Ramsey's Gold

Chapter Fifteen

Vadim and Sasha trudged down the road, their rented sedan dead a mile behind them, the windshield shattered from a shotgun blast, the driver-side front tire flattened. Vadim’s face was bleeding from safety glass that had sprayed across his cheek, and Sasha had his tie wrapped around his left arm where he’d been nicked by a few shotgun pellets that had winged their way through the car.

“What now?” Sasha asked in gruff Russian, his breath steaming before him.

“We find a vehicle. We take it. Then we continue until successful,” Vadim said angrily. “What do you think we do?”

“I was thinking about how the girl’s phone stopped transmitting. Looks like they worked that one out.”

“Only a matter of time.”

“Yes, well…which brings us back to question of what we do now.”

Vadim’s eyes narrowed to slits, rage building in him, driving him forward as his blood dried on his face. “I don’t know. But we will think of something — just as we always do.”

“I wish we had accessed some heavier artillery,” Sasha complained, patting the Ruger 9mm in his jacket pocket. “I, for one, did not expect the boy to travel with an arsenal. The only things missing were grenades and a bazooka.”

“A mistake we will certainly not make again.”

A frigid gust blew across the adjacent field, carrying with it the scent of freshly plowed soil. Tendrils of ground fog seeped over the furrows, the land stretching as far as they could see in the gloom, the only sound in the quiet night their footsteps crunching on the gravel underfoot and the hiss of their labored breathing.

“The larger oversight was underestimating their resourcefulness…that they were onto us. That changes the situation. But it also tells us something — they either have the journal, or they know where it is.”

“The lawyer already told us the boy has it.”

“But the boy probably does not understand its significance. Now that his father’s associate is involved, we have to assume he does. And that he also realizes that no place is safe for him. For any of them.” He paused, thinking. “What would you do if you knew that the devil was coming for you and you couldn’t go home?” Vadim asked rhetorically.

“I would go after whoever was hunting me.”

“Ah, but that is impossible for them. We don’t exist. The old man isn’t stupid. He knows the stakes. The only thing we can assume is that they’ll try to find the Inca city themselves.”

“But can we be sure of that?”

“It is the most probable outcome.”

Sasha spit. “I hate that jungle. Hated it then, and I hate it even more now.”

“As do I. But it holds our future. And this time we will prevail.”

Allie emerged from the twenty-four-hour drugstore on the outskirts of Corpus Christi with a roll of gauze, a bottle of iodine, tape and pads, two liters of orange juice, and a container of Pedialyte. Jack gulped the juice greedily, his body depleted by blood loss, and downed the Pedialyte by the time they’d rolled out of the lot.

The engine was still holding out, although strained to its limits. Drake was relieved when they eased to a stop in front of a fleabag motel that wouldn’t care much about formalities like identification as long as their cash was green. He went in with Allie and got two rooms from a sleepy East Indian clerk listening to a radio broadcast that sounded like cats rolling down a slope in a barrel.

Drake helped Jack to the first room as Allie backed the truck into a dark recess by a dumpster so that the bullet holes in the tailgate wouldn’t be obvious. Upon her return, she stripped the clotted T-shirt from Jack’s side and examined the damage before twisting the cap off the iodine.

“This is going to hurt. It’s a flesh wound, but deep. Looks like it cut through one of your love handles,” she warned, and Jack nodded.

“I’m not using them for anything. Do your worst.”

His sharp intake of breath hissed as the liquid bubbled into the wound, and Drake could see moisture well in his eyes, an involuntary physical response to the pain. Allie fished a small first aid kit out of Jack’s bag and poured another dollop of iodine onto the bullet hole — thankfully a clean entry and exit that had missed any organs. After blotting it, she squeezed two drops of Dermabond adhesive into the entry wound, and Jack reached down and held it closed with his fingers. She went to work on the exit hole and repeated the procedure, pressing the flesh together until it had sealed.

“That’s pretty amazing stuff,” Drake said as she returned the tube to the kit.

“A friend of mine who works in the ER got me some. It’s prescription, but it’s basically superglue without the compound that generates heat. I use it for mountain biking spills. It can be a lifesaver out in the boonies,” Allie explained.

“Only a graze, it was the blood loss that was worrying me,” Jack said, and looked up at Drake. “I suppose we should add some basic first aid to the bag of tricks I teach you. If we hadn’t had the Dermabond and we’d been in the jungle, you might have had to heat your dad’s sword up and cauterize it. Trust me. I’ve had to do that, and you never forget the smell.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” Drake looked around the shabby room, whose sickly cream-colored walls reminded him of pus. The carpet was stained and threadbare in places, and the bathroom door hadn’t been properly repaired where a prior guest had punched a hole in it. The impressionist print of a woman staring off over a field of wildflowers made him unaccountably sad, and he realized that it was lack of sleep more than anything that was wearing at him. He checked the time and saw that it was 4:20 a.m., and couldn’t help but yawn. “Sorry. I’m beat.”

“I think we all are. Let’s get a few hours of shut-eye and then figure out what we’re going to do,” Jack suggested. “Figure nine we’ll hook up?”

“Fine by me. I’m right next door if you need anything.”

“I’m just going to get the rest of our stuff so nobody steals it out of the truck. I’ll be back in a second,” Allie said.

Drake caught Jack’s worried look. “I’ll go with you.”

Allie didn’t argue, and as they walked to the darkened form of the Chevrolet, Drake instinctively scanned the lot. Nothing. All quiet.

“How much time do you think we have before they find us?” he asked.

“Who knows? Hopefully my dad has some idea. He usually does. It’s his world, not ours.”

“It’s ours now.”

Drake helped her with the shotguns and backpacks. They carried the bags back to the room, and Drake saw the dark circles under her eyes when the light hit her face. The night had been hard on all of them.

He hung out the Do Not Disturb sign and locked his door before setting his backpack onto the bed. How had it all spun so out of control so quickly?

Drake brushed his teeth, shrugged out of his clothes, and set the alarm clock for eight thirty. He laid the SIG Sauer next to it, within easy reach. After a quick look around the room, he moved the lone wooden chair to the door and leaned the back against it, wedged under the knob, as additional insurance against intruders. He was so tired it didn’t even strike him how odd that would have seemed to him just a few short days before. Now, it was just something he did. Automatic. Reflexive. As he drifted off to sleep, his last thought was to wonder how much else about his life was going to change before this was over.

His dreams were uneasy. Silent figures lurked in the shadows outside his room and, before he could come fully awake, were inside and pointing the ugly snouts of silenced pistols at him, the SIG Sauer now useless only a foot away. Both had stockings pulled over their heads, distorting their features. The nearest one, with a body like a bear, swung his pistol and slammed the butt into Drake’s head. Drake saw pinpoints of light.

Drake bolted awake, the sheets soaked with perspiration, his heart trip-hammering in his chest, his hand groping for the SIG Sauer. It took him a few seconds to realize he was still in his bed, the chair undisturbed, his only companion the slow ticking of the heater grate.

Drake stood, shaking his head, and shuffled to the bathroom half asleep. The tap water was icy cold and tasted like metal and chlorine, but he didn’t care. He drained the cup in two gulps and peered at his watch. 5:47.

The rest of his slumber he spent tossing and turning, a headache pulsing behind his eyes as his body tried to get the sleep it needed. When he cracked a lid open to check the time, warm sunlight streamed through a slit in the curtains, and he saw it was 8:00. He threw the covers aside with a sigh and switched off the alarm before heading to the bathroom, any further chance of sleep lost to the day’s advance. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror — his red eyes, face drawn with fatigue, three day’s scraggly growth on his normally chiseled jaw — and a single word sprang to mind to describe his reflection.

Hunted.