Page 34 of Play With Me

“All right, all right. Airplanes are different. They really can come down in the middle of nowhere.”

He tilted his head to the side, looked at me funny, and then the look vanished.

“Are you afraid when you’re with me?”

“When you do what you did to me back here, then the answer is no.”

Why did I say that? Why didn’t I want to say it? This wasn’t the way I’d wanted to start my day. I wanted to keep my distance from Brook. We were on a job, and I’d failed enough times already. He was a distraction I could no longer afford.

“Good. I have to make sure we repeat this on our way back.”

“Don’t count your blessings just yet, Madman. We have a job to do. I want Kate out of there safe, and if you say even one word to scare her, I will personally gut you, and you will not enjoy it.”

His face fell, and he rubbed around his navel.

“Come on, Lola. She was with Cameron.”

“Well, Cameron fucked up big time.” And so did I, but I already knew that, so it wasn’t worth repeating. If I didn’t find Kate all in one piece, I’d never forgive myself. The chances of that happening were increasing with every minute it was taking for us to get to her. Cortez was unforgiving.

A shudder flew through me, and Brook checked his buzzing phone.

“Cameron’s waiting on the tarmac. We’re going to stop by a hardware store to pick up supplies. He thinks that Cortez will take Kate to the chapel outside of Pace. He says that’s where he thinks the money is.”

Of course Anna would have hidden he money in their family chapel. I was surprised no one had checked there first.

“Interesting. I have to say, he could be right.” I followed Brook out of the airplane.

“We need to hurry,” Cameron called out, as we descended the steps. “We have only a short window to catch them.”

“Okay, brother, you need to fill me in on this fifty million shit because there’s no way that money’s lying around in a chapel and no one’s found it.”

As the two of them talked about Kate’s mother hiding the mafia’s money, I grabbed my backpack and cellphone and followed them to the parked Hummer. The dense hot air was more difficult to breathe, and I remembered why I’d hated living in Pace. The heat combined with sweat and lack of air-conditioning drove me nuts. On our way, we stopped at a local hardware store in Tucson, picked up a few supplies that were missing from Cameron’s plane emergency kit plus a nice blade I stashed inside a belt at my hip, and we drove into the desert.

I called shotgun on the way out of the store. If I was going to work with Cameron, I needed to ensure we had trust; and what better way to establish that than getting personal?

“So listen to this. I get a message from this girl named Barbie, and she’s babbling something about me stealing her man.”

This chit-chat shit was definitely not my strength. I felt a kick in my seat as Brook shifted behind me. Was I being too obvious?

“And what did you do?” Cameron asked, focused on the darkness ahead. We’d already entered the desert’s uneven terrain, and Cameron was driving down a dirt road that turned into a field. The headlights were off, and he followed the GPS. I’d scouted the area before; it was one of the roads I’d used to dash in and out of Pace at night.

“I deleted the message.” I shrugged, but he was truly interested in what I had to say. Maybe I wasn’t that bad at this ‘making new friends’ thing after all?

“She didn’t mention who the guy was?” he asked.

“Didn’t you hear me? I deleted the message. If a girl calls herself a Barbie, that’s an instant red flag for drama, and the last thing I need in my life is drama. I just say it like it is. I don’t put sparkles and rainbows on shit. It’s still gonna stink, right? So why bother making shit look all pretty? I just don’t like wasting time.”

Cameron chuckled, looking in the rear view mirror at Brook. Something passed between them, but I couldn’t quite catch what it was. He might have been amused; but more importantly, Cameron would trust me when it came to Kate.

“Okay, so what’s the plan?” I asked. They’d better have a plan! Going into an ambush without one was suicide.

“You’re going to stay outside the chapel,” Cameron said. “If anything goes wrong, one of us needs to escape.”

“Cameron, I’m not going into this thinking I won’t get out. We’ve got this.”

Cameron peeked in the rear view mirror again and smirked at Brook. If they had some kind of a secret language between the two of them, I definitely didn’t know about it. My gut tightened, reminding me that when you trusted people, things could get ugly real quick. When you trusted people, they held your life in their hands. When time came to it, I wouldn’t let Cameron fuck it up and I wouldn’t let Brook fuck it up either. But I did trust them.

He better be ready for this stakeout.

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