“Not at all,” Sarah said. “This was always reality. I need to know that you are one hundred percent committed at this point Mike. I don’t want to hear that you’re having doubts.”
The music stopped. Camilla walked across the room and fiddled with the iPod that was inserted in a portable speaker system. Stevie Ray Vaughn started singing that ‘The Sky is Crying’ and she turned up the volume. “Lighten up, Mikey,” she said as she strode seductively back to the table. “We’re doing the right thing. You’re doing the right thing. There’s no question about it.”
“You’re right,” Mike nodded filling his glass with more wine. “I’m not sure what I expected. But I am committed, no second thoughts. You can trust me one-hundred percent. Maybe it’s from the trouble back in Maine. I don’t know. You know me, Camilla. I’m never tense but, man, my shoulders are in a knot.”
Camilla walked behind him and started rubbing his shoulders.
Sarah watched the massage and listened to Camilla and Mike change the conversation and banter between themselves playfully. She didn’t like the way they had both referred to this as like being in a movie and now here they were laughing and joking. She hadn’t really trusted Mike from the beginning but now she had reason to mistrust him. He wasn’t committed. He had just admitted as much and then as quickly changed his mind, almost protesting too much about how committed he was. She had better keep a very close eye on him over the coming days.
12:05 am PDT Humboldt County, California
The rapid, percussive pops of machinegun fire erupted outside. The car accelerated rapidly. Ted and the banker tried to get to their guns. Chris ducked down. Bullets peppered the car. The windows blew out. Jake’s head jerked back and to the right violently. Chris pressed himself down on the floor.
The banker and Ted screamed as the car spun out of control and launched off the road into the woods. They rammed into a tree head-on. Chris slammed into the back of the front seat with incredible force. The engine was running at full throttle as the car came to a stop. It howled at an unsustainable pitch. They must have shattered the axle or blown out the transmission and the accelerator was stuck at full throttle. Ted and the banker moaned, obviously injured. Chris flung his door open, rolled out onto the ground, and stumbled into the dark forest, away from the car.
Tripping on a log, he fell to the ground. His chest heaved. He felt like he was going to have a heart attack as he sat up against a tree and forced himself to take deep breaths – to calm down. He couldn’t see any signs of Ted or the banker. Through the trees, he caught glimpses of Miguel and one of his men approaching on the road. As they swaggered along with their weapons leveled at the car, they exchanged a low-fisted high five and spoke loudly in Spanish. The other thug drove their car. Its lights illuminated the wreck. A thick cloud of steam and smoke poured out from under the hood. The engine continued to howl. The men opened fire. Their machine guns blasted away at the now-shattered hot-rod until the engine made a loud sound and went silent, as did their guns.
The three men walked down to the car. Chris watched in horror as they pulled the bodies of Ted, Jake, and the banker out and laid them on the road. Miguel fired a single shot into each of their heads.
“My name is Miguel,” he said before pulling the trigger each time. “And don’t you forget it.”
“What about the other one?” One of the other men said to Miguel.
“He must be in the woods,” Miguel replied.
Miguel seemed to look right at him as he yelled into the dark forest, “This is what happens when you cross us.”
He sprayed a burst of bullets into the woods. One hit a tree about ten feet from Chris. He couldn’t have moved if he had wanted to.
“You tell your friends that if they ever do business with Miguel, they better treat me with respect.”
“Yeah, we are businessmen too,” one of the other men said in his Latino street accent.
They popped the trunk on the wrecked car and pulled out a bale of pot.
“I guess we’re getting this at a bargain,” Miguel said.
“It’s a sale,” another one of them said. They all started to laugh as they loaded the pot into their idling car and sped away down the road.
The dark lumps of the dead men lay in the road.
“What the hell,” he muttered as he stood up noticing for the first time the sharp pain in his left arm. The adrenaline rush had numbed it temporarily but now an intense pain flared on his forearm – a jagged edge of his ulna or radius protruded through the skin, blood ran from the wound. His knees weakened as he felt the sharp edge of bone. Damn.
The sounds of tires sliding on dirt and the low rumble of a powerful engine drifted through the woods. A car sped down the dirt road. It skidded to a stop just before running over the bodies, and machine-gun fire erupted from the vehicle into the woods all around him. Miguel and his boys had come back to see if he had gone up to the road. Falling to the ground, trembling, he listened to the bullets tearing through the woods.
After a few seconds, the car drove over the bodies, spun around, and drove over them again as it sped away with its occupants hooting and cheering.
Paranoia gripped him. Would they be back? He hurried deeper into the woods. He wanted to get as far away from those bodies and the road as possible. His arm throbbed with each step. What had he gotten himself into? How could this all be happening at once? David Rose, Sara Burns, Pell, Karen, The Banker and Miguel – it was too much, too coincidental, as if fate had somehow chosen him to see how far one man could be pushed before snapping.
As he staggered along, he ripped a piece off his shirt and wrapped it around his forearm to control the bleeding.
1:15 am PDT Humboldt County, California
“Weren’t we going to play some cards?” Sarah asked.
“Yes,” Camilla said as she sat back down at the table and sloppily refilled their glasses “Let’s have some fun.”
Mike finished dealing the cards and they got down to another game. Sarah watched as Camilla and Mike finished off the wine getting louder and drunker as the night progressed.
“Let’s change this music and dance,” Camilla suddenly yelled as she slammed the table, stood up and started dancing over to the iPod dock. Mike laughed and got up to follow her, almost falling over his chair as he went.
Chris stumbled to the ground again, slamming his arm into the decaying remnants of a tree trunk. Pain tore through his arm. He rolled over onto his back and screamed. The dark, dense woods consumed his weak howl – nobody was going to hear him.
Brilliant patches of star-filled sky peaked through the forest canopy. The air was warm but uncontrollable tremors still shook his body. He was in shock and needed medical attention.
He lay on the mossy forest floor drifting in and out of consciousness. Everything was going wrong. The emotional rollercoaster of the past few days caught up with him and he started to cry. In shock, lost, emotionally drained, he didn’t have the strength to go much further.
The faint sound of a guitar drifted through the quiet woods. Moving on pure will power, he rose and stumbled in the direction of the sound. All he wanted to do right now was lie down and sleep, but that would be the worst thing he could do.
Camilla and Mike swayed together in the middle of the floor, singing along to some pop song and laughing like teenagers. Sarah got up to leave and head to bed. A loud crash on the back porch stopped her in her tracks.