Tango Key (32 page)

"Looks like you were right, Allie."

Maybe
, she thought. The marine and food supplies fit with her theory, but the other stuff didn't. "Then why didn't they take most of this stuff to her boat? Why bring it here?"

"And risk drawing attention? Hell, this is much better. Who's going to find the stuff here?"

She looked at him. "We did."

July 6, 12:05 P.M.

W
hen her eyes open, there is nothing but blackness.

Eve remains absolutely still. She waits for the voice of God or Satan, angels or demons. She hears only the quick, steady pulse of her heart. But how can her heart beat if she's dead? And if she's not dead, then why is it so black? Hey. Of course. That's the goddamn joke. You die, but you can still think. And if you can think, then you recreate what you remember of life—like the throb in her gums and the stickiness between her legs.

She closes her eyes, waiting.

Nothing happens.

She becomes aware of the hard pressure in her bladder, the cold stiffness in her back, the stuffiness of the air. She sits up. If she can sit up, she can't be dead. All right. She will assume she isn't dead. Then where the fuck is she?

Memories slide back, unbidden. She whimpers, pulls her legs up against her, presses her head against her knees. Bile surges in her throat. She's gonna throw up.

You throw up and you live with it in here.

She won't get sick. She won't. She swallows. She forces the nausea down.

I was naked then, when he caught me.
But not now. She's wearing . . . Her hands feel her clothes. A cotton T-shirt. Jeans. The jeans are loose on her. He probably bought them
 
and got her size wrong. No, he doesn't make mistakes. He bought her size but she has lost weight. A lot of it.

She stretches her arms in front of her. Her fingers brush wood. The door. She pats it, defining the shape, seeking the knob. She finds it. Turns it. The door doesn't give. He has shoved something up against it. The bureau. She's in the other room now.
The room where we stored the supplies.

Her fingers dig along the crack between the door and the floor. She feels the fuzz of a blanket.

She stands, stretches her arms over her head until she brushes the bottom of the shelf. She turns, lets her fingers walk along it as her feet follow. She reaches the end and steps to the left, presses her back to the wall and reaches up to the shelf. Her nails scratch the paper bags. She claws at them, moves along to her right, looking for the gallons of water. Jesus, the water. She needs water worse than food, worse than a toilet, worse than anything. Farther back there. Oh God, there it is. One of the gallons. She grabs it, holds it against her as she sinks to the floor. She works the cap off and tilts it to her mouth, gulping at the water. It dribbles over her chin, down her chest, between her legs. She pours some in the palm of her hand and splashes it on her face. She anoints her feet with it. The water, all this water, releases memories of water.

She is four, swimming in a pool at the Y with her father for the first time. He holds her, he helps her float, he says,
Don't be afraid, Evie. Let your head go under,
and she does and it's another world, cool and silent. She is ten. She and the boy next door are playing in the yard, spraying each other with the hose. She is thirteen, soaking in a hot tub and the water turns pink
with blood because she has started her period. Sixteen, and this time the water is a torrent of rain and she dances in it. Water.

When the gallon is empty, when she is sitting in a puddle of water, when it is seeping into her jeans, she leaps up and finds the second one. The third. She brings both down onto the floor with her. She clutches one against her, rocking it, and presses the soles of her bare feet against the other jug, liking its coolness against her skin, the way its sides give a little, as though the jug is filled with Jell-O.

There's something she's not remembering about this closet, something she discovered one night when she was up here. Something important. What? Do the walls slide away? Does the floor pull up? Is there a hidden window? Another door? Yes, something like that. But what? What?

Murphy had walked out of the room and . . .

That's all she remembers.

The memory flutters against the edges of her mind like a hideous moth, but she can't grab it. It soars away from her and she is alone again, rocking the jug, weeping, whispering for her daddy, rocking, rocking.

T
he kangaroo was the first thing Aline saw when she opened her eyes. It was fixed at an angle on the ceiling above Kincaid's bed, sandwiched between posters of the Copacabana and Machu Picchu. It looked . . . well, happy. That weird little mouth that could've been a smile, those ears, that pouch, those small upper arms, and those eyes, huge and brown and soulful.

She heard thunder and, closer in, the shower, and felt a momentary regret that he was already up. She rolled onto her stomach and reached for her purse at the side of the bed, digging inside for her pocket calendar. It, like the kitchen calendar, had lots of little red L's in June, all right, and most of them were followed by a K. She made a neat red L in the slot for Friday, July 3, then slapped it shut, dropped it back into her purse, and threw off the covers.

The first thing she saw as she sat up was a Ladeco airline ticket, tucked under a corner of the phone on the nightstand. She slid it out and opened it. One-way Miami/Santiago with a return from Buenos Aires. The return date was open, but the departure date was August 1. She stared at it. A swell of something that shouldn't have been there thumped hard against her ribs. This was supposed to have been a breezy relationship, nothing more, something to get her over the hump of Murphy. And Murphy was supposed to have been an interlude, with her helping him over the hump of Monica's death. But "supposed to be" never turned out the way you expected, at least not on Tango Key.

This was what happened on an island where women outnumbered men two to one. This. This soft, subtle weave of illusion with its iridescent threads that embraced you, caressed you, intoxicated you. She slid the ticket back under the phone and sat there with her hands clenched against her thighs
. I will now get up and put on my clothes and leave. I will not call Kincaid. I will not make any more marks on my calendar. I will go about my business. Find the gold frog. I will . . .

But she was standing. She was moving toward the bathroom and the din of the shower. She was opening the door. She was walking through the steam, pulling back the curtain, peeking inside. She was saying, "Hey, you didn't wait for me," and Kincaid was turning around, and he grinned and she grinned and he tossed her the soap and she missed, and it hit the floor of the tub with a thud. As she stepped in and reached to retrieve the soap, he beat her to it. Now she felt his hands against her spine, her buttocks, soapy hands that slid over her breasts and belly as she leaned back into him.

"You feel so good," he said, his mouth against her ear, a hand gathering her hair, sliding it to one side so it hung over her shoulder. Now those same hands were gliding between her thighs with the soap, moving down her thighs to her calves, her feet. She opened her eyes and turned and looked down at him, the water drumming around them. His mouth followed his hands back up her leg, leaving behind a river of fever. She slid down the wall of the shower, and he turned off the water, and in the silence, the strange, tight silence, she took him in her hands, stroking until he was hard, and he licked the beads of water from her kneecaps, making her laugh. Then he slid the bar of soap over her belly again and drew designs in the foam with the tip of his finger.

With his tongue, he inscribed tight circles around her nipple until it was taut, distracting her from the light touch of his adventurous finger that slid down the center of her and home. She moved her hips against the pressure
 
of his hand. He kissed her again. He picked her up, carried her into the bedroom, and lowered her to the bed. His hand never left, his finger sliding, teasing, then moving in quick, tight circles against her until she could barely breathe. She whispered, "You're making me crazy."

"That's the point." He slid his tongue along her lower lip as though he were savoring it like wine. "It's me, Al. Ryan. Not Murphy."

He breathed the words into her. Her lungs filled with the words. Her awareness shrank to a small orb of sentience, then expanded like a brilliant light until she seemed to be in two places at once—on the bed with Kincaid and somewhere near the ceiling, watching. She could see the muscles tighten in the back of Kincaid's legs as he entered her. She saw her own hands against his back, kneading his spine, his shoulders, his buttocks. They rolled. The sheets slipped off the bed and puddled against the floor. She saw herself rising up over him, her hair a twisted dark river against her back. She was there, inside herself, insider her own bones, and yet she had also shed the boundaries of her skin and melded into something greater, into the light that pulsed with the essence of whatever it was she and Kincaid became together. The ribbon of braided light that they were suddenly exploded in the center, spewing shards of blinding color, reds that beat like tiny hearts, blues that glistened like a sun struck sea, greens deeper than emeralds.

Outside, the rain poured down and wind rattled the windows and the part of her that had floated away returned, settling into the curve of his body, as snug as a ship in a harbor.

W
hen she awakened again, Kincaid was on the phone, his back to her. Aline rolled onto her side and drew her finger down his spine. He glanced around and smiled. ". . . yeah, I'll give her the message, Ferret, thanks. . . . What?" He laughed. "Okay, I'll pass that on, too." He hung up and slid back under the sheet next to her, his hand cruising over her arm. "Ferret says there's been no word on who broke into your place and got blasted by your little friend. He figures it was someone from off the island, otherwise he would've heard about it by now."

"Whoever it was, I'm kind of grateful," she said, turning on her side so she faced him.

"You are?"

"Sure. Otherwise you might not have stuck around that night and we might not have ended up at the cove."

"So I have a skunk to thank for that, huh?" He chuckled and kissed her, then peeled the sheet away from her skin.

His mouth slid along the ridge of her collarbone. "You going into work?" he asked, his hand pressing against the inside of her thigh.

"Not if you keep doing that."

"This?"

"Hmmm."

"And this?"

"Unfair, Kincaid."

"How about this?"

"That, too."

He raised his head. "Oh, I'm also supposed to tell you that Ferret thinks it's time you bet two grand on a sure thing."

"Hmmm," she murmured, and he laughed softly and went back to what he'd been doing.

A
t 8:30 sharp that evening, Aline and Kincaid were at Lilly Monroe's door in the Flamingo Hotel. With Ed Waite a no-show, Aline supposed Lilly would be delighted to have some other sucker fill the slot. And, hey, why not two suckers?

But the muscle guy who answered the door looked from Aline to Kincaid, then down at the sheet of paper in his hand and shook his head. "Got one name here only. Ed Waite."

"Ed Waite won't be able to make it," Kincaid said.

"Lilly only does one reading at a time."

"We're married. We need a reading together. We'll pay her the two hundred bucks."

Muscle Man hemmed. He hawed. Aline's impatience grew to almost immedicable proportions. It would've been easier to have greeted Lilly at the door when she checked in and whisked her down to the station for questioning.

But if nothing else, undercover broke the routine. It was fun to be someone else for a minute or an hour, fun to pretend you were an American from Panama or a woman who needed the wise Lilly's counseling at a hundred bucks a shot.

"Yes or no?" Kincaid snapped. "We don't have all night."

"Yeah, all right. Lilly's on the phone. So come on in and have a seat."

He opened the door wider and they stepped into a suite that smelled of honeysuckle. A card table was set up in the middle of the room. In the center of it was a deck of Tarot cards, an ashtray, a glass of ice water, two chairs on one side, and a big comfortable leather chair for Lilly on the other. Muscle Man knocked on the adjoining door. "Lilly?"

"Coming right out, hon," she called.

Aline and Kincaid took their seats, and a moment later the door opened and a woman in a chatoyant silk jumpsuit the color of ice sailed into the room. She had short, curly red hair that was heavily sprayed and a dusting of freckles across her cheeks. Her lashes were thick with mascara. Aline guessed she was in her early forties and trying to look fifteen years younger.