Killing Time

14

Their Avianca flight had left Peru at 12:30 a.m. and right on schedule, almost fourteen hours later, it touched down at Dulles at 3:28 p.m. Mike was happy as hell not to have to deal with jet lag, since the time in D.C. was only an hour later than in Lima. He was equally happy to finally be out of that cramped seat where touching Eva Salinas, either accidentally or on purpose, had been unavoidable—even with Ramon’s ghost hovering between them.

“You realize we can’t go to your apartment,” he said. They’d cleared the customs gate and she was stuffing her Emily Bradshaw passport back in her purse as they headed through the terminal at a brisk walk. “Our friend with the MP5K may or may not be alive, and may or may not have reported in to his handler. Either way, whoever ordered the hit either knows by now that it was a bust or is wondering why his man hasn’t surfaced.”

“What do you think the chances are they don’t know we’re back in the States?”

Mike had been doing the math on that one himself. “I think we’re good, for a while. I’d make book that there was no one on that flight interested in either one of us. He’s not going to fly charter—too many records. And I checked—the next commercial flight out of Lima to D.C. lands at least four hours after ours. So, even if the shooter somehow managed to recover enough to follow us and figures out we headed north, we’ve at least got that much time.”

“And if he contacted whoever sent him?”

He touched a hand to the small of her back and steered her around a gaggle of teens who were walking five abreast through the terminal. “Whoever sent him is going to be looking for travel records for Mike Brown and Eva Salinas—not John Mason and Emily Bradshaw. But they’ll find us eventually, so time is also our enemy. We need to get the flash drive and figure this out. Please tell me it’s not at your apartment.”

She shook her head and kept on walking. “Lockbox.”

“Your regular bank?” Whoever was after her had no doubt already tossed her apartment, so they’d be looking for her to have stashed the file someplace safe. A bank made sense.

“No. I opened up an account and a lockbox at Independence Federal on Ninth. Under Emily Bradshaw.”

“And the key to the box?”

“Was in the lockbox with my passports. Now it’s in my purse.”

The longer he was around her, the more she proved how smart she was.

Man. He’d come a long way from thinking of her as a lying, conniving, wack-job.

“I don’t know about you,” she said as they shouldered through the crowd in the busy airport, “but I could use a change of clothes. And a shower.”

Mike looked down at himself. She was right. He didn’t exactly blend in with city dwellers. In his combat boots, camo pants, sweat-stained T-shirt, and five-day whisker grow-out, he looked like he’d stepped out of the pages of Mercenaries R-Us. He needed to lower his profile. And yeah. He needed to clean up, too.

She stopped short beside a women’s restroom, then dug into her purse and came up with a half-full packet of Wet Wipes. “My emergency rations. Never leave home without them.” She peeled off half of the stack of moist towelettes and handed them to him. “Meet you back here in five.”

“Make it three,” he said and headed across the wide walkway to the men’s room.

“Much better,” she said when they met up again and made a beeline for the rental car desk.

After completing the paperwork for a black SUV, which Eva paid for with a credit card that couldn’t be linked back to her real name—the lady had covered her bases—Mike maneuvered the car through the maze of airport parking.

“Next stop—a change of clothes.”

“Fine,” he agreed, knowing it was necessary but anxious to get to the bank.

They’d only traveled a few miles on the freeway before she had him take an exit, then gave him directions to the great American hunting and gathering spot: the mall.

Less than fifteen minutes later, he stood with his hands on his hips in the middle of a Tommy Bahama store, more than a little intimidated.

“What size shirt?” she asked, quickly rummaging through a spinning rack. “Pants, too.”

“Large or maybe extra large for the shirt?” He shot off what he thought was his pants size, trying to remember the American size charts.

It had been a damn long time since he’d bought anything but T-shirts and camo cargo pants, so he was fine deferring to her advice on casual wear for D.C. in July—until she grabbed a shirt and shoved it into his hands. A shirt that felt like silk and looked like a city slicker’s version of a rain forest in shades of moss and gray and white.

“No,” he said and shoved it back at her.

She gave him a look. “Seriously? You want to waste time arguing about clothes?” She thrust the shirt back at him. “Don’t be such a diva. Go try it on. These, too.” She handed him a pair of tan chinos that at least had a few pockets, but still made him think of white sand, hammocks, and fruity rum punch.

Jaw tight, he took both pieces and headed for the dressing room. She added a pair of brown sandals to the stack of clothes as he went by. And a package of boxer shorts.

“What are you, my mother?”

“What are you, five?”

Because she was right—he was acting like a spoiled adolescent—and because they didn’t have time to argue, he bit the bullet and tried them all on. Unfortunately, everything fit, so he kept the clothes on, then paid for them and a pair of aviator-style shades he snagged off a rack on the counter. The clerk—a girl who couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen—gave him a blatantly flirtatious smile when he asked for a shopping bag and stuffed his old clothes inside. Biting back the urge to ask her if her mother knew she acted like that, he slipped on the dark glasses and walked to the front of the store to wait for Eva.

He’d never admit it to her, but he was surprised how comfortable the clothes were—and how much he liked what he saw when she walked toward him looking fine. Glad he was wearing the shades, he took his time checking her out. Her dress was formfitting, V-necked and sleeveless, and gathered like a fan beneath her left breast. The skirt hit her above the knee. Her bronze sandals had fancy straps covered with beading and bling.

Chic, understated, and so damn sexy he almost swallowed his tongue. Superimposed over all that cosmopolitan cool was the memory of her breasts spilling out of that red bustier and her hips swaying on the dance floor at El Tocón Sangriento.

“What color do you call that?” he asked to diffuse the image, the memory of the taste of the pisco, and to keep from thinking about the way her breasts bounced beneath the soft, stretchy fabric.

“Eggplant.”

A vegetable—good, he needed to think about vegetables. Not ripe, luscious fruit, which was what she made him think of. Beans, legumes, squash. That’s what he needed to think about, because she’d also pulled her hair out of the utilitarian ponytail and wound it into a loose, thick braid that looked sophisticated and exotic.

The woman was a chameleon. She was also a woman of extremes. He’d known her for less than twenty-four hours, and during that time she’d effortlessly changed from sex kitten to commando to metropolitan sophisticate.

The only constant was the sexy part and, Lord love a duck, did she ever have that nailed.

“Two bags?” he asked, relieving her of one of the full shopping bags she carried in each hand.

“As long as I was there, I picked up a few extra changes of clothes. For you, too,” she added with a small but pleased-with-herself smile.

“Oh, goodie. A man can never have enough flowered shirts.”

She actually laughed. A first. And the sound did something to his nerve endings that he didn’t want to dissect. All of his nerve endings, and holy God, he needed to get a grip.

It had been way too long since he’d gotten laid. And he’d gone far beyond having a need-to-know curiosity about this woman.

“Give me five more minutes,” she said. “There’s a drugstore two doors down. I need to pick up a few personal things.”

Since he needed the space, he didn’t argue. Good to her word, five minutes later she was back with another bag full of stuff. A woman who could speedshop. Impressive.

As they left the mall and hurried across the blistering hot parking lot toward the SUV, he wondered if he would ever know the real Eva Salinas. More disturbing was the realization that he might want to know. Intimately.

Now who’s crazy, Brown?

Back in the SUV, he dug his phone out of his pocket, dialed a secure number, let it ring three times, then hung up. He could feel her curious gaze as he pulled out into traffic, and gave her credit for not asking what the call was about. He’d have an answer for both of them soon.

She dug into the bag from the drugstore—lipstick, a compact, lotion, deodorant, and such—and was sorting through them when his phone rang less than a minute later.

He grabbed it on the first ring. “That was quick.”

“Figured it was important.” The familiar voice of Joe Green sounded reassuringly close although Mike knew he could be anywhere from here to Singapore. “After all, it’s been a year.”

Green was a member of Black Ops, Inc. And yes, it had been a little over a year since the team had enlisted Mike’s services to help Joe and the woman who was now his wife escape Sierra Leone after Joe had been falsely imprisoned. Of course, nothing was ever that simple, and Mike and his brother Ty had ended up helping Green uncover a corrupt government official, dodge a few bullets, and save a couple of lives along the way.

Mike and the team went way back. He’d been their pilot during their military days, providing air transpo for their Task Force Mercy missions in South Africa and the Middle East. After TFM had been disbanded Mike had redeployed to Afghanistan, was drafted into the One-Eyed Jacks unit, and the rest, as they say, read like a bad B-grade movie.

“I’m in D.C.,” he told Green, peripherally aware that Eva had pulled down the passenger-seat visor and was using the mirror to apply makeup. “Need a place to crash. A safe place. There’ll be two of us.”

Green didn’t hesitate. “That all you need?”

He’d just offered his services—most likely the support of the entire BOI team—and for that Mike was grateful.

He also felt a resurgence of guilt. As far as he knew, none of the BOI team knew about what had happened in Afghanistan. The shame and disillusionment he felt over rolling over and playing dead when he’d copped that plea and taken the less than honorable discharge wasn’t exactly something he wanted to broadcast to men he respected and admired.

“For the time being,” he said, pushing past it, “but how ’bout I give you an IOU for a six-pack and you can consider yourself on retainer?”

“That’ll work.”

“Appreciate this, man.”

“Tit for tat and all that.”

It was good to know that a team as skilled and connected as BOI felt they were indebted to him. Joe, after all, was married to the daughter of the new Secretary of State, and Black Ops, Inc. was now a sanctioned entity of the Department of Defense. He didn’t intend to call in that marker unless it was absolutely necessary, but he had a feeling that before this was all over, it would come to that. Shooters wielding MP5Ks tended to make him a tad paranoid.

“Hi to Steph, okay? Give her a kiss for me, a big wet one. And just because you need the occasional reminder, that woman is way too good for the likes of you.”

Green grunted. “No argument from me on that front. Keep the line clear. I’ll be back asap with an address for you.”

“Hey, man, there is a little something you could do for me. Hold on for a text, okay?”

“You got it.”

As soon as Green disconnected, Mike pulled into a liquor store parking lot and fired off the photo he’d snapped of Eva at the Bogota airport. He followed up with a text message asking Green for a detailed search on Pamela Diaz, Emily Bradshaw, and Eva Salinas. Insurance was king in this game.

Mike felt Eva’s gaze on him as he eased back into the stream of traffic. For the first time, he noticed the scent of flowers and musk as she lavished lotion on her bare arms. “One of your friends in high places?”

He turned onto Ninth Street, heading for the bank. “Yup.”

She toed off a shoe, propped her bare foot on the dash, and started smoothing lotion onto her leg. Her very bare leg, left that way when her skirt slid up her thigh. “You asked him to run a background check on me.”

He dragged his gaze back to the street, tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “On all three of you.”

“I thought we’d started to trust each other.”

He laughed—it was either that or swallow his tongue as she shifted legs and started the lotion motion all over again. “You wouldn’t do the same if you were in my shoes?”

She let out a big sigh. “They won’t find anything.”

He laughed again, this time in relief, when she smoothed her skirt back down her thighs and slipped into her shoes. “Oh, yes. They will. Anything you want to spill before they dig up the dirt?”

She shook her head—more a gesture of disgust than a response.

“There’s parking over there.” She pointed toward the lot when they reached the bank.

“Wait here.” He held his hand out for the lockbox key. “Let’s play it safe, on the off chance someone followed you here when you rented the box and still has eyes on the place.”

“That’s not going to work. The bank will want photo ID.”

Right. “Then we go in together. They won’t be looking for a couple.”

His words stopped him short as it occurred to him for the first time that she may have hooked up with someone in the eight years since Ramon’s death. She was an outrageously attractive woman. Intelligent. Driven. Wore the hell out of a red bustier. And right now, she smelled like hot sex on a summer night.

“Or would they?” He looked across the seat at her. “Is there a Mr. Right Now in your life?” If there was, Mike disliked him already. Call him a chauvinist, but in his book a man who would let his woman traipse off by herself to hunt down a no-good like him wasn’t a man at all. Unless she hadn’t told him where she was going or what she was doing, which was totally her MO.

She hesitated, then shook her head. “No. No one would be looking for a couple.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to ask her if Ramon had spoiled her for any other man, but that would have been just plain tacky and maybe even a little mean.

He’d stopped feeling mean toward Eva Salinas somewhere over a half-eaten sandwich at the Bogota airport, when she’d told him Ramon was her dead husband.