“Did you disarm it?”

He shook his head.

“Then what are we going to do?” Grace asked. “Call the police?”

“Since Hector seems to have the federal cops sewed up, it probably was the local police bomb squad that planted the damn thing. Or maybe the state.” Faroe shrugged. “Either way, Hector is red graffiti sprayed on every wall in three blocks.”

“But you said Lane would be safer if Hector lived.”

“Yeah, he would. Dammit.”

Faroe pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and hit speed dial. The call was answered on the second ring in New York.

“It’s Faroe,” he said. “I need two things fast. First, the phone number at All Saints. It’s a private church school on the toll road south of Tijuana and north of Ensenada, both in Baja California, Mexico. There should be a listing in the Ensenada directory or at a web site.”

Grace handed him the notepad and pen he’d left on the bed.

He gave her the surprised look of a man used to working alone, smiled a silent thanks, and started writing.

“Got it,” he said after a moment. “Now work your magic on the Telmex cellular supplier for Ensenada. Try like hell on fire to find out who bought a cell phone, probably in the last day or two, that was assigned the following number.”

Faroe read back the number that had been written on the phone beneath the flagstone.

Even Grace heard the squawk from the other end of the line.

“I know, I know,” Faroe said impatiently. “It’s a lot to ask, but a boy’s life depends on it. Spend what you have to, but get the info. Yes, it’s on my tab. And call me back the instant you get lucky.”

Faroe cut off the call and punched in the number of Lane’s school.

Grace listened while he talked with Father Rafael Magon, coaxing and threatening by turn. Abruptly Faroe cut off the call, opened a cold beer, and sat on the balcony staring down at the restaurant with the single-minded focus of a predator watching prey.

Grace wanted to ask questions, a lot of them, but knew she wouldn’t get any answers. Not when Faroe was like this, consumed by whatever he was planning.

I paid for the best, so I should just shut up and let him work.

And I won’t think about how good it felt to be held by him again, if only for a few seconds.

The phone on the bedside table rang. Instantly Faroe was on his feet and standing next to the bed.

“It will be for me, but go ahead and answer,” he said.

Grace picked up the receiver on the third ring. A male voice demanded to speak with Faroe. She held out the phone. He took it but put his hand over the receiver.

“Hector?” he asked Grace.

She shook her head. “Some lackey.”

Faroe took his hand off the receiver and spoke curtly. “Bueno.”

The conversation went back and forth in fluent, colloquial Spanish. Faroe finally cut it off with a string of epithets and blunt threats.

Despite herself, Grace was impressed. She hadn’t heard language that specific and colorful in a long, long time. Intimidating, too.

There was a pause in the conversation.

Grace looked at Faroe.

He shrugged and waited. Then he started speaking English, a power move that only a diplomat or a judge could appreciate.

“No, Hector, you don’t know who I am,” Faroe said. “But you know a very good friend of mine, Judge Silva.”

At the other end of the call, Hector looked around the classy condo, just one of the several places he’d “borrowed” for his stay in Ensenada. Men and weapons were everywhere. One of his younger nephews worked over a rock of cocaine, shaving it down. Cigarette smoke was thick in the air. Dirty dishes were stacked in the kitchen. The curtains were drawn so tight that not even a slit of daylight made it in.

Except for this odd call, everything was perfectly normal.

“Si, I know her,” Hector said. “So?”

“Her business is my business.”

“Is she with you?” Hector asked, suddenly wary.

“Yes, she’s here, and no, she doesn’t have anything to say to you except that you should listen to me. We’re going to save your life.”

Hector drew hard on the burning cigarette his nephew handed him. “I listen.”

In the hotel, Faroe glanced at Grace, mouthed the words cell phone, and pointed to his pocket.

She hesitated only a moment before she put her hand into the deep pocket of his slacks. The first thing she found was hard, but it wasn’t a phone. She looked up at him, startled. His smile told her he’d been looking forward to this moment.

Obviously he could focus on more than one thing at a time.

So could she.

She removed the phone very slowly, dropping and retrieving it more than once, checking out the pocket very thoroughly.

Faroe’s breath came in and his eyelids lowered to half-mast. “You heard me, Hector. The judge and I can save your life.”

Grace handed him the phone with a feline smile. She might not be able to scale walls and play with bombs, but she knew how to bring Joe Faroe to attention.

He punched in a number on his cell phone but didn’t hit send.

“I am safe,” Hector said, unimpressed. “I need nothing from you.”

Faroe looked out over the balcony railing to the front of the restaurant. The building was dark. The grounds and the gardens were deserted.

“You’re going to a wedding party tonight at the Encantamar in Ensenada,” Faroe said. “Dinner at the Cancion.”

Hector straightened. “Who tell you this?”

“Listen very carefully.” Faroe held the receiver of the room phone toward the balcony door, then punched the send button on his cell phone.

Grace’s eyes widened. She would have run to the balcony, but Faroe dropped his cell phone and blocked her with his body, holding her close and hard, staying between her and the coming blast.

“One one-thousand, two one-thousand,” Faroe counted aloud. “Three-”

A hard white light burst from the restaurant garden, brighter than the sun. An instant later the air was ripped by a sharp, flat explosion. The concussion slapped off the walls of the hotel. Flocks of terrified pigeons exploded from the rooftops of adjacent buildings.

For a few seconds the world went silent, listening. Waiting.

The explosion echoed and re-echoed before it turned to shadow noise in Grace’s ears. Stunned, she watched a cloud of dust rise from the courtyard. In that instant she knew what war was like. She swallowed hard against fear and helplessness.

“Did you hear that?” Faroe asked Hector evenly.

“?Madre de Dios!”

“The mine was buried beneath the flagstone entrance to the Cancion. If you don’t believe me, send over some men to check it out.”

In the expensive condo, Hector was silent for a few seconds. He watched every man in the room with new eyes, wondering if one of them could be the traitor. With a curt command, he sent one man to check out the restaurant. Before the man left the room, his bodyguards’ cell phones started ringing. Thirty seconds later, he knew that the man on the telephone was telling the truth.

Whether that made the man friend or enemy didn’t matter. What mattered was that he’d had the ability to kill Hector and hadn’t.

Hector took a deep hit on his doctored cigarette. “What do you want from me?”

“Meet me tonight, in person. Name the place, name the time. If I get lucky, I’ll have the names of the men who laid the trap. If not, we still have a lot to talk about.”

In the hotel, Grace forced herself to breathe deeply, then do it again, and again, until her ears stopped ringing. She went to the window and stared down.

It looked like a war zone. Stucco had peeled off the front of the restaurant building. Smashed flagstone was scattered around. The wrought-iron gate had been blown off its hinges and lay in a twisted pile twenty feet away. The restaurant’s windows were gone. People were pouring out of the hotel and running to stare at the damage.

She turned to the man who had triggered the bomb.

“Okay, you’ve got a deal.” Faroe hung up and looked at Grace. “Ready?”

“You-I saw-” She tried again. “You just casually triggered that bomb!”

“It was calculated, not casual. We now have an inside track with Hector. He doesn’t know if I’m a friend, an enemy, or the Easter Bunny. But he’s damn sure I could have killed him and didn’t. Given that, he’s likely to be real titty-fingered about pissing me off, which means that Lane is safer now than he has been since Hector locked down the school. Let’s go.”

Grace fastened on the one thing that mattered: Lane was better off than he had been. That was worth a few windows and a wrought-iron gate any day.

Listen to yourself, Judge. Blowing up things is a felony.

So is kidnapping. If it benefits Lane, I’ll help Faroe commit as many Class A felonies as it takes.

If the law can’t protect my son, screw it.

She fell in step beside Faroe as they headed out of the room. She didn’t ask where they were going.

28

TIJUANA

EARLY SUNDAY EVENING


GRACE SLEPT FROM ENSENADA to Tijuana. The sound of traffic became part of her, transformed into a relentless, primitive beat. Maybe it was exhaustion that let down her barriers, maybe it was simply that she fell asleep breathing the same air as Joe Faroe, but she slept deeply, dreaming of him. The images and sensations were frank with sexual need. Hot. Heady. Hungry. She woke up with flushed cheeks and a feeling of disorientation.

Faroe was driving in four-abreast traffic on a three-lane street. Newspaper vendors, flower hawkers, and lottery shills danced in and out of the stop-and-go traffic. Astride polished Harleys, pairs of big-bellied cops tried to maintain order. Cars parted around them like water around river boulders.

Many laws were ignored, yet beneath the appearance of chaos there obviously was an informal system understood by the drivers. The result wasn’t orderly or neat, but it worked well enough to keep traffic moving.

Off to the north Grace saw the blazing lights of San Diego, a few miles and half a world away. She longed for a bath, longed to strip off the years and start all over again in a new, raw world, where past lies wouldn’t exist.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Ah, she lives, she breathes. How do I know this? She asks questions.”

She smiled, found herself watching his mouth, and flushed, remembering her dream.

“We had such a good time at the Encantamar that I thought we’d try a new hotel,” Faroe said dryly. “We’re going to the Hotel del Fiesta Palace. It’s out by the world’s most famous dog track.”

“Are we meeting Hector at the hotel or the track?”

“The track, in about three hours. The hotel offers a good view. I’ve worked the track before, so I’ve got the layout memorized. But the hotel room will give me a chance to make a long-distance recon before I meet with that crazy bastard.”

“We,” she said. “I’m going with you.”

“I thought you didn’t want to be in the same room with him.”

“I don’t. So what? I didn’t want any of this, but here it is anyway.”

They drove on, fighting into the Zona Rio traffic. As they negotiated the roundabout at the foot of the statue of Abraham Lincoln, Grace spotted the Plaza Rio.

“Hector is a clotheshorse,” she said. “Ironed jeans, pristine white shirt, ostrich-skin boots, and a hunk of neck jewelry that would choke a horse.”

“So?”

“If this is all about macho and command presence, we lose. We look like dog crap. Is there time to shop?”

Faroe looked at himself in the mirror. Dog crap looked back. “Good point. We can afford half an hour.”

He drove to valet parking and slipped the attendant half of a twenty-dollar bill.

“Half an hour,” Faroe said to Grace as they got out.

“Do we synchronize our watches?” she asked sardonically.

“Better move, amada. You’re wasting seconds.”

She left him behind before they reached the entrance. He started to follow her, then remembered how he looked and went shopping instead. He barely made it back to the valet stand in time. She was already there, three shopping bags on her shoulder, waiting for him. He handed the valet the other half of the twenty and showed another five.

The Mercedes appeared with impressive speed. Not a scratch, a nick, or a dent anywhere.