 |
|
|
|
|
Author: Guede Mazaka
Rating: PG-13. Some violence.
Pairing: Will/Elizabeth now, eventual Jack/Will/Elizabeth
Feedback: Good lines, bad ones, etc.
Disclaimer: Does not belong to me.
Notes: Ripping off every movie ever seen by the author that involved something going on beneath the U. S.-Mexican border. Modern-day AU.
Summary: It’s your average wacky Spring Break road trip, only now with guns and big black cars and strange meetings in Mexican bars.
***
“I’m thirsty! Is that a crime?” Honest to God, if she’d known Will would be this much of a wet rag even outside of school, Elizabeth would’ve just gone on her own. Never mind that her father had cut her off at five wrecked Mercedes; if she could wheedle her classics professor into buying her a beer, a little problem like lack of transportation wasn’t going to stop her from having a genuine Mexican Vacation.
But no, she’d had to go with the cute but ultra-serious engineering major who couldn’t deal with a couple food-stops. She probably should have known when Will had shown up armed not with a cooler and his best mix CDs, but with a packet of maps and advisory pamphlets and guidebooks bigger than the three-inch coursepack for her Shakespeare’s Histories class. Thing was, he just had such nice eyes and he was always willing to do things for her…
…except, apparently, deviate from a travel plan that might have been plotted by the goddamn CIA. Will got out of the car and yanked open Elizabeth’s door for her like he’d never been put through so much trouble in his life. His expression reminded her a lot of her grandmother whining about the linens, like the woman couldn’t find perfectly good antique replacements on eBay. “I’m just saying that we need to make better time. At this rate, we’re not going to get to our hotel on time.”
“Oh, we’ll make up the time somehow. Stop worrying so much. This is a vacation, Will, not a covert mission,” Elizabeth snapped. She stomped past him and up the cracked wooden board that served as a front step. If she hadn’t been so pissed off, she might’ve stopped to take a picture of the quaint little graffiti of an anatomically optimistic dick cut into the top. “I mean, it’s not like you’re secretly bound to go retrieve a…a legendary gun or anything and if you don’t, somebody’s going to come and shoot you.”
At first she thought the thing poking her was just some bell hanging off the door and she irritably slapped it away. Behind her, Will seemed to be choking in his rush to say something and so wasn’t saying anything at all. Not one to miss an opportunity, Elizabeth stalked on and yanked a soda from the fridges lining the opposite wall. She figured the people standing around were just frozen because they’d never seen a white girl that wasn’t smiling and drunk and generally having a damn good time south of the border. There was a time and a place for shattering stereotypes, and God, did Elizabeth wish she hadn’t been tapped for this one.
“Would it kill you to calm down a little? It’s not like I had a choice the first time, unless you wanted me to make the whole car smell like piss. You keep going like this and…” Elizabeth finally looked up.
She was standing at one end of the aisle. Will was standing at the other, back to the door, and about ten feet of space separated them. In that ten feet, four other people were frozen in various positions. Two of them had guns and the two that didn’t were on their knees.
She blinked. “Is this place being robbed?”
“Yes,” said the one with the handgun.
“No,” said the one with the shotgun.
The one with the handgun frowned, then swiveled around to put his hand on his hip. “No? Whaddaya mean, no? We’re holding them up, aren’t we?”
“Yeah, but we’re not to take the money. Remember, we was told specifically not to do that. So we’re not robbing the place,” said the other one.
The handgun-carrying one thought about this for a long moment before nodding. “Guess that makes sense. All right, poppet, we’re—ugh!”
“Ugh!” grunted the shotgun-wielding one. He went down hard on top of the other man, toppling a potato-chips display as he went.
One of the bags landed on Elizabeth’s foot. She flipped it over with her toe and read the label while sticking the thug’s gun in the waistband of her jeans. “Chipotle. Oh, we’ve got to get some. It’s impossible to get this flavor up in the U. S.” Then she noticed how Will was looking at her. “Um. Daddy was concerned that I’d need to protect myself and we’ve got an ancestral estate big enough to house a private firing range? And ow…I thought the bottle was supposed to break, not recoil…”
“That’s if you hit him with a glass one. And if you’re in a movie,” Will dryly said. He seemed surprisingly unshocked by the events of the past few seconds, given how dorky he generally came off. Plus he was handling that shotgun in a way that might even impress Elizabeth’s shooting teacher—not to mention a couple of her less-than-straight friends. “I think if we drive through dinner, we’d make it.”
“Will. We’re stopping for dinner, damn it. We’re only here for a week and I intend to sample the finest Mexican cuisine my Daddy’s credit card can—” Oops. Elizabeth whipped around, gun up, but a little too late. For a guy that looked like a whale would be his chosen mate, the man on the floor was surprisingly fast.
Will, however, was even faster. Now there were three men on the ground, and the woman that was still on her knees was babbling frantically in Spanish. A pained expression crossed Will’s face, and he knelt down to take her hand and babble back. Something silvery flashed in the woman’s hand.
Well, hah. Elizabeth could be sneaky, too. Though as weapons went, a plastic soda bottle wasn’t that great. It whacked back into her hand so her palm stung, and she couldn’t even take a swig afterward because she’d definitely get foam exploding all over her.
Will glanced at the knife that the now-unconscious woman had dropped, then put his hand over his face. “Look, can we just talk about this in the car?”
“You’re being way too serious about this,” Elizabeth muttered, stepping over the bodies. She dropped the bottle off on a shelf since she didn’t want her vacation ruined by a shoplifting charge. “Just consider for a moment, for one moment…Will?”
When she turned around, Will had just stood up. He hastily pulled at his shirt and pretended he just hadn’t been digging about in the unconscious people’s clothing. “What?”
Elizabeth frowned and crossed her arms so her hand rested lightly on the butt of the gun. “I think before I go anywhere else with you, I’ve got to ask you something.”
“I’m not on a secret mission to retrieve anything.” Will stood up and casually slung the shotgun over his shoulder. Then he blushed and quickly took it down to hold surreptitiously by his side. Apparently he’d remembered he was in front of a live audience instead of his mirror, though to be honest, he was good enough at that move to send a warm flash through Elizabeth.
God, even when she tried to stick to the safe ones, she ended up picking a bad boy. She might as well just give up and suffer the huge insurance premiums.
“That wasn’t what I was going to ask. I knew that—you’ve been staring at my breasts way too much to be thinking about much of anything else. No, I want to know whether this is going to make things weird. I know you agreed that what happens in Mexico stays in Mexico, but guys really don’t like girls saving them.” She leaned against the door and carefully watched his expression.
First he went red, then slowly paled back to normal. Adorable little wrinkles appeared between his eyebrows, and he settled his weight on his back foot as he thought. One of the men on the floor stirred and Will absently swung the shotgun down to club the man, then flipped it back up in an elegantly seamless move.
Elizabeth raised an eyebrow. She clearly hadn’t known what she was in for…but it looked like it was going to be absolute fun finding out.
“I think I’m just grateful she didn’t get to stick me. I accidentally packed the full medikit under all our luggage, so it would’ve been a pain getting it out. So actually, thank you for that,” he finally said. His cute speech came adorned with a shy smile that made Elizabeth grin back.
“Oh, good. Then you won’t freak out when I mention that I wasn’t exactly expelled from three high schools for truancy.” She moved aside as Will walked up, letting her hand drop from the gun. A little inward sigh of relief briefly tensed up her chest, but then they were into the golden Mexican sun and she relaxed. “You know, this is a really nice pistol. Not really street material.”
Will shot her a narrow look, then stared off to the side. “Elizabeth?”
“Hmm?” She opened the door on her side and slid back onto the seat so she could pop out his boring bland pop CD and put in one of hers. A driving Jamaican dancehall beat soon filled the air.
They pulled back onto the roof, Will still mumbling to himself and absently tapping on the wheel. He’d slid the shotgun beneath the seat; Elizabeth thought about it, then stuck the pistol in the glove compartment. It looked cool in her waistband, but it was stretching that out and these were her favorite pair of jeans. Not to mention she didn’t feel like bribing the police this early into their trip.
“I’m not retrieving anything because I, um, already have it. Did I ever mention how I got this car?” Will finally said.
It was a very, very nice car. The first time Elizabeth had seen it, she hadn’t been able to believe that a guy that walked around with solder burns on his fingertips and half the time forgot to wipe the soot off his nose would be driving something that big and black and filled with sexy leather.
“Nope,” she said. “But I’ll forgive you if you tell me right now.”
* * *
Jack walked into the bar and every head instantly swiveled towards him. He essayed his best innocent grin, but for some reason they didn’t seem to be buying it. He tightened his hold on his case. “Afternoon, compadres.”
None of them said anything. They certainly looked like the nonspeaking types. It was hard to tell where the collars of their flour-sack shirts ended and their filthy necks began, and they all seemed to have gone to the same bad optometrist to get eyes like orbs of cloudy water painted with red streaks on the outside. The artist probably had had something in common with Jack when he’d been five.
One of the bigger ones stood up, and another one shifted his chair so he could cut off Jack’s exit. Jack looked around, and by the time he got back to looking straight ahead, he was surrounded. It wasn’t a promising start.
“What do you want?” growled the bartender. He had good English, but his teeth needed work with a sledgehammer to straighten out his voice.
“Just wanted a bit of rum. What’s the matter?” Jack asked.
The bartender shrugged. “Depends on what’s in the case.”
Now that was an interesting question, and deserved a moment’s consideration. While Jack was giving it that, a gun went up against his head. He leaned back, but it poked forward so either he had to stop or devise a way to get around his backbone’s inability to fold up that way. “Now, let’s not be hasty…”
“What’s in the case?” the bartender repeated a little more pointedly.
“Just my instruments. Here, let me—” But before Jack could even touch the latch, he was deafened by the sound of clicking guns. He shrugged and let one man take the case from him.
The bartender nodded sharply, and the man flipped open the case. Everyone tensed up, then blinked. Not to be left out, Jack blinked with them.
“What the hell are these?” the man said, poking at Jack’s sextant.
“My tools, you know. What I use to do my job,” Jack patiently answered. He watched while the man disbelievingly poked about the lining. A couple times, the man jabbed his knife clear through the velvet padding, making Jack wince. “Er, those are a bit delicate…”
“Off…off…give him back his case.” The bartender smiled apologetically as Jack was handed back his tools. “Sorry, man. But you know, we’re not that far from the town where that crazy mariachi went nuts…”
Jack nodded understandingly, and then he yanked out his first pair of guns. Funny how they never seemed to notice his baggy many-layered clothing, but oh, well. Fashion sense apparently was something you checked at the border.
***