Read Online Renegade with a Badge by Claire King - Free Book Online Page B

Rafe asked, tucking his weapon back into the waistband of his black jeans. He was a little chagrined that his partner had been listening to the scolding he’d been getting from Olivia. And more than chagrined that Bobby had come upon them without Rafe knowing it.
    “A couple hours. I watched you come up the mountain.”
    He stretched and yawned, just as though there weren’t a town full of lawmen hunting for the three of them this very minute, Olivia thought, incredulous.
    “I was taking a little nap before the yelling started. Hello, Dr. Galpas. Would you like some water?”
    Olivia tentatively reached for the offered canteen. So he knew her name, too. “Yes, please,” she said. She drank, while Rafael’s partner grinned at her. He seemed to take her presence in this godforsaken spot as nothing at all to be curious about. Olivia carefully handed back the canteen. “Thank you.”
    “I’m Roberto,” he said to Olivia. “But everyone calls me Bobby.”
    “Very nice to—” Olivia stopped herself. What did one say when introduced to a criminal? She should know that by now. “—meet you,” she finished lamely.
    Rafe shook his head. She’d just been on a forced march and was being introduced to what she must assume was her second drug runner of the past twenty-four hours, and she still sounded as if she were having drinks with the First Lady. He hated rich people. He really did. They were completely out of touch with reality.
    Rafe wrenched his focus back to the matter at hand. “A couple hours?”
    “Our camp has been raided.”
    That got his attention. Rafael cursed violently. “Did they dig up our communications equipment?”
    Bobby glanced blandly at Olivia, then raised his eyebrows at his partner. “Not yet, but they’re poking around,” he said. “Even if they don’t find it, I don’t think we’re going to get to it anytime soon. They have four men posted. And two of them are carrying some very nice semi-automatic machine guns.”
    “What about the bikes?”
    “I think we’re walking from now on.”
    “Hell.” Rafe dragged a hand down his face, rough now with a day-old beard. He wanted to get back to the ocean, wash the sweat and the smell of Cervantes’s blood from his body. “I stashed mine outside the compound. It’s in the brush. Or was.”
    “It’s gone by now,” Bobby agreed. “You must have had twenty men crawling after you last night.”
    Rafe swore again, more softly this time. They needed the motorcycles now more than ever. The quick little dirt bikes had been perfect for outrunning Cervantes’s goons and their expensive, unwieldy sports utility vehicles. He and Bobby had been able to slide in and out of nasty confrontations without much more than shouting to show for it, and the rough desert had provided the perfect escape routes. No one had been able to follow them across the rock-strewn animal trails and down the washed-out arroyos.
    They’d be on foot, now, unless they could scrounge a couple of bikes somewhere. And Rafe knew that would be next to impossible. They’d brought the bikes in across the border; replacements would likely have to come from there, as well, and Cervantes was too well-primed for Rafe to risk the time it would take to make it back to San Diego, or even into La Paz or Cabo San Lucas, for new bikes.
    Although it would mean getting rid of Olivia Galpas. He could deposit her neatly back into her tidy little doctor’s life, and forget all about her.
    Someday.
    No. No time for that, either. They’d just have to make adjustments. If they could get to their communications equipment, and radio in some assistance from the federales with whom they were working on this bust, then maybe the Mexicans could provide some transportation.
    Unfortunately, that was a big “if.”
    Olivia watched Rafael carefully. “Who raided your camp, Ernesto? Why?” she asked. “Do you keep drugs there?” That seemed incomprehensibly stupid. “And what did you mean,