Flash Fire Page 13

  Clara hesitated only a second. “I’d love a cup.”

  She could afford a five-minute delay. Questioning Jorge would go way better with caffeine in her system. She hurried forward.

  Large blue eyes, a generous mouth, Brunhilda was close to six foot tall and well over two hundred pounds. She cursed the heat in a mixture of German, Spanish, and English, her blonde hair braided and coiled on top of her head in a crown. She was a startling sight, like something one would see on stage at the opera. Clara half expected her to burst into a Wagner aria.

  Instead, the woman led her to a small kitchen and seated her at the table. “I’m Brunhilda.” She started brewing coffee. “Walker?”

  “Gone off for the morning. I’m Clara.”

  Brunhilda flashed her a pensive look. She sipped her own coffee in a poppy red nightgown barely covered by a matching robe, her voluptuous figure on unselfconscious display.

  Clara tried not to look at all that silk, fancier than anything she’d ever owned. Personally, she preferred simple, breathable, comfortable cotton sleepwear. She tended to go for the most practical choice in any given scenario.

  Brunhilda smiled. “You’re the first Mädchen he’s ever brought here. He likes you muy bueno, ja?”

  “How long have you lived in Mexico?” Clara responded to the question with a question, because she had no idea what to do with the woman’s revelation about Walker.

  Brunhilda had shared the information with a soft look on her face, like a mother talking about an errant son. Ah, the first girl he brought home. Sigh.

  The moment was fairly surreal.

  “Ich come aus Hamburg five years ago. I was a Bibliothekarin, ja?”

  Clara shook her head.

  “Oh, was ist das? Librarian,” Brunhilda translated the word.

  Clara nearly choked on her coffee.

  “I shock you, ja?”

  “A little.”

  Brunhilda’s smile said the woman appreciated the truth. “Ich ende wo ich beginne. I end where I start. Meine Mutter was stolen von Albania when she was sixteen. I was born in a place like this in Hamburg.”

  And then she told Clara how she’d been taken from her mother and adopted at ten. How the older couple, both teachers, made sure she had her schooling.

  Brunhilda’s smile widened. “I worked muy hard at the Hamburg library. Then every year, I take vacation. Ich liebe Mexico.” She said ich liebe in perfect German, then Mexico the Spanish way, with the x sounding like an h. “The food, the music, the muchachos… Muy macho.” She gave a wicked grin. “I fell in love, ja?”

  Clara sipped her coffee, trying to figure out how a German librarian ended up a Mexican brothel madam.

  “Two decades with Guillermo.” Brunhilda sighed. “Paradise. Then mine Guillermo dead. Kaputt. I was muy sola.”

  Lonely.

  “And you, um, work too?” Clara couldn’t help asking. Brunhilda had upset the spreadsheet in Clara’s brain that had librarians in a different column from ladies of the night. She needed to create order again.

  Brunhilda offered a wide smile, then slapped her pillowy thigh. “Some hombres need a dainty girl to make them feel macho. Other hombres want to climb Mount Everest. Jedem das Seine. To each his own.” She laughed, a free, throaty sound.

  The next question tumbled out of Clara’s mouth while her brain was still too stunned to function. “And Walker?”

  She winced. She hadn’t meant to ask that.

  But Brunhilda laughed again. “Walker doesn’t need to do anything to be macho. Nada. Nicht.”

  Did that mean that he didn’t sleep with anyone here? Clara wouldn’t have asked if her life depended on it. She absolutely did not care.

  “Walker ist Walker,” Brunhilda said with full motherly approval. “When there’s Schwierigkeit, trouble, he comes. He asks nada in return. Sometimes he sleeps in the attic. People know he’s our amigo. Nobody hurts my girls, nadie,” the woman said with affection.

  Clara stared.

  Light Walker, DOD facilitator, all-around mercenary, cold-blooded killer, protector of fallen women. The man defied categorization. Which was probably why she felt so off-balance around him.

  “Does he come often?”

  “Nein. He comes and goes like the wind. Unruhig.”

  Clara raised an eyebrow.

  “Restless,” Brunhilda translated, even as her cornflower-blue eyes turned speculative. “You know him long?”

  Clara shook her head. “He’s just helping me with something. I’m looking for a friend who disappeared around here. Rosita Ruiz. Seventeen. Have you heard anything about a young woman like that?”

  She pulled the printout from her back pocket and showed Rosita’s picture to the woman. Maybe one of her clients had been involved. Maybe he’d bragged.

  But Brunhilda shook her head after a moment. “Nein. Did she come up from the south?”

  “She came down from the US to visit family in Furino.”

  Surprise crossed Brunhilda’s face. “Und the traffickers took her, ja?”

  “I’m not sure,” Clara admitted, and it occurred to her that Brunhilda might know as much about sex trafficking as Jorge. So she settled in with her cup of coffee and launched into her long list of questions.

  Brunhilda was more than cooperative. She told Clara that while the area was active in the sex trade, Mercita was no Tenancingo.

  Clara was grateful for that. The first thing she’d done when she’d been assigned the case had been to look up sex trafficking, and Tenancingo had been the first thing that came up in her search. Tenancingo, up north, was the sex-trafficking capital of the world, one in ten inhabitants working in trafficking.

  Generations of men had gone into the business of forcing women into prostitution, mostly for customers in the US. The women were trafficked up to major cities as far as New York, then distributed to the countryside, to farms to service migrant workers.

  And Tenancingo was just one town. There were places almost as bad in nearly every Mexican state. Twenty thousand women were trafficked across the Mexico-US border every year so their bodies could be sold.

  “But the traffickers don’t take Americans,” Brunhilda said with a thoughtful expression. “Too much trouble.”

  Walker had said as much. “Do you think maybe one of the cartels took her?” Clara asked.

  She couldn’t imagine what for. The human traffickers made a lot more sense to her, but both Walker and Brunhilda were more familiar with local conditions than her, so she wasn’t about to completely ignore their opinion.

  Brunhilda tipped her head from side to side as she considered, a doubtful expression on her face. “Nein. When the cartels take people, they’re rivals, und people who stole from the cartel.”

  She made a slashing motion in front of her throat with her hand to indicate what happened to the thieves.

  Clara nodded and finished her coffee. So not the human traffickers, and not the cartels. Then who? One of the gangs? Walker hadn’t thought so. But Clara had to consider any possibility at this stage.

  “I’m going to head out for a while.”

  Even as she stood, she was mentally listing her options once again, hoping the list would trigger some brilliant insight, that something would suddenly jump out at her.

  Cartels. Banditos. Gangs. Random.

  She’d expected to be back in Furino by now, but Walker still hadn’t returned. Right now, right here, she could only follow up on one of the possibilities on her list: gangs.

  She needed to see if Jorge would be willing to talk with her. According to Walker, Jorge wasn’t given to senseless violence. But he probably knew a lot about the rival gangs who were. Sure, going to Jorge with Walker would have been better. But Walker wasn’t here, and even when he was, he seriously dragged his feet when it came to helping her.

  Bottom line: she was the investigator on this case. She needed to investigate. Walker might blow his top, but she’d deal with him.

  Clara thanked Brunhilda f
or the coffee, then headed out to see if she could scare up a lead without getting killed.

  Chapter Ten

  Walker pulled over the pickup Santiago had lent him, and parked it by the curb outside of Brunhilda’s.

  His stomach growled. He’d been gone longer than he’d intended. Longer than Clara had patience for, apparently. As he watched her walking down the road up ahead, he felt a number of things. Surprise wasn’t one of them.

  He got out, breathing in air that was hot enough to scorch his lungs, then swore under his breath and hurried to catch up to her. Which part of “stay put” didn’t she understand?

  At siesta time, the street stood mostly deserted—too damn hot to be outside. Even the telephone poles looked wilted, the lines sagging. The heat didn’t seem to bother Clara as she marched on—a woman on a mission and a half.

  She had a strong, confident stride. Those long, lean legs that her shorts did little to hide certainly drew the eye. As far as curves went, however, she was about as voluptuous from behind as from the front—meaning not at all.

  Yet she still managed to draw Walker’s full attention. Made no sense. He’d never been into lanky. But the closer he got, the more he wanted to put his hands on her.

  All over.

  He wanted to put his mouth on her too. And he wanted her to put her mouth on him. He wanted her, period. But he wasn’t going to do anything about it. The sudden blast of lust that shot through him only confirmed that it was time to send her packing.

  He caught her by her pointy elbow. Which she immediately slammed back in a textbook self-defense move that would have knocked the air out of an unsuspecting person.

  Walker evaded on instinct, a decade of hand-to-hand combat experience kicking in. The next moment, he had her turned, his arm around her middle, pulling her body flush to his to keep her in place and keep her from doing damage to either of them.

  So much for him trying to keep his distance. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  As she recognized him, she stopped struggling, but her eyes shot Patriot missiles. “Let me go.”

  He didn’t want to, for reasons he didn’t want to probe too deeply. She fit surprisingly well against him. He liked the feel of her. Enough to want to keep her there, her body pressed to his. Enough so that his dick stirred in his pants.

  A single swearword slipped through his teeth, hopefully too low for her to hear.

  He’d worked hard on telling himself he wasn’t interested. He had to keep reminding himself that he liked women with curves and without complications. He hadn’t been looking to get involved with anyone, and certainly not with someone like her—a freaking DOD investigator.

  Clara Roberts had caught him off guard. Not many people had ever done that.

  He dropped his arm from her waist and stepped away before she could feel his growing hard-on and ask what the hell that was about. He jerked his head toward Brunhilda’s. “Let’s go back.”

  And because she looked like she might argue, he wrapped his fingers around her wrist, then turned and led her back to Brunhilda’s, around the house, only letting her go on their way up the fire stairs.

  He went through the window and turned to face her as she climbed in after him. He watched her lift one bare leg over the windowsill after the other, and wished once again that those long legs were wrapped around his waist. His idiot brain had to go there every damn chance it got, apparently.

  Shit.

  The timing was ridiculously bad. Beyond bad. Impossible.

  “I thought I asked you to stay right here while I was gone,” he said, his voice coming out more clipped than he’d intended.

  She drew a deep breath and changed her expression from angry to coolly professional, oblivious to his X-rated thoughts of what the two of them could do up in the attic for the rest of the afternoon.

  “I know you think Rosita is dead,” she said. “But if that’s the case, I need to at least find confirmation.”

  He watched the steady resolution in her gunmetal-gray eyes. Then his gaze dropped to the stubborn set of her mouth. He liked people who had resolution. He liked her strength, and that she was sticking with her cause no matter what.

  Clara Roberts had backbone. And she wasn’t easily scared. Which, at the moment, actually worked against him, since he was trying to scare her out of the state.

  He swore under his breath once again as he turned from her and strode deeper into the attic. He’d take her to Furino tonight, but the entire afternoon stretched before them, and spending all that time with her up here was a bad idea.

  In any case, he had business to take care of. And he clearly couldn’t leave her behind again and expect her to stay put.

  “I’ll take you to the town incinerator. You can show Rosita’s picture to the operator.”

  Instead of falling at his feet with gratitude, she asked, “Is that where unclaimed bodies go from the morgue?” Then added, “I already checked with the morgue when I got here. They haven’t received any unidentified bodies that fit her description.”

  He shook his head as he turned back to her. “Most unidentified bodies don’t make it to the morgue. They only take bodies there that have a high chance of being claimed. If someone is suspected of being a migrant, without any papers, likely a victim of trafficking, they bypass the morgue and go the quick and cheap route. Nobody is going to claim them anyway. Cold storage at the morgue costs money, and they don’t have enough capacity to begin with.”

  So he wouldn’t think of his brother, he asked, “Would you rather have lunch before or after the incinerator?”

  She didn’t look overexcited about that offer either. “I want to talk to Jorge again. Actually, that’s what I need to do first.”

  “Jorge got hit last night. He lost three guys. He won’t be entertaining visitors today.”

  She stared at him.

  “Lunch,” he reminded her, then added, “If you want my advice, the incinerator is the kind of place best visited on an empty stomach.”

  But she said, “I’ve seen dead bodies before. I’m hungry. Let’s grab something to eat on the way.”

  Walker kept his gaze on her. She was pretty tough for a fairly new investigator with a background in accounting. Scaring her off should have been easy. Right at the outset, the incident with Pedro should have done it. If not that, then Jorge’s shed for sure. Yet she was still here.

  “After the incinerator,” she said. “I’m going to Furino, with or without you.” Then she added, “You promised to help me. You said you’d take me back.”

  “I consider keeping you alive helping you.”

  As a further gesture of goodwill, he didn’t tumble her onto the mattress. But the temptation was there.

  The attic seemed too small all of a sudden, and way too hot, but it was definitely too early to go back to Furino. They had to wait a couple of hours, at least, before it’d be safe. Not that he couldn’t think of a dozen ways to distract her in the meanwhile, as he looked at her—all riled up, her eyes sparkling with heat.

  At least, a dozen ways. Actually, make that two dozen. All of them at the very top of the stupid scale. Frankly, he wasn’t sure who was distracting whom. His focus had definitely slipped since he’d laid eyes on her in the cantina, a lamb encircled by slobbering wolves.

  She was too fresh, too innocent, and entirely too earnest, not nearly cynical enough for the Mexican borderlands. She should have become a schoolteacher. Or stayed an accountant.

  At first, he’d been simply annoyed that she’d come, at the exact wrong time, and that he would have to waste time on dealing with her. Then Pedro had come for her. And Walker had known that he would never let Pedro have her.

  When he’d kissed her after taking her from Pedro, he’d kissed her for showmanship’s sake, to mark her as his to the wolf pack.

  And now he wanted to kiss her again. “Let’s get out of here.”

  * * *

  Clara was glad to be out of the weird mood of the attic. The
re was something off about Walker, but she couldn’t put her finger on it and decided not to waste her time trying. Most likely, he just had his knickers in a twist because she wouldn’t follow his every order like an obedient little puppy.

  They ate lunch at a busy roadside stand, then drove to the dump that stood outside the city limits east of the city.

  The Mercita dump was the most ghastly place Clara had ever visited. Other than mountains of regular waste one would normally see at a place like this, the dump also took in the bodies of dead pets and diseased farm animals.

  As they passed by a dozen or so maggot-covered cows on their way to the main building, Clara was seriously rethinking her decision to eat on the way over. Her lunch sat in her stomach like a bucket of stones. The stench that permeated the air was unbearable. The dump was a hundred times worse than Jorge’s shed.

  “I’m going to have to soak in bleach water for a week to get the smell out of my hair and clothes,” she muttered as she followed Walker. “Or maybe just burn my clothes and shave my head.”

  He stopped to look at her.

  “The burning clothes part has potential,” he said in a low tone.

  Was that heat in his eyes?

  She blinked. She had to be mistaken. She wished he’d stop with the come-ons he used only to knock her back a pace, because even though he didn’t mean them, they left her a little breathless.

  She wanted to kick him in the shin, but the uneven ground was covered with garbage, and she didn’t want to risk losing her balance and falling into something nasty.

  He seemed to know where to go, so she followed him, trying to hold her breath and look neither left nor right.

  He led her straight to the back of the building where a ten-foot tall incinerator threw off volcano-like heat, the air shimmering around the giant cast-iron furnace.

  The short, wrinkled man who operated the fiery monster greeted Walker as if they knew each other.

  They’d probably had some business together in the past. Dirty business seemed right down Walker’s alley. Since he clearly had rapport with the man, Clara let him ask the questions, while she stood there quietly, doing her best not to gag from the smell or faint from the heat.