Beg Me Read Online Free PDF Page A

dude fired. At Lee. That much was clear.
    Breathing hard now.
    This. Is bad.
    We ducked down an alley, and the creeps in the cart behind us overshot. I had no idea where I was, of course, but Lee must have known. In a moment, I saw we were trying to reach our own private
tuk-tuk
that had brought us down to the restaurant, and at thirty yards Lee shouted something to his driver in panicked Thai. The poor fellow at the wheel looked at us completely bewildered and started the engine.
    The guys after us were catching up, and I felt helpless, like a tiny figure in my brother’s Hot Wheels cars from childhood, zinging along the narrow streets, hitting a main road and passing a palace, passing great mural portraits of Thai royal family members, and where were the cops? When I looked back, another shot slammed into the metal bar that held up the awning.
    “Okay,” I whispered. “We won’t do that again.”
    Car chases were fine for movies, but I was riding on what amounted to a rickshaw on a lawn mower with a thyroid condition.
    Lee had told me that most of the
tuk-tuk
drivers came from northern Thailand and they didn’t have to have “The Knowledge” like London cabbies—they didn’t have to have any training at all. But Lee considered having his own personal driver and
tuk-tuk
yet another “precaution for business.” We sloshed up a low hill, parting the rainwater like a motorboat, and came out on another main road.
    Traffic jam. A sea of red taillights in front of us. I thought we were in trouble, until I spotted what looked like two police cruisers parked three cars up ahead—a fender-bender was helping to clog things further.
    “Come on!” I yelled. “Let’s run like hell for them!”
    Lee tapped me frantically. “No, look!”
    He’d barely noticed his driver was already hightailing it—not in the direction of the cops, mind you, but he was off.
    “Look!” Lee was still telling me.
    The guys in the
tuk-tuk
chasing us must have spotted the cruisers as well. But now they were boxed in as cars filled in the alley behind them and alongside. My guess was they had stolen their vehicle anyway, and now they were abandoning it. The flashing cherry lights on the cruisers were scaring them off. They ran.
    “Go tell the cops,” I told Lee.
    “Teresa! Where are you going?”
    I paused all of two seconds to explain. “After them. They’ll disappear.”
    “Are you crazy, Teresa? First they’re chasing us, now you’re chasing them? They have
guns
!”
    “Yeah, but they’re looking forward.”
    He was right. This was mad. If they heard me behind them, all they had to do was stop, turn, and fire. I kinda stood out here. Let’s see, black woman on a street in Bangkok, and we only saw her a moment ago with our target—
    I have this problem with planning ahead.
    On the bright side, it had stopped raining.
    “Don’t follow me!” I whined, because Lee wasn’t moving to the police cruisers but loping twenty feet behind me.
    Shit.
    I ran to catch up to our would-be assassins. I thought I had seen them splitting up, but I couldn’t be sure. Not being a complete fool, I focused on the Thai guy, since he’d been the driver, not the shooter. He was already slowing down from a jog to a natural walk, not wanting to draw attention. He didn’t seem aware of me at all. But where was his partner?
    Into another side street with signs I couldn’t understand, more Thai massage parlors, a closed amulet shop, a launderette—and now my quarry had disappeared.
    As I rounded the corner, still waving at Jeff not to follow me but to get to safety, the big fat shin of this meaty leg flew up and
walloped
me right in the shoulder.
    Ow. Huge ow. I staggered to my knees, and I actually had tears of pain in my eyes, because that bloody well hurt. And another shin was flying toward my head.
    If I hadn’t ducked, I’m sure a blood vessel would have burst inside my brain from the impact, and I’d be dead. I
hate
guys who know Muay Thai.