Free Flirting with Disaster by Jane Graves Page B

seven hundred miles into the middle of the Mexican wilderness.
    He sat down on the opposite bunk, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped in front of him. He wore faded jeans, boots, and a denim shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows. He still had the same tall, well-developed body he’d had in high school, though the leanness he’d shown back then had given way to a more substantial build that made him look even more powerful. He had the kind of face women dream about—strikingly handsome, with strong features, deep, dark eyes and a sharp, mesmerizing gaze. His face was marred only by a few age lines, and the congregation of those lines at the corners of his eyes and around his mouth told her he smiled a lot.
    He wasn’t smiling now.
    “Give me the whole story,” he said, “and don’t leave anything out.”
    The whole story. Good God. It felt as if she’d lived a lifetime in the past couple of days. She sat up a little more, releasing a weary breath, her throat dry and scratchy.
    “It started,” she said, “when Adam Decker and I were getting ready to fly out of here on Friday afternoon. He’s one of the doctors who volunteer at the clinic. The clinic is closed on weekends except for emergencies, and that’s when we swap out the staff. I was going to take Adam back to San Antonio, then bring another doctor down here.”
    “San Antonio?”
    “I live there now. Adam does, too. The organization is based out of there.”
    Dave nodded for her to go on.
    “A storm was approaching, so Adam and I were hurrying to take off before it hit. Before we left the clinic, Robert gave me a defibrillator to get serviced in San Antonio.”
    “A device that shocks hearts back into action.”
    “Right. It was a portable unit, about the size of a small suitcase. I take a lot of medical equipment back and forth, so I didn’t think anything about it. Adam and I were hurrying toward the plane, trying to beat the storm, when lightning struck only about fifty yards away. Scared the hell out of me. I recoiled from the flash and dropped the defibrillator. The plastic casing cracked wide open. And guess what was inside.” She nodded toward the pills. “Adam said they looked like Lasotrex. But then he scratched the surface of one with a pocketknife. The blue exterior gave way to a white interior. He said if it was really Lasotrex, it would be blue all the way through.”
    “So they’re definitely counterfeit.”
    “Yes. Apparently this kind of thing goes on all over the world. Mexico, South America, the Orient, the Middle East. They manufacture fake pills for pennies, then transport them to other areas and sell them at retail prices. Adam estimated that there had to be least a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of them in that one bag.”
    “You say Douglas is the culprit. But what’s his motive? He’s a doctor. A guy like that has to have all kinds of money. What does he need with more?”
    “Actually, he doesn’t have a lot of money. He botched an appendectomy a few years ago that ended up killing a guy. He got hit with a multimillion-dollar malpractice suit that cleaned him out. Rumor has it that he was so negligent and the award was so big that nobody will insure him to practice medicine in the U.S.”
    “So how did he end up down here running a humanitarian organization?”
    “It’s not his baby. It’s his father’s. Bernard James Douglas is a respected heart surgeon. He began the clinic a few years ago, and then his health began to fail. So he put his son in charge.”
    “He doesn’t know what Robert is like?”
    “I think deep down he does. He just refuses to believe it. I think he’s hoping that someday his son will grow a heart.” She made a scoffing noise. “He’s got a long wait.”
    “I can’t imagine that a man like Robert would put up with being sequestered in a tiny Mexican town for very long.”
    “Are you kidding? He thrives on it.”
    “How so?”
    “People look up to him here. It’s