Revenge Never Rests by Laurie Lewis

Author:Laurie Lewis [Lewis, Laurie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Covenant Communications, Inc.
Published: 2022-11-07T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Tallie watched out her window for more than a half hour as the city’s luxurious shopping and entertainment district shifted into bustling suburban neighborhoods, which eventually faded into blocks of rundown residences and shops running toward the edge of more rural terrain. Some of the buildings were no more than lean-tos constructed from plywood or cardboard owned by tired, bedraggled people. Buildings became more sparse and paved roads ended as agriculture consumed the land, watched over by armed guards in trucks posted along the acreage. The SUV trundled along the rutted road, beyond tended fields of produce laid in quilt-like rows and on to wild acres of trees and viny growth, broken only by an occasional shack or cluster of run-down, inhospitable hovels. Tallie suspected that the presence of armed guards meant that behind the innocuous fields of vegetables and corn lay plots of marijuana, nightshade, and possibly coca, the plant behind cocaine.

She’d spent most of her childhood in obscure shanty towns and squatter settlements, places where she and Julia could become part of the invisible poor while Julia served the indigent locals as a teacher or nurse or research scientist. Poverty didn’t frighten Tallie, but the desperation it sometimes bred did, and she saw that hopelessness in the eyes of some of the villagers she and Burke passed.

The hairs on her arms rose as she noticed that same desperation in the eyes of the armed man guarding the road Burke turned onto. More a trail than a road, it was rutted so badly that the trip felt like a carnival ride of deep forward dips and shifts left and right. They passed a decrepit bus parked in a junglelike clearing by the side of the dirt trail. It was guarded by another armed man, illustrating its worth to the community. Tallie assumed it was the area’s one form of transportation to move shifts of workers to the resorts and hotels in the city.

She smiled at the sight of children kicking a soccer ball in a field and women gathered by a cooking fire, some with small children bundled on their backs. There were no house numbers or street names in the village, so she found it a cause for wonder when Burke accurately snaked through the patchwork paths and parked the car amid some overgrowth a hundred yards from one of the finer buildings in the community—a block-and-wood structure. He had the vehicle’s door open and one leg out before he said, “Wait here.” His tone was unequivocal and underscored by the shutting of his door without further explanation.

Tallie rebelliously exited through her door and met him at the back of the SUV. He glared at her as he opened the door and silently unzipped his satchel to grab an extra magazine and a silencer, which he slid into his hip pocket.

“I should go along. I’ll stay out of harm’s way, but I’ll be there if you need backup.”

“No.”

“Stop and think, Burke. You have no idea what you could be walking into.

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