Send Down the Rain(67)
I glanced at my feet. Then back at her. “We’ve never talked about the war.”
“Never?”
“Not once.”
She was incredulous. “Why?”
“Some things are just too painful.”
THE SHOW CLOSED, AND I walked through the kitchen and out the back door to get some air and sip some soda water. The hair involuntarily stood up on the back of my neck. I turned and saw Catalina off to one side. Frozen in a defensive posture and holding a large kitchen knife. The knife was shaking and terror riddled her face.
A few feet away, a man I did not know was holding a knife to Gabby’s throat.
Juan Pedro’s lieutenants had found us. Next to Gabby, Javier lay on the ground. Unconscious. Rosco lay next to him, completely still. A puddle of dark blood beneath him.
The man was speaking in hushed Spanish to Catalina. I couldn’t understand his words, but his tone of voice told me that if either of us made a move he was going to finish Gabby. I also gathered that he was telling her to get into the turbocharged Dodge at the foot of the steps. I told her not to move, but he pressed harder against Gabby’s neck and Catalina obeyed. She dropped the knife, walked around him and down the steps. She stood next to the car, where two more men waited inside. While Gabby cried and blood started trickling down her neck, the man holding her kept his eyes on me and backed down the steps. Slowly. Smiling. A cigarette dangling from his lips. At the base of the steps he stopped and was turning toward the car when I heard a piercing scream.
The man holding Gabby lost his grip and crumpled into a pile at the bottom of the steps. In the same second, Catalina launched toward Gabby, lifted her off the steps, and ran. The engine in the Dodge roared to life, and a hand extended out of the door to try and pull the downed man into the car.
I got there first and slammed the door shut, to the great discomfort of the owner of the hand. The blacked-out Dodge flung gravel through the parking lot as I raced toward the Corvette. The top was down, so I jumped in, cranked the engine, slammed the gear into first, and was about to let off the clutch when Diego appeared at my left shoulder, offering me Juan Pedro’s bloody knife.
A half mile later, I’d pegged the accelerator at 160 mph. Both the Dodge and I were soon approaching the turn at the Rocks. Neither of us could make the turn at this speed. But if he made it through, he’d be gone. There was no way I could catch him. I had one chance—when he slowed just before the turn. I sat on his rear bumper, pushing him, wanting him to carry as much speed as possible into the turn. I knew the road would be slippery from a thin layer of windswept sand spread across the road.
He approached the turn at 120 mph. The Dodge got squirrelly, but he corrected, and that’s when I figured out how good a driver he really was. He let off the accelerator, allowed the car to be absorbed by the soft sand on the side of the road, which stopped the spin he had begun, and let his momentum carry him through the sand and into the corner. If he didn’t touch the accelerator, he’d emerge out the other side and disappear as the supercharger pushed the car over two hundred.
Halfway through the turn, I knew it was now or never. I swerved into the left lane, which would bring me into a perpendicular course with the Dodge when it corrected. The Dodge rounded the turn, began to straighten, and I T-boned him at over a hundred miles per hour.
Allie heard the crash at the restaurant. But unlike Jake’s, there wasn’t enough gas to cause an explosion. Just the sound of twisting metal.
The Dodge collided with the rocks and began flipping. As did the Corvette. I don’t know how many times we rolled, but my roll bar saved me. When we came to a stop, we were both lying upside down on the beach on the other side of the rocks. The waves were rolling in beneath us. When the first one swamped me, I knew if I didn’t get out I’d drown.
I unbuckled my harness, stumbled from the car, and stood weak-kneed on the beach, trying to shake out the dizziness and force my eyes to focus. There’s a problem with spending your whole life trying to get back to good. Sometimes on the way back, you bump into the bad. And bad doesn’t care. Bad is just bad. It likes it that way. And the bad is always hell-bent on you never getting back to good.
But in the last several years I had been trying. Making strides. Keeping to myself. A danger to no one. That ended on the beach when two strong, muscled figures crawled out of the Dodge and headed toward me. I didn’t want to hurt them and I didn’t want them to hurt me, but reason holds no place with people like that. They didn’t give me much choice. And thanks to the United States military, I’d always been good at fighting on a beach.
Twenty minutes later the police arrived. When they saw two bodies on the beach and Juan Pedro’s bloody knife in my hand, they arrested me.
40
The details would come out in court. Three illegal aliens, lieutenants of Juan Pedro, had attempted to kidnap Gabby and Catalina and return them to Mexico. When Diego and I prevented that, they fled. The prosecuting attorney neither admitted nor denied this. He focused on what happened the moment they drove out of the parking lot of the Blue Tornado. He was really good at his job and convinced the court and the jury that my castle doctrine defense ended at the boundary of the parking lot and what occurred thereafter, that is, my pursuit and the ensuing fight on the beach, constituted premeditated murder.
To an extent, he was right. Although I never verbalized that.