They were coming. They were a good distance back, but they were coming.
I sped into an area that had no streetlights, a seaside area with plenty of bushes that were indented and had vehicle-sized cubbyholes, spaces that would be occupied by late-night lovers. Winding, snaking, narrow, curving road leading to a shipyard. Patched asphalt. Caribbean Star Airlines hangar; it looked abandoned, its fence locked and covered with barbed wire; was forced to keep going, nowhere to stop and hide, no shelter, then came up on an area that had damaged, maybe abandoned boats, like a boating repair shop junkyard. A strip of ship-repairing businesses and seaside buildings. Not a person in sight. A ship was in my path,
Lola Antigua West Indies,
hitched to a trailer at the side of the road.
The road smoothed out and a lush area appeared, an oasis that was a private landing strip owned by a billionaire. A hangar for his private jet. But that smoothness didn’t last for long; as soon as that property whisked by, the new road vanished and eroded terrain reappeared, as if the billionaire never went in that direction so the condition of the road was inconsequential.
The eroded terrain went to the right, back inland, the beauty of the sea becoming a shadow in the dust and debris I left behind, dust that was enough to show my enemies my trail, but not enough to create a usable smoke screen. There were no edges to the road. Then more than 50 percent of the paved section of the road vanished and what was left was more pothole than asphalt, the ride rougher and faster.
Hawks held on, bounced, a helpless passenger as we passed another section of the USAF property, then the amount of road down to 25 percent, maybe less in some spots, signs declaring that to the left side was the U.S. Air Force’s property, acres of acacia trees, junkyards, trucks, boats, buses, bushes, goats, a rock quarry, acres of construction equipment, places to execute the living and hide dead bodies, an area that, if it was nighttime, would look like a pool of endless darkness.
I maintained my speed, the Jeep bumping and speeding across dirt, sand, rocks, and tar, the airport now on my right, this route having left V. C. Bird International and backtracking up a different road, taking the shape of the letter U; I struggled to stay on the road as I first saw Liat’s hangar, then Geotech’s, no place to run and hide without this ground turning into my own burial spot, excavators and backhoes on the sides of the road, side roads no good to take because they were blocked with mountains of debris. Another sugar mill appeared on the left, the road littered with school desks, car seats, a dead dog, bottles, plastic bags, tires, anything people could leave behind.
A construction pit, rocks, boulders, and sand off to the left, nothing but trees and other bushes to the right, nowhere to escape to, forced to keep going, my fight with potholes a never-ending battle, knowing they were still back there. I took us down an incline, past the remnants of a sugar mill and beautiful areas that had been turned into dumping grounds, and came to another intersection, hit the brakes, and skidded to a bumpy stop, a stop that made the Jeep stall out.
They were coming.
I had to shift the Jeep back to Park to get the damn thing to start. To the right was more dirt and gravel, a road that led back to Old Parham Road and Airport Road. I didn’t go that way.
They were rampaging down the bumpy hill, maybe thirty yards behind me, behind us.
I took off to the left, sped over unforgiving road, fishtailed in the direction of St. George’s Anglican Church. Gunshots came at us, tore through the plastic soft top, hit the windshield. My foot stomped down on the accelerator. Another shot hit the side-view mirror. My foot pressed the accelerator through the floor. Another shot hit the backseats. I sped in desperation toward Fitches Creek.
They were on me, breathing fire down my neck.
At the church, another V-shaped intersection; I faked a left, then made a hard turn in the opposite direction, a hard right that threw the determined driver off. The Jeep turned, skidded, and dropped into one of the deepest potholes I’d ever seen, bounced like it wanted to turn on its side. My injury screamed as I struggled to recover, lost control of the wheel. The back end of the Jeep hit part of the two-foot wall that circled the church, the impact knocking us back upright, jarring me against the door, that jarring like a mean blow, bringing new pain to my gunshot wound. I gritted my teeth, hit the accelerator again, kicked up grass and dirt, stomped down on the accelerator, and bumped up a narrow road that was covered by trees, again making another hard left, a left turn around a dense forest hanging over a blind curve.
As soon as I made it inside the curve, I hit the brakes, skidded to a stop that threw me and Hawks forward, and turned off the Jeep. I had stopped in the most unseen part of a blind curve, an area covered by dense foliage that reached high and hung over the edges of the road. This Jeep was no longer my ride. It was now my two-ton weapon. Hawks reached for her door, pushed it open.
I grimaced. My pain begged for a case of B.C. Powder. I hurried around to Hawks’s side.
She had the gun in hand, limped toward me before I made it to her.
I was panting, exhausted, and beaten, throbbing like I had run the entire route.
Hawks’s grimace told me she was frustrated, mean as hell, and battle-worn all at once.
She had been in Antigua less than thirty minutes, and this was not what she’d had in mind.
Heartbeats strong, breathing rugged and out of sync, sweat pouring like a river, we waited.
My heart raced, not knowing if they were following or if they had taken that road to the left, had gone around the church; that circular route would bring them up behind us instead, meant we wouldn’t have time to get back inside the Jeep and turn it around, meant I’d trapped us.
Just like Bonnie and Clyde had been trapped.
Then I heard gears shifting. From in front of us, the direction we had come.
Heard them in the distance. Gunning their ride. Coming for me. Coming for us.
My guess was they had turned too hard, had run off the road, had to get back on the road; the same route that had tossed and thrown me and Hawks had tossed and thrown them as well.
The roar of an engine was growing louder, like an animal in the wild, an animal that was determined to get its prey. Blood. I smelled my own blood. Felt it mixing with my sweat.
I reached for the gun. Hawks didn’t want to give it to me. All communication was with our eyes and anger. Her arm wasn’t injured, but I could move better than she could. She wasn’t agile, not now.
Two assassins sharing one gun.
A hard call on who got to be quarterback, both of us on the injured list.
Hawks gave me the gun, handed me more than her trust; she handed me her life.
I checked the gun, made sure it was loaded, made sure it was ready.
While I did that Hawks was back at the Jeep, pulling out her backpack, then dumping the broken glass that was the remainder of two of the three fifths of whiskey she had rushed to purchase.
Hawks pulled her tank top off, did that as fast as she could, used her clothing to pick up the neck of one of the broken whiskey bottles, its end long and ready to perform surgery.
The skies opened up again; rain fell and muted the world.
They were relentless, motivated by good money.
With a deep frown Hawks limped to the right side of the road, moved as fast as she could.
The roar grew louder, urgent, the engine screaming as it charged uphill over rugged terrain.
Death’s diplomats roared around the blind corner with ambitious speed, chasing what was no longer on the run. The front end of their vehicle crashed into the Jeep so hard the back end of the Wrangler lifted off the ground, rose up like a mule kicking, and the Jeep was knocked sideways. That high-speed collision activated air bags, those air bags working in my favor, exploding and smacking faces, blocking their vision, pinning the occupants where they were, became my improvised weapons, knocked guns away, did to them what had been done to me on a rainy day in Huntsville, Alabama.
The moment their vehicle crashed and the air bags popped, before the noise from that collision faded, gun in hand, I was moving in an arc, shooting, windows cracking and air bags exploding.
The rain came down hard enough to steal the noise from their yells and screams.
I sent them the bullets from the gun that had been shoved underneath my chin, the same gun that was going to be used to end my days, the gun that had caused suffering in my left arm. Unable to use my injured left hand to keep the gun steady, I still managed smooth pulls, didn’t jerk. Rapid shots without a pause in between. My jaw tight, breathing smooth, focused. I fired on them, this my only weapon, fired on a vehicle filled with men who no doubt had an arsenal of weapons, because only a fool would come to this party unprepared.
Their vehicle had them trapped, boxed in, had become a coffin on four wheels.
The right-side back door opened fast and hard and one of the passengers ran from his end.
That man pulled the trigger on his gun, his gun clicked, its load shot during the chase.
He wasn’t in my line of fire. I didn’t shoot at him. Didn’t waste my energy, didn’t waste a bullet.
Hawks, like the bird that shared her name, had keen sight. Her haunting eyes were capable of making her prey stop in its tracks. In her hand, that broken bottle was more deadly than a true hawk’s sharply hooked bill, more powerful and destructive than feet with curved talons. The bird was strong and graceful in flight. On the ground, even when she was wounded, Hawks possessed the same quality.
The would-be assassin raced out of the rear; the dense and impenetrable acacia bushes trapped him, gripped him, ripped at his flesh and clothing as he stumbled and fell into the foliage. Maybe he thought he could run through the bushes to escape; those bushes tore away skin as he tried to pull himself free, clung to him and cut him like he was dancing with barbed wire. He changed directions, only to run into another family of acacia bushes. The thick bushes were in every direction he turned. Those bushes covered the island the way kudzu covered Atlanta. A strong rain came down on his bloodied hands and face while he discovered the power of a prickly bush made of sharp thorns, each prick deep and as painful as shaking hands with a cactus.
Face, legs, and arms punctured and scratched like he had been in a fight with a hundred wolverines, he struggled to get free from the hostile bushes, fled from me.
That was when he stumbled into the rain and met Hawks.
Hawks was waiting, a broken bottle in her hand, the business end sharper than a knife.
Her haunting green eyes, her aggravation, and her fury were the last things he saw in this world.
Up ahead, in front of a single-level home, was a silver Hyundai Santa Fe, a crossover SUV that had the steering wheel on the left, a ride with American-side drive. Two minutes later Hawks was sweating and hot-wiring the car as I stood guard, my arm in too much pain for me to hot-wire the car myself.
In the distance I heard cars speeding toward us.
Hawks was rushing. I looked in on her, looked to see what the problem was.
Besides the one on the ground, there were four cooling bodies inside the vehicle that had trailed us. The man with the red hair wasn’t one of them. Then the rear window of the Hyundai Santa Fe shattered. The sounds of zips, more silenced gunshots. The second chase car had caught up with the first. The curved road was only as wide as a man’s arm span, blocked by two wrecked vehicles and one dead body, the thick and tall bushes on both sides of the road impossible to drive through.
Hawks kept hot-wiring the car, her effort peppered with hot lead in search of moving targets.
I returned fire, hit their windshield, enough to make them take cover.
Another car pulled in behind them, and just like the one that had arrived a second before, it became trapped by the wrecked vehicles and the stopped one. It was a smaller car, one that would have had a hard time flying over the rough and rugged terrain at the speed needed to keep up with a Jeep.
The man with the red hair had caught up with the chase; the leader had arrived.
Detroit was there, in that car, impatient, wanting to see my lifeless body.
Hawks got the car started. I shoved her inside, pushed her over to the passenger side.
The red-haired man left the car with quickness, ran up the road, shooting as he ran, missing, his coworkers doing the same. I caught only a glimpse of the third car’s driver before my adrenaline gave me a new high. It was the strawberry blonde. The woman who had followed me in London.
She wore the clothes of a runway model, had a gun drawn, her stance that of a professional policewoman as she aimed my way, too many of her frantic people in front of her to get a clear shot.
It was only a glimpse, less than a half second, but my mind recorded what it had seen.
Something about the strawberry blonde seemed wrong, unsure, and unsteady.
Something about her had seemed sluggish.
In all the pandemonium, during that brief portion of a second when our eyes met, an abrupt chill had come toward me, hugged and cooled my heated body. She had a severe coldness, one I had never witnessed before, one I had never seen, not without looking in the mirror.
They were blocked in by the crashed vehicles, no way they could chase us in their rides.
I screeched away, expecting another chase vehicle to appear in front of us and box us in, but I made it out of the area, made a hard right, expecting them to pop up in my rearview at any moment, but nothing appeared. I kept my speed as I went through the villages, passed stray dogs and playing children, knowing this was a pause, not a conclusion, a pause liable to end at any moment.