Dateline: Kydd and Rios (10 page)

“Bingo,” he whispered, drawing the word out. “Can you identify the man coming out of the Paloma? The one who looks like somebody starched his shorts?”

Nikki pressed her cheek against the wood sign, peering through the “A” in Sanchez. When she saw the man fitting Josh’s description, the fine hairs rose on the back of her neck.

“Is that Brazia?” he asked.

“Yes.” Suddenly all the pieces fell into place. Travinas hadn’t double-crossed her; his mad dog had tracked Josh down. Tall and thin to the point of emaciation, Brazia skittered down the broad steps fronting the Paloma, barking orders and flailing his arms at the soldiers. “We’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “Now.”

She turned to leave, but Josh’s hand on her arm stopped her. “Just a minute. Who’s that?” He pulled her back down and pointed to the street.

Two soldiers were dragging an old man toward Brazia’s jeep. Nikki watched in growing horror as they slammed him up against the door. “Paco,” she whispered, her arms tightening around her duffel bag.

“Who’s Paco?’

“My gasoline connection. He was supposed to fill up my car tonight.”

“He knows where your car is?”

“Yes.”

Their eyes met, and in the next second they were both running across the roof, racing against time.

Josh dropped off the roof first, then reached up for Nikki. There was no hesitation this time. She slipped over the edge, her fingers gripping the rain gutter until she felt his hands grab her waist. As soon as her feet touched the ground, he took off down the trash alley, knowing she’d be right behind him all the way. In a year of chasing after stories and running from trouble, he’d only lost her once. The night she’d walked out on him.

Rats fled in front of their flying feet, scurrying under garbage bins and behind trash cans. Rubbish and sewage spilled out of the containers, running a ribbon of stench from the Palacio half a mile west to the river two miles east. On the rare days when the wind came out of the north, Nikki kept her doors closed and burned incense in her apartment, fighting a losing battle with Third World sanitation.

Tonight they only had to get through two blocks of the smell. She did her best to hold her breath, but they were long blocks and the putrid air was gagging her, making her nostrils quiver with revulsion.

At the first cross street, Josh stopped and motioned for her to do the same. A quick check revealed the immediate area to be clear of soldiers, proving that Paco was still holding out.

“How far up are you parked?” he asked, still watching the street.

“The end . . . of the block.” She gasped in a lungful of fresher air, her chest heaving. “There’s a smaller access alley between the buildings . . . leading to the boulevard. My car’s a few yards from it.”

Without a word, he grabbed her hand and dashed across the pavement. Nikki clutched her duffel close to her stomach. She was going to be sick. Or she would have been if he’d given her a chance. He didn’t, though, and she didn’t have the strength either to stop him or to free herself.

Josh knew she was in some kind of distress. Her arm had gone limp in his hand, and she was stumbling along behind him like a rag doll. He cared, but there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it except to keep running and get them out of that hellhole of an alley.

The access corridor wasn’t much better, and it was a lot narrower, making every box and can a major hurdle. He dodged the rubble, lashing out with his free arm and his feet to clear a path. Cartons of trash crashed down behind them. He stopped ten feet from the street, and Nikki immediately slumped against the building wall, her eyes shut, her head tilted back.

Ignoring her for another moment, Josh ripped open the zipper on her duffel and rummaged through her stuff until he found her keys. “Stay put,” he commanded, shoving the bag back into her hands.

She couldn’t have moved if she’d wanted to. She was scared, and something was wrong with her. Her knees were trembling, her stomach churning. Sweat poured down her face and drizzled into a stream between her breasts.

She rubbed her cheek against her shoulder, trying to slow her breathing. Stress, she told herself, too much stress, and that god-awful smell, and Brazia and Paco. A sob caught in her throat. She’d really done it this time.

In a minute Josh was back at her side, lifting her arm around his shoulder. “We’re almost there, Nikki. Help me.”

But he didn’t need her help. With his other arm around her waist, he lifted her off the ground and half ran to the car. He shoved her inside and slammed the door shut, then vaulted over the hood of the car and slid down the other side. His foot was on the gas pedal, his fingers turning the ignition, even before he had his door closed.

He started the car with a roar, spinning the steering wheel and leaving a U-shaped trail of rubber on Simeon Boulevard. Nikki was doubled over in the seat, one hand braced on the dashboard, the other pressed against her stomach.

Two blocks east a pair of headlights flashed in the rearview mirror. Swearing loudly, Josh made a sharp left turn, throwing her against the door. He grabbed her shoulder and pulled her back to the middle of her seat.

“We’ve got company.”

Nikki groaned in answer.

“How do you feel?”

“I think I’m going to die,” she whispered between clenched teeth.

“Not if I can help it,” he said grimly, checking the mirror and finding it empty of the two bright spots of light. His hands didn’t relax on the wheel, though, and neither did his foot on the accelerator.

The Chevy ate up the miles, skidding around the maze of turns he put it through, taking them deeper into the barrio where the streets were rougher. The small car bounced through the potholes, and Nikki cringed every time the undercarriage hit bottom. The lights of downtown faded to a glow in the night, replaced by the smoking remains of the rioters’ bonfires. When they reached the outskirts of the capital, he turned toward the highway, but only got half a block before another car screeched out of a side street onto the main avenue.

“Hold on!” he warned as he slammed on the brakes and swung the wheel in a 180-degree arc. He punched the gas, and the car roared back down the bone-jarring pavement. Nikki’s stomach leapt into her throat, lodging in the middle of a knot of nausea and fear. They were going to die. Travinas had covered every escape route. He hadn’t given her a chance to pull together her side of their sordid bargain. Or had he found out about Delgado? Had he put her name next to Josh’s on Brazia’s hit list?

God save us
. The soundless prayer fell from her trembling lips.

Josh tried to make it to a through street but was cut off again by another car. Not a military vehicle. The odd thought registered, but only for a moment before a jeep came out of nowhere to take up the chase.

Sweat and panic broke out at the same time. He’d never lose all three of them. The ensuing few minutes proved his point. The jeep stayed hot on his tail, but the other two cars were playing cat and mouse with him, falling behind, jumping ahead, shooting through the alleys. One thing he quickly realized was the horsepower advantage they had. He was faster than the jeep, but the two cars were faster than anything he’d seen in San Simeon—and they were confusing the hell out of him. He was about ready to do something crazy, like stop the car and ask them what they were doing, when he got a clue.

During a blur of lights and cars at a crossroad, the jeep took off after the wrong car. He didn’t really believe the mix-up had happened on purpose, but neither did he quite believe it was an accident. Thoroughly confused, he tried for the highway again and was cut off by the second car.

He uttered a foul obscenity. They were left with only one way out, the river road. He wheeled the Chevy into the last-chance turn.

“Don’t take the river road,” Nikki moaned from her huddled position deep in the seat, her head barely above the windowsill. “It dead-ends in about a mile.”

“Not quite,” he muttered.

True, she knew, but it didn’t exactly remain a road, either. She hazarded a quick glance at him. His face was a stony mask, his mouth drawn tight. A small muscle twitched in his jaw, a warning sign she normally would have heeded, but nothing about the night was normal.

“My car doesn’t have four-wheel drive,” she said, straining to be diplomatic.

He slanted her a hard look and continued driving too fast. The pavement ended abruptly, but that didn’t slow him down. If the driver of the other car wanted them, he was going to have to blow a few shocks to get them. Dust billowed up behind and around the Chevy until even the dirt track became lost in an overgrowth of weeds.

Instinct and a faint set of memories guided his hands on the wheel. The trail curved around every giant tree, hearkening back to its history as a footpath from the outlying villages, and it took them deeper into the forest with every turn. Finally, out of necessity, he eased up on the gas pedal.

Shadows and shapes loomed out of the pitch darkness, caught in the gleam of the headlights, but no lights followed them. Josh didn’t know whether to be relieved or scared senseless—it was pretty obvious the car driver had allowed him to go this way—so he settled for an intense mix of alertness and unease.

Branches slapped against the car, and the dank odor of mildewing leaves permeated the air. The undergrowth thickened with each mile until he was forced to slow the car to a crawl.

Shaking uncontrollably, Nikki released a heavy breath and pried her fingers off the dashboard. Blindly she groped in the glove compartment, feeling around for the bottle of antacid tablets she’d stashed in there for her Sulaco trip.

Two tablets and five minutes later, she felt the nausea and cramping subside to a manageable level. She would live after all.

Josh heard her sigh and stretch out in the passenger seat, and felt a small measure of his own tension dissipate. A very small measure. She’d pushed him too far this time. He wanted to shake her or hold her or yell at her or something.

“Whatever you took, give me double,” he demanded.

She complied by shaking four tablets into his open palm. He popped them into his mouth and immediately grimaced, but he chewed until he got the whole chalky mess down.

“You’re a little young to be working on an ulcer, aren’t you?”

His accusing tone grated on her already shot nerves. The last thing she needed was a rundown of her shortcomings. “So are you,” she countered, not bothering to open her eyes, let alone look at him. Lord! What had happened? She’d had everything under control until he’d shown up, and damn little had gone right since.

“It wasn’t me back there holding my gut and shaking like a leaf,” he said.

And the last thing she wanted to talk about was her stomach. With luck, she might be able to forget she even had one, an empty, aching one. “This road has changed since the last time we were on it. Nobody uses it anymore. We might not be able to get through to the highway.”

“We might not need to.”

Her eyes opened to narrow slits. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that unless I get the answers I want, I’m turning this Chevy around and heading back to the city.”

Despite the harsh conviction in his voice, she didn’t believe him, not for a minute. “I’d heard you’d gotten a little reckless,” she said, “but no one mentioned you’d gone crazy.”

“Then whoever you were talking to didn’t know the whole story,” he snapped back, fighting the wheels out of a deep rut. He knew he’d been labeled as one of journalism’s “bad boys,” but most of the time his reputation worked to his advantage. It kept other reporters out of his stories and kept his editor’s expectations high for quality and low for obedience.

“Don’t you know who Brazia is?” Her voice rose with doubt, instantly setting him back on the fine edge of anger.

He sat silently fuming, his hands white-knuckling the steering wheel. Who in the hell was she to question him? He was the one with the questions, and rightly so. He hadn’t lied to anybody, and he hadn’t traveled a thousand miles to hear her lie to him. Now that he thought about it, he didn’t know why in the hell he
had
come back.

He was gearing himself up to tell her just that when the headlights caught a heavy branch lying across the trail. He cut the wheel fast to the right, throwing Nikki over to his side. He slammed his foot down on the brake, and the car lurched to a halt. She thudded into his lap, sprawled over the front seat with one hand digging into his thigh.

“Have you completely lost your mind?” she sputtered, trying to right herself. “Maybe I should—”

He jerked her up, sending her blond hair flying and rattling her teeth. He held her in a viselike grip, her face mere inches from his. “I know Brazia better than his own mother,” he said softly, his eyes glittering with menace. “It’s
you
I don’t know anymore.”

Her heart jumped back into her throat. She attempted to move away, back to the safety of her side of the car, but he was having none of it.

His hands tightened painfully on her arms. “It’s game time, Nikki, and the game is Twenty Questions. My questions. Your answers.”

A strange tremor, very much like fear, coursed down her spine. She squirmed, shaking her shoulders, testing the strength of his grip and finding it unbreakable. Her eyes flashed up to his. “You’re scaring me,” she said, confessing her fear in the hope it would bring him to his senses. He’d never hurt her before, but he was darn close to doing it now.