You gonna throw up?”

Oddly enough, that almost made Kyle smile. “No, probably not.”

“Then no, now’s good.”

Cody got behind the wheel and started the loud engine while the men in the back tied their hands and feet in front of them.

“Where are they taking us?” Kyle asked a few uneventful minutes later, his bound hands resting on his knees. It wasn’t so bad, really. Better than having them behind his back, especially with just a blanket on the corrugated metal floor for cushion.

“Death Valley,” Daniel answered, blasé, leaning his head back against the wall of the van as if he were going to take a nap. “Emmanuel Santos is meeting us there with a boatload of heroin. Literally. We’re late, so they don’t have time to kill us on the way.”

“That’s good news, right?”

“Not really. When Santos finds out he’s been dealing with DEA for the last year, odds are he’ll disembowel us instead of just shooting us.”

Kyle swallowed. He looked at the other guys, one of whom nodded.

“Sounds…” Okay, disemboweling was hard to joke about.

“You’re taking this pretty good, Kyle. I expected something with less dignity from you by now.”

So had Kyle. “Yeah, well, you haven’t seen my shorts.”

Daniel gave a lazy grin. “You should get some sleep if you can. It’ll be a few hours.”

“I don’t think I can sleep.” Not with his heart racing and the cold sweat starting to run down his back. The windows of the van’s front doors were down, sending a steady stream of air his way, but while it kept the claustrophobia from sucking him down, it wasn’t enough to keep the fear for his life at bay. There weren’t even enough smudges of dirt to count and distract himself from the impending doom. Like Jessica had warned, he’d run out of distractions.

“All right. I’m gonna knock out, then. I’ve hardly slept at all the last few nights.”

Kyle looked at him incredulously. “At a time like this?”

“Not gonna be able to do it later.” That said, Daniel closed his eyes and within a few minutes was snoring.

Kyle looked around, but no one seemed particularly bothered. The other guys were settling in, trying to get comfortable too. With nothing else to look at for an hour and the drone of the wheels on the road, the summer heat warming the air until it wasn’t worth it to fight it, Kyle let his own lids droop and decided to dream of Jessica for what little time was left to him.

It wasn’t as if it were difficult, since she was the only thing he dreamed about these days anyway. But instead of the usual dreams where she huskily said she loved him and couldn’t live without him right before taking his cock deep into her mouth, he dreamt memories. Jessica, smiling against her will that first night he’d met her, the lightest rose flush across her cheeks because he’d teased her about wanting hot beef. The graceful curves of her shoulder and arm, leading to the rise of her hip beneath her sheet, visible only in the moonlight, a sight that haunted him long after he’d left her. In the elevator, her eyebrow raised while she taunted him about their impending fiery doom, never knowing how impish she looked there on the floor or that he’d been able to see all the way down her blouse from his vantage point of hanging on for dear life. But the best, the very best, was the memory of her from the night before, curling into him there on the floor, her hair wild around her face, her blouse open so he could see her perfect, creamy skin from her face all the way down to her belly button. But as much as he’d loved the sight, had wanted to trace the curves of her breasts peeking out from behind the open folds, the only thing he’d been looking at was her face. So soft, so open for the first time since he’d known her…so confused by the feelings she had for him.

You make me feel things I can’t even name…

Because she’d never known it before. Could barely recognize love—not his, not even Dory’s. For a few precious seconds, though, she’d let him in. Let him see on her face what it meant for someone to care about the man he was instead of the man he thought he should be.

Until he’d crushed it.

Kyle jolted awake to hot, oxygenless air and a stopped van. His startled gaze met Daniel’s steady one.

“We’re here.”

And that’s when the fear broke past the cotton of numbness.

The sweat that had been burning his body turned frigid despite the fact that it was so hot everything looked like a mirage. His stomach turned into a giant coiled knot that made him wince at the pain of it. The bindings at his wrists carved into his flesh as his hands tried to twist out on their own. But there was no escape.

Daniel’s friends opened the sliding door of the van and hopped out. The sun outside had turned the whole sky orange, which meant it was either so hot his eyeballs were on fire or that it was low enough to be starting to cool. Of course, cool in Death Valley was high noon in hell anywhere else. Either way, he’d never seen anything more beautiful than that open door.

Until he remembered he was still going to die.

Shit. A few more words popped up in his head, but he bit his tongue to keep from saying them. Otherwise he’d be swearing ’til they killed him.

“You could have had a part of this, Danny,” Cody said from the front seat, startling Kyle into looking away from the gold light. He’d been so happy to see it he’d completely forgotten about the man still in the van with them. If Cody hadn’t spoken, Kyle might have talked himself into hopping out and seeing if he could make a dash for it. All those years of running could have paid off, even in the desert. Couldn’t they?

He pulled his feet closer and started toying carefully with the knots in the rope. Whatever else these guys were, they were good at tying knots.

“I’d rather be a part of what I already am, Cody,” Daniel said evenly.

Kyle kept his eyes on his ropes. He didn’t want to be here. Not just because of the obvious. There was something between these two men that he didn’t have a right to be listening to.

“What you’re part of is going to get you killed.” Cody sounded almost sorry about that. “Your friend there too. Maybe even me. What happened to you, Danny? The guy I knew would never let his job be more important than his friends or his family.”

“Could ask the same for you. Deals with Santos don’t exactly extend your life expectancy. He kills all his associates, eventually.”

“Yeah, well, if that day comes he won’t find me.”

“Sure, he won’t, Cody.”

Kyle waited for the other man to say something else, to get mad and yell again, but instead he just opened his door and left the van with a solid slam of the door.

“No one’s going to stay here and watch us?” he asked after a few minutes when no one came back.

“No reason to. We step out of this van we’ll be surrounded by twenty other crews with vans just like it, ready to kill us. If somehow we made it past them, we’d have to get past Santos’s men and there’s bound to be a hell of a lot more of them.”

Kyle looked down at his loose knot. Great. Free but if he took one step outside, he’d die. So much for claustrophobia. Looking for something else to do, he went to work on Daniel’s hands. The other man looked amused but he didn’t stop him. “So what happens now?”

“Well, if it all goes to plan, Cody out there is going to make a deal with Santos using the money I brought with me for the deal. Last year, Santos’s operation was pinned down in Southern Mexico. He beat the agents out, though, taking pretty much everything he could scrape with him. We figure he’s been floating around the Pacific on a ship, transferring cargo containers for months. But that couldn’t last and with his accounts frozen, he needed to move the smack.

“Lucky for us, his usual distribution lines were closed—Latin Kings won’t touch him because he’s too hot. We found out his in was a group of bikers in Central California. He’d been using them to move small shipments and supply his distributors from LA to Sacramento. Since I was already under with a crew for a smuggling ring, I was chosen to infiltrate.”

“Through Cody,” Kyle surmised, finishing the knot.

Daniel nodded, rubbing his wrists and uncoiling the rope. “Remember that ’53 Indian I was telling you about? The owner was Cody’s dad. Cody was practically a brother to me.”

“Not anymore, though.”

Daniel looked away, sighing deeply. “You can’t protect people determined to do themselves in. I’d have given this whole deal to anyone else if he’d have come out of it, but he won’t. He’s in over his head with Santos. He thinks this is going to take him to the big time. Truth is, Santos just needs a glorified bag man.”

“So you were going to come here, buy it, then arrest everyone?”

“Um-hmm.” Was it really that simple to him?

“But then Dory had her coronary…”

Daniel’s dark eyes opened and for the first time he didn’t look untouched. “I couldn’t let her be alone for that.”

“You risked the biggest bust of your career for your mom?” It was a nice idea, but he didn’t know many guys in his field who would do something like that. Most of them would probably just ask which rest home to send the check to. He wondered if he could give up all his plans for anyone else.

Jessica sprang to mind.

“I’d throw my whole damn career away for her,” Daniel said with no remorse or second thoughts. “She’s my family. She’s everything.”

Kyle looked at his tied hands, thinking of his dream along with Daniel’s words. How was that for an epiphany? He’d met Jessica Saunders looking for family. Looking for everything. Not only had she tied his hands because she wasn’t ready for “everything”, but he hadn’t even offered to wait for her to be.

His eyes stung, thinking about the things he’d said to her. Those weren’t the last words he wanted to have said, hurling his hurt and accusation over his shoulder just because she bruised his feelings. Because she was scared.

“Thinking about Jessica?” Daniel pulled up his boots to start on his own ties.

“How’d you know?”

“I’d be thinking about her, if she was mine.”

“She’s not mine.” Painful to admit, but since he’d be dead in another twenty minutes or so, it wasn’t the time to be proud.

“Screwed it up, huh?”

“Yeah. Thanks, Dan. Got a real graceful way with words, there.”

Daniel chuckled. “Sorry, man, but it’d be hard for you to get that one right anyway.”

Kyle frowned at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Don’t get all offended or nothing. It’s just she’s got that scared rabbit look. One second she’s all googly-eyed at you, the next it’s like you’ve got the plague.”

He couldn’t quite argue with that, not even to defend her honor. “Yeah, well…she has reasons.” They hadn’t seemed like good reasons, when she was trying to explain, but that was between them.

“You know why I got into undercover work? Cause it was way easier than dealing with women.” Daniel laughed again, his voice whisper-low while he unwrapped the lines on his boots. “Then I got to thinking that it was a lot the same. I mean, when you’re undercover, you’re after something. Something your mark isn’t real likely to let just anyone get, right? Right,” he answered, not even looking up to see if Kyle was following him.

Wouldn’t have been worth it, Kyle wasn’t sure he was.

“So, you gotta earn their trust. You can’t just show up and think they’re gonna give it up just like that.”

Kyle decided to keep his comments on that to himself, but Daniel snorted, taking Kyle’s hands and pulling at the bonds. “I don’t think she had any qualms about sleeping with you, man.”

“Yeah, you weren’t there. Believe me, she had qualms.”

“I’d bet money she was more worried about that puppy look you get on your face when you see her.”

“Puppy?” Bad enough everyone was calling him little, now he was a puppy?

“Yeah, like you’re in the pound and she’s your last chance at adoption. You’re not real subtle, man.” Daniel tossed the rope to the corner of the van. “You gotta earn some trust first. Marks always have tests to see if you can do something for them first without trying to screw them. So, you prove your worth.”

Well, he could chalk that up to failure. Just about anything between him and Jessica that didn’t involve phone calls and orgasms had gone down in flames.

“Marks got needs too. The more you prove, the more they trust. The more they let you in.”

“Like Cody?” Kyle asked and Daniel’s expression hardened.

“Yeah, like Cody.” The knots began slipping. “He let me in. And eventually, he let me in on this deal. Let me talk him into getting Santos here personally.

“The plan was to wait on the bust ’til today because Cody trusted me so much we had the opportunity to get it all; shut down the entire pipeline in one bust. Maybe it was greedy, but it was worth the risk at the time. Now, instead, each van gets a thousand kilos, Santos gets fifty million and everyone in the country gets treated to a dose of mierde puro at rock bottom prices. Happy freakin’ fourth of July.”

The ropes came off and Kyle rubbed his chafed wrists. Daniel checked his watch and swore. “We don’t have a lot of time left.”

Kyle stopped rubbing and looked up. Daniel was looking out the open door. “You thinking we’ll make a break for it?”

“No, I think this is when they come and get us.”

That clenching in his gut started up again, harder. Kyle watched along with Daniel until Cody came back to the open door with a gun out. Daniel’s gun. “Santos is waiting.”

Daniel turned to Kyle. “You ready?”

“No.”

Daniel grinned and chucked Kyle’s feet with the back of his hand. “Come on, I have a little something in mind I call the ‘Bond Plan’.”

“You mean there’s a chance we’ll get out of this alive?”

“Not really, but what do you have to lose?” He started out of the van.

With nowhere else left to go, Kyle took a breath and followed. It wasn’t what he expected. They were in what looked like a desert valley. Open flat land and mountains all around. Dozens of vans were all lined up, of various colors and makes, each one with their doors open. To one side were five large semis, each one fully loaded with new cars. Kyle realized men were unloading the cars, while a few others were disassembling them. It didn’t make much sense until he saw a man lift a little silver brick from inside the tire he’d just slashed.

“Mr. Pierson,” a thickly accented voice said smoothly, dragging Kyle back to the scene of his imminent demise. Standing at a table in a clean dark suit was a man he didn’t really imagine a drug lord to look like. Lean, brown skinned, wearing glasses and looking a bit more like an accountant than an evil murderer capable of ripping his guts out. He wouldn’t have any trouble hiding in plain sight with fifty million dollars.

“Santos,” Daniel replied, standing next to Kyle and not looking the slightest bit concerned about his death.

“I trust your mother is on the mend.”

Daniel nodded curtly.

“Excellent. It’s always best to have healthy subjects. Killing the ill takes all the sport out of it.”

Kyle’s misgivings faded and his phobia suddenly seemed insignificant. Dying here wouldn’t stop with them. They’d kill Dory. And who knew who’d be with her when it happened. Probably Jessica. He took a step forward, but Daniel put a hand to his chest and shook his head.

Santos looked him over then seemed to dismiss him as insignificant. “I actually think this is a perfect end to my transaction. Killing an undercover federal officer. Fitting way to disappear into the night, don’t you think?”

“I kinda doubt that disappearing-into-the-night stuff, Santos,” Daniel said calmly. “I don’t think you’ll get ten feet, but then again, you look fast. You might make twelve.”

The man’s eyes flickered before he decided to be amused. Kyle, on the other hand, just wanted to know what the hell was going on.

“And who do you think is going to stop me? Your little friend here?”

Daniel grinned, looking as scary as Kyle first thought he was. “Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of the DEA and an assload of local cops. But Kyle here might take a shot at it.”

Santos looked around. Nothing happened. His show of teeth couldn’t quite be called a smile. “Doesn’t look like any of them are here to help you this time, cabrón, but you almost looked serious.”

“I’m serious enough. Ever hear of cellular triangulation?”

Santos gaze turned sharp. “There’s no cellular service here. Nothing works in Death Valley. Even if it did, you don’t have anything to transmit a signal—”

Daniel extended his arm and flicked off his thick watch band. He tossed the strip of leather at Santos who caught it. “It’s a tracer. They’ve been monitoring me all the way up here. Even if you shoot me, Santos, you’re sure as shit not getting out of this canyon.”

Santos looked at the watch, disbelief obvious. Kyle was about to consider the “Bond Plan” a dismal failure when from the south came the strange sound of chopping.

Santos picked up his head, threw the watch down and stomped on it while swearing out commands in Spanish. The sound grew closer and people started running. Vans turned and peeled out, doors flying and men clinging on like escaping pinwheels. The cars were abandoned and ultimately, from what Kyle could tell, so was Santos. In the chaos of the helicopter coming over the rise and spotlighting them, sending wind and dust whipping all around them, only the three of them were standing still.

Santos reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a gun and pointed it at Daniel. A booming voice demanded something from a speaker above them, but it didn’t make any sense to Kyle. Between the rushing blood in his ears and the chopping blades of the helicopter, one thought repeated.

Daniel’s gonna die.

Daniel’s gonna die.

Daniel’s gonna die.

He couldn’t let it happen.

He sprinted forward. He thought he heard Daniel yell his name, but Santos turned his head. Turned the gun.

A flash, a boom, rocked his senses, but Kyle didn’t stop. He threw his arms around Santos, coming down on the man like a cape, and knocked them both to the ground. His bones jarred at the impact. Pain spread through his chest, icy and sizzling at once. His fist connected with Santo’s jaw once before the man rolled them in the dust to deliver a punch of his own to the same damn side Lucas had already bruised.

For a second, Kyle saw only the blinding white of pain, but he managed to grip the handle of the gun, determined to yank it away. Another vicious punch to his jaw and he lost purchase. Adrenaline sapped out of him, warm at his back. His arms were too heavy, too weak, too— He could only stare up at the silhouette of Santos sitting on his chest as the gun lowered to aim at his forehead.