St Kilda Consulting 02 - Innocent as Sin

won’t. But we’ve got the fastest ATV on the track.”
    Or he hoped they did. Faroe was betting the feds didn’t have anything better than an electric golf cart out on the course.
    “Doesn’t this thing have a lap belt?” she asked.
    “Use that,” Rand said, pointing to a handle firmly bolted to the dashboard in front of the passenger.
    “What is it?”
    “I’ve heard it called a lot of things.” He grinned and began rolling forward. “My favorites are ‘Jesus Bar’ and ‘Oh Shit Bar.’”
    “Why?”
    Rand twisted the throttle. The ATV leaped forward, slamming Kayla back into the seat.
    “What are you—Oh shit!” Kayla said, grabbing for the bar.
    “There you go.”
    Grinning, Rand cut the wheel hard to the right, shot through a gap in the oleander hedge, and burst into the sunlight on the tenth fairway of the resort’s golf course.
    The ATV four-wheeler moved so fast that she had to pull the wide brim of the sun hat around her face to keep from strangling on the chin strap. She was completely hidden when a mid-thirties white man dressed in resort clothes stepped out of a stand of bamboo near a water hazard. He carried a camera that was dwarfed by a long telephoto lens. Swearing, the cameraman started banging off pictures as the ATV sped past.
    Rand gave him the back of his head and the universal sign of friendship.
    “Are you trying to piss them off?” Kayla asked.
    “Hey, if the feds are going to stand in the sun and shoot surveillance photos, they should be rewarded. Federal cops are way too used to having things go their way.”
    “Do all St. Kildans have a bad attitude about authority?” Kayla asked.
    “Most of us have had enough authority in our lives to know its limitations. Federal cops still have to learn.”
    “And you live to teach them,” she muttered.
    “It’s a dirty job—” he began.
    “And you love doing it,” she interrupted.
    “Oh, yeah.”
    Clenching her teeth, she hung on to the dashboard bar whileRand swerved around a sand trap and shot up over a dune at the far side of the fairway. When she risked a peek over her shoulder through the folds of her hat, she saw that a second man in casual clothes had joined the first fed. He, too, had a fancy camera. He was talking on a cell phone or a radio.
    “They aren’t chasing us,” she said.
    “Surveillance teams don’t pursue. They radio ahead. Now we pray they don’t have anyone positioned on the far side of the golf course.”
    Rand cut across another fairway before he hit open rolling desert at the eastern edge of Scottsdale. A mile ahead of them lay the concrete piers of the 101 Loop Freeway and a scattering of multistory buildings in new industrial and office parks.
    Kayla braced herself and kept a stranglehold on the bar. The ATV was well suited for cross-country desert travel, but it wasn’t always comfortable. The wheels raised a thin cloud of grit as Rand slewed around creosote bushes and dodged patches of prickly pear.
    “There it is,” Rand said, barely missing a rock.
    Kayla squinted through her glasses as he skidded onto a narrow dirt track that headed toward civilization again. He twisted the throttle on the ATV. Suddenly they were rushing along at more than thirty miles per hour on a road just bumpy enough to make the ride interesting.
    Kayla felt like laughing out loud. When she’d sold the ranch, she hadn’t expected to be on an ATV anytime soon. Even though she was used to being the driver, she trusted the man beside her. He had the lanky yet powerful build of a bronc rider. The Stetson added to the aura.
    Too bad the ranch is gone. Rand would have looked right at home on it.
    Without thinking, she touched the back of Rand’s hand onthe steering wheel. His fingers lifted, caught hers, squeezed, and released. He slowed the ATV as the road crested a bank and dropped down into a dry wash. He braked, then turned downstream toward an office park that was under construction. The ATV’s two-stroke engine screamed with the pleasure of being let off the leash on a brilliant desert morning.
    Minutes later they flashed up over another bank and through the open gate of a construction yard. A white Dodge SUV with heavily tinted windows was parked inside the yard. Rand braked to a skidding stop next to the vehicle.
    “Backseat,” he ordered Kayla.
    He snatched the backpack and his laptop computer off the cargo shelf and tossed them into the back of the SUV. Kayla slid into the right rear seat and