by Gayle Wilson
Too far, too far, her fear whispered, but she walked on, touching each door on the right side of the hall, until one swung open under her hand. And in spite of the fact that this was what she was looking for, it was unexpected. She had touched it and then it wasn’t there any longer. It had moved away from her reaching fingers. Her hand sought the door again, only slightly open, and it swung a fraction more before she finally gripped the edge. She waited in the doorway, listening, and eventually she heard, above the pounding of her own heart that threatened to drown any outside noises, the soft rhythm of his breathing.
She dropped to the bedroom carpet, gently pulling the door almost closed, and then she caught the knob and turned it. She waited, listening to the even tempo of the breathing of the man who slept behind her before she eased the knob back until the latch rested silently in its niche in the frame.
There was no change in the quality of the sound from the darkness. She crawled across the floor and knew that getting back into bed, the pressure of her weight against the mattress on which he slept, would be the deciding factor, the most difficult part of all she had done.
She reversed what had worked before. Her weight on one foot, she lowered her body to touch down in breathless stages. And finally she was there. She enjoyed for a brief moment the cold smoothness of the sheet against her burning face. Then she finally pulled her foot up off the carpet and onto the mattress.
She almost screamed when his hand touched her. She bit her lips to keep them from gasping with the shock. His hand lay on the curve of her lower back and then he turned toward her body. She felt his breath against her shoulder, heard him sniff and the soft noises of waking. He rubbed his palm up her spine, and when he took her upper arm to pull her to spoon against him, she offered no resistance. She eased into his body and heard the sleepy whisper, his breath stirring her hair, “You’re cold. Come here, querida. Let me warm you.”
The muscular arms that had tightened lovingly around her body finally slackened into sleep, and she lay, staring into the darkness, feeling the regular rise and fall of his chest against her back.
She never could have guessed how long or how short a time it was until she felt Diego’s hand on her wrist, freeing her from his arms. It had seemed an eternity that she had lain against the body of the man she had betrayed. Like a prisoner being removed from his cell, she welcomed Diego’s touch as he guided her back to her room without speaking. When she heard the lock engage on her door, she knew that the decision she had made was now irrevocable.
SHE WAS STANDING by the window when dawn broke. Dryeyed and unseeing, she stared into the garden below. She had done what she was supposed to do, what she had been raised and trained to do, what was right; but it felt only like betrayal. Against all the treachery that had already been committed, add one more. In the name of law and order. In the name of her father’s memory. In the name of…betrayal.
There was nothing in the morning light that climbed over the house to touch the roses to signal that this day was any different from those that had gone before. And still she stood watching the shadows edge across the dew-wet grass. A figure appeared on the outer rim of her vision, and she almost missed him in her inner contemplation—Diego with garden shears in his hands. He moved among the roses and touched with his huge fingers one and then another. He bent his head to breathe against the crimson-black of their petals, and suddenly the scene below her blurred.
She watched his hands gently select and touch a long stem and then cut. He held the rose up to the light, turning it slowly in his outsize fist, examining it from every angle as if ensuring its perfection. He moved back along the path and disappeared around the corner, and she could taste the salt of the tears that covered her cheeks as she licked them from her lips.
Finally she used her palms to rub them from her face and turned away from the window. She walked to the mirror. The makeup she had so carefully applied last night was smeared, and her neck was beard-burned by his lovemaking. And the eyes of the woman reflected in the glass were dead.
She left the mirror and spent a long time under the hottest water she could endure, letting it pour down over her head and body until there were no more tears, no more shuddering sobs left, and then she carefully dried off and dressed. She lay across the bed in the sunshine and waited.
It was Diego who came for her. When he didn’t knock, but opened the door and walked in, she knew that whatever she had set into motion was already taking place.
“You have to go downstairs,” he said, and she nodded.
When she rose to follow him on the last journey down the stairs, he was standing with a pistol on his outstretched palm. The immense size of his hand made it look like a toy, a child’s gun.
“He said to tell you that this isn’t a rescue, querida.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, but he slipped the pistol into the right-hand pocket of her pleated slacks and pulled her arm behind her back and pushed her out the door. She led the way down the stairs to the room where he had taken her before, and again Diego didn’t knock.
His master was seated in the chair behind the desk while Kyle Peters, looking blessedly efficient, held a gun against his temple. The fingers of Kyle’s left hand were locked into the curling blackness of his hair, pulling the dark head back against the padding of the high-backed chair. The right profile of Diego’s master was highlighted against the wall of windows behind the desk, as clean and pure as the faces on old Greek coins: the nose strong and high-bridged, the chin still arrogant even against the pressure of Kyle’s fingers.
“Check your escort, babe,” Kyle ordered. “I told him if he wasn’t back with you in under a minute without any tools he’d picked up on the way, I’d kill his friend here. Make sure.”
Rae ran her hands down Diego’s body, feeling the tension that corded the muscles bulging under his clothing. She stole a glance at his master’s profile as she touched Diego, her mind locked on the two men silhouetted against the light from the French windows.
“He’s clean,” she assured Kyle, knowing where the gun Diego had carried was, but she didn’t understand why he had given it to her or the cryptic message. Not a rescue.
Kyle turned his body slightly. The desk chair and the seated man swiveled with the movement, out of the glare from the morning sun, and she could see the bloody gash that marred his right cheekbone.
“What have you done to him?” She could not have prevented the question had her life depended on it.
“He said something to the big guy, something in Spanish. I just reminded him that I don’t like messages I don’t understand. It still doesn’t quite match the other side, however.”
Kyle’s laugh struck the wrong note, jarring against her senses, but then he swung the chair another quarter turn so the face of the seated man was squarely before her eyes, and she was no longer aware of Kyle or of anything else in the too-bright room. Only of the horror of what had been revealed.
The left side of the darkly handsome visage was ridged with two scars, brutally illuminated in the summer light. The top one ran across his eye so the lid was slightly distorted, drooping over the dark iris that was barely visible under the damaged flesh. The other traversed the cheek, pulling the skin. The bottom of that slash touched the corner of his upper lip.
He watched her impassively. She could guess what her face had revealed, sickened by how much he had been hurt. Now she knew the reason for the darkness. My natural element, he had said.
“Not a very appealing sight this early in the morning,” Kyle mocked, but the figure under his hands made no response and finally Kyle released his head with a jerk and removed the gun from his temple. He motioned Diego closer to the man behind the desk so he could cover both of them.
Just Kyle. No one else.
“Where’s your backup?” she asked, watching him move around to the front of the desk to pull her against his side in a quick embrace. Kyle didn’t take his eyes off the two men, and the gun never waver
ed.
“On the way. I couldn’t wait for it all to be coordinated. I had to get to you, so I came on alone. Are you all right? They didn’t…hurt you, did they?”
She knew what he was asking and what the hesitation conveyed, just as she knew that she had to answer him.
“I’m all right. I just want out of here. How long before help arrives?”
“Not long,” he reassured, still holding her lightly against him, his left hand caressing down her upper arm. She thought of the pistol that was in her pocket, and she moved away from him, crossing her arms over her chest as if she were cold in the brightness of the sunlit room.
“This is stupid, Kyle. Let me call the sheriff. We need to get this wrapped up.”
The man in the chair and Diego were too quiet, too calm. Something wasn’t right here. She hadn’t looked at him since Kyle had shown her the damage to his face, and she didn’t dare. But she could feel the force of his and Diego’s eyes on her, and she suddenly realized that they must know what she had done.
“How did you get in?” she wondered aloud, remembering her failure and frustration last night. “How did you get past the security system without setting off the alarms?”
When Kyle didn’t answer, she knew it was because he had no answer. There was no way he could be here unless someone had let him in, and if they had, it was for a very good reason.
“Kyle,” she said, trying to think what that meant, “there’s something wrong here. They’re waiting for something. They let you in, didn’t they? They were expecting you.” None of it made any sense.
“Not unless you told them I was coming. You said there were only two. I found a window and surprised them. It wasn’t hard. They’re not as tough as they’re cracked up to be.”
“I don’t like this,” she said, trying to convince him of the reality of her premonition that this was some kind of trap. What she knew of these men did not fit with their calm acceptance of Kyle’s control. They were waiting. She could sense Diego listening, expecting. She looked at Diego’s master and couldn’t read his expression, but his dark eyes were locked on her, not on Kyle. He disregarded whatever threat Kyle might pose, and she suddenly knew that, as always, he was the one in control. She wanted the gun Diego had given her in her hand, wanted the tangible reassurance of its protection; the problem was, she wasn’t sure exactly whom she needed protection from.
Diego’s eyes flicked to the window and even that small movement telegraphed a warning. She followed his gaze to the stretch of lawn revealed beyond the glass, but there was nothing there. The pleasant morning calmness was unbroken. And then she heard what had attracted Diego’s attention, what he had been aware of before any of the others except possibly the man who sat so calmly behind the desk, the one who was closest to the windows. The man whose gaze was fastened intently on her face.
Not a rescue, querida, he had instructed Diego to tell her. To warn her.
She felt Kyle stiffen beside her and knew that finally he, too, had heard the unmistakable thrump of the chopper that was moving through the still, summer sky to touch down on the velvet of the manicured lawn beyond the glass.
“Damn,” Kyle said, and she turned to look at his face, which had suddenly gone gray under the tan. He moved to the window, but his attention on his two prisoners never wavered. Rae slipped her hand into the pocket of her slacks and felt the satisfying coolness of the pistol. She knew that it didn’t have the stopping power she was used to, but she was an excellent shot, at least on the range. Although her father had taught her to shoot when she was a child, she had never shot a man, never killed anyone.
The chopper was down, and she could see figures jumping out, moving across the lawn, guns drawn. Paul Hardesty’s white hair was unmistakable, and she felt nothing but relief, in spite of the name spoken into the darkness last night.
“It’s Paul,” she told Kyle, whose continued tension didn’t fit with her own overwhelming sense that help was at hand.
“You know he’s one of them. You told me that.”
Rae could hear the strain in his voice. Diego shifted slightly, and Kyle’s gun trained on the center of that broad chest.
“I told you I heard his name. That there was some connection,” she said. “I don’t know that he’s involved in this. I just wanted you to be careful who you contacted.”
She watched the people advancing carefully across the lawn and knew that they couldn’t see inside, were unaware how closely three pairs of eyes were watching their every movement. She recognized another figure and knew then that her suspicions about Hardesty must be unfounded.
“That’s Stewart,” she said to Kyle. “Dell Stewart. You know Stewart’s straight.” Stewart was DEA, one of their top men, and they had both worked with him before. If Stewart was here, then Paul was clean, still operating within the system, not a renegade.
Which meant that someone else was the weak link in the task force, the betrayer. Her eyes moved from the men on the lawn to the figure of her colleague outlined against the light.
You can do better than Kyle Peters, he had told her. She didn’t know why or how, but all at once she was absolutely certain that Kyle was the key to the puzzle—to the deaths, even to the betrayal of the courier who had died to bring down the cartel. His reaction to the arrival of the chopper had just revealed his guilt.
Her eyes found the face of the man in the chair and spoke her conviction aloud, “He’s the one who knew the name. You let him in because he could lead you to the man who gave us the information.”
“No, querida.“ The beautiful, familiar voice washed over her, and she wanted to lay her head on his shoulder and have him touch her as he had last night. Last night. A lifetime ago. “I let him in because we were expecting him. He came here to sell me that information, but he doesn’t know the name, and now the game is over. And he has lost. But then so have I, my friend, and we must all learn to accept our fates,” he said, his mockery clear.
He was deliberately goading Kyle Peters, who stood behind him, watching the end of his options approaching across the peaceful green of the summer lawn beyond the windows.
“You son of a bitch,” Kyle said, hatred deep and harsh in his voice. “You lying son of a bitch.”
From the time the man in the chair had begun to speak, to answer her question, Kyle had also begun to move away from the window, the muzzle of the heavy revolver he held tracking downward at the beautiful, taunting, slightly accented voice. By then Diego was moving too, but not, of course, quickly enough. No one can outrun a bullet.
Kyle swung his weapon, and Rae saw red blossom across Diego’s massive chest and his forward motion checked almost before the report of the gun echoed in the closeness of the room. She could smell the cordite and watched as Kyle fired again into Diego’s body. She heard her own voice screaming against the second report, and then Kyle turned and pointed the revolver again at the man still seated behind the desk.
She shouted Kyle’s name, as if she could stop him with words, and the pistol was in her hand now. Kyle’s attention was diverted, and as she had intended, the black eye swung toward her, away from its target to focus like an accusing finger at her body. As on the range, she raised and fired smoothly, the motion practiced so many times that her body performed what her mind had no time to command.
A small dark circle appeared in Kyle’s forehead, and she could see the surprise in his glazing eyes before he fell forward onto the top of the desk. But his finger had completed its own well-trained and automatic squeeze of the trigger. She was aware of the blow and the heat, but there was no pain. She felt her legs melt, and the gun dropped from her nerveless fingers.
Please, God, I don’t want to die, she thought, and then her cheek was somehow against the rough wool of the Oriental rug.
She wondered why it was taking Paul and Dell so long. Why it was so quiet and why the air was dead in the room. Her head began to swim and the last thing she thought was that she could smell his cologne, so she cl
osed her eyes to savor it.
SHE WAS NEVER SURE of the sequence of events after she fell. She felt the shock wear off and then the burning pain in her shoulder, and she knew she had cried out when they moved her.
She wanted to ask about Diego, but nothing would come out, no words would form that ever reached her lips. Dell Stewart’s face floated before her once and Paul’s, but they were like figures in a dark dream. Their mouths moved, but the sense of whatever they asked her never reached her brain.
She awoke again in the chopper, and the paramedic was with her. She didn’t know who else, but she felt the rhythm of the rotor vibrate through her body and she relaxed against it, knowing she was being taken to help.
“I don’t want to die,” she said, quite clearly she thought, but she couldn’t understand the words that answered her.
The ride through the halls of the hospital to the operating room was just like on the television show, whatever it had been, where the ceiling flashed overhead. She was sick with the motion, so she closed her eyes and didn’t wake up again until much later, after the surgery, in her own room.
Paul Hardesty was sitting beside her bed, and he smiled at her when he realized she was awake.
“How do you feel?”
“Like I’ve been run over by a freight train,” she managed to whisper. “You see all those people in the movies get shot and then jump up and fight and swim rivers and all kinds of stuff. I’m not sure I can manage the next breath.”
“I’ll let you in on a secret, kid,” he said, reminding her suddenly of Frank. “They don’t use real bullets.”
She closed her eyes and smiled. “That makes me feel lots better.”
She heard his laugh. They sat there together in the quietness. She didn’t have the energy to ask for details, but there were two questions she had to know before she could rest.
“Diego?”