Desert Heat

Angie nodded. “My baby sister’s getting married day after tomorrow,” she said. “Really. Whereabouts?”

“Some church up in the foothills,” Angie answered evasively.

It was growing dark outside by the time Angie was delicately making her way through a fluted glass filled with scrumptious chocolate mousse. Only by accident did she happen to be looking out through the lobby door as Tony Vargas walked past on his way from the front disk heading for her room.

Angie was thunderstruck and terrified. Obviously, he hadn’t fallen for the airplane ruse. AIready he was here, hot on her trail. How had he done it?

The look on her face must have shown. The waitress hurried to her side. “Are you all right?”

With trembling hands, Angie groped in her purse for some money. She threw a twenty-dollar bill into the waitress’s hand. “Keep the change,” she stammered. “It’s my boyfriend. He’s come here looking for me. Please don’t I him which way I went. Is there a back way t of here?”

The waitress nodded. “Through the kitchen,” she said. “This way.”

FOURTEEN

While angie stumbled past the cooks in the kitchen, Tony Vargas stood outside the door to her hotel room. He had come home to an empty house less than an hour after Angie left there. After storming through the place looking for her, he turned to the hall closet and discovered that the money was missing. And the notebook as well.

That incredible bitch! After everything he had done for her, how could she do such a thing? How could she treat him this way? And whatever made her think she could possibly get away with it?

Since there was no soft flesh to pummel with his fists, no target present on which to vent his rage, Tony Vargas controlled it. Stifling his anger, he sat down at his desk and calmly made a few phone calls. For someone with his kind of co

Denver? Tony Vargas hadn’t made it to the hi p of his profession by being stupid. As far as he knew, Angie Kellogg had no co

It took several hours, but his careful search paid off when he talked to a cab driver who had seen someone who looked like Angie-girls that good-looking were few and far between-get into the Spanish Trail’s hotel van.

He tapped lightly on the door to her room, hoping she wouldn’t be smart enough to look through the peephole before opening it up, but there was no answer, no sound from inside. He knocked again, impatiently this time. He wanted to get to her and teach her a lesson she’d never forget, not necessarily here where other people might listen to the noises and object, but back home where there would be no interruptions.

When there was still no answer to his third knock, he shouldered his way inside. The room was empty. The light was on. The bed had been rumpled but not slept in. A newspaper lay in a heap beside the bed, but Angie wasn’t there, and neither was his money.

Frustrated, he stood in the middle of the room and turned in a complete circle. The desk lamp was switched on. He went over and looked down at the stack of message paper. Sure enough, the faint impression of the number written on the missing top sheet was still visible to the naked eye. Gleefully, he pocketed the paper and rushed from the room. Moving at a fast jog, he headed back down-stairs.

Through luck, determination, and perseverance, he had come this close to catching her. He wasn’t about to give up now. And even if she escaped for the time being, he had that piece of paper in his pocket. He was almost sure that would at least give him a clue about where she was really going.

As Angie Kellogg darted through the steamy kitchen, she knew her life hung in the balance. She emerged in the poorly lit back parking lot next to a fetid dumpster. At best, she had only a few minutes’ lead. She was lucky someone hadn’t sent him directly into the dining room after her. Once he located her room, it wouldn’t take him long to guess that she hadn’t left the hotel and was down eating i

Angie searched the parking lot for some avenue of escape. Seeing none, she pounded her way around to the front of the building. The Spanish Trail sat on one side of the T at the end of South Fourth Avenue. It faced a short frontage road bordering the freeway. I-10’s northbound lanes lay beyond a chain-link fence and down a steep embankment. Two locks to the north was South Sixth and an overpass that would take her over the freeway. Angie ran that way.

She started across Fourth. Checking traffic she ran, she noticed a noisily idling eighteen-wheeler parked along the street half a block or so back. In the dim glow of a street light she caught sight of a man out checking one of his tires. With one last panic-stricken glance back over her shoulder toward the hotel and without breaking her stride, Angie turned in that direction. She reached the truck just as he started to swing himself up into the open door of the cab.

“Please, mister,” she shouted over the truck engine’s uncompromising roar. “Give me a lift. My boyfriend’s back there. If he catches me, he’ll kill me.”

Maybe the trucker believed her, maybe he didn’t. After so many years on the road, one line sounds about as good as another, but for a change, the woman doing the asking was a real looker, and Dayton Smith didn’t mind the company. “Sure, lady. Climb in. Which way are you going?”

Without answering, Angie Kellogg scrambled into the cab in front of him. “It doesn’t matter,” she said gasping for breath. “Let’s just get the hell out of here.”

Moving slowly and with maddening deliberation, the driver climbed up into the cab beside her, switched on the lights, released the emergency brake, and eased the truck into gear. Angie watched out the window until the truck’s blue, United Van Lines trailer completely obscured her view of the hotel.

“Do you see anybody back there?” she asked, as the truck rounded the corner.

“Not so far,” the driver returned.

In a moment, Angie, too, could see back to the hotel’s well-lit entrance. No one appeared there before the truck slid out of view completely at the next intersection. “I think we made it,” she breathed in relief, settling back into the truck.

The driver looked at Angie appreciatively in the glow of the streetlights as they waited for the light to change and allow them onto the South Sixth overpass. “You were kidding, right?”

“About what?”

“About him killing you. I mean, people say it all the time, but it’s usually a joke.”

“This is no joke,” Angie answered. “I mean He really would kill me.”

“Well,” the driver said with a shake of his head. “Seems to me, that would be a real shame. My name’s Dayton Smith, by the way, and as of right now, we’re headed toward El Paso.”

As he spoke, the light changed and the truck slid into motion. A few moments later, they were heading down a southbound on ramp. Angie tried to look, but she couldn’t see in the mirror herself. “Is there anybody back re?” she asked nervously.