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thrill-a-minute task was left to guys like him, guys who looked like the kind she’d probably spent her whole life avoiding.
    “Y-you do,” she added.
    Yes, he did, one with plenty of ammo, enough to get him out of the Palacio, if it came to that.
    Him and her, too, dammit, if it came to that.
    The woman really did need a keeper. It wasn’t going to be him, oh, hell no, but he could at least get her off Tony Royce’s street and back over to where the turistas played.
    “Y-you look like you know what you’re doing. With the gun, I mean.”
    He did, but he sure as hell didn’t like this particular turn of the conversation, no more than he liked what he was hearing through the door: the sound of men coming down the veranda.
    “You scared me.”
    He’d meant to scare her.
    “And I don’t trust you,” she said.
    Smart girl, he thought, giving her a quick glance where she’d pressed herself into the corner. She was all white swoops and polka-dot curves against the ancient, dull gold paint covering the walls.
    “B-but I trust those men out there even less.”
    A very smart girl, he decided, a very smart and shaking-like-a-leaf-in-a-class-five-hurricane girl who sounded like she was starting to hyperventilate a little.
    “I’ll p-pay you five hundred d-dollars to be my bodyguard for the next five minutes.”
    Smith lifted one eyebrow in her direction, then gave her a quick nod and shifted his attention back to the door—and he grinned. He couldn’t help himself. Five hundred dollars, and to think he’d been going to save her for free.
    CHAPTER
    4

    W HAT THE FUCK is this?” Tony Royce asked, looking at the photograph Zane Lowe, his top lieutenant, handed him.
    “San Luis.” At six feet four and hitting the scales at two-fifty, Zane was a beast—a red-haired beast with a brain.
    Royce looked at the picture again, more closely, and felt his jaw lock.
    “This is my fucking house?” The windows of his suite at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas overlooked the whole glitzy, overlit, goddamn city—but his gaze was glued to the photograph that Zane had just printed off the computer, a close-up shot of a stucco wall with the number three written on it in red paint.
    He’d seen that color of red paint before, four separate times, and every time he’d seen it, bad fucking news had followed. This time, the bad news had arrived first. The goddamn Mara Plata deal he’d been working had been one big goddamn waste of time. The piss ants had leaked the deal.
    Now he knew why.
    “Yes, sir,” Zane said. “The photographs were taken this morning.”
    “And Manuel just decided to send them now?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Sir . That was goddamn right. He may have recruited his slag heap of operators out of the gutter, but by God, they either called him sir, or he called them out.
    Zane handed him another photo, a long shot, and the full extent of the damage to his million-dollar property and the solution to a whole lot of his problems over the last two years suddenly became crystal clear.
    “The stupid bitch.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    He glanced at Zane and found his beast grinning.
    Zane had problems, psychological problems, but nothing that interfered with his job. Quite the contrary. Sadism was one of Royce’s preferred qualities in a job applicant. Not that any of his men had applied. Hell, no. He’d searched each one of them out and offered them the opportunity of a lifetime, to be part of an elite team of international drug-runners with the connections to broker deals and deliver smack from one corner of the earth to another, seamlessly, flawlessly, and by the hundreds of kilograms. Royce was the middleman to the middlemen, with the added bonus of offering a cartel-connected cocaine pipeline into the world’s most lucrative markets, and supplying a full line of special-use, high-tech pharmaceuticals guaranteed to blow the head off anybody unlucky enough to end up on the wrong end of one of his needles, a niche market he filled