The Seduction of Goody Two-Shoes

“That may be true, but you’re also what got us out of it.” He cleared his throat and tried for a lighter tone. “You know, for a Goody Two-Shoes you’re pretty damn good at this cops-and-robbers stuff.”

There was a pause before she said, with a curious lilt in her voice, “For an artist-slash-beach bum, so are you…”

He looked at her and saw that she was smiling that glorious Cinnamon Girl smile. And when he remembered to look at the road again, he could see lights up ahead in the distance. They were coming into the outskirts of Chetumal.

Providence? He thought maybe that was as good a name for it as any.

Ellie sat shivering in the dark VW and watched McCall turn away from the pay phone, no longer even bothering to hunch up his shoulders when the deluge hit him, just letting it sluice down over him like a shower bath.

“Are the lines down?” she asked when he opened the door and she got a good look at his face.

“Nah.” He pulled the door shut with a jerk, sending water droplets flying everywhere in a way that reminded Ellie of a big wet dog. “I actually got through to him-his answering machine, anyway. He’s away on a dive. Says he’ll be back on the second.” His voice was strangely neutral, almost completely devoid of expression.

“That’s tomorrow, isn’t it? Or today-” she held her watch up close to her face and pressed the button to illuminate the numbers “-almost.”

“The Day of the Dead…” They sat in silence, McCall staring through the windshield at the grocery-store windows behind the pay phone, all boarded up against the hurricane Paulette never had quite become, Ellie staring at him. “So,” he said at last, glancing over at her with a look of apology. The fatigue in his face made her heart ache. She thought about his wounded arm, wondered again how bad it was and how much blood he’d lost. “That’s it, I guess. No help there.”

“Then let’s just get a motel room for tonight. If he’s going to be home tomorrow-”

“You’re forgetting one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“What do we do for money? We left everything back in the hotel at Lago Bacalar.”

“Not…everything.” Ellie was already fishing around inside the beach bag. A moment later she gave a little grunt of triumph and held up the slender wallet containing her “cover” documents. “I still have Mrs. Burnside’s credit card-U.S. Government issue.”

He reached for her, took her face between his hands and gave her a swift hard kiss-an impulse born of joy he might have bestowed on just about anyone, but her heart gave a fiery little leap anyway. Already shaky with fatigue, she now felt a new kind of trembling, a strange pulsing vibration deep, deep inside.

“We’re in business,” he said huskily. “Now, if we can just find a hotel clerk awake at this hour…”

McCall knew Chetumal fairly well. Even in the darkness and pouring rain he didn’t have much trouble finding the place he’d had in mind. It was well away from the modern Holiday Inn-type hotels in the center of town, down near the docks-a fairly scruffy area, but the hotel had rooms that opened onto a central courtyard so at least they wouldn’t have to trek through a lighted lobby looking like drowned rats.

He parked the VW in a narrow side street and left Ellie there to wait for him while he went to try to rouse a hotel clerk. It took him a while, pounding on the door and the boarded-up windows of the lobby, but eventually, after he’d almost given up, a short stocky man came out of a door at the back of the office and shambled up to the night window, bleary-eyed and unshaven, scratching at the sleeveless white undershirt that covered his round belly. Though at first obviously not pleased to see a customer so late, especially one who must have looked as though he’d just come out second-best in a back-alley brawl, he perked up considerably when McCall showed him the credit card and offered to pay him double the going rate for what was left of the night.

With the room key in his pocket, he splashed his way back to the Volkswagen to find Ellie crouched down like a frightened rabbit with her head between the steering wheel and the back of the driver’s seat.

“I saw a car go by…out there, on the main street,” she explained in a croaking, slightly embarrassed whisper. “I thought…you know, just in case it might be-”

“Wouldn’t do you much good to hide,” he said mildly as he edged in behind the wheel. “It’s the car they’re going to be looking for.” She made a small, rueful sound and put a hand over her eyes. He threw her a glance. “If it makes you feel better, we can park it in the back, out of sight. But I don’t think they’d be after us yet. Not in this.”

She nodded but didn’t say anything. She hadn’t had much to say for a while now-stress and fatigue wearing on her, he supposed. Only natural she’d be coming to the end of her rope, after everything she’d been through.

Except that there was something vibrant, almost electric about her silence, a strange kind of subaudible humming that seemed to reach out and touch him in the darkness and make his skin tingle and his heartbeat accelerate in response. In response to what, exactly, he didn’t know. Fear, he thought-uneasiness at being still in danger, still so vulnerable-that would make sense. Except that his own responses didn’t feel like fear. He wasn’t an adrenaline junkie and never had found fear a particularly enjoyable sensation, but right now what he felt like more than anything was a kid waiting in line to get on a really wild and scary roller-coaster ride.

He started the VW, rolled it slowly, almost silently down the narrow street and turned into the even narrower alley that ran behind the hotel. He parked, not bothering to lock it up. There was one more dash through the downpour, through water that ran ankle-deep in places, a brief struggle with a balky lock and an old key, and then they were inside, surrounded by walls and darkness and silence and, for the moment at least, safety.

It was humid and musty in the little hotel room, as it usually was in the tropics, with or without air conditioning. Without much hope, McCall flipped a switch near the door. Miraculously, light flooded the room and a ceiling fan reluctantly began circling.

“Power’s on, at least,” he muttered; it was by no means a given in that part of the Yucatan, even without a tropical storm.

He carefully avoided looking at the single bed in the room, which looked even smaller than the one in the “honeymoon suite” at Lago Bacalar in which he’d spent a mostly sleepless night-had it only been last night, twenty-four hours ago? It seemed like a month. He thought about how they’d discussed it then, who would sleep where, just as a matter of course. Why was it that now he couldn’t think of anything to say that didn’t seem fraught with pitfalls, with infinite possibilities for misunderstanding?

He looked instead at Ellie, who had lowered the beach bag to the floor beside the dresser and was slowly taking off her sun visor.

“We should be safe here, for the time being, anyway,” he said gruffly. “At least until the storm moves on. Even with all his resources, there’s not much the general can do while it’s raining like this.”

Ellie nodded. She took off her wristwatch and placed it beside the sun visor. And still she hadn’t spoken.

“You can have first crack at the shower, if you want…”

Her body gave a little jerk, face turned away from him, and he heard a soft, ironic laugh. “Right now what I’d give almost anything for is just to be dry.”

He’d have liked to have laughed with her, but all he could come up with was a snort. “Best we can do is rinse our clothes out in the shower, wring ’em out good and hang ’em up for what’s left of the night-don’t think they’ll do much drying in all this humidity, but in the meantime we can share-I mean, each take part of the bedclothes…” Damn.

It didn’t help matters, the way she was looking at him now, arms raised, fingers combing her wet hair back from her face. The room light, under a parchment shade, gave her skin a warm, buttery glow. The freckles scattered across her nose and cheeks looked like a sprinkle of cinnamon. His mouth began to water. Then he happened to glance down, and it went dry instead. Under the clinging T-shirt, her small round breasts stood out in perfectly defined relief, nipples dark and-there was that word again-pert.

“Yeah,” she said softly, “we could do that.” She gave her head a little shake, then went on looking at him…her face so open, so honest, he wondered how he could ever have been so stupid as to believe her capable of committing a crime…or an infidelity. Even lying, he remembered, had made her blush. He remembered that he’d called her Goody Two-Shoes and wondered if that was why.

“McCall,” she said, tilting her head slightly to one side, “Can I ask you a personal question?”

“Shoot,” he said, a sound raspy as a snarl.

Her chin came up a notch, the only sign she gave of nervousness or that she might not be quite as confident as she seemed. “I know you don’t like personal questions, but I thought, since we’re about to make love, it would be really nice if I knew your name.”