Wild Card

with a giddy extra charge. But lying drowsily wrapped around Felipe at her Oxford Avenue apartment Friday night, her thoughts getting into a relaxed flow after they had exhausted their passions in bed, Marissa had found it impossible to conceive of losing what he had brought out in her, or sharing it with any other man, and acknowledged then that it was time to release whatever emotional reins she’d persisted in holding onto.

Being who she was, however, letting go of her emotions did not mean she could simply have them bolt the fences. Marissa needed a framework within which to display and share them, and sought unambiguous definition for her relationship with Felipe if she was to feel altogether comfortable with it. If the two of them were not yet a mutually and openly declared, exclusive, official couple, then maybe what they were having was just a disruptive sidetrack in the well-coordinated progress of her life, a fling that — like the others that had preceded it — would lead nowhere in the end. In those moments late Friday night after he’d brought her to unprecedented pleasure and gratification, taken her as far out of control as she had ever been, Marissa had drifted off to sleep thinking she wanted to take the next step toward romantic legitimacy and introduce him to her father, whose stamp of approval she strongly desired, even while worrying more than a bit that she might be rushing things. But to her relief Felipe had met the idea with enthusiasm when she broached it the next morning, and, seeing no point in further delay, she’d arranged for them to meet for brunch up at the family home in San Rafael later on today.

Right now though… right now Felipe was once again making it hard to think about later on. Or about anything.

Not with what he was doing to her.

He kept his eyes open while they kissed, as did Marissa, their gazes locked, remaining that way until after their mouths came apart.

“We should quit,” she said, taking a breath, “before we do something against the law.”

“I won’t snitch.”

“Somebody might see us.”

“There’s no one else around.”

“This is a public beach.”

“No one’s around,” he repeated. “It’s six A.M.”

“Right about the time it was when we met.”

She looked at him.

He looked at her.

“I know where,” he said. “Let’s go back to the car.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No.”

Marissa’s heart pounded. And those tingles coming from all the way down inside her…

“Felipe, this is crazy, we aren’t through with our run,” she said, her last bit of resistance sounding unbelievably lame to her own ears.

He slid his hand from under her jacket and T-shirt now, wrapped both arms around her waist, and pulled her hips against him, held her so close their clothes hardly seemed to give them any separation.

She gasped, swallowed.

“Omigod.”

Felipe nodded.

“Forget about running,” he said. “Let’s go while I can still walk.”

She understood perfectly what he meant.

They had driven down from Marissa’s place near the Berkeley campus, leaving her Outback in a sandy access road east of the tunnel that cut through the hills below Richmond Plunge. Tucked into a cove past the marina, the beach was a fairly secluded cul-de-sac pocketed in on its landward side by the split and crumbled remnants of an ancient cliff face, with the road where Marissa parked about midway along its irregular curve on the bay shore. Her usual habit was to trot to the cove from the vehicle and then start her laps in earnest, running to one end of the beach, then the other, and then doubling on back toward the access road to wind things up. She and Felipe had been in that final stage of their run when he had gotten to her with his bottom-pinching seduction, and they could see the road through some waist-high beach grass a short distance ahead to their right.

Her pulse raced as they walked toward it, holding hands. Felipe had gotten to her all right, gotten her weak- kneed with eagerness. Reaching the foot of the access road, she could feel whatever was left of her inhibitions sailing off toward the white gulls and cloud puffs overhead like helium balloons snipped from their strings.

Which made the unexpected sight of another parked vehicle a wholly frustrating comedown.

It was a Saturn wagon, one of those sporty new models designed to resemble sleeked out minivans, and it had been angled onto the side of the road opposite her car a few yards closer to the beach. Standing by the closed rear hatch with his back to them was a guy in a windbreaker, jeans, sneakers, and an army green field or baseball cap. He was bent over one of those large red-and-white beer coolers as if reorganizing its contents.

They paused at the foot of the road and exchanged looks.

“So much for us being alone,” Marissa said, thinking Felipe seemed especially out of sorts. She sighed, let go of his hand to slip her water bottle from its pouch in her runner’s belt, and took a long gulp. “Better have some,” she said and handed him the bottle. “It’ll cool you down.”

Felipe lifted the water to his mouth and drank without a word, still seemingly unable to quite grasp the idea that there might be more than two early birds roaming the beach in the state of California.

He was passing the bottle back to Marissa when the guy behind the Saturn straightened from rummaging around in his cooler and turned to look at them.

His appearance caught Marissa by surprise. For whatever reason — his posture, or the way he was dressed, or maybe because of that oversized two-tone beer cooler — she had assumed he would be a youngish man, but the face under the bill of his cap was far from youthful. In fact it was incredibly ancient. Lined and wrinkled, its cheeks sagging in loose folds of flesh, the slits of its eyes peering at her from above a vulturous nose and scowling lips, it was also infinitely unpleasant…

Then Marissa noticed what he was holding in his right hand. What he’d drawn out of the cooler, keeping it briefly hidden from sight by his body as he turned. And all at once her surprised reaction jolted up to one of surpassing shock and fear.

Not at any point in the waking nightmare to come would Marissa be certain whether she realized the man was wearing a mask before she actually saw his weapon, what might have been an Uzi, or something like one. But she knew what was happening the instant she did see it, knew it was her fault, all hers… and knew that none of the protective structures she’d built to contain her orderly little world had kept the truth from breaking through at last.

The man raised his gun in front of him, and then the rear doors of the station wagon were flying open, and more men were exiting both sides, three of them spilling from the doors, sprinting across the sand toward her and Felipe with miniature submachine guns also in their hands and obvious disguises pulled over their heads — a bearded pirate, a devil’s head, a grinning skull.

Tears began to flood Marissa’s eyes, further distorting the grotesque Halloween shop faces, but she held them back, checking them almost on reflex, refusing to succumb to panic. This was a public beach, hadn’t that been what she’d insisted? A public beach, where any break in the quiet would stand out. Her voice would carry, and someone might be close enough to hear her scream. Driving, walking, on a bicycle. Close enough to hear.

Make some noise, she demanded of herself. Come on, make some noise, scream your head off—

But it was too late, the men from the wagon were on her in a flash, surrounding her, a hand clapping over her mouth to stifle her rising cry for help. “Entra aqui! A prisa!” the one with the old man mask shouted to the others in Spanish, telling them to hurry up. And an instant later she was grabbed by the arms and shoulders and hustled toward the car with the metal bore of a gun sticking into her back. Alongside her, and then slightly ahead of her, Felipe was also jostled forward at gunpoint, stumbling a little as they pushed him toward one of the wagon’s open back doors.

He turned his head toward her, eyes wide, and started to call out her name, but was punched hard across the face by the man in the pirate mask before it could fully escape his lips.