Page 60 of Omega
Holding the wheel and the pistol in the same hand, he shifted up into fourth and we went briefly airborne as we merged onto the blacktop, causing a pile-up when a little blue sedan had to brake and swerve to avoid us. I heard the crash behind us, but didn’t spare it a look.
“Just like a Jerry Bruckheimer movie,” I said, hearing further metal-on-metal impacts.
“You should have ducked. I fucking told you to duck, goddamn it.” Oooooh shit. Harris was pissed.
“Yeah, well…I never do what I’m told. Get used to it, buddy.”
“You want to live? You’d better learn to listen.”
“Are you really going to argue with me about this right now?” I asked, glaring at him. “You haven’t even said hello.”
He stared at me, incredulous. “Hello, Miss Campari. How are you? Having a nice day? Would you care for some tea?”
I flipped him the bird. “Don’t be a dick,Nicholas.”
“I swear to fuck I’ll throw you out of this car,” he snarled. “Donotcall me Nicholas. Not even my mother calls me that.”
“I’m having trouble reconciling the idea of you sitting in a tasteful Midwestern bungalow, drinking sun tea with your sweet little mother.”
This earned me a chuckle. “Everyone has a mother, Layla. Even me. But no, they don’t live in abungalowin the Midwest, they live in a condo in Florida. And my mother is not sweet, nor particularly little.” A pause, and then he grinned at me. “Although, she does drink sun tea, funny enough.”
“What does she call you, then?”
He didn’t respond right away. “Not Nicholas,” he said, eventually. He gestured behind us. “See if they’re back there. Look back several car lengths.”
I twisted on the bench seat, peering into the dense traffic behind us. “Shit. Yeah, they’re back there. Quite a ways back, like maybe half a mile or so, but they’re there.”
“Vitaly’s men don’t give up. They’ll keep coming until we kill them or they catch us.”
“No shit. They don’t dare go back to Vitaly without results to show him,” I said.
Harris glanced at me, his gaze sharp, and his voice soft. “No?”
I shook my head as I returned to my seat and buckled up. “No. They don’t dare. He doesn’t accept failure or excuses. You do what he tells you to do, or you die trying. If you show up and you haven’t carried out his orders to the letter, he’ll kill you. And you’ll never even see it coming.”
“How does he kill them?”
I blinked hard. “Knife to the ribs.” I tapped two fingers over my heart. “He’s got this switchblade, keeps it in his pocket. He’ll just be talking, calm as anything. One second he’s smiling, hands in his pockets, casual, the picture of understanding and congeniality. The next? That blade is between their ribs, and they’re dead. He does it so fast, so easily. Doesn’t even blink. I saw him do it at least six times in the four days I was his prisoner. He must pay those guys really well if they’re willing to risk death any time they’re in the room with him.”
“Recruit from the poor and desperate, pay them well, and they’ll put up with just about anything,” Harris remarked. A few minutes of silence, and then he glanced at me again. “Layla, when you were with Vitaly—”
I shook my head, cut him off. “Not now, Harris. I can’t go there right now.” I focused on breathing slowly and evenly, staring straight ahead, refusing to blink, refusing to unclench my teeth. “Get me somewhere relatively safe first, and maybe I’ll tell you what happened.”
Harris nodded. “I can do that.” He checked his rear-view mirror. “So I just gotta figure out how to lose these guys.”
“Do what you’d do if you were alone. Don’t worry about me.”
“I just rescued you, Layla. I’m not about to put you in harm’s way again.”
“Meaning you’d stop and shoot it out with them, if it were just you, right?”
He bobbled his head side to side. “I’d ambush them.”
“So let’s ambush them.”
“No offense, Layla, but I’m a highly trained combat veteran, and you’re—”
“I stabbed a guy in the eyeball with a pen I’d kept hidden in my cunt for over a week. I shoved it so far into his fucking brain that he died instantly. And that was after I broke his arm like a twig. I did this because he was in the process of raping me. I put on his blood-soaked clothes, his smelly boots—I had to wear his clothes because Vitaly had kept me naked the entire time—and I stole a car, stopped for supplies, drove to fucking Guarujá, walked several miles in the blazing heat, most of that distance either in the sand or uphill, without having any food or water. And then I stole a car right out from underneath the very men who were hunting me.” I was getting a little worked up at this point. “And then—andthen!—then I was nearly shot several times just now by thoseassholesback there. So I think at this point, Nicholas, there isn’t much that’s going to faze me. Figure out how you want to ambush these fuckers, and I’ll help you kill every single goddamn one of those pussies.”