Which I guess makes me… homeless.
The thought punches into me, and I brake at the intersection, my body jerking forward, then slumping back in my seat. Turning off the music blasting through my car, I grip the wheel.
I see I’m clear to go, but I can’t move.
I’m frozen in this quiet moment of realization.
I’m homeless.
I’m a dropout.
I’m—
My passenger door rips open, and I scream as a man I’ve never seen before jumps into my car. He looks like he’s just stepped off some mafia movie set with blood coating his hands and shirt, ugly bruises marring his face.
“Drive!” he shouts.
I gape at him, and he pulls a gun from the back of his pants and points it at me. A flash of remorse flickers over his beat-up face, but then he’s shouting again.
“Just drive, lady! Drive!”
Something pings off the side of my car, and it only takes a second for me to realize it’s a bullet.
I scream again and punch the gas, accelerating through the intersection just as a car is about to pass through it.
We barely miss each other.
A horn blasts just as another bullet hits my wing mirror, shattering the glass.
I press the gas pedal to the floor, swerving around a corner and nearly taking out a pedestrian.
“Sorry!” I screech but don’t slow down, because a car has just veered around the corner, and I can tell by the speed it’s approaching that it must have picked up the gunmen on the street and is now set on mowing me down.
“Shit,” I rasp, glancing in the rearview mirror.
The guy beside me swivels around, growling something under his breath before putting down the passenger window and leaning out of it.
The gun in his hand fires off a few rounds, and I’m struggling to comprehend this.
Have I been sucked into an alternate universe?
Am I suddenly on the set of some Hollywood movie?
This is insane!
I don’t have any idea where I’m going, but I turn onto the next street and go to pull over.
“What are you doing?” the guy barks at me. “They’re still chasing us!”
“We should call the police.”
“Not a chance,” he mutters, digging the gun into my stomach and forcing me to accelerate. “Just do exactly what I say, when I say it.”
All I can feel is the metal barrel pressed against my torso.
Maybe I should tell him to go ahead and fire.
I’m a homeless, futureless case anyway. Maybe I should just go be with my parents now.
But I can’t quite bring myself to say it.
I can’t quite bring myself to defy him, so I punch the gas and turn when he tells me to, following his every direction until we’re speeding through the back roads of El Cajon—screeching tires, burning rubber, reckless corners. It’s a Molotov cocktail of disaster, heavily seasoned with lashings of terror.
Narrowly missing another car, I punch it into the next lane and notice when I check the rearview mirror that no one is behind us.
“Did we lose them?” I whisper.
The guy beside me doesn’t say anything. His jacket rustles a little as he turns to look over his shoulder.
“Keep going,” he mutters.
His gun is still resting against my side, and I do as he says, holding a steady course to a destination unknown.
My imagination takes off, wondering what he’s going to do when we get there. His shirt is covered in blood but not soaked through as if he’d been shot or stabbed. Is the blood his? Or someone else’s? And if it’s someone else’s, is he responsible for that?
It’s hard to breathe.
Gripping the wheel, I bite the side of my tongue and hope to God this man beside me isn’t some evil psychopath who’s going to leave no witnesses in his wake.
My life has never been a ticking clock before.
And even though I had the fleeting thought that maybe I do want to go and be with my parents, now that I’m thinking it through… I don’t.
I’m not ready to die.
10
Captivating
The woman beside me is a damn good driver, considering I’ve probably scared her shitless.
She looks young, but I can’t really tell. With all that dark makeup on, she could be anything from sixteen to twenty-two.
Ages are always so hard to pick.
My eyes skim down her body as she stays on the road I tell her to.
She’s skinny with long legs, arms and fingers. Her knuckles are white, the skin stretched tight over the bones of her hands.
I ease the gun back from her narrow body but don’t pull it away completely.
I still need the control until this ordeal is over.
She doesn’t need to know the chamber is empty and I have no bullets left to refill it.
When I first spotted her car at that intersection, I was going to pull her out the door and take off, but the thought that she might get shot or mowed down by Cruz’s crew stopped me. She was safer being my getaway driver.
And now I’m stuck with a hostage.
Shit. I didn’t think this through.
“They’re definitely not chasing us anymore.” Her voice is small.
I look out the back window and spot a couple of cars behind us, but I don’t recognize any of them.
The woman overtakes a blue Camaro before ducking back in front of it.
“Yeah, we’ve lost them. Keep driving, though.”
“For how long?”
“Until I tell you to stop.”
Her lips pinch tight, the black lipstick giving her a ghostly vibe.
I study her face as we head east.
Her cheeks are kind of round, and her almond eyes tell me she must have some Asian blood in her, but maybe some European as well. She’s got that multicultural thing going on.
Her large eyes dart to check me out, and I avert my gaze, staring out the windshield and wondering how far I should get her to take me.
I need to hide away somewhere and regroup. Figure out how I’m going to bust back into Cruz’s world and get Arley.
I also want to figure out how to take him down in the process. Anger fires through me and I grip the gun, my nostrils flaring as I try and fail to breathe in the freaking calm.
I’m not calm!
I’m livid!
Jade is dead.
Everything that is precious to me keeps getting taken away.
Mom died of cancer. Grandpa was killed by my dad. Michael was lost in the street. Jade has been murdered by a man she once loved. He may not have pulled the trigger, but he would have ordered the kill.
Arley’s not dead.
I clench my jaw.
And she needs you to focus.
Forcing air in through my nostrils, I will the anger to settle.
Get control, Deacon.
Grandpa’s voice is in my head again. I feed off it, willing his soothing tone to bring me back to a place of coherent thought.
After a moment, I let out a breath and turn to check on the driver again. Her hair is a long black mess, making me wonder when she last brushed it. It rests just past her shoulders, a thick mop in desperate need of taming. Skimming down her arm, I notice again how white her knuckles are. She needs to ease up her grip or she’s going to get a hand cramp. I glance at the speedometer, my eyebrows popping high as she swerves around the car in front of us.