There are many things that can make someone second guess their life choices. Driving through Mexico with a decapitated head on the passenger seat was one of them.

Angus Sullivan slipped a .45 between his thigh and the seat, ejected the empty magazine and reloaded without taking his eyes off the road.

The decapitated head was going to be a problem. Angus had no idea how he was going to get the son of a bitch through customs.

The whole nightmare started twenty four hours ago when Henry Micallff, the CEO of Universal Imports was abducted from his hotel room by MS-13ers with machetes and Mac-10s. The fuckers wanted two million dollars for the safe return of the CEO. They said no cops and no feds. So Universal Imports called their K&R company, Stone & Ferguson and they picked up the phone and called Angus Sullivan.

Six hours later the gunfighter touched down in the city of Acapulco.

Fifty years ago it used to be all beach resorts and cocktails. Now going to Acapulco was like vacationing in a war zone. Drug cartels had taken over large parts of the city with a fuck you attitude and there was absolutely nothing the Mexican government could do about it.

The locals called it Narcopulco.

So when Angus stepped off the private jet onto a small runway in the middle of nowhere Mexico and found a BMW with a trunk full of weapons and two million dollars on the back seat, it wasn’t exactly out of the ordinary.

The job was simple. Deliver the cash, return the CEO and everybody goes home happy.

Angus climbed behind the wheel of the car and hit the road.

MS-13 set the meet. Their territory. Their streets. Their world.

They weren’t some group of teenage thugs roaming the streets and getting into shit. MS-13 were international mad, bad and dangerous bastards to know, with menacing presences in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Honduras and Central America. They had their dirty hands in all kinds of businesses from drug smuggling, human trafficking, gunrunning, extortion and all other kinds of bastard activity. The kidnapping of an American CEO was just another routine day at the office for them.

Night had fallen over Acapulco but it didn’t cool any of the heat. Angus wiped the sweat from his brow with his sleeve of his black t-shirt as he slowed at the address he was given. It was a warehouse on the outskirts of town. A place where there was once an industry an now all that remained was the empty warehouses with faded signs and vacant lots.

MS-13 were already inside the warehouse. Angus counted five souped-up Nissan Skylines, possibly ten guys, all topless, all covered head to toe in tattoos and all of them with bad attitudes and itchy trigger fingers wrapped around the MAC-10s in their hands.

 Angus brought the BMW to a stop a fair distance away from the Maras. Twenty feet was far enough away to mess with their aim but close enough for them to still think they could hit him. He left the engine running, climbed out, and stood in the beam of the headlights.

The man in charge went by the name of Casper. Angus scanned the gangsters and figured Casper to be the one standing dead and center with the most gold chains around his neck. He couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, but in criminal years that was a career.

“You the gringo?” Casper called out.

“How many gringos are you expecting?” Angus said.

Casper didn’t have much of a sense of humor and the silence hung in the air until Angus spoke next. “Yeah, well, I guess I’m the gringo, then,” he eventually came back with.

Casper scratched his temple with the muzzle of the MAC-10. “You got the two million?”

“You got the man?”

“I got the man.”

“Then I got the two million,” Angus said. “Am I going to get to see him or what?”

Casper turned to the muscle-bound monster by his side who had done too many steroids and too many weights. “Get him out.”

The monster made his way to the rear of the Nissan Skyline, opened the trunk and dragged out an obese hooded man in a filthy suit that looked as if it had been dragged though the gutter.

“Ta-da,” Casper said. “Where’s the cash-ola?”

Angus unzipped the bag and held it in the light to show Casper the wads of cash inside.

“Bring it,” Casper called. “I can’t spend it from over there.”

Angus zipped up the bag. “Send over the man.”

“We do it at the same time,” Casper said. “That would be… diplomatic.”

“That’s not what diplomatic means, but let’s do it anyway,” Angus said.

The monster pushed the hooded man forward. He stumbled, regained his balance and then took short, unsure steps toward the BMW.

Angus matched his speed and kept an eye on everything. At roughly someplace in the middle, Angus exchanged the bag of cash for the obese man with a hood on his head and everybody retreated back to their respective sides with the speed of molasses.

Looking back, Angus remembered thinking the trade off had been a walk in the park. Then he pulled the hood from the man’s face.

Mexican.

60s.

Beaten bloody and blue.  

Duct tape across his mouth.

Not Henry Micallff. Not by a long shot.

“Hey,” Angus called out to Casper. “Who the fuck is this?”

Casper looked over his shoulder. He was already pulling out the cash from the bag. “That’s your man.”

“This is a man,” Angus said. “He’s not the million dollar man.”

Casper tossed the bag on the hood of the Nissan. “You calling me a liar?”

“I’m not saying that,” Angus said, “not yet anyway. The deal was for Henry Micallff.” He thumbed to the scared Mexican man. “Not this poor son of a bitch.”

“I don’t see what the problem is.”

“You don’t?”

“No.”

“Really? Because from where I’m standing, this is a huge fucking problem.”

The smile dropped from Casper’s face and instantly everything got real serious real fast. His crew sensed it, they knew what was coming, and they all took half a step away from him.

“You calling me a liar?” Casper was pissed and when he spoke he spoke with his gun pointing at Angus as if it were his index finger.

This kind of thing could go either way, Angus thought. If he wanted to diffuse the situation, he had to play it cool.

“You did say you were going to bring me Henry Micallff,” Angus continued, “and you didn’t bring me Henry Micallff. In my book, yes, that makes you a fucking liar.”

So much for playing it cool.

In that part of the world, when an uneducated, heavily armed, egotistical gang member is given shit by an outsider in front of his very own crew? There is absolutely, positively, no fucking thing anybody can do to avoid gunfire.

Casper raised his weapon, gritted his teeth and blasted two rounds into the chest of Angus Sullivan.

The gunfighter hit the concrete floor hard and nobody said shit until the echo of the shots faded into silence.

To everyone in that warehouse, the Yank was as dead as nails.

The old Mexican man with his hands bound and duct tape across his mouth, well, he didn’t last much longer.

Casper shifted his aim and buried two in his chest as well.

Then they bailed.

There was no way in hell Casper was leaving a two hundred thousand dollar BMW in the middle of fuck knows where Mexico, so when MS-13 bailed, they did so with Angus’ premium BMW.  Within minutes the warehouse was empty except for the dead Mexican and Angus Sullivan on the cold hard floor and the four empty shells that put them there.

For a long time the warehouse sat quiet, then… Angus coughed. Rolled onto his side and sat up. He tore his shirt off, then tore the Kevlar off. Vest or no vest, getting shot in the chest hurt like a son of a bitch. He pulled a couple of painful breaths into his lungs. Two broken ribs at least. Angus was just grateful that Casper wasn’t trained enough, smart enough or a good enough aim to make a head shot at twenty feet, and lazy enough to not confirm the kill.

MS-13 were never going to make the trade. They were always going to kill the messenger, take the cash, sell the CEO or kill him too. All Angus needed was to find them and with the GPS tracker he’d hidden in the spare wheel cavity of the BMW, that’s exactly what he’d done. Although, as he painfully sat up, he wished he’d done it without taking two in the chest.

The blue glow from the iPhone lit up Angus’ face. He watched as the green dot on the map passed through Cumbres, then Chinameca. Thirty minutes later, when they stopped, he had an address.

#

Angus waited until 4 am.

He had been on more raids at 4 am than at any other time in his career.

At 4 am people were asleep, they were stoned, they were drunk. Nobody is ever ready at 4 am, least of all for gunfire and hell.

The signal from the BMW stopped at 14 Pino Suarez. And at 4 am, number 14 was as quiet as a mouse. A single story house that was once painted blue, but that was a long time ago and the color had since faded to an off-white shade of things. Angus figured it was a four bedroom place and judging by the half a dozen vehicles, including his BMW parked in the front yard, the rooms were all occupied. Blue hue from a television filtered out through the yellow stained curtains in one of the rooms, but apart from that, the house appeared quiet.

Bent at the waist, Angus made his way across the front yard to the BMW. He had a second key and used it to open the trunk. The gear he had hidden in the empty cavity where the spare wheel should have been was all still there. Angus loaded up and made ready the .45, slipped the two extra magazines down the front of his jeans for easy access, and fitted the night vision goggles. They were panoramic, which meant they had two tubes per eye and four in total, giving them the appearance they were built for operators with four eyes. They extended the operator’s peripheral so they could quickly cycle through the OODA loop, which stood for Observe, Orient, Decide and Act.

Act meaning blowing somebody’s fucking head clean off.

Angus left the tubes aimed to the sky until they were needed and quietly made his way around to the side of the house to where the fuse box was. The wooden door that was meant to protect the power supply from the elements had lost a hinge, and hung by the two remaining and very hard working screws. With a hell of a lot of care, Angus gently opened the small door, found the main switch, that powered the entire house, and pulled it.

The blue hue from the television inside died.

Angus held his breath.

Listened for movement.

Voices.

Footsteps.

Anything.

For sixty seconds he listened.

Nothing.

Angus switched on the goggles. They powered up and the world went green. Then he made his way to the back of the house, around the rusted garden furniture and up to the back door. It took him ten minutes to pick the lock; it had been a long time since he’d silently lock picked anything and he wasn’t very good at it to begin with.

The back door opened into what used to be a kitchen. The benches, sink and oven had all been ripped out leaving what was left of the plumbing poking from the wall exposed.

It wasn’t a home. It was a party house. Even through the green tint of the goggles, Angus could make out the MS-13 graffiti that covered the dented and bashed in walls. The carpets were all torn up and stained, and the furniture was a mismatched mess of second hand and stolen. The only thing that held any value was the sixty inch television in the living area with fingerprint smudges all over it.

From the back door, through the kitchen, to the living area and down the hall, Angus counted three MS-13ers deep in drunken, drug induced sleep. His presence hadn’t been noticed by anyone. He had the time to do this right. Duct tape over their mouths and eyes, flexicuffs around wrists and ankles. The first two were so out of it they didn’t even wake. The third wasn’t as wasted at the others and put up a struggle.

Angus punched the gangbanger three times.

That quietened him down.

So far, so good.

Then Angus stepped up and followed his .45 quietly down the hall.

He heard footsteps, stopped dead.

Waited.

Listened.

Footsteps. Whispers. Whispers. Footsteps.

He saw the glint of a MAC-10 in the moonlight that flooded through the window.

Angus shifted his aim accordingly and a moment later, Casper shuffled into the hall holding the obese Henry Micallff hostage style; MAC-10 to his head. His free hand was over Micallff’s mouth with his snot and tears running over it.

“Hey, man,” Casper said. “No need to start some shit.”

This wasn’t the Casper that was full of balls and swagger Angus had seen earlier that night. This version was scared. Scared wasn’t always good.

“Let him go,” Angus said, “and I pinkie swear not to start any shit.”

 “And then what, huh? What happens next?”

“We all go our separate ways, with no hard feelings.” Angus said coolly.

Casper shook his head. “Can’t see it going down like that.”

“I’m here for the CEO, that’s all,” Angus said. “I don’t give a fuck about the money. Keep it. Just let him go and I’ll go.”

“You’ll go?”

“Like I wasn’t even here.”

“Can’t see it going down like that,” he said again, and then the gangbanger stepped backwards into a room with Micallff, and kicked the door closed with his foot.

Scared gunman. One hostage. No way out. Angus had seen it before, and it always ended the same bloody way. With a dead hostage and a gunman ready to go down in a blaze of glory like a fucking hero.

Angus only had seconds to decide what was going to happen next.

He thought about how tall Casper was, and how short the CEO was.

He aimed accordingly.

The door was the only thing between him and his target.

It was a hell of a gamble.

His finger wrapped around the trigger.

Took a breath.

Paused.

Waited.

Froze.

That was where Angus fucked up.

A crack of gunfire came from the other side of the door followed by a thump.

Angus took off running and kicked the cheap wooden door at the end of the hall.

Henry Micallff was down. There was a bullet in his back and he bleeding out all over the floor.

Casper was half out the window. Angus blasted three rounds his way without so much as a second thought. He died right there in the window frame. Then Angus dropped to his knees and put his hands on Micallff’s wound. The obese man coughed and spluttered blood but it was no good. Angus knew that much. He had seen too many people die and they all had the same look on their face just at the moment before death.

It was the look of surprise.

Angus held his hand and looked into the old man’s eyes just to let him know he wasn’t alone, that in his last moment, somebody was there. There was nothing Angus could say to him. They both knew the score. The end was coming. The seconds that passed felt like an eternity but it wasn’t long until his body stopped convulsing and heart his stopped beating. And then he was gone.

Angus sat back on his heels and rubbed his face leaving blood smeared across his cheek. Combat wasn’t about thinking. It was about reacting and Angus gave reacting too much thought. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered.

What a mess.

The iPhone in his pocket vibrated and when Angus looked at the screen he let out a long sigh before he answered. It was Warren Dixon; his contact at Stone & Ferguson.

“Do you have Micallff?” Dixon asked.

“About that?” Angus said lighting up a cigarette. “He’s dead.”

“Dead?” There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Did you give them the money?”

“I did.”

“And then what happened?”

“Hell, it really doesn’t matter does it?” Angus said climbing to his feet, “He’s dead as disco.”

“We need proof of death,” Dixon said.

“What?”

“Proof of death.”

“He’s dead. I’m telling you he’s dead, if he could tell you himself that he was dead he would.”

“The insurance company needs proof he’s not vacationing in South America somewhere, or they won’t cover our costs.”

Angus looked down at the poor bastard on the floor. “If this is a vacation I don’t think he’s having a terribly good time.”

“Simple. Just bring the corpse back with you, Mr Sullivan.”

Angus was 6’2, in shape and it wouldn’t have been the first dead body he carried but when Angus looked at the three hundred pound corpse he knew it would be a son of a bitch to move.

“Yeah,” Angus said, “I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

“Why not?”

“Your client wasn’t exactly a salad eater if you know what I mean.” Angus couldn’t even believe he was even having this conversation. “I’ll take some photographs, okay?”

“They’re not going to prove he’s deceased.”

“Shit,” Angus mumbled as he rubbed his tired face. “DNA? I’ll take some blood.”

“Again, Mr Sullivan, that doesn’t mean he’s deceased,” Dixon said. “We need definitive proof of death. If you can’t provide proof of death, then we don’t get paid and that means you don’t get paid. Bring the body back, Mr. Sullivan.”

The line went dead.

Prick.

Angus wouldn’t be able to move the body even if there were two of him. He put the cigarette to death under his boot and that’s when something out of the corner of his eye grabbed his attention. On the bedroom wall of number 14 Pino Suarez was a good, old fashioned, Mexican made machete.

“Oh, hell,” Angus said as he pulled the blade down. “This job really does have it’s ups and downs.”

And that’s how there came to a decapitated head on the passenger seat of Angus Sullivan’s rented BMW.

#

Mexico was a bad idea. He should have stayed at home in New York, had a few beers and proposed to Mackenzie Porter just like he always planned to do.

They met six months ago at a bar called Pinks in the East Village. It was a rock ‘n’ roll dive and although the music was good, smoking was banned so Angus and Mackenzie found themselves outside sharing a cigarette. They argued about how it was sometimes impossible to tell the difference between The Cure and The Cars and by the time that cigarette was smoked, Angus was in love.

Mackenzie was a part time paramedic and part time bass player in a band called, Cat Wing, Bat Wing. Angus thought she looked like Debbie Harry but he would never tell her that because she always preferred Joan Jett, and for some reason in Mackenzie’s mind you couldn’t like both. He had been working up to the proposal for weeks and everything was falling into place. Angus had tickets to Guns ‘n’ Roses at Madison Square and was going to propose during November Rain, which was her favourite Guns ‘n’ Roses song.

The engagement ring he bought from Tiffany’s cleaned out his bank account, so when Warren Dixon called with the Mexican job and an offer of 50k for two days work, it was hard for Angus to say no.

Considering the recent developments and the decapitated head on his passenger seat, he wished he had.

Angus was almost back to the hotel. His plan: run up to the room, collect his passport, wallet and other identifying items and then get the hell out of Acapulco with his new travelling buddy.

Angus slipped the .45 into the back of his jeans, steered with his knees and checked the rear-view mirror for any tails, and after a couple of seconds of scanning the traffic behind him, Angus was pretty sure there wasn’t a tail in sight.

Stone & Ferguson had booked him a room at the Fiesta Americana Villas and when Angus pulled up to the valet in the BMW, the bell boy tried taking the old, canvas bowling ball bag that now contained the decapitated head of Henry Micallff.

“No, God damn it,” Angus said as he gave the bell boy twenty Pecos not to take his bag and cut across the lobby to the elevator.

He found the bowling ball bag in the back of a closet at Casper’s house. It was either that or a shopping bag from 7-11. He was grateful Casper was a bowler.  

Angus hit the button to call the elevator and then hit it three more times just in case that was going to speed things up. The elevator arrived and two minutes later Angus was walking down the hall toward his room on the twelfth floor. Key in one hand, head of Henry Micallff in the other.

In and out. Back on the road in five minutes. With any luck, home sweet home of New York by the end of the day.

Angus found his room, used the key card and pushed open the door.

There was somebody there. He reached for the .45 in the waistband of his jeans but stopped short when he saw Mackenzie sitting on the bed. Her hair was up, her bikini was on and the room smelt like coconut oil. Full vacation mode.

“Surprise!” She said. And when she saw the look on Angus’ face, the smile from her own faded. “I thought you would have been a bit happier to see me than that. Are you not surprised?”

He was surprised alright. All the colour had gone from his face.

Mackenzie had no idea what Angus did for a living. She knew nothing of kidnappings, guns, heads in bags. She thought Angus was in the transport industry which accounted for his sporadic travel. He was good at keeping secrets but in that moment he wished he had come clean a long time ago.

Angus closed the door, got his shit together and forced a smile across his face. “Of course, baby. You just gave me a fright that’s all.” He put the bowling bag on top of the mini bar fridge and wrapped his arms around her as she stood.

“I know you’re here for work,” Mackenzie said into his ear. “but while you’re working I can swim and at night we can hang out?”

“Great,” Angus said trying to sound convincing. “Just, great.”

Mackenzie pushed back and noticed something on his neck. “Is that blood?” Then with a more through look, she saw more in his hair and on his t-shirt. “It’s everywhere.”

“Yeah, I hit a deer, just before,” Angus said, “came out of nowhere.”

“A deer? Do they have deer in Mexico?”

Angus had absolutely no idea. “Sure,” he said as he stepped to the bathroom. “I’m just going to clean some of this off.” He ran the tap and did the best he could but blood has a nasty knack of getting in everywhere.

This was bad, this was very fucking bad, Angus thought. His mind raced to find an exit strategy.

He didn’t get very far.

Mackenzie stepped in the doorframe. “Ah,” she said, “Angus?”

He cut the taps and turned. “Yeah, baby?”

Mackenzie cocked her head. “Your bowling ball is bleeding.”

“What?” Angus stepped back into the room. She wasn’t wrong. Blood was dripping out of a small hole in a worn out corner of the bowing bag, onto the minibar, down the door and was forming a little pool on the carpet.

“Why is your bowling ball bleeding?” Mackenzie asked.

“Maybe it’s injured?” Not even Angus sounded convinced.

“This is bullshit. What the hell is going on?” Her voice was hard and stern. In short, she wasn’t fucking around. “What’s in that bag?”

Angus racked his brain to come up with an explanation that was believable as well as  acceptable and within the couple of seconds that passed, he came up with absolutely nothing.

“Fine,” she said. “I’m opening it.”

“Wait,” Angus yelled, “stop!”

But before he could do anything about it, Mackenzie had the blowing bag in her hand and the zip pulled back.

“FUCK!” After half a glance, she dropped it and stepped back. “What the fuck is that!”

Angus wanted to calm her down but every time he took a step toward her, she stepped back until she was against the wall. “It’s not what it looks like,” he said.

“It looks like you’ve got a human head in a bowling bag. That’s what it looks like.”

Angus gave that some thought. “Well, it is what it looks like, but I can explain.”

Mackenzie was starting to hyperventilate. “Oh my God. You’re a serial killer. I’m dating a fucking serial killer.”

“What, no! I didn’t kill him.”

“You didn’t cut his head off?”

“Well, yeah. But he was already… look it doesn’t matter. Here’s the truth, one hundred percent, here’s the truth.” He took a breath. The conversation he should have had months ago. “I’m the guy you call when you need to get somebody out of a bad situation.”

“Like a divorce?”

He shook his head. “Like if a reporter is kidnapped by the Taliban, you call me. Or if you need dozen Americans extracted from an embassy during a coup, I’m the guy you call.”

Mackenzie was starting to calm down. “I thought you were in exports?”

“I kind of am,” Angus said. “In a way.”

She pushed off the wall and wrapped her arms around her middle. “What about the bowling ball?”

“I wasn’t able to get all of him out.”

“That’s not funny.”

“It’s a little funny.”

The phone on the bedside table rang and scared Mackenzie half to death. Angus picked it up and put the receiver to his ear.

“The police are here. They’re heading up to your room now,” Juan the hotel manager on the other end of the line said. When Angus checked in he gave Juan five hundred Pecos to call his room if anybody asked about him. It was the best five hundred Pecos he’d ever spent.

Angus hung up and turned to Mackenzie. “Baby,” he said. “Time to get the hell out of here.”

They grabbed what they could carry, including the head and thirty seconds later they were in the fire escape and running down the stairs. Twelve flights of stairs later, Angus and Mackenzie busted out of the fire escape door and into the garage. They were covered in sweat and out of breath but there was no time for slowing down. Angus held Mackenzie’s hand, took a couple of steps forward and scanned the garage for the BMW. He found it by the back wall parked in between a Merc and a Porsche.

The valet had the key so Angus put his boot through the rear passenger door window and they were inside. Ninety seconds later the engine roared to life after Angus hotwired it and not too long after that they were on the road.

What Angus didn’t know but would find out later, was that across the road from the MS-13 house on 14 Pino Suarez street lived a little old lady who still believed in neighbourhood watch. At approximately 4 AM the night before. She couldn’t sleep and therefore was up late watching re-runs of Hasta La Cocina, when she heard gunfire. She thought that her neighbour, Casper and his friends were good boys. They always took care of her trash and made sure that nobody bothered her when she went to the store. So that morning at four in the morning after she heard gunfire, that little old lady wrote down the licence plate number of the BMW that the Yank drove away in.

It didn’t take the police long to trace the licence plate number to Easy Car Hire and that name to the Fiesta Americana Villas. It was a rookie mistake. Somebody at Stone & Ferguson had fucked up and created a trail.

If at the time Angus had of known that the Mexican police had fingered his BMW he would have stolen absolutely anything else in that garage. As it turned out, he didn’t.

It was morning in Acapulco and it was already hot. The roads were jammed with V-Dub taxis and busses full of school kids and nine to fivers.

Angus asked Mackenzie to grab two magazines out of his overnight bag. She pulled it onto her lap, dragged open the zip and when Angus glanced over he saw that it wasn’t two magazines for his .45 in her hands but a jewellery box from Tiffany’s. The lid was open and she was looking at the engagement ring inside.

“Oh, shit.”

“Angus,” she said. “If you get a second, would you mind explaining this?”

He wasn’t exactly having the best day. It was meant to be a quick extraction, in and out, quick and easy, back in time to see Guns ‘n’ Roses and propose properly, during November Rain. Well, Angus thought, if this was the way it was going to be, this was the way it was going to be. He took a breath and cleared his throat. “I was wondering,” he mumbled. “If you wouldn’t mind marrying me too much.”

“No,” she snapped. “You don’t propose to me in the middle of an escape.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not exactly the most romantic way to propose to a girl, you idiot.” She pointed at his neck. “And you’ve still got blood all over you. It’s not romantic, it’s just not.”

“I had this whole thing planned with November Rain and Guns ‘n’…”

“… What are you talking about?”

“This is not the way I wanted to do it?”

“It’s not the way I wanted you to do it either.”

“What were you doing snooping around in my bag?”

“You told me to get your bullets.”

“They weren’t in the fucking Tiffany box. Tiffany don’t make bullets,” Angus said. “Look, you know, shit.” Angus took a breath to calm himself down and get the angry tone out of his voice and shifted it to something a little more gentle. “Can we have this conversation later? Please. I’ve got a lot to deal with right now.” He saw something in the rear view. “Is that… Check and see if we have a tail?”

“How would I know if we had a tail?”

Have a look out the back window and tell me if you see anything suspicious looking.”

Mackenzie kneeled on the passenger seat and peered through the morning haze. “Would you call three police cars suspicious.”

Angus threw a quick glance over his shoulder at the heat they’d picked up. “Given the current situation, yeah, I’d call that suspicious.”

Angus swallowed hard, his throat was dry. This wasn’t going to play out well. It would only be a matter of minutes until this shit storm escalated from moderately fucked, to fucked beyond all recognition.

A high speed chase to the border was out of the question. It was thirty hours to Pirtleville and the BMW didn’t have enough gas even if they weren’t forced off the road and killed along the way.

Angus could slam on the brakes, turn into Rambo and start blasting away in the middle of the city street. That would last about ten seconds before the Mexican police turned the BMW into Bonnie & Clyde.

Angus didn’t always think ahead but he always thought quick.

Half a block up and on the left, there was a ten-story parking lot complex.

Angus drew a shaky breath, changed gears and buried the pedal. The BMW lurched forward and shot past the two V-Dub taxis in the lane next to it.

“Angus?” Mackenzie said as she reached for the handle to hold on tight.

The BMW hit the first ramp of the parking lot complex and sped around and around and around at a dangerous 60mph, up all ten stories, until it hit the sun blasted roof.

Angus slammed on the brakes and came to a sliding stop.

Mackenzie looked around at the empty roof top car park and no way out. “Did you just drive us up a ten story dead end?”

He unclipped his belt, shifted in his seat and took Mackenzie’s hand. “I’d say we’ve got maybe thirty seconds until the police make it up here”. Angus pointed to the elevator. “Take that down to the ground floor and get to the American embassy. They’ll get you back to New York.”

“What about you?”

“I’m probably not going to be right behind you, baby.” Angus knew the horrible mess he was in. He was looking at jail. Not just any regular jail, but, violent, kick you in the balls, hell hole, Mexican jail. Angus took the engagement ring out of the jewellery box and placed it in the palm of her hand. “I’ll get out of this. I’ll find you, and I’ll find propose the right way I promise.”

“Guns ‘n’ Roses and November Rain?” Mackenzie said with a smile.

“November Rain,” Angus repeated.

“You know that song is about a break up.”

“No it’s not.”

“Yes it is.”

“Please, baby,” Angus said. “Can we discuss this later?”

By the time the three Mexicali patrols had screamed up the ten story car park they found the American, Angus Sullivan standing in front of a BMW.

There was a lot of yelling and bad noise. Guns came out and Angus was quickly surrounded. He looked down at the decapitated head in the bowling bag by his feet.

“Looks like this is the end of the line for us, Henry.” He shifted his attention to the police. “Now, which one of you sons of bitches is going to take me to jail?”