Killing Time (One-Eyed Jacks) (8 page)

“You okay?” Brown turned to her.

Her ears rang like church bells. Other than that, she was fine. “Yeah. I think so. You?”

His answer was a grunt, which pretty much told her that other than his attitude, he was fine. “Friend of yours?”

“I told you I was being followed.”

He sprinted past her toward the door that led to the hallway. “Shut those balcony doors. Keep your Glock close and don’t let anyone in this room but me.”

She didn’t have to ask where he was going. He was heading down to check the body. As he left, she ran inside and locked the doors to the terrace. Then she wedged herself into the corner facing the hall door, sank down to her butt, and propped the Glock on her updrawn knees. And she waited. Heart going hay-wire, her breath tight and strained. She’d trained for such a scenario all of her career—but this was the first real encounter she’d had with someone shooting at her. The blowback of the adrenaline rush shot off the charts. It took everything she had to keep her
teeth from rattling and the gun from shaking out of her hands.

When a knock finally sounded, she jumped to her feet like she was on springs and pointed the business end of the Glock dead center in the middle of the door.

“It’s me. Open up.”

Brown.

She hadn’t realized until that point how happy she would be to see him.

“Anything?” she asked after she’d let him in and quickly shut the door behind him.

“Nada. Whoever it was, is gone.”

“Gone?” Her eyes widened in disbelief. “How can that be? I swear I hit him.”

“Well, somebody hit him or he wouldn’t have taken a header off the balcony.” He shook his head. “The cab’s gone, too. I’m thinking wrong place, wrong time, for the cabbie.”

Fear obliterated filters. She couldn’t stop herself from asking, “Still think I’m crazy?”

He expelled a heavy breath. “What I think is that we’ve got to get out of here.” He glanced around the room. “I don’t want to stick around for the second act. If he’s got reinforcements waiting in the wings, they might have better aim.”

He didn’t have to tell her twice. Eva grabbed her bag and followed him.

And she didn’t ask a single question until they were in a cab and a good twenty blocks away from the
hotel on
Calle San Ramon
where both of them were supposed to have died.

•   •   •

“I don’t know where we’re going, okay?” Mike said when she finally popped the question he’d expected long before.

Whether it was from shock or disbelief that she’d almost died, relief that she hadn’t, or because she had finally realized she was into something beyond her pay grade, he didn’t know. But she hadn’t asked one question until they were well away from the hotel.

What he
did
know was that Pamela Diaz, or whatever her name was, had landed herself—and now him by proxy—into some very deep doo-doo.

“Are you ready to fly back to the States with me?”

He grunted. “All I’m ready to commit to at the moment is getting out of Dodge.”

He looked at her then. At her coffee-brown eyes, showgirl breasts, and anxiety-stricken expression, and man oh man, all he could think about was how gorgeous she was.

Hot, sultry air rushed through the cab’s open window, whipping strands of hair that had escaped from her ponytail into her eyes. Her effort to smooth it back was a bust. The wind grabbed it again, plus did a fine job of plastering her damp T-shirt to those amazing breasts.

Seriously, you stupid wing nut? After what she’s done to you, you’re still wondering what it would be like to get her in bed?

He shook his head to clear it. He could
not
get
sidetracked by her sex appeal. Thinking with his little head had gotten him in this mess to begin with.

Drugged, flex cuffs, shanghaied, crazy.
That’s
what he needed to think about.

He drilled her with his best pissed-off glare. “You do realize the significance of what happened back there, don’t you?”

“It means I’m probably right about a conspiracy.”

He wasn’t ready to go quite that far. “For certain, someone wants you silent,
chica
. Someone wants you dead. Someone, apparently, had you followed here from the States, put out a contract on you, and gave the order to pull the trigger.”

“Yeah. I got that part.” She shuddered, and damn if he didn’t have to resist the urge to put his arm around her and pull her against him.

Little head, big trouble.

He ramped up his glare. “So did you also get the part that, thanks to you, they want me dead, too?”

“All the more reason for you to help me figure out who’s behind it.”

His jaw dropped before he could check it, but she never missed a beat.

“What? You expect me to tell you I’m sorry for dragging you into this? Well, that’s not happening. You’ve been in it from the beginning.”

“I’ve been out of it for eight years, thank you very much.”

“No, you’ve been
hiding
out. Big difference. Grow a pair, Brown. It’s past time.”

He opened his mouth. Shut it. Whipped his head toward the opposite window and clamped his fingers around his thighs to keep from clamping them around her throat. Talk about tossing a glass of ice water on a lit match. He wasn’t thinking about sex anymore. Oh, no. He was thinking about murder. If she’d been a man, he’d have dropped her.

And if she’d been wrong, he admitted as a flood of self-disgust washed over him, he’d have stopped the cab, gotten out, and told her to go preach to another choir.

Can I get a hallelujah?

He stared blindly out at the shadowed urban landscape scrolling by in the dark.
But she wasn’t wrong, was she? She was
so
not wrong.

In fact, she was so flat-out, dead-on right, it shamed him. Kicked him in the head, punched him in the gut, and shamed him into finally admitting the truth.

For eight years he’d been running. For eight years he’d been telling himself it didn’t matter, he couldn’t change it, couldn’t make it right. He’d only been partly right. He couldn’t change what had happened, couldn’t bring those men back.

But it
did
matter. On that he’d been head-up-his-ass wrong. It had
always
mattered. Every second, every minute, every hour of every freaking day. Mattered to the point where he’d run and denied and become so mired in the game of avoiding the truth, that he’d totally lost sight of it.

Here, now, was the truth. He was an innocent man. Taggart and Cooper were innocent men. And just because his balls had been nailed to the proverbial wall all those years ago didn’t mean he had to be held hostage by lies now.

An even sadder truth? Nothing but his own stubborn determination stopped him from breaking free.

He glanced at the woman responsible for upsetting his cart full of rotten apples. Gave her her due. She was wrong about a lot of things, but she was right about the one thing that counted.

He
was
a coward.

Had been for eight long years.

He set his jaw, breathed deep, and made that final leap from resistance to resolution.

That all changed right now.

As of now, he was officially back in the game, because this lying, conniving, sexy-as-ever-loving-sin, wack-job of a woman had dragged him out of his hidey-hole.

So . . . did he thank her or throttle her? And what in holy hell was he supposed to make of her? Though her conspiracy talk was off-the-charts crazy, that gunman had been sent by someone. Someone she’d either pissed off or someone who wanted her silenced—or both.

He scrubbed a hand over his face.

Okay, so if he bought into her conspiracy theory—and that was a big
if
—who was behind it, and what was their endgame? It was bad enough that he’d lost
friends that day. Bad enough that he’d taken the fall. But if she was right—if it was far bigger than an operation gone sideways—then it meant that his being framed was only a microscopic blip on the radar of a far bigger plot. Which reduced the importance of what had happened to him to less than nothing.

And that
really
pissed him off. Because he was
more
than nothing. His team had been more than nothing. And suddenly, because of her, if it was the last thing he did, he wanted not only justice for them, but he wanted this bastard taken out. And he wanted to be the one doing it.

“All right, Ms. Hot Tamale Diaz,” he said, deciding to give her what she wanted. “We’re going to play this out. We are going to proceed as though we have our fingers on the trigger of a gun that’s going to go
boom
in the face of the man who killed a lot of good men, a lot of innocent people, and ruined my life.

“But so help me God,” he warned her when relief and satisfaction filled her eyes, “if you don’t deliver the goods—”

“I’ll deliver,” she promised. And though he had a shitload of reasons not to trust her, the conviction in her words made him want to believe—at least part of her story. She was still lying her gorgeous ass off about who she was and what she did. Reporter? Not a chance. She was personally vested in this—her heavy-handed tactics at the bar told that story.

“If you sell me out,
chica,
be warned: There’s
not a corner of this earth remote enough for you to hide in.”

She had nothing to say to that, but her eyes told him he’d made her a believer.

“
Aeropuerto. Rapido,
” he told the taxi driver, hoping to hell he wasn’t going to regret his decision.

When Brown decided to move, he moved. They hit the Jorge Chavez International Airport running. First stop was at a small hangar far away from the busy international commercial terminals. With an order for the cabdriver to wait that Brown insured by tipping him with some of the money he’d lifted from her pockets, he grabbed her hand and they raced into the building.

“Do you think we’re being followed?” she asked breathlessly.

“If there had been more than one shooter, we’d have met up with him before we left the hotel.”

That made sense, but didn’t stop her from constantly looking over her shoulder.

The hangar housed several small private planes and as Brown jogged briskly across the concrete floor, she’d either have to keep up or fall flat on her face. He dragged her along behind him at a break-neck pace.

“What are we doing here?” They ducked around
and under several wings before stopping beside a vintage twin turboprop Beechcraft King Air.

“Getting my passport.”

The Beechcraft was a sweetheart of a plane—her dad had been a Beechcraft buff so she recognized the make and model immediately.
PRIMETIME AIR CARGO
was sprawled across the gleaming white fuselage in glittering red, white, and blue letters.

For a man who claimed no love of country, they were interesting color choices,
she thought as he unlocked the door with a key he fished out of his boot.

And for a man who didn’t want anyone to think he gave two rips about anything, the plane was immaculately clean and well cared for.

“If you sell me out
, chica,
be warned: There’s not a corner of this earth remote enough for you to hide in.”

Despite the pulsing heat under the tin roof of the hangar, she suppressed a shiver at the memory of the look in his eyes. He’d meant it. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned—or like a man who’d been played by a woman.

But that sword sliced both ways. If it turned out he’d lied and he was responsible for Ramon’s death, she wouldn’t hesitate to throw him to the wolves.

“We’d better ditch the guns here. Stash them in the plane.” He held out his hand.

He was right. They’d never make it past airport security. Reluctantly, she handed hers over.

“Wait here.” He tucked her Glock in his waistband and pulled down the airstairs. “I’ll be right back.”

He trotted up the five steps and ducked inside. Curious about what she’d find inside, she ignored his order to wait and followed him up the stairs.

He spun around so fast that if he hadn’t grabbed her and pulled her against him, she would have tumbled backward down the steps.

For a very long, very intense several seconds, they stood that way. Him gripping her upper arms, her breasts pressed against his chest, their gazes clashing and hot. For a wild and crazy instant, she thought he would kiss her. For an even wilder and crazier instant, she thought she might let him.

“I told you to wait,” he growled, breaking the spell.

Stunned by her reaction to him, she lifted her chin and gave him a “you’re not the boss of me” look.

He shook his head and with a roll of his eyes, let her go.

And damn if she wasn’t shaking. She steadied herself with a deep breath.

What the hell was that?

Adrenaline. Had to be. And sleep deprivation. And the constant, recurring memory of the pillow exploding on the bed from the gunman’s MP5K.

While Brown dug around in the cockpit, she grounded herself by looking around the plane. Pretty basic, totally empty. Apparently the cargo business wasn’t merely a front. The passenger seats had been removed and the fuselage was rigged with nylon straps fixed to the floor to secure freight.