Flirting with Disaster (9 page)

Taking a deep breath, she forced herself to step back toward the car and peer into the backseat again. Her gaze traveled hesitantly up Adam’s legs to his waist, and then to his chest. It was covered in blood, but . . .

She blinked. It couldn’t be. For the first time she realized . . .

Fresh blood?

Then she saw something else, and she was so shocked that she had to grab hold of the car door to keep from collapsing. In the faint morning light she could just make out Adam’s chest rising and falling with short, shallow respirations.

He was alive.

chapter five

Eerie shafts of late morning sunlight streaked through the grime-crusted windows of the bunkhouse, weakly illuminating Lisa’s pale, bruised face. Dave had dozed on and off for the past several hours, but she’d slept like the dead. He watched as she stirred now, turned over, lifted her head, and, after wearing a confused expression for several seconds, closed her eyes and dropped her head back down to the mattress.

She moved her legs over the side of the bed and sat up with a muffled groan. “What time is it?”

“Ten after eleven.”

Dave hoped that the next words out of her mouth would be something like
Boy, I must have been out of my mind before,
or
I bet you thought I was a little nuts, huh?
or maybe just
Gee, Dave, false alarm. Sorry for dragging you all the way
down here for nothing.

Instead, she looked toward the door, then craned her neck to peer out the window. “Nobody came looking for me, did they?”

Dave sighed. Yeah, he still had a problem here. It remained to be seen whether that problem had to do with injury-induced paranoia or something straight out of an action-adventure movie.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Like I got hit by a truck.”

“Do you think you could eat something?”

“Maybe in a minute.”

Dave dug through the bag he’d brought and pulled out a bottle of water. Sliding off the bed, he came over to sit beside her. She took the bottle, drank, then bowed her head, expelling a long, weary breath.

“You need water. Drink more.”

She did.

“You were a little out of it when I got here.”

She glanced at him, then looked away. “If you’d been through what I’d been through, you’d have been a little loopy yourself.”

“Does your head feel better now?”

She looked at him warily. “Yeah.”

“Are you thinking a little clearer?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Are you asking me if I’ve gotten over the silly notion that somebody is trying to kill me?”

“Take it easy, Lisa. I just need to know what’s going on here. That’s all.”

“I told you what’s going on here. Drugs. Sabotage. Plane crash. Men with machine guns. How much clearer do I have to make it?”

“Are you sure that’s what happened?”

“Stop patronizing me.”

“I only want to know—”

“Damn it, will you listen to me? I’m not crazy! Somebody is trying to kill me! I found the drugs. My plane went down. They came after me—” She let out a breath of disgust. “Forget it. You’re not going to believe it until you see it.”

She stood up, wobbling a little. She righted herself, then strode toward the door of the bunkhouse.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

She ignored him and walked outside.

“Lisa!”

He went to the door and watched as she stepped toward the edge of the woods, looking left and right the whole time as if she expected somebody to leap out of the bushes and grab her. She reached the place where he’d found her sitting last night and picked something up off the ground. As she walked back, he realized it was her backpack.

She came back through the door, slapping the backpack against his chest. He grabbed it in a reflex action, and she stalked on past him and sat back down on the bunk with a weary sigh.

“Open it,” she said.

He walked back over to the bunk where he’d been sitting, tossed the backpack down, and unzipped it. Inside was a thick plastic bag. He pulled it out.

Holy shit.

Pills. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. What the hell . . . ?

“They’re made to look like Lasotrex,” Lisa said. “A vasodilator.”

Dave knew that counterfeit pharmaceutical operations went on all over the world, and Mexico was definitely a hot spot. If she’d found something she wasn’t supposed to, somebody could very well want her dead. If so, the moment she showed her face . . .

Damn.
His mission to get medical help for a delusional woman had just turned into something potentially more treacherous.

“So what do you think now?” Lisa said. “Still think I’m imagining things?”

“I think,” he said, “that we need to talk.”

Lisa’s mind still felt fuzzy and disoriented, but maybe the sleep she’d had meant she’d be able to put a few consecutive thoughts together and tell Dave exactly why she’d asked him to come seven hundred miles into the middle of the Mexican wilderness.

He sat down on the opposite bunk, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped in front of him. He wore faded jeans, boots, and a denim shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows. He still had the same tall, well-developed body he’d had in high school, though the leanness he’d shown back then had given way to a more substantial build that made him look even more powerful. He had the kind of face women dream about—strikingly handsome, with strong features, deep, dark eyes and a sharp, mesmerizing gaze. His face was marred only by a few age lines, and the congregation of those lines at the corners of his eyes and around his mouth told her he smiled a lot.

He wasn’t smiling now.

“Give me the whole story,” he said, “and don’t leave anything out.”

The whole story. Good God. It felt as if she’d lived a lifetime in the past couple of days. She sat up a little more, releasing a weary breath, her throat dry and scratchy.

“It started,” she said, “when Adam Decker and I were getting ready to fly out of here on Friday afternoon. He’s one of the doctors who volunteer at the clinic. The clinic is closed on weekends except for emergencies, and that’s when we swap out the staff. I was going to take Adam back to San Antonio, then bring another doctor down here.”

“San Antonio?”

“I live there now. Adam does, too. The organization is based out of there.”

Dave nodded for her to go on.

“A storm was approaching, so Adam and I were hurrying to take off before it hit. Before we left the clinic, Robert gave me a defibrillator to get serviced in San Antonio.”

“A device that shocks hearts back into action.”

“Right. It was a portable unit, about the size of a small suitcase. I take a lot of medical equipment back and forth, so I didn’t think anything about it. Adam and I were hurrying toward the plane, trying to beat the storm, when lightning struck only about fifty yards away. Scared the hell out of me. I recoiled from the flash and dropped the defibrillator. The plastic casing cracked wide open. And guess what was inside.” She nodded toward the pills. “Adam said they looked like Lasotrex. But then he scratched the surface of one with a pocketknife. The blue exterior gave way to a white interior. He said if it was really Lasotrex, it would be blue all the way through.”

“So they’re definitely counterfeit.”

“Yes. Apparently this kind of thing goes on all over the world. Mexico, South America, the Orient, the Middle East. They manufacture fake pills for pennies, then transport them to other areas and sell them at retail prices. Adam estimated that there had to be least a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of them in that one bag.”

“You say Douglas is the culprit. But what’s his motive? He’s a doctor. A guy like that has to have all kinds of money. What does he need with more?”

“Actually, he doesn’t have a lot of money. He botched an appendectomy a few years ago that ended up killing a guy. He got hit with a multimillion-dollar malpractice suit that cleaned him out. Rumor has it that he was so negligent and the award was so big that nobody will insure him to practice medicine in the U.S.”

“So how did he end up down here running a humanitarian organization?”

“It’s not his baby. It’s his father’s. Bernard James Douglas is a respected heart surgeon. He began the clinic a few years ago, and then his health began to fail. So he put his son in charge.”

“He doesn’t know what Robert is like?”

“I think deep down he does. He just refuses to believe it. I think he’s hoping that someday his son will grow a heart.” She made a scoffing noise. “He’s got a long wait.”

“I can’t imagine that a man like Robert would put up with being sequestered in a tiny Mexican town for very long.”

“Are you kidding? He thrives on it.”

“How so?”

“People look up to him here. It’s as if God himself had dropped down from heaven to diagnose their illness or prescribe a drug. He tosses enough money around that shop, owners are happy to see him walk through the door. He plays poker with the sheriff and a couple of other guys every Friday night and usually comes out on the winning end, which means he probably cheats. And he has his pick of the local women for all kinds of recreational activities. Throw in a profitable counterfeiting operation, and he’s in paradise.”

“Sounds like a real asshole.”

“Actually, I haven’t had any problem dealing with Robert.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I told him once when we were cruising at ten thousand feet that either he could lose his condescending attitude or he could land in Santa Rios the hard way.”

“How’s that?”

“Without a plane.”

For the first time, Dave cracked a tiny smile. “I see you haven’t changed a bit.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“Oh, it’s a good thing,” he told her, a smile still playing on his lips.

Suddenly she had the strangest feeling, as if eleven years hadn’t passed at all and she was basking in his approval all over again.

No.
She didn’t need that. She wasn’t that lost, lonely kid anymore, the one who’d have sold her soul for a kind word from anyone. But still, there was something about the way he looked at her, as if he could see right inside her. At least in that way, he hadn’t changed a bit, either.

“Tell me more about Robert’s connection to local law enforcement,” Dave said.

“Well, as I told you, he’s really chummy with the sheriff, but there’s more. In a place like this, the moment anyone shows up with anything shiny and new, it has a way of disappearing. Participating in burglary and theft and carjacking is just an alternative lifestyle. That means the clinic should be ripe for the picking where drugs and equipment are concerned. Nobody touches it. In this town, I think the people who enforce the law and break the law are pretty much one and the same. And Robert’s probably got them all on his payroll.”

“Which means he can run a counterfeiting operation with no interference.”

“Exactly.”

“How do you think Robert found out that you and Adam discovered the drugs?”

“I don’t know. But there’s a possibility we were being watched.”

“Watched?”

“Yes. By Gabrio Ramirez. He’s a sixteen-year-old kid, maybe part of a local gang. His car was parked near the airfield when we were leaving.”

“Were you suspicious of him at the time?”

“No. Not really. He hangs out at the airfield a lot. I took him flying once. You should have seen his face when I gunned it down the runway, then pulled back and started to soar. He loved it. That day he even spoke English to me, when he pretends most of the time that he doesn’t know how. Ever since then, he shows up just about every time I take off or land. I think maybe he was hanging out just because he likes flying.”

“Or he was keeping an eye on you.”

She sighed. “Maybe. But I’d like to think that he’s just a good kid who needs a break. From what I hear, his mother moved to the U.S. with him when he was just a baby. She died when he was ten. His only living relative was his brother, Ivan, so he came back here to live with him. Ivan’s got no obvious means of support but always has wads of cash. Around here, that spells
gang
.”

“Which Gabrio could be part of.”

Lisa sighed again. “Maybe.”

“Did he see you find the drugs?” Dave asked.

“I don’t know. He could have.”

But she still didn’t want to believe that Gabrio had anything to do with the sabotage of her plane. Most of the time, he had the look of a boy with nothing but a dead-end life ahead of him, who despised where he was but wouldn’t admit it in a thousand years. She knew that look, because she’d worn it herself once. But she’d discovered that there was something about leaving the earth and climbing into the clouds that made just about anything seem possible. She’d thought maybe Gabrio had felt that, too. Now she wasn’t so sure.

“So what did you and Adam do once you realized what was going on?”