Elizabeth Lowell - Innocent as Sin

“He’s smart. There are probably a dozen feds out in the parking lot, with a dozen surveillance vehicles ready to roll out on our tail. Some will follow Faroe. Some won’t. But we’ve got the fastest ATV on the track.”

Or he hoped they did. Faroe was betting the feds didn’t have anything better than an electric golf cart out on the course.

“Doesn’t this thing have a lap belt?” she asked.

“Use that,” Rand said, pointing to a handle firmly bolted to the dashboard in front of the passenger.

“What is it?”

“I’ve heard it called a lot of things.” He grinned and began rolling forward. “My favorites are ‘Jesus Bar’ and ‘Oh Shit Bar.’”

“Why?”

Rand twisted the throttle. The ATV leaped forward, slamming Kayla back into the seat.

“What are you-Oh shit!” Kayla said, grabbing for the bar.

“There you go.”

Grinning, Rand cut the wheel hard to the right, shot through a gap in the oleander hedge, and burst into the sunlight on the tenth fairway of the resort’s golf course.

The ATV four-wheeler moved so fast that she had to pull the wide brim of the sun hat around her face to keep from strangling on the chin strap. She was completely hidden when a mid-thirties white man dressed in resort clothes stepped out of a stand of bamboo near a water hazard. He carried a camera that was dwarfed by a long telephoto lens. Swearing, the cameraman started banging off pictures as the ATV sped past.

Rand gave him the back of his head and the universal sign of friendship.

“Are you trying to piss them off?” Kayla asked.

“Hey, if the feds are going to stand in the sun and shoot surveillance photos, they should be rewarded. Federal cops are way too used to having things go their way.”

“Do all St. Kildans have a bad attitude about authority?” Kayla asked.

“Most of us have had enough authority in our lives to know its limitations. Federal cops still have to learn.”

“And you live to teach them,” she muttered.

“It’s a dirty job-” he began.

“And you love doing it,” she interrupted.

“Oh, yeah.”

Clenching her teeth, she hung on to the dashboard bar while Rand swerved around a sand trap and shot up over a dune at the far side of the fairway. When she risked a peek over her shoulder through the folds of her hat, she saw that a second man in casual clothes had joined the first fed. He, too, had a fancy camera. He was talking on a cell phone or a radio.

“They aren’t chasing us,” she said.

“Surveillance teams don’t pursue. They radio ahead. Now we pray they don’t have anyone positioned on the far side of the golf course.”

Rand cut across another fairway before he hit open rolling desert at the eastern edge of Scottsdale. A mile ahead of them lay the concrete piers of the 101 Loop Freeway and a scattering of multistory buildings in new industrial and office parks.

Kayla braced herself and kept a stranglehold on the bar. The ATV was well suited for cross-country desert travel, but it wasn’t always comfortable. The wheels raised a thin cloud of grit as Rand slewed around creosote bushes and dodged patches of prickly pear.

“There it is,” Rand said, barely missing a rock.

Kayla squinted through her glasses as he skidded onto a narrow dirt track that headed toward civilization again. He twisted the throttle on the ATV. Suddenly they were rushing along at more than thirty miles per hour on a road just bumpy enough to make the ride interesting.

Kayla felt like laughing out loud. When she’d sold the ranch, she hadn’t expected to be on an ATV anytime soon. Even though she was used to being the driver, she trusted the man beside her. He had the lanky yet powerful build of a bronc rider. The Stetson added to the aura.

Too bad the ranch is gone. Rand would have looked right at home on it.

Without thinking, she touched the back of Rand’s hand on the steering wheel. His fingers lifted, caught hers, squeezed, and released. He slowed the ATV as the road crested a bank and dropped down into a dry wash. He braked, then turned downstream toward an office park that was under construction. The ATV’s two-stroke engine screamed with the pleasure of being let off the leash on a brilliant desert morning.

Minutes later they flashed up over another bank and through the open gate of a construction yard. A white Dodge SUV with heavily tinted windows was parked inside the yard. Rand braked to a skidding stop next to the vehicle.

“Backseat,” he ordered Kayla.

He snatched the backpack and his laptop computer off the cargo shelf and tossed them into the back of the SUV. Kayla slid into the right rear seat and made a startled sound.

The driver was Jimmy Hamm.

He looked past her, searching for any dust from followers. “You’re clean,” he said to Rand. Then, “Shit, what happened to the fur?”

“Freddie.”

Hamm glanced at Kayla in the rearview mirror and smiled. “Hey, darlin’. Love that take-no-prisoners grin.”

With that he put the idling vehicle in gear and accelerated out of the construction yard onto the street.

Kayla dipped her chin, looking over the rims of her sunglasses at the man who had flirted madly with her for the past several months.

“Liar,” she said.

He took his eyes off the road for a second and glanced in the mirror at her, surprised. “What? What did I do?”

“You let me think you had the hots for me,” Kayla said. “But you were just trying to get inside Andre Bertone’s life and his bank accounts.”

“Babe, you thought I had the hots for you because it was the truth.” He gave her a friendly leer. “That was the easiest cover I ever put on.”

Rand turned back from watching their rear and said to Hamm, “Remember what Faroe said about the interesting ones.” Rand smiled from the teeth out.

“Well, hell,” Hamm muttered. “Kayla, can you ID the dude that made the hard pass at you last night?”

Startled, she looked at Rand.

“In Bertone’s garden,” Rand said, and this time his smile was real.

She hoped her floppy hat covered her blush.

“Yes,” she said to Hamm. “Not that I want to see that cockroach again, but I’d recognize him.”

“I did a little nosing around with my colleagues on the security detail,” Hamm said. “Then I checked the employee database and came up with a possible name, Gabriel Navarro. He’s supposed to be some kind of majordomo of the estate grounds, but nobody remembers seeing him around any of the gardening crews.”

“I recognize the name from the employee payroll,” Kayla said, “but if Mr. Navarro is a gardener, even the chief cheese, he’s really well paid.”

“How much?” Rand asked.

“Ten thousand a month.”

“I’m betting he plants things in six-foot holes,” Rand said.

Images of the handcuffs and the ugly little pistol spiked through Kayla’s memories. Gooseflesh rippled. She hated being scared, but she was too smart not to be.

Hamm wheeled onto a westbound on-ramp, merging with light Sunday-morning traffic. “St. Kilda hacked into the employee database at the Castle in the Sky, so we know where Gabriel lives. Faroe hired two private types to stake out Gabriel’s house. He’s there, but we need Kayla for an eyeball ID.”

The last thing Kayla wanted to see again was the face of her nightmare. “Sure. Whatever. Let’s get it over with.”

“Change into these first,” Rand said, dropping jeans, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap on Kayla’s lap. Then he looked at the driver. “Handsome, if I catch your eyes in the rearview mirror while she changes, you’ll need a new nickname.”

Hamm kept his attention on the road. Strictly.

Guadalupe, Arizona

Sunday

8:55 A.M. MST

Hamm parked on a dirt side street that had a view across a sandy town square toward two ancient whitewashed churches. If Kayla squinted enough to fuzz out the freeway in the background, she could almost believe she’d been transported five hundred miles south, into the Sonoran Desert of interior Mexico. The bells in the tower of the larger church began ringing, calling the faithful to worship. A knot of dark-skinned, dark-haired young men plodded across the sandy square toward the church.

“That explains something,” Kayla said.

“What?” Rand asked.

“The man in the garden-”

“Gabriel Navarro.”

“-was Latino but not really Mexican. He was too dark, like mahogany-colored lava.”

Rand waited, absently rubbing his shaved cheek. He felt naked. “So?”

“This little town is called Guadalupe,” she said. “It was established more than a century ago by Yaqui Indians from northern Mexico, refugees from the Mexican Civil War. The man in the garden was muy indio, very dark.”

“That means we’re going to have a hell of a time getting closer,” Hamm said.

“Wrong color?” Rand asked.

“Or something,” Hamm said. “The Yaquis are clannish as Gypsies and twice as suspicious. They don’t even trust their fellow Mexicans. That’s why there are two churches side by side, both Catholic, one for Mexicanos and the other for Yaquis.”

“Guess we won’t be walking around,” Rand said.

“Don’t have to. We have those local private investigators hanging in the neighborhood, passing themselves off as repo guys from a car dealer. They can work in close to Gabriel’s house. We’ll stay here and work at a distance.”

“Binoculars?” Kayla asked.

“Telephoto camera,” Hamm said, passing it over the seat. “Tourists like to hang out here on the weekend, watch the funny locals.”

He opened the glove box and dug out a Diamondback baseball cap that matched the one he was wearing. He tossed it to Rand, who ditched the Stetson, grumbled about being a Mariners fan, but put the cap on anyway.

Hamm’s cell phone rang discreetly, the sound of a cardinal chirping. He answered and listened.

“There’s something happening at the house,” Hamm said. “A van. Driver’s a white guy with red hair.” Then, into the phone, “Go ahead, slide in a little closer. Guadalupe is always crawling with repo guys in tow trucks.”

Hamm listened some more. Then he relayed more information. “The van says ‘Arizona Territorial Gun Club.’”

Kayla said something under her breath.

“What,” Rand demanded.

“Steve Foley is a redhead,” she said, “and he’s a member of that club.”

“What kind of place is it?” Rand asked. “Antique weapons and pistols at dawn?”

“More like Rambo’s wet dream,” Hamm said, flipping through his mental files. “High-tech all the way.”

“Steve likes to think of himself as a sports shooter,” Kayla said, “but here in Arizona, that could mean anything from a nervous grandmother to a Wyatt Earp wannabe.”

“You know where the club is?” Rand asked Hamm.

“At the edge of the desert, on tribal land.”

“No feds allowed?” Rand asked.

Hamm shrugged. “Every tribe’s treaty rights are different. I’ve never been invited, so I’ve never been inside the club. Just hearsay from those who have.”

“Steve is always talking about the club’s ‘Tire City’ and their close-quarters course, whatever they are.”

Hamm and Rand exchanged glances.

Tire City.

The term sent a chill through Rand. Modern urban warriors practiced close-quarters combat in open-roofed buildings with walls constructed of discarded auto tires filled with dirt. He had a mental image of the kind of place Kayla was describing, concrete block buildings, gravel canyons, and indoor labyrinths of movable shooting galleries with overhead observation platforms. Foley’s gun club was a fortress in the desert, remote and bristling with firearms.

“What does ‘Tire City’ mean?” Kayla asked.

“It’s slang for simulation bunkers,” Rand said. “Close-quarters courses are run-and-shoot ranges. Usually such places are reserved for advanced training in law enforcement or military counterterrorism units.” He smiled thinly. “Think of it as a kind of live-fire Disneyland for the well-armed adult.”

“That would be Steve,” Kayla said.

“Sweet,” Rand said.

She shrugged. “As far as gun laws are concerned, Arizona is the last wild frontier. We have an open-carry law.”

“Meaning?” Rand asked.

“You can still walk most of our streets with a sidearm, so long as you display it openly. I’ve seen guys in the Costco parking lot with pistols on their hips.”