Kathleen Creighton - The Seduction of Goody Two-Shoes

Since then, the little VW had been churning slowly but steadily through the downpour, sending up wings of water on both sides of the car, occasionally sputtering a little, but otherwise hanging in there.

Which was about as much as could be said for her driver and passenger. Hangin’ in there.

“Luck’s been with us so far,” he said softly, looking over at the woman beside him. Looking at the curling tips of her wet hair, dark and somehow childlike against her pale forehead, at her tense profile and slumping shoulders. Wishing she’d just put her head back and sleep. Wishing he could gather her into his arms and hold her while she slept.

Instead, unexpectedly, she straightened up and laughed. “Providence…” she murmured. “That’s what my Aunt Gwen called it. And you know what? Knowing Gwen, I don’t think she’d be surprised to find out Providence has such a sense of humor.”

McCall snorted. “Sense of humor?” Personally, he was having a hard time finding much about the last couple of days that was funny.

She shifted in her seat, half facing him. “Ever since I got to this country I’ve been feeling kind of like Alice-in-Wonderland, you know? Everything flip-flopped, nothing like it was supposed to be. Now I’m thinking maybe all the time it was just Providence having this huge joke on me.”

“Some joke-damn near getting us both killed.”

“Yeah, but don’t you think it’s funny? I thought you couldn’t be trusted, you thought I was totally bad news, and all the time, we’re the good guys. Meanwhile, the head good guy, the man I’m supposed to trust, he turns out to be the head bad guy.”

“Hilarious,” he muttered under his breath. But he was beginning to see her point. He’d been wondering himself how his Goody Two-Shoes had turned into Indiana Jones.

“And then,” she went on, really warming to it, “you go and sacrifice your cigarettes so we can find our way back to the car, and I try to follow my family tradition and start a fire as a distraction so we can escape, and the rain completely ruins both our plans. But as it turns out, the rain is what saves us. See what I mean? Providence.”

McCall shook his head. “Uh-uh,” he said with gravel in his voice. “ You are what saved us, sister.”

She stared at him. “I’m what got us into this mess.”

“That may be true, but you’re also what got us out of it.” He cleared his throat and tried for a lighter tone. “You know, for a Goody Two-Shoes you’re pretty damn good at this cops-and-robbers stuff.”

There was a pause before she said, with a curious lilt in her voice, “For an artist-slash-beach bum, so are you…”

He looked at her and saw that she was smiling that glorious Cinnamon Girl smile. And when he remembered to look at the road again, he could see lights up ahead in the distance. They were coming into the outskirts of Chetumal.

Providence? He thought maybe that was as good a name for it as any.

Ellie sat shivering in the dark VW and watched McCall turn away from the pay phone, no longer even bothering to hunch up his shoulders when the deluge hit him, just letting it sluice down over him like a shower bath.

“Are the lines down?” she asked when he opened the door and she got a good look at his face.

“Nah.” He pulled the door shut with a jerk, sending water droplets flying everywhere in a way that reminded Ellie of a big wet dog. “I actually got through to him-his answering machine, anyway. He’s away on a dive. Says he’ll be back on the second.” His voice was strangely neutral, almost completely devoid of expression.

“That’s tomorrow, isn’t it? Or today-” she held her watch up close to her face and pressed the button to illuminate the numbers “-almost.”

“The Day of the Dead…” They sat in silence, McCall staring through the windshield at the grocery-store windows behind the pay phone, all boarded up against the hurricane Paulette never had quite become, Ellie staring at him. “So,” he said at last, glancing over at her with a look of apology. The fatigue in his face made her heart ache. She thought about his wounded arm, wondered again how bad it was and how much blood he’d lost. “That’s it, I guess. No help there.”

“Then let’s just get a motel room for tonight. If he’s going to be home tomorrow-”

“You’re forgetting one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“What do we do for money? We left everything back in the hotel at Lago Bacalar.”

“Not…everything.” Ellie was already fishing around inside the beach bag. A moment later she gave a little grunt of triumph and held up the slender wallet containing her “cover” documents. “I still have Mrs. Burnside’s credit card-U.S. Government issue.”

He reached for her, took her face between his hands and gave her a swift hard kiss-an impulse born of joy he might have bestowed on just about anyone, but her heart gave a fiery little leap anyway. Already shaky with fatigue, she now felt a new kind of trembling, a strange pulsing vibration deep, deep inside.

“We’re in business,” he said huskily. “Now, if we can just find a hotel clerk awake at this hour…”

McCall knew Chetumal fairly well. Even in the darkness and pouring rain he didn’t have much trouble finding the place he’d had in mind. It was well away from the modern Holiday Inn-type hotels in the center of town, down near the docks-a fairly scruffy area, but the hotel had rooms that opened onto a central courtyard so at least they wouldn’t have to trek through a lighted lobby looking like drowned rats.

He parked the VW in a narrow side street and left Ellie there to wait for him while he went to try to rouse a hotel clerk. It took him a while, pounding on the door and the boarded-up windows of the lobby, but eventually, after he’d almost given up, a short stocky man came out of a door at the back of the office and shambled up to the night window, bleary-eyed and unshaven, scratching at the sleeveless white undershirt that covered his round belly. Though at first obviously not pleased to see a customer so late, especially one who must have looked as though he’d just come out second-best in a back-alley brawl, he perked up considerably when McCall showed him the credit card and offered to pay him double the going rate for what was left of the night.

With the room key in his pocket, he splashed his way back to the Volkswagen to find Ellie crouched down like a frightened rabbit with her head between the steering wheel and the back of the driver’s seat.

“I saw a car go by…out there, on the main street,” she explained in a croaking, slightly embarrassed whisper. “I thought…you know, just in case it might be-”

“Wouldn’t do you much good to hide,” he said mildly as he edged in behind the wheel. “It’s the car they’re going to be looking for.” She made a small, rueful sound and put a hand over her eyes. He threw her a glance. “If it makes you feel better, we can park it in the back, out of sight. But I don’t think they’d be after us yet. Not in this.”

She nodded but didn’t say anything. She hadn’t had much to say for a while now-stress and fatigue wearing on her, he supposed. Only natural she’d be coming to the end of her rope, after everything she’d been through.

Except that there was something vibrant, almost electric about her silence, a strange kind of subaudible humming that seemed to reach out and touch him in the darkness and make his skin tingle and his heartbeat accelerate in response. In response to what, exactly, he didn’t know. Fear, he thought-uneasiness at being still in danger, still so vulnerable-that would make sense. Except that his own responses didn’t feel like fear. He wasn’t an adrenaline junkie and never had found fear a particularly enjoyable sensation, but right now what he felt like more than anything was a kid waiting in line to get on a really wild and scary roller-coaster ride.