A moment later she wasn’t certain of anything, even the evidence of her own eyes.
One second the boy was there, shaggy dark head and narrow sun-bronzed back plainly visible, all but branded on her retinas. The next second he’d disappeared-vanished-and her purse…her precious purse! was flying…flying in seeming slow motion, tumbling lazy as a butterfly through the shimmering sunlight, shoulder strap like a looping lariat against the sky. And then an arm, lean and tanned as leather, reached up and fingers stained with electric blue snatched the purse right out of the air.
Breath gusted from Ellie’s lungs as she halted, open-mouthed, rendered speechless by overwhelming relief coupled with wonder. Not that miracles, and the silent, breathless awe that accompany them, were unknown to Ellie; in her lifetime so far she’d been privileged to witness quite a few: Orcas breeching in the Alaskan Straits; the birth of a dolphin; a loggerhead turtle struggling up a sandy Georgia beach on an inky-black night. Not to mention a thousand smaller miracles, the kind that happen every single day and so few people even notice. But this was different. This was the first miracle she could recall that involved another human being. And a male human being at that.
The crowd parted almost magically, and even that seemed only part of the miracle. Still stunned, Ellie watched the culprit shuffle toward her, now sniffling piteously, tears making shiny tracks on his dusty cheeks. His skinny ribs were heaving, and there were fresh, quarter-sized abrasions on his knees-a matched set. The paint-smudged hand clamped on the back of his neck looked large against its vulnerability, and strong enough to snap it.
“This belong to you?” The owner of the hand, only slightly less scruffy than his captive, was holding out her handbag, dangling by its strap from one hooked finger. Under the brim of his Panama hat his eyes were squinted and his teeth were showing, but it didn’t look to Ellie like a smile. More like Clint Eastwood in one of those old westerns where he always seemed to be wearing a serape.
It suddenly seemed necessary to lubricate her voicebox before she spoke, although when she tried to swallow it didn’t help much. The scratchy sound that came out was just pretty much Ellie’s normal speaking voice. And she couldn’t do much about that, since she’d inherited it approximately twenty-eight years ago from her mother.
“I…I don’t know how to thank you.” It was no more than the truth; having always prided herself on being an uncommonly independent and resourceful person, she’d never been in such debt to a man before.
The artist-her benefactor-snorted and made a jerking motion with his head, aiming it over his shoulder in the general direction of his display. “You want to thank me, you can pay me for that picture I brought him down with.”
That was when Ellie first noticed that the boy’s bare feet and shins bore smears of the same blue paint that decorated the artist’s hands. Her mouth dropped open and she smothered a gasp of dismay with her hand. “Oh. Oh, I’m so sorry. Well, I-of course I’ll…” And she was rummaging through her purse, fumbling for her wallet. “How much do I-”
He waved her off, like someone swatting at a fly. “Forget it. Water over the bridge.” Bestowing a look of annoyance upon his captive’s dusty bowed head, he growled, “What do you want to do with him?”
“Me! Do with him?” She clapped a hand to her forehead and looked around at the gathering of tourists, perhaps in hopes of some sort of advice. Though officially a member of law enforcement, she’d had no experience in dealing with juvenile delinquents, or juveniles of any kind, for that matter.
Plus, beneath her crusty exterior there lurked a guilty secret: a heart like a half-melted marshmallow. This was a little boy, for God’s sake! One who didn’t appear to have been eating regularly lately, if not for most of his life so far. And at that, panic of a new sort seized her. She knew herself very well. She had her wallet in her hand; in another moment she was afraid she was going to give the kid every dime she had with her.
“Do with him?” she repeated in a hissed undertone, sidling closer to the boy’s captor. “What am I supposed to do with him? He’s just a little boy.”
“A little thief,” someone in the crowd muttered. There were rumblings of agreement. Someone else added something that included the word police.
“Look, I’ve got my purse back,” Ellie said to placate the gathering at large, and then, to the keeper of the captive, trying to keep a pleading note out of her voice, “There’s no harm done, can’t you just let him go?”
The “artist” shrugged.
Just then the purse-snatcher, seizing the moment-and taking no chances on anyone changing his mind or being outvoted-squirmed out from under his captor’s hand and vanished into the crowd.
There were a few cries of mild protest and dismay. Someone-a man-said loudly, “What’d you let him go for? Kid’s nothin’ but a thief. Shoulda handed him over to the police before he hits on somebody else.”
“Not my problem,” the artist mumbled around the revolting stump of his cigarette. With that he turned and shambled back toward his stall, sandals slapping on the baked adobe bricks.
For a moment or two Ellie just stood and watched him go, frowning and chewing on her lip while around her the crowd slowly dispersed, talking in breathless, gossipy undertones to one another as people do when they’ve been privileged to witness some untoward, possibly violent event. Presently, she drew a quick, decisive breath. No way around it-at the very least she owed the man a thank-you.
She couldn’t have said why she should feel such inner resistance to doing something simple good upbringing demanded. Such a peculiar tightening in her belly. A quickening of her pulse. It made no sense to her. Certainly it wasn’t his surly manner that put her off. Rose Ellen Lanagan didn’t know the meaning of the word intimidation.
Besides, she’d seen the twinkle in those cool blue eyes of his. Heard the warm, contagious peal of his laughter. That crustiness was ninety percent show, she was sure of it, though what purpose he thought it served she couldn’t imagine.
The artist had retrieved the painting he’d sacrificed in the interests of justice and was regarding it stoically, held at arm’s length in front of him. He must have sailed it, Ellie now surmised, into the path of the fleeing purse-snatcher, rather like an oversized Frisbee.
“That was quick thinking,” she said, coming up behind him.
The artist grunted without looking away from his masterpiece, which, smeared and smudged almost beyond recognition, in Ellie’s opinion now had actually attained a certain surrealistic charm. Personally, she considered it a vast improvement over the original.
With “thank you” hovering on the tip of her tongue, she hesitated; once again, the words seemed meager, hopelessly inadequate, not to mention alien to her nature. They came out sounding more prissy than anything.
“I really would like to pay you-for the painting,” she briskly added as the artist shot her a sharp, almost hostile look. His eyes weren’t cool at all, she realized, but a clear, almost transparent blue, like midsummer skies, with whites as soft and clean as cotton clouds. All at once her voice seemed to stick in her throat, and when she forced it through anyway it emerged sounding even more raggedy than usual. “It’s the least I can do.”
The moment stretched while he stared at her with that keen and piercing glare. While she noticed for the first time that his lips, without that awful cigarette clamped between them, seemed finely chiseled, almost sensitive-unusual for a man’s lips. For some reason her own suddenly felt swollen and hot, giving her a wholly alien urge to cool them with her tongue. And then…
“Keep it,” he said, thrusting the canvas at her so abruptly that she actually gasped. “Maybe it’ll remind you to be more careful next time.”
He turned away from her and was almost immediately swallowed up by a crowd of lady tourists, all cooing and chirping their appreciation for his heroism and his compassion, and eager to take home a souvenir of the Purse Snatching Incident.
Feeling somehow dismissed, Elli
e left him posing for photographs with a group of middle-aged belles from Atlanta. And as she made her way back to the pier she was wondering, with a cynicism that was also foreign to her nature, if he might have paid that boy to snatch her purse, just to drum up business.
Ellie dropped the painting of three drunken-looking parrots onto one of the two single beds in the stateroom she shared-platonically-with her partner and fellow agent with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
“Don’t ask,” she said, plucking a Hershey’s Kiss from the bag on her bedside table, even though the muffled groan that was her supposed husband’s only response made it clear he’d no interest in doing anything of the kind. Concern and guilt quickly banished the grumpy mood she’d come in with. “Still feeling lousy?”
The question was wholly unnecessary; Ken Burnside looked, to quote one of her mom’s favorite clichés, like something the cat dragged in-and given the sorts of things the cats were prone to dragging into her mom’s barn back in Iowa, that was saying something.
“I think I’ve got a fever,” Ken said in a hushed and pitiful voice.
He looked it, too, but Ellie squelched an instinctive urge to step closer and lay a ministering hand on his brow. She’d had to fight off the man’s attentions often enough in the early days of their working relationship so that, even though the ground rules between them had been firmly established long ago, she still didn’t quite trust him. Not even now, when he was laid out in his bed with his eyes closed, skin sweaty and roughly the color of old library paste.
“Maybe you should see a doctor,” she offered by way of compensation, peeling the last of the foil off the chocolate and popping it into her mouth.
“It’s just the stomach flu.” Rousing himself enough to open both eyes, he inquired blearily, “How’d it go in town?”
“Umm. Great.” Feeling calmer, she helped herself to a couple more Kisses and settled herself cross-legged on her own bed, carefully avoiding the still-gooey canvas. “I think I’ve pretty well established myself as your typical dopey tourist,” she said as she pulled off her sun visor. “Got my purse snatched.” Burnside made a strangled sound that may have been a snort. “Don’t worry,” she assured him, “I got it back-intact.” She didn’t think it was necessary to tell him how close she’d come to losing the vital meeting information. She was the rookie on this operation, and suspected her partner was already nervous about how she was going to handle herself when things got tricky.
“No further contact from the smugglers, though, and I gave them plenty of opportunity.” She gave the lump of misery in the next bed a dubious glance. “You going to be able to go with me tonight?”
“Don’t…think so,” Ken said in an airless whisper that alarmed her.
“We have to make that meeting.” Ellie’s heart rate was beginning to speed up. She hurriedly unwrapped another chocolate. “The instructions were clear on that. They won’t contact us to set up a meeting until they’re sure it’s not a trap. We have to be out there where they can look us over-make sure we’re not being followed.”
There was some deep, carefully controlled breathing. Then, in a voice tight with pain, “Maybe we should contact General Reyes-let him know what’s going on.”
“Let him know what? There’s nothing to report, and won’t be until after that meeting. If there’s a meeting; we don’t even know for sure they’ll go for it. It’s for sure they won’t if we don’t show up at-where is it?-José’s Cantina.” She paused, then said flatly, “If you can’t make it, I’ll just have to go by myself.”
This time there was no doubt about the snort. “Lanagan,” Burnside said in a faint but firm voice, “I know these people. They’re old May-hee-co-back-country Mexico. They won’t do business with a woman-especially one that looks like you. They’ll chew you up and spit you out…” He closed his eyes and licked his lips, clearly exhausted by that effort.
Ellie watched him for a long moment, a knot of cold fear taking shape in her stomach in spite of the insulating coating of chocolate. Finally she said in a low voice, “Ken, we can’t screw this up-not now.”
Her partner gave a deep, guttural sigh, then mumbled, “I’ll be okay. We still have a few hours. Don’t worry, I’ll make it to José’s with you…you’ll see.”
It was an important part of McCall’s credo that any day could be made better by a shot of tequila washed down with several bottles of pulque. Not that today had been all that bad; it had turned out to be a pretty good day, actually, in spite of the loss of “The Three Caballeros” to the feet of a street thief and a turista with golden eyes and hair and freckles the exact color of cinnamon.
As a matter of fact it was the integrity of that personal creed of his, as affected by the street thief and the cinnamon girl, that had him worried, and making for his favorite watering hole for reinforcement at the first soft promise of twilight. Live and let live. He’d come way too close to forgetting his favorite motto to suit him. Today a lady’s purse, tomorrow…who knew where such a careless act could lead? If he didn’t look out, before he knew it he’d be sliding down that long slippery slope toward a social conscience. Uh-uh, no thank you, not for him. No sirree.
That was why he sailed into José’s Cantina with a wave and his usual, “José-¿Qué pasa?” for the guy behind the bar-who also happened to be the owner-and swam his way through the noisy murk to his favorite table without taking much notice of who else was in the place. If he had, he’d have turned around and walked right out again and never looked back. He swore he would have.
As it was, by the time he saw her-Lord help him, the cinnamon girl!-sitting there all alone at the table in the front corner by the glassless window, he was already settled comfortably in his own favorite creaky rattan chair with the tequila, a quarter of lime and a saltshaker and the first of the local brews making wet rings on the table in front of him, and it just seemed like it would be too much of a waste to go off and leave them sitting there. Hell, he thought, might as well drink ’em and see what happened in the meantime.
Maybe nothing would. Maybe none of the regular patrons of the place would notice her. Maybe she’d come to her senses and leave. Maybe the person she was obviously waiting for would show up and McCall wouldn’t have to think about how she was going to get herself back to her cruise ship without getting her bones jumped in one of the dark alleys between here and the tourists’ part of town.
Maybe it would turn out to be true that the Lord looked out for children, drunks and fools.
Hell, it was none of his business, anyway. Live and let live.
But the image of that smile of hers kept crowding into his mind, the way it had burst so suddenly, so wonderously over her grave little face, like…oh, a dozen comparisons he could think of, all of them clichés, none of them quite worthy. So naturally he couldn’t help but watch her as he licked lime and salt, slugged the tequila and sat back to enjoy his pulque, though he tried to look as if he wasn’t-watching her, of course he meant, not enjoying the beer. Noticing the way she kept looking at her watch, frowning.
Noticing the growing ripples of interest from the regulars lounging around the bar, and the helpless looks José-who knew his customers well-kept throwing McCall. The ones that said plainly, Hey-she’s a gringa, you’re a gringo, that makes her your responsibility. So do something!
To which McCall’s response was a shrug uniquely Latino in character, but which in any language easily translated to, She’s not my problem, man.
He’d just about decided to take a chance on ordering a second beer when, Lord help him, he saw the woman get up from her table and head straight for the bar. How could any woman be so stupid, he wondered, even for a turista? He’d thought her pretty cute, he remembered, when he’d seen her this morning, but she was seeming less and less cute by the minute. Even her smile was fading from his memory. In fact, he was experiencing a powerful urge to yank her up by the scruff of her neck and haul her home to her mama-or her husband, he amended with a frown, belate
dly recalling the gold band he’d seen on the third finger of her left hand.
That memory inspired a new spurt of anger. What was her husband thinking of, to let his wife go off alone to such a dive? Or-a new thought-if he was the one she’d been waiting for, to stand her up like this?
He blamed the anger for making him once again forget his motto as he watched the woman push her way through the massed male bodies at the bar, cinnamon head barely topping burly shoulders-and Mexican men weren’t that tall. His muscles tensed and anger sizzled in his belly as he watched those bodies turn to let her through, but just a little, being sneaky about giving way just enough to let her pass but with plenty of contact. Watched her ask José a question, apparently oblivious both to the bodies and to the leers on the faces around her. Watched José shrug and shake his head in reply.
With a sinking feeling in his gut, McCall then watched the woman squeeze back through the pack, and with one final frowning look at her wrist and a sweeping glance around the cantina, go out the door.
A moment later he knew a sense of inevitability-of fate, if you will-as two of the more disreputable-looking bar patrons separated themselves from the wolf pack and slunk out after her, smirking to one another and their comrades in an anticipatory way that made McCall go cold.
Live and let live…live and let live…she’s not my problem, he chanted hopelessly to himself, staring into the gloom at the bottom of his pulque bottle.
And then, “Ah, the hell with it,” he muttered to nobody in particular, tossed a handful of pesos onto the tabletop and followed.
The Seduction of Goody Two-Shoes Page 2
