“Cat got your tongue?”
“You killed that man in cold blood.”
“Ah, no. I did not. I merely shot an escaping fugitive, after warning him to stop. I am the sheriff of this district, Olivia, and I had reason to believe this man was a drug runner. I saw him in the company of two known narcotics smugglers only two days ago, on the same boat.” He smiled, clucked his tongue. “As I did you, Olivia. You should be more careful of the company you keep.”
Olivia shook her head derisively, summoned up her best Rafael sneer. “Like you?”
Cervantes cocked his head, gave Olivia a regretful look. “Ah, but you had your chance,
querida.
”
“I would rather keep company with the scorpions. You’re a monster.”
He backhanded her casually. Olivia saw stars, tasted blood. “I’m a businessman,” he said pleasantly enough. “You have caused me no end of embarrassment, Olivia. You ruined my party, and I had to make explanations to everyone.”
Her eyes flashed. “I’d like to kick in your capped teeth, Cervantes.”
He hit her again. She almost went down with that one, but steadied herself defiantly. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing her drop to her knees.
“I don’t have time to trade insults with you, Olivia.” He motioned the men behind him forward with the barrel of his gun. “Put her back in the car. We’ll have to take her back to the house with us.”
“Why? Are you worried that if you stay any longer, Rafael will come and steal your poison out from under your nose, as he has for months now?”
Cervantes laughed, but his face flushed darkly and Olivia could see his nonchalance was forced. “So, he told you about that, did he?”
“That you are a drug smuggler and a killer? Yes.” Olivia smiled slowly, narrowed her eyes. “He told me many things,” she said. “He is my lover.”
Cervantes’s red face turned purple. He spat a filthy name at her, a name her brothers would have beaten him for speaking, but Olivia only laughed.
“All the time you were courting me with those long, boring speeches about wine and art, I was with him,” she lied, taunting him. “Since the very beginning.”
“You put yourself in peril, woman,” Cervantes bit out.
“No, Ernesto, you have put me in peril. You and your lies and your fraudulent life.” She gave him a disgusted once-over. “You pretend to be a man of family and education, but you are nothing but a common, low criminal, as your father was before you.”
She was pulling the tail of the shark, she knew, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. She knew perfectly well that he was going to kill her, and she was not about to go down like a mewling miss.
The shark only grew calmer, the more she yanked, however. He was looking at her, considering her now. Olivia felt a trickle of dread slip down her spine.
“Lovers?” He pulled his pistol from the holster at his hip, cocked it.
Olivia held her breath.
Cervantes smiled. “Lovers?”
His gun hand twitched. Olivia knew he wanted to kill her.
But he wasn’t going to. Not just yet. Because of her brash words, she was to be used as bait to lure Rafael into a trap, she realized with a sudden sick emptiness in the pit of her stomach.
Well, she assured herself, whatever Cervantes’s plan was, it wouldn’t work. She almost looked forward to seeing his battered face when he realized she was no better at being bait than she was at being the ideal wife-to-be of the local sheriff.
Rafael would never compromise himself or his operation for her. She was simply a woman he’d had sex with—and, judging from his amazing skill in that particular area, one of many. But Cervantes was the man who’d killed Rafe’s brother, the man he’d dedicated his entire life to bringing to justice.
Olivia knew Rafael wouldn’t choose to save her at the risk of losing Cervantes. Never. Never.
Cervantes put his hand in her tangled hair, yanked her around so that her back was pressed against his chest.
“Come out,
cabrón,
” he shouted in a enticing, mocking voice that sent goose bumps down Olivia’s arms.
Olivia smiled bitterly, triumphantly. “It won’t work.”
Cervantes yanked brutally on her hair. “We’ll see.” He ground the barrel of the pistol to her temple and yelled again, “Are you out there,
cabrón?
”
There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of the surf. Olivia focused on that. She was glad, actually, that the sound of the ocean would be the last she ever heard.
“I’ll kill her where she stands,” Cervantes yelled.
Olivia closed her eyes. Odd that at the last moment of her life, it would be Rafael’s face she would see—not her mother’s or her father’s, faces she’d known a lifetime. His face. And it was smiling. How very odd.
“I’m here.”
Olivia’s eyes snapped open. She stared at Rafe as he walked down the dune, his hands in the air. A sob wrenched from her throat. She hadn’t wept when she thought she was going to die, but the sight of Rafael walking across the dunes made her cry out in agony.
Oh, she didn’t want to die. She was terribly afraid and she didn’t want to die. But more than that, she didn’t want Rafe to die.
“Don’t,” she screamed in English.
Cervantes yanked her hair again until her chin pointed to the sky. “Shut up,” he said in her ear. He watched Rafe slip on his heels down a sand hill. “Stop where you are. Lift up your shirt.”
Rafe stood, yanked his shirt up around his chest. Olivia saw that his bruises had turned a sickly yellow color over the past two days.
“Turn around.”
Rafe pivoted slowly, letting Cervantes see that he carried no weapon.
“Let her go, Cervantes,” he said ominously. “You want me, you got me.”
“Don’t do it,” she said, again in English. “He’s going to kill me, anyway. I saw him kill Manuel. Don’t, Rafael.”
“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 her, 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?
”