“Calvino,” I say, breathless, and he must hear the fear in my voice because he manages to pull himself together enough to come join me.
He looks out and sucks in a sharp breath. “They fucking found us.”
Charlie releases a long groan. “Oh, god, he’s going to kill me. He said he’d kill me if I left and now he’s going to do it.”
“There’s another way out.” Calvino grabs me by the arm and yanks me to the bedroom. “Charlie, gather your stuff, we need to go in ten seconds. I’ll make a call.”
Together we throw what we can into bags as he phones Diego. “Need you around the corner in two minutes. Vince found me. No, I don’t know how. Well then you’d better fucking hurry.” He slams the phone into his pocket and helps me throw more clothes into a duffel. When we’re done, we meet in the living room. Charlie’s already packed—she never had a chance to take things out—and she stands there with Emilio clutched to her chest.
Calvino shoulders another bag and grunts under the weight. “There are stairs down to a back door that leads into an alley. We go fast and quiet, and if we’re lucky, his men won’t spot us. Understood?”
I nod and Charlie says nothing. What can we say? It’s like I’m a robot and my emotions are shoved down deep inside of me, and all I can do is keep moving forward.
Calvino leads the way into the hall. He pauses and listens but there’s no sound, so we walk single file as fast as we can without making too much noise. Once we reach the back door, someone begins pounding on the entrance in the front. Calvino curses quietly, but unlocks the back stairwell, and we descend as softly as we can. I’m breathing hard and sweating and doing my best not to make any noise, thinking tiny thoughts, pretending to be a mouse, like I weigh nothing and I’m as light as the wind. When we reach the bottom, a massive bang and a crunching splintering of wood means the guys up front just broke inside.
“Hurry.” Calvino drags me along with Charlie bringing up the rear. We stumble out a back door into a narrow alley framed by two fences about twice the width of my arm span. The far side looks like a dead end, but when we reach it, there’s a gap between the fence on the left and the buildings on the right, just enough for us to slip down.
“Slow and quiet,” Calvino says and we’re off. Charlie goes first, then me, and he brings up the rear. “Head straight. When you reach the sidewalk at the end, turn right and keep running until you can’t run anymore.”
Charlie forces her way forward, staggering under the uneven terrain. There are empty glass bottles, trash bags filled with rotting refuse, mud and old leaves, and it smells like the underside of a fallen log. Emilio makes some crying sounds and Charlie does her best to shush him but she’s clearly barely holding on as it is. We reach a narrow section of the fencing, and Charlie’s bag gets caught on a loose nail in in the boards, and we have to spend a tense thirty seconds getting it untangled, my hands shaking, Emilio whimpering against his mother’s chest.
There are voices back the way we came. Vince’s men must’ve found the stairwell and the back alleyway, but they haven’t spotted the tight path we’re moving along. Charlie hurries now, going faster, and the end’s straight ahead, a brightness cut into the otherwise damp, dark path. She reaches it, steps out onto the sidewalk, and turns to the right as a voice back the way we came calls out, “They’re behind the fence! They’re out back!”
Calvino curses and shoves me forward as a sharp roar kicks out and a piece of the building next to his head breaks off and showers us in rock dust. I nearly fall but he catches me, steadies us both as we stumble onto the sidewalk, and then we’re running, all three of us sprinting away from the block and into a more residential section of the neighborhood. Charlie’s falling behind under the weight of her bags and the baby, and Calvino grabs another one of her backpacks off her shoulder, hefting its weight and grunting under the effort.
“This way,” he shouts, turning a sharp corner. Voices echo after us, and I know they’re getting closer. An engine roars back at the hardware store, and my heart’s racing, my lungs burning, my legs churning. I’m riding the edge, right in the middle of utter agony, and my muscles want me to stop so desperately it’s like slogging through sand, but I don’t let myself give up. I have to keep going, or else we’re dead, we’re all dead.