On Wings Of Deliverance

She stared up at him, mouth pursed to protest. Then something shifted in her expression and she looked away. “I guess I shouldn’t expect you to say anything else.” She didn’t exactly sound grateful.

“What does that mean?”

“Never mind.” Leaning back a little, she gave him a gentle poke in the side. “Turn around and let’s get going before Señor Federal decides to come after us. We’re going to have to disguise you and find a change of clothes.”

“Disguise me?” Owen nudged Sunflower in the ribs with his heels. “How?”

“You’ll see. Just find a general store.”

Owen cast a look over his shoulder and found Benny’s eyes twinkling. “I have a feeling I’m not going to like whatever you’re cooking up.”

“You want to stay with me, you’re going to have to do this my way.”

Unable to get her to come clean, Owen had to content himself with the full-time task of keeping Sunflower’s attention off the wild onions growing along the side of the road.

He could not wait to trade in this contrary, spavined animal for a vehicle with wheels. Cousin Jorge had better have a decent selection.

“I look like an Elvis impersonator!”

Benny surveyed Owen critically in the wavy, speckled mirror. She thought she’d done a pretty good job, considering she’d never been to cosmetology school and hadn’t dyed her own hair since she was fourteen. Back then she’d gone in for magenta and green streaks or a full-platinum bleach. She wrinkled her nose. Thank goodness those days were over.

On the outskirts of Poza Rica, they’d stopped at the first general-store-cum-tourist-trap they came to. Leaving Owen to tend to the mule, Benny had gone inside to purchase a beach towel, a bottle of hair dye, a hat and a pair of cheap sunglasses.

She’d had to get creative to find a place to effect Owen’s disguise. The restroom in the store was out of the question. Slipping a man of Owen’s height past the clerk would have been impossible, and besides, anybody could walk in on them. So they’d headed toward town until they saw an outhouse in an empty schoolyard. It was relatively clean and contained a sink and mirror—the major requirements for Benny’s impromptu beauty salon. Propping the door open, she’d draped the gaudy towel around Owen’s broad shoulders and got to work.

Now his blond hair and eyebrows were jet black. By contrast, his horrified blue-green eyes looked even more electric. She had to admit, he bore a strong resemblance to the King, whose black-velvet portrait hung over the couch in Roxanne Gonzales’s living room. Every day during her sophomore and junior years of high school, Benny had giggled at that portrait as she walked into the kitchen for breakfast.

She whipped the towel off his shoulders. “Can you do ‘That’s All Right, Mama’?”

Giving her a pained look, he slipped on a wrinkled Hawaiian shirt he’d had stuffed in his backpack and buttoned it up. “You’re making fun of me.”

“Would I do that?” She crammed his discarded T-shirt and the towel into the backpack. Fooling around with Owen’s hair had been an intimacy that left her flustered.

“What are you gonna do with your hair?”

“What do you mean?”

“You ought to cut it.”

“Oh, no you don’t!” She grabbed the braid lying across her shoulder. “If I cut this off I’ll look like a Brillo pad.” Vehemently she plopped on her new straw sun hat. “The hit man saw me wearing a skirt, with my hair down. See? In these jeans, with my head covered, I’ll look like a boy.”

There was a short silence as Owen studied her. “I don’t think so.” The look in his eyes seemed to suck every bit of oxygen out of the room.

Or maybe she was just breathless because it smelled so bad in here. “You s-said you wouldn’t—”

Owen sighed. “I know, but…”

There was nothing threatening in his stance, and his gaze was tender. Still, she closed her eyes. Was she afraid of him or herself? She couldn’t help thinking of that picture of her in his notebook.

“Bernadette, look at me.”

She was trying to summon the courage to open her eyes when someone banged on the door. With extreme vigor. Apparently it had swung shut while she was occupied with Owen’s hair.

“What’s going on in there?” demanded a female voice in scandalized Spanish. “Get out here right now or I’ll call the police!”

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