In the expensive condo, Hector was silent for a few seconds. He watched every man in the room with new eyes, wondering if one of them could be the traitor. With a curt command, he sent one man to check out the restaurant. Before the man left the room, his bodyguards’ cell phones started ringing. Thirty seconds later, he knew that the man on the telephone was telling the truth.

Whether that made the man friend or enemy didn’t matter. What mattered was that he’d had the ability to kill Hector and hadn’t.

Hector took a deep hit on his doctored cigarette. “What do you want from me?”

“Meet me tonight, in person. Name the place, name the time. If I get lucky, I’ll have the names of the men who laid the trap. If not, we still have a lot to talk about.”

In the hotel, Grace forced herself to breathe deeply, then do it again, and again, until her ears stopped ringing. She went to the window and stared down.

It looked like a war zone. Stucco had peeled off the front of the restaurant building. Smashed flagstone was scattered around. The wrought-iron gate had been blown off its hinges and lay in a twisted pile twenty feet away. The restaurant’s windows were gone. People were pouring out of the hotel and running to stare at the damage.

She turned to the man who had triggered the bomb.

“Okay, you’ve got a deal.” Faroe hung up and looked at Grace. “Ready?”

“You-I saw-” She tried again. “You just casually triggered that bomb!”

“It was calculated, not casual. We now have an inside track with Hector. He doesn’t know if I’m a friend, an enemy, or the Easter Bunny. But he’s damn sure I could have killed him and didn’t. Given that, he’s likely to be real titty-fingered about pissing me off, which means that Lane is safer now than he has been since Hector locked down the school. Let’s go.”

Grace fastened on the one thing that mattered: Lane was better off than he had been. That was worth a few windows and a wrought-iron gate any day.

Listen to yourself, Judge. Blowing up things is a felony.

So is kidnapping. If it benefits Lane, I’ll help Faroe commit as many Class A felonies as it takes.

If the law can’t protect my son, screw it.

She fell in step beside Faroe as they headed out of the room. She didn’t ask where they were going.

28

TIJUANA

EARLY SUNDAY EVENING


GRACE SLEPT FROM ENSENADA to Tijuana. The sound of traffic became part of her, transformed into a relentless, primitive beat. Maybe it was exhaustion that let down her barriers, maybe it was simply that she fell asleep breathing the same air as Joe Faroe, but she slept deeply, dreaming of him. The images and sensations were frank with sexual need. Hot. Heady. Hungry. She woke up with flushed cheeks and a feeling of disorientation.

Faroe was driving in four-abreast traffic on a three-lane street. Newspaper vendors, flower hawkers, and lottery shills danced in and out of the stop-and-go traffic. Astride polished Harleys, pairs of big-bellied cops tried to maintain order. Cars parted around them like water around river boulders.

Many laws were ignored, yet beneath the appearance of chaos there obviously was an informal system understood by the drivers. The result wasn’t orderly or neat, but it worked well enough to keep traffic moving.

Off to the north Grace saw the blazing lights of San Diego, a few miles and half a world away. She longed for a bath, longed to strip off the years and start all over again in a new, raw world, where past lies wouldn’t exist.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Ah, she lives, she breathes. How do I know this? She asks questions.”

She smiled, found herself watching his mouth, and flushed, remembering her dream.

“We had such a good time at the Encantamar that I thought we’d try a new hotel,” Faroe said dryly. “We’re going to the Hotel del Fiesta Palace. It’s out by the world’s most famous dog track.”

“Are we meeting Hector at the hotel or the track?”

“The track, in about three hours. The hotel offers a good view. I’ve worked the track before, so I’ve got the layout memorized. But the hotel room will give me a chance to make a long-distance recon before I meet with that crazy bastard.”

“We,” she said. “I’m going with you.”

“I thought you didn’t want to be in the same room with him.”

“I don’t. So what? I didn’t want any of this, but here it is anyway.”

They drove on, fighting into the Zona Rio traffic. As they negotiated the roundabout at the foot of the statue of Abraham Lincoln, Grace spotted the Plaza Rio.

“Hector is a clotheshorse,” she said. “Ironed jeans, pristine white shirt, ostrich-skin boots, and a hunk of neck jewelry that would choke a horse.”

“So?”

“If this is all about macho and command presence, we lose. We look like dog crap. Is there time to shop?”

Faroe looked at himself in the mirror. Dog crap looked back. “Good point. We can afford half an hour.”

He drove to valet parking and slipped the attendant half of a twenty-dollar bill.

“Half an hour,” Faroe said to Grace as they got out.

“Do we synchronize our watches?” she asked sardonically.

“Better move, amada. You’re wasting seconds.”

She left him behind before they reached the entrance. He started to follow her, then remembered how he looked and went shopping instead. He barely made it back to the valet stand in time. She was already there, three shopping bags on her shoulder, waiting for him. He handed the valet the other half of the twenty and showed another five.

The Mercedes appeared with impressive speed. Not a scratch, a nick, or a dent anywhere.

Even so, Faroe breathed a sigh of relief after he’d fought through traffic to the thirty-story Fiesta Palace and handed the keys over to a bellman. Nobody who knew what Faroe knew drove a car as expensive as Grace’s SUV into Mexico and expected to bring the vehicle home intact.

The hotel’s stainless steel and gleaming glass turned the reflected skyline of Tijuana into something mysterious and beautiful. While Faroe checked them into the hotel, Grace stared at the colors of the city. They rippled and flowed, unearthly, and she was floating with them, everything spinning away.

A shower. That’s all I need. A long hot shower. Then maybe a short nap.

Or something.

The hours between now and the meeting with Hector stretched in front of her like an eternity. Nowhere to go. No way to forget. Nothing to do but wait until waiting was an animal eating her alive from the inside out.

Lane, are you all right?

“Stop thinking about your son,” Faroe said.

Her head snapped toward him. “How did you know?”

“The way you looked. Thinking about him doesn’t do any good and can do a lot of harm.” He took her arm and led her toward the elevator.

Grace’s hands clenched. So did her whole body.

“See what I mean?” Faroe said. “You went from looking blindsided by life to vibrating like a wire stretched to the breaking point. You’re wasting energy.”

“How do you not think about something?”

“Do you want to hurt Lane?” Faroe asked, sticking the key in the lock.

“No!”

“Then think about something else.”

Like how much I want to touch you? Grace thought raggedly. And how much you don’t want to touch me? God knows you’ve had plenty of opportunity.

And every time, you don’t follow through.

She’d done the same, but she wasn’t feeling charitable about it at the moment. Given the choice of thinking about Hector, Lane, or Faroe, Faroe was the least of the three evils. It was easier to feel angry than rejected, so anger was the flavor of the moment.

Faroe opened the door and nudged her into the suite overlooking the dog track. He dumped her packages in one bedroom and his own packages in the other and went to stand at the side of the window. After a long look, he turned and walked to his bedroom.

“Shower,” he said without looking at her. “That’s what I’m going to do. No dog crap allowed near Hector Rivas Osuna.”

Without a word Grace went to her bedroom, walked straight into the bathroom, and began stripping. Moments later she was alone in a fancy marble and chrome bathroom with an orgy-sized, double-headed shower.

She told herself that it didn’t matter to her that Faroe hadn’t even tried to talk her into sharing a shower. Her body told her that it did matter, and that she was a fool to be lathering herself with fragrant French milled soap just to crawl into bed for another nap.

Alone.

But it beat the alternative, which was to lie awake trying not to think about things she couldn’t change.

Right. Think about Faroe.

The son of a bitch.

She washed her hair with French shampoo from the suite’s complimentary supply. Then she washed it again. Like the shampoo, the conditioner smelled like sin and sex in paradise. She wanted to rub it all over her body, but settled for just her hair and hoped that the body lotion was half as appealing as the rest of the toiletries.

It was. Cool, fresh, perfumed but not overpowering, the lotion vanished into her skin.

Eat your heart out, Mr. Feel-Nothing Man. Shower alone until you turn into a pink prune.

She toweled her hair thoroughly, shook her head, and finger-combed the result. Her ancestors had given her smooth, thick hair that required only a good cut to behave.

Faroe knocked on the bathroom door. “Supper’s ready.”