The Devil's bounty

Fifty

In the back seat, Julia knew she had to escape before they reached their destination or she was dead. Since her kidnapping, when anyone had spoken Spanish to or around her, she had played dumb and pretended not to understand what was being said. The truth was different. Though she was far from fluent, she could broadly follow a conversation. And she could certainly pick out enough words to work out that Hector had just discussed whether she should live or die.

Sitting alone in the back seat, she had already tried the door. It was centrally locked, with no way of overriding it from where she was. Her only chance, she figured, was to cause some kind of distraction, and find a way to make them pull over. But it couldn’t be obvious, like pretending she had to pee. It had to be something from left field that would throw them off balance. Her mind flashed back to her childhood and road trips with her parents.

Leaning slightly forward in her seat, so that neither Charlie nor Hector could see her, she jammed the index and middle fingers of her right hand into her mouth, forcing them down her throat until she began to gag.