Sinclair Justice (Texas Rangers #2)(24)
Sinclair looked at Curt as if pleading for support, but he seemed to have a strong interest in the plaques on the wall.
With a rueful laugh, Sinclair held up both hands in surrender. “Shall we agree to a mutual information sharing? With the understanding that whatever intel we exchange not leave our little trio.”
Emm frowned. “I have to let the Baltimore detectives know what’s going on. I promised them I would.”
“Can you at least trust me with that much?” Sinclair groused. “It’s part of my job to keep other agencies in the loop . . . My God, what a control freak.”
This last was muttered, but Emm heard it. She had to bite back her response that he was the one who’d taken total control of her in her own hotel room last night, but the memory colored her cheeks. When his eyes narrowed a bit, she turned toward the door. “Very well, then, shall we find a quiet spot for a glass of wine?”
“Let me get my hat,” Sinclair muttered, marching back to his office.
Curt eyed that starched spine, then lifted an interested eyebrow at Emm.
“None of your business,” she preempted the very reporterlike question she saw him about to utter about the sparks flying between her and Sinclair. “I’ll see you at the bar.”
On the short drive back downtown, Emm gripped the wheel tightly, hoping that among the three of them they could stumble across something, anything, that would lead to Yancy and Jennifer. For the umpteenth time, she uttered a silent prayer for the safety of her sister and niece.
On the outskirts of Mexico City, Yancy Russell patted the heads of the three Rottweilers she’d long ago befriended, tossing them the dog biscuits she’d filched from the kitchen. This secluded estate, on the hills outside Mexico City, was such a fortress that it had taken her months to learn how to circumvent its defenses. The corner of the vast gardens was the only place invisible to the electronic eyes surveying the entire compound. She only knew this because she’d saved her pocket change, doled out to her every week by her “benefactor,” Arturo, to bribe one of the security techs who periodically came in to maintain and tweak the equipment. One of them, an aging expat American hippie with a guitar tattooed on his forearm, had been susceptible to her smiles and wiles. When she could duck her own constant companion, aka jailer, several times she’d joined him in the kitchen for fajitas and mojitos.
The kitchen staff had long ago turned a blind eye to her little rebellions against Arturo, for in that way she was no different from the innumerable beauty queens, models, and barrio girls who became the mistresses of various cartel leaders. Their careers were short, dictated by their youth and beauty, and to a woman they utilized every female guile at their disposal to milk jewels, designer clothes, cars, apartments, and even trust funds from their benefactors.
Yancy, the servants of the vast mansion agreed, was older and smarter, though still very lovely. If she wanted to share a drink with the other help, it was a small transgression in a kingdom where food tasters and armies with advanced tactical training were the favored vassals of the patron. She was just a Yanqui cast out from her own wealthy family who was lucky the patron had been at the merchandise drop when she came in and had taken a fancy to her. It was said he’d noted her resemblance to the pretty blonde his son had snatched for himself months earlier, and he’d been titillated to think of the fun he and Tomas could have with a gorgeous American mother-daughter combo.
And, since in the last five months or so Yancy had never tried to escape or, from all the eyes and ears on alert wherever she went, even tried to use a phone other than the restricted one they allowed her, her jailers had relaxed enough to leave her alone occasionally. Besides, as she herself had told Arturo on more than one occasion, she’d never leave Jennifer behind. Because Jennifer had tried to escape several times, and slit her wrists once, she was kept under constant armed guard. Yancy was allowed to see her on supervised visits once a week.
And that visit was tomorrow, and was the reason for her risky maneuver. Yancy patted the dogs again, hitched her tight red silk dress above her thighs, kicked off her heels, and climbed up the brick wall. She’d always loved rock climbing, and from a distance this wall looked too smooth to scale, but there were breaks where the mortar was loose, and with the stakes so high, she had no choice but to chance it.
She slipped once, scraping a knuckle as she scrabbled to hold on, but using the upper-body strength she maintained by calisthenics in her room when she was alone, she topped the wall, dangled her legs down the first six feet, and dropped the remaining four feet to the asphalt road. She knelt down, staying in the shadow for a moment to get her bearings between the cameras watching the road and the wall. She ignored the slight wound on her hand, aware that it was still bleeding—Arturo had been slow to get her very expensive meds for her in the last month or so, and she hadn’t been able to take them consistently. The little money she’d saved would have to go toward the pills for Jennifer, which were also expensive and hard to get in Mexico.
She confirmed there were no cars in sight and then darted across the road. She rounded the corner and went through a small copse of trees to a tiny clearing, expecting the little red Fiat to be there, where it always was. Her heart sank when she saw the empty clearing. What now?
While she stood there debating, she heard a very smooth, powerful engine approaching the bend. Crap; she recognized that sound. Only an armored Rolls-Royce Corniche could sound that quiet and powerful all at once, which meant Arturo had returned early from his meeting.