Elizabeth Lowell - Innocent as Sin

“Was that a silencer?” Kayla asked, hurrying after Rand.

“Sure was. Skinny is quite the dude. He came ready to party. Duct tape, handcuffs, a black cloth people sack.”

“He wanted to kidnap you,” Hamm said matter-of-factly. “Sack you up and take off.”

“How can you be sure?” Kayla asked, dazed.

“If he’d wanted to kill you,” Rand said, touching the new gun at his back, “you’d be dead. A professional gun trumps an amateur knife every time.”

She stared at him as he held the gate open for her, then looked away and slowly shook her head. “This is so not happening. Not to me. I backpacked through guerrilla territories and dope smugglers and pythons and never once was in real danger. Now I’m a banker and I’m-” Her voice broke and she shook her head again.

Rand tossed the bag to Hamm. “Give this to the tech guys. They won’t find any prints because he was wearing gloves, but we might as well do it by the numbers.”

“Got it.”

“Joe,” Rand said to his collar, “I’m either staying with her or bringing her in. Which is it?”

“Bloody hell. Bring her in. If she goes sideways on us-”

“Yeah, yeah, my ass is potato salad. Just remember who sweet-talked me into coming back.”

“If I find the bastard, I’ll kill him.”

Rand laughed, surprising himself. “Yesterday I would have helped you.”

“But not today?”

Rand found himself looking at Kayla. “Not today.” The same fingers that had handled the deadly gun tipped her chin gently up toward him. “I can’t explain here. No time and no place to hide. Let me take you to a place where there’s time and safety.”

She just stared at him.

“I promise I won’t lie to you, ever,” Rand said. “Ask me anything you want. If I can’t answer, I’ll tell you why. In return, you’ll be honest with me. Deal?”

She was silent, then, “You are an artist, right? You didn’t just make that part up?”

He smiled slightly. “You saw me paint. You have one of my paintings.”

“I don’t trust what I’ve seen.” Her voice was weary and wary. Then she looked at him again, trying to read his eyes. “Who are you working for?”

“St. Kilda Consulting.”

“Shit Marie,” Hamm said, shaking his head. “When you take a burn, you take a big one. Faroe’s going to go right through the earphones and give you a Colombian necktie.”

Rand ignored him, pulled the camera out of his backpack, and gave it to Hamm. The memory stick went with it. “Don’t lose this.”

“Ten-four.”

“Anything else?” Rand asked Kayla.

“I have to go back to my ranch for a few things. Will you let me?”

“If I go with you.”

“Son of a bitch! You bring her right to the motel.”

“But it will be dangerous,” Rand said calmly. “Your ranch is the second place they’ll look for you.”

“What’s the first?”

“The apartment you just rented and haven’t had time to really move into.”

Kayla digested the fact that he knew a lot more about her than he should. “I’ll be quick at the ranch. Take a back road.”

“Don’t even-”

“Shut up, Joe,” Rand said. “It’s not that big a risk.”

“The hell-”

Rand talked over Faroe. “It will take Bertone time to reorganize. Besides, you wouldn’t want her little babies to starve, would you?”

“Her what?”

Rand didn’t answer.

Castillo del Cielo

Saturday

7:25 P.M. MST

Not many people could make Gabriel Navarro uneasy, but Andre Bertone did. It wasn’t just Bertone’s burly body, his height, his wealth, that made Gabriel wary. It was a killer’s knowledge that he was in the presence of a better killer.

And Gabriel had pissed that better killer off.

Elena’s laughter wasn’t helping. “Oh, my. Tell me again how a little mouse of a banker defeated one of the best-”

“Enough.” Bertone cut across his wife’s amusement. “Who came to Kayla’s aid?”

Gabriel shrugged and stubbed out his cigarette in a crystal ashtray. Then he crossed his legs and looked at Bertone. “Tall dude. Moved good. Like a fighter, you know?”

Elena snickered and said mockingly, “But of course. We have so many warriors in Pleasure Valley.”

“What did he look like?” Bertone asked.

“I told you. Tall.”

“Mexican, white, black, mestizo?” Bertone asked impatiently. “Young, old?”

“Like I said. The dude blew out my eyes with his flashlight. Didn’t see shit ’cept for a big knife. Moved like he could use it. You said no killing, so I booked.”

Bertone said something in Russian and lit his cigar.

Elena sighed and opened the French doors to air out the smoke. With every step her sandals flashed wealth and impatience.

Gabriel watched her without seeming to. If she’d been anyone else’s woman, he would have tried to put his hands on her.

But she was Bertone’s.

“You’re sure he called out Kayla’s name?” Bertone asked.

“Yes.”

“Find her,” Bertone said.

Gabriel stood up. “Catch or kill?”

Bertone’s eyes narrowed. The intelligence and instincts that had gotten him from the frozen gutters of Siberia to Arizona’s Pleasure Valley were twitching. Right now, Kayla knew more about who had saved her than he did.

Knowledge was a weapon.

“Catch,” Bertone said curtly.

He could always kill her later.

Beyond Phoenix

Saturday

8:04 P.M. MST

Slow down,” Kayla said to Rand.

He looked sideways at her. After she’d gotten in the car and given him directions to Dry Valley, she hadn’t said a word.

“I thought you were asleep,” he said.

“Just thinking.” Trying to get used to the impossible. Failing. Trying again. And again. “There’s a deep dip up ahead, a desert wash that runs wall-to-wall in the monsoons. If you don’t slow down, you’ll-”

The suspension on the SUV bottomed out as Rand crested a little rise and dropped into the arroyo she was describing.

Kayla grabbed the overhead handrail and grunted at the impact, then again when the vehicle crested the rise on the far side. She felt weightless in the second before the body of the car slammed down again.

“About that dip,” Kayla said through her teeth. “There are others. If you don’t listen to me, what’s the point of having me along?”

Rand lifted his foot, dropped back to a more reasonable speed, and smiled slightly. “Still channeling your inner bitch?”

“Listen, macho man. I don’t do any better with the ‘You Tarzan, me Jane’ bullshit than I do with the toe-licking lapdog. And I figured out real quick in the garden that the lapdog was an act.”

“What about Tarzan?”

“I’ll get back to you on that.”

“When?” Rand asked.

“When I’m damn good and ready.”

He gave her another sideways glance. She was stiff, clutching the handrail with one hand and bracing herself on the console with the other.

“Still scared?” he asked gently.

Her mouth flattened as she stared at the night racing by on either side of the headlights. “I don’t like handcuffs. They freaked me out more than the silencer on the gun did.”

“Rather be shot than bound, huh? Me too.”

She blew a little breath out of her nose. “Listen, Tarzan. A woman living alone in this world is considered fair game. Smart women know it. Dumb women end up handcuffed one way or another.”

“My name is Rand,” he said patiently. “You can call me McCree if Rand is too friendly for you. Unless you want to be called Jane?”

She almost smiled. “Okay, McCree.”

“As for being fair game, everybody in the world is fair game for a guy like Bertone.”

“So you do know him,” she said.

Gunfire stitching through the helo.

Reed bleeding, sighing.

Dying.

“We’d never met face-to-face until tonight, but yeah, I know a lot about him.”

“And me.”

“And you,” Rand agreed. “You can read my dossier if you like.”

She blinked. “Will it tell me why you wanted to slit Bertone’s throat?”

“I’d better buff my acting skills. I didn’t think I gave myself away.”

“Only once, the last time he turned his back on you.”

Silence filled the car.

Kayla waited.

“Yes, I know Bertone well enough to want him dead,” Rand said. “But that makes me one of about a million potential assassins.”

“Why? Because he’s rich?”

“Because he’s evil.”

She drew in a deep breath. “Interesting choice of words.”

“It’s the twenty-first century,” Rand said calmly, steering the SUV through another steep dip. “People are free to talk about evil rather than bad childhoods, which most people have without turning into murderers. The Siberian started poor, but so do billions of people. They don’t end up like him.”

“Siberian? Bertone? He’s Russian?”

Rand nodded.

“That explains it,” she said.

“Explains what? No country has a corner on evil. I’ll match some American-grown thugs against Bertone any minute of any hour.”

“It explains his accent. His English is grammatically perfect, almost without accent, but there is a heaviness to it that you only get in Slavic tongues.”

“The dossier didn’t mention you were a linguist,” Rand said.

“I traveled a lot, right after college, after my parents died.”

“Did you like it?” he asked, because that part of her dossier had been blank except for passport entries, the coming and going of a world traveler.

“Like it? No. I loved it. I hit every continent except Antarctica. I was looking for a job that would let me save the world. Turns out the world didn’t want to be saved.”

Rand’s smile was a knife-edge of white. “True fact.”

“Then gringos became everybody’s favorite target,” she said without bitterness, “so I hung up my backpack and got a job close to home.”

“Smart. Your experience should make it easier.”

“Make what easier?” she asked.

“I’d hate to try and explain this transnational clusterfuck to someone who’d never been farther than Kansas.”

Rand turned right at the country intersection.

“Are the hummingbirds actually in my dossier?” Kayla asked after a moment. “My babies, as you called them.”

He laughed. “St. Kilda is nothing if not thorough. Those kinds of details are how you discover where someone is likely to surface next. Helps to reaquire the target. You love those flying beggars, which means you’ll show up to feed them, at least for the rest of the month you occupy the ranch.”

“Any other time of the year, I’d let those little flying pigs pollinate cactus, but right now it’s migration time. They count on me to get to Montana. One of my neighbors loves the birds, too. She’s agreed to start feeding them next week. Until then, it’s on my karma.”

Rand couldn’t help liking Kayla better for caring about something that brought her no obvious return. “What species do you have?”

“Oh, I’ve got them all right now, broadtails and Anna’s and Costa’s and even some rufous.”

“The rufous aren’t headed for Montana. They summer by the thousands north of Seattle. In a few weeks they’ll be showing up on my doorstep.”

“You feed hummers?” she asked.

“I even paint them. Or try to. They’re as fast as they are fierce.”

Kayla knew it was crazy, but she trusted Rand more because he shared her love of those flying bits of life.

Then he killed the headlights and her throat closed.

Trust was overrated.

Dry Valley

Saturday

8:08 P.M. MST

What are you doing?” Kayla asked tightly.

“Going in stealth mode.”

She gave him a disbelieving look. “We’re miles from the ranch.”

“Light shows a long way in the desert. I’d rather see someone before he sees me.”

She let out a ragged breath. After a few moments, she got the rhythm of driving in the dark. It helped that the night wasn’t absolutely black. Once her eyes adjusted, the starlight was surprisingly bright, throwing ghostly shadows. The dirt road was a pale ribbon unwinding through the darker plants of the Sonoran Desert.