“Oh god.” This whole thing sounds like a horrible idea.
“Don’t freak out. It’s going to be fine,” Jamie says. But I can tell from the tightness in his voice that he’s not a hundred percent sure it will be.
******
Twelve hours is a seriously long time to sit on a motorcycle. It’s better now that I’m actually riding my own bike and I’m not perched on the back of Jamie’s, but still. Sore shoulders. Sore back. Sore hips. Sore ass. Every part of my body is humming with pain. We stop to stretch our legs and get gas, but it’s not enough; the dull ache returns within ten minutes of being back on my Ducati, and all I can think about is blasting my skin with a hot shower and falling asleep in a soft bed.
The only thing that keeps me from complaining is the thought of Dad, asleep on a cold, damp floor, no hot showers or soft beds for him. He’s probably wondering what the hell happened to land him in this predicament. Has Ramirez spilled the beans about me? Has he told my father I’m shacked up with an outlaw, the leader of a motorcycle club that has one boot firmly planted in highly illegal activities, the other shoved up the Los Oscuros cartel’s ass?
I really fucking hope not—no matter how much I’ve let my family down, I don’t want them thinking badly of me, ironic though that may be. It seems as though Hector delights in causing hurt wherever he goes, though. He’s probably taken great pleasure in showing my dad what a miscreant his daughter has become.
It’s dark when we cross the border into California. There are no streetlights or cars on the roads. The sky overhead is cloudless and vast, a myriad of stars bowed from horizon to horizon, clustered so thick and shining so bright that it takes my breath away as I follow the constant red glow of Jamie’s tail light up ahead. We ride for another hour through the night before he pulls off the highway at a dingy looking motel and parks up out front. I pull in beside him, killing the engine on the Ducati, trying not to groan as I sit up straight, stretching out my back.
“Are we stopping here?” I ask.
Jamie nods. “We’ll head on over to Julio’s place first thing. If we come charging out of the desert at this time of night, his men will shoot us on the spot. Better they can’t use the dark as an excuse for any accidents they might try to instigate.”
Fucking perfect. So there’s a chance we might end up dead. I guess I knew that when we set off. Julio’s a piece of shit, and from the high fences and the razor wire I saw circling his home when I was there last, it’s pretty clear he doesn’t take too kindly to uninvited guests. Jamie climbs off his bike and heads into the motel; the building itself has been painted a rather gaudy color of pink, and there appears to be a Star of David painted above each and every single one of the entrances to the rooms. A flickering sign above the reception reads: Queen Of Hearts Motel, though it seems that half of the letters only work half of the time.
Jamie’s gone for five minutes. When he returns, he has a key in his hand and a sour look on his face.
“That was like pulling teeth,” he says. “The old guy in there is ancient. He had a fucking sawn off shot gun leaning against the wall behind his desk.”
I try and figure out if this makes me feel safer or even more concerned for our wellbeing, but I can’t decide. We both take our small backpacks up to the room on the second floor the ancient guy allocated us, which overlooks a drained swimming pool full of trash and rotting leaves, and Jamie pretends not to notice the craters in the building’s plasterwork that can only have been created by gunshots. Shotgun blasts by the looks of things. I know he sees them, though.
Inside our room, Jamie tosses his bag down on one of the beds and starts typing something into his phone. After a second he frowns, then holds his cell up for me to see the screen
‘Three teenagers attacked in rural Queen Of Hearts Motel. Girl’s mother shot dead in pool by elderly desk clerk.’ There’s a black and white picture of a pool underneath the tagline, the same pool that sits in the yard outside our room, except in the photograph it’s full of water, and there’s a woman floating face down in the middle of it. The article shows a date two years ago.
“Seems we can’t escape trouble.” Jamie lets out a deep breath. He takes me in his arms and immediately works his way underneath the light jacket and the t-shirt I wore to ride in. “I need to ask you something,” he says. “And this is the worst fucking time for me to ask this, but I’m sick and tired of waiting.”
I angle my head, tilting it to one side, narrowing my eyes at him, trying to figure out what he’s talking about. “Waiting for what?”