On the Loose (10 page)

CHAPTER
TWELVE

“I like the rain.”

Rain?
Smith looked at Honey sitting across from him in one of the two Land Cruisers they'd acquired at Ilopango along with a two-and-a-half-ton cargo truck. This wasn't rain. It was a torrent.

“We're practically underwater,” he said. The world on the other side of the windshield was a solid sheet of gray night sky melding into wet pavement. He had the wipers on light speed and still couldn't see a damn thing—a fact proven when he skidded onto the shoulder going around the next curve, the same way he'd skidded onto the shoulder going around the last curve.

Honey grabbed for the dash and cleared her throat, the same way she had the last time, but this time she didn't let go of the dash. She did use her free hand to take her cigarillo from her lips so she could blow a small cloud of fragrant smoke into the cab—cherry with a hint of whiskey—most of which found its way out the small open crack at the top of her window.

Smith tightened his grip on the steering wheel and checked his rearview to make sure the deuce-and-a-half behind them stayed on the road. The last thing they needed was for their pallet of weapons and luggage to end up at the bottom of some damn gorge.

“Do you want me to drive?” Honey asked, before taking another hit off the small Cuban cigar.

He looked at her—once, sharply, briefly.

“I'm an excellent driver,” she said, resting the hand with the cigar back along the seat.

“No.” Smith kept his eyes on the road. One word to say it all, that was his motto. The fewer words the better. Keep it short. Keep it simple.

Or say something he was bound to regret, something cold and true about misplaced dogooders and self-sacrificing nuns.

“And I'm rested. You were up all night and—”

“I'm driving.”

And if it took more than two words to get his point across, he was losing his touch.

“I drove at Talladega.”

“You did not.”

Another mile passed in silence and a small puff of cigar smoke.

“Did too.”

Smith let out a breath, a heavy breath. It was not a sigh. He did not sigh.

“I almost graduated from their training school.” The end of the cigarillo glowed momentarily in the dark cab as she inhaled.

No way. Not even almost.

“Did not.” A person had to actually be good to graduate from a Busch Series training school or a NASCAR school. They didn't hand out diplomas simply for paying the money.

“Did too...almost.”

Well, this was a definite deterioration of the lovely silence they'd been sharing, a juvenile squabbling match.

“When we get to the Campos plantation, it's going to be my rules, all the way. Anything I tell you, do it. Any questions may or may not be entertained later. Don't expect me to explain myself, especially not in front of anyone else.”

“Talladega was the second driving school I went to,” Honey said, which was not the confirmation he'd expected. The words “yes, sir” would have been more appropriate.

“If we end up in the CNL camp tomorrow, which I'm going to do my best to ensure we don't, then, more than likely, I won't be speaking to you at all, except when absolutely necessary. Just follow my lead.” The last damn thing Smith was inclined to do, under any circumstances, was drag Little Miss Cigar-Smoking Sparkle Toes into an insurgents' camp in the mountains, but it was a possibility. It was also his definitive definition of insane. So insane, he was considering resorting to serious intimidation to get the combination out of her—very serious. The kind she wouldn't forget for a long time, if ever, and then he'd take
his
handcuffs and lock her to something immovable at Campos's, while he and the plantation owner went and retrieved the CIA's merchandise and the saintly Sister Julia.

Sure, he could do it. He didn't need Honey on his side. Once this deal was over, they'd go their separate ways, and she'd be nothing but a nagging, niggling, confusing piece of unfinished business that would probably drive him nuts for the next twenty years.

“The first driving school I went to was DDD in Los Angeles.” Honey knocked her ash into the Land Cruiser's ashtray.

Smith shot her another glance. “Dandridge Dynamic Driving?” In the circles where driving skills could mean the difference between life and death, Dandridge's was considered to be the finest school in the States, if not the world. Every tactical driving school had their theories and a track. DDD had a proven track record.

“Yes.” She was sitting sideways in the seat, facing him. “My brother Thomas sent me a few years ago, and I did graduate from their course. I still can't parallel park worth a damn, but I can do a ninety-degree controlled slide and a reverse one-eighty.”

Okay. He was impressed—and Thomas, he remembered, was the brother stuck with “Avaldamon.”

“I've been to Dandridge's,” he said. It had been part of his training for SDF.

“When?”

“Recently” was all he said. Smith didn't give the actual details of his life away, ever, not even the fairly innocuous details, if there even were such things, which he doubted.

“Did you meet Steve Thornton?”

“Steve? Yeah. He was doing a two-day defensive course for a group of L.A. limo drivers while we were there.” And wasn't that unexpected. They had something in common besides one wild night in San Luis. Nothing could have surprised him more. They even had an acquaintance in common, someone besides Brett Jenkins III, who was probably a foreign agent. There had been times when Smith had thought half the State Department comprised alien nationals, and he meant cosmic, not political.

“Steve was my personal instructor.”

Yeah. He believed it. Any guy with some pull would have picked Honey out of the crowd and taken her under his wing, just for the fun of having her around. She was beautiful, friendly, warm, liked bourbon, and actually wasn't too spoiled.

That last thought brought him up short.

Sure, she was dripping in money, confidence, money, designer clothes, looks, and more money, but when he thought about it, she wasn't at all like Natalie.

Natalie had been spoiled R.O.T.T.E.N.

He'd actually liked it the first couple of weeks of their liaison. He'd liked all the hair-tossing and coyly sly smiles, all the breathless conversation about all the breathlessly fascinating moments that made up the life of Natalie. He'd liked the underlying sexuality and overt sensuality of every move she'd made, every touch, every step, of every time she'd slid into a chair, of every cup she'd lifted. He had personally watched her performance scramble men's brains. It had scrambled his for a while.

Na-ta-lie.

Natalie de Salignac. She'd been half French, and all, all, all about Natalie, but he'd loved her for two solid, trying months, until she'd beaten his initial fascination into the ground, and then she'd turned into a bitch, one of the hellhounds. His crime, as he recalled, had been in not listening to yet another “Day in the Life” pout about a rude
barista
at her favorite coffee shop. Rude, apparently, because the new coffee guy had charged her for her latte. Natalie de Salignac did not pay for lattes. They were gifts from the corporate coffee world in payment for her presence in their shop.

No kidding.

She'd even had a name for it: the Princess Discount. She got it all over town, just for showing up and being Natalie.

Smith glanced over at Honey, whose French twist was doing a little of that coming-undone thing, enough to put a few loose curls around her face. The black patent leather bow was still perfectly in place, a sleek and shiny band across the top of her head, proclaiming her Queen for a Day, or Audrey Hepburn, or something, he guessed. It made him grin. Who wore headbands besides teenage girls and women in magazines?

Oh, right. She had been in a magazine, and it was easy to see why, even with her BDUs rumpled and her tactical vest filling up with all sorts of odds and ends. He'd watched her put her lipstick and a small brush in one ammo pouch, and some cash and a credit card in another. Her cell phone had fit neatly in a pouch usually reserved for a spare pistol magazine. Tissues, some gum, a pen, a small notebook, granola bars, perfume—it had all disappeared into her vest.

But somehow, she was still missing something from the mix. With the cigarillo clamped between her teeth, she was back to searching through her big canary yellow purse.

“Thomas was planning a research trip to Nepal and wanted me along for company,” she was saying. “But it was the kind of trip where there was very limited access to the sites he needed to visit.” She took the cigarillo from between her teeth, blew out, and then held the small cigar in the fingers of one hand while she continued searching through her stuff with the other. “Everybody had to pull their weight and be approved by the Nepalese, so he wrote me down as one of the expedition's drivers and sent me to Dandridge's.”

She probably got Princess Discounts all over the world, but every time Smith had been with Honey, it had been all about Julia, and getting into trouble, and going boldly, fearlessly, and stupidly where no Park Avenue princess had gone before. It had never been about Honoria York-Lytton, unless he'd pried the information out of her, or come up with it on his own.

San Luis, El Salvador? Give him a break. She'd had no business being there. And buying a gun off the street in front of the old Hotel Palacio? He'd never really had a chance to ask her how that piece of idiocy had come about.

But she wasn't stupid. He'd gone and gotten her other book,
Women's Sexuality Under the Yoke of Twenty-first Century Political Tyranny,
and man, that had been a real slog. Avaldamon Thomas wasn't the only York-Lytton capable of writing nearly indecipherable academic treatises.

Smith was a smart guy, but that thing had beat him cold.

“My brother Haydon got the plum assignment, though.” Honey was still talking and still searching through her purse. “He ended up in muleteer school, so he could help with the mule train on the trek up the valley. The gist of which is, the roads in Nepal are much worse than this, even with the rain tonight, so if you'd like to relax, maybe take a nap, and let me drive, you'd be in good hands. I really did pay attention at Dandridge's, and Steve, as you know, is an excellent teacher.”

Honey finally found what she was looking for, and pulled a small case out of her purse.

“He taught me how to feel where the weight is in a car,” she said, “especially on an SUV, which we used a lot in the class, and I can brake accordingly, and control where the vehicle is at all times, and I can, uh, keep it off the shoulder and from going over the side”—she blew out another cloud of smoke—“...no offense intended.”

Flipping open the case, she flashed a pair of glasses at him.

“Driving glasses,” she said. “A slight prescription with yellow lens for night. It'll keep lights from haloing and sharpen everything up a bit.”

Smith grinned. Piece of work—she thought she could drive better than him? Not on Dandridge's best day, glasses or no glasses. Still, he actually considered her proposition for a moment, which gave him pause. He was always in the driver's seat, physically, intellectually, and emotionally. He controlled his immediate environment absolutely, and his broader environment to the best of his ability, and he had some very precise, exacting, and extremely well practiced abilities—especially when it came to control.

“Thank you,” he said. “But we're only an hour out from Campos's. It's best to keep the convoy rolling, rather than risk a driver change.”

She let out a sigh, and sat back in her seat, and he felt like a jerk.

She had that effect on him, a lot.

“So what kind of research was Thomas doing in Nepal?” He'd read something about Nepal lately, but he couldn't quite remember where.

“Giant ammonites of the upper Kali Gandaki River. It's kind of an obscure branch of study.”

Yeah. He bet it was.

“They really are giant, as big as tires, some of them,” she said. “I was along for the luxury portion of the trip, from Kathmandu to Pokhara. Thomas knows I'm only good for as long as the hotel rooms and the hot water hold out, but in Nepal the roads run out with the hotel rooms, so he didn't need an official driver after that anyway. Beyond Pokhara, it's all mule trains and yaks and frozen plateaus, but we bounded around a bit in the lower river valleys, seeing what had washed down from Tibet, if anything, and visiting shrines. Thomas is big on taking samples and organizing data and extrapolating theories. He's the scientist in the family.”

“And Julia's the saint,” Smith said. A misplaced do-gooding saint. “And Haydon is the big-time adventurer, so where does that leave you and your other two brothers, Gerald and William?”

Honey turned to look at him again, a quizzical expression on her face. “Have you been investigating me? More than accidentally stumbling over the article in
Ocean
magazine?”

“A little,” he admitted. Hell, he investigated everybody who bumped into his world, especially if they'd made a dent—and she had.

“So what did you find out?”

“Besides Shakespeare in the nude?”

“I had leaves on.”

“And underwear-modeling boyfriends?”

“The romance in that romantic relationship was very brief, no pun intended, and a very long time ago. We truly are friends—and no, I never think of my friends as ‘just friends,' even if they were former boyfriends. I like to keep the people I care about a little closer than that.”

Touché, and ouch. Any woman he'd ever been done with had been done with him. Really done. Natalie was probably still sticking pins in a voodoo doll with his name on it, and she probably wasn't the only one. The only woman he'd never been done with had been his first full-blown love affair, a lush and lovely thirty-year-old tax accountant named Caroline, who had taken his nineteen-year-old ideas about sex and turned them inside out. He still kept in touch with Caroline.