Mission Road (Tres Navarre #6)(53)

“I couldn’t do it,” Ralph said.

I looked back and found him standing behind me, his face pale, slick with sweat. He wasn’t holding a gun anymore.

“I know . . . he tried to hurt Maia,” he stammered. “But I told him about the kitchen entrance. I told him to run.”

I’m not sure who was more surprised—Ralph or me—when Maia threw her arms around him and kissed his cheek.

Ralph stared at her blankly. “He didn’t shoot Ana. He convinced me of that. But I knew Mr. White . . . he would’ve had him killed anyway.”

Mr. White, in fact, was standing by his buffet table down on the lawn, glaring up at us. Alex was whispering in his ear. I doubted he was advising hugs and kisses for Ralph.

I decided it was best not to wait for them to come to us.

“Stay with Ralph,” I told Maia. I headed down the marble staircase.

I intercepted White and Alex at the bottom step.

“Inside,” Mr. White ordered. “We need to discuss this.”

“Titus isn’t our guy. Ralph’s convinced.”

“Perhaps I did not make myself clear.”

“You left the choice up to him,” I said. “Isn’t that right?”

White was having too much excitement for his condition. His complexion was turning gray despite the makeup. His breathing was shallow.

Alex put his hand on his boss’s shoulder. “Let me deal with them, sir.”

White trembled with anger. He kept his cold blue eyes on me. “Mr. Navarre, I seem to have been mistaken about your friend. I do not understand him any better than I do you.”

“We’ll leave then.”

“I don’t think so,” the old man said. “We’ll have you as our guests tonight. And in the morning . . . we’ll talk.”

He turned and walked back toward his crowd of guests, who were getting barraged with a new round of champagne and appetizers, security guards circulating amongst them, assuring everyone they could forget the rude interruption of the escaped prisoner.

I caught Madeleine’s eye in the crowd. She appraised me coldly, then turned back to the crowd of young men who wanted her attention a lot more than I did.

“Quite a show,” Alex told me, amused. He raised one hand, and a heavyset security goon materialized at my right arm. “Virgil will show you to your room.”

I had a feeling Alex would’ve said your coffin with the same good humor.

I looked up at the balcony. A couple of other goons had already found Ralph and were marching him inside.

And Maia was gone.

Chapter 13

MAIA DIDN’T WANT TO HOLD THE BABY.

“Just ten minutes?” Ralph’s sister pleaded. She looked like a woman who’d just crawled through a wind tunnel full of baby food. “So I can take a shower? You’re a lifesaver.”

She handed over Lucia Jr., a bundle of grunting, kicking unhappiness, then disappeared down the hallway.

If Maia were in her place, she would’ve headed out the back door and driven away.

“Hey, sweetheart,” Maia told the baby.

“Ah-ba!” Lucia Jr. complained.

Maia wondered if her head needed supporting. No, that was with younger babies. Lucia was almost a year old. She could sit up, use a cup, all of that.

Maia had been reading so many damn baby development books, hiding them in the dirty laundry hamper whenever Tres visited, but she couldn’t remember anything. Law school had been a snap compared to studying babies. Babies made no intuitive sense.

Lucia Jr. kept kicking and squirming.

Maia propped her over one shoulder, holding her by her terry-cloth-covered bottom. She got out her key chain. Babies loved keys. She put Lucia on the sofa and sat next to her and offered the keys.

“Ah!” Lucia went straight for the pepper spray canister.

“No,” Maia said. “Not that.”

She detached the pepper spray and put it in her pocket and Lucia started crying.

“Aw, come on, honey. Look, keys.”

Lucia was having none of it. She wanted dangerous stuff or nothing. She was, apparently, her parents’ child.

Down the hall, plumbing shuddered. Water began to run.

Hurry, Maia thought.

She bought a few seconds showing Lucia the handcuffs she kept in her purse. Lucia seemed to think they tasted pretty interesting.

Maia cursed herself for promising Ralph she’d stop by. The sister was clearly doing fine with the baby. But Maia hadn’t been able to resist. Maybe it was her exhaustion, her frazzled state of mind, but earlier that evening, for the first time, she’d actually come close to liking Ralph Arguello.

THEY’D BEEN STANDING TOGETHER ON THE back veranda of Guy White’s mansion. Without the glasses, Ralph looked older, weathered, like a Native American in a nineteenth-century photograph, staring across a landscape that was no longer his.

“I screwed up,” he said, “cutting Titus loose.”

Maia felt so relieved she couldn’t speak. Never mind that Titus Roe had tried to kill her. Ever since she pulled him out of his Volvo, she’d known he was as much of an unwilling victim as she. She’d been foolish to bring him to White’s house—a sure death sentence. Ralph had spared him. He’d lifted a huge weight from her conscience, and she was completely unprepared to feel so indebted to a man she so disliked.