Without thinking, she touched the back of Rand’s hand on the steering wheel. His fingers lifted, caught hers, squeezed, and released. He slowed the ATV as the road crested a bank and dropped down into a dry wash. He braked, then turned downstream toward an office park that was under construction. The ATV’s two-stroke engine screamed with the pleasure of being let off the leash on a brilliant desert morning.

Minutes later they flashed up over another bank and through the open gate of a construction yard. A white Dodge SUV with heavily tinted windows was parked inside the yard. Rand braked to a skidding stop next to the vehicle.

“Backseat,” he ordered Kayla.

He snatched the backpack and his laptop computer off the cargo shelf and tossed them into the back of the SUV. Kayla slid into the right rear seat and made a startled sound.

The driver was Jimmy Hamm.

He looked past her, searching for any dust from followers. “You’re clean,” he said to Rand. Then, “Shit, what happened to the fur?”

“Freddie.”

Hamm glanced at Kayla in the rearview mirror and smiled. “Hey, darlin’. Love that take-no-prisoners grin.”

With that he put the idling vehicle in gear and accelerated out of the construction yard onto the street.

Kayla dipped her chin, looking over the rims of her sunglasses at the man who had flirted madly with her for the past several months.

“Liar,” she said.

He took his eyes off the road for a second and glanced in the mirror at her, surprised. “What? What did I do?”

“You let me think you had the hots for me,” Kayla said. “But you were just trying to get inside Andre Bertone’s life and his bank accounts.”

“Babe, you thought I had the hots for you because it was the truth.” He gave her a friendly leer. “That was the easiest cover I ever put on.”

Rand turned back from watching their rear and said to Hamm, “Remember what Faroe said about the interesting ones.” Rand smiled from the teeth out.

“Well, hell,” Hamm muttered. “Kayla, can you ID the dude that made the hard pass at you last night?”

Startled, she looked at Rand.

“In Bertone’s garden,” Rand said, and this time his smile was real.

She hoped her floppy hat covered her blush.

“Yes,” she said to Hamm. “Not that I want to see that cockroach again, but I’d recognize him.”

“I did a little nosing around with my colleagues on the security detail,” Hamm said. “Then I checked the employee database and came up with a possible name, Gabriel Navarro. He’s supposed to be some kind of majordomo of the estate grounds, but nobody remembers seeing him around any of the gardening crews.”

“I recognize the name from the employee payroll,” Kayla said, “but if Mr. Navarro is a gardener, even the chief cheese, he’s really well paid.”

“How much?” Rand asked.

“Ten thousand a month.”

“I’m betting he plants things in six-foot holes,” Rand said.

Images of the handcuffs and the ugly little pistol spiked through Kayla’s memories. Gooseflesh rippled. She hated being scared, but she was too smart not to be.

Hamm wheeled onto a westbound on-ramp, merging with light Sunday-morning traffic. “St. Kilda hacked into the employee database at the Castle in the Sky, so we know where Gabriel lives. Faroe hired two private types to stake out Gabriel’s house. He’s there, but we need Kayla for an eyeball ID.”

The last thing Kayla wanted to see again was the face of her nightmare. “Sure. Whatever. Let’s get it over with.”

“Change into these first,” Rand said, dropping jeans, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap on Kayla’s lap. Then he looked at the driver. “Handsome, if I catch your eyes in the rearview mirror while she changes, you’ll need a new nickname.”

Hamm kept his attention on the road. Strictly.

43

Guadalupe, Arizona

Sunday

Hamm parked on a dirt side street that had a view across a sandy town square toward two ancient whitewashed churches. If Kayla squinted enough to fuzz out the freeway in the background, she could almost believe she’d been transported five hundred miles south, into the Sonoran Desert of interior Mexico. The bells in the tower of the larger church began ringing, calling the faithful to worship. A knot of dark-skinned, dark-haired young men plodded across the sandy square toward the church.

“That explains something,” Kayla said.

“What?” Rand asked.

“The man in the garden-”

“Gabriel Navarro.”

“-was Latino but not really Mexican. He was too dark, like mahogany-colored lava.”

Rand waited, absently rubbing his shaved cheek. He felt naked. “So?”

“This little town is called Guadalupe,” she said. “It was established more than a century ago by Yaqui Indians from northern Mexico, refugees from the Mexican Civil War. The man in the garden was muy indio, very dark.”

“That means we’re going to have a hell of a time getting closer,” Hamm said.

“Wrong color?” Rand asked.

“Or something,” Hamm said. “The Yaquis are clannish as Gypsies and twice as suspicious. They don’t even trust their fellow Mexicans. That’s why there are two churches side by side, both Catholic, one for Mexicanos and the other for Yaquis.”

“Guess we won’t be walking around,” Rand said.

“Don’t have to. We have those local private investigators hanging in the neighborhood, passing themselves off as repo guys from a car dealer. They can work in close to Gabriel’s house. We’ll stay here and work at a distance.”

“Binoculars?” Kayla asked.

“Telephoto camera,” Hamm said, passing it over the seat. “Tourists like to hang out here on the weekend, watch the funny locals.”

He opened the glove box and dug out a Diamondback baseball cap that matched the one he was wearing. He tossed it to Rand, who ditched the Stetson, grumbled about being a Mariners fan, but put the cap on anyway.

Hamm’s cell phone rang discreetly, the sound of a cardinal chirping. He answered and listened.

“There’s something happening at the house,” Hamm said. “A van. Driver’s a white guy with red hair.” Then, into the phone, “Go ahead, slide in a little closer. Guadalupe is always crawling with repo guys in tow trucks.”

Hamm listened some more. Then he relayed more information. “The van says ‘Arizona Territorial Gun Club.’”

Kayla said something under her breath.

“What,” Rand demanded.

“Steve Foley is a redhead,” she said, “and he’s a member of that club.”

“What kind of place is it?” Rand asked. “Antique weapons and pistols at dawn?”

“More like Rambo’s wet dream,” Hamm said, flipping through his mental files. “High-tech all the way.”

“Steve likes to think of himself as a sports shooter,” Kayla said, “but here in Arizona, that could mean anything from a nervous grandmother to a Wyatt Earp wannabe.”

“You know where the club is?” Rand asked Hamm.

“At the edge of the desert, on tribal land.”

“No feds allowed?” Rand asked.

Hamm shrugged. “Every tribe’s treaty rights are different. I’ve never been invited, so I’ve never been inside the club. Just hearsay from those who have.”

“Steve is always talking about the club’s ‘Tire City’ and their close-quarters course, whatever they are.”

Hamm and Rand exchanged glances.

Tire City.

The term sent a chill through Rand. Modern urban warriors practiced close-quarters combat in open-roofed buildings with walls constructed of discarded auto tires filled with dirt. He had a mental image of the kind of place Kayla was describing, concrete block buildings, gravel canyons, and indoor labyrinths of movable shooting galleries with overhead observation platforms. Foley’s gun club was a fortress in the desert, remote and bristling with firearms.