Lina was waiting in the Jeep, frowning and biting her lush lower lip.
Hunter got in and started up the engine without a word.
“Well?” she asked after they were beyond the long drive.
“I’m thinking.”
“Think out loud.”
Hunter almost smiled despite the anger and adrenaline racing through him.
To speak his name is death.
He didn’t want Lina anywhere near that kind of danger.
And he didn’t have any choice. Houston hadn’t provided safety for her. They had been followed to the city limits and would have been followed farther if Hunter hadn’t lost the tail. The fact that it was a lone follower had told Hunter that it wasn’t a law enforcement agency breathing down their neck. Even the dumbest cop knew that if the subject was alert, a single tail didn’t get the job done.
“Hunter?”
He flexed his hands on the steering wheel. “If I thought it would do any good, I’d turn around and hold Crutchfeldt’s face in the toilet until he talked.”
Lina’s eyes widened in shock. “Did he recognize the photos?”
“As in knowing where they were now? No. But he knew they came from Reyes Balam land.”
“How?” she demanded.
“Same way you did, even when you didn’t want to. A good eye.”
“What did he say?”
“That there are grave robbers on Reyes Balam land.”
She made a low sound. “I was afraid of that.”
“Apparently their leader is a real piece of work. Crutchfeldt was afraid to even say his real name. When I asked if it was El Maya, he invited me to leave.”
Lina’s long lashes lowered and she went back to nibbling on her lip. “Celia would have to know about him, wouldn’t she?”
“You own a lot of land. Rough land. Remote. Tough to get around in. I doubt if anyone could keep track of every acre.”
“But if she’s buying from grave robbers, she’d know.”
Hunter’s hands flexed on the wheel again. He didn’t like any of this, and everything he found out made it worse.
“Crutchfeldt said the grave robbers weren’t selling to anyone he knew.” Hunter’s voice was like his eyes, edgy.
Relief and frustration went through Lina. She was glad to hear that her mother wasn’t trading in black-market artifacts, yet the information didn’t get them any closer to the person who was.
The sounds of the tires and the road and the occasional cry of a seabird filled the Jeep.
“You’re thinking again,” Lina said finally.
Hunter didn’t answer.
“I can’t help if you close me out,” she said.
“I’m trying to decide between taking you to my uncles for protection—”
“No,” Lina cut in. “I don’t want to drag anyone else into this.”
Hunter glanced at her and knew that she was hearing bullets chewing through concrete, seeing Jase’s blood.
“They know how to protect themselves,” Hunter said.
“So did Jase.”
Hunter let out a low curse. “I don’t want you hurt.”
“Neither do I.” She looked out the window. “I’ll go to Quintana Roo. My abuelita will be happy and I’ll be safe. My family members might live in the jungle outside Tulum, but they’re fashionable enough to have motion sensors, guards, and a panic room. All the latest in rich, paranoid chic.”
“What about the grave robbers? And El Maya?”
Lina shrugged. “They’ve obviously been in place for some time and nobody in the family has been harmed. Houston was where I was attacked, not the Yucatan. As for El Maya, it could be an American nickname, not Mexican. Besides…” Her voice died.
“What?”
“I’ve never felt watched in Quintana Roo.”
Hunter looked at his watch. “We have just enough time to make the next flight out of Brownsville.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE SEA TURNED TURQUOISE IN THE AFTERNOON LIGHT, slapping lazily against the shore. Tourists were thick on Cozumel’s ground. Expensive hotels gleamed like high-rise wedding cakes, absorbing light and spreading a shimmering kind of brilliance. Backpackers and students swarmed over the other end of the tourist rainbow, sprawling on peripheral beaches or gearing up for jungle hikes. High or low, liquor flowed, oiling the machinery of commerce and culture.
Lina breathed in deep and bloomed like an orchid. Part of her was very much at home with the heat and humidity. A whole childhood of memories poured through her—prowling the jungle, diving and swimming in the cool cenotes that pocked the land, and eating exquisitely spiced food.
“Do we have time to eat?” she asked Hunter as they walked to a cheap rental-car place. “I’d kill for a good pibil.” She laughed. “Even a bad one.”
“I’m supposed to meet Rodrigo at a place called La Ali Azúl on Avenue Escobar. I’m sure they serve a mean pibil. But you’ll be eating alone.”
“Why?”
“My contact isn’t a nice man,” Hunter said. “That’s why he’s useful.”
“Is meet-and-greet with unsavory people another aspect of your job, like being an occasional bodyguard?”
“Information is our most important resource,” Hunter said. “Nothing quite like knowing the weather on the ground to help an operation go smoothly.”
“In other words, yes,” she said.
“Savory people aren’t much help when your business comes down to stopping crooks.”
Hunter rented a Bronco with Quintana Roo plates. Back-road dust had been ground into the floor mats. They drove off the rental lot and followed the Cancun-Chetumal highway south to the meeting place. The countryside was wild with greenery spilling across the limestone plateau and punctuated with even more shrines than Hunter recalled. But then, he hadn’t spent a lot of time in the nicer areas of the Yucatan.
“You remember this many shrines?” he asked.
“Not really,” Lina said, frowning. “Even at this time of year, it seems like an excess of religious fever, more than I’ve ever seen. A lot of Maya crosses.”
“Maya?”
“The cross was a significant symbol to the Maya before the Spanish ever came. Some texts are interpreted as meaning that the native cross represents the plane of the ecliptic, the time when the Long Count calendar ends.”
“Twenty-twelve again.”
She shrugged. “The division of time was a Maya preoccupation. Rather like modern civilization, with our obsession for minutes and hours and nanoseconds. The Maya measured bigger chunks of time, but the intent was the same. What can be measured can be controlled.”
“Culture rules,” Hunter said. “Like us.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve been speaking Spanish since we landed.”
She looked startled, then amused. “You’re right. I didn’t even notice the transition. Maybe Abuelita will forgive you for being a gringo after all. You’re very fluent.”
“Your great-grandmother sounds like a pistol.”
“Oh, she is. I swear she’ll outlive us all.”
Hunter smiled at the affection in Lina’s voice.
The vegetation thinned and low buildings sprawled to either side of the divided road. Most of them were made of stucco over cinder blocks and other masonry, fenced off with wrought iron, and walled in by a succession of low billboards and electrical lines like blood vessels nourishing every building.
The mirrors were clear. Nobody had followed them from the airport. Nobody on the highway seemed interested in them.
“You feel watched?” Hunter asked Lina.
“No.”
“Let me know if that changes.”
“I’m impressed,” she said.
He checked the mirrors automatically. “By what?”