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“Zoe? Are you okay?” I heard Christopher asking.
“I…I think so.” I tried to look up at him but I was feeling very dizzy and slightly stunned. Had I knocked my head against something? It seemed possible but I was too numb to hurt anywhere yet.
“Here they come,” I heard Gabriel say grimly.
“Are you crazy? Put the gun away!” Christopher exclaimed. “They’ll shoot us all, Gabe!”
“Like I said, maybe we’re better off dead,” was the stoic reply.
Slowly I sat up, rubbing my head. I saw Christopher sitting frozen in the front seat and Gabriel, right beside him, with a gun dangling casually from one hand between his legs. Looking out the window, I saw a policeman in uniform coming towards us, with a frown on his face.
He got to the driver’s side window and made a motion for Gabriel to roll down his window. But he must have seen something through the tinted glass because suddenly he drew his own pistol and pointed it at the driver’s side door.
“Shit! He’s armed—drop the gun!” Christopher hissed.
“Shut up—let me handle this.” Casually, Gabriel rolled down his window with his free hand, still clutching his gun with the other. “Hello, officer, what can we do for you?” he asked, giving the policeman a winning smile.
“You know how fast you were going back there?” The policeman’s English was heavily accented. “You wanna get yourself killed?”
“Of course not, officer.” Gabriel was still smiling but his eyes were cold.
“Get out of the car.” The policeman gestured with his gun.
“I don’t think I can do that. My seatbelt seems to be stuck.” Gabriel yanked at his seatbelt with his free hand. “Fucking thing! Sorry about that, officer.”
“He said, get out of the fucking car!” another voice said.
I turned my head to see another man with a gun—a much larger gun—pointed right at Christopher.
“Okay, okay!” Christopher held his hands in the air and nodded at the door handle. “Just let me unlock the door, all right?”
“Christopher, don’t!” Gabriel’s voice was suddenly tight. “There’s something wrong here!”
“I’m not getting killed just because you don’t want to surrender!” Christopher snapped. He pressed the unlock button and all the door locks popped open at once.
Immediately a third man—(where were they all coming from?)—snatched open the door of our car. A hard hand grabbed me by the arm and hauled me out of the backseat.
“Oh, officer—thank goodness!” I gasped, blinking in the harsh sunlight. “I was kidnapped and these men were trafficking me across state lines!” I was pretty sure this was true since we’d crossed from Arizona into New Mexico sometime back.
“Shut the fuck up,” the officer holding my arm said, much to my surprise.
I looked up at him, wondering if I had really heard him right.
“But…but they—”
“Drop the gun, cabron,” the officer at Gabriel’s window snarled and suddenly two more officers were pointing guns at my older stepbrother’s head. But not just handguns, like the first officer, I saw—these men had assault style rifles—the kind that ought to be banned so assholes can’t use them to shoot up schools and grocery stores and other public places that should be safe but aren’t anymore.
Also, the men holding the rifles weren’t wearing police uniforms. Actually, none of them were, except for the first man who had approached us—the one who was still standing outside Gabriel’s door pointing a gun in his face.
It began to dawn on me that something strange was going on here. I shot a glance over at the police car that had been chasing us and saw that it was dirty and dusty. The paint was faded, one of the lights was cracked, and there was a huge dent in the passenger side door. Surely a regular police department—even a rural one—would take better care of their vehicles than that—wouldn’t they?
“You’re making a huge mistake,” Gabriel said. He dropped the gun on the floorboard of the sedan and raised his hands. “Do you know who my father is?”
“Yes, we fucking do, you little piece of shit,” the man dressed as a police officer growled. “He’s Esteban Cruz—the same man who bought my boss’s house out from under him.”
“You’re kidding!” Christopher’s eyes went wide as another one of the men hauled him out of the car.
“This is not a fucking joke,” the man impersonating a policeman said. “You three are coming with us—Don Diego wants to have a word with you.”
Then the man who had yanked me out of the car pulled a hood over my face and I couldn’t see anything anymore.
EIGHTEEN
They zip tied my wrists in front of me—not that I was trying to fight them. With that many high-powered assault rifles pointed at us, I would be nothing but a red stain on the desert sand if I tried to run and I knew it. So though I gave a little cry of pain when my captor tightened the zip ties to the point where the plastic cut into my flesh, I didn’t struggle. I wanted desperately to live, though I didn’t know if that was in the cards for me now.
