Two years before, when Zamora had first met Lourdes Lopez, his mother’s warning was the first thing that had come to his mind.
He’d been at a bar near Bullhead City, Nevada, to discuss the need for certain firearms and explosives with a group of methamphetamine dealers looking to expand their territory. The bar — located well outside town — was a confusing rabbit warren of separate rooms and gaudy stages where all sorts of illicit behavior, labeled “special events” by the establishment, took place. Raucous laughter, cheers, and even screams sometimes wafted into the main barroom at each opened door. Assorted pieces of underwear, apparently donated by patrons in moments of abandon, had been nailed to every inch of the clapboard walls. The entire place stunk of sweat and stale urine. Zamora found it exhilarating.
While waiting for his contact, a series of muffled cheers drew Zamora toward a side room through the shadows behind the main bar. The whistling and applause grew louder as he approached. A deadly glare combined with a folded fifty-dollar bill got him past the fat baldy with a flashlight guarding the door.
The intense beam of a spotlight hit him full in the face as soon as the fat guy pulled open the door. As Zamora’s eyes adjusted from the darkness of the outer barroom, the stark image of a woman filled his vision. She faced him dead-on, wearing only faded blue jeans and a pushup bra of white lace that contrasted beautifully with the rich bronze and pink of her flushed skin. The muscles of her face twitched as he joined the chanting crowd in the packed room. Blue-black hair was cut short in a Cleopatra style with bangs straight across severely painted brows and eyes as sharp as straight razors. She trapped his gaze the moment he looked at her as surely as if her stare had been made up of steel jaws. Full lips, tinted with metallic green makeup, clenched tight in intense concentration. Her entire body quivered; her face ran with beads of sweat.
Straining less than ten feet from the door, she leaned forward, groping the air for him with long, tan arms. The tendons in her neck were drawn into tight cords.
“Take me,” she hissed through clenched teeth. Blood-red nails beckoned him closer. “Grab my hands, quickly!”
Entranced, Zamora had stepped to her. The strength in her hands still haunted him. She’d grabbed the lapels of his shirt, digging her nails into his chest. There was a smell… no, a taste of burnt sugar as she leaned in, straining to try and kiss him with trembling lips.
A frenzied cheer erupted from the mob of onlookers ringing the edges of the room.
It was only then, startled from his trance by all the yelling, that Zamora had even noticed the other woman. A blonde, she was similarly dressed in jeans and a bra but facing the opposite direction. Two shining steel hooks pierced floral tattoos over her shoulder blades, pulling the skin away from a gaunt body. Lines of blood ran from each set of wounds and down the naked flesh of her back. A length of sturdy chain connected her to an identical set of hooks piercing the back of the dark woman, the woman who now clutched his hands.
“Be still!” the dark woman gasped.
Helpless to do anything but obey, Zamora had frozen in place. Inch by agonizing inch, the dark woman had pulled herself toward him, using his weight as an anchor to pull the blonde toward a red line drawn in the middle of the tile floor.
The tattooed woman screamed as one of the hooks ripped through her flesh. She pedaled backward to keep the other hook from tearing, crossing the line and thereby conceding the contest.
And thus, with two stainless-steel hooks and a length of chain hanging from the smooth flesh of her back, Lourdes Lopez had fallen into Valentine’s arms. He had good enough looks — and, more important, enough money — that he was accustomed to taller, more refined women with the look of swimsuit models, but this creature with smallish breasts, powerful thighs, and a heavy brow had left the bar with him that night and followed him faithfully everywhere. Every day when he’d looked at her over the ensuing years, he had been struck by the darkness of her eyes.
Cheshm-Zakhm indeed.
Others might find her deep brow and the willingness to bite the heads off baby chicks frightening. To Valentine Zamora, such a multifaceted woman was intriguing — or at least she had been.
Now, on Pollard’s porch, he reached to stroke the back of her head. “I am in dire need of someone I can trust at this moment,” he said.
She shrugged him away. “Maybe this is only a convenient time to scrape me off your boots?” She shot a glance at the SUV. “My love, I beg you to let Julian stay here with the pitiful woman and her filthy whelp.”
Zamora put a finger to her cheek and turned her face toward him. “My darling,” he said. “Where I am going, I need Monagas with me.”
“I should be with you.”
“I know,” he said, but not feeling it himself. She was right. It was time for a much-needed break. “I need you here.”
Always one to respond to his needs above her own, she gave him a sullen nod. She sighed, staring out at the SUV and Pollard.
“You trust this weakling?”
“Don’t let him fool you,” Zamora said. “We have his wife and baby so we can control him, but he’s a brilliant man with two doctorates. His expertise in the U.S. Navy was in nuclear devices. He can and will do what I need him to do.”
“I hate babies,” Lourdes muttered under her breath, uninterested in any more specifics.
“Chin up, my darling,” Zamora said. “This should be great fun for you.” He waved at a despondent Pollard, who slumped in the SUV, leaning his head against a window, beaten. “When our professor is finished with what we need him to do, you may kill the woman and her child in whatever manner pleases you. I only ask that you keep them alive until that time.”
“Must I keep them comfortable?” Lourdes asked, pouting.
Zamora dipped his head toward the SUV. “Enough to speak to him online each day.”
“So I can have a little fun?” the dark woman brightened.
“Just don’t kill them.” Zamora chuckled, afraid to guess what she had in mind.
“Yet,” she reminded him, a quiet grin crossing her long face.
“See.” He gave her a pinch on the backside, hard enough to make her flinch. Anything else, she would have ignored. “I told you you’d enjoy it. Now, Monagas and I need to hurry. We have another surprise for the authorities to keep them guessing while we get Professor Pollard set. I think this might amuse you as well.”
CHAPTER 13
A misshapen sun squatted smugly on the horizon over Biscayne Bay, its December warmth pushing moist fingers of ground fog across the racetrack, streaked black from thousands of spinning tires.
Quinn leaned into the fifteenth and final corner of his fourth lap. It was shallow and relatively easy, but he felt the bike wobble when he caught a glimpse of Veronica Garcia standing beside Thibodaux along the fence. As in life, the bike generally went the direction the eyes were pointed.
He poured on the gas, putting the sight of the beautiful woman behind him to begin another lap. Cranking his head as far to the left as it would go, he pushed the purring Yamaha R1 hard over as he took the third turn, tickling his inside knee against the pavement. Emerging from number three, his head snapped quickly right, then left, as he slalomed through four and five before standing up to gain speed on the relatively long straightaway toward the next turn.