Running Wild

It took every drop of willpower she had to lower her heels back onto the floor, but she did so, breaking their connection. Stepping back, she touched a knuckle to her still-tingling lips. Then she slung the strap of her bag back over her head and, in an attempt to minimize anything that might set off recognition from Joaquin, positioned its bulk on the opposite side from where she usually wore it and slid on a pair of shades.

The doors whooshed open and she met Finn’s eyes. “Thanks again, Finn Kavanagh,” she said in a voice that sounded rusty. “You did your mama, three sisters, two grandmothers and boatload of aunts and girl cousins proud.”

Stepping out onto the platform, she slid on her iPod earphones. Then, pretending to move in time to music she hadn’t turned on, she carved a path for herself through the thankfully crowded station.

* * *

FINN STEPPED INTO the car’s open doorway to watch Mags salsa her way through the throng waiting to board. He ignored the people clumped up in front of the gondola even as they surged forward the second Mags cleared it. He was bumped and jostled but refused to budge. Instead, he did his best to keep Mags’s brightly patterned head-cover thing in view as his gondola inched along in one direction while she moved in and out of view in the opposite.

He was happy as a monkey with a peanut machine to have his vacation back, but he had to admit that while the past he-didn’t-know-how-many minutes had been far from relaxing, which, face it, was his chief goal for the next two weeks, they had sure as hell gotten his blood pumping. And as he’d watched her sit on the floor and transform herself with the help of only a few items, he’d found himself downright mesmerized.

And then there was the three-hundred-pound gorilla in the car. Her kiss.

Man. He hadn’t been expecting that and it had knocked his socks off.

Licking his bottom lip as if a ghost taste might have survived, he felt the cabin door trying to close against his side and stepped out onto the platform. He could always catch another car. But before he went whistling on his merry way, he intended to make sure Mags made a clean getaway.

His gondola glided away, then out through the turnabout and he crossed to one of the center pillars to get out of the flow of still fairly heavy foot traffic. With coloring closer to the El Tigrians, he didn’t stand out in the crowd the way Mags had before she’d worked her magic with the scarf and her face paints. Yet even so, he was an obvious gringo. So he found a spot in the shadow of a column that at least partially concealed him as he kept an eye on the two remaining cars that had entered the terminal behind his. Best-case scenario, Joaquin had caught the car still approaching. If that were the case Mags would be in the wind before the guy cleared his gondola.

But, of course, that would’ve been too easy, and even as Finn watched, Joaquin pushed past an elderly couple who were exiting the furthermost gondola, then stopped dead to survey the crowd. The cabin’s remaining few occupants split to flow around him like a stream circling a boulder.

The cartel enforcer, or whatever the hell he was, stood silently as seconds stretched into eternity. His gaze intent, he appeared to be sectioning the area into quadrants and scrutinizing each closely. After several moments that felt like hours to Finn, Joaquin turned back as if he planned to catch the next group of gondolas already entering the station.

Finn breathed a silent sigh of relief.

Prematurely, as it turned out, because Joaquin suddenly spun around, then leaped up onto a bench against the inside wall and stood on his toes, obviously craning to see something. Seconds later, he leaped down from the bench and sprinted for the down escalator.

“Son of a bitch!” Clipping together his backpack’s belt to keep it from bouncing, Finn took off after him. Chasing an armed-to-the-teeth maniac was not how he’d intended to spend his vacation.

Yet how would he live with himself if he walked away and Baby Psycho hurt Mags?

Or worse. Because hurt was probably putting a pretty face on things. God knew Joaquin hadn’t seemed the least bit averse to shooting her or stabbing him.

Mags had done a good job of disguising herself, so how the hell had the kid recognized her? He understood Joaquin exiting the car at the station. Subjecting each station to at least a cursory check was just good business sense, and the way the cars crept through the station with a new gondola always less than a minute behind, it wasn’t as if the guy would have missed his ride if he failed to spot her. But that was the logic of a mature mind and the boy had struck Finn as a whole lot more reactionary than a logical thinker.

So maybe someone coached him. But how had he recognized Mags?

The streets around the station were busy when he burst through the exit a few minutes later and he moved to the side of the door to get his bearings.

At first all he could see was the kaleidoscope of people moving up and down a long narrow avenue made of multicolored pavers. But taking a page from Joaquin’s playbook, he climbed onto a bulkhead that separated a restaurant’s outdoor tables from the sidewalk traffic and sectioned the area into quadrants. He started with the one dead ahead of him.

And spotted Mags by the color of her headgear a couple of blocks ahead of him. When he shortened his focus to the area between them, he located Joaquin as well. And the other man was a helluva lot closer to her than Finn was.

Determined to eliminate that distance, he set off at a dead run.

He was closing in on Joaquin when Mags stopped at an ancient car that looked as though it was held together by spit and rubber bands. He also saw Joaquin stop. The young man pulled that damn gun from the back of his pants and took a serious-looking shooting stance.

But then Joaquin seemed to hesitate. His heart crowding his throat, Finn put on an additional burst of speed just as the other man called, “Magdalene?”

With a whole lot less certainty in his voice than Finn had heard before.

So he wasn’t sure it was her. If Mags played her cards right, she’d ignore Joaquin, get in her car and take off as if his insistent shout had nothing to do with her. It wasn’t like the kid could follow her on foot.

She clearly wasn’t a card player, however, for she whipped around just as Finn came up behind Joaquin.

And as if sensing an impending threat, the cartel soldier started to turn, but Finn, who had several inches on him, drove his elbow into the vein he saw throbbing on the side of Joaquin’s neck, then snapped the back of his fist into the side of the thug’s face.

“Ow! Jesus!” He cupped his hand to his chest, feeling like he’d fractured his knuckles on the kid’s hard head. But at least Joaquin dropped like a stone. Once again his gun clattered away, but this time with a better outcome since Finn was able to snatch it up and shove it into the front of his own waistband. He didn’t have time to check that the safety was on. But he did cross himself and say a quick prayer that he didn’t shoot his dick off.

Because there was an outcome that didn’t bear thinking about.

Although, looking on the damn bright side, it at least would put an end to all this bullshit agonizing over should he or shouldn’t he be thinking about settling down.

He heard the whine of an overworked car engine reversing faster than sounded wise and looked up from using one hand to relieve Joaquin of his knife and feeling for a pulse with the other to see Mags’s junker. At the same time, he felt a thump beneath his fingertips—and had mixed feelings. He’d give a bundle not to have to spend the entire time he was down here looking over his shoulder. But neither did he want anyone’s blood on his hands.

Shelving the dilemma when the car screeched to a stop alongside him so abruptly its chassis rocked on its axles, he pushed back from where he was crouched over Joaquin’s unconscious body.

Mags leaned toward the passenger window. “Get in!”

He climbed to his feet and got in. She burned rubber the ancient tires couldn’t afford to lose getting out of there and Finn retrieved the gun from its precarious hiding place and leaned forward to slide it under his seat.

Without taking her gaze from the road, she reached across the seat and gripped his wrist. “Thank you,” she said fervently, her palm warm against his skin. “Again.” She gave him a quick glance before turning her attention back to the road. “I made that necessary twice in one day. It was dumb of me to answer when he called my name.”

“That’s how we learn.” He watched as her long, narrow fingers slipped away. Then he raised his eyes to study her face. “So. Magdalene, huh?”

She scowled. “Nobody calls me that but my parents.”

He didn’t understand why, since he thought it was a prettier name than Mags, if not as hipster cool. But he merely shrugged. “Where you heading?”

“As far away from here as I can. Then I need to get to a phone. I know my mother mentioned the Munoz grow farm in one of her letters but I kind of skimmed the part that said where it was. If it actually did say.” She took her gaze off the road long enough to give him a quick grimace. “It didn’t seem important at the time so I don’t really remember.”

She flapped a hand at him. “In any case, I’ll call my neighbor to see if she’ll go over to my place and try to find the reference in one of my letters. It wasn’t that many mailings ago.”

“Are you kidding me?” Not being hampered by anything so modern as a seat belt, he turned in his seat to stare at her. “Your big idea is to head right into the heart of a cartel?”

“I plan to get my folks away from one, yes.”

“Are you undercover DEA?”

She snorted. “Do I look like a drug enforcement agent?”

“Ah, the always popular answer-a-question-with-a-question ploy—I’ll take that as a no. You trained in special ops, then?”

She sighed. “I’m guessing you know I’m not that, either.”

“Then I suggest you get back on your meds, darlin’, because you clearly have suicidal tendencies if you’re self-aware enough to know you lack said training, yet intend to tackle an organized syndicate, anyhow.”

“I do not have suicidal tendencies! I didn’t say I was going in there with guns blazing—supposing I even had a gun. But if I can pinpoint the farm, then I can take that information to the nearest US embassy. They should know which agency to contact to get my folks out.”