Page 11 of Red Boar's Baby

“You stole something more expensive than a dress?”

“Could you put a shirt on?” Diana said. “It’s very distracting.”

Costa grinned and folded his arms, intentionally flexing. “Sorry, distracting from what? Maybe if you’d change into your?—”

At that point the object she was carrying squirmed, made a small peeping noise, and extruded a tiny pink arm. Costa, who was leaning a hip on the arm of the couch, very nearly lost his balance and also his towel.

“Is that a baby? You stole a baby?”

“I did not—” Diana began indignantly. “Well, okay, I did, technically, but?—”

“You what?”

“Will you let me explain?”

“Only if there are actual explanations!”

“Here,” Diana said. She thrust the bundle in Costa’s direction. “It has been a really long day, it’s not over yet, I drove here with a baby on the floor of the backseat of my car?—”

“What?”

“—which she handled very well, by the way, not that I didn’t panic every time I passed a highway patrol cruiser—Costa, take the baby—and I need a drink.”

Costa took the baby because otherwise it looked like Diana was about to drop ... it? her? on the floor. The small weight settled against his chest, warm and heavy and soft.

Diana, free of her burden, marched into the kitchen. Costa followed her, jiggling the baby. From what he could see of her in the blanket, she was adorable, very pink and healthy with a mop of light brown curls.

“Di, did you kidnap this baby?” Costa asked Diana, or more accurately, the dusty and very nicely shaped ass of her jeans, as Diana rummaged in his fridge’s vertical freezer.

Diana’s answer was mumbled. She straightened up and unerringly opened the cabinet where Costa kept the hard liquor.

“Di.”

Diana poured two fingers of whiskey over ice. She took a swallow.

“Okay. That’s better. There is a story here, which I will tell you as soon as you put some damn pants on.”

“Can’t, I’m holding a baby.” Costa looked down and jiggled the baby some more. The small round face, topped with a dusting of dark fuzz, blinked up at him and then, very charmingly, smiled. “Hi there, you adorable little kidnap victim. Di, whose baby is this?”

“I have no idea.” Diana took another swig of whiskey. “Trust me, if I knew, I’d—well, okay, possibly not give her back immediately, given that there are some highly suspicious circumstances involved in however she got to where I found her?—”

“Okay, so you found her,” Costa said patiently, feeling like he was pulling the story out of her with tweezers, one word at a time. “And where was that, exactly? Yes, hi, you’re still very cute,” he added as the baby grabbed a handful of her blanket and pulled it into her mouth. “No, don’t eat that. Di, any information you want to add, you can drop in at any time.”

“The Chiricahua mountains.”

“You found her in the mountains?”

“I found her next to a crashed airplane, the one we were looking for. My paramedic ride-along was with me. Luis. I think you met him at the park employee spring mixer last year.”

“Yeah, sure,” Costa said. He had a sharp memory for faces and names, but the various events to which he and Diana had accompanied each other as a plus-one fake date all ran together in his head, as did the many people he’d met at them.

“He’s willing to keep her secret for now. He gave her an exam and said that she seems healthy, and we fed her at his place with some emergency formula he keeps in his supplies. Then I, um, made a blanket nest for her in the rear footwell of the car and drove straight here, because all I could think of—” She abruptly snapped her mouth shut.

Costa found himself wondering how she was going to end that sentence, but he was pretty sure he knew where she was going with it.You’d fix things. Somehow, for all the ups and downs, he and Diana did seem to have that going for them.

“You drove here from the Chiricahuas?”

“From Sierra Vista, where Luis lives. It was about two hours and I sweated buckets the whole way. Head on a swivel, terrified of getting stopped. I must have looked like an absolute lunatic.”

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