Deadline (Sandra Brown)

lot of it, because everybody in Miami seems to be stoned on something!), and the guy that was supposed to sell us the guns sold them to the Cubans instead. That pissed Carl off, and for the three days since then, he’s been in a terrible mood.
He wanted to go after the Cubans, kill them, and take the guns, but Quirty (I still don’t know his real name) talked him out of it. He said it was crazy to f—with the Cubans, who had just as soon cut your throat as look at you. Carl said if you shot them first, they wouldn’t have a chance at cutting your throat. He was on a rampage.
But Quirty got some good smoke (probably bought off those same Cubans) and that calmed Carl down some. At least me and Quirty were able to talk sense to him about getting revenge.
I didn’t want to get into a war with those Cubans or anybody. I’m always afraid for Jeremy’s safety. Anytime I say that to Carl, he laughs and says nobody would dare lay a hand on his kid. But I don’t think the Cubans would be afraid of Carl, and maybe Carl knows that deep down because he didn’t shoot anybody.
Which could also be why he’s cross. He’s bored, is all. Since that bank job in Louisiana when Jim got shot, we’ve been laying low. On the news they said the robber had died at the scene, killed by police. But Carl doesn’t trust the news people to be telling the truth. He calls them puppets who only repeat what the cops and politicians want got across to the stupid public.
Carl says that if Jim lived even for a little while after he was shot, he could have talked, told them something about us. So we holed up in a trailer park in MS with a guy that Jim didn’t know. That way, even if he had ratted us out, we were still safe from capture.
I was glad not to be on the move, because Jeremy and I both got sick with runny noses. His cough was worse than mine. What my grandma used to call croupy. Taking him to a doctor was out of the question. I didn’t even ask Carl if we could, knowing what he’d say.
The man who put us up in his mobile home, Randy, thinks the world of Carl. Carl is his hero. He was nice to us even though Jeremy’s coughing must’ve kept him up all night like it did Carl and me. It might have been that, instead of kindness, that caused Randy to buy a bottle of cough syrup for Jeremy without me even asking.
After a few days, Jeremy got better. He stopped being so puny and whiny and started eating. Which was good because Carl had decided that it was time to move on. We drove into FL and kept going until we got here. Carl’s sixth sense told him the heat was off and it was safe for us to stay put for a while.
Miami is okay, I guess, but I don’t like this house. The mice seem to be making fun of me for even bothering to set traps. I hear them snapping shut all night long. I hate that sound! Come morning I’ll have to empty the traps of those limp little bodies. Much as I hate their scurrying around in the dark, I hate to see them dead. But no matter how many I catch, there’s ten more to take their place. The roaches are about as big as the mice.
I don’t like Quirty’s girlfriend, either. She’s sneaky and sly. She reminds me of a cat we had when I was little. He’d had one of his eyes scratched out, which scared me already. But he’d come up on me before I knew it, and that gave me the willies. I was glad the day he crawled under the house and died.
Anyhow, this gal of Quirty’s prances around and shows off, especially in front of Carl. The worst thing happened yesterday when Jeremy tipped over a bottle of red nail polish while she was painting her toenails. Barely a drop spilled on the floor and I got it right up. But she pinched Jeremy’s arm, twisting the skin so it hurt him really bad. I lit into her, and before it was over, the men had to break us apart. I think I would have killed her if Carl hadn’t stopped me.
The pinch left a dark bruise on Jeremy’s arm, and that riled Carl, too. His mood went from bad to worse, so that today, when he saw me with the camera, he blew his stack.
It was an old Polaroid I found in a cabinet when I was setting a mousetrap. Quirty said I could use it to take some pictures of Jeremy. Carl’s never allowed any pictures of us, but I wanted at least one baby picture of Jeremy.
I think it was the smell that gave me away. The chemicals inside the camera make the pictures stink when you peel them off and coat them with that stuff. Carl came storming in and caught me red-handed. He