Evans stared at the SAC. “Or Warren could go somewhere far worse.”
Warren was backing up, his hands lifted in denial. “She’s trying to cause trouble between us.”
“It’s working, friend,” Carlos said.
Eve edged away. Both men were so interested in Warren that they seemed to have forgotten her for a moment. She was close, so close to the exit. The other men were readying the plane.
“It is easy enough to check these financials,” Carlos was saying.
“I didn’t do it.” Warren kept backing away, toward the airplane, and Evans and Carlos were tracking him like a predatory pack.
Eve felt the door at her back, the handle right below her waist. The highway was too far. She needed to make a break for the farm she’d seen. It was maybe two hundred yards away.
Warren was loudly arguing his innocence when she slipped outside.
Eve ran. She sprinted for everything she was worth. Keeping her balance was hard with her hands in front of her. Her cheek ached and she could feel a trickle of blood from where Warren had split her lip. In fact, she was bleeding from several places, but she kept running, praying there was a door into what looked like an arboretum. The structure ahead was screened in, perhaps to keep birds from the fruit trees. She had to hope there was a way in.
“Hey!”
She heard a man scream in the distance. This was all the head start she was going to get.
“Help! Help me!” Maybe someone was outside. The sign had claimed they had daily tours. The sun was starting to wane, but maybe there were stragglers.
A door! She caught sight of it and ran toward it. Just a few more feet. The ground beneath her had become soft, muddy. Please be unlocked. Please. Please.
Eve fumbled with the latch. The door came open and she slipped inside. With a heaving breath, she closed it and turned the lock. It wouldn’t keep her pursuers out for long.
But they weren’t running anymore. Four men were leisurely walking now, laughing as they moved toward her.
“When you’re ready to come back, princess, let me know,” one of the men yelled.
Eve turned, ready to run across the farm. She could hide somewhere.
A low hiss turned her blood to ice.
It wasn’t a citrus farm. Mud and swamp and hundreds and hundreds of sleepy reptiles started to writhe and awaken around her.
It was an alligator farm, and Eve worried that she’d just become dinner.
Chapter Nineteen
Alex looked through the scoped rifle at the target up ahead.
“Do you see her?” Jake stood beside him as Sean and that dipshit Murdoch checked and rechecked the guns and ordinance.
“Not yet. I can’t get a line on anyone. There’s a single vehicle in the parking lot. Looks like a rental.” Warren’s most likely. Betrayal burned in Alex’s gut and all he could think about was getting his hands around his ex-partner’s throat and squeezing until he turned blue and his fucking eyes popped out. Or maybe he would just carve out Warren’s eyeballs. And his tongue. And then he would take the fucker’s cock and feed it to him. “Have Adam run the plate.”
Jake got on the phone immediately, feeding Adam the information he needed. According to Adam, one plane, a Learjet 40, arrived roughly thirty minutes ago out of New York and immediately filed a flight plan for Mexico City.
They would be required to file a plan because they were leaving US airspace, and the choice of Mexico City was telling. Mexico City had a large airport. Once they arrived, Evans didn’t have to worry about US government records, and he could move Eve around South America with very little trouble as long as the governmental wheels had been greased with cash.
Eve would be gone. Utterly untraceable.
Revenge would have to wait. “Getting Eve out is all that matters.”
Sean took a place beside him. “So if you get a shot at Evans, you’re not going to take it?”
Not if he had a second’s concern. It twisted him up. The need to avenge her was right there, a fire in his belly, but he had to put her first this time. “I can’t.”
A savage grin crossed Sean’s face. “I think you should let me do it. It’s been a long time since I got to kill someone.”
“You killed a couple of people not an hour ago.”
Sean shrugged. “Fine, it’s been a long time since I killed someone who mattered.”
“Are we killing the fed, too?” Jake asked. “Adam said that sedan was rented by Warren Petty.”
So this was the place. “As much as I hate to say it, we probably need the fed alive.”
To question. For a really long time. He couldn’t even bring himself to call Warren by his name. He was the fed, the man who had sentenced his wife to hell on earth.
“We need to get closer.” Sean studied the scene.