Page 93 of Omega
“All right then.” He eyed me again, assessing rather than leering. “So, when you say ‘your woman’, what does that mean, exactly, boss?”
Harris was in the cockpit, flipping switches, settling a headset on his head. He turned around and glanced through the open door. “It means shut the fuck up and mind your own goddamned business, that’s what it fucking means.”
Thresh’s eyebrows rose. “Whoa, dude. Uptight much?”
“Uptight?” Harris rose out of the seat, pulling at the headset. “I’ll show you—”
“Harris! Sit down, shut up, and fly the fucking airplane. We don’t have time to measure dicks.”
Thresh’s eyes, already wide, widened further when Harris did as I said. The noise of the engines ramped up, and we bolted forward. Something sparked off the ramp and ricocheted around the cargo hold with angryping-zzzzinggg-buzzzzz, and Thresh’s hand—which was so big a fully-grown Pomeranian could have sat in his palm—shoved me to one side. He dropped to his knees, flipped a bipod out, and dropped to his belly. Our plane was howling down the runway, picking up speed, but Thresh didn’t seem concerned by this as he took aim and opened fire at the black SUV roaring up behind us. I grabbed hold of the nearest object, which was a chain fastened to the floor and to the wall, clinging to it as I felt the ground fall away. The banging of the machine gun was the most deafening sound I’d ever heard, and it rocked Thresh’s entire body back with each report. He fired in bursts of three shots, and on the fourth burst, the hood of the SUV crumpled, the front bumper buried itself into the tarmac, and the entire vehicle flipped forward. Contrary to Jerry Bruckheimer movies, it didn’t explode in a fiery ball, instead just flopping forward onto its roof and rocking a few times before coming to rest.
We were angled upward now, so the tail end was facing the ground at a steep angle. My stomach lurched into my throat. Thresh, meanwhile, calmly folded the bipod, shouldered the huge gun, and grabbed a chain near mine. He loomed over me, glanced down at me, and winked. The man was justenormous. It boggled the mind, honestly.
He slammed his palm over a button, and the ramp folded up, darkening the interior and removing my view of the ground.
I let my head thunk against the wall of the plane, and I blew out a breath of relief.
“Well, that was nerve-wracking,” I said.
Thresh just chuckled. “All in a day’s work, sweet—I mean, Miss Campari.”
“Layla.”
“I’m sticking with ‘Miss Campari,’” he said. “Harris can be a vicious son of a bitch.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, so I just shrugged. “Okay. Well…I’m going up to the cockpit.”
Harris may have been a vicious son of a bitch, but I still felt Thresh’s eyes on my ass as I walked forward to the cockpit. I turned and glanced at him, an eyebrow lifted. He just shrugged, making a face that saidwho, me? I don’t know what you’re talking about.
I laughed as I took a seat in the copilot’s chair.
“What?” Harris asked.
“Just Thresh. He’s funny. I like him.”
Harris gave me an odd look. “Thresh is funny? Since when?”
I waved it off. “So. We’re finally going home?”
“Well, to theElizaeventually, but our route there will be a bit…circuitous. We’re stopping in Miami first, and then to the Bahamas, and then eventually we’ll take a chopper from St. Thomas to the ship. Gotta make sure we really lost them.”
“Think we have?” I asked.
He didn’t answer right away. “I don’t know, honestly. I told you I’d never bullshit you, so I won’t. You killed his best friend. I don’t think we’ll ever really lose Vitaly’s guys until Vitaly is dead. ”
“Best friend?” I swallowed hard at that.
“Reports are Cut was the only person Vitaly trusted, his best friend since childhood.”
“So I just made things worse, didn’t I?”
Harris glanced at me. “You did what you had to do. That’s all you need to worry about.”
I didn’t like the sound of that.
And the fact that Harris stayed quiet as we flew out over the ocean, his brow pinched, worry on his features…didn’t do much to reassure me.
Nor did the roiling uneasiness in my stomach.