While Wulf drove them back to the city, Rae Stone clutched her purse to her chest and watched the desert slide behind the car, away from Pirtleville, away from her estranged family, away from everything she had grown up believing.
Ahead of them, the black road pointed through the parched ground and scrub brush toward the city, which was shrouded in brown, dusty haze. The sky straight above them was as brilliantly blue as Wulf’s eyes, but dirty smog smudged the horizon all the way around.
Wulf’s Porsche droned as it zoomed down the road, vibrating the seat under Rae’s butt. She watched him, making sure he didn’t weave or fall asleep at the wheel because he hadn’t slept again last night, but he seemed fine. Every time she had roused herself, unaccustomed to sleeping entangled in a man’s arms, he had been staring at the slice of red light from a neon sign across the street from their hotel.
Rae held onto her unanswered questions with both her arms wrapped around her purse and herself. Grit lined her eyes from trying not to cry and the dusty desert air.
In the child-sized back seat, one of Wulf’s security guys, Friedhelm, rearranged his cramped legs, bent up with his feet tucked behind Rae’s seat, and spoke German into his cell phone to the rest of the security men in the SUVs that flanked the sports car as they raced back to the city. After the brouhaha in the desert last night, the security men seemed extra twitchy and had insisted on someone in the car with Wulf and Rae, just in case the rest of them were diverted somehow.
That’s how they put it: diverted.
When Wulf walked away for a moment for a phone call, Rae rounded on them asked them what they meant by diverted. Friedhelm and Dieter glanced at each other, reticent to tell her if she didn’t already know.
Finally, Dieter muttered, “Grenade launchers. Surface-to-surface missiles. Like that.”
Rae watched the glaring desert for the silver sparkle of weaponry.
Soon, if it rained, the desert would bloom, and the saguaros would wear crowns of white flowers and hold bouquets to the blue sky. Prickly pear cacti grew rings of flowers around their pads that ranged from light lemon through peaches and salmon to magenta. In the spring, the desert showed you its beauty, but the cacti still grew wicked thorns, and the shiny, baby rattlesnakes bit with the deadliest venom.
Last night, Wulf had convinced her to wait for answers, to see rather than be told.
She had been frantic to know, to be reassured that he wasn’t involved in the heinous trade of drugs and weapons and women and children across the Border that destroyed everyone it touched, cartel lords and customers and chattel alike, but he had insisted that he was not involved in that.
All his investments were legal, he had said.
He would show her, he had promised.
They were safe, he said.
Yet every time she had awakened in the dark hotel, his arms and legs had been wrapped around her, protecting her, and he had been staring at that slant of red light intruding through the blinds.
A rattle at hotel room’s door had awakened her twice, as the security men had shifted their weight while standing guard outside. The clatter sounded like someone trying to break in to shoot Wulf or take her away to slavery.
The desert sun blazed in the Porsche’s windows. The blasting air conditioner sprayed cold air on her skin, cooling the sun’s hot rays. She tried to calm herself, but she wanted to know what he was hiding and afraid to find out anything he had kept such a secret.
From the tiny back seat, Friedhelm spoke to someone on his phone and laughed a humorless snort.
“Where are we going?” Rae asked Wulf.
He sped down the blazing highway, trailing mercenaries. “The house, first, to show you my home office, where I do my real work, then we’ll go to the office.”
The office was his euphemism for The Devilhouse because he kept his lives separate. Only she and a few of his security men, Dieter surely, possibly Hans, had breached the privacy wall between them. “Why are we going to the office?”
He glanced at the rearview mirror at Friedhelm in the back seat. “Business.”
No, not business. Secrecy. Friedhelm wasn’t one of the men who moved between Wulf’s two worlds.
Were there only two worlds that Wulf moved between, or were there more?
How many more?
Rae gazed out the window over the sun-bleached desert, her only world, from which she had been expelled.