St Kilda Consulting 02 - Innocent as Sin

Bertone time to reorganize. Besides, you wouldn’t want her little babies to starve, would you?”
    “Her what?”
    Rand didn’t answer.

25
    Castillo del Cielo
Saturday
7:25 P.M. MST
    N ot many people could make Gabriel Navarro uneasy, but Andre Bertone did. It wasn’t just Bertone’s burly body, his height, his wealth, that made Gabriel wary. It was a killer’s knowledge that he was in the presence of a better killer.
    And Gabriel had pissed that better killer off.
    Elena’s laughter wasn’t helping. “Oh, my. Tell me again how a little mouse of a banker defeated one of the best—”
    “Enough.” Bertone cut across his wife’s amusement. “Who came to Kayla’s aid?”
    Gabriel shrugged and stubbed out his cigarette in a crystal ashtray. Then he crossed his legs and looked at Bertone. “Tall dude. Moved good. Like a fighter, you know?”
    Elena snickered and said mockingly, “But of course. We have so many warriors in Pleasure Valley.”
    “What did he look like?” Bertone asked.
    “I told you. Tall.”
    “Mexican, white, black, mestizo?” Bertone asked impatiently. “Young, old?”
    “Like I said. The dude blew out my eyes with his flashlight. Didn’t see shit ’cept for a big knife. Moved like he could use it. You said no killing, so I booked.”
    Bertone said something in Russian and lit his cigar.
    Elena sighed and opened the French doors to air out the smoke. With every step her sandals flashed wealth and impatience.
    Gabriel watched her without seeming to. If she’d been anyone else’s woman, he would have tried to put his hands on her.
    But she was Bertone’s.
    “You’re sure he called out Kayla’s name?” Bertone asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Find her,” Bertone said.
    Gabriel stood up. “Catch or kill?”
    Bertone’s eyes narrowed. The intelligence and instincts that had gotten him from the frozen gutters of Siberia to Arizona’s Pleasure Valley were twitching. Right now, Kayla knew more about who had saved her than he did.
    Knowledge was a weapon.
    “Catch,” Bertone said curtly.
    He could always kill her later.

26
    Beyond Phoenix
Saturday
8:04 P.M. MST
    S low down,” Kayla said to Rand.
    He looked sideways at her. After she’d gotten in the car and given him directions to Dry Valley, she hadn’t said a word.
    “I thought you were asleep,” he said.
    “Just thinking.” Trying to get used to the impossible. Failing. Trying again. And again. “There’s a deep dip up ahead, a desert wash that runs wall-to-wall in the monsoons. If you don’t slow down, you’ll—”
    The suspension on the SUV bottomed out as Rand crested a little rise and dropped into the arroyo she was describing.
    Kayla grabbed the overhead handrail and grunted at the impact, then again when the vehicle crested the rise on the far side. She felt weightless in the second before the body of the car slammed down again.
    “About that dip,” Kayla said through her teeth. “There are others. If you don’t listen to me, what’s the point of having me along?”
    Rand lifted his foot, dropped back to a more reasonable speed, and smiled slightly. “Still channeling your inner bitch?”
    “Listen, macho man. I don’t do any better with the ‘You Tarzan, me Jane’ bullshit than I do with the toe-licking lapdog. And I figured out real quick in the garden that the lapdog was an act.”
    “What about Tarzan?”
    “I’ll get back to you on that.”
    “When?” Rand asked.
    “When I’m damn good and ready.”
    He gave her another sideways glance. She was stiff, clutching the handrail with one hand and bracing herself on the console with the other.
    “Still scared?” he asked gently.
    Her mouth flattened as she stared at the night racing by on either side of the headlights. “I don’t like handcuffs. They freaked me out more than the silencer on the gun did.”
    “Rather be shot than bound, huh? Me too.”
    She blew a little breath out of her nose. “Listen, Tarzan. A woman living alone in this world is considered fair game. Smart women know it. Dumb women end up handcuffed one way or another.”
    “My name is Rand,” he said patiently. “You can call me McCree if Rand is too friendly for you. Unless you want to be called Jane?”
    She almost smiled. “Okay, McCree.”
    “As for being fair game, everybody in the world is fair game for a guy like Bertone.”
    “So you do know him,” she said.
    Gunfire stitching through the helo.
    Reed bleeding, sighing.
    Dying.
    “We’d never met