Beautiful Sacrifice

be addictive,” he said against her skin.
    Her breath sighed out and her hands stroked the slick heat of his back. “I’ll risk it.”
    Reluctantly he pulled out of her. She made a disappointed sound.
    “Condom,” he said.
    She mumbled something and snuggled under the covers while he disposed of the protection.
    “Shower?” he asked, turning over and reaching for her.
    “Sleep.” She burrowed close to him, skin to skin.
    He pulled the bedspread over them and was asleep before his head hit the pillow. So was she.
     
     
    H UNTER AWOKE AS HE HAD SLEPT, A SENSUAL TANGLE OF HEAT and flesh, female and male. He watched the sun spill across Lina’s face. Dark hair, eyelashes black half circles against her creamy brown skin, her lips full and red. Her beauty made his heart ache. They had reached for each other again and again during the night and he still wanted her. Knowing that she wanted him in the same way was a miracle he was still trying to absorb.
    He looked at the digital clock on the small bedside table. It was early, but tourist towns worked long hours. Crutchfeldt and his staff should be awake. From what Hunter had found out about the man, he was up at dawn and lying in the sun like a lizard until the sun went down. All work was conducted at poolside.
    The clock told Hunter it was time to get going, to find out who El Maya was and make sure he would never threaten Lina again.
    But all Hunter wanted to do right now was sink into Lina so deep they would never be separate.
    Caught between what he should do and what he wanted to do, he forced himself to slide slowly from the bed. The room was warm, not only with the day but with a whole summer’s worth of heat still captured in the cinder-block walls. He retrieved his cell phone from his jeans and went to the living room with long, silent strides.
    The first call he made was to the nurses’ station on Jase’s hospital floor. Ali had told them that he was Jase’s brother, so getting information wasn’t a problem. A nurse reassured Hunter that Jase was doing well, a lot better than expected. His condition had been upgraded to good.
    Relief went like wine through Hunter’s system. He savored it for a moment before he went to the living room, where his computer had been plugged in for a charge. The workstation in the corner of the living room was mildly messy and quite dusty. He booted up his computer and read quickly—e-mails from contacts answering his queries, and from his uncles concerning background checks.
    Snakeman had been deported in record time.
    The body count at the second death house was up to eleven, but only a few of them had had their hearts removed.
    Why them? Why not the others, too?
    No one had any answers, or even hints of answers. None of the gangbangers who had been arrested had talked. They didn’t know nothing from nothing. Each one of them had claimed he was just couch-surfing at a friend’s place and he’d been arrested for no reason but racism.
    And rats have wings covered in booty dust.
    The dead janitor had a mother and two teenage sons living across the border. When questioned, they admitted that the sun rose in the east and set in the west. Other than that, they only knew that the dead man had sent money south and now he didn’t. The grandmother was terrified. The grandsons were sullen.
    The crime-scene photos an ICE contact had sent were as ugly as Hunter’s memories.
    Nothing new.
    Certainly nothing useful.
    The quick, but not careless, background checks his uncles had done yielded little more than Hunter had already guessed or known. Lina’s parents lived separately. Other than a single scandal about artifacts that were sold from Reyes Balam land without government approval and a public drunkennesscharge when Philip was a freshman, there were no flags in any official files that had been searched.
    Carlos had indeed been a bad boy in his early teens, but had grown into a citizen in good standing with two governments. There were bare hints that he might be unofficially working for and/or being investigated by DEA. Not surprising for the Mexican-born CEO of a cross-border enterprise in these days of open narco warfare. Two ex-wives, serial mistresses, no children.
    De la Poole was single, upper class, educated, connected, and clean.
    Crutchfeldt not so much, but he didn’t have any official black marks on his record on either side of the border. Reading between the lines, there was a good probability that he snitched