Page 54 of Running Scared
Three steps.Two steps.One step.
“Papa, didn’t you say they were bad men?”
The Spanish, spoken in a clear, bright child’s voice, acted like a spur in Dean’s ass, and he and Marcus jammed their guns in the backs of their targets, and they began to run.
AS MANYtimes as Dean and Marcus had walked this hallway in the course of the day, as many times as they’d studied the plans with Birdie, this part still remained the weakest part of the plan.The hallway sat adjacent to locked doors of what looked like classrooms—because it figured that this cartel would be training their people on computer, weapons, and emergency medical procedures—all of which were locked after use in the day.So instead of a warren of convenient hiding places, the corridor stretched long and deadly, like that one hall in a high school with all the lockers lined up on either side.A death trap, waiting for the unwary AP honor student to be walking in the late afternoon, about to be cornered by all the jocks.
There was nowhere to go but all the way through, and they had maybe ten feet to go when Dean heard that small voice, belonging to the boy—maybe ten—who shouted, “Stop!I have a gun!”Right as a frantic adult shouted, “No, mijo, don’t!”
Dean growled, “Go!”to Marcus and turned around, his revolver pointed at the source of the voices, only to be brought up short.
Itwasthe little boy, yes, and hedidhave a gun.A toy gun, wooden, that he was wielding as though he’d been trained how to use it in place of the real thing.
His father was caught between grabbing for the gun and pulling his own, and in that moment, Dean was face-to-face, drawn Glock to drawn Beretta, with Gael Barrera, the leader of the Corazones de Sangre cartel.
And next to him, looking frightened but resolute, Barrera’s young son.
Dean stayed, gun still raised, staring directly into Barrera’s tense face.And then, mindful that he and Marcus had drawn lines, he said, “You needn’t worry.I don’t kill children.”
Barrera nodded and held his gun steady.“You could have shot him.I saw you had your gun aimed before you knew.”
But Dean had hesitated, and here they were, with Barrera’s men piling up behind him, obviously chomping at the bit to draw their guns and obliterate Stanford Dean Royal from the roster of all living things.
“I don’t kill children,” Dean said again.And then, for honesty’s sake, “I’m not really excited about killing anybody, really.”
Barrera raised his eyebrows.“And yet you invaded my compound to release a couple of hit men?”He scowled.“Incompetenthit men, who have managed to foul up my business formonths, which is what I get for trusting these—”
The word he used then wasn’t in any book of street Spanish provided by the Bureau, but Dean got the idea.
His two hit men weren’t Gael Barrera’s favorite people.
“So,” he said, thinking quickly, “you can either have me killed here and let your son see it—” To his relief, a look of revulsion crossed Barrera’s face.Good.Not a great human, no, but a decent father.“Which would be a terrible way to pay me back,” Dean felt compelled to remind him.
Barrera raised a sardonic eyebrow.“You are right,” he agreed smoothly.“I do owe you for showing mercy to my child.But I can’t simply let these men go.They were to be… dealt with for incompetence.What do you suggest I do?”
Dean smiled and thought about their plan for putting the two men in a gas Jeep and pointing them in the direction of the open desert.“Maybe send your kids back to the villa.It’s going to be busy here for a bit,” he said, and he watched Barrera’s eyebrows—both of them this time—go up.
“You do not kill children?”he said carefully.
“No,” Dean said, and this he meant.He was impressed by the fact that Gael Barrera didn’t use his sons as human shields, even though Dean had displayed this weakness for all to see.
“Anything else?”Barrera asked.
And this was where Dean’s inflectionreallygot tricky.“Could you… I don’t know.Stay away from the northwest quadrant outside the gate,” he said blithely.“No reason to go there at all.”
“Northwest gate,” Barrera said, nodding sagely.“Okay, then.Is that all?”
And this was where Dean had to pray.“One more thing,” he said.
“Yes?”
“Give me three steps,” he said, and then he started singing the Lynyrd Skynyrd song as he turned and bolted for the cross in the corridor and the open maintenance tunnel door Marcus had ready for him.
He slid through the door, and Marcus swung it shut and bolted it from the inside mere heartbeats before the shouting mass of men scuffled past the outside, searching for him at top volume.The men weren’t stupid; more than one man tried the handle of the maintenance corridor, but the door was locked.What could they do?
Or course theycouldhave chosen to shoot the thing down, which was why Marcus and Dean were running top speed, heading north, Marcus counting doors as they went.
“Five,” he murmured.“Six, seven—here!”
