There was plenty-with drawn guns to add to the suspense.

“Oh, hell,” she said again, and oh, hell was right.

Ponce’s bought cop was striding up toward the guardhouse, undoubtedly to throw his weight around and get Ponce’s car through the gate, the rest of the idiots trapped at a standstill on the road be damned.

Two of the Brazilian’s goons were walking down the haphazard line of cars, gesturing and yelling, telling everyone to move, move, move. Vamos! Get out of the way. Back off. Make room for the most important and expensive Range Rover to turn around.

One way or the other, Esteban Ponce wanted out of this roadblock.

For Dax, it was a classic rock and a hard place-start doing the bumper car thing to get out of there, too, and draw a lot of unwanted attention. Or stay put and take the chance that these guys wouldn’t recognize Suzi from earlier at Beranger’s.

It took him about a tenth of a second to calculate the odds on a guy not remembering Suzi. He cranked the wheel hard and threw the Land Cruiser into reverse.

“Oh, hell,” she said again, and he didn’t doubt her for a moment.

He looked back up the line of cars, and Esteban Ponce himself was getting out with the Sphinx in his hand, looking extremely agitated and very unhappy. The driver who got out with him appeared to be trying to calm him down, but the spoiled youngest son of Arturo Ponce refused to be consoled. He was throwing a fit, a temper tantrum, and any second, he was going to break something. Dax could see it coming.

Holding the Sphinx by the top, Ponce shoved the bottom of the statue in the driver’s face, his other arm swinging wildly.

“Is there something wrong with the bottom of the statue?”

“That’s where the plaster shows through,” she said, both of them watching damn near breathlessly through the windshield. Sunlight was glinting on the fake creature’s eyes. The gold mane was catching the light. From a distance, the thing looked good.

“Then this is it,” he said.

“I think so.”

In the next moment, it was a done deal. With a final grand gesture of unprecedented, undeserved, monumental disappointment, Ponce smashed the statue to the ground.

They couldn’t see what happened to it, but the way Ponce was kicking around at the road, and still waving his arms about, and practically frothing at the mouth, Dax had a good idea that the thing had been smashed into smithereens.

“You’re sure that was a fake.”

“Absolutely positive. One hundred percent.”

“Then we’re out of here.” Whatever it took.

And it was going to take a lot.

He stepped on the gas and bumped into the car behind him, moving it about six inches. Then he cranked the wheel hard to the left and bumped into the car in front of him.

He noticed Ponce’s goons notice the Land Cruiser.

“The next time you’re coming up on a guardhouse, Sugar, or really, anytime, even just for a stoplight”-he cranked right and stepped on the gas again, bumped into the car behind him, heard all the cussing going on, and just kept gunning the motor, really moving the car behind him-”it’s a good idea to keep enough distance between you and the car in front of you that you can see their tires.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“Good girl.”

He cranked left one more time, stepped on the gas, took the Cruiser over the median, into the southbound lane, and headed back to the Gran Chaco.

“I think there’s another road out of here,” he said, remembering the maps of the city he’d downloaded and studied.

“One of the service roads on the golf course goes all the way down to the river. If you follow it long enough, it’ll empty out on Calle Palma.” Palm Street.

Okay, he was impressed.

“Ponce is going to head back to Beranger’s, same as us,” she said, turning in her seat and looking out the back windshield.

He heard it, too, the sound of sirens approaching from the north. Hell.

“We’ll never get ahead of him taking the river road,” she said. “Do you hear those sirens?”

“Yeah, and we don’t need to get ahead of him. We just need to get in place. He can have first shot at Beranger’s. If he walks out of there with anything, I’ll go after it.” He speeded up-quite a bit. “How far is this service road into the golf course?”

She looked out each side window. “About a quarter mile.”

He speeded up a helluva lot more. The best way for this to work would be to get off the road before the cops even knew they were on it.

He was hoping a hundred miles an hour for a quarter mile would do the trick.

“Do you have a visual?” he asked, somewhat surprised by the quick pickup and good handling of the Cruiser. He wasn’t an SUV kind of guy, but this thing was doing its job.

“No. We’re still clear.”

There was no median this far from the guardhouse, so when he saw the smudge of a dirt road peeking out of the heavy vegetation on the east side of the pavement, he slowed down just enough to take the turn without rolling the vehicle-which was quite a bit of slowing down.

Thirty yards in, he slowed down even more, and at the edge of the golf course, where the trees ended, he came to a stop. They would cross after the cops went by.

It didn’t take long, about half a minute, before the sirens crested and started to wane, the police passing them on their way to the Gran Chaco.

So, this was perfect. They’d escaped the cops. Ponce was very unlikely to turn around and virtually follow the police to the scene of where he and his men had committed murder. Even in Ciudad del Este, that was bound to go over very poorly. Of course, the cops would be looking for Suzi. Everyone was going to be looking for Suzi, and all of them for no good reason.

He needed to get her out of this country, and he needed to keep her with him until he could do it.

Yeah, that’s the way it was going to be from here on out, him and Suzi Q joined at the hip, until he put her on a plane, whether she liked it or not.

And yeah, he knew exactly where he was headed with the whole joined-at-the-hip plan-trouble.

Which didn’t stop him from making his play.

“We need to cut a deal, you and I, together.”

She buried her head in her arms on the dash and swore under her breath, way under, but he heard her, and he waited until he got what he wanted.

“Fifty-fifty,” the word finally came out.

“Sure. Great. I can work with that.” Not really. She was lying, but he didn’t care. He was lying, too. He didn’t need a deal with her to get what he wanted. He just somehow, in a very real macho caveman way, needed to be in charge of her for a while, until she really did leave the country.

It wasn’t about sex.

Not all of it. Really. Not even most of it.

It was more about… more about…

He let his gaze drift up the length of her to where she was draped over the dash like she didn’t have an ounce of energy or gumption left. No, it really wasn’t about sex. The sun was coming in through the windshield, dappled with the shadows of the palm fronds above them, dappling her. She had a line of sweat running down her side from under her arm, and one down the middle of her back, turning her black shirt even darker. The telltale print of her holster showed across her shoulders in another damp trail, and he could see the grip of a semiautomatic pistol where her shirt had been pushed back, a Beretta M9 to be exact, a 9mm, and yes, he recognized it just by the frame and magazine.

She actually looked kind of tough, wearing a pair of lace-up boots and tactical pants with cargo pockets, like maybe she could kick a little butt. Of course, she’d be kicking it in a silk camp shirt and butter-soft Italian leather boots, so soft the tops folded down. Her tactical pants weren’t heavy cotton twill like his, either. They looked like a linen and cotton blend, expensive, tailored to within an inch of their lives for some long-legged, curvy-hipped, small-waisted, all-girl female like Suzi Q… Sugar… Shu-gah.