Renegade With A Badge. Claire King
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steps forward at a time, as everyone wanted some attention from the hefe. Ernesto skillfully worked the crowd, while Olivia smiled and spoke easily with his guests, slipping automatically into Spanish, the language of her childhood home. But she had the oddest itch at the back of her neck, and it wasn’t until nearly an hour after she arrived that she figured out why. Everywhere she looked, there were uniformed men standing guard. Armed with unsmiling, intimidating faces and big, scary guns.
“Uh, Ernesto?”
Ernesto turned at once at the small tug on his sleeve. He covered Olivia’s rough, sea-weathered hand with his own smooth, manicured one and smiled deferentially down at her. Oh, yes, Olivia thought, distracted for a moment. This man could run Mexico from this hacienda. He had all the charm and old-world refinement of a Don.
“Yes, Olivia?”
She blinked up at him. “Pardon?”
Ernesto brought her hand to his lips. Olivia wanted to snatch it back; it looked like a sea hag’s gnarled fist against his full, beautiful mouth.
“You are tired of all this inane conversation, my dear?”
“What? No, of course not,” she protested, though, in truth, she would have given her right arm for a cold Mexican beer, her laptop and her narrow cot in her beach camp tent right about now. “I was just wondering about all the men here.”
Ernesto lifted one graceful brow. “The men here?” he said.
Olivia felt a little chill slide right past the itch at the back of her neck, but decided she must have imagined the slight menace in Ernesto’s perfectly modulated tone.
“I mean the men you have in uniform. Your deputies. Why are they here, at a party?”
“Ah, that. To protect my guests, of course,” he said, relaxing visibly. He swept his arm in an unmistakably urbane gesture. He smiled again, that charming flash of teeth. “They are unobtrusive, though, are they not? I believe it’s your American sensibilities that made you notice them at all.”
“Why do your guests need protection?”
Ernesto sighed, then turned away for a moment to greet yet another supplicant. Olivia did a quick count of Ernesto’s not-so-unobtrusive pack of gun-toters. Fifteen!
“I’m sorry, Olivia,” Ernesto said when he returned his attention to her. “You were saying?”
“Why do you have so many men posted here at the hacienda? Have you had trouble? Are you expecting trouble?”
Ernesto’s lips compressed ever so briefly, then he took Olivia’s arm again and led her to a relatively quiet corner. “Olivia,” he began patiently. “I am the sheriff of Aldea Viejo, as well as a very wealthy man.”
“Yes, I know, Ernesto.”
“And as such, I face many dangers, every day. We have criminals here in this small village, just as you have in your large American cities.”
“But at a party?”
Ernesto shrugged, his broad shoulders enhanced by the fine cut of his suit.
“Have you been robbed here at the hacienda?”
Ernesto’s eyes darkened. “Certainly not.”
“Are your guests in the habit of walking off with the family silver?”
“Olivia,” Ernesto admonished, offended.
Olivia smiled, but rubbed at the back of her neck all the same. “I’m teasing, Ernesto.”
He watched her carefully for a moment, then leaned to kiss her lightly on her mouth. “I should hope so. Do not concern yourself with these questions, Olivia. I have my men here to protect my guests.” He smiled gently. “Most especially my guest of honor. It is my duty to protect you, Olivia. And it is my pleasure.”
“I don’t need protection, Ernesto,” Olivia said meaningfully. Best to begin as you mean to go on, she thought. “I have been taking excellent care of myself for several years now.”
Ernesto wrapped her hand around his forearm, scanning the crowd of guests absently. “Another thing I admire about you, Olivia.” He brought her hand to his mouth again and kissed it. “But in all your travels, I cannot imagine you have come across the kind of men I am dealing with now.”
“The smugglers?” He’d mentioned it before, on one of their walks. Drug shipments had been coming through Aldea Viejo, out of range of the Mexican Federal Police, the federales, in La Paz. Ernesto was determined to bring the smugglers to justice, but they’d been as slippery as reef eels so far.
“They are very dangerous, these men,” Ernesto said.
“But not stupid. I doubt very much they’d crash this party.”
Ernesto’s eyes narrowed fractionally. “One never knows what the criminal mind will think of doing.” Ernesto smiled, nabbed another glass of champagne from a passing tray and toasted Olivia cordially before taking a sip. “Does one?”
Rafael Camayo crept through the house, using the clamor of the party on the floor below to cover what little noise he made. Though his mother would be shocked to know it, this was hardly the first time he’d broken into someone’s home and searched through every room like a bandit.
It was, however, the first time it had ever been so important to him.
Rafe skirted a lighted doorway. A fussy little powder room, he noted with disdain, wondering how many of the ladies and gentlemen using the elaborate, gold-plated facilities knew how Cervantes had paid for them.
He smiled grimly. Probably more than a few. Rafe knew from years of tracking Cervantes that many of the man’s friends were actually more like associates; partners in crime, so to speak. Not that Rafe’s employers—the United States Drug Enforcement Agency—or their associates in the Mexican government had ever been able to get the goods on any of them. Lesser men fell, swept up in routine drug raids, while Cervantes and his swanky pals held lavish dinner parties and toasted each other’s cleverness.
He and his partner, Bobby, had been in Baja California for months now, trying to change all that. They’d been methodically stealing drug shipments from Cervantes’s men and slipping them surreptitiously into the hands of DEA agents across the border in Mexico. They made no arrests, busted neither the men at the drop site nor the runners who brought the stuff over from mainland Mexico. They simply swept in—or snuck in, depending upon the situation and the likelihood one of them would be shot through the head—and stole what Ernesto Cervantes firmly believed was his.
It was a last-ditch effort, a plan devised by Rafe and Bobby alone, and one that neither the federales nor Rafe’s superior officers at the DEA thought likely to succeed. But Rafe and Bobby were determined.
They knew Cervantes—knew him inside and out—though neither of them had ever been within fifty feet of the man. They knew he could outwait the authorities and their traditional methods forever, keeping his minions on the front line while he led his respectable, lawful life.
But he would never tolerate being ripped off by a couple of filthy, low-class bandidos.
It was driving the big man crazy, Rafe thought with an unprofessional smirk, just as they’d hoped it would. Cervantes was a canny kingpin, but a kingpin nonetheless, and with the ego to go along with the title. It wouldn’t be long—couldn’t be long, according to Rafe’s superiors back in San Diego—before he showed up at one of the shipment sites himself. Rafe could almost smell Cervantes’s frustration, could almost touch it.
It was certainly evident by all the thugs he had posted at this little soiree.
Rafe had easily slipped past them all, of course. Another thing that would have shocked his mother. Ten years as an undercover DEA agent was excellent training, but it was nothing to the years in the San Diego barrio of his youth. A boy who spoke no English learned how to fade into any background in the border towns