The Finishing School

54

LUCKY THING Melanie was so enamored of Dan O’Reilly’s voice. It had this killer rough-sweet quality, gravelly and totally sexy, with a noticeable New York accent. It was so distinctive to her ear that she even recognized its fingerprint in a brief grunt that emanated from a nearby níspero tree when the shooting started.

Melanie instantly plunged into the underbrush, heading for that tree. The air was thick with flapping bats and bright flashes of gunfire. Sharp branches tore at her clothes, but damn it, she was zeroing in on Dan.

“Shit, behind you!” she heard Bridget Mulqueen exclaim.

The next second something whizzed by Melanie’s ear, and it wasn’t a mosquito. The bullet knocked a branch off a tree behind her head. It fell with a crash, and she dropped to her knees into a tangle of thorny brush, her heart in her throat, the hair on the back of her neck standing up, every nerve quivering.

“Stop, stop! It’s me, Melanie! Don’t shoot!”

She knew she was yelling louder than safety counseled, but Dan was an excellent shot. If she didn’t stop him, he’d kill her, and what kind of ending would that be to their love story?

Dan stopped firing. “Melanie?” he called, pitching his voice low.

“Yes. I’m getting up. Don’t shoot.”

She stood up slowly, shaking all over, her arms and legs stinging where thorns had pierced her skin. She made her way the remaining ten feet to where Dan and Bridget crouched behind the tree.

“How’d you get here?” Dan asked, rubbing his eyes like he thought he was hallucinating.

“I took a cab.”

Bridget looked at her as if she were crazy, but Dan laughed. “That’s you, all right,” he said.

“I’m sorry, but I had to come,” Melanie whispered urgently. “Trevor’s missing. Esposito is still in New York. He never got on a plane to come here. I was thinking this deal was either a diversion or an ambush, and that I needed to warn you. But then I saw Lamar and Pavel coming here, so now I’m completely confused.”

“Uh,” Bridget said, mouth still hanging open in astonishment at Melanie’s presence.

“The hand-to-hand’s definitely going,” Dan said under his breath. “Two guys came in from the right less than five minutes ago, prob’ly the Colombians, because they were carrying a duffel bag, which we gotta assume has the product. Armed with assault rifles. One of ’em has a pit bull. Right before the shooting starts, Pavel and Lamar show up from the direction you just came from. They’re about to do the hand-to-hand when all hell breaks loose.”

“We think the local cops jumped the gun, started shooting for no reason,” Bridget explained.

“We can’t be sure. I don’t want to prejudge guys. You can barely see your hand in front of your face out here. But I gotta tell you, nobody was supposed to move until I gave the signal, and I did not give the fucking signal. It’s quiet now, but we don’t know if anybody’s hit,” Dan said.

“If we don’t know that, chances are the bad guys don’t know either, right?” Melanie said.

“What’s your point?” Dan asked.

“If you could call the locals off, maybe after a while the bad guys would assume whoever was shooting at them took a hit?”

“It’s possible.”

“Then maybe they’d make their exchange and try to leave. If we could pick off Expo’s guys and arrest them with the drugs, we’d have a prosecutable case. I know where they parked. We could set up on their car.”

“Huh,” Dan said, thinking.

“Well?” Bridget asked.

“Maybe. Not bad, actually. Our only other choice is to shoot it out, and obviously we’re not gonna fire first,” he said.

Somebody else made the decision for them. The moment the words left Dan’s mouth, bullets began to fly again up ahead. Bursts of gunfire mixed with shouting and cursing in Spanish. Dan and Bridget raised their weapons, ready to advance.

Dan threw a final glance over his shoulder at Melanie.

“You move from this spot, I’ll shoot you myself,” he said. But he gave her his gorgeous smile, backlit by gunfire, before he turned and strode off toward the battle.