Death Dream (30 page)

"I've got to go back there tomorrow, try to find out what's wrong."

"No!" Susan snapped, her lips white, her eyes burning. "You're not going back to that woman!"

DOROTHY AGUILERA DE MARTINEZ

She had hit the simulations lab at Wright-Patterson like a bombshell. Barely twenty, her dark skin exotic, her dazzling smile inviting, Dorothy Aguilera had the men ogling openly and the women whispering to one another over what to do about her.

At first she was considered merely a "twofer": a Hispanic female who accounted for two slots in the Air Force's affirmative action program. But within a week it became apparent that this young Latina with the thickly tumbling hair of midnight black and the big beautiful eyes was also one of the fastest typists at the lab and a cheerful hard worker who put most of the older secretaries to shame.

She started as an assistant to one of those older women but before her first month was out Dr. Appleton commandeered her to be his own secretary. The whole lab buzzed with innuendo and off-color jokes. Appleton had never before shown any signs of susceptibility to female charms; everyone at the lab had met his wife at the parties that the Appletons gave at Christmas, and they assumed that Doc and his matronly wife were happily married. Which they were.

It quickly became clear that Appleton took Dorothy under his wing more as a foster father than a potential seducer. He wanted to protect her from the leering men who just happened to be going past her desk each day and stopped to chat or invite her out for a drink after work or ask her if she enjoyed boating on the weekends.

The buzz around the lab subtly shifted. The question got to be: How innocent is Dorothy? She seemed to smile and be pleasant to everyone, yet as far as the rumor mill could determine no one had laid a hand on her. Partly, of course, that was Doc's doing. It was difficult to make time with her when the boss was watching you through the open doorway of his office.

And although she behaved like a very proper young lady she dressed in skin-tight, mini-skirted fashions that drove the men to flights of fantasy. Dorothy had the kind of full-busted, long-legged figure that turns women green and gives men a fever.

She dated a couple of the men from the lab occasionally but they had nothing to report back to their buddies except a pleasant dinner and maybe a dance or two with a charming, beautiful young lady who smiled her goodnight at the front steps of her apartment building.

"She's a female Nolan Ryan," grumbled one of her disappointed swains. "She keeps throwing shutouts."

"No-hitters," said the guy he was talking to. Wistfully.

Ralph Martinez was still a major in those days, unmarried but a veteran of much more than aerial combat. His first impression of Dorothy was that she was very young, very beautiful, and very lucky that Doc was the kind of fatherly man he was. Major Martinez also thought that it was a good thing that such an attractive Hispanic woman was also a good worker. The Anglos always thought that Latin-American women were sluts, he knew. At least Dorothy can show them otherwise. And make them drool in their disappointment.

Dan Santorini had been working at the lab for more than five years at that point, the last two of them with Jace Lowrey. Dan and Susan had married a year earlier, and Sue was pregnant. She spent a lot of her time at her parents' home, comfortably surrounded by her three sisters and her beaming mother who anticipated the baby even more than Susan did, if that was possible.

Dan's in-laws lived in Xenia, nearly an hour's drive from Wright-Patterson when the traffic was heavy or the weather bad, and even farther from their own home near Vandalia. Dan found himself resenting the extra distance when he had to drive there at night after work. He knew Sue was a little frightened of what was happening inside her; the pregnancy was not without its problems, especially in the first couple of months. It was pretty much of a mystery to Dan, though. Sue did not feel well, that was clear enough to see. It was more than morning sickness. She would phone her mother whenever she felt the slightest twinge and her mother would drive over take Sue back home with her. Usually Dan would get a phone call at the lab to tell him to drive to his in-laws after work. As often as not the call came from his mother-in-law rather than Sue.

It happened on a raw sleety night as he headed out to his car, bent over against the cutting wind, clutching his hat to his head with one gloved hand and fumbling in his pants pocket for the car keys. Humps of graying snow were piled beneath the light standards; Dan could see the cold sleet slanting in their feeble lights. The parking lot was almost empty; Dan had worked more than an hour after their nominal quitting time. Jace, with no transportation except his rusty bicycle, had decided to stay at work until the sleet let up.

"Or until the snow melts, whichever comes first," Jace had said.

Wondering if Jace actually would spend the whole night at the lab, grumbling to himself that he was going to have to drive all the way to his in-laws' and probably end up sleeping on their damned stiff sofa in their stuffy old living room, Dan noticed that somebody in a long belted coat had the hood up on his car and was peering at its engine in the shadowy darkness.

"Need a jump?" he called out as he approached the figure.

She turned and he saw that it was Dorothy.

"It won't start," she said forlornly

The first thought to pop into Dan's head was an old joke about Hispanics and the wrecks they drove. He came up beside Dorothy and looked at the engine, as if that would help.

"Try it again." he said. "If it's the battery I've got jumper cables.

It was not the battery. Dan spent half an hour in the cold wet wind, his ears going numb, the sleet driving into his face. Dorothy's car was dead and whatever the cause was he could neither find it nor fix it.

"Come on," he said, rubbing his hands together. Despite the gloves his fingers were starting to tingle. "I'll drive you home."

"Just leave the car here?"

"Nobody's going to steal it on a night like this and nobody's going to come out to fix it."

She looked doubtful.

"Come on," Dan insisted. "Hell, even if somebody does want to steal it he'll have to get it started first.

Dorothy broke into a smile. "Yes," she admitted. "That's true, isn't it?"

So she got into Dan's Taurus and gave him directions for her apartment building. The car's heater did not really warm up until he was pulling onto her driveway, yet he could still smell her perfume despite the wet clamminess of their soaked overcoats.

She thanked him and he watched from the car until she has safely inside the building's glass front door. Then he drove to his in-laws, narrowly missing a head-on collision with some jerk who skidded on the ice because he was driving too damned fast.

Dan did not see Dorothy the next day or the one after that. Somehow his work kept him busy out in the hangar or in Jace's rat's nest of an office, far from the quieter and more orderly corridors where the senior staff people and Dr Appleton's offices were.

She came to see him. Late one morning as he was unpacking the lunch he had brought with him, Dorothy appeared at Dan's office door. She was wearing blue slacks and a gold turtleneck sweater, completely covered from throat to toes. Yet she looked as sexy as a swimsuit model to Dan.

"I wanted to thank you again," she said, smiling brilliantly.

Startled to see her, Dan managed a weak, "Uh, it's nothing."

"The car was still there the next day. Nobody stole it."

"What was wrong with it?"

She shrugged, and on her it was a provocation. "The man from the garage said something about a distributor?"

Dan nodded.

"You're eating lunch in? Not at the cafeteria?"

He nodded again.

"Well, thanks again. I really appreciate it. You were my knight in shining armor."

Before he could reply she left. He sat there thinking that his two-door Taurus, stained and streaked by road mud and highway salt, hardly looked like the steed of a knight in shining armor. Then he realized that his hands were trembling.

The following week he happened to see her at the cafeteria and sat at the same table with her. Within a few days he had stopped making lunches for himself. No matter how busy he was with Jace he always took a lunch break. As often as not Dorothy was there at the cafeteria. She always sat with him.

"Do you want me to make you lunch?" Susan asked him when she finally noticed that he had stopped making his own.

"Uh, no. That's okay. I'll just grab something at the cafeteria." And inwardly he grinned at his double entendre.

He wished he could grab Dorothy even though he knew he would never try.

"I can fix a sandwich for you," Susan insisted. "I'm not completely helpless."

She was getting round, and instead of going to her mother's, her mother had started staying over with them.

Like having a live-in nurse, Susan had told Dan. Like having your mother-in-law living with you, Dan had silently retorted.

It was probably not inevitable but it happened anyway. Susan had gone to the doctor's for another checkup, accompanied by her mother. Late in the afternoon Sue called and left word that Dan should pick her up at her mother's home. She left the message with Dr Appleton's secretary.

Dorothy went down to the cold, drafty hangar where Dan and Jace were shoehorning a bulky gray electronics console into the equipment rack already crammed along the catwalk above the hangar floor. Down on the floor Major Martinez was supervising a crew of mechanics in blue Air Force fatigues, driving them like a muleskinner whipping his team up a steep hill. A big flat-bed truck was slowly backing into the hangar, the sawed-off cockpit of an F-22 jet fighter lashed down on its back. It was a brilliant winter day outside but the wind cut like a saber.

"Maybe Ralph'll freeze his balls off," Jace muttered. "Or better yet, maybe they'll turn Air Force blue. That'd be poetic, huh?"

Dan had had the foresight to wear a sweater under his tweed jacket; still his hands hurt from the cold. Jace had a thin leather windbreaker over his inevitable tee shirt.

Then he saw Dorothy running into the hangar, arms wrapped around her, hair blowing in the wind, covered by nothing more than a chocolate leather and sheer stockings. He noticed that her shoes were comfortable black sneakers, incongruous against the rest of her outfit.

By the time she had climbed the catwalk her teeth were chattering. She handed Dan his message; she had written it on a pink telephone message slip.

Dan felt his jaw tighten.
Sue's off at her mother's again.
He did not know why it made him angry. Mother Emerson was as kind and generous as she could be. He had nothing to complain about, really. Except that he wanted his wife home, with him, in the home he made for her, not running off to her mother every couple of days.

Then he saw that Dorothy was shivering.

"Here, take this." Dan pulled off his jacket and slipped it over her trembling shoulders.

"What about you? Won't you freeze up here?"

"I'll be okay," he said.

"But—"

"Go on," he told her. "Go back to your office where the sane people work. I'll pick up the jacket when I'm finished here."

She looked doubtful, but she said, "Thank you," and hurried back toward the warmth of the heated office building with Dan's jacket bundled around her.

Jace watched her go, then turned back to Dan. "Your mouth is open," he said, grinning.

Dan retrieved his jacket just before quitting time. He had intended to go back to the lab and work another hour or so, but as Dorothy smilingly handed him the rumpled old tweed coat he noticed that Appleton had already left; the boss's office was empty.

Suddenly he heard himself ask Dorothy, "Would you like to stop off someplace for a drink?"

Her smile changed subtly. "All right," she said softly, "under one condition: I'm buying."

Dan blinked with surprise.

"I owe you for the coat," Dorothy explained. "And for the ride home last week."

He grinned—foolishly, he was sure—and agreed. As they walked out to the parking lot together he realized that if she bought the drinks she would be under no obligation to him whatever. Smart girl. And she could end their little get together when she felt like it.

Dan suggested the Stratosphere, the tavern just outside the base's gates where the guys hung out. Dorothy suggested a place nearer to her apartment building. "It's quieter, nicer," she said. "The Strata's too noisy for me."

He followed her car into the city and parked on the tree-lined street behind her. It was a quiet residential neighborhood, five- and six-story red brick apartment buildings. The Greenwood Lounge was on the corner, a tasteful small neon sign glowing above its dark wooden door.

True to Dorothy's word, the lounge was quiet, Almost empty. People were in their apartments eating dinner at this hour in this neighborhood. They would come down for a drink and some conversation later. Soft music purred from speakers in the ceiling. The bartender had a financial news program on his TV by the cash register. Not like the smoky, raucous Stratosphere at all, Dan agreed, with its hillbilly music blaring and beer sloshing everywhere.

"I don't know this part of town very well," Dan said as they slid into a booth.

"It's just two blocks from my apartment building," said Dorothy.

"Do you come here often?" He realized it was an inane question as he spoke the words.

She shrugged. "Now and then."

A middle-aged cocktail waitress in a no-nonsense black dress took their drink orders: Dan asked for a bourbon and water, Dorothy for a glass of white wine.

"I thought you'd want a Margarita."

With a shake of her head, "You can't get a decent Margarita this side of Santa Fe."

"Is that where you were born? In New Mexico?"

She laughed and told him no. In Los Angeles. Their drinks arrived. Dan asked Dorothy if she had encountered any prejudice against Hispanics. She talked briefly about it. Dan found himself talking about his childhood in Youngstown, the kinds of prejudices thrown at you when you're weak and asthmatic and the brightest kid in class. Dorothy told him about the problems of being an attractive young lady.