Page 61 of Omega
Harris’s jaw worked up and down, as if he was trying to respond but didn’t actually have any words. “Jesus, Layla.”
“If you were hoping for a damsel in distress, you’ve got the wrong bitch. I may be in distress, but I’m sure as shit not a fucking helpless damsel.”
A long, tense moment passed, in which Harris tried to figure out what to say. “You called me Nicholas again.”
“Yes I did, and you can either deal with it or shove me out of the car. I don’t care. I’ll figure this shit out, one way or another, with you or without you.”
“You’re fucking impossible,” he grumbled.
I laughed. “You’re just now figuring that out?”
He shook his head. “No, you’re just reaching an all-time-high impossibility factor.”
“Buddy, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
“That’s a scary thought,” Harris said.
“I’m from Detroit. Don’t fuck with me.” I crossed my arms over my chest and kept an eye on the passenger-side mirror, watching as the black SUV closed the distance. “They’re getting closer. If you’ve got a plan, I’d start putting it into play if I were you.”
A body of water rippled pale blue in the distance; traffic was getting thicker and thicker by the moment.
Harris gestured at the water. “Once we’re past this causeway, we’ll be hitting Batistini. I’ll make my move there.”
“What’s in Batistini?” I asked.
“There isn’t shit in Batistini, it’s just the first suburb of São Paulo we’ll get to. It’s hard to ambush someone in the car on the freeway.”
“I guess that’s true. But I’ve never ambushed anyone, so I wouldn’t know.”
We were on the causeway that stretched out over the lake, and a sign over the road announced the exits for Batistini. It struck me as funny that despite the fact that I was in a totally different country and that I didn’t speak, read, or write the language in the slightest, the highway signs were totally understandable anyway. I mean, I didn’t understand the words, but based on the layout of the sign,saídawas probably equivalent to “exit”, anddiademawas close enough to “diadem” that it probably represented the ring of highways around the city of São Paulo.
Harris took the exit for Batistini, and sure enough, the SUV behind us followed, staying at least four or five car-lengths behind us. Obviously they had no intention of pushing the confrontation on the highway either. Too much risk of things going wrong in our favor, I guess. When we hit the residential area—which was a graffiti-tagged, run-down area—Harris gunned the engine and pulled away from our pursuers, twisted around a tight right turn, gunned it again so the tires spat gravel, pushing me back in my seat, the engine roaring. I heard tires squealing behind us, still several car-lengths back. I revised my estimate of the area as being poor, simply judging based on the number of well-kept cars parked on the street.
Another long straightaway, a left turn, and then we were on a narrow gravel road running parallel to the highway, the scrub-covered hillside leading up to the highway on our left, a cinderblock wall hiding a junk yard on the right, full of rusting semi trailers, ancient buses, and random bits of metal. Harris pulled into a driveway, the highway on our left, a ramshackle warehouse or factory on the right. There was a short, low awning under which Harris parked the Land Rover. The outside of the warehouse on our right had been roofed over to create a porch, and on this makeshift porch was a cluster of middle-aged men, all of them hard-bitten and hard-eyed, weathered faces lined with wrinkles, sweat dotting their foreheads, brown glass bottles of beer in their hands, cigarettes hanging out of their mouths. As Harris and I exited the Land Rover—which was older by a decade than I was, at least—the men on the porch stared at us, unblinking, mute. They were giving us the kind of stares a blond white girl would get if she were strolling down Cass Corridor at midnight. The kind of stares that say, “You are in thewrongneighborhood, and you’d best keep going if you know what’s good for you.”
Harris circled around to the back of the Defender, opened the trunk, and hauled out a huge black duffel bag. He hung the bag on his shoulder, and it gave a heavy, ominousclankas he did so. One of the men on the porch said something in Portuguese, and if I was any judge of tone of voice, it wasn’t polite. Harris reached behind his back and leveled the pistol at the man who’d spoken, stepping closer to the porch in that quick, careful, lithe movement men trained in combat all seem to use, keeping his torso swiveled to the side, presenting as small a target as possible. Harris spoke in fluent Portuguese, his voice low and smooth and even, but still somehow fairly snarling with threat. He gestured with the pistol, and the entire cluster of men stood up, gripping their beer and cigarettes, and vanished into the warehouse.
“Do I want to know what you told them?” I asked.
“No,” was all he said, and grabbed me by the hand and hauled me across the road, where a break in the wall had been hastily boarded over with lengths of two-by-fours and scraps of corrugated iron.
I climbed over the jury-rigged fence and then waited for Harris, who pulled me out of sight and used one hand to press me flat against the intact portion of the cinderblock wall.
He set the heavy bag down at his feet and wiped his brow with his palm, then wiped his palm on his khakis. “Please listen to me very carefully now, Layla, all right? If we’re going to have any chance of getting out of this alive, you havegotto do as I say.”
I blinked sweat out of my eye and nodded at him. “Tell me what to do, Nicholas.”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “First, stop calling me that.”
“How about Nick?”
He shook his head, irritated. “This isn’t the time for this shit, Layla. Sure, Nick works. Now, are you done mouthing off?”
“I wasn’t mouthing off, actually, but if you want to see what that sounds like, I can—”
“Jesus, Layla. Shut the fuck up and listen, would you?” he snarled. I shut my mouth with an audible click of my teeth, and gestured for him to continue. “Thank you. There’s five of them, and two of us. You’re not trained in the use of assault rifles, I’m assuming—correct me if I’m wrong, as you have a knack for surprising me. Point is, that’s what they’re carrying. What that means for us is this is gonna get gnarly. Bullets will be flying hot and heavy. I’m gonna put you in a position, and you’re going to stay there, come hell or high water, until I tell you otherwise. You got it?”
I nodded. “Got it.”