“Hold him steady. I don’t want to miss.”
I took the machine, turning it on again, relishing the buzzing and held it just above Felipe’s eye. “It’ll hurt less if you keep your eyes closed.”
Actually it didn’t matter. But he didn’t have to know that.
I lowered the needle and the man shut his eyes tightly, struggling under Gus’s sure grip. I pressed it, just a bit, into the scrunched up eyelid. The man cried out. Then I pressed it in further, like puncturing a really dense grape.
Screams filled the room.
“Camden, stop,” Gus said.
“Tell me where they went and why he has her or I’ll remove it with your eyeball still attached.” I pressed it a bit further. Ink filled the hole. If he was lucky, he was getting ink around his cornea, causing permanent color but no major damage. If it was through his retina, he’d be blind for life.
“Fine!” the man screamed and then started hyperventilating. “Th-they, he, Javier, he took her to Mexico.”
I exchanged a glance with Gus. “Why? What’s in Mexico?”
“Travis,” the man sobbed. “Oh please just take it out of my eye.”
I felt like my lungs were filled with sand. “I will,” I told him, trying to breathe. “Where in Mexico?”
“I don’t know. Veracruz, maybe. The Gulf Coast. Travis has places all over.”
“Why is he taking her to see him?”
He started shaking, convulsing, succumbing to the pain and panic. “I don’t know! It wasn’t part of the plan.”
“What was the plan?” Gus asked quickly. The urgency was spreading.
“Her parents. He wanted her to kill her parents. He thought they’d come back here.”
Those words sank over the room.
I shook my head. “Why would they come back here? Aren’t they working for Travis?”
“I don’t know. Please, please just let me go.”
I looked to Gus for his opinion. He only nodded. It was over. We had the info and now we had to get out of there.
“Hold still, Felipe,” I told him and while pressing down around his eyelid, I pulled the needle out. He let out another cry of pain and I stuck the machine in my backpack. “Now open your eye. Don’t worry, I’m just checking to see if there’s damage.”
Felipe shook, afraid.
“Camden, we have to go now.” In the distance sirens could be heard, wailing on the breeze.
“Look at me,” I said, getting up and leaning over him.
Felipe tried to open his eye but couldn’t. I placed my fingers on either side and forced it open. It was total fucking mess. Blue ink bleeding out from the white. But his iris and pupil were uncolored. “You won’t be blind. You’ll just look like an idiot for the rest of your life.”
I turned around, wiping my hands on my jeans. “I guess we should leave him tied up, right?” I said to Gus. “If he’s lucky, someone will set him loose.”
“Yes,” he said in an odd voice. I turned around to look at him. Gus had a gun pointed at Felipe’s head.
“Gus, no!” I yelled, but it was too late.
He pulled the trigger. He shot Felipe right in the temple, causing his head to slump to the side. Alive one minute, dead in the next.
I had trouble speaking, the gun shot still ringing through my ears. “He would have been okay,” I finally said. “I hadn’t really hurt him.”
He gave me an odd look. “No, but you could have. You wanted to.”
“No. I didn’t want him dead.” It felt like a lie on my lips.
Gus came over to me and placed his meaty hand on my shoulder, looking me in the eye. “He would have talked. We still have the element of surprise. We can’t afford to take any chances, not after tonight.”
He walked toward the hall and paused in the doorway. “This is a different world now. You’re not Camden McQueen. You’re Connor Malloy. In this world, you will have to do things you never thought you’d do, things you wish you never did. I think you already got a taste of that today. That flavor will stay on your tongue. Now come on. We have to get out of here.”
I followed him out the door, fighting the instinct to turn around and look at the mess we’d made. Felipe’s death now was as much on my hands as it was on Gus’s.
Ink and blood.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ELLIE
After the incident in the cockpit, Javier went back to ignoring me for a few days. Well, maybe he wasn’t ignoring me so much as he was keeping quiet and oddly professional. Whatever intimacy we shared, those secrets dredged up from the past, were gone, like it never happened and we were back to the strained relationship of blackmailer and hostage.