“No, but I know where he is.”
“Where?”
“I’ll tell you later.” He added, “Good driving.”
Taylor made a few more random turns, and Brodie could no longer see or hear the truck behind them.
He said to Taylor, “Try to avoid dead-end streets.”
“What the fuck do you think I’ve been doing?”
“Right.”
Taylor approached a wide road that looked like it would take them out of the barrio. She turned onto the four-lane road, put on her headlights, and sped downhill. The shanty barrio houses began to thin out, giving way to abandoned industrial buildings and long stretches of dense forest that climbed up the hills on either side of the road.
Brodie asked Luis, “Do you know where we are?”
“Sí. The other side of the hills. East of Caracas. If we head north toward the mountains, we will hit a highway that will take us back to the city.”
Brodie looked in the rearview. No sign of the pickup, or any other vehicle in pursuit. He wondered how territorial these gangs were, and if they would cross into a rival gang’s turf to pursue them. But no matter how much distance they put between themselves and Petare, they still might have to contend with the police, the National Guard, the Venezuelan Army, or SEBIN. A gangland shooting was no big thing, but Luis had plugged two regime guys.
Taylor looked at Brodie as she sped down the road. “Did you satisfy your ego and your macho male fantasy?”
“I did.”
“We almost died.”
“Still might.”
Brodie took out his smartphone and checked his GPS. There was no cell service, and they were approaching the edge of the offline maps he’d downloaded at the hotel, but it looked like they were coming to a turnoff that would snake north through the hills and link up with the east-west highway that ran along the base of the coastal mountains and back toward Caracas. “There’s a turnoff coming up. Take it.”
She nodded.
Brodie noticed Luis’ bejeweled cross swinging from the rearview mirror in front of the bullet hole in the windshield.
Luis saw where Brodie was looking and said, “Jesus protected us tonight.”
Should he put that in his report? Probably not.
Brodie took the cross from the mirror and turned to hand it to Luis, who kissed it, made the sign of the cross, and put it in his pocket.
Brodie saw that Luis held the Beretta in his lap, and was now staring off into space. The man had just killed at least four men in the span of twenty minutes, and chances were they were his first kills. Brodie remembered the first time he’d killed a man, an insurgent during a firefight in a small town outside of Baghdad. He saw the body afterward—a young guy, not older than seventeen, his organs punched out of fist-sized holes in his back from Brodie’s M4. It rattled him. Then the next time it got a little easier. After a while, it just became a good day’s work.
But that was a war he’d volunteered for. Luis hadn’t asked for any of this. Luis had just picked up the wrong people at the airport.
Brodie said to him, “This is almost over, amigo.”
Luis made eye contact with him. “Sí.”
Brodie looked ahead at the dark road, and the black wall of trees around them. They were really in the middle of nowhere now, in a car pocked with bullet holes and with shattered windshields. This battle-scarred wreck was going to attract attention, even in Caracas, so they would need to ditch it at some point before arriving back at the hotel.
As they drove, Taylor asked again, “What happened in there?”
“I think they were waiting for us.” Brodie added, “Maybe I shouldn’t have shown Mercer’s photo to the National Guard guys.”
“Your first mistake.”
“Right. Then the a-hole I spoke to in the Club of the Damned probably called the Hen House.”
