Free Whiplash River by Lou Berney

Duke cutoffs was going to shoot at Evelyn and then beat her in a footrace. But Peppermint Patty veered suddenly. She ran straight toward the burning restaurant.
    Evelyn had to pull up. The heat was so intense near the fire that it felt like her contacts were fusing to her eyes.
    Peppermint Patty ran right along the wall of the restaurant, a crazy risk. A flaming beam rolled off the roof and just missed her. She reached the corner of the veranda and cut around it. Evelyn sprinted the long way around. When she got to the road that ran behind the restaurant, Peppermint Patty had disappeared.
    Evelyn hurried back to Bouchon and checked his pulse. Steady, and his eyes were open. He hadn’t been shot. He looked like he was going to be okay. “Never a dull moment at your place,” she said, “huh?” And then she felt stupid, how cheesy that sounded.
    He said something she couldn’t hear.
    â€œWhat?” He said it again and still she couldn’t tell what it was.
    Evelyn jogged back up the beach to find her purse, her cell phone. For a split second she thought about making another run for it, but even she—expert rationalizer that she considered herself—couldn’t justify fleeing the scene of a gunfight she had actually participated in. She found Cory’s number in her phone, hit the call button, and prayed for the sake of her career that he got there before the cops did.

Chapter 9
    T erry heard the explosion off in the distance and just about jumped out of his shorts. Shitfire! He wondered how much of the dynamite Meg had used. They’d happened by a demolition site a week ago, first day they got to Belize, nobody around and the dynamite just sitting there. Terry didn’t know what Meg wanted dynamite for, since they had the guns her friend Jorge in Guatemala City had given them. But Meg said the more the merrier when you aimed to kill a body, so they helped themselves to some dynamite.
    It had come in handy after all, now they had two bodies to kill. Meg had said, I told you so, didn’t I, and Terry admitted she had.
    He was sitting alone in the golf cart, parked in the jungle. Meg rolled her eyes when he called it that, the jungle. Well, it was jungle to him. The middle of the island up here was one big mess of twisted-up trees and big vines hanging down and the leaves so heavy in places the sun could barely push through. And plenty of snakes, you could be sure of that.
    All that made Terry think of Tarzan, and Tarzan made him think of Meg, standing there naked in front of him this morning, her hair slicked back from the shower and her body shining wet. An interesting fact about Meg’s freckles was they were just mostly on her face, hardly anywhere else.
    â€œI love you too damn much,” she’d said, so quiet he could barely hear it. “It ain’t good for me.”
    â€œI’ll be good for you,” he’d said. “C’mon over here.”
    She was back to her old self then. Pushing him flat on the bed and calling him a goddamn moron and saying it was a good thing he had such a big goddamn cock. Terry got embarrassed when she talked like that. The way he saw it, you couldn’t get too proud about what you just came by lucky, never putting any work of your own into it.
    There was another explosion, and some pop-pop-popp ing. Terry figured that must be gunshots. A second later he remembered that the first explosion was supposed to be his signal. Oh, hell, he thought. He had a good idea what Meg would say about it, he didn’t get down there to pick her up on time. Terry cranked that golf cart, out of the jungle and down the sand road. You never saw a golf cart cranking along like that, he thought. Old Ironhead in his number three car up in heaven just looked down in awe.
    Meg was waiting by the side of the road. “What’d I tell you to do, Terry?” she said when she climbed in. “The one thing?” They drove about a mile