smiling at her as he tipped back the brim of his hat and took the bottle she offered. He was feeling amazingly good-humored.
Which seemed to befuddle her, for some reason. She gave her head a quick little shake, and in that abrupt, scratchy way of hers said, “No, no-I was just thinking-no gas also means no garages. This car’s probably about a hundred and ten in human years. What happens if we break down?”
McCall cracked the cap, twisted it open and took a long drink. “No problemo,” he said with an airy wave toward the Beetle’s front end. “That’s why I carry my tools with me wherever I go.”
“Tools!” She gave him a sharp, startled look across the car’s rounded roof. “Don’t tell me you’re a mechanic.” Her gaze lingered…puzzled…quizzical, and he suddenly wished he could have read her mind just then. But the only thing he saw in those golden eyes of hers that he could be certain of was surprise.
“Not me,” he said as he opened his door and got in. She did the same, and he handed her his water bottle to hold while he fired up the VW’s engine and shifted gears. “My dad was, though. I worked for him weekends and summers all through high school, so anything around the mid 1970s or earlier I’m pretty comfortable with. These modern cars, though-all the electronics, computer-controlled everything-forget it. That’s one reason I drive the Beetle. At least I know if anything goes wrong I can probably fix it.”
He heard a faint sound, quickly stifled. He glanced at Ellie and found her gazing at him, lips parted, eyes glowing with frustrated curiosity. Smiling to himself-hell, he was in a mood to be generous-he waited until he’d got them back on the highway and headed south once again before he went on in a conversational tone, “I’d have probably been a mechanic, too-I liked it well enough-but my parents had their hearts set on sending me off to college. I was their only child, you see, and they had big plans for me.” He didn’t tell her what he’d always suspected, which was that his parents’ real reason for wanting him gone had been because they’d wanted their own lives and privacy back. Or how hard it had been, sometimes, feeling like the fifth wheel, the unwanted third party tagging along on someone else’s date.
“Where did you go?” Her voice was breathless and brave. “To college, I mean.”
“Harvard.” He punched it at her and waited for her reaction.
“Harvard!”
And he laughed, because, as he’d known it would be, it was so clearly the last thing she’d expected. “Not bad, on a mechanic’s income, huh?” But when he glanced at her, the look on her face seemed more gratified than surprised.
“You’re not-you weren’t-a lawyer, were you?”
He smiled, but irony and memory were crowding in on him again, constricting his heart and making the smile feel strained and wry. “Nope,” he said, still trying to keep it light and low-key. “Business. MBA.”
“Your parents…your dad-they must have been very proud.” Her tone was pensive, only slightly ironic, and her face was turned away, toward the window. But McCall could hear the thought as clearly as if she’d spoken it.
“I imagine they would have been,” he said with gentle defiance. “Unfortunately they died in a car accident my junior year-” he continued relentlessly over her gasp of dismay and whispered “I’m sorry…” “-coming home from the beach on a Sunday evening. Somebody in a hurry tried to pass on a two-lane stretch of highway and hit them head-on. Matter of fact, it happened not far from the spot where James Dean died…”
Chapter 7
About thirty miles south of Felipe Carillo Puerto, Ellie’s broken night’s sleep began to take its toll. She was dozing off intermittently, shaking her head and fighting it as hard as she could, when McCall suddenly yelled, “Wild turkeys-look out!”
Adrenaline slammed into her like a truck. Her head jerked up and her eyes snapped open, and she managed to utter one gasped word:
“Are you okay?” McCall asked. His tone was solicitous, but with a suspicious little croak of excitement.
Ellie felt a sudden urge to hit him. “I didn’t see them,” she wailed. “The turkeys! I didn’t even see them.”
McCall looked shocked. “How could you miss ’em? They were all over the road. What were you, asleep?”
“Yes! Maybe…I don’t know, I must have been. Why didn’t you wake me?”
“I thought I did.”
“No, I mean
“How was I supposed to know you’d dozed off?” And he was laughing as he shifted gears and the VW sputtered to life once more. Ellie subsided in a disappointed if now wide-awake sulk.
A few hundred feet farther down the highway, the VW slowed…sputtered…gasped one last time…and died.
“What?” Ellie demanded, looking at McCall.
“I don’t know.” Frowning, he tried turning the ignition key. The starter coughed and growled like a bad- tempered tiger. “Feels like we just ran out of gas, but that’s…”
“We can’t be out of gas. We just filled up,” Ellie said, flatly stating the obvious. And after a moment, “Maybe something happened when we were bouncing around back there.”
“Maybe,” McCall grunted as he opened his door and stepped out of the car. “Come on, help me get it out of the road.”
With both of them pushing on the doorjambs and McCall steering one-handed, they managed to maneuver the VW more or less onto the shoulder. McCall opened the hood and took out a serious-looking metal toolbox which he carried around to the back of the Bug.
“I thought you said you could fix it,” Ellie said when she saw him standing there, scowling at the open engine compartment and absently swatting at mosquitos.
“Gotta find the problem first. Might be a ruptured fuel line…maybe the pump. If it’s the pump…only thing I can think of is to flag somebody down and hitch a ride to Los Limones, see if we can order a part. Car this old…I don’t know. Probably have to come from Merida…someplace with some good-sized salvage yards. Maybe take two…three days-”
He broke off, primarily because his audience had deserted him. And secondly because he suddenly had a sinking feeling in his stomach. Because Ellie was just then crawling into the Beetle’s front seat, where she had no business being. That was not good. Not good at all.
His worst fears were confirmed when she sang out happily, “Hey, I think I’ve found the problem.”
“What the hell do you mean, you found the problem?” McCall stalked around to the open passenger-side door just as she was squirming out from under the dash, looking flushed and radiant-and so damned delicious she’d have made his mouth water if he hadn’t been frustrated enough to spit nails.
“This is what-a ’58, ’59? Must be, because only the really old VWs had it. It was because they didn’t have fuel gauges then. There’s this little switch down here, see? So you can manually switch over to the reserve tank. Or, you can also shut it all the way off. That’s what happened-you must’ve hit it with your knee when we were bouncing all over the place back there. Try it now.”
Mentally gnashing his teeth and silently using up every swearword he knew, McCall stomped around to the driver’s side and got in. He turned the key, and, of course, after only the usual amount of pumping, begging and growling, the engine fired.
“Don’t forget your toolbox,” Ellie said in a tone that tried too hard not to be smug.
“How come you know so much about a car that’s probably twenty years older than you are?” he grudgingly asked when he had his tools stowed and they were on their way again. “I never even thought of that fuel switch.” Well, okay, he was a liar. May that be the least of the sins I commit this week, he thought.
“I’m not that young,” Ellie cried, which in McCall’s opinion only proved she was. It had been his experience that only very young women objected to having their ages
