He was right. He was always right.
We took off running toward the Escalade, Camden supporting both me and Gus the best he could. Gus was bent over, the fall probably reopening the bullet wound in his stomach, wheezing for breath. It was so weird being with him now, knowing what he was to me. Did he know himself? I thought back to all our interactions over the years, the way he talked to me, kept in contact with me, watched over me. He must have known. All this time.
We got Gus in the back and I climbed in the front, just as Camden got behind the wheel and started to peel away. We drove past the house, an explosion now blasting open the front door in mess of flames, and it wasn’t until we were zooming halfway down the street that Camden’s eyes went to the rear view mirror.
“Shit,” he said.
As I turned to look, he popped the SUV in reverse and we started speeding backward toward a man running toward us, hell bent, Tom Cruise style.
Derek.
Camden screeched to a stop just before he collided into him and I leaned back to open the back door for him.
“Thanks,” he said as he jumped in beside Gus. His face was covered in a layer of soot, the gash on his face reopened and he smiled, widely, for the first time. “That was a rush.”
Camden shook his head and pressed his foot to the pedal. We roared away from the fire and destruction and though Gus was hurt and I’d been shot and Camden was missing his son, it felt good to have all three of them. They were my family. They were my home. And we were going to California.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
We ended saying goodbye to Derek in Acapulco. Even though we felt a camaraderie with him after everything we went through, he still wanted his money. All the money we had was still in checks that we hadn’t cashed yet, so we had to promise him an IOU through monthly PayPal installments. The funny part was that he trusted us to do so and I knew I would make good on my promise. Maybe I’d picked a lot of locks in the last few days, but the scamming days were truly gone for me. I had the second chance I asked for.
After we dropped him off (and after he bought us all clean clothes from a local Wal-Mart), we continued on with the Escalade to Zihuatanejo, a beach town that Gus had always wanted to go to because Morgan Freeman ended up there at the end of The Shawshank Redemption. I’d put fake plates on the Escalade back in Acapulco, knowing now that I could never ever be too careful again, though we planned to steal a new car once we were heading up to California. For now, we needed to catch our breaths and take stock in the fact that we were still alive.
The three of us were sitting on the patio of a restaurant that lined the silky sand beach, enjoying gigantic margaritas, when Camden got up to go to the washroom.
“So, Ellie,” Gus said, sitting back in his chair with controlled movement. In the end, his gunshot wound was healing nicely. For whatever reason, Javier hadn’t mistreated Gus. After he’d been shot by Raul and after Camden came running for me, Javier took Gus immediately to a doctor who removed the bullet and stitched him up. Then Gus was knocked up full of roofies (Javier’s drug of choice, it seemed) and the next thing he remembered was waking up in the stash house where he was guarded by three formidable men and two idiots (according to him). He wasn’t allowed to leave the bedroom upstairs and was tethered to the first half of the room by a chain around his leg, thus not allowing him to reach the windows. He was permitted bathroom breaks though, he could watch TV and he ate whatever food the rest of his captors ate. He was more comfortable than I thought he would have been, certainly more than my mother was. If that was the way Javier treated the people he captured, he had shown he wasn’t as much of an animal as Travis was.
Of course, he’d shown he was an animal in so many other ways.
“So, Gus,” I said, pulling my shades on to my head so I could look him in the eye, even though the sun was setting, causing the ocean to refract in beams of light.
He gave me a smile that could only be described as shy. And Gus was not a shy man. Suddenly I realized why Camden had excused himself with a knowing look on his face. Gus and I had not discussed what I learned yet. But I had a feeling it was about to come up.
It made me feel as awkward as a child. I rubbed my hands on my linen pants and smiled back.
He rubbed at his beard and said, “I think you and I have something to … talk about.”
I nodded, waiting.
“I know what your mother told you back at … back where you saw her.”
Oh god. Don’t tell me he wasn’t my father.
“She said that I’m your dad,” he went on. He picked up a chip from the tortilla basket and started spinning it around on the tablecloth. “That we had an affair before you were born.” He looked up at me, his eyes sad.