with him? He’s just a little boy.”
“A little thief,” someone in the crowd muttered. There were rumblings of agreement. Someone else added something that included the word police.
“Look, I’ve got my purse back,” Ellie said to placate the gathering at large, and then, to the keeper of the captive, trying to keep a pleading note out of her voice, “There’s no harm done, can’t you just let him go?”
The “artist” shrugged.
Just then the purse-snatcher, seizing the moment—and taking no chances on anyone changing his mind or being outvoted—squirmed out from under his captor’s hand and vanished into the crowd.
There were a few cries of mild protest and dismay. Someone—a man—said loudly, “What’d you let him go for? Kid’s nothin’ but a thief. Shoulda handed him over to the police before he hits on somebody else.”
“Not my problem,” the artist mumbled around the revolting stump of his cigarette. With that he turned and shambled back toward his stall, sandals slapping on the baked adobe bricks.
For a moment or two Ellie just stood and watched him go, frowning and chewing on her lip while around her the crowd slowly dispersed, talking in breathless, gossipy undertones to one another as people do when they’ve been privileged to witness some untoward, possibly violent event. Presently, she drew a quick, decisive breath. No way around it—at the very least she owed the man a thank-you.
She couldn’t have said why she should feel such inner resistance to doing something simple good upbringing demanded. Such a peculiar tightening in her belly. A quickening of her pulse. It made no sense to her. Certainly it wasn’t his surly manner that put her off. Rose Ellen Lanagan didn’t know the meaning of the word intimidation.
Besides, she’d seen the twinkle in those cool blue eyes of his. Heard the warm, contagious peal of his laughter. That crustiness was ninety percent show, she was sure of it, though what purpose he thought it served she couldn’t imagine.
The artist had retrieved the painting he’d sacrificed in the interests of justice and was regarding it stoically, held at arm’s length in front of him. He must have sailed it, Ellie now surmised, into the path of the fleeing purse-snatcher, rather like an oversized Frisbee.
“That was quick thinking,” she said, coming up behind him.
The artist grunted without looking away from his masterpiece, which, smeared and smudged almost beyond recognition, in Ellie’s opinion now had actually attained a certain surrealistic charm. Personally, she considered it a vast improvement over the original.
With “thank you” hovering on the tip of her tongue, she hesitated; once again, the words seemed meager, hopelessly inadequate, not to mention alien to her nature. They came out sounding more prissy than anything.
“I really would like to pay you—for the painting,” she briskly added as the artist shot her a sharp, almost hostile look. His eyes weren’t cool at all, she realized, but a clear, almost transparent blue, like midsummer skies, with whites as soft and clean as cotton clouds. All at once her voice seemed to stick in her throat, and when she forced it through anyway it emerged sounding even more raggedy than usual. “It’s the least I can do.”
The moment stretched while he stared at her with that keen and piercing glare. While she noticed for the first time that his lips, without that awful cigarette clamped between them, seemed finely chiseled, almost sensitive—unusual for a man’s lips. For some reason her own suddenly felt swollen and hot, giving her a wholly alien urge to cool them with her tongue. And then…
“Keep it,” he said, thrusting the canvas at her so abruptly that she actually gasped. “Maybe it’ll remind you to be more careful next time.”
He turned away from her and was almost immediately swallowed up by a crowd of lady tourists, all cooing and chirping their appreciation for his heroism and his compassion, and eager to take home a souvenir of the Purse Snatching Incident.
Feeling somehow dismissed, Ellie left him posing for photographs with a group of middle-aged belles from Atlanta. And as she made her way back to the pier she was wondering, with a cynicism that was also foreign to her nature, if he might have paid that boy to snatch her purse, just to drum up business.
Ellie dropped the painting of three drunken-looking parrots onto one of the two single beds in the stateroom she shared—platonically—with her partner and fellow agent with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
“Don’t ask,” she said, plucking a Hershey’s Kiss from the bag on her bedside table, even though the muffled groan that was her supposed husband’s only response made it clear he’d no interest in doing anything of the kind. Concern and guilt quickly banished the grumpy mood she’d come in with. “Still feeling lousy?”
The question was wholly unnecessary; Ken Burnside looked, to quote one of her mom’s favorite clichés, like something the cat dragged in—and given the sorts of things the cats were prone to dragging into her mom’s barn back in Iowa, that was saying something.
“I think I’ve got a fever,” Ken said in a hushed and pitiful voice.
He looked it, too, but Ellie squelched an instinctive urge to step closer and lay a ministering hand on his brow. She’d had to fight off the man’s attentions often enough in the early days of their working relationship so that, even though the ground rules between them had been firmly established long ago, she still didn’t quite trust him. Not even now, when he was laid out in his bed with his eyes closed, skin sweaty and roughly the color of old library paste.
“Maybe you should see a doctor,” she offered by way of compensation, peeling the last of the foil off the chocolate and popping it into her mouth.
“It’s just the stomach flu.” Rousing himself enough to open both eyes, he inquired blearily, “How’d it go in town?”
“Umm. Great.” Feeling calmer, she helped herself to a couple more Kisses and settled herself cross-legged on her own bed, carefully avoiding the still-gooey canvas. “I think I’ve pretty well established myself as your typical dopey tourist,” she said as she pulled off her sun visor. “Got my purse snatched.” Burnside made a strangled sound that may have been a snort. “Don’t worry,” she assured him, “I got it back—intact.” She didn’t think it was necessary to tell him how close she’d come to losing the vital meeting information. She was the rookie on this operation, and suspected her partner was already nervous about how she was going to handle herself when things got tricky.
“No further contact from the smugglers, though, and I gave them plenty of opportunity.” She gave the lump of misery in the next bed a dubious glance. “You going to be able to go with me tonight?”
“Don’t…think so,” Ken said in an airless whisper that alarmed her.
“We have to make that meeting.” Ellie’s heart rate was beginning to speed up. She hurriedly unwrapped another chocolate. “The instructions were clear on that. They won’t contact us to set up a meeting until they’re sure it’s not a trap. We have to be out there where they can look us over—make sure we’re not being followed.”
There was some deep, carefully controlled breathing. Then, in a voice tight with pain, “Maybe we should contact General Reyes—let him know what’s going on.”
“Let him know what? There’s nothing to report, and won’t be until after that meeting. If there’s a meeting; we don’t even know for sure they’ll go for it. It’s for sure they won’t if we don’t show up at—where is it?—José’s Cantina.” She paused, then said flatly, “If you can’t make it, I’ll just have to go by myself.”
This time there was no doubt about the snort. “Lanagan,” Burnside said in a faint but firm voice, “I know these people. They’re old May-hee-co—back-country Mexico. They won’t do business with a woman—especially one that looks like you. They’ll chew you up and spit you out…” He closed his eyes