The Wrong Hostage sk-2

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Except for this odd call, everything was perfectly normal.

  “Si, I know her,” Hector said. “So?”

  “Her business is my business.”

  “Is she with you?” Hector asked, suddenly wary.

  “Yes, she’s here, and no, she doesn’t have anything to say to you except that you should listen to me. We’re going to save your life.”

  Hector drew hard on the burning cigarette his nephew handed him. “I listen.”

  In the hotel, Faroe glanced at Grace, mouthed the words cell phone, and pointed to his pocket.

  She hesitated only a moment before she put her hand into the deep pocket of his slacks. The first thing she found was hard, but it wasn’t a phone. She looked up at him, startled. His smile told her he’d been looking forward to this moment.

  Obviously he could focus on more than one thing at a time.

  So could she.

  She removed the phone very slowly, dropping and retrieving it more than once, checking out the pocket very thoroughly.

  Faroe’s breath came in and his eyelids lowered to half-mast. “You heard me, Hector. The judge and I can save your life.”

  Grace handed him the phone with a feline smile. She might not be able to scale walls and play with bombs, but she knew how to bring Joe Faroe to attention.

  He punched in a number on his cell phone but didn’t hit send.

  “I am safe,” Hector said, unimpressed. “I need nothing from you.”

  Faroe looked out over the balcony railing to the front of the restaurant. The building was dark. The grounds and the gardens were deserted.

  “You’re going to a wedding party tonight at the Encantamar in Ensenada,” Faroe said. “Dinner at the Cancion.”

  Hector straightened. “Who tell you this?”

  “Listen very carefully.” Faroe held the receiver of the room phone toward the balcony door, then punched the send button on his cell phone.

  Grace’s eyes widened. She would have run to the balcony, but Faroe dropped his cell phone and blocked her with his body, holding her close and hard, staying between her and the coming blast.

  “One one-thousand, two one-thousand,” Faroe counted aloud. “Three-”

  A hard white light burst from the restaurant garden, brighter than the sun. An instant later the air was ripped by a sharp, flat explosion. The concussion slapped off the walls of the hotel. Flocks of terrified pigeons exploded from the rooftops of adjacent buildings.

  For a few seconds the world went silent, listening. Waiting.

  The explosion echoed and re-echoed before it turned to shadow noise in Grace’s ears. Stunned, she watched a cloud of dust rise from the courtyard. In that instant she knew what war was like. She swallowed hard against fear and helplessness.

  “Did you hear that?” Faroe asked Hector evenly.

  “?Madre de Dios!”

  “The mine was buried beneath the flagstone entrance to the Cancion. If you don’t believe me, send over some men to check it out.”

  In the expensive condo, Hector was silent for a few seconds. He watched every man in the room with new eyes, wondering if one of them could be the traitor. With a curt command, he sent one man to check out the restaurant. Before the man left the room, his bodyguards’ cell phones started ringing. Thirty seconds later, he knew that the man on the telephone was telling the truth.

  Whether that made the man friend or enemy didn’t matter. What mattered was that he’d had the ability to kill Hector and hadn’t.

  Hector took a deep hit on his doctored cigarette. “What do you want from me?”

  “Meet me tonight, in person. Name the place, name the time. If I get lucky, I’ll have the names of the men who laid the trap. If not, we still have a lot to talk about.”

  In the hotel, Grace forced herself to breathe deeply, then do it again, and again, until her ears stopped ringing. She went to the window and stared down.

  It looked like a war zone. Stucco had peeled off the front of the restaurant building. Smashed flagstone was scattered around. The wrought-iron gate had been blown off its hinges and lay in a twisted pile twenty feet away. The restaurant’s windows were gone. People were pouring out of the hotel and running to stare at the damage.

  She turned to the man who had triggered the bomb.

  “Okay, you’ve got a deal.” Faroe hung up and looked at Grace. “Ready?”

  “You-I saw-” She tried again. “You just casually triggered that bomb!”

  “It was calculated, not casual. We now have an inside track with Hector. He doesn’t know if I’m a friend, an enemy, or the Easter Bunny. But he’s damn sure I could have killed him and didn’t. Given that, he’s likely to be real titty-fingered about pissing me off, which means that Lane is safer now than he has been since Hector locked down the school. Let’s go.”

  Grace fastened on the one thing that mattered: Lane was better off than he had been. That was worth a few windows and a wrought-iron gate any day.

  Listen to yourself, Judge. Blowing up things is a felony.

  So is kidnapping. If it benefits Lane, I’ll help Faroe commit as many Class A felonies as it takes.

  If the law can’t protect my son, screw it.

  She fell in step beside Faroe as they headed out of the room. She didn’t ask where they were going.

  28

  TIJUANA

  EARLY SUNDAY EVENING

  GRACE SLEPT FROM ENSENADA to Tijuana. The sound of traffic became part of her, transformed into a relentless, primitive beat. Maybe it was exhaustion that let down her barriers, maybe it was simply that she fell asleep breathing the same air as Joe Faroe, but she slept deeply, dreaming of him. The images and sensations were frank with sexual need. Hot. Heady. Hungry. She woke up with flushed cheeks and a feeling of disorientation.

  Faroe was driving in four-abreast traffic on a three-lane street. Newspaper vendors, flower hawkers, and lottery shills danced in and out of the stop-and-go traffic. Astride polished Harleys, pairs of big-bellied cops tried to maintain order. Cars parted around them like water around river boulders.

  Many laws were ignored, yet beneath the appearance of chaos there obviously was an informal system understood by the drivers. The result wasn’t orderly or neat, but it worked well enough to keep traffic moving.

  Off to the north Grace saw the blazing lights of San Diego, a few miles and half a world away. She longed for a bath, longed to strip off the years and start all over again in a new, raw world, where past lies wouldn’t exist.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “Ah, she lives, she breathes. How do I know this? She asks questions.”

  She smiled, found herself watching his mouth, and flushed, remembering her dream.

  “We had such a good time at the Encantamar that I thought we’d try a new hotel,” Faroe said dryly. “We’re going to the Hotel del Fiesta Palace. It’s out by the world’s most famous dog track.”

  “Are we meeting Hector at the hotel or the track?”

  “The track, in about three hours. The hotel offers a good view. I’ve worked the track before, so I’ve got the layout memorized. But the hotel room will give me a chance to make a long-distance recon before I meet with that crazy bastard.”

  “We,” she said. “I’m going with you.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to be in the same room with him.”

  “I don’t. So what? I didn’t want any of this, but here it is anyway.”

  They drove on, fighting into the Zona Rio traffic. As they negotiated the roundabout at the foot of the statue of Abraham Lincoln, Grace spotted the Plaza Rio.

  “Hector is a clotheshorse,” she said. “Ironed jeans, pristine white shirt, ostrich-skin boots, and a hunk of neck jewelry that would choke a horse.”

  “So?”

  “If this is all about macho and command presence, we lose. We look like dog crap. Is there time to shop?”

  Faroe looked at himself in the mirror. Dog crap looked back. “Good point. We ca
n afford half an hour.”

  He drove to valet parking and slipped the attendant half of a twenty-dollar bill.

  “Half an hour,” Faroe said to Grace as they got out.

  “Do we synchronize our watches?” she asked sardonically.

  “Better move, amada. You’re wasting seconds.”

  She left him behind before they reached the entrance. He started to follow her, then remembered how he looked and went shopping instead. He barely made it back to the valet stand in time. She was already there, three shopping bags on her shoulder, waiting for him. He handed the valet the other half of the twenty and showed another five.

  The Mercedes appeared with impressive speed. Not a scratch, a nick, or a dent anywhere.

  Even so, Faroe breathed a sigh of relief after he’d fought through traffic to the thirty-story Fiesta Palace and handed the keys over to a bellman. Nobody who knew what Faroe knew drove a car as expensive as Grace’s SUV into Mexico and expected to bring the vehicle home intact.

  The hotel’s stainless steel and gleaming glass turned the reflected skyline of Tijuana into something mysterious and beautiful. While Faroe checked them into the hotel, Grace stared at the colors of the city. They rippled and flowed, unearthly, and she was floating with them, everything spinning away.

  A shower. That’s all I need. A long hot shower. Then maybe a short nap.

  Or something.

  The hours between now and the meeting with Hector stretched in front of her like an eternity. Nowhere to go. No way to forget. Nothing to do but wait until waiting was an animal eating her alive from the inside out.

  Lane, are you all right?

  “Stop thinking about your son,” Faroe said.

  Her head snapped toward him. “How did you know?”

  “The way you looked. Thinking about him doesn’t do any good and can do a lot of harm.” He took her arm and led her toward the elevator.

  Grace’s hands clenched. So did her whole body.

  “See what I mean?” Faroe said. “You went from looking blindsided by life to vibrating like a wire stretched to the breaking point. You’re wasting energy.”

  “How do you not think about something?”

  “Do you want to hurt Lane?” Faroe asked, sticking the key in the lock.

  “No!”

  “Then think about something else.”

  Like how much I want to touch you? Grace thought raggedly. And how much you don’t want to touch me? God knows you’ve had plenty of opportunity.

  And every time, you don’t follow through.

  She’d done the same, but she wasn’t feeling charitable about it at the moment. Given the choice of thinking about Hector, Lane, or Faroe, Faroe was the least of the three evils. It was easier to feel angry than rejected, so anger was the flavor of the moment.

  Faroe opened the door and nudged her into the suite overlooking the dog track. He dumped her packages in one bedroom and his own packages in the other and went to stand at the side of the window. After a long look, he turned and walked to his bedroom.

  “Shower,” he said without looking at her. “That’s what I’m going to do. No dog crap allowed near Hector Rivas Osuna.”

  Without a word Grace went to her bedroom, walked straight into the bathroom, and began stripping. Moments later she was alone in a fancy marble and chrome bathroom with an orgy-sized, double-headed shower.

  She told herself that it didn’t matter to her that Faroe hadn’t even tried to talk her into sharing a shower. Her body told her that it did matter, and that she was a fool to be lathering herself with fragrant French milled soap just to crawl into bed for another nap.

  Alone.

  But it beat the alternative, which was to lie awake trying not to think about things she couldn’t change.

  Right. Think about Faroe.

  The son of a bitch.

  She washed her hair with French shampoo from the suite’s complimentary supply. Then she washed it again. Like the shampoo, the conditioner smelled like sin and sex in paradise. She wanted to rub it all over her body, but settled for just her hair and hoped that the body lotion was half as appealing as the rest of the toiletries.

  It was. Cool, fresh, perfumed but not overpowering, the lotion vanished into her skin.

  Eat your heart out, Mr. Feel-Nothing Man. Shower alone until you turn into a pink prune.

  She toweled her hair thoroughly, shook her head, and finger-combed the result. Her ancestors had given her smooth, thick hair that required only a good cut to behave.

  Faroe knocked on the bathroom door. “Supper’s ready.”

  Obviously he didn’t linger in the shower, wishing that he wasn’t alone.

  “Okay” was all she said.

  “Better hurry. It’ll get cold.”

  In the presence of a deep freeze, what wouldn’t?

  Part of Grace knew that she was being unfair, that she hadn’t exactly jumped Faroe’s bones or even tried to. But most of Grace just wanted to smack Faroe for never following through on the smoldering looks and equally hot touches.

  Screw him.

  She almost laughed out loud. That was the problem, wasn’t it? She could hardly screw an unwilling man.

  With a muttered word, she pulled on one of the hotel’s terry-cloth robes, buttoned it at the neck, and cinched it firmly around her waist. Barefoot, she walked into the suite.

  A candlelit meal for two waited. The golden flames flickered over plates of steak, salad, fruit, cheese, and puffy rolls. The scent of food told Grace that she was hungry for more than sex.

  You’re a high-octane woman.

  As usual, the son of a bitch was right.

  The SOB in question was sitting deep in the shadow of an easy chair he’d dragged over to the window, staring through binoculars. The floor-to-ceiling glass looked out on the grandstands and the dirt track of Hipodromo Tijuana. Beyond, the city fell away into the bright lights of commercial and high-end real estate. The dimly lit shadows that pocked the glitter were colonias and barrios, where trash and poverty, rage and hope lived in unholy matrimony.

  The candlelight wasn’t for a romantic dinner. It was to keep anyone from seeing Faroe at work with the binoculars.

  “See anything useful?” Grace asked.

  “Not yet.”

  She sat at the table, poured herself a little red wine from the uncorked bottle, and began eating. A bite of steak told her that it had been seared over a wood fire. The Caesar salad was delicious and authentic down to the raw egg in the dressing. The wine was a Mexican varietal she didn’t recognize but liked at first taste.

  Faroe walked over, poured himself a glass of wine, and sat across from Grace. A single look told her that he’d showered, shaved, and was dressed in new jeans and a dark green guayabera that was the exact color of his eyes. The same soap she’d used must have been in his shower, too. He smelled of sin and sex.

  One out of two ain’t bad, Grace told herself bitterly.

  Silently the two of them devoured the food. Not until the last savory bit was gone did Faroe say a word.

  “We have two hours until we meet Hector,” Faroe said. “Unless whatever you’re keeping from me is really complicated, that should be plenty of time.”

  Grace’s head snapped up. “What are you talking about?”

  “You. You’re hiding something, something that has to do with this case. Not good. Not good at all. I don’t want to go up against Hector with a partner who’s lying to me.”

  Her stomach knotted. She pushed away from the table so fast that she nearly knocked over her wine.

  “Where are you going?” Faroe asked.

  “To get dressed.”

  He moved quickly, blocking her, forcing her to meet his eyes. She backed away like she’d been burned.

  “What is it?” he asked. “You’re acting like you’re afraid of me.”

  “I’m the one who tracked you down, remember?”

  He shrugged. “You were desperate. I was the only outlaw you knew.”<
br />
  She watched as he took a gliding step toward her. Candlelight flickered over his face, his eyes, heightening the intensity that was so much the core of him. She wanted to back up more. She wanted to step forward until she could taste him.

  She didn’t move.

  “At first I thought that it was the outlaw in me that scared you,” Faroe said, watching the pulse in her neck. “But the longer we’ve been together, the less that flies. You’re not a woman to be frightened without reason.”

  “You’re an intimidating man.”

  “Bullshit, amada. Not where you’re concerned. You wrap me around your little finger with a smile or a tear.”

  Her eyes widened. “You could have fooled me.”

  “I could have, but I didn’t. And I won’t. Can you say the same to me?”

  She was in the middle of the room and she felt like her back was to the wall.

  “I thought so,” he said softly, watching her frantic pulse. “What are you hiding from me?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Why?”

  She just shook her head.

  “When we face Hector, there won’t be any room for secrets or games between us,” Faroe said. “It’s called divide and conquer. Don’t do that to us. Don’t do that to Lane.”

  29

  TIJUANA

  SUNDAY EVENING

  SILENCE GREW, STRANGLING GRACE. Numbly she watched Faroe circle her, blocking any escape to the hallway. She couldn’t move. She could barely think.

  Then rage burned through the numbness.

  He could have made this easy.

  He didn’t.

  “I misjudged you,” she said through thin lips. “You’re brilliant, ruthless, skilled in things I’d rather not imagine, and a blind idiot who couldn’t see the truth when you put your arm around it!”

  Faroe picked through her words, looking for meaning. “I don’t understand.”

  “Ya think?” She glared at him and thought of how sweet it would be to just smack the ignorant, arrogant man.

  Faroe blocked Grace’s open hand before her palm hit his cheek. Then his fingers circled her wrist and held it, restraining her without hurting her.