Page 55 of Shadow Man
A loud curse from the front seat has me tearing my eyes away from him.
“What is it?”
“It’s cool,parcera. I can handle it.”
She’s lying. The way she keeps looking in the rear-view mirror is sending a bucket of ice down my spine.
“Tell me!” I beg her.
She blows out a ragged breath and glances in the mirror again. “Okay, we’ve got company.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Swiping at my tears, I turn to see for myself. Three huge jeeps are darkening the horizon like a pack of shiny, black predators.
“Fernandez,” she deduces with a hiss. “They’re gaining on us and we’re still five minutes out.”
“Can we lose them?” I say urgently. “We don't have much time, Vi.”
Everywhere I look is crimson: the gray leather interior, the foot well, my clothes…my bloody handprints on the windows.
“Anna,” he mutters, and then I swear he says the word moon.
I lean over him again, pressing my forehead to his. “Tell me what to do, Joseph. I don’t know what to do.”
“Call him.”
“Not that, anything but that.” I glance at Vi again. I refuse to betray her twice.
“You have to. Don’t trust—” His voice gets swallowed up by his pain as the first spray of bullets hits the trunk. “None of us are making it out alive otherwise.”
It’s not so much a rock and a hard place as the devil and his hellfire. I hate that man with every smashed-up part of me.
“Hold on!” I hear Vi yell. “I have an idea.”
The Colombian countryside is whizzing past us in a blur of green and brown, and then suddenly it’s gone. It takes me a beat to realize we’re driving through an open field, with the SUV’s suspension creaking and rocking to the uneven terrain.
“Where the hell are we going, Vi? Where the fuck are you taking us?”
“We’re approaching the north side of Emilio Santiago’s former estate… Just trust me, okay? I know what I’m doing.”
Emilio… As in the devil’s dead brother?
I open my mouth to contradict her when a cell phone gets pressed into my hand. It’s slick with sweat and blood. It’s a temptation I never wanted.
“Call him,” coughs Joseph, his face creasing up as he tries to get a handle on the pain. Another spray of bullets peppers the back windshield, leaving ugly pockmarks in the bulletproof glass.
I open up the cell and see a single number saved in the phone book. My finger hovers over the green dial button as Joseph’s head rolls sideways again.I can't believe I’m even considering this.But that’s what happens when someone who breathed life into your soul is fighting like hell to take one breath for himself.
The world tilts.
The black curtain gets tossed aside.
And that decision I thought was so hard…?
It’s turns out to be the easiest one I ever made.
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Dante