by Claire King
“He won’t kill you,” Rafe said, his eyes focused intently on Cervantes. “I have something he wants, Olivia. And he won’t get it unless he lets you go.”
“What do you have that I want, cabrón? Except your blood on my hands.”
Rafe reached them. He looked neither right nor left. All his attention was on Cervantes. If his backup was there, wonderful. If they weren’t, he and Bobby would pull this off themselves.
All that mattered in the world was saving Olivia.
“I have a badge.”
Cervantes stood stock-still for a good thirty seconds. Olivia could no longer even feel his chest move at her back. Finally, he began breathing again in a great exhalation that breezed past Olivia’s ear.
“You have a badge,” he stated flatly.
“I’m DEA.”
“An American? An American has been stealing from me?” Cervantes shook his head. “You will pay for this, cabrón.”
“I want to deal.”
Cervantes lifted a corner of his mouth sardonically. “Deal?”
“I get the woman, you get into one of these shiny green sports utility vehicles you’re so proud of and drive away. We go home, you go home.”
Cervantes laughed. “That is no deal, cabrón. I could kill you both right now, and I get to go home, anyway.”
“Not for long.” The movement of men behind Cervantes caught Rafe’s eye, but he had no way of knowing whose men they were, his or Cervantes’s. “You kill an American agent and a prominent scientist from an important university, there’ll be no place in the world you can hide. Baja will be crawling with cops from both sides of the border before you even make it past your own welcome mat.”
Cervantes considered. “I give you Olivia, you leave Baja. But for how long?”
Rafe kept his voice steady, his eyes pinned on his enemy. But in his peripheral vision, he saw someone take out the pig who’d driven in with Olivia. He willed Cervantes’s attention away from the silent activity going on behind him. “Forever.”
“Rafael,” Olivia began, but Cervantes snatched her hair in his fist and snapped her head back.
Rafe forced his hands not to close into fists and concentrated on keeping his breathing even. Just a little longer, he told himself, and he would pound this dirtbag into bloody bits. In the meantime, all he had to do was stay calm and keep from looking into Olivia’s terrified, liquid eyes.
Olivia could feel as well as hear the diabolical little chuckle that came from Cervantes. “But you are a thief, Rafael. You may be DEA, but if it looks like a thief and steals like a thief, it’s a thief. Is that not how your American expression goes?”
“Something like that.”
“How can I trust you will keep your word?”
Rafe moved his shoulders. “You will just have to take a chance. You have no choice.”
Cervantes smirked at him. “I have no choice?”
“Not if you want to continue this little empire you’ve got going here, Ernesto.”
“Would you like to know what I think, cabrón? I think this woman can accidentally drown on a lovely Tuesday afternoon such as this one, and I think you can be shot through the head and left in the desert so the coyotes chew your bones. And I think no one will question Ernesto Cervantes because Ernesto Cervantes has more power in Baja than your DEA and the federales put together.”
Rafe grinned. “I don’t think so.”
Cervantes shrugged elegantly and smiled. “Ah, but you are not very smart, Rafael—”
“I’m smarter than he is,” Bobby cut in, pressing his gun to the back of Cervantes’s head. “And I don’t think so, either.”
Cervantes’s eyes bugged a little. “Are you both crazy? I have men surrounding this beach in every direction.”
“That’s funny,” Bobby said. “So do we. I wonder if some of them aren’t the same men?”
Cervantes looked frantically around, keeping his gun barrel positioned carefully at Olivia’s temple.
Olivia hadn’t taken her eyes off Rafael since he’d come from his hiding place in the dunes. He wouldn’t look at her. She knew why, of course. She’d almost cost him Cervantes.
Rafe stood ready for anything. Cervantes kept his gun on Olivia, Bobby kept his on Cervantes. There was no move to be made until Cervantes decided whether he wanted to kill Olivia more than he wanted to stay alive himself.
“Let her go,” Rafe said.
Cervantes’s eyes were wild as he looked to the sand hills for assistance. “Andale!” he screamed. “Let’s go!”
No one answered.
“It’s just you, Cervantes. Give up the woman.”
Olivia could feel Cervantes’s chest heaving against her back. His hand was rock steady on the gun, but she knew from the breath rushing past her ear that he was beginning to panic.
He shouted again for help, then looked at Rafe. His eyes bored into the man.
“I’ll kill her,” he shrieked. He was turning in circles, looking up and down the beach. Bobby followed him around in the dizzying spin. Olivia closed her eyes and let Cervantes drag her around in the sand. She knew any move she made could be her last.
No, that wasn’t true. She’d seen Rafael’s eyes. He would never let Cervantes shoot her.
Never, never.
“Drop the gun, cabrón!” Bobby shouted. “Drop the gun, drop the gun!”
“Let her go!” Rafe yelled at the same time. “Let her go!”
Their shouts made Cervantes more frantic. He pointed the pistol first at Rafe, then back at Olivia. “I’ll kill you both,” he screeched pitifully, all pretense of grace and courage wiped from his face and his manner. Mucus ran from his horrible broken nose, and his bruised eyes were feral spots of black in his twisting head.
The gun swung around on Rafe once more. “I’ll kill you both.”
Olivia would swear for the rest of her life that she never saw Rafe exchange a single glance with Bobby. Yet somehow, at the instant when Cervantes pointed the pistol at Rafe, Bobby kneed Cervantes in the back and struck Olivia hard between her shoulder blades, shoving her facefirst into the sand. And Rafe lunged forward.
Olivia squeezed her eyes shut and began to scream to drown out the sound of the shot that killed Rafael. She screamed loud and long, as would befit a woman who’d caused the death of the man she loved.
“Olivia!”
Rafe was on his knees beside her, removing her restraints with quick, anxious movements. “Olivia!”
She stopped screaming but didn’t take her face out of the warm, damp sand. Her shoulders shook with reaction and her arms fell limply to her sides. “No,” she moaned. “No.”
“Olivia,” Rafe said sharply again. “Are you hurt? Did he hurt you? Olivia!”
She turned her head and opened her eyes slowly, blinking sand away.
There had been no gunshot. No sound at all from Cervantes. He was on his belly, unarmed and unmanned, and Bobby leaned over him, his knee at the back of Cervantes’s neck and his gun at the back of his head. Olivia looked up at Rafael with frightened and questioning eyes.
“Did he hurt you?”
Rafe shook his head, gently dusted sand off her cheek with the back of his hand. He could see Cervantes’s knuckle prints on the side of her face. “No,” he said, his voice trembling ever so slightly.
She scrambled awkwardly to her knees and collapsed onto him, trembling in shock and terror. “Oh, Rafael. Oh, God.”
Rafe stroked her back. “Shh. I know. Be quiet, mi’ja. You’re all right now.”
“He killed Manny. He killed Manny,” she mumbled frantically, her lips numb with strain, her voice quivery with reaction.
“Okay, princesa, okay.”
“You can arrest him, now. You can make him pay for everything, Rafael.”
“Yes, I can make him pay.” He dragged her to her feet. “Get in the Land Cruiser, Olivia. Right now.”
“Why? It’s over. Isn’t it over?”
“It’s over,” he reassured he
r, though his own hands were still shaking. He’d come so close to losing her. He’d almost botched the whole thing. He’d almost let the bastard shoot her. “I want you to get in the front seat, put your head between your knees, and stay down until Bobby or I come get you.”
“Why?”
“We need to make sure our federales have all their men, okay? Get in the truck.”
“Rafael.”
“What, mi’ja?”
“You lied to me on the boat.”
“Yes, I did.”
“You love me.”
Rafe couldn’t have denied it to save either of their lives. “Yes, Olivia. I do.”
Chapter 14
Rafe put Olivia in the front of the closest Land Cruiser and shut the door. Then he walked to Bobby and Cervantes.
He suspected the Mexican federales were safely in control of their targets—Bobby would never have been able to sneak up on Cervantes and things would have been much noisier, and much bloodier, if they hadn’t been—but Rafe didn’t want to take a single additional chance with Olivia. Letting her stay in her little tent on the beach three weeks ago had been chance enough. Kissing her in Cervantes’s bedroom, dragging her through the desert, leaving her on the fishing boat with Manny—all were chances he should never have taken with Olivia’s life. He was almost as furious with himself as he was with Cervantes.
Bobby was wearing his fiercest frown, as Rafe approached the pair on the sand. “Did you see the marks on her face?”
Rafe nodded grimly. “Get him on his feet.”
Bobby yanked Cervantes up by his collar. Rafe took a step forward, using the momentum of his stride to put extra power behind the backhand.
Cervantes staggered and would have fallen but for Bobby holding a handful of khaki at the back of his shirt.
“You chased her,” Rafe ground out. He swung again, using his left hand this time. He wanted the bruises to match the ones on Olivia. “And you hurt her.”
He stepped close enough that his nose was nearly touching the sweating, bleeding snout of his lifelong enemy. He looked deeply into the eyes of the man who’d killed his brother so many years ago.
“I should kill you where you stand for those things, Cervantes.” Rafe smiled thinly. “But I made a pact many years ago, to make sure you suffered before you died, you miserable, murdering son of a bitch. And I will do everything in my power as a United States drug agent to ensure that happens.
“You are going to spend the rest of your life in a Mexican prison, amigo. For the possession of illegal narcotics with intent to transport across international borders and for the murder of Manuel Gomez Arrieta, an officer of the La Paz City Police of Baja California, Mexico.”
Rafe took Cervantes’s face in his hand. He dug his thumb and index finger into the hollows of the formerly handsome man’s elegantly high cheekbones. “And if you ever do find yourself on the outside again, I will have you extradited, tried and lethally injected for the murder of my brother, George Camayo.” He felt the print of teeth on the pad of his thumb, and blood began to trickle from Cervantes’s distorted mouth.
One of the federales came out of the dunes, shoving a handcuffed, khaki-clad man in front of him. Another reappeared from behind the cruiser that had brought Olivia in, with his own handcuffed prisoner. One by one, a dozen more federales came in from the dunes, each with one of Cervantes’s men. Rafe didn’t recognize most of them.
He leaned over and snagged Olivia’s wrist restraints from the sand. He handed them to Bobby, who roughly secured their captive.
Rafe turned to the first Mexican officer who made it to the beach. “I’ll be escorting the prisoners to La Paz.”
“Sí, señor.”
“I want Dr. Galpas to be able to leave the country. Call your people and arrange a plane out of Loreto.”
“Sí, señor.”
Rafe looked around. “Round up anyone still on the beach, and call in your men to secure the house in Aldea Viejo and seize the computer system and any records.” He gave Cervantes a withering glance. “You’re one of the riffraff now, Ernesto. Just like the rest of us.”
He left his enemy bleeding, and walked back to Olivia. She was seated sideways on the front seat of the cruiser. Her little feet, in those damn impractical sandals, were perched on the bottom of the door frame.
“I’m escorting Cervantes in to La Paz,” he told her briskly.
“I want to see for myself that he’s safely in a cell before I file a report. Bobby will take you to Loreto. There’s a plane waiting for you there.”
Olivia watched Rafael carefully. His face was weary, she thought, but expressionless. She could see grains of sand clinging to his thickening beard and to the shallow frown lines around his eyes. She wanted to blow them off with pursed lips, and then kiss him until that look of death eased from his hard and handsome face.
“All right.”
Rafe ran a hand roughly over his chin, avoiding her eyes. Cervantes was even now being driven away in the back of one of his own Land Cruisers, but Rafe felt the worst of the terrible day was yet to come. He still had to say goodbye, again, to Olivia.
“You’ll have to come back to Mexico to testify, of course. About Manny.”
Olivia battled back the pain in her chest when she thought of Manny. She knew perfectly well that Cervantes would have killed them both whether she’d beached the boat and taken off or not, but she still felt sick at the thought that she’d been in any way responsible for his death.
“I know,” she said. “I will be happy to.”
“But that won’t be for a while. Considering everything, the Mexican government isn’t going to give you any trouble about leaving for the States right away. I’ll call as soon as I get back to Aldea Viejo, make sure the feds have cut through the red tape.”
“Okay.”
She was being awfully calm. “Are you all right?” he asked, searching her face for the first time.
Olivia smiled weakly. “Don’t I look all right?” Her horrible orange dress was in shreds, her face was bruised in every place it was not sunburned, scratched or sand scoured. Her hair was one wicked tangle from the roots to the ends.
Rafe thought, as he always had, that she was the most beautiful woman in the world.
“You look fine. You might want to get Bobby to buy you something to wear home, though.”
Olivia looked down. “Yes, this will all be impossible enough to explain without showing up looking like a war refugee.”
He wanted to kiss her goodbye, tell her…what? Nothing. He’d said everything that morning. “All right, then,” he said awkwardly.
She lifted her head, slaying him with a single look from those dark eyes. “Rafael?”
“I’ve got to get going,” he said impatiently. Before I lose it altogether.
“I know you do.”
He leaned forward, kissed her lightly on her poor cheek. “Goodbye, Olivia.”
She twisted her fist into his shirtfront. “Don’t say goodbye to me like that, Rafael.”
“I have to.”
“Why?” she demanded. She’d been through hell over the past several days, but nothing had hurt her as this did. She was willing to throw her considerable Galpas pride down a rat hole, if only she could know why he was doing this.
“This is not the time to discuss it.”
“Rafael, you just saved my life. You walked up to a man who would have liked nothing more than to put a bullet in your brain, just to save my life. I have been chased halfway across Baja today—in these damn sandals, I might add—and held at gunpoint. You’ve told me you were just using me for sex, then admitted, under duress, that you lied about that.”
She took a deep breath. “I am leaving for Loreto and a plane back to San Diego. I don’t know where you live, I don’t know your phone number, I don’t know anything about your life there. I have this hollow feeling in my stomach that tells me if we don’t talk about this now, I may never see you again. And if I have to go the rest
of my life never seeing you again, Rafael, I think it may do me in in a way far more painful and slow than anything Ernesto Cervantes could have dreamed up.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Then tell me why you’re saying goodbye to me as if you’ll never see me again.”
“I won’t see you again, Olivia.”
Olivia felt a sting at the back of her eyes. It didn’t help at all that Rafael looked even more likely to burst into tears than she did.
“Why?” she asked softly. “Are you married? Are you terminally ill? Are you a priest?”
Rafe chuckled damply. She could make him laugh even when his life was being ripped out from under him. “I’m not any of those things. Definitely not a priest.”
She shook him by the shirt she still had clutched in her hand. “I’m not any of those things, either.”
He met her eyes, tamped down his pride and worked up his courage. “No. You’re a scientist.”
Olivia knew this was important, but could not begin to fathom why. “So?”
“Where were you born, Olivia?”
“Where? In San Diego.”
“I mean, where?”
“You mean, what hospital?” She shook her head. “Coronado, I think.”
That figured. “I was born at home, in my parents’ bed. The last of nine children.”
She narrowed her eyes. “We all have big families, Rafael. It was our parents’ generation.”
“I didn’t have my own pair of shoes, or a shirt, or even underwear that hadn’t been worn by somebody else—until I was thirteen.”
“Rafael.”
“I slept with my brothers in a bed my mother dragged home from the dump.”
“Okay.”
“I worked in the avocado groves, Olivia, with the rats. I’ve slept in places you wouldn’t let your dog lie down in. I’ve eaten things that crawl across the ground to fill my empty belly. My parents came to this country by swimming the canals. They’re wetbacks, Olivia. Have you ever heard that expression? They don’t speak English even after thirty years in the United States. Half my brothers and sisters come to dinner with dirt under their fingernails. All my friends are either cops or homeboys. I am the youngest son of illegal immigrants, and I’ve lived the life that entails.”
