Not that any of that mattered right now while she was in the hands of a madman who was going to drive them both over a cliff into the Pacific. She swallowed a scream as the Jeep slid toward the edge, but her captor yanked it back to the middle of the track that passed for a road.
Her heart was still pounding when the sky unleashed the nightly rains he warned about.
Rain seemed like such a benign term for this. Growing up in Texas, she thought she knew about precipitation, but this was like nothing in her experience. It was as if someone had suddenly turned on a hot high-pressure shower and let it loose on the countryside.
Buckets of water gushed off the trees and cascaded down the road. The canvas roof of the Jeep offered some protection but not much. In only a few moments, Olivia was soaked.
The Jeep slid again, moving inexorably toward the side. This time she didn’t bother to contain her scream.
“I’ve got it,” he assured her. “Hang on.”
He muscled out of the skid, then downshifted for the next hill. She didn’t know how he managed it—years of experience, probably—but he managed to get them up the next hill, and they plowed through mud and muck and rivers of rain rushing down the road.
As abruptly as it started, the rain ceased, as if someone turned off that imaginary tap somewhere.
She thought she saw lights ahead and the impression was verified a moment later when he pulled up to a small cluster of buildings—two or three with what looked like a small general store and a couple of ramshackle houses.
He parked in front of the store, where Olivia was surprised to see a sign tacked to the window of the little storefront that said Policía. An odd destination for a would-be rapist, she had to admit, and found some degree of comfort from that.
Galvez turned off the engine. “This won’t take long. In a minute, this will all be over and you’ll be safe, I promise.”
Hope and confusion warring within her, Olivia watched him open his door and start to climb out.
And then the shooting started.
Chapter 3
For half a second, Olivia wasn’t sure what was happening. It sounded like firecrackers going off somewhere or a car backfiring, but then she hadn’t seen any other vehicles on the road.
Before the reality had really soaked in that those were bullets flying around, her captor suddenly leaped back into the Jeep and started the vehicle’s engine.
“Get down,” he yelled, driving with one hand and reaching the other across the Jeep to shove her head to her knees when she only stared blankly at him.
The Jeep slithered in the slick mud, then the rear wheels engaged. She heard a ping ricochet off the metal skin as bullets continued to rain around them. Miraculously, none hit the tires. A blowout in these conditions would be disastrous, she knew.
She huddled there, her hands over her head, numb with fear and certain that any moment now, Galvez could take a hit and the vehicle would go careening out of control.
Her breathing hitched and she fought hysteria, wanting nothing so much as to curl into the fetal position and disappear. She heard sirens behind them and could see the strobe of lights piercing the darkness as the Jeep rattled and shook its way down the trail.
She didn’t know how close the pursuers were—and she wasn’t completely sure whether she wanted to evade them or have them catch up. She wanted out of this situation now and at this point she was willing to take any rescue offered.
On the other hand, she wasn’t sure she was really crazy about turning herself over to police officers so willing to shoot first and ask questions later. They didn’t seem particularly concerned about her safety while they fired a barrage of bullets at the Jeep.
“Hang on,” Galvez ordered.
As if she could do anything else, besides pray. She gripped the roll bar with one hand and braced one hand against the dashboard to steady herself against the wild jostling of the vehicle.
“What are you doing?!” she gasped when he suddenly turned off the headlights, pitching them into darkness.
“Trust me,” he said.
Before she could tell him how absolutely ludicrous such a statement was under the circumstances, he jerked the wheel off the road into what looked like impenetrable jungle. There must be some kind of track here, but for the life of her, she couldn’t see anything. How did he know where he was going? she wondered, as rain-soaked branches whipped the Jeep.
At least the shooting stopped, but she fully expected them to ram headlong into a tree any moment now. Some moonlight filtered through the thick trees, but he couldn’t possibly see more than a few feet in front of them.
She was not cut out for wild moonlit rides through the rain forest. She had been known to have panic attacks in rush hour traffic, for heaven’s sake.
After several heart-pounding moments—each one that seemed to last a lifetime—he turned the Jeep again, this time driving over plants and around trees until they were off even that narrow track, swallowed up by the rain forest.
He shut off the engine and turned to face her, and she saw the gleam of his teeth in the pale moonlight.
“End of the road, sweetheart. I think we lost them for now.” He climbed out of the Jeep and reached behind the seat for a backpack.
She gazed blankly at him. “You’re…you’re just going to leave me here?”
He gave a short laugh. “Do you want me to?”
Some creature screeched in the night and Olivia shivered. She wanted to think she could find her way back to the main road, but she wasn’t completely certain.
The alternative—huddling here all night on the off chance that someone might come along and find her—was not at all appealing.
“What’s happening?” She hated the thin note of panic in her voice but seemed unable to keep it at bay. “Why were the police shooting at us back there?”
He pulled a few more items out of the back of the Jeep and set them on the ground, then opened her door and reached a hand to help her out—or rather, he didn’t really give her a choice in the matter, just tugged her out of the vehicle.
He had his machete out again, she saw with a spurt of fear. But as soon as she climbed down from the high-profile vehicle, he turned around and started scything away at the underbrush.
“My fault,” he finally answered, dragging several of the branches he cut over the Jeep. “I should have taken into consideration that Rafferty probably owns every officer of the law between here and Puerto Jiménez. There’s only one halfway decent road around the Peninsula to the Golfo Dulce and the bastard has probably already got roadblocks all along the way.”
He was trying to conceal the vehicle from their pursuers, she finally realized as he continued to cut branches and huge, leafy ferns. She stood with her arms wrapped around her, watching him work.
“I guess Rafferty and your groom—what’s his name?”
For a moment, she couldn’t think how to answer him. “Uh, Bradley,” she finally said.
“Right. Bradley.” He said the name with thinly veiled scorn. “I guess Jimbo and Bradley aren’t going to let me just run off with you after all.”
“Did you really think they would?”
“I wasn’t thinking, if you want the truth. If I had been, I would have realized that with one phone call, Rafferty has probably got his people up and down the whole damn coast, all the way to Jiménez, roadblocks in every one-donkey town from Agua Buena to Plataneres. He’s probably told the rural police some cock-and-bull