Ocean Burning (3 page)

A silence hung between us.

“You haven’t changed a bit,” I said finally.

“You think? Well, you hardly look five years older. You might even look younger.”

“Clean living,” I said.

“I couldn’t believe it when I heard you were down here. At first I wasn’t sure we’d be here on the west coast, but once we decided, I knew I’d have to look you up. I can’t believe you own a boat!”

“Speaking of the boat—how much?” said the man standing next to her. I had almost forgotten about him.

I tugged my eyes away from Carmen and her sundress, and tumbling back down off the cloud I’d been walking on, turned to face our third wheel.

“Well,” I said, pausing to give him a quick once-over. He was handsome, I’ll give him that, with dark hair slicked straight back and an aquiline nose stolen right off a Roman bust. He wore it well, but I consoled myself with the fact that it was a bit too big for his fine-boned face. He dressed well too. There was a fine weave to everything he wore, all of it tastefully understated.

Worst of all, he was taller than me.

“How rude of me,” Carmen said. “This is Ben Hawking.”

“Pleasure,” he said, and proffered his hand.

I took it, and made sure to pour some extra power into my grip. I tried to crush him.

He grinned affably.

“Well,” I coughed, “the cost depends on the rental. We can do hourly or daily.”

“What about a couple of days,” he said. “Can we sleep on board?”

“Sure,” I said quickly, already thinking of the passenger berths currently crowded with junk. “She’ll sleep four comfortably, six in a pinch. How long were you thinking exactly?”

Ben stroked his chin, fingered the cleft there in the middle. “However long Carmen wants. This whole thing was her idea. It’s a kind of early wedding present.”

“Oh?” I asked. “For who?”

“For us.”

I stood slack-jawed, just looking at them. After ten seconds of awkward silence, Carmen couldn’t take it anymore.

“Ben is my fiance,” she said. Then and only then did my powers of observation extend down to her fingers. My head ratcheted down and my eyes scanned her left hand.

An elegant gold band circled her ring finger, plain as day, and the diamond setting danced in the light, taunting me.

After that, I barely heard a word either of them said.

Ben and I quickly agreed on a price because, somehow, I couldn’t even bring myself to haggle. We set a time to leave the next day, and Ben suggested I come out to dinner with them that night. I looked at Carmen, who was looking lovingly at Ben Hawking.

This is your chance,
I thought,
to get her back.

Dinner sounded great, I told them.

I watched them shrink as they walked down the pier, and then they were gone, and I was alone with the burning Mexican sun.

I climbed up onto my boat’s sundeck and let its rays flay me over the next few hours. I never felt a thing. I thirsted for water, but filled only the narrow blue glass I use for whiskey. Filled it again and a third time until my insides burned as fiercely as my skin did. By sunset, I’d made a list in my head of all the things I needed to do to make the
Regal Purple
guest-ready and seaworthy. I needed to make up the beds, refuel the tanks, check the batteries, stock the galley, take on drinking water.

None of that got done.

Instead I drank and watched the sun die a slow death by lowering itself into the Pacific. Sunsets down there are usually red, but that night it skewed toward rose. It matched the color of Carmen’s dress exactly.

I tried not to think about her, which only made it worse. It was like when I try to fall asleep: I know the key is to
not
think about falling asleep, to just forget about it. But of course in the process of reminding myself not to think about sleep, or my lack of it, I would. And then I would be back to square one.

So it was with Carmen. She danced in and out of my head, my mind invaded with memories. I’m not good with people, but she and I had been good together. Waking up next to her, morning sun bathing my cheap apartment, throwing back the five-hundred-thread-count sheets she’d insisting on buying me—all of it came back. It filled my head until I thought it would burst.

Reaching up to rub the spot between my eyes, I realized I could still smell her on me. Carmen always smelled faintly of citrus, light and fresh. Like the infusion of orange steaming off a cup of hot Earl Grey tea, it was always in the background, adding something extra that you never even noticed.

Until it was gone.

I’d lived for Carmen, right up until the day she disappeared.

Five years is a long time to harbor feelings, even I knew that. She seemed happy, and for a second I wondered if it was right to try and wedge myself between her and Ben.

But Carmen was always happy, that was her gift. She would be as happy with me as with anyone else. My life, on the other hand, would improve ten-fold.

I folded my sweat-stained canvas chair, corked the bottle, glanced around the boat before I locked it up.

Things certainly couldn’t get any worse.

Chapter 3

I PUMPED OUT one hundred pushups right there on the deck, trying to evaporate the booze into the fading twilight. I jumped up and grabbed the overhang of the conning tower and cranked out some pullups. There was a time I could remember doing fifteen without breaking a sweat. Tonight I counted five, and the last took everything I had to give.

Then I took a shower in the marina’s locker room, walked back to the
Regal Purple
, put on a breathable knit shirt, and headed into town on the bicycle I keep stowed away on land.

I broke a sweat again, pumping my legs up a couple of hills, but didn’t think anything of it. The heat down here was omnipresent. Sweat wasn’t dirty, just a fact of life. I knew the light fabric of the shirt would do its job, wicking and evaporating. My legs had it worse, burning up in a pair of oil-soaked jeans. They started to burn and throb as I reached the top of the last hill and braked.

The clock in the little town square was edged in adobe and read five after seven as I locked up the bike. Dinner wasn’t until seven-thirty, but I had plans for those extra twenty-five minutes. I picked a side street with promise and wandered up and down the shops, peering into windows until I found the one I wanted.

The little store had class, but not too much; quality, but without the exorbitant price tags meant for tourists. The proprietor was a short, dark-skinned man with a drooping mustache and a bad toupee. He found me a pair of slim light-colored pants that looked like chinos, but when I slid them on the material was silky and smooth.

“Cuales son estos?” I asked, and ran my fingers down the fold line.

“For golf,” he said in English. I nodded, retrieved some crumpled pesos from the back pocket of the wrecked jeans, and paid him. I asked if he had had a garbage can, and he pointed toward a cut-off fifty five gallon drum stowed behind the counter. I crumpled the jeans up and stuffed them inside.

At two minutes to seven I strode into the restaurant, bursting with the confidence only a pair of new pants can provide. I had never been inside the place before, though I had lived here for more than two years.

One glance around and I knew why. The place was candlelit, with waiters in tuxes and busboys in ties. I felt sure I could guess the menu price of Mahi Mahi without even looking. Somewhere in the stratosphere, I bet myself, and I could catch them by the dozens any time I dropped a line more than a half-mile off shore.
Tourist prices,
I thought.

I caught sight of Carmen in a private alcove in the back. She looked resplendent in red sitting at a table for three, the light of a candle flickering off her. Alone.

I threaded my way between the other small, intimate settings, and sat down.

“Where’s Ben?” I asked.

She smiled. “I told him dinner was at eight.”

My heartbeat quickened into a two-step. “Why would you do that?”

“So we could be alone, of course, so you could ask me the thing you want to ask me.”

I said nothing.

“So ask already.” She batted her eyes at me.

The plan to play it cool evaporated. My hands clutched at the side of the table. “What happened to you? What happened to you five years ago? Where did you go? I went down to get the engraving plates, and when I came back, you were gone.”

She reached out and put a hand on top of mine. A single tear rolled out of one of her big green eyes. “I know, Frank. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for you.”

I brushed a strand of hair out of her face, then reversed my hand and used the back to wipe her cheek. “I was worried. I mean, I was mixed up in some stuff there for awhile. I know you weren’t really involved, but I thought there was an outside chance…” I trailed off.

“That I’d been killed?”

“Yeah.”

“Nothing nearly that dramatic. The police pulled me over in downtown Guadalajara. I didn’t have a passport, so they wanted money. I didn’t have any, so they put me in lockup.”

“And then?”

“And that’s it. I sat there in lockup. I’m sure they thought I was just another tourist whose husband would come running in with a fat wallet. I couldn’t call you—you never had a phone.” She wiped away some of the tears herself, started to laugh. “Probably still don’t.”

I grinned and nodded.

“Eventually I got my brother in LA to wire them some money, and they cut me loose. But that was four, maybe five days after they picked me up. And you were gone.” She looked at me, long and hard.

I detected something like reproach in her glance, as though I’d abandoned her. Something caught in my throat.

”Long gone, Frank,” she said.

“It wasn’t like that,” I said. “Two days after you disappeared, the
Federales
kicked down my door.”

She sat up straight, reached out and grabbed my hand again. “What are you talking about?”

“Someone tipped them off about the engraving plates. Not that Mexicans particularly care about someone counterfeiting American dollars, but who turns down a softball? They knew exactly where everything was. Miguel and I got interrogated together, then separately, for days on end. For awhile there I thought they were going to forget the investigation. Just forget about us, lock us up and throw away the key.”

She leaned in across the table. “Who tipped them off?” she whispered.

I liked that she didn’t skirt around the sixty-four thousand dollar question. Her face was open, her red red mouth a little “O” of surprise and worry.

“Miguel was pretty sure you did,” I said, and sat back and waited.

For a minute she said nothing, didn’t react at all. Then her face blended into confusion, then contorted into rage. She closed one hand into a fist and brought it down on the tabletop, rattling the silverware together. Everyone looked at us.

“He said what?” she said, her voice much too loud.

I put both hands out, palms down, and lowered them, signaling for her to lower her voice.

“He said what?” she repeated, in a hoarse whisper that sounded like a growl.

“He said that you did it, turned us in for the reward. Said that you were the one that introduced us, after all.”

“And you believe him?”

I studied her face, and went with my gut. It never let me down, and right now is was telling me Carmen was telling the truth. Either that or she was giving an Oscar caliber performance.

“No,” I said, and she let out the breath she had been holding. “No, I don’t believe him.”

“You really don’t?” she sighed.

“No. You were always a terrible liar, Carmen. Remember my surprise party?” We both laughed. “Besides, Miguel was somehow walking around downtown by the third night after the raid, and someone shot him. They called it a robbery,” I paused, “but it seemed too much of a coincidence. The thing about cutting a deal with the
Federales
is that they never keep their word.”

“And what about you?” she asked.

“Me? I’m still sending an envelope of cash to a police lieutenant every month. I probably will be as long as I want to stay in Mexico.”

“And you bought the boat?”

“With everything I had left. They had me close enough to the prison that I could smell it, and that was enough for me. I mean, it was the building next to the station—I could actually smell the place, Carmen. Talk about a deterrent. I haven’t even dreamed about easy money since then.”

She seemed to imagine me locked up in there, and her smile collapsed. “It was my fault,” she said, and another tear rolled down her cheek.

I felt my face soften. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“No, really. If I had never met Miguel, if I had never let him convince me how simple the whole plan would be to pull off, if I had never even told you about it…we would still be together.”

The two-step in my chest turned into a tango. “We can be together,” I said.

“Frank…”

“Frank Conway!” The high-pitched voice pierced the air behind me. I turned reluctantly, and regretted it immediately.

Maria stood behind me, dressed to the nines, her filmy dress perfectly white and contrasting against her nut brown skin. Her hair was up, her lips had been rouged.

“Franky, Franky, Franky,” she said, and patted the side of my face. An empty wine glass hung loosely in one hand. I doubted it had been her first. “Como esta? How’s the date going?”

“It’s not a date,” I said.

“Hey lady, remember me?” Maria asked.

“Of course,” Carmen said, “From the marina office. Maria, right?”

“Not just the marina office, ba-by.” She stretched the word out in her mouth, a mockery of the American pronunciation. “Me and Frank, we used to date.”

“Maria, please—”

“But then he left. Stopped coming by. Wouldn’t even look at me. Isn’t that right, Frank?”

I stared at her, tried to wish her away. “Sometimes things just don’t work out,” I said lamely.

“Love ’em and leave ’em. Is that it?” Her smile morphed into something ugly. She hurled the wine glass at my head. I saw it coming, froze, ducked just in time. It whistled by my ear and shattered on the tile floor behind me.