Sooner or Later (7 page)

The moon cast a reflective glow
across the smooth waters of the Colon River, which separated Hojancha from Zarcero. Carlos s small engine echoed in the night like a rusty buzz saw. Letty wondered how it was that no one could hear their approach.

Hidden under the tarp, she lay tense and stiff after holding still for so many hours. Murphy, disguised in clothes borrowed from a native fisherman, sat next to Carlos in a boat little bigger than a dinghy. It amazed her that the vessel had been able to keep from sinking with the three of them, plus their supplies.

Letty would have liked to point out the unfairness of such an arrangement—her under the tarp, Murphy not—but she knew before she protested that it would do no good. When Murphy set his mind to something, it took an act of God to convince him otherwise.

In an effort to ward off the stench of rotting fish,
she alternately held her breath and closed her eyes, neither of which helped. She would have given just about anything to escape in the luxury of sleep. The night before she’d spent in the back of a jeep, being jostled around like a popcorn seed in hot grease. She could no more have slept during their road trip than leapt over the moon.

Murphy hadn’t gotten any more rest than she, and she wondered how he fared. He gave no indication that it had affected him in any way, but for all she knew he might routinely go without sleep just to prove how tough he was.

“It isn’t wise to take the woman with you,” Letty heard Carlos say. She had to strain to hear Murphy’s response.

“It isn’t my choice.”

“What is so important in Zarcero that you would risk your lives?”

“The less you know, old man, the better,” Murphy returned without emotion.

The boat engine slowed to a crawl. “She is a good woman.”

Murphy snorted.

In other circumstances Letty might have felt guilty for having duped Murphy into accompanying her to Zarcero, but not after his insulting proposition. As far as she was concerned, he got what he deserved.

It troubled her the way her mind continued to return, like a homing pigeon, to their lone night together. It had been a momentary lapse in judgment. She wasn’t perfect, but she wasn’t like her mother either, selling herself and her family for the pleasure she found in the arms of another man.

The episode wouldn’t be repeated, of that she was confident.

The boat engine died completely, and Letty stirred beneath the tarp. Turning her face toward the narrow opening, she angled upward to catch a whiff of cool, fresh air.

“Are we there?” she whispered.

“I told you to keep quiet,” Murphy answered impatiently.

“I want out from under here.”

“All in good time.” He pressed his booted foot against her rump. “Don’t move a muscle, understand?”

“The area is said to be crawling with rebel troops,” Carlos warned. “Stay off the main roads.”

Not waiting another moment, fearing Murphy wasn’t to be trusted not to leave her behind, Letty peeled back the tarp and sat upright. Even in the thick night, she felt Murphy’s displeasure.

The rowboat butted gently against the bank.

Murphy grabbed Letty’s upper arm and helped her to her feet. “Be as quiet as you can, understand?” he demanded.

“I wasn’t planning to break into song.”

Murphy leaped onto the riverbank and left Letty to make her own way out of the boat while he dealt with the equipment.

Carlos handed him the necessities collected from Ramirez earlier.

“Be very careful, my friends,” Carlos warned before he made his way back to the helm and artfully steered the dinghy away from the bank. “I will search each night for the signal for your return.”

“Thank you,” Letty whispered back, and waved.

“Come on,” Murphy urged, “remember what Carlos said.”

The old man had said plenty, most of it in an effort to dissuade Letty from going into Zarcero. After a while she had paid little attention.

“Come on, we’ve got a long walk.”

“I won’t hold you up,” she said, determined she’d keel over before she gave him the satisfaction. Carlos had given them the name of a friend, someone they could trust, who would put them up for the night.

After strapping the supplies onto his back, Murphy started walking. Letty hurriedly slung her backpack over her shoulder and followed. Neither spoke.

In other circumstances Letty would have paused to admire the heavens. A smattering of stars littered the night with tiny beacons of light. After the crushing heat of the day, the cool breeze came as a welcome relief.

Murphy didn’t give her time to stargaze. She quickened her pace in order to keep up with him and was soon winded, but she didn’t complain. Regulating her breathing, she kept her steps in line with his.

They rested once, and only then because Murphy thought he might have heard something. He held out his hand, pressed his finger to his lips, and stopped dead in his tracks. The moments seemed interminable. The night spoke to them in snippets of sounds. A bird’s call echoed like crickets, or perhaps monkeys, and the breeze whispered through the thick foliage. Letty smelled orchids. The texture of this country her brother loved so dearly wrapped itself around her.

After what seemed a lifetime, they continued walk
ing. It came to her that this was the first time she was truly alone with Murphy. Her survival and that of her brother rested squarely on his shoulders. The realization brought home the fact that she knew very little about this man. Not much more than his name and post office box. True, she’d sorted his mail for a number of years, such as it was. A few bills now and again, magazines, most with a military orientation. What she knew about him wouldn’t fill an envelope, and yet she’d trusted him with her life.

When the farmhouse Carlos had mentioned came into sight, Letty sagged with relief. The straps from the backpack dug into her shoulders, and her calves ached from walking at Murphy’s killing pace.

“Wait here,” Murphy ordered in the imperious tone he used with her. He guided her under the protection of a large tree.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“I can’t and won’t explain my motives everytime I ask you to do something,” he snapped. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

She opened her mouth to argue and knew it would be useless.

Carlos had already told them his cousin would see to their needs. If it had been up to her, she would have walked up to the farmer’s front door, knocked politely, and explained who she was. But not Murphy. He apparently felt it was necessary to break in like a criminal.

Unfortunately the moonlight wasn’t bright enough for her to see where he’d gone. The man all but disappeared into the shadows. Either that or she’d viewed too many James Bond movies.

With her back braced against the tree trunk, Letty sat. She must have drifted off to sleep, because the next thing she knew, Murphy had returned.

“We’ll spend the night in the barn,” he whispered.

She rubbed the sleep from her face and nodded. Anything with the word “sleep” in it appealed to her.

“There’s a small catch.”

She raised questioning eyes to him.

“We stay together.”

She frowned, not understanding the problem since she thought that was why she’d hired him.

“In other words, we sleep next to each other.”

Men baffled and exasperated
Marcie Alexander. She stood in the room in the back of her beauty shop and mulled over her life to this point.

For her first thirty-one years the only place she found herself capable of communicating with the opposite sex was in bed. Well, she was finished with that, finished with having her friends marry and start a family while she waited on the sidelines, and for what? To get passed over again and again.

She’d never had a problem attracting a man. At certain times in her life she’d dated three or four at a time. But instead of feeling wanted and charmed, she felt more like an air traffic controller.

Finding men had always been a snap, especially the needy kind. From the time she was sixteen and lost her virginity in the backseat of a car at a drive-in movie during
Raging Bull
, she’d maintained steady
relationships with the opposite sex. Unfortunately her relationships rarely lasted more than a month or two at a stretch.

As the years progressed, Marcie had learned a painful lesson. Men flattered her, courted her, borrowed money from her—which they seldom repaid—and then promptly deserted her. The pattern rarely changed. She’d fallen in and out of love so often, it had all become a revolving door.

Men flocked to her. Mostly penniless ones with problems for her to solve. She specialized in rescue operations. For years she was convinced that all these poor, misunderstood men really needed was the love of a good woman.

In her search for a husband, Marcie had gone so far as to take out a loan in order for Danny, the man of the hour, to hire an attorney so he could get a divorce. It was understood that once he was free from his battle-ax of a wife, he’d marry her. It took Marcie two months to learn he’d never been married. The money had paid for a weekend in Vegas with another woman. It had taken her sixteen months to pay back the bank.

What hurt most was that a couple of her beauty school friends had been married twice. They’d already started families with two different men while Marcie had yet to snag even one husband.

Every time she saw another one of her friends with a baby and a doting husband, her heart ached. She wanted it all. A husband, a gentle, kind man who would love her to distraction. One man enough to keep her satisfied in life and in bed.

Heaven would testify that she’d done her best to
land herself a lifetime mate. But in her long, often tumultuous search, Marcie had met only one such candidate. Johnny.

She was crazy about him the minute she laid eyes on him in the Pour House, a local bar. Her mistake, she realized, was sleeping with him too soon. Way too soon.

He’d gone home with her on some phony excuse and, against her better judgment, stayed the night. Hard as she tried, Marcie couldn’t make herself regret it. Sex with Johnny had been incredible. Probably the best of her entire life.

The following morning, after he’d left her, Marcie feared she’d never hear from him again. She’d nearly wept tears of joy when he showed up on her doorstep a month later. She’d already decided that, if given a second chance with him, she wouldn’t make the same mistake. She’d been waiting all her life for a man like Johnny, and come hell or high water she was going to find a way to marry him.

Unfortunately Johnny made her weak, and before she’d realized what was happening, they were back in the bedroom again. This time he stayed the entire weekend. Nothing interrupted them. Not televised football. Not phone calls. Nothing. He didn’t even want her to cook, had insisted on ordering out and paying for it himself. When he left her that time, Marcie was so completely exhausted she’d had to stay home from work for two days.

If ever there was a man capable of keeping her happy, it was Johnny. It went without saying that if she wanted to marry him, she’d need to play her cards right, and that meant careful planning.

She was well aware that becoming intimate before forging an emotional bond was a tactical error. Johnny had to want her for more than her body. Marcie knew it, yet she’d allowed herself to be manipulated right back into bed. Mainly because he was such an incredible lover.

As time progressed he stopped by more and more often, but rarely for longer than two or three days. Sometimes he’d show up unexpectedly at the shop and every now and again at her apartment. He wouldn’t believe it if she told him, so she never did, but she hadn’t been to bed with another man since they’d met.

In their times together, she noted that he rarely spoke about himself. But then they seldom talked other than superficially, which was fine. The trust would come in time. If she had to pick up snatches of his life here and there, that was okay with her, too. She was a patient woman.

What made Johnny special was that he proved to be an unselfish lover, inventive and generous. A fair portion of her previous lovers had been sexual brontosauruses. The type who considered lovemaking to consist of ripping off her clothes, throwing her down on the bed, completing the act while grunting as though in the midst of a cardiac arrest, then rolling over and promptly falling asleep.

The men Marcie had loved generally knew little about foreplay. This was where Johnny excelled. No one needed to tell her he was a rare breed. She’d been around long enough to appreciate a lover with a slow touch. One who titillated her verbally, who
seduced her with words before he so much as kissed her.

It amazed Marcie how well he read her moods. There were times when she was too desperate for him to wade through the long, slow process of being undressed and adored as he stripped away each piece of clothing.

Johnny gauged her mood without her having to say a word. He’d smile, his mouth soft and sexy, then quickly dispense with the preliminaries. Before long he had her pinned against the wall, her skirt up around her waist. By the time he finished she was breathless and limp with satisfaction.

After she’d been seeing him fairly frequently, there’d been a lull. Several months passed without a word. At first she suspected he might be married. But having fallen into that trap before, she’d come to recognize the signs. Not Johnny. He was a free spirit, a salesman whose job often took him away for weeks on end.

It killed her not to question him, but if he wasn’t willing to tell her of his own volition, then she didn’t ask. To the best of her knowledge there was no faster way to get rid of a potential husband than to make demands on him. From her experience, if she mentioned the word “commitment,” she might as well hold open the front door as he raced past. Mow a man down with questions and chances were the relationship wouldn’t rebound.

Marcie had made far too many mistakes in her life to fall prey to those traps. She wanted Johnny and was willing to be patient.

After a lengthy silence, Marcie figured she’d lost him for good. That was when she’d taken a long hard look at her life. Frankly, she hadn’t liked what she’d seen, so she’d made some basic changes. Cleaned up her act, so to speak.

The first thing she’d decided was that she wouldn’t go to bed with a man again until there was a ring on her finger. When she’d first made the decision, it had sounded drastic even to her own ears. She’d enjoyed an active, healthy sex life from the time she was a teenager. But to her surprise, she found she rather enjoyed being celibate.

Clothes shopping took an entirely different slant. No longer did she judge an outfit by how sexy a man would find her or how seductive she looked. She purchased clothes that felt good, clothes that made her feel good about herself.

Once she looked at herself differently, she learned to view men by more than how much they needed her. She was no longer interested in rescue operations. The money and emotional energy she saved made her feel years younger.

She wanted to marry Johnny, but if she couldn’t have him, then she had no option but to move on to greener pastures. So she’d gone on a campaign to find herself a husband. One who didn’t frequent a bar.

A sign of exactly how serious she was came the day she applied for and received a library card. Because she hadn’t paid nearly enough attention in school, her reading skills weren’t what they should have been. She started out borrowing books on tape. That satisfied her for a while, but shortly afterward she pro
gressed to reading the books by herself. Especially the self-help ones.

It wasn’t long before she recognized that she was a woman who loved too much.

Too much. Too often. Too soon.

Now, just when she believed she was about to achieve her goal and meet someone decent, Johnny popped back into her life. Well, she wasn’t the same woman he’d left behind. Besides, there was Clifford. She’d been dating him for two months, which was something of a record. It was certainly the longest time she’d gone out with a man without going to bed with him.

Clifford Cramden owned a plumbing company, played on the local softball team, and hadn’t once asked for a loan. Well, he had run out of check blanks that once, but he’d repaid her promptly. He wasn’t a bad kisser. Their petting had gotten heavy a couple of times, but he’d always put an end to the foreplay before it got out of hand. Only once had he suggested spending the night. Marcie had gently rejected the idea, and he hadn’t pressed her. He wouldn’t be any kind of man, she decided, if she didn’t tempt him sexually.

They were at the point in their dating where Marcie felt free to talk about “their relationship.” For the first time in her life, she was on first base, and she wasn’t about to let a weekend fling with Johnny ruin that.

It sounded good when she reasoned it out. Johnny was in town briefly, looking for a good time, and she was a good-time girl. Or had been.

If ever a woman stood at the crossroads, it was Marcie. The minute Johnny had walked into her back
room she’d seen the need flash in his eyes. Heaven help her, she’d wanted him too. That she’d been able to refuse him confirmed how much she’d changed.

Johnny would be back. Marcie would bet her last dollar on that. He wasn’t used to losing, wasn’t accustomed to not having what he wanted, when he wanted it. Next time, she suspected, he’d come with a whole lot more than a bouquet of cheap flowers.

“Marcie.”

“In here,” she answered, calling over her shoulder.

“Someone’s come to see you.”

Something in Samantha’s voice alerted her that it wasn’t one of her LOLs. Marcie worked wonders with older women’s hair. Her little old ladies loved her, and she showered them with attention.

“Who?” she asked. She knew her schedule, and she was finished for the day. From the inflection in Samantha’s voice, she guessed it was a man. Probably Johnny.

“Come and see.”

She came out from the back, wiping her hands dry on a towel, praying for the strength to resist him. If ever a man could push her buttons, it was this salesman.

She saw the huge teddy bear first.

“Hi, sweetheart.” Clifford’s head appeared from behind the stuffed animal. His grin stretched wide.

“Clifford.” Her relief was so great, she nearly succumbed to tears.

“Just a little something special so you’ll know how much I love you.”