Renegade with a Badge

by Claire King

  “Everybody out,” he said, and shoved open the driver’s door, his gun already in his hand. He took hold of Olivia’s wrist and hauled her out of the car. She fell into him.

  “Are we stopping?” she said, white-faced and wide-eyed.

  Rafe examined her face intently for a second. “Do you need to vomit?” he asked.

  She blinked at him. “No.”

  “Then, come on.”

  And again, they ran. If her life hadn’t been in danger and she hadn’t been shaking with fear every other minute, the past three days would have constituted an excellent workout, she thought as she was pulled through the streets. She only wished she’d worn better shoes.

  She didn’t ask where they were going this time. It really didn’t matter, as long as they eventually ended up someplace where she could stop for a minute and let the fight-or-flight adrenaline bleed off and her system settle.

  Funny, that’s all she wanted now. The meaning of her entire life compressed into a single desire. She just wanted to feel safe again. She didn’t want to be chased, she didn’t want to listen for the sound of running feet or gunshots behind her, she didn’t want to look over her shoulder.

  She no longer yearned for anything so impossible and abstract as to go home. She knew in her heart she’d be trapped in Baja until she died; she accepted that. She just didn’t want to have to run another step.

  But she did. Because Rafe had her hand in his and she realized she would have followed him anywhere. He and his cousin were the only people she could trust in all of this madness, the only ones who could provide her the safety she required.

  They’d risked their lives a half-dozen times in the past forty-eight hours to keep her safe. Or to keep her from Ernesto, anyway. Olivia instinctively knew that was the same thing.

  Rafe and Bobby could have hidden in those desert hills for weeks and never been found. They hadn’t needed to steal one of Ernesto’s Land Cruisers to drive her to La Paz. They hadn’t needed to be at the La Paz airport, sitting ducks for the police and Ernesto’s men. They hadn’t needed to dump over a taco trailer and steal another car and drive like lunatics so she would be safe. They could have faded into thin air. She’d seen them do it.

  But they hadn’t faded into thin air. They’d done everything they could to keep her alive. Criminals or not, she wouldn’t leave them now for the world. Her survival instincts had thoroughly overridden her common sense.

  They stopped running when they hit the streets, and Rafe and Bobby tucked their weapons back into their waistbands. The three of them tried to blend in with the strolling tourists and the busy townspeople. They ducked through stores, going in the front, heading out the back, doing everything they could to disappear.

  It was not enough, Rafe knew. He caught a glimpse of one of the Land Cruisers as it slowly patrolled a side street, the driver and passengers—not Cervantes this time—squinting intently into the faces of passing pedestrians.

  Rafe stopped dead at a shop window, when the vehicle turned onto the street where they were walking. He watched the reflection of the cruiser as it slipped past, keeping his body between Olivia and the street. Bobby had gone into a crouch the instant Rafe had stopped, ducking his head, blending into the scene. Olivia stood frozen with dread, expecting any moment to feel Rafael’s big body shudder at her back as a bullet ripped through him.

  “Where’s Cervantes?” Rafe muttered, as the vehicle turned down the next cross street.

  Bobby rose casually, shrugged.

  Rafe pushed his fingers through his hair. “We’ll have to hole up again.”

  Bobby sucked on his teeth. “Day after tomorrow’s the nineteenth,” he said enigmatically.

  “I know what day it is, vato.”

  “What does the date matter?” Olivia asked, her voice trembling. She wanted to go again, get out of the open, but neither man was making any move. So she stayed still, trapped between Rafe and the storefront, while he and Bobby talked to each other without taking their eyes off the reflection of the street.

  “We have to be back in Aldea Viejo before the nineteenth,” Bobby said. “We’re intercepting a shipment.”

  “You know,” Rafe said in disgust, “why don’t you just tell her the national soccer scores while you’re at it?”

  Olivia had turned her head, was staring at him in horror. “You’d go back? For a shipment of drugs, you’d risk your life?”

  “That’s what I do, princesa.”

  “Oh, my God.” She looked at him for a moment more, then broke from his grasp and began walking, alone, down the street.

  She didn’t finish a third step before she was whirled back around to face him. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “I’m going to the police.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I am, Rafael. You two are obviously too stupid to protect yourselves, much less me. I’m going to the police. I can’t imagine every single one of them knows and cooperates with Ernesto.” She tried, unsuccessfully, to wrench her arm from his grasp. “I’m sure I’ll be safer there than I am with you two lunatics,” she said as patiently as her roiling stomach and her pounding heart would allow. “I’ll just give them your description and your last known whereabouts, and they’ll come by and arrest you and save your stupid lives for you.”

  “Olivia, you’re not going to the police,” he said, his expression stern. “And I am not going to stand here on the street with you and argue about it.”

  “No, honestly.” She tried to convince him. “You’ll be safer in jail. You’re obviously not well.”

  “Olivia.”

  “Let me go, Rafael.”

  “No.”

  “Let me go, or I will start to scream. That will undoubtedly bring both the police and Ernesto’s goons to the scene in short order. We’ll let everyone just shoot it out here on the street, and whoever wins gets the drug shipment and the Land Cruisers and whatever’s behind door number three!”

  Rafe began tugging her in his wake again. “You won’t scream, Olivia. You never scream.” It was one of the many things he’d come to admire. Along with her stubbornness. He knew the little princess would go to the local police and rat them out. She’d think she’d be saving their lives, but all she’d accomplish would be to ruin years’ worth of good DEA undercover work. He wasn’t letting her near a police station, here or anywhere else, until this thing went down.

  He’d just have to really kidnap her this time.

  She twisted her wrist, giving herself a skin burn. “Let me go,” she warned through her teeth. They passed Bobby, who was smiling fatuously. Olivia bared her teeth at him. “I’m screaming, Rafael. I’m screaming.”

  He didn’t even turn around. “You’re not stupid, Olivia. You won’t scream.”

  Olivia filled her lungs to capacity. The piercing sound that came from that pretty little bow of a mouth shocked all three of them, and made several people on the street jump in surprise.

  Rafe jerked her body close to his and clamped his hand roughly over her mouth, cutting off the scream. He put his nose to hers. “You’re going to get us all killed,” he hissed ferociously. “I trust you not to be so stupid, Olivia, and then you do something like this. It’s very disappointing.”

  “Very disappointing,” Bobby murmured in agreement from his perpetual place at her back.

  “Now, you have two choices,” Rafe continued, while Olivia stared at him from above his hand. “I can clip you on the jaw right now and carry you unconscious in that orange dress through the streets of La Paz, thereby ensuring all three of us end up as shark food. Or I can let go, and you can behave like a sensible adult, and we can try and get out of here in one piece.”

  “Clip her on the jaw,” Bobby said helpfully.

  Rafe ignored his cousin. “Olivia?”

  “Mmnnph,” Olivia replied.

  “Sensible adult?”

  She nodded.

  “She could be lying, Rafe,” Bobby said. “I say you clip
her on the jaw, anyway.”

  Olivia rolled her eyes, trying to see Bobby so she could glower at him. Rafe glanced over her shoulder at his cousin and swore softly.

  “I’m counting on you, Olivia,” he said, and let go of her mouth. He kissed her swiftly, firmly. Then kissed her again, for good measure and because she looked so scared. “It’s okay, mi’ja,” he said softly, and he pulled her into a tiny grocery that smelled of fresh fish and sweet bread. “I am not without friends in this town. All I need is a telephone.”

  Fifteen minutes after Rafe used the store owner’s phone, a tiny hatchback pulled to the curb in front of the store.

  Bobby, at the window, checked out the street. “Okay, let’s go.”

  Bobby and Olivia scrambled into the back seat, and Rafe sat next to the driver. Not a word was exchanged as the car threaded through the streets. Olivia didn’t even bother to look out the window. It really didn’t matter where they were going, anyway. Rafe and Bobby were going back to Aldea Viejo for a drug shipment.

  After several minutes of silence, the driver looked at Rafe in disgust. “A taxicab?”

  Rafe shrugged, glancing in his side mirror to determine if they’d been picked up by either of Cervantes’s drivers. “It was all we had to work with.”

  The driver snorted. “And the taco trailer?”

  “That was a stroke of genius, I thought,” Bobby offered brightly from the back seat.

  “Did you? Then you deal with the man who owns it.”

  “I gave the guy a hundred dollars American to let me do it,” Bobby said indignantly, leaning forward in his seat. “He even helped me push it over.”

  “He is not the owner, idiot,” the driver said.

  Olivia stared at the back of his head. She wished she could see him. How in the world had he already found out about all this?

  “How’d they know we were in La Paz?” Rafe asked.

  The driver sniffed. “I don’t know, for sure.”

  “You’ve got a leak, amigo,” Bobby said.

  “Big news,” the driver said sourly. “Anyway, we found the Land Cruiser yesterday. We didn’t run it, but someone must have recognized it and called Aldea Viejo.”

  “If he didn’t drive those damn conspicuous monsters,” Bobby said, flopping back onto the seat in annoyance. “Everyone knows them.”

  “Yeah, that’s what’s been wrong with this whole deal. You’ve made every right decision—it’s the Land Cruiser’s fault you’ve almost been caught a dozen times,” the driver said scornfully. “Starting with you, vato,” he said to Rafe. “Kidnapping a female American marine biologist was a great plan.”

  “I’m not a marine biologist,” Olivia said dully.

  “I didn’t kidnap her, she kidnapped me. And she’s an oceanographer,” Rafe added.

  The driver shook his head. “Whatever. I got a report from the party, Camayo. Apparently it looked very much like you had a gun to her head.”

  “I wouldn’t have shot her,” Rafe said evenly. “Besides, if you guys had been able to find anything out from the inside, I wouldn’t have had to go in.”

  The driver glanced over at him. “I can’t believe you got nabbed. What a loser.”

  If Olivia didn’t know better, she would have sworn Rafe looked embarrassed. “Mitigating factors,” he mumbled.

  “Oh, my God,” Olivia said softly.

  They ignored her. “What have you got for us?” Rafe asked.

  “You know, you want the damn moon.”

  “No. I want a boat. That should be a hell of a lot easier to get.”

  “Well, I got you a boat.”

  “Good. We can get back to Aldea Viejo by tomorrow afternoon. When’s the shipment scheduled on Tuesday?”

  “Who knows? According to our source, the boat’s leaving the mainland today. Barring bad weather, that could put him in at Aldea Viejo any time after sunrise Tuesday.”

  Olivia huffed out an astonished breath. Of course, she thought. Of course. How could she have been so blind?

  “You can hold Dr. Galpas in La Paz until Wednesday?”

  “I don’t know why you don’t want her going out on the next plane. Seems it would be a hell of a lot easier on everyone involved if she was back home safe and sound in the States.”

  “Not if Cervantes has contacted his people in San Diego,” Rafe argued. This was a point he would not concede under any circumstances. Until Cervantes was actually facedown in the Aldea Viejo sand with handcuffs on his wrists and Rafe’s foot on his neck, Rafe wanted to know exactly where Olivia Galpas was.

  “If she makes a fuss, she can cause a lot of problems for us, Rafael,” the driver said quietly, glancing suspiciously back at Olivia. “We’re not technically supposed to hold American women in Baja against their will.”

  “Just do it,” Rafe said shortly. “She’s liable to blow this whole thing for us if you don’t.”

  Olivia started to nod to herself. She caught Bobby’s eye. He had the audacity to smile knowingly at her. Oh, she was going to murder them both. With her bare hands.

  “Fine, but if I get fired, I expect you two to put in a word for me with—”

  “Will you shut up?” Rafe snapped. He shook his head. “I swear, no one can keep their mouths shut anymore,” he muttered to himself.

  Except you, Olivia thought, furious, shaken.

  She spent the rest of the trip to the Sea of Cortéz—and she knew they were heading in that direction, she could practically feel it in her bones—trying to calm down. It would be easier to kill them, she thought, if she kept a cool head.

  The driver pulled into a dirt parking lot that abutted the sea. One dingy dock jutted irresolutely into the calm waters of the gulf. Tied to the dock was a fishing boat Rafe wouldn’t have trusted to take him across the orca tank at Sea World.

  He got out of the car and walked down to the boat, carefully avoiding gaps in the disintegrating dock, through which he could see chunks of seawater. Olivia, Bobby and the driver followed.

  “Very nice,” he said.

  “You called me half an hour ago. If it has fuel and starts on the first try, count yourself lucky, vato.”

  Olivia looked at the driver for the first time. He was a smaller man than either Bobby or Rafe, with a wildly thick head of hair and an unscrupulous air about him. He looked as though he’d fleece his own mother and laugh while he was doing it.

  Just like Rafael. Just like Bobby.

  Olivia tipped her head back and took a deep breath of ocean air. It was so obvious. She had been unforgivably obtuse.

  “I guess we don’t have much choice,” Rafael was saying. “But I’m going to remember this, Manny.”

  “Yeah, and I’m going to remember you dumping the lady marine biologist on me,” Manny replied.

  “I am not a marine biologist,” Olivia said evenly. The three men looked over at her in surprise, as though they had forgotten for a moment that she was there. She pinned Rafael with a look. She hoped she hid the hurt she felt, but didn’t have much confidence. It didn’t matter, she supposed. “In fact, I’m no more a marine biologist than you are all drug runners.”

  The driver of the little hatchback rolled his eyes dramatically. “Wonderful. Now she’s pissed. That’ll make this whole thing easier.”

  “Shut up, Manny,” Rafe said sharply.

  Bobby, for once, did not smile at her, and Olivia was grateful. She didn’t think she would have been able to combat both Rafe’s furious scowl and Bobby’s silly grin at the same time. She ignored Manny completely as he paced the dock in short bursts, swearing and wondering aloud how much trouble she was going to give him.

  “How could you?” she whispered.

  She might as well have screamed it, Rafe thought. The accusation went through him like a knife.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked, his face expressionless.

  She stared at him, her eyes dry, her heart pounding a hole through her chest. “You can stand there, after everything, and ask me
that?”

  Rafe resisted the urge to drop his gaze. “I’m just trying to establish what it is you’re saying, Olivia,” he said calmly.

  She watched him for a moment, then smiled thinly. “You have no soul, señor. At least, I was right about that.”

  Bobby grabbed Manny as he paced. “Come on.”

  “What? I’m not getting on that boat.”

  “Neither am I until you prove it seaworthy, Manuel, my friend,” Bobby said, and practically tossed the smaller man on board.

  Rafe and Olivia never broke eye contact. “You’re a cop,” she said, her voice flat, her eyes flat.

  Rafe didn’t acknowledge the statement. “You were better off not knowing,” he said.

  “No, you were better off with me not knowing.”

  “It would have put the entire operation in jeopardy.”

  Olivia squeezed her eyes shut. “And you couldn’t have that.”

  “I couldn’t have that,” he insisted. “Bobby and I have been planning this sting on Cervantes for over a year. We’ve been in Baja since before Christmas. There are eight other DEA guys down here, as well as Manuel and a dozen Mexican federales working with the agency. You don’t know how important this is.”

  “How would I have jeopardized all that?”

  “Come on, Olivia. Have you forgotten all those evening walks you and Cervantes took together? How the hell did I know how close you were getting?”

  “Were you watching me at my camp?” She thought she might be sick.

  “No.”

  “Then how did you know about the walks?”

  “We have four guys inside his organization. When he started hanging around your camp at the beach, they let us know.”

  “That’s how you knew my name,” she breathed. Oh, so many things made sense now.

  Rafe nodded tersely. “I had you checked out.”

  “Lovely.” She gritted her teeth. “If you had me checked out, you knew who I was. You knew I would never have been involved in whatever it is that Ernesto does.”