Extreme Bachelor (36 page)

“Anything else?” Michael asked.

The bartender thought about it. “He was a
nice guy, actually. A big tipper.”

That was Juan Carlo, generous to a
fault.

At the only real grocery in town, Juan Carlo
had apparently proven once again that he was a consummate ladies’
man. He had chatted it up for almost an hour with a middle-aged
clerk with Brillo-pad jet-black hair who had added a thick slash of
dark red lipstick across her mouth, perhaps in anticipation of a
return visit by the dashing Spaniard. Whatever he’d said to the
clerk had obviously kept her smiling into today.

“Do you know where he might be?” Michael had
asked as he paid for some gum.

“I don’t know for sure, but he was talking
about making the drive up Sunlight Canyon Road.”

“Up there?” Michael asked, feigning
confusion. “I heard there wasn’t much up there anymore.”

“Oh there’s not,” the clerk agreed,
confirming Michael’s guess. “Just a couple of old family cabins. I
know two of them have been empty for years, since the cost of
heating fuel got so expensive. But there are a couple of nicer ones
down by the main road. I’m sure that’s where he’s probably
staying.”

Michael was sure that’s
where he was
not
staying. He thanked the clerk, walked out to the Jeep. This
was like finding an elephant in a haystack. All he had to do now
was find the right cabin, which wouldn’t be too hard, thanks to
Juan Carlo’s big red flags and pointers.

He got into the driver’s seat and sat a
moment. What was he going to do when he found him? Storm the cabin?
Right. Juan Carlo was as crafty and cunning as any arms trader or
dope runner could be and undoubtedly was waiting in the trap he’d
set for Michael. Without backup—and Michael wasn’t waiting hours
for backup—he’d basically have to walk right into the trap if he
was going to get to Leah.

He did not relish the
thought of doing that, but he figured he had little choice. If she
was still alive—and he couldn’t even think of the other
possibility—it was his only chance to get to her before Juan Carlo
did something stupid. But once Juan Carlo had
him
, Leah would become secondary.
Maybe he could negotiate her release in exchange for himself. He
liked his chances much better on his own.

He couldn’t even guess how this was going to
play out, but first things first—he had to get Leah away from Juan
Carlo.

AS he guessed, Michael found the cabin
easily enough—it was just where he suspected it would be, high on
the end of the old forest road, the last of a couple of run-down
vacation cabins.

The car sitting out front of the cabin bore
the familiar logo of a rental agency—it was a predictably high-end
car and too nice for this particular area. It stuck out like a sore
thumb. But Juan Carlo was the sort of guy who liked top of the line
so that he could flash his wealth at every opportunity, even when
he was in the hunt to kill a man. Stupid bastard.

Michael parked his Jeep at the bottom of the
long road up, beneath a stand of spruce trees on an abandoned
mining road. He tried to call out on his cell phone, but couldn’t
get a signal, and pitched it inside his Jeep. He’d already called
Rex from town and told him what he knew. Once again, Rex had urged
him to sit tight, that he’d have someone out from D.C. as soon as
possible.

“D.C.?” Michael asked. “I thought you said
Seattle.”

“I did. But the FBI prefers we keep this
below the radar. The president doesn’t want any bad press over a
known terrorist slipping undetected past our borders. If the media
got hold of that, the administration would have to explain it. So
just sit tight. I’ve got a plane—we’ll be there in a matter of
hours.”

“Right,” Michael said, but he and Rex both
knew that he wouldn’t wait. “Whatever you do, just be cool, man,”
Rex said before Michael hung up. Easier asked than done, Michael
thought.

Outside of the Jeep, he took the lug wrench
to carry with him for protection. He had never, in all the years
he’d worked for the CIA, carried a gun. He had a deep cover, a
businessman selling packing materials to people like Juan Carlo.
He’d had no need of a gun. There was only one time he’d even wanted
one—back when he was sleeping with Juan Carlo’s wife and spent each
night wondering if it would be his last. That, and today. He would
have liked the feel of cold steel in his hand, would have liked to
find Juan Carlo’s fat face in its sites.

Unfortunately, there was no gun. There was a
tire jack and a lug wrench. The lug wrench was almost useless as a
weapon—Juan Carlo would kill him before he could do much damage—but
he might be able to get one good lick in before Juan Carlo had that
chance.

He started his trek up the slope of the
mountain, tracking behind the cabin through a forest thick with
spruce and pine trees. As he picked his way over fallen trees and
rocks, which aggravated him by wasting his time, his fear of what
was happening to Leah grew exponentially, and it occurred to
Michael that he had, at last, formed a deep attachment.

It was weird to realize something that
profound in this situation. But having spent years convinced he was
incapable of forming an attachment, it felt huge—deep and
inseverable. Thinking that Leah might be in any sort of
danger—especially danger he had caused—felt as if someone or
something had reached inside of him and wrung his heart clean of
blood. He felt ill, unsettled, like his skin didn’t exactly fit
his body, like he needed to be doing something other than trekking
through the woods.

To make matters worse, he had nothing to do
but think on his way up, and knew that this would not have happened
if he’d just been man enough to admit what he was feeling five
years ago. Both of their lives would have taken a different track.
But instead he had turned coward and had run. A change of scenery,
that’s what he thought he needed. Just like when he was a kid—as
soon as he’d start to get close to someone, he’d always be moved to
the next foster home. He always got a change of scenery.

How remarkable that a man could be
thirty-eight years old and understand for the first time what a
sick existence that was. How remarkable that he hadn’t understood
until now how much a person needed attachments. Back then, he
hadn’t understood it at all. He’d thought commitment meant he’d
have to stay in one place, could not move to the next foster
parent, or the next school, or the next life. Commitment meant he
would die off in one place.

Now he understood that commitment meant
freedom. It meant peace and a sense of belonging to someone at
last.

He climbed up, stepping over logs and rocks,
stoic and grim, the magnitude of the sea change in him weighing his
steps. It took him more than two hours to climb through the debris
of the forest before he caught a glimpse of the faded red paint of
the cabin. He crouched down, tried to see through the brush.
Nothing had changed since he had driven by earlier. The car was
still parked out front, an old tattered wind sock still hanging
from a flagpole. It actually looked as if nothing had moved. Not
even the wind.

He moved quietly forward, to the edge of the
tree line surrounding the house. There was a rickety old porch with
three plastic chairs stacked in one corner. In the opposite corner
was a pile of boards covered by a faded blue plastic tarp. One side
of the cabin had nothing but the small square of a bathroom window.
He moved to his right, saw that the other side of the cabin had a
window looking out from the kitchen, through which he could see a
cluttered table and countertop.

A rusted propane tank in the yard allowed
him to get a little closer, and he used the cover of it to move to
the back of the cabin, where an old chimney had been converted into
a barbeque pit. There was a freestanding hammock, more chipped
plastic chairs, and a couple of discarded beer bottles. Corona,
Michael noticed. Juan Carlo used to have crates of the stuff
trucked into Costa del Sol.

Moving from behind the propane tank to the
cover of the forest again, Michael checked out the back of the
cabin. There was a covered entry, but the door was boarded up with
new lumber. There were two big windows overlooking what there was
of a backyard, and in that window, sitting cross-legged on a bed
was Leah.

Michael caught his breath, felt a rush of
relief to see her alive, and squinted to see her better. It was
difficult—there was nothing but natural light, and she was mostly
in shadows. But when she looked up, he saw her face and thought she
looked . . . perturbed?

Perturbed
.

Not scared. Not furious. But irritated and
tired, like she was babysitting a petulant child. Was it possible
that she didn’t know she was in danger? Was it possible that she
thought she was involved in nothing more than a tryst with Juan
Carlo? He swallowed down a lump of revulsion at that idea, and
crept closer, straining to see through the dingy window into the
shadowed room, until he saw her lift her hands.

They were bound together with rope.

His throat constricted; he felt the fury
rise up in him again, hot and thick. He clenched his jaw, gripped
the lug wrench and tried to control the anger. It was the first
thing they taught you in the agency—never let your emotions take
control.

They had a reason for
teaching him that—because of his anger, he didn’t hear Juan Carlo
creep up on him until he said, “Welcome,
amigo
. I’ve been waiting for
you.”

Michael tried to rise up and swing out, but
he was hit with such force on the back of his head that everything
went very black and very still.

IF Leah ever got out of this mess, she was
going to happily find a way to make Adolfo suffer before she killed
him. The more she thought about it, the more she was really very
incensed—first there’d been the drugs, then the gun he didn’t know
how to handle but insisted on waving at her anyway, then tying her
up, her hands to her feet, and finally, dragging Michael inside and
kicking him a couple of times before he gave in to her shouts to
stop.

He was really turning out to be royal
bastard.

With his arms folded across his chest,
Adolfo glared down at Michael’s still body. “Perhaps you are
right,” he said to her, panting heavily. “What is the point of
hurting him? After all, I intend to kill him.”

Leah shuddered at the calm, smooth way he
said it. “Stop saying such ridiculous things, will you?” she
insisted as he decided to drag Michael across the floor and lay him
face down beside the bed. “You’re not going to kill anyone, Adolfo.
You and Michael are going to sort out whatever is between you, like
two calm, rational adults.”

That made Adolfo laugh. “This cannot be, my
sweet. Do you think I risk so much only to talk?”

Well, no, she didn’t, but she was hoping he
might see reason. As that seemed a lost cause—evidence: she was
tied up, for Chrissakes—she leaned over and looked down at her
fallen hero.

Poor Michael. He had an ugly gash on the
back of his head. But he had come just like Adolfo said he would,
and for some reason, that gave her a major feeling of warm pride.
The man had put his life on the line for her. He really did love
her, didn’t he?

Adolfo trussed Michael’s
arms behind his back, chuckling to himself as he worked, muttering
alternately in Spanish and English. When he had finished, he fell,
exhausted, into the Naugahyde chair and smiled at Leah. “Here he
is, the bastard. He’s not such a very big man now,
si
? Without the American
government, he’s a little cockroach, one that I will smash with my
boot.”

“Did you have to hit him so hard?” Leah
asked, peering at the blood at the base of his skull. “He might be
seriously hurt.”

“What care do I have?” Adolfo exclaimed,
then frowned at Leah’s expression. “Don’t cry. He’s not dead, he is
merely sleeping. I have not yet killed him.” He stood, looked down
at Michael again, then abruptly squatted next to him. He tightened
the rope that bound Michaels hands, and then—with a lot of grunting
and grimacing—he hoisted Michael up, so that the upper half of his
body was on the bed. He then grabbed Michael’s legs and hoisted
them up, too, so that Michael was lying next to Leah, his face in a
pillow.

“At least move his face so that he can
breathe,” she insisted.

Adolfo rolled his eyes, sighed loudly, and
with one big hand, shoved Michael’s face around, so that it was
facing Leah. “There. You may gaze at your bastard and fill your
mind with the memory of him before I kill him.”

“Just stop it, Adolfo! No one is killing
anyone here!” she exclaimed, and tried very hard to believe it. She
leaned forward, put her bound hands to the gash at the back of
Michael’s head. “Ohmigod.”

Adolfo laughed and turned toward the
tarnished mirror and began to mess with his hair. “You do not
understand. This man is no better than the dirt on your feet.” He
paused, leaned forward to examine his bangs a little more closely.
“He deserves no better than to be slaughtered like a pig.”

“Okay, I am asking you nicely to please stop
saying things like that,” Leah said, throwing up a hand. “It’s
really very upsetting.”

Adolfo shrugged.

She was going to kill him, literally kill
him with her bare hands, and she could, too. Cooper had taught them
the hand-to-hand combat moves for the film, and had jokingly told
them that with some real force, they could kill someone. If she
could get her hands free, she’d cheerfully test that theory on
Adolfo.

Leah turned away from Adolfo, who was
preening in the minor like he had a big date, and glanced at
Michael. She leaned forward—and gasped softly. His eyes were open,
and he was squinting up at her. His lips were pressed tightly
together, and she had the distinct impression that he was trying to
tell her to be silent.