The Seduction of Goody Two-Shoes

They’ll have a phone, Ellie told herself, ever the optimist. Yes, surely they would. She could call for a cab after her business was concluded.

If… If they show up at all. If they’ll even talk to me, a woman…

Roused by that thought, she snorted defiantly and stepped through the doorway.

The dimness and the smell inside the cantina hit her like a physical blow. It smelled like old outhouses. New vomit. And a sweet smokiness she remembered from her college days that was either incense or hashish-she never had been certain which. Fortunately, Ellie wasn’t squeamish; between her farm upbringing, her crusades on behalf of endangered wildlife and a chosen profession that involved animals at all stages of life and death, she was accustomed to sights and smells some would probably consider revolting.

After that reflexive pause and another moment to let her senses adjust, she crossed the room to a wooden bar that was leaning drunkenly against the back wall. A man sat there on a high, three-legged stool, elbows propped on the bar, drinking a milky liquid from a bottle and lazily smoking a brownish, handrolled cigarette. Perhaps the source of that cloyingly sweet smell? Ellie decided she’d rather not know.

“Senor Avila?” she asked, placing the note with her handwritten instructions on the bar.

The man regarded it with silent disdain, one eye closed against curling smoke.

Ellie was about to resort to her extremely limited knowledge of Spanish when inspiration struck. Feeling quite astute, she reached into her handbag and found the crumpled bills she’d thrust there after paying the taxi driver. She pulled one out and laid it on top of the note-paper. A ten, she noticed with some chagrin; probably a five would have been more than enough. Oh well.

The man slowly picked it up and stuffed it into the pocket of his sweat-stained blue shirt, then jerked his head toward the front of the cantina.

Turning, Ellie saw for the first time that there were three men sitting silently at the table in the corner, half hidden in the shadows behind the shaft of sunlight slanting in through the open doorway. A little chill shivered down her back as two of the men rose and moved unhurriedly to form a silhouetted phalanx across the entrance, blocking her only escape.

McCall drove slowly down the deserted road, squinting into the midday glare and mentally gnashing his teeth. Not a creature was stirring, save for one evil-looking dog shambling idly from one disgusting discovery to another, pausing to sniff them all and occasionally eating one. On the one hand, McCall figured that was a good sign; at least, all things being equal, he thought he could probably handle the dog. On the other, it was obvious the taxi had departed for safer pastures, with or without its passenger, it was impossible to know for certain.

Or rather, there was only one way to know for certain.

Resigned to the inevitable, he parked the Beetle next to a more-or-less vacant lot, arousing the immediate interest of the dog, who shuffled over to investigate and wasted no time in marking this new addition to his territory. With a sigh that was more like a growl, McCall locked up the VW-aware that it was probably going to be futile-and crossed the road to the cantina.

When he stepped through the doorway, he really believed he was ready for anything. A nice little tickle of adrenaline was making his skin tingle in a way that wasn’t entirely unpleasant; probably if he’d been of a species possessed of hackles, they’d have been rising. He felt like Clint Eastwood walking into one of those dusty desert bars looking for bad guys to shoot-except that the way he remembered it, Clint never had to contend with the effects of that glare, which made the inside of the cantina black as a cave and McCall consequently blind as a bat for as long as it took his eyes to adjust.

But as it turned out, there was probably nothing that could have prepared him for what did happen.

His first warning was a little rush of air, a whiff of a sweet flowery scent that jolted him with a memory he couldn’t place. He threw up his arms reflexively, but instead of a fist or a knife, they met with soft, yielding flesh.

There was a gasp, then a cry, breathless with joy and relief. “Darling-thank God you’re here!”

A pair of arms, small but strong, hooked around his neck. A pair of lips, soft but firm, pressed against his. Pressed, not brushed. And for a heady, heart-stopping moment, clung. He tasted moisture and warmth, and sweet, clean woman.

Adrenaline hit him, big-time. Response was automatic; his mind had become incapable of thought. Clutching reflexively, his hands found and closed around a small, firm waist covered in something soft and clingy, but that was as far as he got before the lips peeled themselves from his and he felt instead the skin-shivering brush of breath on his cheek. And then a whisper in his ear, along with enough of that breath to blast the shivers clear through his body.

“You’re my husband. You’ve been sick. Please play along…”

Play along? Hell, he didn’t even know what the game was!

Now that his eyes had adjusted to the gloom, McCall could see that he and Cinnamon-the owner of the lips and source of that delicious scent-were not alone in that corner of the cantina. Two men wearing jungle camouflage khakis and a faintly military air stood flanking the woman and a little behind, arms folded across outthrust chests, legs planted firmly and apart. Behind them a third man, obviously the one in charge, half sat, half leaned against a rickety wooden table, smoking a cigar. The aura of menace in the room was as unmistakable as the cloud of sweetish smoke that hung in the air like ground fog.

“?Quien este?” The smoker spat the words into a tense and ringing silence.

The woman’s golden eyes, bright with fear and pleading, were fastened on McCall’s face. What could he do?

So-though with a mental shrug and a familiar sense of foreboding-he hooked his arm around the woman’s waist and pulled her against his side.

“I am her husband,” he said in Spanish, and added in silent afterthought, Just, please God, don’t let him ask me what our last name is.

The cigar smoker watched him with narrowed eyes through the swirling golden fog. “She told us you were sick. You look very healthy to me.”

McCall glanced down at Cinnamon-okay, she’d told him her name but he’d forgotten it, dammit-who was either frozen with fear or not very fluent in Spanish. In either case oblivious, and no help to him at all. “I’m feeling much better now,” he ventured, and taking a chance that the malady afflicting the absent husband was the one most common to tourists in that region, added with a wan smile, “Something I ate.”

The smoker’s narrow-eyed stare didn’t alter, but around the cigar his lips lifted in a sneer. “So…a little turista and you send your woman to do your business for you?”

“I did not send her. She came without my knowledge or permission.” McCall added a snort that gave the words a definite ring of sincerity.

“You do not seem to have much control over your woman, senor.”

“She has a mind of her own.” McCall shrugged. “What is a man to do?”

“I would know what to do with her if she were my woman.” The smoker made a gesture, one even Cinnamon had no trouble understanding. She sucked in air in an incensed gasp. The two men flanking them laughed, and McCall, recognizing a male-bonding moment when he saw it, joined in.

“Unfortunately, such things are illegal in my country,” he said dryly, as Cinnamon squirmed in his arm to give him a dirty look. Under his breath he snarled at her in English, “Not a word. You’re my wife. Play along.”

The smoker placed his cigar on the tabletop with an air of getting down to business. “Enough. We have important matters to discuss. You have brought the money?”

Money? This just keeps getting better and better, thought McCall. But while his hackles were perking up, preparing for the worst, the woman was already pulling a fat envelope out of her handbag.

She held it out to the smoker. “It’s all there.”

The smoker regarded the envelope with hooded eyes. Recovering his senses, McCall snatched it out of his “wife’s” hand and took a quick peek inside. Yikes. American bills-hundreds, it looked like- lots of them. Now his hackles not only perked, they positively crawled. What was this he’d gotten himself mixed up in? A drug deal of some kind? Surely not-Lord, the girl might be a little bit loco, but she looked wholesome as cornflakes.