“Yes,” she said. “But we can go out a window and onto the roof.”
“A few at a time,” Garrett said. “Too much smoke to wait around up there long. Get up top, out the window onto the roof and keep goin’. Don’t come back inside, no matter what. Do you hear? You come back in, you slow us down. Women first, git up on up there.”
“Not without our men,” Chelsea said, latching onto his hand.
Something exploded, and everyone screamed and crouched down. The roar seemed louder after that, the smoke denser, the very air hotter.
Lily yelled, “Top of the stairs, to the right, that’s the closest window. We have to hurry! Smoke’s getting worse.” She grabbed Drew’s hand, she didn’t know why. “Hold your breath up there and get out fast. Ready?”
Ethan texted Lily ten times, but there was no response, and that made the panic inside him grow.
“Still nothin’?” Jeremiah asked from the passenger seat.
Ethan shook his head left and right. “Nothin’ better have happened to her.”
“Nothin’ better have.”
Jeremiah had tossed the sombrero and poncho into the back and Ethan wondered if he’d only worn them to make sure he’d be easy to spot in the crowd, the opposite of the reason he’d worn them before.
He looked back at the clothing briefly. Jeremiah saw the look. “I wanted to be anonymous in town. Didn’t know if anyone in Mad Bull’s Bend would know me by sight, so I kept my face covered.” He ran a hand over his full beard. It seemed reddish in the dashboard lights. “Kinda eager for a shave now that you know. Didn’t want to take the time, though.”
“I appreciate it.”
“You love her, huh?” Jeremiah asked.
Ethan actually gasped. It was an odd reaction. He didn’t remember ever gasping before.
“I picked up on it the first time you two came into Manny’s together. Maria and Harry were with you—sorry, Harrison—and Willow.”
“What, exactly, would you say you picked up on?”
He shrugged and said, “I don’t know. You just seemed like a couple, you know? I was surprised when I found out you weren’t.”
He grunted and kept driving.
“She’s a rare beauty, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“I don’t mind you sayin’ so. I agree with you.”
Jeremiah nodded. “It’s more than a pretty face, though, it’s…a light. Comes from inside her, you know what I mean?”
“I do. She gets mad when I say it, though.”
“Got a temper on her,” he agreed, grinning from behind his beard. Then, his smile dying, “I sure hope she’s okay.” He looked down at Ethan’s phone, face-up in the console.
Ethan was painfully aware of its uninterrupted black screen. “We’re almost there. Ten more miles.”
Chapter Seventeen
Lily held her breath as she raced up the stairs. She was holding Drew’s hand and had a death grip on Orrin’s wrist to pull him behind her. Without lights it was dark as pitch, and smoke was a thin fog hanging in the air. She needed to take a breath. The window was to the right, and she realized they’d have never found it on their own. Lily took Drew’s hand and guided it to Orrin’s. When they latched onto each other, she found the window, opened it easily, reached behind her and pulled them to it. Orrin put one leg over the sill and helped Drew climb out, then he reached back for Lily, but she saw him turning, put her hands on his ass, and shoved him the rest of the way out onto the roof.
Her eyes were burning. She stuck her head out the window, as far to one side as she could, to take a breath. Then she ducked back in, and ran to the top of the stairs, and shouted, “Send more up!”
The open window was creating a draft, drawing the smoke right up the stairs and out the opening, but there was no help for it. If she closed it, the rooms below would fill.
Rosa and her daughters waited below. Lily thought of Manny and his recent heart attack, and knew she should’ve grabbed him first, but she guided Rosa and the girls to the window and got another breath as they climbed out. Orrin & Drew remained on the roof to help, so Lily went back to the stairs and down them into the deafening roar and impossible heat. There were vaguely human shapes in the smoke, all crouching low on the dance floor. Flames were roaring in the original part of the cantina, and heading this way fast, and the main entrance was a curtain of fire. No way out but up.
The biggest shape came her way, those broad shoulders so like Ethan’s that for a second she thought…
