“You lied to me on the boat.”
“Yes, I did.”
“You love me.”
Rafe couldn’t have denied it to save either of their lives. “Yes, Olivia. I do.”
Chapter 14
R
afe put Olivia in the front of the closest Land Cruiser and shut the door. Then he walked to Bobby and Cervantes.
He suspected the Mexican
federales
were safely in control of their targets—Bobby would never have been able to sneak up on Cervantes and things would have been much noisier, and much bloodier, if they hadn’t been—but Rafe didn’t want to take a single additional chance with Olivia. Letting her stay in her little tent on the beach three weeks ago had been chance enough. Kissing her in Cervantes’s bedroom, dragging her through the desert, leaving her on the fishing boat with Manny—all were chances he should never have taken with Olivia’s life. He was almost as furious with himself as he was with Cervantes.
Bobby was wearing his fiercest frown, as Rafe approached the pair on the sand. “Did you see the marks on her face?”
Rafe nodded grimly. “Get him on his feet.”
Bobby yanked Cervantes up by his collar. Rafe took a step forward, using the momentum of his stride to put extra power behind the backhand.
Cervantes staggered and would have fallen but for Bobby holding a handful of khaki at the back of his shirt.
“You chased her,” Rafe ground out. He swung again, using his left hand this time. He wanted the bruises to match the ones on Olivia. “And you hurt her.”
He stepped close enough that his nose was nearly touching the sweating, bleeding snout of his lifelong enemy. He looked deeply into the eyes of the man who’d killed his brother so many years ago.
“I should kill you where you stand for those things, Cervantes.” Rafe smiled thinly. “But I made a pact many years ago, to make sure you suffered before you died, you miserable, murdering son of a bitch. And I will do everything in my power as a United States drug agent to ensure that happens.
“You are going to spend the rest of your life in a Mexican prison,
amigo.
For the possession of illegal narcotics with intent to transport across international borders and for the murder of Manuel Gomez Arrieta, an officer of the La Paz City Police of Baja California, Mexico.”
Rafe took Cervantes’s face in his hand. He dug his thumb and index finger into the hollows of the formerly handsome man’s elegantly high cheekbones. “And if you ever do find yourself on the outside again, I will have you extradited, tried and lethally injected for the murder of my brother, George Camayo.” He felt the print of teeth on the pad of his thumb, and blood began to trickle from Cervantes’s distorted mouth.
One of the
federales
came out of the dunes, shoving a handcuffed, khaki-clad man in front of him. Another reappeared from behind the cruiser that had brought Olivia in, with his own handcuffed prisoner. One by one, a dozen more
federales
came in from the dunes, each with one of Cervantes’s men. Rafe didn’t recognize most of them.
He leaned over and snagged Olivia’s wrist restraints from the sand. He handed them to Bobby, who roughly secured their captive.
Rafe turned to the first Mexican officer who made it to the beach. “I’ll be escorting the prisoners to La Paz.”
“Sí, señor.”
“I want Dr. Galpas to be able to leave the country. Call your people and arrange a plane out of Loreto.”
“Sí, señor.”
Rafe looked around. “Round up anyone still on the beach, and call in your men to secure the house in Aldea Viejo and seize the computer system and any records.” He gave Cervantes a withering glance. “You’re one of the riffraff now, Ernesto. Just like the rest of us.”
He left his enemy bleeding, and walked back to Olivia. She was seated sideways on the front seat of the cruiser. Her little feet, in those damn impractical sandals, were perched on the bottom of the door frame.
“I’m escorting Cervantes in to La Paz,” he told her briskly.
“I want to see for myself that he’s safely in a cell before I file a report. Bobby will take you to Loreto. There’s a plane waiting for you there.”
Olivia watched Rafael carefully. His face was weary, she thought, but expressionless. She could see grains of sand clinging to his thickening beard and to the shallow frown lines around his eyes. She wanted to blow them off with pursed lips, and then kiss him until that look of death eased from his hard and handsome face.
“All right.”
Rafe ran a hand roughly over his chin, avoiding her eyes. Cervantes was even now being driven away in the back of one of his own Land Cruisers, but Rafe felt the worst of the terrible day was yet to come. He still had to say goodbye, again, to Olivia.
“You’ll have to come back to Mexico to testify, of course. About Manny.”
Olivia battled back the pain in her chest when she thought of Manny. She knew perfectly well that Cervantes would have killed them both whether she’d beached the boat and taken off or not, but she still felt sick at the thought that she’d been in any way responsible for his death.
“I know,” she said. “I will be happy to.”
“But that won’t be for a while. Considering everything, the Mexican government isn’t going to give you any trouble about leaving for the States right away. I’ll call as soon as I get back to Aldea Viejo, make sure the feds have cut through the red tape.”
“Okay.”
She was being awfully calm. “Are you all right?” he asked, searching her face for the first time.
Olivia smiled weakly. “Don’t I look all right?” Her horrible orange dress was in shreds, her face was bruised in every place it was not sunburned, scratched or sand scoured. Her hair was one wicked tangle from the roots to the ends.
Rafe thought, as he always had, that she was the most beautiful woman in the world.
“You look fine. You might want to get Bobby to buy you something to wear home, though.”
Olivia looked down. “Yes, this will all be impossible enough to explain without showing up looking like a war refugee.”
He wanted to kiss her goodbye, tell her…what? Nothing. He’d said everything that morning. “All right, then,” he said awkwardly.
She lifted her head, slaying him with a single look from those dark eyes. “Rafael?”
“I’ve got to get going,” he said impatiently.
Before I lose it altogether.
“I know you do.”
He leaned forward, kissed her lightly on her poor cheek. “Goodbye, Olivia.”
She twisted her fist into his shirtfront. “Don’t say goodbye to me like that, Rafael.”
“I have to.”
“Why?” she demanded. She’d been through hell over the past several days, but nothing had hurt her as this did. She was willing to throw her considerable Galpas pride down a rat hole, if only she could know why he was doing this.
“This is not the time to discuss it.”
“Rafael, you just saved my life. You walked up to a man who would have liked nothing more than to put a bullet in your brain, just to save my life. I have been chased halfway across Baja today—in these damn sandals, I might add—and held at gunpoint. You’ve told me you were just using me for sex, then admitted, under duress, that you lied about that.”
She took a deep breath. “I am leaving for Loreto and a plane back to San Diego. I don’t know where you live, I don’t know your phone number, I don’t know anything about your life there. I have this hollow feeling in my stomach that tells me if we don’t talk about this now, I may never see you again. And if I have to go the rest of my life never seeing you again, Rafael, I think it may do me in in a way far more painful and slow than anything Ernesto Cervantes could have dreamed up.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Then tell me why you’re saying goodbye to me as if you’ll never see me again.”
“I won’t see you again, Olivia.”
Olivia felt a sting at the back of her eyes. It didn’t help at all that Rafael looked even more likely to burst into tears than she did.
“Why?” she asked softly. “Are you married? Are you terminally ill? Are you a priest?”
Rafe chuckled damply. She could make him laugh even when his life was being ripped out from under him. “I’m not any of those things. Definitely not a priest.”
She shook him by the shirt she still had clutched in her hand. “I’m not any of those things, either.”
He met her eyes, tamped down his pride and worked up his courage. “No. You’re a scientist.”
Olivia knew this was important, but could not begin to fathom why. “So?”
“Where were you born, Olivia?”
“Where? In San Diego.”
“I mean, where?”
“You mean, what hospital?” She shook her head. “Coronado, I think.”
That figured.
“I was born at home, in my parents’ bed. The last of nine children.”
She narrowed her eyes. “We all have big families, Rafael. It was our parents’ generation.”
“I didn’t have my own pair of shoes, or a shirt, or even underwear that hadn’t been worn by somebody else—until I was thirteen.”
“Rafael.”
“I slept with my brothers in a bed my mother dragged home from the dump.”
“Okay.”
“I worked in the avocado groves, Olivia, with the rats. I’ve slept in places you wouldn’t let your dog lie down in. I’ve eaten things that crawl across the ground to fill my empty belly. My parents came to this country by swimming the canals. They’re wetbacks, Olivia. Have you ever heard that expression? They don’t speak English even after thirty years in the United States. Half my brothers and sisters come to dinner with dirt under their fingernails. All my friends are either cops or homeboys. I am the youngest son of illegal immigrants, and I’ve lived the life that entails.”
Olivia shook her head in warning. “I will never forgive you if you say this, Rafael. Please be very careful.”
“You and I met under intense circumstances. They taught us about this kind of relationship in the Academy.”
They’d never told him how he would feel, however. Or he’d never have joined up at all. “We have nothing in common. You are a Galpas from San Diego. I’m a barefoot nobody from Lakeside.”
Olivia slowly uncurled her fist from his shirt, let it drop into her lap. “And I’m too good for you,” she said, aghast.
Rafe smiled sadly. “You’re too good for anyone, Olivia,” he said.
“I could hate you for saying this to me.”
Rafe swallowed thickly. “You’d hate me even more after you realized I didn’t know anything about the art world or which fork is for fish. Or how to make more than a drug agent’s salary to support my wife and children.”
“Which fork is for fish?” She bit down hard on her bottom lip. “God, I do hate you for this,” she whispered.
“I know. But it’ll be easier for both of us to end this now.”
“Well, by all means make this easy on me, Rafael. After all, I am a
princesa.
Shallow and weak and greedy.”
“No.”
Olivia nodded her head. “Oh, yes. That’s what you mean. You Neanderthal.”
“I don’t mean that!”
She shoved him as hard as she could away from the vehicle. “Get away from me.”
“Olivia. You have to understand. It’s romantic to think we can live happily ever after. But women like you live happily ever after with men who have condos in La Jolla, not with greasers from the
barrio.
”
“That’s what you are? A greaser from the
barrio?
” She swung her arms to indicate the beach, empty now except for Bobby and two of the Mexican federal agents, who were arranging transport of the cocaine to La Paz as evidence. “You did all this? You planned this operation for twenty years and despite every monkey wrench thrown into the works, pulled it off and saved my life at the same time?”
“That’s my job,” he said tightly. “I never said I didn’t know how to work.”
She jumped from the seat of the cruiser and stalked him. “Well, oceanography is my job. If I had to get a PhD after my name in order to do my job, and those three little initials make you feel like less than the man I know you are, them’s the breaks. Too bad for me.” She poked him in the chest. “Too bad for you.
“You’re a snob,” she continued furiously. “You will stand there and break my heart and your own rather than face a world that scares you. You stomp on scorpions without a blink, you rescue women and shoot at bad guys and do all kinds of things that make me want to throw up—but you’re afraid of me. You’re a coward, Rafael Camayo, and I was wrong about being in love with you.”
He grabbed her wrists, pulled her up short. “Olivia,” he snapped. “Stop it.” If she said it out loud, if she said she loved him, he couldn’t bear it.
“I was wrong,” she said, her voice catching on the lie. She was suddenly grateful for the dehydration she was suffering. This was going to be much more believable if she didn’t start weeping all over him. She met his dark eyes with her own. “Because I could never love a coward.”
He didn’t eat, he didn’t sleep, he could barely work.
Bobby looked him over as they rode across the border from El Centro into Mexicali.
“You do understand you’re going to kill yourself acting like such a
tonto,
” he said sharply.
Rafe grunted absently. “Look at that map again. Where the hell are we supposed to meet this informant guy?”
“Tonto,”
Bobby said disgustedly, and yanked out a map from under the passenger seat.
“I’m not a fool,” Rafe muttered.
“Really? You act like you’re perpetually chewing on broken glass and you’ve lost ten pounds you can’t afford to lose. For God’s sake, it’s been almost a month since you packed her off with me to Loreto, looking like she could barely keep from curling into a little ball and throwing herself out the window.”
“Will you stop saying stuff like that!”
“Will you stop acting like such a
tonto?
”
“Call me that again,
primo,
” Rafe said through his teeth, “and you’ll be sorry.”
“I’m already sorry. I’m sorry I’m even related to you.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It means, if we were just partners, I could go home at the end of the day and forget your pitiful face and your miserable disposition. But as it is, I have your sisters calling me every other night, asking me if I know what the hell’s wrong with you. And your mother called my mother last week to see if she knew why you’ve been skipping Sunday dinners at the house.”