Traitor, The (3 page)
Even as Isabella clutched at him, Rafe's rational mind
warned him to pull back from the heady distraction. She dipped her tongue into
his mouth in sensuous simulation, and logic clanged another alarm in his head.
The allure of her mouth tamped it down.
Good God.
His right hand worked up to grip her bare bottom beneath the
panties while his left tangled in her dark curls, roughly tugging her head
backward to expose the vulnerable flesh of her neck. He tasted the tang of
cologne and sweat mingling on her neck as he broke away from her lips again to
run his tongue along the smooth skin.
A third tiny ping registered at the same time he remembered the
sly look on the bartender's face. Rafe snapped back to reality with a rush of
adrenaline that screeched danger. By then it was too late. He barely had time
to swing around, shield Isabella's body with his own, and reach futilely for
the handgun at his ankle. A split second to acknowledge the burly body of the
attacker who'd crept up on them.
Hell!
The sharp blow to his temple might've felled him except that
the woman's body braced him at the back. A trickle of blood ran from his
forehead into his eye, blurring his vision as he sank against her and they both
toppled to the ground. A soft groan escaped her as she collapsed under the full
force of his hundred and eighty pounds.
Swiping the blood from his eye and shaking his head to clear
the dizziness, he unholstered his weapon and braced himself on one knee. By the
time he'd swung around and gripped the pistol in a two-handed stance, the
attacker had fled down the alley and darted around the corner toward the rear
parking lot.
Rafe chased him to the end of the alley, ran past the waste
disposal bin, and leading with his gun, eased around the corner. The lot was empty
except for his green Hummer, a battered white truck, and Isabella's sisters huddling
beside a blue sedan.
He put his finger to his lips and cautiously moved along the
exit doors that lined the back lot, twisting each knob as he reached it. All
locked. Crouching low, he approached the truck and peered through the windows,
then checked in the bed and beneath the carriage. Nothing. The attacker had
vanished.
"Which way?" Rafe barked at the older sister.
Consuelo, he thought her name was.
With wide eyes both women shook their heads and pointed
tremulous hands toward the street and the dark night beyond.
"Where's Bella?" Consuelo asked sharply.
"What have you done with her?"
As the three turned back to the dark mouth of the alley,
Isabella limped slowly toward them. Belatedly, he remembered the thud of her
body hitting the pavement.
Ah, shit!
"You always leave a woman sprawled out like that?"
she quipped.
Her hip felt as if it had been ripped from its socket, her
left knee burned from a bloody scrape, and her right arm tingled from wrist to
elbow. But, damn it all, she would keep her sense of humor even if it killed
her. Twice now she'd tumbled in front of Rafe, sprawling as gracelessly as a
toddler. She was not going to revert to the shakiness that threatened her limbs.
"Bella," Nita wailed. "Are you hurt? Is
anything broken?"
Connie ran practiced, assured hands over Bella and glared at
Rafe. "What kind of a thug are you?"
Bella felt her face flush. "It's okay, Connie. I'm not
hurt. Rafe's a polite thug."
"Looks like you're well enough to wrangle," Rafe muttered,
edging Connie aside. He took Bella's hands and turned them over, observing the
knuckles and then the palms. "So I guess you'll live." He glanced
down at her knee. "My place is close. We'd better get some antiseptic on
those abrasions."
"Gringo,"
Connie spat, although Rafe
clearly was darker than she was. "She's not going anywhere with you.
¡Tonto
torpe!"
Clumsy idiot.
Connie didn't mince words.
Rafe daubed at his temple with a snowy white handkerchief,
but made no reference to his own bleeding wound, Bella noticed. Without another
word he trotted back down the alley, retrieved his jacket from the ground, and
gazed carefully around.
A few feet from where he'd dropped his jacket, he crouched
down and touched his fingers to what looked from a distance like an oil stain
on the asphalt close to the brick wall of the building. He dipped his fingers
into the stain, lifted them to his nose, and sniffed. What had he found?
Bella shivered and Connie clutched her harder around the
waist. What if their assailant came back while Rafe dawdled and poked around in
the dark alley?
Suddenly she remembered the gun. Rafe's weapon. She had felt
it jab into her leg when he slammed against her, but she hadn't realized what
it was until he pulled it out after they tumbled to the ground.
Her analytical district attorney's mind clicked into gear.
What kind of government agent was Rafe that he carried a weapon? Definitely not
a paper pusher. Not the local police either. She would've immediately recognized
the badge as one of theirs.
After several long minutes of examining the alley, leaving
her and her sisters in the murky parking lot, Rafe returned. "Let's go."
He touched her arm and started to guide her toward a giant Hummer parked
directly beneath a street lamp, its dark green color shiny and fluid in the
night air.
Connie shoved his hand away. "No!" she commanded,
fierce as a momma bear with her cub. "She will go home with us."
Bella started to agree, but curiosity overtook caution. What
was the elusive Ashraf, call me Rafe, long A, up to? He wore a gun to a fancy
bar and met with a guy who clearly didn't belong there.
He engaged in a pickup date, but got mugged in an alley. In
her mind his badge was protection enough for her to go along until she
discovered what he was up to. Some kind of undercover, she decided. Anyway, she
didn't want to go back to her mother's small house in Pico Rivera, and apart
from the cursory flash of his badge hours earlier, she knew innately that she
was safe with him.
"Consuelo, I'll be fine," she insisted. "Rafe
... uh ... works in ... uh ... law enforcement."
He grinned wickedly and flashed his badge again, aiming it
Connie's way. "I'm close by," he said, "and I'll bring her home.
No worry."
Connie reluctantly agreed to leave with Nita after they'd
exchanged phone numbers, addresses and car license plates. Rafe got a grilling
stricter than screening for the CIA.
His apartment was indeed a short distance from the district
that housed Stuckey's Bar. His neighborhood was one of those gentrification
projects that sprang up from time to time in crowded cities. Abutting a more
worn, seedier area to the west and upper-middle class property to the east, it
accommodated young professionals with incomes on the rise.
Up a flight of well-worn stairs and down a poorly lighted
corridor, a door at the end of the hall opened into a surprisingly spacious and
homey apartment. Bella took in the sparse furnishings and understated décor. A
man's place, arranged for convenience and comfort with minimal distraction.
Rafe pushed her into a deep, oversized arm chair that faced
a giant plasma television screen, propped her feet on the hassock in front of
the chair, and left the living area through a white shuttered swinging door.
Bella glanced at the small end table to her left, littered with half-opened
mail, yesterday's newspaper, and the latest television guide.
He returned moments later bearing a small first-aid kit
containing bandages, antibiotics, and hydrogen peroxide, along with a clean
white towel. He pushed the end-table contents onto the floor, set down the
items, and knelt to inspect her knees. As he hunched over her wounds, she noted
the flecks of gray woven through the thick jet waves.
"This might sting," he warned, dabbing at her knee
with a peroxide-soaked cotton ball.
"Ouch!"
"Don't be a baby," he chastised, blowing on her
knee and sounding exactly like Consuelo. But the slight roughness of his
callused fingertips as he held her calf wasn't anything at all like her sister's
touch.
"That's fine," she said impatiently, attempting to
rise from the chair.
"Whoa, there, you're not going anywhere until I bandage
that knee."
He shoved her back down and quickly smoothed ointment onto
the abrasion, then fitted on a large bandage. Without a word he took her hands
in his and examined the scrapes on the heels. Dabbing them with more peroxide,
he then placed them in her lap, his own large hands covering hers.
Now his face hovered inches from hers as he examined her
eyes. She hated the strong betrayers of her emotions, the flush that crept into
her normally pale cheeks and the pattering of her heart.
"Is it that hard for you to let someone help you,
Isabella?" Rafe's breath fanned her cheek and the tangy scent of liquor
filled her nostrils. He seemed sincerely curious and rather gentle.
She blinked furiously and protested, "I let people help
me." Her voice sounded thick in her own ears.
"Like hell you do," he said softly, tucking an
errant curl behind her ear. An eternity passed with him alternating between
staring at her lips and examining her eyes. And then he said what she'd been
thinking all along. "Do you want to kiss me, Isabella?" Her name
rolled off his tongue with the intoxicating accent of one schooled in her
native tongue. Ees – sah – BEL - la.
She expected it, but even so, she felt a thrill of shock
when what they'd begun in the bar and continued in the alley looked like it
might finish right here in Rafe's apartment. The night's danger fled her mind
like trees stripped bare on a windy day.
"Do you, Isabella?" he murmured again, just as if
he'd read her mind, and the answer to the question was a simple, unqualified
yes.
"What about my knee?" she whispered staring at his
mouth. "What about the scrapes on my hands?" She held them up for his
inspection as if they were proof of required kissing.
He took her hands in both of his, smoothing rough fingertips
over the tender palms, and then in turn, lifting each one to his mouth and
placing gentle kisses on them. Then he leaned in slowly to kiss her mouth. Not
like the kiss in the alley, not the heated passion of mating, but a gentle
melding of two people in tentative like with each other.
Tremors started in her thighs and injured knee and traveled
upward to her shoulders while tears prickled her eyes. Clearly recognizing her
case of the shakes, Rafe pulled her into his arms. He brushed back the damp
hair from her forehead and wrapped his large, hard body around her.
"It's just a delayed reaction." He spoke into her
temple, his lips warm against her skin. "Don't worry."
Swiping at her tears, Bella gave him a little shove, her arm
braced against his chest. "What kind of idiot reacts to an event hours
after the fact?"
He smiled. "A normal kind of idiot." He picked up
another bandage and affixed it to her shin where a smaller abrasion had begun
to redden. Then he sat back to admire his handiwork. "There, I think you're
put back together again, Humpty."
Diego Vargas stepped back from the dead body and wiped his
feet on the short grassy patch at the water's edge. "Fuck!" He leaned
over to peer at his shoes. "These loafers just came last week from Italy.
You want to know how much they cost me?"
Gabriel Santos glanced up in carefully controlled irritation
from where he crouched over the man's body. The question was rhetorical, he
knew, but still a ridiculous comment when compared to the more serious problem
he knelt over – the bluish body lying on a black tarp.
He eyed his boss's scowl and erased all emotion from his own
face. Santos had been an actor in the old days. Well, a stunt man at any rate.
But perhaps that was not the same thing. Perhaps he was no actor at all, but
had only the credentials to take and give a serious beating.
The dead man lying naked before them had been an actor too,
an up-and-coming young star full of bright promise. At least, according to the
tabloids. He lay on his back, his lips a darker blue than the pale tinge of his
flesh, his muscled body glowing in the light from Santos' flashlight. Fresh
needle tracks marred his right arm, and his open eyes showed wide dilations of
black that nearly eclipsed the blue of the irises.
Santos knew if the actor's so-called friends had called 911
at the onset of overdose, the naloxone cocktail the EMTs administered might
have saved his life. But paramedics and emergency room doctors asked too many
questions whose answers could not safely be scrutinized. So the young actor had
died with fatally low blood pressure, rattling respirations, and convulsion.
It was an ugly death to behold.
Apparently the dead actor was too
estúpido
to realize
the smack he'd just purchased at the Blue Mango Cocktail Lounge in Bakersfield
should be used sparingly. The China White was much purer than the black tar
heroin the gang-bangers schlepped over the border from México. A fraction of
the drug was enough to kill someone.
As evidenced by the body before them.
"¡Idiota de mierda! Fucking idiot.
Such pure
smack is wasted on someone like this
.
" Diego shook his head and
spat toward the body.
Santos sighed inwardly and shuttered his eyes. "DNA,"
he reminded, referring to the spit, although of course, the warning was too
late.
Ay,
sometimes he believed that Diego was the idiot. Spitting near
a dead body? Now Santos would have to dump the young actor's body somewhere
else to avoid any chance of
El Vaquero's
DNA being connected to the
overdose victim.
Santos sighed again as he reached for the edges of the tarp
he'd used to transport the body. He wrapped it around the stiffening corpse,
hefted the slight weight onto his shoulders, and trudged toward the black sedan
parked in the breakdown lane at the top of the promontory. Diego strolled ahead
of him, fishing in the breast pocket of his jacket for a cigarette and
whistling a tuneless melody.
Santos wondered yet again why he worked for such a man.
On the drive to another dump site, Santos thought of the
beautiful face of Magdalena Vargas and knew exactly why he put up with a pig of
a man like Diego Vargas. He smiled to himself. It was true that El Vaquero paid
very well for the kind of services only Santos could deliver.
But it was also true that the wife of Señor Vargas was worth
more than gold. What was it the Bible said? Her price was far above rubies.
"Why do you grin like a jackass?" Diego complained
from the back seat. "A man's death is a funny event?"
"Vaquero,
I deal in death every day." Santos
shrugged philosophically. "If I did not find humor at such a time, when
would I laugh?"
"Verdad."
Vargas barked out a harsh laugh. "And
the loss of such a man is not so significant."
He leaned over the seat to tap his bodyguard on the
shoulder. "There must be no more of these foolish deaths, Gabriel. No
more." He punctuated each word with a sharp jab to Santos' shoulder and
then blew cigarette smoke into the side of his face. "Our distributors
must let their customers know how pure the China White heroin is."
"Yes."
Vargas sat back and gazed at the glowing tip of his
cigarette. Through the rearview mirror, Santos watched him.
Ay,
did
El
Vaquero
expect the distributors to hold a seminar in safe drug usage of
illegal substances?
Santos smiled again, but this time discreetly.
#
Humpty dumpty, indeed, Bella thought, pushing away. Rafe,
no-last-name, was trouble with a large dose of sex appeal, and while she'd
thought that's what she wanted, she now realized with the Vargas case on her
plate a distraction was the last thing she needed. "I should call a cab,"
she decided.
"Nuh uh," he insisted, "You've had a shock
and you're not going anywhere until you rest."
"But my clothes ... my sisters ... " She stared at
her sister's dress smudged with dirt, oil, and God knew what else. The ruined
clothes against her skin made her feel vulnerable. She heard the rising panic
in her voice, the shakes taking over again. "I don't want to wear these
anymore."
"Okay, I'll find something for you to put on." He
headed down a short hallway off the main room, and she heard the opening and
closing of drawers and closets. Returning a few moments later, he handed her a
stack of clothing. "Try these. You might have to roll up the sleeves and
legs." He examined her face. "Maybe you should get washed up first.
You'll feel better when you've showered."
She opened her mouth to protest, but clamped down on her jaw,
then snatched the clothes from his hands and marched down the hall to the room
he'd just exited. At the entry, she paused, eyeing him suspiciously. "Don't
think I don't know what you're doing," she said as she reached the door.
Did he think she was a complete fool?
She glanced around the luxurious bedroom suite. To the left
rose a bank of four narrow windows that stretched from floor to ceiling with
white wooden shutters opened wide so she could see the clear, dark sky through
the slats. All three doors to the right of the bed were closed. Maybe she
was
an idiot. She didn't know which was the bathroom.
Amused, Rafe listened to the slamming of the bedroom door.
He'd let her keep her pride. The first tremors of panic after an assault were
all too familiar to him, the vulnerability that hung on long after the attack
was over.
He hadn't felt these emotions for years, but he remembered
them vividly. Right now showing her claws was healthier than giving way to
hysteria. When he heard the sound of running water minutes later, he figured
she'd found her way around his bathroom. He used the time to make a call about
the suspicious evidence he'd examined in the alley.
Max Jensen, a local homicide detective, was catching
tonight. "Blood, huh?" Max said after listening to the account of the
attack in the alley. "Why'd you call me, Rafe? Why not your field office?"
"Just reporting an assault."
"But you didn't go to the hospital, right? No one
sustained injuries?"
Rafe ran his fingers over his temple. "The lump over my
eye might argue with you, but no, neither of us got seriously hurt."
Max laughed. "Shit, I figure your head's too hard."
"Check that alley, Max. I'm pretty sure that was blood
I found. Recent."
"I'll send a crime scene unit out."
"And check out the bartender, would you? I have a
feeling about him. Hold him overnight if you can."
Max snorted. "Sure, old buddy. LAPD lives to serve the DEA's
needs."
By the time Isabella walked back into the living room, Rafe had
tended to his own wounds, showered in the guest bathroom, and dressed in sweats
and a long-sleeved police academy tee-shirt.
"Feeling better?" he asked when she curled up in
the wide armchair across from where he sat nursing a brandy.
She nodded. "Thanks for the clothes."
The oversized tee-shirt was a remnant from his college days
at Stanford. The hardened peaks of her breasts told him she wore nothing
underneath it. She'd turned up the sweatpants several times so that her red
painted toes stuck out beneath the rolled hem.
The unexpected image of a pair of red panties popped into
his maverick brain. Tonight was stacking up to be a long night, and his
self-control was ebbing fast. Maybe calling that cab wasn't a bad idea after
all.
But instead, he strode toward the bedroom, calling over his
shoulder. "I've got fresh sheets for the bed. You should get some sleep."
She followed him into the bedroom and stood in the door frame.
"Where will you sleep?"
"Couch," he said shortly, ripping off the used
sheets and replacing them with fresh ones from the linen closet.
She watched him silently. He wondered what was going on in
that pretty little head of hers. Was she thinking about their earlier
flirtation? Their interrupted passion in the alley? His fingers had touched her
and found her wet right before the attack. Had she even been aware that he'd
felt the moist heat of her ...
there?
"There," he said aloud. He pulled an extra blanket
from the closet and laid it at the foot of the bed. From the bathroom, he
retrieved his toothbrush and shaving gear, and a clean change of underwear from
the dresser.
He paused at the door to the hall and looked back at her as
she sat on the edge of the bed. "There's an extra toothbrush in the
medicine cabinet." He waited for her to respond. "Well then,
goodnight." He shifted awkwardly before adding, "Are you going to be
all right?"
She stared at the black maw of the windows. "He won't
come here, will he?" Her voice sounded small.
He knew instantly what she meant. "Of course not. He
doesn't know where I live."
She nodded slowly as if contemplating how valid his claim
was. "But he knew who you were when he attacked us in the alley."
He hesitated. "Don't worry. I have a friend in the LAPD.
He's taking care of everything."
"I'll call my sister," she answered by way of
consent to remaining for the night.
After she'd made the phone call, she sat down on the edge of
the bed and eyed him tentatively. "Rafe?"
"Yes?"
"I don't want to be alone." She flushed and he
thought the admission embarrassed her.
He stood beside the bed while Bella crept beneath the sheets
and pulled the covers up to her neck. Then he lay down on the top of the
bedspread beside her.
Damn, if he'd known she'd end up wanting him to comfort her,
but not ... well, sleep with her, he'd never have made that first invitation
for her to sit down in the booth opposite him. A chaste night in bed with a
gorgeous woman was not what he imagined when he'd first noticed her across the
room at Stuckey's Bar.