On the Loose Read online

  “Jewel, baby?” he asked.

  “Yeah, boss?”

  From underneath the steering wheel, he tapped a couple of wires together, and got nothing.

  “Why is it again that you left me?” he asked.

  Jesus. He used to be so good at this, one of the best.

  True, the car was a piece of junk, a cheap-ass four-banger with rusted-out quarter panels and a hole in the floorboards—but it wasn’t like they’d had a whole lot of options after the Mercedes had gone up in a flaming ball of twisted metal and smoking tires, Jewel’s car, a pearl gray 380 SL, and oh, hell, yeah, he knew it was going to show up on her expense account.

  The girl was ruthless.

  “Because you’re a head case.”

  A ruthless, brutally honest bitch—that was why he loved her.

  He fished around for another wire.

  But did he still love her like that? Hell, he’d been asking himself that question since she’d walked out of his bedroom door for the last time, two years ago, and he still didn’t know. The day she’d gotten married to what’s-his-name, and that would have been one year, eleven months, and two weeks ago—and yeah, that had been some kind of clue—anyway, that day, he’d thought he’d known the answer—no. Bon voyage, baby, and all that.

  A short burst of gunfire pop-popped into the alley, and Jewel returned fire, precision fire, raising her pistol and squeezing off two rounds aimed toward the roofline on the south side.

  A guy fell off the building and landed in a bloody pile in the alley, less than two meters from the car. One solid center-chest hit, and from the looks of what Campos could see, or rather what he couldn’t see, like the back of the guy’s skull, a head shot. God, she was good—but the bad guys were catching up.

  He touched another set of wires, and got another big nothing.

  Dammit.

  Sure, bon voyage, that’s what it had been on her wedding day, but when he was stretched out under a steering column, and she was in the passenger seat, arranged for maximum tactical advantage, and he could see up her skirt—well, it was times like those when he asked himself if he still loved her. And depending on how far he could see up her skirt, the answer could be either yes or no.

  Today was a yes.

  “Red lace panties?”

  “Fuck you.”

  He grinned. He loved her. It was a definite yes.

  “So how you doing, boss?”

  “Bleeding, but not bleeding out.” Not in this rat-infested alley, not in this flea-bitten town, not today. He’d gotten trimmed, that was all, a round catching him across the meaty part of his right thigh during their great escape from a lunchtime drug deal gone bad. The wound burned, but somehow not quite as badly as his brain.

  Yeah, his brain was on fucking fire. Some two-bit chingaletos had jacked the cocaine shipment he’d been delivering to Exaltación’s number-one drug lord, a player named Ray Gonzalez. They’d stolen the damn shit right out from under him and then come after him for good measure—and baby, this week, on this deal, that was a death warrant. Nobody screwed with Alejandro Campos’s cocaine deals except Alejandro Campos.

  Christ, the drug trade was so damned complicated these days. Too many players, too much blow, too many people with their fingers in the cocaine pie, and too many people fucking up.

  The next ignition wire he tapped against the two he’d already twisted together gave him a spark—hot damn. The motor groaned, and whined, and finally turned over.

  It was the most pitiful excuse for a getaway, and a getaway car, he’d ever been involved with—he just hoped like hell that it worked. They were a hundred miles out of Barranquilla, and if he didn’t get Jewel home in one piece, what’s-his-name would probably write some really crappy poem about him and have it published in some really crappy academic journal.

  A poet. She’d left him for a fucking poet.

  Jesus. Women.

  He levered himself up into the driver’s seat and ignored the fact that he was sitting in a pool of his own blood. It was only a small pool, little more than a wet smear now that most of what he’d lost had soaked into the upholstery. Yes, sir, turning his favorite silk tie into a pressure bandage had been a brilliant idea.

  The car sputtered when he gave it a little gas, and he swore under his breath. “Come on, you inbred piece of shit. Don’t quit on me now.”

  Exaltación, Colombia, wasn’t that damn big, not so big that Gonzalez shouldn’t have better goddamn control of the streets, and not so big that it should have been such a goddamn big deal to get the fuck out of it.

  But he and Jewel were sucking air.

  He tried the gas again, and when the motor kept running, he jerked the car into gear.

  “Buckle up, baby, and reload.”

  “Buckle up?” She let out a short laugh and slammed a fresh magazine into her .45-caliber Colt. “We don’t have a driver’s side door, a back window, or half the dashboard, and you want me to buckle up? Christ, boss. I’m lucky to have a damn seat.” She grinned. “Buckle up. God, Campos, you were always good for a laugh.”

  And that was probably the last damn thing a guy wanted to hear, any guy. It was only one step above the utterly demoralizing “You’re finished? Already?” Which, admittedly, was a couple of dozen steps above “What’s the problem? Don’t you like me?”

  And yes, he’d been there a couple of times. Dammit.

  Once with her—but no guy got left because of an “equipment malfunction,” not when a woman loved him.

  So, yeah, that’s probably how it had been, with him being in love and her being in something else, like in it for the thrill of the game, because baby, the thrills in the game they played were razor sharp.

  “We have to stop meeting like this, boss.”

  Yeah, yeah, he knew it.

  “I mean it, Campos. It’s time for you to jump ship, cash in your chips, and say hasta la vista.”

  No, it wasn’t. He’d know when it was time.

  “But you won’t,” she said.

  Christ. Was she reading his mind? He hated it when she read his mind.

  He glanced over at her: “Jewel”—Joya Molara Gualterio, former U.S. Marine and Austin, Texas, high-school homecoming queen, long legs, long chestnut-colored hair, dark eyes, smart mouth, red business suit with a three-button jacket and a tight skirt.

  Hell. She was fucking a poet, and he was good for a laugh. Something wasn’t right with the world.

  Actually, a whole lot of things weren’t right with his world, beginning with these small-time hoods thinking they had something to gain by killing Alejandro Campos instead of doing the smart thing and letting him make good on his deal with Gonzalez. There was plenty of action to go around, always a way for everyone to get ahead.

  But nobody got ahead by going after Alejandro Campos. That was a strictly “good way to get fucked” move. He’d spent the last twelve years building the reputation that made it so.

  Twelve years, dammit.

  Twelve years to go from a street corner drug thug to a major mover with an estate in the Salvadoran highlands and the kind of entourage that was supposed to keep him out of rat-infested alleys.

  Not today, though. He hadn’t seen this disaster coming, and he sure as hell hadn’t expected to get fucking shot and bleed all over one of his best damn suits.

  Well, the street thugs had gotten all the blood they were going to get, and it was all soaked into the seat of the POS, the piece-of-shit four-banger.

  Yeah, it was a hundred land miles to Barranquilla, but only two to the coast and a go-fast boat running four 250 Mercs. He’d have Jewel back in what’s-his-name’s good keeping and be sitting in a Beech Baron, flying home to Morazán before Gonzalez’s staff finished cleaning up the mess that had started out as an elegant lunch with a little business on the side and ended with Mercedes flambé and a firefight in close quarters.

  He had a package arriving this evening, a package with his name on it, and he’d be damned if he missed the d
elivery.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Make it four sumo wrestlers, Smith thought, sitting next to Honey in the limo taking them to Howard Air Force Base, where they would board a C-130 to Ilopango. She wasn’t giving anything away, least of all the damn combination to the briefcase she’d honest to God handcuffed to her wrist. It was the only flaw in an otherwise flaw-less look. He didn’t know how she’d done it, honestly, he didn’t, but in the half an hour she’d had to get ready, she’d managed to turn herself from a bikinied bimbette into a Park Avenue princess. All her wild curls had disappeared into a sleek French twist, and all those wild curves had disappeared inside a sleeveless canary yellow dress so simple it almost defied description. There was nothing to it: a front, a back, and a very thin black patent leather belt with a very tiny black patent leather bow in the front. That was it. And yet it looked like it cost more than his car. And it fit her like a glove. Every breath she took registered with a subtle rise and fall of canary yellow material. Every move she made, the dress was right there with her—and so was the damn briefcase.

  For her own good, he was going to have to tell her the bad guys had a real quick way of dealing with wrists handcuffed to briefcases, and she didn’t know it, but she would freeze her butt off inside a C-130 in a sleeveless dress. Fortunately, being cold was one problem he could fix.

  “Our friend at the State Department did not give you a pair of handcuffs to wear,” he said. White Rook knew as well as anyone that in this part of the world, handcuffing yourself to anything worth stealing was a real good way to lose a hand, and the bad guys wouldn’t hesitate, not for a second, no matter how pretty her French manicure looked.

  “No,” she said, arranging the briefcase more comfortably next to her in the seat, tucking it up against her large canary yellow purse. “The cuffs are mine.”

  Great. Just what he wanted to hear. The woman who had written The Sorority Girl’s Guide to Self-Help Sex, the woman who had made the covers of the tabloids with headlines about shameless sorority girl sex games, owned a pair of handcuffs—and he’d let her slip through his fingers in record time.

  Yeah, about twelve hours, that’s how long she’d been in his care, a real hit-and-run hookup, and wasn’t that the way of it sometimes. Hell.

  Honey turned a page in the book she was reading and let out a sigh, one of many she’d given in to since they’d left the Blake. Something was all pent up inside her, that much was obvious, and it was probably something he needed to know, like maybe the truth of why she’d let herself be roped into this mission, or maybe exactly how much and what kind of trouble Sister Julia had gotten herself into, and what in the world Honey thought she could do to get Julia out of it.

  One thing Smith did know: The CIA didn’t give a damn about Julia Bakkert. The station chief at the U.S. Embassy here in Panama City, William Dobbs, had made that much clear when Smith had stopped by, per General Grant’s orders, and politely asked him what the fuck was going on. Covert mission gone bad, Dobbs had told him. A plane down. Time-sensitive, classified data floating around loose in the jungle. Guerrilla faction demanding money, weapons, and some woman named Honoria York-Lytton to deliver it all in forty-eight hours or less, or they were going to pack their toys and disappear, and the next time the Agency would see their documents would be on the international black market. Luckily, the Agency had enough dirt on Ms. York-Lytton to make her a malleable asset. Dirt, Dobbs had recalled, that included an unnamed covert operator under the command of General Richard Grant.

  Yeah. Dobbs’s opening salvo had pretty much summed up everything Honey had told him.

  Regardless, the chief of station had gone on, Rydell’s involvement had come from the other end of the chain, straight from someone high up at the State Department in Washington, D.C., very high up if they were overseeing the CIA’s involvement in the retrieval of their own data. Dobbs had been told to support the mission, and he had, arranging transportation and personnel from Panama City to Ilopango, and from Ilopango to Morazán, and negotiating political expediency in San Salvador, a lot of very expensive political expediency, considering where the weapons were going. In return, Dobbs had been promised that Grant’s operator could be counted on to deal with the rebels, retrieve the diplomatic pouch, and recover a 2GB flash drive concealed in the fuselage of the downed Cessna. The Catholic nun connection was purely peripheral and should in no way compromise Rydell’s or Ms. York-Lytton’s primary objective—as a matter of fact, if any part of the mission failed, Rydell’s involvement would be traced back to the State Department, not the CIA, so their meeting was strictly off the books. Brett Jenkins should have briefed him. As a matter of fact, as far as Dobbs was concerned, Jenkins had briefed him, and thank you very much for stopping by.

  To his credit, Dobbs had produced current intel on the CNL, and current imagery of northern El Salvador, specifically of Morazán Province, and most specifically of the probable plane crash sites. The analysts had pinpointed two, both within a few kilometers of the CNL’s camp on the Torola River.

  The pilot couldn’t have picked a worse place to bury his Cessna.

  Next to Smith in the limo, Honey let out another barely audible sigh, and it occurred to him she might be simply flat-out scared, and if she was, he needed to know it, and if she was, sitting next to him being closemouthed and stony-faced probably wasn’t helping. Conversation might ease some of her stress, and sure, he had just the thing for openers.

  “I came across the Ocean magazine you were talking about, the one with you on the cover.” The one with her on the cover re-creating the famous photograph of Marilyn Monroe standing over a grate in the sidewalk with her skirt flying up, the back issue he’d had to buy off some Internet magazine trader in Hell-and-Gone, New Jersey, and pay an outrageous amount of money to get. Yeah, that one.

  She’d told him about it the night they’d met in San Luis, and after getting home and spending the following two days thinking about her pretty much nonstop, he’d gone on a mission to find it, alone, bypassing Skeeter, who was so damn good at finding everything anyone at Steele Street wanted. Some things a guy needed to keep to himself, like chasing millionaire heiresses to ground, millionaire heiresses he didn’t have a chance of landing.

  But hell, it couldn’t hurt to know more about her—or so he’d thought.

  “The article was interesting, very well done.” For a cupcake extravaganza.

  Honey slanted a glance up at him from her book. “I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

  Yeah, enjoyed it—not quite.

  “Are you still involved with a lot of charity organizations?” Her list of good deeds had taken up a good third of the interview, and he’d been impressed. Good deeds and an overwhelming net worth were a natural combination, but still commendable, even if, every now and then, those good deeds ended in arrest and front-page scandal.

  It happened. He wasn’t going to hold it against her, but he’d definitely started to understand why someone with newly found saintly inclinations, like her sister, preferred to keep their distance from the family.

  And then, after scandalous good deeds and newspaper headlining arrests, there had been the rest of the interview, the other two thirds, the bulk of it, which had given him plenty of pause and way too much to think about, and none of it really any of his damn business.

  “A few,” Honey said, turning partly toward him, a note of curiosity in her voice—rightly so. Idle chitchat wasn’t Smith’s strong point, and if she remembered anything about him—which he had good reason to doubt—she’d remember that, but he didn’t have a lot to work with here, at least nothing of substance. The article had been a fluff piece, all fluff. Apparently, she was the queen of it. There hadn’t been a hard fact in it anywhere, because there were no hard facts in her life, none that he’d been able to find anyway, and that had been bugging the crap out of him, the fluff and the two thirds of the interview devoted to her famous boyfriend.

  Two fricking thirds of a two-page article, more column
inches than Ocean had given “The New State of Lingerie,” which apparently was Alabama, and a “refreshingly retro” style created by a designer working out of her shop in Mobile—’Bama Mama Brassieres. The designer and her wares were all the rage, and sure, he could dig it. He liked bows on bras, especially if they untied. And ’Bama Mama’s did.

  “And I didn’t know you’d had a job—once.” Smith let the last word drop with a little more weight than he’d intended, and being a quick girl, Honey picked up on it immediately.

  “Don’t bother to disapprove of me, Mr. Rydell,” she said, turning back to her book. “I’m simply doing the best I can with what I’ve got.”

  Tough work, but he guessed somebody had to do it.

  “How many more times are you going to call me Mr. Rydell?”

  “As many times as I need to.” She snapped another page over in her book.

  Fair enough.

  He rearranged himself in his seat and wished he’d eaten a bigger damn breakfast on his last damn flight. It was a long way to El Salvador.

  “Look, Mr. Rydell,” she started in again, turning to face him, her tone slightly exasperated. “Being the director of fund-raising for the Kardon County Human Services Foundation was a paid position, and I held it for three years. Ergo, I had a job.”

  “And donated your salary back.” Every year, according to the magazine.

  “I made a donation commensurate with my salary. There’s a difference.”

  Only to a tax accountant.

  “The picture of you in Midsummer Night’s Dream was an interesting part of the article. You must have been Titania.”

  Honey held his gaze for a second, then sat back in her seat and cleared her throat.

  “We made a lot of money on our theater productions,” she said, “especially Shakespeare. The Bard is a solid seller in Kardon County, and I was the one the fairy costume fit. Ergo, I was Titania.”

  “Costume?” Excuse him, but what costume? “Did I miss something in the photo?” Like an actual costume?