Chapter 8

Bonnie insisted she had a place to go, but as they neared the outskirts of Caracas, headed out of the city, Taylor became less sure. With the airports off limits, he was a little unmoored, but just wandering the jungles with a mass murderer didn’t seem like the best option he could choose.

Maddeningly, she just kept driving. The outskirts of Caracas gave way to rougher terrain, dusty roads winding through sparse vegetation. Neither spoke much outside of Taylor’s complaints.

The further they went, the harder it was to see as they took narrow roads, although he was being generous calling them roads. Dirt tracks in the jungle were more like it. It would have been precarious during the day, but with the sun down, it was almost impossible to navigate.

As Taylor was about to tell her to just turn around, Bonnie pointed the vehicle down a dirt track branching off the main road. An abandoned farmhouse came into view, its weathered boards bleached gray by years of sun and neglect.

As they got to the building, she pulled around back and parked behind the structure, hidden from the road. Although, anyone just stumbling across this place seemed incredibly unlikely. Bonnie got out and walked up to the side door, produced a key from her pocket, and let herself in. Taylor followed, hand near his weapon, wondering what the hell was going on.

Inside, the farmhouse was musty and dim. Bonnie flicked a switch, and a generator hummed to life, illuminating the space. Shelves lined one wall, stocked with canned goods, water jugs, and ammunition boxes. A battered couch sagged in one corner.

“Safehouse,” Bonnie explained, collapsing onto the couch in a cloud of dust. “Set it up as a fallback.”

Of course, she did. Taylor did a quick sweep of the house, checking windows and exits, but as expected, the place was buttoned up tight.

“What’s the plan?” Bonnie asked from the couch when he walked back into the main room, eyes half closed as she leaned her head against the wall. “I need some rest before we go on.”

Taylor leaned against the wall, considering their options. “We keep moving overland. Try to get out through another city, maybe push as far as Colombia. Hopefully, the senator’s reach doesn’t extend beyond the locals here. I know he’s rich, but paying off half a continent seems a bit of a stretch and a good way for him to get caught.”

Bonnie nodded. “Fine. Wake me in a few hours. There’s food if you’re hungry.”

“Not so fast. Tell me more about the Casall hit. I want details, ‘cause this is way beyond what I signed up for.”

Bonnie sighed, pushing herself upright on the couch. “Fine. What do you want to know?”

“Everything. Start from the beginning.”

“I’m not sure what else I can tell you that I haven’t already. Ellsworth was careful. Used cutouts and go-betweens to reach me. Wanted Casall gone, but cleanly. No messy bullet holes or ‘accidents’ that’d raise eyebrows. The money was right, so I got to work. Spent a month shadowing Casall. Learned his schedule down to the minute. It helped that the guy was a creature of habit.”

Taylor gave a small gesture of understanding.

“As jobs go, it was actually one of the easiest I’ve ever done. Casall already had a bad heart and was on some pretty serious medicine for it, so that was my in. I reached out to some labs I knew and had them look at the medicine he was taking and then had another one whip up some look-alikes; same size and color and even mostly made of the same medication, but with a few contraindicated ingredients that would not only neutralize his pills but turn them deadly. I even had it checked out to make sure the factory that made these pills had lines with these same chemicals, so if anyone worked out what caused the heart attack, it would lead to them assuming cross-contamination. A lawsuit for the company that made them but ... fuck ‘em. You have to admit that’s genius, right?”

“You realize how that sounds? You’re proud of how you murdered someone.”

Bonnie just shrugged. “Tell me you never took pleasure in a good shot, even if it ended up blowing a guy’s head off. Don’t get all prudish on me. I was doing my job.”

“They’re not even a little the same.”

“Whatever,” she said, waving a hand. “So Casall had this maid, Jenny, I think her name was. Sweet girl, really, although she owed a ton of money to bad credit card debt. She also really hated her job. Casall might have been a man of the people or whatever, but after watching him for a while, I can tell you he was definitely an asshole. So I approached her on one of her days off, told her I was a private investigator looking into him for possibly cheating on his wife, which he was definitely doing, and I needed to get proof. I offered her a stack of cash to get me into his room so I could ‘plant some bugs.’ She bought it, turned off the security system one day by ‘accident’ and snuck me into the house. I put in a cheapo bug, just in case anyone looked into her story, and switched out the medication in his bathroom. The best part was I put the fear of God in her afterward, about how she’d just broken the law, and I wasn’t going to tell anyone, but she was in as much shit as I’d be if anyone found out what had happened. She was a nervous wreck for days.”

“What’s the point of that if you’re just going to kill him?”

“Because it guarantees her silence. People will do a lot of things out of fear, but they’ll do even more out of relief. When he kicked and it was ruled a heart attack, it meant she was off the hook. No one would be looking into her. She probably thought she’d won the lottery, getting away with it and getting to keep the money. Like I said, I’m good.”

It was well thought out. Taylor had to give her that. Despicable, but the planning behind it was solid.

“If you were good, you wouldn’t have all these people trying to kill you.”

“That’s just some bullshit. I can’t believe his people were so stupid as to let his name slip. I go out of my way to not know who I’m working for, or at least not letting the target know that I know who they are, for this very reason. People who want someone killed and are willing to pay for it get very paranoid. It’s honestly what ends up getting them killed.”

“Fine. The other thing I still don’t get is why me? There are other people you had to know weren’t compromised. I mean, you trust the justice department enough to go into witsec, which suggests you don’t really think he can get someone inside law enforcement to come after you. So this ‘I know you’re not on the take’ doesn’t fly. At least not completely.”

Bonnie shrugged. “I still think he can get to people, but once I spill and enough people know about it, the people inside the government he could buy off will be too worried about it going public. Also, the person in government protection who blew the whistle ending up dead would lead to a ton of investigations, so I think they would abandon him. Before I can give my story ... that’s another matter. They’re more likely to want to get me out of the way to keep any of that from going public. So, until I am with a state’s attorney and a bunch of witnesses, putting my story on tape, I didn’t want to give anyone in the federal government my location. Even if they wouldn’t go after me themselves, giving Ellsworth my location would be easy for them. You tracked me before, came closer than anyone else ever has. I figured if I chose you, I wouldn’t have to give up my location and risk compromising myself. And you proved how good you are.”

She gave him a smile that, for her, was probably incredibly genuine.

“You don’t think you’re going to convince me that you’re not a psychopath, do you?”

“You don’t always have to be an asshole, you know. I’m here, putting my life on the line, finally doing the right thing. Give me a little credit. You know, it’s not the glamorous life people imagine. Always looking over your shoulder, never letting anyone get close. Gets lonely after a while.”

“Give it up. You’re never going to get sympathy from me. Get some sleep. I want to be out of here first thing in the morning.”

She shrugged and laid her head back against the wall, closing her eyes. Taylor had the distinct impression that his words had actually stung a little, and that maybe she’d hoped for a different response.

They were up with the sun early the next morning, which was probably for the best. Had he been forced to keep driving those back roads through the night, he would have gotten turned around and ended back in Caracas or crashed into a tree.

And Bonnie wouldn’t have been much more help. She had this one out-of-the-way safe house set up, and one on the other side of town, but that was it. An hour to the west and she was as uninformed as he was, and the path she’d taken them on had gone pretty deep into the backroads of Venezuela. Getting to a major road that would lead them west, either to another city with a big enough airport or Colombia, was tricky. Bonnie did have a portable GPS system with her, but that was only minimally helpful, as it couldn’t actually tell them if the tiny dirt road they were on led back to a major road.

So they’d been forced to wait until daylight, which meant that if the mercs were looking for them, the mercs would have a head start.

Taylor had spent a lot of time leading up to sunrise thinking about what to do next. The closest city with an international airport wasn’t all that far. Valencia was maybe two and a half hours or so by car and was a viable option. Taylor thought it unlikely that the senator would have bought off the local police in multiple major cities as a precaution and even if he’d realized they’d fled town and guessed which one they were heading to, it seemed even less likely he’d have time to put his fingers on the scales of this one before they could get to the airport and onto a plane.