21. Morbidity and Mortality

Gomez squirms and struggles, but I'm psyched. "It's bad enough you kidnap my friends and try to fry me like a chicken. You molest children - yeah, I saw your little chiquita in the limo! And Eduardo, you can't drive worth shit. In the space of two minutes, you just totalled a Ferrari and shot up a GT350. You are a waste of life."

In the light of oncoming headlights, I slide the knife slowly between his ribs, bearing down on it by the end of the thrust and wiggling the handle. Gomez is really most sincerely dead by the time I'm through with him. It's a lot quicker than he deserves, for his sins. He shouldn't have shot the Shelby.

"We're heading back to the warehouse," RC hollers as I rise and saunter back to the GT 350. I wave to show I've heard, then launch the Shelby downhill, leaving the jeep far, far behind.

George doesn't say anything when I cruise past the turn-off to the industrial park where the warehouse is. He doesn't say anything when we motor through Culiacan, its streets deserted in the late evening hours. He doesn't say anything until I veer onto the downhill fork in the road. Then, he says, "Can you slow down? Please? There's no one chasing us, this time."

Killjoy. "What's the matter, you don't trust my driving?" But I back off on the pedal a little. God, what a great car. The spoils of victory are sweet indeed.

"Why didn't you just shoot Gomez?" he asks me suddenly.

"I don't like guns," I say, which I'm sure sounds ridiculous coming from a woman who's spent the last hour doing what I've been doing.

Sure enough, the look he give me is pure disbelief. He reaches into my bag and starts pulling out armament. "Five?" he says with incredulity. "You don't like guns, and you're toting around five of them?"

I thought it was getting a little heavy. "One of them is yours," I remind him. "That's mine - that's the only one I started out with! I borrowed one from Sands; I think that's the one I took off that guy in the courtyard. And that sissy little thing with the pearl grips was Gomez's."

"You could have shot him with that."

For some reason, he seems to be brooding about me gacking Gomez. "Yeah, I could have. And this afternoon, when his goons had me strapped to a table with a shock collar around my neck, he could've said, 'Let her go' - but he didn't, and I didn't, and did you get a look at that kid in the limo? Did you? Huh? She was just a baby! Save your righteous indignation - that bastard got what he had coming to him!"

There's a silence in the car that's broken only by squealing tires as I take one of the hairpins at speed. "Do you remember the first time you killed someone?" he asks me out of the blue.

What the hell kind of question is that? "Yeah, so?"

"Did you have a problem with it? Did it bother you?"

The Shelby slows; this conversation has my attention. "Bother me? I guess so. It wasn't supposed to happen the way it did." I sigh. "I was supposed to be getting back some sensitive information for the company that hired us. The guy who had it - I tried everything else, but he didn't leave it in his hotel room, or his car, and I finally had to resort to a good old-fashioned mugging. I had a knife to make it look good, and the dumbass tried to take it away from me."

Fighting for the knife, I'd hauled off and punched him in the throat. It was a trick I'd learned from an unarmed combat instructor after the Buffalo Bill incident. I'd never really expected to use it; had grabbed the courier's briefcase and his wallet while he was writhing on the ground, gasping for air. He choked to death in front of me. Not quickly, either. I'd stood there while his face turned blue. Then I'd snapped out of it, and bolted. I kept the data and his cash, wiped the rest in case of prints, and tossed the remains into a dumpster nearby. When I tell him that, he wants to know what I spent the money on. I'm baffled by the question. I don't even remember how much it was...not much, under a hundred dollars.

"Did you have bad dreams about it?"

"George, I have plenty of nightmares, okay? There are nights when all I do is try to keep people from killing me in my sleep. I'll dream that I'm at the grocery store, and the butcher wants to carve me up for the meat case. I have dreams where I'm being chased through the jungle by cannibals. Now I'm probably going to start having dreams about being shot and electrocuted, thank you very much. Is there some point to all this, or did you not believe me about me not being a nice girl?"