Shooting Scars: The Artists Trilogy 2 (35 page)

I opened the door and stepped in. There were only two stalls. Both looked empty but both stall doors were closed.

“Javier?” I whispered tentatively.

A pair of shiny shoes stepped down from one of the seats. I held my breath as the stall door opened and Javier stepped out. Everything felt so fucking different now. I had to keep it cool.

He nodded at the door behind me. “Lock it.”

“Okay,” I said and turned around to do so.

When I turned toward him, he was right there behind me, grabbing my head and kissing me hard. His tongue snaked around in my mouth, his hands going down my sides, cupping underneath my ass until he pressed me up against the door.

It was different now. It had been wrong before and I knew that but now it was another shade of wrong that was about more than just me. It was about Camden. I couldn’t do this to him knowing what I knew now, what I should have always, always known. Even if Camden didn’t want anything to do with me after this was all over, it couldn’t even be an option. This had to stop.

“Ellie,” Javier whispered as he pulled his lips away and started biting down my neck. I felt powerless, frightened and cold. “Ellie, I need you. I missed you.”

Lies, lies. Too many lies. His fingers went down to my thighs, gathering up the length of my dress. His other hand went to his pants, started undoing his fly.

“Javier,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “This isn’t the time.”

“There’s always time for this,” he said, nipping at my collarbone, near the edge of the razor blade. I held my breath, dying inside.

“No,” I said. I ducked under his arm and went to the opposite side of the bathroom, hands at the wall.

He had his cock in his hand, stroking it, the look on his face one of lust and madness.

His smile was lopsided, wickedly amused. “No? You don’t get to say no, Ellie.”

I narrowed my eyes at him, pulled down my dress. “I’m saying no now. Don’t you want to know how my fucking date with Travis went last night? Don’t you want to know if he touched me, threatened me, hurt me?”

He looked taken aback, enough so that he put his dick away and zipped up his fly. He walked over to me, smoothing back his hair. “Okay. If it’s so important for you to tell me, but I already heard it from Enrico.”

I swallowed down the anger that was building up. That he could send me off to be with such a monster, the monster who did those things to Javier’s own family, and not even care to hear about it.

“It doesn’t matter,” I spat out. “I guess you know about the plans for tonight?”

He smiled. “Yes, I do. And it’s perfect, Ellie, just perfect. This couldn’t work out better. Dinner. Food. Tonight is when you’ll do it.”

A wave of horror flashed through me like the lightning strikes outside. “When I do what?”

“When you kill Travis.”

My mouth dropped open and my hand automatically went to my necklace. “I am not doing it. I’m not killing him. I’m leading you to him. I’m working as a mole. I am not your assassin. I am not your weapon.”

“You’ve always been a weapon,” he said, coming closer and pulling something out of his pocket. “That’s what makes you and I so good. This time you’re the weapon and I’m the one holding the trigger.”

He brought out a necklace with silver angel wings as the pendant. He flicked the edge of it and the angel wings opened up, a locket. Inside was a tiny, tiny vial of powder.

“What is that?” I said, barely breathing.

“It’s poison,” he said matter-of-factly. “Tonight, you’ll put it in his food. He will die.”

“I … I can’t … I won’t. They’ll know I did it!”

“They won’t. I’ll be waiting for you outside, Ellie. I’ll be there.”

“No,” I shook my head. I wouldn’t do it. And though I could have pretended for the sake of pretending, to make things go easier, to get him out of here, I wanted to let him know that I wouldn’t. That he couldn’t make me do everything he asked. That I was stronger than he thought I was.

“This whole time,” I said sadly, “this was your plan, wasn’t it?”

He furrowed his brow. “It’s better this way, Ellie. You have to be the one to do it. It’s the only way you’ll get your revenge.”

“You need your revenge too.”

“Yours is more important.”

“Or maybe my life is more expendable than yours,” I said bitterly.

His face contorted like I had slapped him in the face. “How could you say that?”

I chewed my lip and held out my hand. “Just give me the damn necklace.”

“No, I’d rather put it on you,” he said reaching for the one around my neck.

“No!” I yelled, ripping out of his grasp. But it was too late. His hand closed around it and he ripped it off. He stared at the razor blade in his hand. The tracking device staring up at him.

Fear took a hard, sharp hold of every part of me.

His eyes burned, blazed, unable to accept what he was seeing.

“What is this?” he seethed, his face reddening.

I could have come up with a lie, if I really tried. But there were no lies left in me.

“What is this?” he screamed. He grabbed my face in his hands, squeezing my chin and my lips, the pressure burning against my bones. “Who gave you this? Tell me!”

“Or what?” I tried to say. “You’ll kill me?”

His eyes widened, all whites around the yellow-gold, his pupils black as night and mean as sin. His grip on my face became tighter and I started to squirm from the pain.

Finally he screamed, “Fuck!” and turned around kicking in the bathroom stall door. He spun around. “Where is he? Huh? Where is that tattooed motherfucker?”

I rubbed at my jaw, cowering away from him. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t fucking know!” he marched over to me and placed his hands at my throat, pressed me up against the wall. “How can you not know?!”

I took my hand and dug my nails into his palms, driving them down, making him bleed, staring right back at him, trying to fight through the air I was losing again. I would not lose again.

His eyes twitched as they searched my face, searching for the truth. When he realized he was already getting it, he released my neck and let me breathe again.

I took a moment to recover, swallowing painfully, and then said. “I don’t know where he is. And that’s the truth.”

He walked away, shaking out his shoulders, going in a circle around the room. The bathroom door jingled and he lifted his head and yelled, “Fuck right off!” He then turned to face me and instead of anger, his face was slack with something else … bitterness. Heartache, if he had a heart that could ache.

“Did you sleep with him?” he asked, voice barely above a whisper.

“What the hell is it with you men and sex?” I said. “Like who gets to fuck who really means anything. No, I didn’t sleep with him. Are you happy?”

He laughed caustically. “Am I happy? Oh, angel, my dirty, rotten, lying angel! No I am not happy. I won’t be happy until you do as I’ve told you.”

He came over to me and quickly put his hands around my neck. I thought he was going to try and strangle me again but he just put the angel locket around me then delicately straightened the pendant so it was resting on my collarbone.

“You have no idea,” he said, soft and hard all at once, eyes focused on the angel wings, “how badly I want you to hurt right now. Because I didn’t think you could ever hurt me again, not like you once did. But you have.” He lifted his eyes up to me. “You betrayed me when all I’ve done is give you my heart and promise you a new life.”

I couldn’t say anything to that bout of crazy. He pressed the pendant into me and walked away, shaking his head, holding up the razor blade necklace in one hand.

“Your Camden will be tracking me now instead of you – he’s going to get quite the surprise. And you’re going to do as I’ve told you. You’re going to go for dinner with Travis. You’re going to kill him.” He put his hand on the lock, then turned his head to the side, eyeing me. “Or I’ll kill your Camden, for real this time. I’ll deliver his head to your doorstep.”

He unlocked the door and stepped out into the café, leaving me alone in the bathroom, wondering how the hell I was going to get us all out of this alive.

A
fter Ellie had gotten ready for her meeting with Javier, and I’d spent a few minutes grappling with the urge to scream, I got out of the closet and very slowly, very carefully made my way back into the main part of the hotel.

Gus was in the room looking like utter shit. For once I got to tell him that. He hadn’t slept at all, waiting up all night for me. I think he thought for a moment that perhaps Ellie and I were making up for lost time but he figured out pretty quickly from my expression that it wasn’t the case. I had to say, he looked a bit disappointed, as if the crotchety old man had been rooting for us as a couple that whole time. I guess I had been rooting for us too.

I couldn’t dwell on that, I couldn’t think about it. I just had to keep going and stick to the new plan. We activated the tracking device on Gus’s phone and were able to see where she was on Google Maps. It was actually pretty relieving to follow that flashing blue dot as it made its way through the streets of Veracruz to the café.

“So she’s just meeting Javier?” he asked, after the blue dot had been immobile for quite a while.

I nodded. “As far as I know. She should be coming back here after to get ready for her dinner with Travis. I guess we should get going just before six. That way we can be out and ready to follow her.”

“I agree,” he said, his eyes on the flashing light. He frowned. “Hmmm.”

“What?” I leaned over and he showed me the screen. The blue dot was moving away from the café, in the opposite direction of the way she came. She was heading north and fairly fast, in a car, not on foot.

“What do you think that means?” I asked. “Do you think Javier is taking her somewhere?”

“Maybe. Or maybe it wasn’t Javier that asked her to meet him.”

I looked at him sharply. “Who, like Travis?”

Gus shrugged quickly. “I have no idea. I don’t think we can afford to sit here and speculate.”

He was right about that. We ran out of the hotel and into the car. Gus had taken back the GTO. No one had touched the thing and I couldn’t blame them – with her scratched sides and smashed side mirrors, she looked like she was destined for the trash heap. But I knew better – I knew what she was capable of and I knew that today we’d need her speed and handling more than anything.

“You think the cops are still looking for this?” I asked as we cruised along the streets, trying to get the car and the blue dot to match up. I wished I was the one behind the wheel but Gus had proven himself with the car so far.

“I doubt it,” he said. “Mexico is a big country and we could be anywhere. People disappear easily in a few days. We’ll still be careful.”

We followed the blue dot as it went north along the Fidel Velázquez Highway, getting further away from the city. I started to get a bad feeling about all of this, as the buildings became more and more industrial.

My shoulder started to ache, I was all tensed up. “I don’t know, Gus.”

He nodded. “I know. This isn’t right. Something’s wrong.”

“I think she’s in danger.”

He gave me a grim look. “That kid is always in danger.”

The blue dot finally came to a stop at the end of a long road that ended into what looked like nothing. Ten minutes later, we were approaching the blue light. Gus took the GTO down a street with a few empty warehouses flanking the sides. At the end of the road was an office building with broken windows and a handful of cars parked outside. That was where she had to be. Unfortunately the software didn’t allow us to get more details and triangulate her position any closer.

“Either Javier has her,” I said, watching the area carefully as Gus pulled to the side of the road, a few yards away. “Or shit has hit the fan with Travis. How many guns do we need?”

Gus exhaled. “Whatever it is, I hope it’s enough.” He turned in his seat and started pulling them out of the bag in the backseat.

“This might hurt for a second,” he said and suddenly jammed my gun into the sling. Pain shot up my arm like rocket ships. “But it’s a good place for it.”

I winced, tears in my eyes, and looked down. He had placed it underneath my arm. No one could see it. “Fine. Give me two more as decoys.”

He handed me too small revolvers, I stuck one in my waistband and held the other one in my hand. That morning I’d put a knife in my sock.

Thunder rumbled in the distance as I eyed the Coffee Mate. “Think it’ll work a second time?”

“Don’t even think about,” he told me. He shoved a gun in his waistband and took another one to his lips kissing it. “Maybe this baby will get to see some action.” He smiled and then the smile went out of his eyes. I knew how he felt. There would be blood. I couldn’t let myself hesitate even once when it came to pulling the trigger, when it came to saving Ellie.

“Alright,” I said, giving him a heavy nod. “Let’s go see what trouble we’ll get ourselves into.”

We got out of the car and started hurrying down the sidewalk, guns to our sides, trying to be fast and inconspicuous all at once. It wasn’t easy, though there was no one on this dead end street. Heavy drops of rain began to fall from the sky. I was grateful for something to distract me from my nerves that were buzzing through me.

We were almost at the building, heading toward the side to see if we could see in the windows when I heard a gun being cocked. I knew that sound wasn’t necessary – it was there to make a point. To let us know we’d been caught.

Gus and I froze at the sound, making split second decisions in our heads. We had no choice but to turn around and see.

We did.

Javier was a few feet behind us, on the road, gun pointed at my head. Beside him was Raul, his gun aimed at Gus.

“
Buenos dias, gringos
,” Javier said with a smile. “Kindly drop your fucking guns and put your hands up or I’ll blow your heads right the fuck off.”

Gus and I exchanged a look. Defeat.

We did as we were told.

Javier waved his gun at us. “And kick it over, you know how this goes.”