Flash Fire

by Dana Marton

  According to the operator, the incinerator was fired up every single day. But he denied burning human bodies, casting nervous glances at Clara.

  He had smudges of dirt on his face, whole clumps of it on his clothes, which didn’t stop Walker from clapping him on the back. “We’re just trying to find a friend who’s gone missing.”

  Clara did her best not to look judgmental, even while the giant cast-iron door of the furnace creeped her out, the thought of bodies tossed in there like garbage sending a shiver down her spine despite the heat.

  The man gave a sullen shrug as he watched her. “It’s not any different from cremation. There’s no one to claim the remains anyway.”

  She kept her opinion to herself on that and pulled the photo from her pocket. “Have you seen her by any chance? She would have come in sometime after July first.”

  The old man gave a reluctant but careful look. “I don’t think so.”

  “You have anybody in the back right now?” Walker asked.

  The man shook his head. “Not that I know of.”

  They talked another few minutes, but it was clear the incinerator was another dead end.

  As they were leaving, Walker asked if he could take a couple of old tires from a pile. The operator told him to take all he wanted.

  “What are those for?” Clara asked as Walker heaved three tires into the back of the pickup.

  “They could come in handy,” he replied, evasive as always.

  Seriously. She didn’t know why she even bothered asking him anything. But she did pose another question, “Do you think the furnace operator was telling the truth? He was kind of wishy-washy, wasn’t he? Although, I’m pretty sure he wishes more than he washes,” she added.

  The corners of Walker’s lips twitched. “I don’t see why he would lie. If he had useful information, he would have traded it in the hope that we’d pay him.”

  Clara found herself agreeing with that assessment as she got into the pickup. “Are we heading to Furino next?”

  Walker slid behind the wheel, started up the truck and drove out of the dump. “I have one more thing to take care of in Mercita.”

  He drove down the single-lane road leading back to the city.

  After another mile, Clara could almost breathe again. “Where are we going now?”

  “I need to pick up something from someone who owes me a favor.”

  She didn’t bother rolling her eyes. Here we go. Another delay. He seemed to be allergic to going anywhere in a timely manner.

  One more trip. That’s it.

  She would allow him one last stop, then she was going to Furino if she had to steal the pickup from him. Decision made, she settled comfortably into her seat.

  Walker only drove for maybe twenty minutes before stopping at a construction site. “You stay here.”

  “How long is this going to take?”

  He shrugged.

  She glanced at the key in the ignition.

  He grabbed it, then pocketed it.

  Because he expected her to make a remark, she didn’t. She even bit back the groan-growl working up her throat. Instead, she asked, coolly professional, “Could I use your phone?”

  He raised an eyebrow as he opened the door to get out. “Who are you calling?”

  “Rosita’s cousin. When I met her yesterday morning, I told her I’d give her a follow-up call today.”

  Follow-up was a good practice with witnesses. They never remembered everything at the initial interview, and they might not take the initiative to call if they recalled something else later. Giving them another call yielded new information more often than not. And by asking Melena to recount again what she’d told Clara yesterday, Clara could also see if there were any inconsistencies in the story.

  Walker reached into his back pocket, tossed her the phone, and left her with, “Lock the door. Under no circumstances are you to get out.”

  Because she hadn’t meant to get out in the first place, she clicked the lock, looking after him as he strode toward a trailer behind a couple of front loaders. He walked like a soldier, constantly scanning the area, his hands loose at his sides, ready to go for his weapon at a moment’s notice. He walked with power, and a little swagger. He was so damn masculine, it hurt her eyes.

  He was a ruthless mercenary.

  He was the type who could never give her a straight answer.

  She was pretty sure he’d never toed a line in his life. In fact, he swaggered over lines without slowing.

  That she was physically attracted to him while pretty much hating everything about his personality annoyed her so much she gritted her teeth. And yet, she couldn’t draw her gaze away from him until he disappeared behind the trailer’s door. Only then did she turn to inspect the rest of the work site.

  The construction looked early in the process, mostly moving around dirt. Here and there rocks stood in the path of the equipment, some as tall as ten feet. A couple of men were drilling holes into the rocks. Probably for explosives.

  The workers paid her little attention past a few curious looks. They went about their work in the midafternoon heat.

  She dialed the operator and gave her Rosita’s cousin’s name and address. The call was connected in just a few seconds.

  “Hi, this is Clara Roberts, Rosita’s friend. We talked yesterday. I was wondering if you might have remembered anything else, or heard anything new from anywhere,” she said in her best Spanish.

  “No. I told you everything I remember.” The woman paused. “Sorry.”

  “I’m really worried about her,” Clara said, and wondered why Melena didn’t sound worried.

  “I’m sure she’s fine.”

  “So you have a suspicion about where she might be?”

  Maybe the girl had run off with a cute boy and asked the cousin to keep it secret from the aunt. If that was it, Clara was going to be seriously angry for the time and resources wasted.

  “No,” the woman said.

  Too quickly?

  Again, she was showing little emotion.

  Maybe the cousins weren’t that close. According to the aunt, Rosita hadn’t been back to Furino since the aunt had taken her to the US.

  “If you think of anything, could you please leave me a message at the guesthouse?”

  The woman promised, then ended the call quickly.

  Clara dropped the phone onto her lap and looked outside.

  The aunt was out of her mind with worry, the cousin wasn’t worried in the least, not now, and not the first time Clara had talked with her. Was that significant? The aunt had been raising Rosita for years, so it was natural for her to have a much closer attachment. Maybe that explained the discrepancy in their reactions.

  Clara thought about that some more as she watched the big machines push dirt around. The ancient pickup had no AC. Dust swirled in the air outside, but she kept the windows rolled down as she went through the entire case again from beginning to end, every little detail that she knew, no matter how insignificant.

  Her brain was nearly fried by the time Walker returned an hour later. The sweat stains on his shirt only made him look manlier and sexier, while she was pretty sure hers made her look disgusting.

  She hoped she stank. He deserved it.

  As he got in, instead of apologizing for putting her at risk for a heat stroke, he handed her what felt like four small bricks of Play-Doh wrapped in a dirty rag. “Hold on to this, and try not to fling it around.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment and sighed in resignation. “C4?”

  “Nothing makes a man feel like a man more than playing with explosives.” His chiseled lips curved into a slow grin. “Well, maybe one other thing.”

  She’d seen a few of his challenging grins, and plenty of his infuriating grins, but this was the first time she saw his smile fully reach his eyes, and the effect was breathtaking. Behind the hardened mercenary, she could suddenly see the boy he’d once been, and her heart turned over inside her chest wit
hout warning.

  Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

  She was sure that not only had he broken countless hearts, but he’d stabbed a few too. She would have to be beyond idiotic to let her heart anywhere near Light Walker.

  She must have had an odd expression on her face, because he said, “Hey, don’t look so scared. C4 is actually pretty stable. You could juggle with it and nothing would happen.”

  He probably did juggle explosives.

  Sweet Jungle Jesus.

  She needed to put the man under the column heading “Men NOT to Fall for under Any Circumstances.” And then she needed to lock the spreadsheet and password-protect it.

  Chapter Eleven

  Walker needed to put off the Furino trip just a little longer.

  They took the C4 back to Brunhilda’s, then he made a few more phone calls, just checking on people, getting a feel for what all the players were doing.

  He wanted to make sure that tensions in the criminal underworld were escalating, that nothing happened that might defuse the pressure he’d spent the last month building.

  Where he could, he also asked about the noseless man, but nobody had information. He was beginning to consider that his original intel might have been faulty. He had a hard time accepting that possibility. He couldn’t reconcile himself to the idea that he might never find Ben’s killer.

  He didn’t leave for Furino with Clara until late in the evening, when he thought it would be fairly safe.

  A police car flew by them on the road as he drove, then another, sirens on full blast.

  Clara looked after them. “What’s going on?”

  “Some trouble in Furino. We’ll see.”

  They drove in silence for all of two minutes before Clara started up her questioning again. “Where did you go this morning?”

  “Here and there.”

  “Who did you meet?”

  He stifled a groan. She was relentless. No matter. A quick trip to Furino and she’d be begging him to take her to the airport at Tuxtla Gutiérrez. He could do that, could make it there then back by midnight the latest, then he would move the next piece forward on the chessboard. He had an important delivery to make.

  “What did you do while I was gone this morning?” he asked, to redirect her attention.

  “Chatted with Brunhilda. She labors under the false impression that you’re a good man.”

  He bit back a grin. “Good can be an objective classification.”

  “Not really,” she immediately objected. “Good is what’s moral, right, legal, and or beneficial to society. As in, the exact opposite of bad.”

  “And people just fit neatly into those categories?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “How convenient for you.”

  She frowned. “I don’t like it when you mock me.”

  He didn’t like it that she was still here. But that would be remedied shortly.

  “What made you leave the military and choose the opposite path?” she asked.

  “Opposite?” He quirked an eyebrow. “You mean because serving one’s country is good and being a mercenary in Chiapas is bad?”

  She nodded.

  “Maybe I was never good to start with.”

  And she said, without stopping to think, “You’re not horribly terrible.”

  He shook his head at her. “You say the nicest things.” He held her gaze for a moment. “You’re not trying to get into my pants, are you?”

  She growled.

  He felt his mouth twitch. And, of course, there was a twitch in his pants.

  She was entertaining. He had to give her that.

  “I think I want that on my headstone,” he told her. “He wasn’t horribly terrible. Has a nice ring to it.”

  Not that he expected a headstone. Most likely, he’d catch a bullet in the back someday, possibly someday soon, and be left to rot in the jungle like he’d left Santiago’s men in that clearing. Karma and all that.

  “There are worse people out there,” she said in an earnest tone. “I think you have some scruples, some lines you wouldn’t cross.”

  “Not that many.”

  “I don’t think you’d kill innocent people. Women or children. I don’t think you’d shoot a dog for barking.”

  He glanced at her. She was looking for his redeemable qualities. It’d been a while since anyone had thought he was redeemable. He certainly didn’t entertain such illusions about himself. She was a damn strange woman.

  Because her words caught him off guard, he made a joke of them. “Ah, you’re warming up to me. You know what comes next.”

  “Bitter disappointment?” she deadpanned.

  A bark of laugh escaped him. “First you warm up. Then you fall head over heels. Next thing we know, you’ll be begging to have my babies.”

  His chest clenched for no real reason as he said the last words. He rubbed the heel of his palm over his breastbone. Probably heartburn.

  “No,” Clara said, completely serious now. “I don’t think we suit each other that way.”

  What in hell was she talking about? Of course, they did. They’d suit in bed just fine. Those long, lean legs wrapped around his waist would be pure poetry. He could make those gunmetal eyes soften. Did she think he couldn’t?

  “We live in different worlds,” she said.

  Okay. She’d been thinking in the abstract, not specifically about sex. Well, she was a woman, with one of those overcomplicated brains. In her case, probably even more overcomplicated than most.

  There was no point in thinking about sex with her anyway, no matter how appealing, since she’d be leaving tonight.

  He decided to turn their conversation in a different direction. “So with this civilian recovery thing… What’s your success rate?”

  She sat up straighter. “One hundred percent.” A frown pulled her brows together. “Not all were live recoveries. I’ve had three body recoveries. But all three had been killed before I was even assigned the case,” she added quickly.

  Her record sounded immensely important to her. She was going to hate having Furino ruin her spotless streak. He almost felt sorry for her. Well, hell, it couldn’t be helped.

  “Your boyfriend doesn’t mind that you’re never home?” He had no idea what made him ask. He stared into the approaching darkness through the windshield. He was not fishing for information. How stupid would that be?

  “If I had a boyfriend, he would be fully supportive of my career,” she said with full confidence.

  Of course, he would be. A big fat lie. Any man who had her would want to keep her naked and under him, and far away from any danger.

  Shit. Walker pressed his lips together. He did not need to think about her naked. Of course, now the image sat there, front, and center in his brain.

  Lanky wasn’t that bad, actually. He had no idea why he hadn’t realized that before. Lithe and tall kind of went pretty well together. Especially when topped off with gunmetal eyes that could go from unforgiving to sparkling with amusement in a blink.

  “Maybe I should visit Rosita’s cousin again,” Clara was saying, her tone pensive, her mind obviously back on the case. “There’s something off there. She isn’t that overwrought. She said, I’m sure she’s fine. She wasn’t all that excited when I offered to help find Rosita in the first place.”

  Walker thought about it. “Some people are more emotional than others.”

  But Clara didn’t look convinced. “Nothing about this case feels right. Something’s off, but I can’t put my finger on it.”

  She cleared her throat. Looked away. “For one, the man Rosita was involved with… He’s not the type for a liaison like this. From what I know of him, I just can’t see it. I’ve seen him with his wife. They’re great together. When he looks at her…”

  “Maybe Rosita seduced him.”

  She winced. “I thought about that, but it feels wrong to think it. Like I’m blaming the victim. He’s the grown-up in the situation, and she’s the teenager.”
>
  “Do you know how long the affair went on?”

  “From what I understand, they were only together once. But she made it into a big story, like a full relationship, to her aunt, so her aunt thinks it was a full-blown affair.”

  “Have you considered that Rosita told the truth to her aunt, and your guy is lying?”

  She watched him silently for several seconds. There were major undercurrents in her eyes, in her body language, but he couldn’t decipher them.

  She said, “I don’t think my guy is lying.”

  He thought over the possibilities. “So, A, he’s a jerk slash predator who seduced a seventeen-year-old. Or, B, she seduced him, maybe for kicks, or for whatever other reason.”

  The whatever other reason stuck in his brain. “Maybe she seduced him so she could blackmail him. It pissed him off, and he made her disappear.”

  “No.”

  Her absolute resistance to the idea was all over her face, in the outraged tone of her voice and stubborn tilt of her chin. She looked stricken at his suggestion. Whoever the guy was, she respected and liked him.

  More than liked him?

  Walker bristled. Then he swallowed his sudden annoyance with the thought and shook off the idea. Clara wouldn’t like a married man. She had very definite ideas of good and bad. She had strict principles. He respected her for that. He’d been like that once. Before Ben’s murder.

  He said, “Maybe Rosita slept with the guy to get him attached to her, then faked her disappearance down here. Maybe a ransom note is on its way. She’s making him sweat first.”

  “Not this long.” Clara sucked in her bottom lip then released it. “She disappeared on July first. There are phones, email. It’s not like they have to send the ransom note with pigeon post.”

  She had a point there.

  They sank into silence, each lost in thought, until they came across the first barricade, half a mile outside Furino.

  A dozen cops lined up by the side of the road.

  Clara stared at them, her posture stiffening. “They could be looking for you, you know. You killed a man in town yesterday, in front of two dozen witnesses.” She swallowed. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe coming back to Furino right now isn’t the best idea.”