The Seduction of Goody Two-Shoes

by Kathleen Creighton

  “You don’t have to be, for me,” Ellie said, amused and tender.

  “I do for me,” he snapped back at her, now sounding more than anything like a grumpy child. “I do still have some ego, you know.”

  Ellie was thankful for the darkness that hid her smile.

  It was only a few moments later, when the electronic signal in her ear was approaching pain level, that she felt him grab her arm as he said in a hoarse whisper, “There-I think I see it. I can see the car.”

  She halted, trying to see through the impenetreble sheets of rain. “Where? I can’t see a thing.”

  “There-wait. Okay…now, see it?” As if on his command the curtain lifted for just an instant, and there it was…the Beetle’s pale, rounded shape, like some great animal, huddled and miserable in the deluge.

  “What about a guard? Can you see anyone?”

  “Don’t think so,” McCall muttered. “Looks deserted to me.”

  “This thing is going bananas,” Ellie said, listening to the pings in her ear. “My bag should be right around here somewhere, but I can’t…find it. If I just had a flashlight-there’s one in the bag, but-”

  “I’ve got one in my toolbox. Wait…right here.” And before she could stop him, he was gone.

  It seemed an eternity, waiting isolated and lonely in the darkness and rain, before she saw the slashes of silvery shimmer…the gleam of light on wet metal. And another lifetime before he was back beside her. And it took all her willpower not to hurl herself upon him, trembling and sobbing with relief and gladness. Where was her strength and common sense now?

  “No guards,” he panted, his face ghoulish in the flashlight’s shadow. “And only one tire gone, far as I could tell.”

  Her teeth were chattering; she clenched them together and asked, “The engine?”

  She could see the shine of his teeth when he smiled. “Blew the air filter to kingdom come. Told you those Beetles are hard to kill. She might run a little hot, but she’ll run.”

  “What about the tire? Have you got a spare? I can change it if-”

  “Never mind the damn tire. She’ll run on the rim if she has to-no need to worry about speed in this mess. We can change it later. Right now let’s find that bag of yours and get the hell out of here.”

  Between the flashlight and the pings, that didn’t take long. And miracle of miracles, though sodden and limp on the outside, thanks to its plastic liner, the bag and its contents seemed more or less intact. Ellie gathered it up and held it clutched against her chest as they ran for the car, hands clasped and laughing giddily, like lovers caught out in a summer shower.

  “Man, I never thought this little car could look so good,” McCall said, shaking water from his hair as he squeezed himself behind the wheel and slammed the door after him. With the storm suddenly shut outside like an unwelcome stranger, the inside of the car seemed unbelievably still and warm and safe.

  “Sorry I insulted her.” Laughing and breathless, Ellie patted the dash-then remembered. Holding her breath, she felt underneath…

  “Is it-?”

  “Yes-it’s here.” Oh, so carefully, she pulled the gun from its hiding place-her nice little nine-millimeter double-action Beretta Cougar, less than thirty-six ounces unloaded, ten rounds in the clip. She’d hated and feared the thing when Ken had first gotten it for her and insisted she learn to use it in addition to the firearms training the agency had provided. Now, her hands were steady as she checked it over, and her feelings toward it were downright tender. “It’s okay. It’s ready,” she said on an exhalation as she leaned over and placed it on the floor between her dripping feet.

  The bag on her lap squelched softly as she opened it. Her searching hands found the flashlight first. She placed it on the floor beside the gun and went back to pawing through the bag.

  “What’re you looking for?” McCall’s voice was soft and sputtery as he wiped away rain.

  “S-something…” Her hands had begun to tremble. Suddenly, she was trembling-all over. She couldn’t seem to control it. She dug more frantically into the contents of the bag-desperately almost.

  There was a tiny click and pale light washed the inside of the Volkswagen. “Here,” McCall said in a gravelly voice, “let me.” Gentle hands lifted the sodden bag from her lap. A moment later he held up a bar of chocolate. “This what you’re looking for?”

  She made a small affirming sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a whimper and reached for it. Holding her off like an eager puppy, he peeled the wrapping off and broke it in half, then held one part out to her. She felt her throat swell as she bit into it, her eyes clinging to his through a shimmer of tears as he did the same. And all the while she trembled and ached inside with a strange, fearful happiness. What was this? What is this? Such a small thing, she thought. Such a simple little gesture…and yet she’d never felt so cared for. So loved.

  “Don’t suppose you’d have any cigarettes in that bag?” His voice was raspy and seemed unnaturally loud.

  “Sorry,” she murmured on a gulp of shaken laughter, hurriedly swallowing tears and chocolate.

  “Bread crumbs…” He muttered that under his breath as he searched for the car keys. He seemed surprised to find them still in the ignition, right where he’d left them. “Damned stupid idea,” he said, glowering at the keys but making no move to turn them. He sounded angry, but somehow Ellie knew he wasn’t.

  “It wasn’t,” she whispered. “It was a great idea. You just forgot one thing.”

  He transferred the glare to her, eyes fierce and bright in a shadowed face. “Yeah, what’s that?”

  “You’ve forgotten the story. Hansel and Gretel?” She leaned toward him, urgent and shaking. “Don’t you remember? Bread crumbs don’t work. The birds ate up the trail of bread crumbs. That’s how they ended up lost. That’s how they wound up in the witch’s-”

  And suddenly his arms were around her and his hard, cold face was pressing against hers, his beard stubble a soft wet prickle on her skin. She could feel that he was shaking, like she was, and that some of the wet on his face wasn’t rain, either. His breath smelled of chocolate, as hers did. It bathed her face in warm, sweet puffs as he kissed her quickly, urgently-her forehead, her eyelids, her cheeks and nose, her lips-as if he feared he might never get another chance.

  “We have to go…” Who said it? Who cared?

  “Yes-yes…I know…”

  “They could be after us any minute-”

  “We have to get to someplace safe-”

  “Just hope the damn car starts…”

  “Well, try it and see!”

  Ellie sent up a prayer while McCall pumped the gas pedal, then turned the key in the ignition. For the second time in recent memory, the VW’s engine fired on the first try.

  Chapter 12

  “We can’t go back to the hotel,” said McCall. “That’s the first place they’ll look for us.”

  “I know. I know.”

  He glanced over at Ellie. She was sitting upright in her seat, eyes riveted on the headlights’ narrow path beyond the windshield, tense as a bird dog on point.

  “Hey-we’ve got a good head start,” he said gently. “They can’t come after us in this. We’ve got some time.”

  She threw him a look, but didn’t relax. “Not necessarily. Don’t forget, General Reyes is a pretty big cheese in Mexican law enforcement. All he needs to do is make one phone call. There won’t be anyplace in this country where we can hide.”

  McCall ducked his head to peer upward into the wind-driven rain. “With any luck this storm will have knocked out his satellite hookup. If we can make it to Chetumal we’ll be okay. I’ve got a diving buddy there-he has a private plane. He can fly us to Merida. If we can get to the American consulate there we’ll be safe.”

  “With any luck,” she muttered darkly. But she did sit back in her seat, at last, with an exhausted-sounding sigh.

  They were on the main highway, heading east, according to Ellie’s wristw
atch, which had turned out to be a compass, too, as he’d suspected it might. They’d stopped to change the tire as soon as they hit paved road, Ellie doing her best to convince him that since he was injured, she ought to be the one to do the job.

  Now…McCall was well aware that the world had changed a lot since the 1950s, and that he’d traveled a long road from his dad’s garage in Bakersfield, California, and that women in this century were a whole lot different than his mother had been, with her soft white hands and red nail polish that had never so much as touched a dip-stick. But in his book, there were just some things a decent man didn’t do, and standing around holding a flashlight while a little tiny bit of a woman changed a tire for him was definitely one of them. Anyway, the wound in his arm had stopped bleeding, and even though it did still throb a bit, it was a long way from keeping him from being able to twirl a lug wrench.

  Since then, the little VW had been churning slowly but steadily through the downpour, sending up wings of water on both sides of the car, occasionally sputtering a little, but otherwise hanging in there.

  Which was about as much as could be said for her driver and passenger. Hangin’ in there.

  “Luck’s been with us so far,” he said softly, looking over at the woman beside him. Looking at the curling tips of her wet hair, dark and somehow childlike against her pale forehead, at her tense profile and slumping shoulders. Wishing she’d just put her head back and sleep. Wishing he could gather her into his arms and hold her while she slept.

  Instead, unexpectedly, she straightened up and laughed. “Providence…” she murmured. “That’s what my Aunt Gwen called it. And you know what? Knowing Gwen, I don’t think she’d be surprised to find out Providence has such a sense of humor.”

  McCall snorted. “Sense of humor?” Personally, he was having a hard time finding much about the last couple of days that was funny.

  She shifted in her seat, half facing him. “Ever since I got to this country I’ve been feeling kind of like Alice-in-Wonderland, you know? Everything flip-flopped, nothing like it was supposed to be. Now I’m thinking maybe all the time it was just Providence having this huge joke on me.”

  “Some joke-damn near getting us both killed.”

  “Yeah, but don’t you think it’s funny? I thought you couldn’t be trusted, you thought I was totally bad news, and all the time, we’re the good guys. Meanwhile, the head good guy, the man I’m supposed to trust, he turns out to be the head bad guy.”

  “Hilarious,” he muttered under his breath. But he was beginning to see her point. He’d been wondering himself how his Goody Two-Shoes had turned into Indiana Jones.

  “And then,” she went on, really warming to it, “you go and sacrifice your cigarettes so we can find our way back to the car, and I try to follow my family tradition and start a fire as a distraction so we can escape, and the rain completely ruins both our plans. But as it turns out, the rain is what saves us. See what I mean? Providence.”

  McCall shook his head. “Uh-uh,” he said with gravel in his voice. “You are what saved us, sister.”

  She stared at him. “I’m what got us into this mess.”

  “That may be true, but you’re also what got us out of it.” He cleared his throat and tried for a lighter tone. “You know, for a Goody Two-Shoes you’re pretty damn good at this cops-and-robbers stuff.”

  There was a pause before she said, with a curious lilt in her voice, “For an artist-slash-beach bum, so are you…”

  He looked at her and saw that she was smiling that glorious Cinnamon Girl smile. And when he remembered to look at the road again, he could see lights up ahead in the distance. They were coming into the outskirts of Chetumal.

  Providence? He thought maybe that was as good a name for it as any.

  Ellie sat shivering in the dark VW and watched McCall turn away from the pay phone, no longer even bothering to hunch up his shoulders when the deluge hit him, just letting it sluice down over him like a shower bath.

  “Are the lines down?” she asked when he opened the door and she got a good look at his face.

  “Nah.” He pulled the door shut with a jerk, sending water droplets flying everywhere in a way that reminded Ellie of a big wet dog. “I actually got through to him-his answering machine, anyway. He’s away on a dive. Says he’ll be back on the second.” His voice was strangely neutral, almost completely devoid of expression.

  “That’s tomorrow, isn’t it? Or today-” she held her watch up close to her face and pressed the button to illuminate the numbers “-almost.”

  “The Day of the Dead…” They sat in silence, McCall staring through the windshield at the grocery-store windows behind the pay phone, all boarded up against the hurricane Paulette never had quite become, Ellie staring at him. “So,” he said at last, glancing over at her with a look of apology. The fatigue in his face made her heart ache. She thought about his wounded arm, wondered again how bad it was and how much blood he’d lost. “That’s it, I guess. No help there.”

  “Then let’s just get a motel room for tonight. If he’s going to be home tomorrow-”

  “You’re forgetting one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What do we do for money? We left everything back in the hotel at Lago Bacalar.”

  “Not…everything.” Ellie was already fishing around inside the beach bag. A moment later she gave a little grunt of triumph and held up the slender wallet containing her “cover” documents. “I still have Mrs. Burnside’s credit card-U.S. Government issue.”

  He reached for her, took her face between his hands and gave her a swift hard kiss-an impulse born of joy he might have bestowed on just about anyone, but her heart gave a fiery little leap anyway. Already shaky with fatigue, she now felt a new kind of trembling, a strange pulsing vibration deep, deep inside.

  “We’re in business,” he said huskily. “Now, if we can just find a hotel clerk awake at this hour…”

  McCall knew Chetumal fairly well. Even in the darkness and pouring rain he didn’t have much trouble finding the place he’d had in mind. It was well away from the modern Holiday Inn-type hotels in the center of town, down near the docks-a fairly scruffy area, but the hotel had rooms that opened onto a central courtyard so at least they wouldn’t have to trek through a lighted lobby looking like drowned rats.

  He parked the VW in a narrow side street and left Ellie there to wait for him while he went to try to rouse a hotel clerk. It took him a while, pounding on the door and the boarded-up windows of the lobby, but eventually, after he’d almost given up, a short stocky man came out of a door at the back of the office and shambled up to the night window, bleary-eyed and unshaven, scratching at the sleeveless white undershirt that covered his round belly. Though at first obviously not pleased to see a customer so late, especially one who must have looked as though he’d just come out second-best in a back-alley brawl, he perked up considerably when McCall showed him the credit card and offered to pay him double the going rate for what was left of the night.

  With the room key in his pocket, he splashed his way back to the Volkswagen to find Ellie crouched down like a frightened rabbit with her head between the steering wheel and the back of the driver’s seat.

  “I saw a car go by…out there, on the main street,” she explained in a croaking, slightly embarrassed whisper. “I thought…you know, just in case it might be-”

  “Wouldn’t do you much good to hide,” he said mildly as he edged in behind the wheel. “It’s the car they’re going to be looking for.” She made a small, rueful sound and put a hand over her eyes. He threw her a glance. “If it makes you feel better, we can park it in the back, out of sight. But I don’t think they’d be after us yet. Not in this.”

  She nodded but didn’t say anything. She hadn’t had much to say for a while now-stress and fatigue wearing on her, he supposed. Only natural she’d be coming to the end of her rope, after everything she’d been through.

  Except that there was something v
ibrant, almost electric about her silence, a strange kind of subaudible humming that seemed to reach out and touch him in the darkness and make his skin tingle and his heartbeat accelerate in response. In response to what, exactly, he didn’t know. Fear, he thought-uneasiness at being still in danger, still so vulnerable-that would make sense. Except that his own responses didn’t feel like fear. He wasn’t an adrenaline junkie and never had found fear a particularly enjoyable sensation, but right now what he felt like more than anything was a kid waiting in line to get on a really wild and scary roller-coaster ride.

  He started the VW, rolled it slowly, almost silently down the narrow street and turned into the even narrower alley that ran behind the hotel. He parked, not bothering to lock it up. There was one more dash through the downpour, through water that ran ankle-deep in places, a brief struggle with a balky lock and an old key, and then they were inside, surrounded by walls and darkness and silence and, for the moment at least, safety.

  It was humid and musty in the little hotel room, as it usually was in the tropics, with or without air conditioning. Without much hope, McCall flipped a switch near the door. Miraculously, light flooded the room and a ceiling fan reluctantly began circling.

  “Power’s on, at least,” he muttered; it was by no means a given in that part of the Yucatan, even without a tropical storm.

  He carefully avoided looking at the single bed in the room, which looked even smaller than the one in the “honeymoon suite” at Lago Bacalar in which he’d spent a mostly sleepless night-had it only been last night, twenty-four hours ago? It seemed like a month. He thought about how they’d discussed it then, who would sleep where, just as a matter of course. Why was it that now he couldn’t think of anything to say that didn’t seem fraught with pitfalls, with infinite possibilities for misunderstanding?

  He looked instead at Ellie, who had lowered the beach bag to the floor beside the dresser and was slowly taking off her sun visor.

  “We should be safe here, for the time being, anyway,” he said gruffly. “At least until the storm moves on. Even with all his resources, there’s not much the general can do while it’s raining like this.”