“Wanna go for a swim?” Beef Jerky Guy asked from behind him. “Wash all that crap off your face?”
“Sure. Maybe you can help me clean it off,” Keo said.
“Maybe if you had a pair of tits I might think about it.”
“You’re all heart, pal.”
“I’m not your pal, dude.”
“And I was saving up for that friendship bracelet, too.”
They were in a very isolated part of the coastline without anything that looked like civilization, much less houses, within sight on either sides of the beach. There were no hints of industry further inland and the beach was littered with seaweed and trash, along with fish carcasses. They were probably the only souls around for miles, which made it a pretty good spot for an extraction point.
The woman glanced over as Keo and his guards reached her. “Keep an eye on him. If he makes one wrong move, shoot him.”
Keo stopped next to her, the sunbaked sand sinking under his boots. “Now why would I do a stupid thing like that?”
“We should shoot him now, Erin,” Beef Jerky Guy said.
“Don’t say that,” Keo said. “What about that friendship bracelet we were going to get?”
“Shut up.”
“Is that a no?”
“Erin,” Beef Jerky Guy said, ignoring Keo. “This guy doesn’t know anything. Whoever he is, he probably killed Davis and Butch.”
“Not yet,” Erin said.
“Give me one reason.”
“I don’t have to give you a damn thing, Troy,” Erin said, and it was hard to miss the finality in her voice.
Troy grunted but didn’t press the issue.
Keo suppressed a smile, when the roar of a turbine engine revving up made him look back, just in time to see the helicopter rising slowly into the air. The man with the aviator shades sitting behind the machine gun waved at them, and Erin returned it.
“See you when we see you,” Erin said into her radio.
“Have a safe trip,” a male voice answered.
It didn’t take the helicopter long to turn into a small dot in the sky, and soon Keo could barely hear its whup-whup-whup.
“Where’s it going?” Keo asked.
Erin ignored him and said, “Looks like we’re early.”
“That’s a first,” the man standing next to Troy, whose name Keo had never caught, said.
“ETA twenty minutes. Until then, I want the area secured. The last thing we need is someone sneaking up on us again.”
“Definitely wouldn’t want that,” Troy said. “What about him?”
“He’s not going anywhere.”
Footsteps faded behind Keo, along with Troy and the second man’s presence.
In the next few seconds, Keo ran through all the possible escape scenarios, but each time he always came to the same conclusion: Mercer. Find Mercer. And the only way to do that was to let these people take him to the man.
Should be easy enough…as long as I don’t get killed on the way over.
“So who’s picking us up?” he asked.
“You’ll see,” Erin said.
“A boat?”
“Unless you can swim very, very far.”
“I happen to be a very good swimmer.”
She ignored him, said instead, “What were you doing back at the barn?”
“Hunting game.”
“With two semi-automatic rifles,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“I was hunting big game.”
“There is no big game. Not anymore.”
“I’m an eternal optimist.”
She smirked, though he couldn’t tell if that was amusement or annoyance. Maybe a little of both. “You had Davis’s iPod on you.”
“There’s a lot of iPods just sitting around out there. What makes you think the one I had belonged to this Davis guy?”
She fixed him with a long look, and he was mostly convinced she didn’t believe a single thing he was saying. “It doesn’t matter if you don’t want to tell me now. We have people who are very good at extracting information. You’ll be telling me everything anyway, including what you were doing back there.”
“I told you—”
“I know, hunting game.”
“I get the feeling you don’t believe me.”
“You know what I think?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“I think you killed Davis and Butch, just like Troy said. Maybe Luke and Bill, too, but that’s a bit of a stretch. What I can’t figure out is what you were doing out there at the barn. Alone. You had to have seen the others pushing the helicopter. That’s six people. And you still moved on us anyway.” She squinted her eyes at him. “You’re either the dumbest man alive, or you’re looking to get yourself killed. So which one is it?”
Can’t it be both? he thought, but said with as much conviction as he could muster, “Neither. I was just curious what you guys were doing out there. If I had known people were going to start shooting at me, I would have kept going.”
“You’re going to stick to that?”
“It’s the truth.”
“Uh huh,” she said before turning back to the endless blue waters in front of them. “Of course, I’m not discounting the possibility you’re one of those guys with more balls than brain cells.”
“Have you been talking to my old girlfriends?”
She ignored him again, said, “You know how I know you were looking for us?”
“Even though I wasn’t?”
“You never asked who we were. That tells me you already knew.”
Well, shit, Keo thought, and wondered how long he was going to be able to keep this up before Erin finally agreed with Troy that it wasn’t worth taking him with them.
Erin had said the ETA was twenty minutes, but it was more like seventeen before the gray dot appeared in the horizon, followed by the slowly growing whine of twin outboard motors. Keo knew it was some kind of offshore fishing boat before it got big enough for him to make out its V-shaped hull. As soon as the boat appeared, the others began converging back on his and Erin’s location.
“Are we all going to fit in there?” Keo asked.
“We’ll make do,” Erin said. “And if not…”
“I know, I go over the side, right?”
She smiled but didn’t confirm or deny.
As the boat neared, Keo counted two guys onboard — one behind the helm and the other squatting at the bow with a rifle. On cue, the radio in Erin’s hand squawked and a male voice, almost entirely drowned out by the motors on the other end, shouted, “Any trouble?”
“You’re clear,” Erin said into the radio.
“Roger that,” the man answered.
Erin clipped the radio back to her hip. “I’m surprised you haven’t tried anything yet.”
Keo held up his bound hands. “Hard to try anything like this.”
“Still, knowing what you did, where you’re going, and what’s going to happen when you get there…”
“Maybe you’re assuming too much. Maybe I didn’t do the things you think I did, and as a result I have nothing to fear.”
“Sure, whatever you say, Keo.”
A hand clamped down on Keo’s shoulder, and he smelled the familiar odor of beef jerky in the air as Troy said, “Cheer up, buddy. It’s a nice, long trip back to The Ranch. Plenty to see and do on the way.”
“Hey, as long as you’re around I’m sure it’ll be a great time, Troy,” Keo said.
“That’s the spirit.”
Keo looked over at Erin, but she was busy watching a couple of the men slinging their weapons and stepping into the lapping waters of the Gulf of Mexico to wait for the boat. Keo focused on the moment — the here and now.