Tijuana Nights (The Nights Series Book 1) (19 page)

Oh, and that Dodge Charger he let me drive? Wow. I had to get myself one of those. If I managed to survive. Just the sound of the engine made me understand why men are so obsessed with cars. It was loud and powerful, and the way it hugged the roads as I drove to River's made me feel really safe. Like I was untouchable.

I guess it was how Chase made me feel; as though Carmen couldn't touch me when I was with him. Perhaps there was a future there... perhaps not. Perhaps he would forget all about me as soon as this job was over and we all went back to England. Perhaps I was the 'job' for him right now. Still, I went to sleep with memories of his lips meeting mine.

Eight hours later, after a heavy sleep, I woke to someone shaking me. I opened my eyes lazily, and found Chase standing beside my bed with a lopsided grin on his face.

There was something funny about the way he looked at me. Then I realised that his eyes were almost black with dilation. Or maybe that was the dim light. Whatever it was, it made me shiver with something. Excitement?

I shook my head. "I'm sleeping."

"No you're not. We have a job to do."

"What job?" I lay back and put my arm over my face.

"Jandro Ramon." He tugged my arm off my face, and interlinked his fingers with mine, pulling me up and out from the sheets. He sucked in a breath, raking his eyes over my body.

That was the moment I remembered I only had my knickers on. "Ah fuck," I muttered, grabbing at the sheet, and trying to wrap it around myself with little coordination. I looked up at Chase, frustrated. "Out!"

He backed up, still watching me. When he reached the door, he put his hand on the handle, turned back to me and paused. He looked as though he was fighting some internal battle. "Jandro can wait," he said quietly as he crossed the room towards me.

I froze. He took my face gently in his hands, and kissed me with such intent, I was utterly breathless when he pulled away. But I didn't stop him. There was no way my mind or body was going to let that happen. Every cell in my body screamed with need.

And then all of a sudden, I was wrapping my arms around his neck, seeking more. I felt as though I couldn't get enough of him, and didn't even protest when he lifted me onto the bed. He pulled back, looking down at me, his gaze locked on mine, filled with desire. I sensed a shiver of anticipation rip through me as I drank in the shape of his lips, his jawline. "This would be pretty inappropriate," I whispered as he lowered those delectable lips towards me.

"I know," he exhaled the words as his lips met mine.

Everything about Chase enthralled me as he slowly kissed his way down my neck. Luke had never kissed me like this.

"I want you," I murmured.

"I know." He chuckled between kisses.

Well that wasn't the definitive response I wanted to hear, but it did amuse me.

And then his phone started buzzing.

Chase pulled away from me, and the air flooding the space between us suddenly felt cold. His eyes locked on mine the entire time he was listening down the phone.

"We'll be there in five," he said, hanging up. He slowly edged his way towards me again, and I smiled. "You're going to be the death of me one day," he whispered as he kissed me once again. He started pulling away. "But right now you and I have somewhere to be."

"Jandro," I commented.

He backed up off the bed. "Go get dressed in whatever. You don't need to wig up, and you don't have time for a shower. You're not going to need it anyway."

I gave him a curious look. I didn't know if he had just complimented me, or if there was some other meaning behind his words.

I wrapped the sheet around me, and walked to the wardrobe. I fished out a tight pair of track-pants, a sports bra, and a zip up sweatshirt, and then disappeared into the bathroom to get dressed. Chase was still in the room when I walked back in.

Before we reached the door, he pushed me gently to the wall and kissed me again. I was just pleased that I managed to quickly brush my morning breath away.

"For the record? I want you too."

Gabe drove the big Dodge truck that Chase got yesterday. It was a damn nice truck, but I definitely preferred the Charger. Chase had said that River always had trucks if he could help it, or sports cars. Gabe generally preferred the smaller cars; he was more than enchanted when he found out I drove a Mini.

Chase said he liked to drive anything with power, hence the Dodge Charger. I had to agree with him. That car was like sex on wheels. There was something thrilling, dangerous, about a car with loads of horsepower. The Dodge truck had a similar feeling about it too, but I preferred being lower to the road.

Gabe was talking to Chase in the front seat. When we got home, he was going to start the upload of the kills to the database that he ran, and then hopefully we would see some money come in for each kill to date. He had been tracking the police as well, and apparently there had almost been an all-out war down in Cabo San Lucas after we left. According to the reports, Carmen had issued a directive to attack one of the other Cartel houses there because she assumed it was them who attacked her.

I was interested, but I also didn’t want to know. Gabe confirmed that Carmen had flown back to Tijuana last night under the directive of her husband. Apparently she had texted Gabe when she landed, wondering where the hell he had got to amongst the chaos of River blowing holes all through her garden.

Just the thought of her made me cringe. I still couldn’t believe what she was doing to those poor women. It made me feel sick. It was just so inhumane. I hated to think what she would do to me if she ever found me alive.

“Mack?”

“Yeah?” I answered Gabe.

“Are you ready for a bit of fun?”

I shrugged. It was too damn early in the morning. I mean, for god’s sake, it was still dark. “No… probably not. It’s too early.”

“This will wake you up.” He chuckled.

Sadistic bastard, I thought irritably. “So what is it that we’re doing?” I was probably irritable because of Chase and the way he made me feel. Just thinking about him made me tongue tied.

“We’re going for a swim,” Chase answered.

“You’re kidding me, right?”

“Hell no!” Gabe whooped. “I should probably say that this is my favourite assassination method. It’s epic.”

We pulled up at a gate of a secluded estate, and Gabe put his device over the electronic keypad, much like I had seen Chase doing the other night down in Cabo San Lucas. The gates clicked open and swung inward. We drove in through the dark grounds with our lights off, and Gabe parked the car under some trees near a big stone wall. “Gear’s in the back,” he said quietly to Chase. “Go suit up, and I’ll check the doors.”

I got out of the car with Chase, and he opened up the back. He handed me a very thin black wetsuit to put on. I stripped off my jacket and track-pants, and pulled the wetsuit on as quickly as I could. I didn’t want to be caught out here in the dark by someone I didn’t know whilst standing in my underwear. By the time I turned back to Chase, he was already zipping himself up. He grabbed a hood, and told me to put it on. I did as I was told, and found it strangely bizarre that it had a black mesh that covered my face. I sat in the back of the car while trying to pull my boots on. The boots weren’t like normal boots that I had seen surfers wear. They were wide at my toes, liked webbed feet. But they felt comfortable and roomy.

Chase silently handed me a slim-line dive tank. He helped me get it on my back, and strapped it on before he did his own. I noticed how lightweight it was, and how it hugged my back. He wrapped a heavy belt around me, and connected a small breathing apparatus to the tank, which then clipped around my neck, so that I could easily reach it through the mesh front of my hood.

Gabe came silently around the car and spoke in a whispered voice to us, “Okay, you’re all set to go,” he confirmed. “Go through the back door around there, and you’ll see the pool dead ahead. It won’t be long before Jandro gets up for his morning training session. The guards are all asleep, and I’ve pumped some amyl nitrate through the ventilation system of the guard’s quarters, so they’ll wake pretty dopey.”

Chase nodded. “Good work.” He grabbed my hand. “Come on,” he instructed. We followed the path that Gabe had given us, and slipped in through a door in the stone wall. We stood in a pump house that was hot and steamy. “Now, when we get in the water, we are going to stay stationary until Jandro gets in.”

“Won’t he see us?”

Chase shook his head, and pointed through a glass door at the end of the room. I walked over, and looked out at the enormous pool. Then I noticed something incredibly unusual. “It’s black?”

Chase smiled beneath the gauze. “Yes. And that’s why we have black suits on. Sometimes the best assassination is the one when they don’t even know you were there.”

We walked through the glass door, and as I watched Chase slip silently into the water, I saw a large blade glinting on his belt.

I slid into the pool after him, trying to be quiet, but I still made a bit of a splash. Looked like I wasn’t graceful at this either.

“You ready?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know, Chase. What am I even doing here?”

He gave me a slow smile in the dim light and moved closer towards me. “We've never done a job together, I wanted you to see me at work and this is safe way to do it.  This is a different and very covert way to kill someone. You never know when you might need to do something like this.” He leaned even closer to me, “You look gorgeous dressed up like a sleepy platypus.”

I pursed my lips in amusement, forcing a giggle down.

“You ready yet?” He put his hand up to my covered face, and brushed it lightly down my cheek, causing me to shiver with the explosion of memories from earlier when he’d touched me.

I took a deep breath and nodded, not trusting myself to speak, and put my mouth piece in. We dove to the bottom of the pool. It was a strange sensation sitting there at the bottom of the pool with Chase. I had never been diving before, and I definitely couldn’t imagine what it would be like in actual open water or the sea. I thought that would scare the crap out of me. In a pool with no predators, it all seemed a little easier.

I looked over at Chase, who was facing the surface. He pointed and I looked up to see that some lights had been turned on. Chase checked his watch, and held his arm out so I could see the face. We had been in the water for more than fifteen minutes already. I wondered how long our tanks could give us oxygen for. That was something I didn’t particularly want to think about right now. I guessed Chase would make us surface before anything like that happened.

Jandro dived into the pool right at that moment, and my heart began to race. I watched with anticipation as he did lengths, just waiting for him to see us.

Chase moved languidly across the bottom, out towards the middle. Jandro took that moment when he was above me at the water’s edge to take a break. I held my breath as his feet dangled down about a metre above me. I looked out in the water, and almost couldn’t see Chase anymore – just a faint outline. It was strange not being able to communicate during this. It was so different to all of the other jobs I had been out on with River where he would give me a step by step instruction of what was happening. It was at a time like this one when I desperately wished I had ESP with Chase so I could at least understand what was going on in his head.

Jandro dipped down in the water, and I shrank back without making much movement. I really did not want him to accidentally touch me. That would blow this whole operation out of the water, literally. The place would become a state of havoc.

Jandro took off through the water in a backstroke, and I watched intently. Chase sprang up from the bottom and met him in the middle of the pool. I couldn’t quite see properly, so I swam closer. Chase wrapped his gloved hands around Jandro’s neck, and squeezed. Jandro struggled in the water, but since Chase was crushing his windpipe, I doubted whether Jandro could even breathe, let alone shout out. Chase wrapped his body tightly around Jandro, and continued to hold his neck with his forearm.

It felt like it took forever for the struggling to stop. When it did, Chase twisted Jandro’s head, and I thought I heard a slight crack through the water, but really I had probably imagined it. Then he let the body go.