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, señor.”
“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.
“Your woman handles your financial affairs, too, señor?” The smoker’s voice, like his eyes, oozed contempt.
“Like I told you—not with my permission,” McCall said with what he hoped was unconcern, lifting a shoulder as he handed over the envelope. The smoker took it and like McCall before him, glanced inside.
“You—” That was as far as Cinnamon got before McCall got his hand clamped across her mouth.
“Shut up,” he growled, “for the love of God.” He was watching Smoker’s face, which had darkened ominously.
“Why are you trying my patience, señor?” McCall stared at him blankly. The smoker smacked the envelope down hard on the tabletop, making the cigar jump. “Where is the rest?”
The woman was squirming frantically against McCall’s side, causing his hand to shift just enough. He sucked in air as he felt the sharp sting of her teeth in the fleshy base of his thumb. Stifling shameful urges, he eased the pressure of his hand enough to allow her furious whisper, “Tell him he’ll get the rest when we meet his boss.”
McCall delivered that message in a carefully neutral voice. Mentally he was grinding his teeth and vowing that if he got out of this mess in one piece and without committing manslaughter, he was going to be faithful and true to his live and let live creed for the rest of his days.
The smoker picked up his cigar and mouthed it while he thought things over—while tension sang like locusts in McCall’s ears, and Cinnamon’s heart thumped against his side. For some reason that made McCall feel a little less ticked off at her. Maybe even a little bit soft-hearted. Damn his Sir Galahad tendencies all to hell.
Apparently satisfied, for the moment, at least, the smoker gave a little shrug and tucked the envelope full of cash inside his shirt. At the same time he pulled out another, smaller envelope, which he passed to McCall. It felt unpleasantly damp, and McCall had to stifle a fastidious urge to handle it with a thumb and forefinger.
“My boss will speak with you,” Smoker said in staccato Spanish, “but not here. Those are your instructions. Be at the designated location tomorrow evening. Come alone, just you two. If you do not…” He narrowed his eyes thoughtfully at the woman huddled against McCall’s side. “Perhaps…I should take your wife with me, eh? To insure that you follow these instructions.”
The thug closest to Cinnamon grinned in anticipation, showing missing teeth. She didn’t make a sound, but McCall felt her shrinking. He jerked her around and thrust her behind him, beyond the reach of either thug. Without going through McCall first, anyway.
“That won’t be necessary,” he said easily, though his heart was pounding so hard he could hear it himself. “I will follow your instructions—I am not stupid.”
There was another tense pause, and then unexpectedly the smoker laughed. “Keep your wife, señor. I do not envy you. But take my advice, eh? A woman needs a firm hand.”
“Yeah,” said McCall, “I’ll consider it.” With a firm hand on his “wife’s” upper arm, he was already steering her toward the door of the cantina. After a nod from their boss, the two soldier bees stepped reluctantly aside to let them pass.
Outside the door he paused, cringing in the light, once again momentarily blinded, lungs in a state of shock from their first contact in a while with nontoxic air. The arm he still held had gone slack and quiescent—for the moment.
And then… “Thank you,” Cinnamon said, in a voice so clipped and prim he’d have found it comical, maybe, if he hadn’t been so damned angry.
“Thank you?” he muttered under his breath as he towed her across the sunbaked street. “She says, ‘Thank you’?” McCall couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this angry.
“You can let go of my arm now,” she breathed. She sounded winded, but he ignored that as well as the suggestion.
No longer the least bit quiescent, she struggled and tugged against his grip. “I said, let go of me.”
“I will let go of you when I’m damn good and ready. Which is when and if we get out of this hellhole with our hides intact, and you’ve told me exactly what in the hell you’ve got me mixed up in.”
She hissed at him like an angry cat. “What if they’re watching? They’ll think we’re quarreling.”
