Breaking Loose

CHAPTER NINE

She was working him. God, was she working him. Dax knew it, and he was still taking the bait. She could melt a brick wall with that smile.

“I’m tempted to go with you,” she said, and all he wanted to say was, No, baby. This one’s not for you.

What he said instead was, “How about if I take you out to dinner the next time I’m in Denver?”

The words were no sooner out of his mouth than he realized that might not have been his wisest course-to ask her out on a date.

Yes, he thought, unbelievably, that’s exactly what you just did, boyo. You asked her out on a date when you know she’s done nothing but lie to you since you grabbed her in the Old Gallery.

He was fucking brilliant.

But she was fucking gorgeous. It was bound to go to a guy’s head.

“Denver, then,” she said, laying on another smile gee-fricking-guaranteed to slay him.

She knew it.

He knew it.

And she knew he knew it.

He had no defense, but he wasn’t getting sidetracked, not even close. He was multitasking. That was all. Guys did that sometimes, multitasked about some really important issue, like, say, the fate of the world… and sex. It was always sex, that second task, just humming away in the back of a guy’s brain.

And yes, he was well aware of the inherent contradiction of trying to get rid of a woman and get in her pants at the same time, especially, somehow, if the pants were white cotton undies.

They rounded the third-floor landing and headed down to the second. He was keeping her moving, hopefully without being obvious enough to rouse her curiosity. Curious women were dangerous women.

Unless they were naked and in your bed.

Right. He was all for curiosity in bed-or out of bed, or anywhere, actually, when a woman was naked, and if she was naked and dangerous, all the better.

More multitasking. Geezus.

His point being that he’d lied, too. That had been no shakedown at the Old Gallery. Before she’d gotten her optics out, the dust had been going up in rooster tails, the whole lot of them, police included, piling out of the building and burning rubber to get away-from what the hell what, is what he wanted to know. Ponce, his crew, and, for whatever reason, one of the cops, had been going one way, Asher the other, and that damned Jimmy Ruiz had circled back to get the Land Cruiser. The only person he hadn’t seen come out the front door had been Remy Beranger. The sick little Frenchman hadn’t been anywhere in sight.

“So when did you get interested in ancient Near Eastern artifacts?” she asked.

“A couple of years ago,” he said, giving her as good an answer as any. He took hold of her arm for the next few steps, because the carpet was lifted in places and torn in others. It was an instinctive gesture-three-inch heels, steep stairs, bad carpeting, hold on. He didn’t even think about doing it. “How about you?”

“My interest isn’t personal,” she said. “It never is, not with antiquities, and a piece like this Memphis Sphinx, a statue with no known provenance or verifiable authentication, has a good probability of being something other than what all these buyers have been told.”

“You mean it’s a fake.”

“There’s a good possibility of that, yes.” They reached the last flight of stairs, and he made sure they got down them and through the lobby as quickly as possible. He didn’t have a problem with the place, it suited his needs, but he understood why she did, and he’d noticed Marcella and Marceline over by the elevators get all but riveted to the floor by the sight of a real girl.

He didn’t blame them. Even in the great pantheon of real girls, Suzanna Royale Toussi was realer and girlier than most. Anyone who wanted to know how it was done would have been staring their eyeballs out-like Marcella and Marceline.

He hated to tell them, but it didn’t matter how hard they stared, or how hard they tried, even with a trowel and forty yards of spandex, they couldn’t get within spitting distance of the super-hot Ms. Toussi. Not on his Curve-o-Meter.

“Beranger could have the real deal,” he said, opening the hotel’s main door onto the street. The Posada Plaza didn’t have the world’s best air-conditioning system, but it was a damn sight better than the straight heat of the city. It was still a hundred and one outside, and the sidewalk was steaming.

“Yes, it’s a possibility,” she conceded.

“Do you believe in it, the Sphinx? The whole immortality thing, that it has mystical powers?”

The question seemed pretty straightforward to him, but he felt her stiffen, her body making a subtle shift from acquiescence to defense.

“No,” she said, reaching up and adjusting her sunglasses, settling them more firmly on her face, her voice coolly adamant. “Absolutely not.”

He’d hit a nerve, unintentionally, and it didn’t take him more than a moment to realize which one.

Hell. Under other circumstances, he would apologize, but he didn’t think her knowing he’d been investigating her would improve the situation, and this most certainly wasn’t the time to be bringing up the subject of her dead daughter.

He’d given her loss a lot of thought over the last few months, remembering how she’d looked that night in the gallery, so gorgeous it hurt, and absolutely untouchable, like she did now. More than once, he’d wished he could reach out over the miles and offer her some comfort, usually about the second glass of Scotch, sure, but the intent had been pure. She was cool, all right, firmly in control, and he’d bet that was exactly the way she needed to keep things.

Well, she had a lot better chance of doing that if she got out of Ciudad del Este inmediatamente.

A cab pulled up at the curb, and she started forward.

He matched her stride for stride, and when they reached the taxi, he opened the door for her, then stood by while she moved past him to get in. At the last moment, he reached for her arm again, stopping her with a light touch.

She turned to face him, the obvious question on her lips, but he beat her to the punch.

“You’re making the right decision here,” he said. “I’ll let you know how it all turns out when I get to Denver.”

Classic strategy, reinforce the goal, which idiotically seemed to be that damned dinner date, once he wrapped up his whole trading-the-ancient-Egyptian-statue-for-the-intel-on-a-terrorist-sleeper-cell-in-the-heartland-of-America mission.

“I’ll hold my breath,” she said, her eyes unmistakably focused on him through the amber lenses of her sunglasses.

Cool, cool Suzi Toussi-he just shook his head and stood back as she finished getting in the cab, and he closed the door for her when she was settled.

Reaching in his pants pocket, he pulled out a roll of bills and thumbed off a few, then leaned down into the passenger side window of the front seat and handed the bills across to the driver.

“Gran Chaco,” he said. There was only one.

“Está bien,” the driver replied with a broad smile, noticing the healthy tip Dax had added to the fare. “Muy bien.”

Turning to look in the back seat, Dax had only one word for her. “Home,” he said, and he meant it. He didn’t want to see her in Ciudad del Este again. The congressman was out of luck on this deal-and really, when he thought about it, few things were scarier than the thought of a congressman looking for immortality.

She glanced at him over the tops of her sunglasses, and he figured that was as good as he was going to get. The message had gotten through. That’s all he wanted. He stepped back on the curb, and even after the cab pulled away, he stayed there, watching her leave.

Home-it’s what he’d said. It’s what he expected.

What he didn’t expect was to see a goddamn blue Land Cruiser with Jimmy frickin’ Ruiz at the wheel pull out of a side street and take off after Suzi’s cab.

Geezus. He was starting to feel like he was in the middle of a beehive, with all the worker bees buzzing around trying to steal the honey and snatch the queen.

Dammit.

Suzi or the Sphinx-it wasn’t really a contest, but one of those prizes was going one way, and the other-he hoped to hell-was still at Beranger’s. Or if it wasn’t, that’s at least where the trail would start.

Again, dammit.

He pulled his radio receiver out of the cargo pocket on his pants and started down the street at a fast walk, heading for his rent-a-Jeep, and trying not to draw any attention to himself. Ciudad del Este was the shopping capital of Paraguay, racking up billions of dollars’ worth of merchandise sales every year, most of it illegal. In the market, the streets were always packed, not just with shoppers, fruit sellers, guys hawking all kinds of crap out of handcarts, armed security guards for the big stores, and the occasional, oddly open-market drug dealer selling his goods off the hood of his car, but with hundreds of hormiguitas, “little ants,” men who made their living smuggling goods across the border on their backs.

Walking along, weaving his way through the crowd, Dax ran through the frequencies of the transmitters he’d hidden in the gallery. The one in the entrance was silent, which was to be expected, considering that everyone had already left the damn place. He checked Beranger’s office, where Ponce’s men had been discussing the new whores at the Colony Club, and got nothing but static; the same as in the junk room-so who knew what in the hell had happened in those two places. The last transmitter was in the main gallery room, what might be left of it anyway, after the police had trashed and crashed their way through it. He dialed in the frequency and listened, then came to a stop in the middle of the sidewalk.

There was something coming through, something very human-sounding.

Checking both directions, he waited for a break in the stream of shoppers, then made his way into the doorway of an electronics store to stand next to a burly security guard holding a pistol-gripped 12-gauge-and he listened.

Breathing, that’s what he was hearing, heavy breathing coming through the receiver, like someone was right against the transmitter. He was getting it all, a whole chorus of the raspy, rattling struggle, an inhalation of infinite, pained complexity. It could be Beranger. The man was not well.

The guy with the 12-gauge gave him a dark look, like he was taking up important space, and Dax gave him a half-assed smile and shrugged.

“Mi mujer,” he whispered, my woman, like there was just no help for this little moment of togetherness in the doorway. The security guy was not his fight.

He hoped the guy was nobody’s fight, not with him carrying a shotgun for curbside security. The streets and sidewalks were jam-packed full of people. If some cholo decided to steal something, the only safe place for a hundred yards was going to be behind the guard. Nothing in the wild, wild West back home could hold a candle to this place. There were no rules in Ciudad del Este.

Another sound came through the receiver, commanding his attention, a scraping noise echoing in rhythm with the breathing, like someone was getting dragged, like…like he didn’t know the hell who, but the visual he got was of somebody dragging Remy Beranger, who was breathing loudly, across the main gallery room to do…well, something horrible-that was the visual he got from the raspy, pained sound. He wasn’t an alarmist, far from it, but the gallery had been coming down around the Frenchman’s ears when Dax and Suzi had bailed off the roof.

Geezus. Whatever he thought of Remy Beranger, he needed the guy.

He looked down the street. The cab and the Land Cruiser were gone, but he knew where they were going-the Gran Chaco, and honestly, he didn’t doubt that Suzi could take care of herself at a luxury hotel, especially when she was packing a pistol, and most especially since it had been the SDF guys who had taught her how to use it. He knew guys like that. He was a guy like that, and guys like him not only would have taught her how to shoot, they would have taught her when to shoot, which in the case of self-defense was well and often, and quickly-very, very quickly. A couple of shots in a second and a half would do the trick nicely. Hawkins would have taught her that.

Beranger, though, he’d been about half done in every time Dax had seen him, and if that really was him breathing like that and getting dragged across the floor-well, then Dax had to do something, or he was going to lose the only person he knew who might have actually seen the Memphis Sphinx.

He looked up the street again, then swore under his breath. Half an hour, that’s all it would take for him to check on Beranger, get the damn Sphinx out of him if it was there to be gotten, and then get back on the road to the Gran Chaco.