Cashed In

by Jackie Chance

  “It’s ticklish.” I tried not to wiggle.

  “Be still,” she ordered.

  I tried. “Uh, Valka, how long do I have to keep this crap on?”

  “One and one half hours. And it is not crap. It is antioxidant, that means anticrap.”

  I was going to have to be squishy in the anticrap for that long? It’d better tighten up the cellulite is all I could say.

  She flipped me over like a giant tuna on a boat deck and began kelping me on the topside. Ick. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t believe I was undergoing such needless torture. I really didn’t care that much about my oxidants, after all. I didn’t even make the appointment, for goodness’ sake. Then, I remembered my Dad’s favorite saying, “What doesn’t kill you is certainly good for you.” I think he meant it about some life experience more substantial than kelp on my rump, but I’d use it here anyway.

  Valka then proceeded to cleanse my face with a series of implements that felt like fine coral, acid and sandpaper, respectively. Then she clapped her hands. “Now, the Dead Sea mud.”

  Goody.

  The mud was warm and more soothing than the kelp. The only negative was it smelled to high heaven. I was afraid I would throw up my lunch.

  “Stop wrinkling your nose,” she commanded.

  “Blech,” I argued.

  “After all the synthetic products you live in and around, you just aren’t accustomed to the clean smell of nature. Open your mind. This is cleansing. Relax.” She paused and I heard her sliding open a window. “Here, I will introduce the sun-drenched sea air to help you.”

  I opened my mind, took a deep breath, tried to relax and cringed. The waves emanating from the walls were pounding harder and harder and harder. I was feeling a bit pummeled. A piece of kelp slid off my thigh and onto the floor. “Uh, Valka? Could I go with the whales now? We’re in a perfect storm in here. Not too relaxing.”

  Valka sighed weightily, washed the mud off her hands in the basin, closed up the kelp and walked to the far door, pausing with a hand on the knob. “I will go change it and you just do deep breathing. Close your eyes. Feel nature. Feel the kelp and the mud drawing the poisons out of your body. Feel your body healing. I will be back later.”

  I know dolphins are smart but whales are more relaxing, fins down. Their deeper voices booming and whooshing lulled me into a state where I could somehow assimilate all I’d been through in the last twenty-four hours. It didn’t bring me to any conclusions, but I did get it organized in my mind.

  I looked up just as I was about to drift off to sleep and noticed something out of place amidst the synthetic vine curling up the corner of the room to the ceiling. It took me a moment to recognize a hidden video camera. My first thought was that my brother, who was surely paying for my funky clothes and all this pampering, had installed something to record his money’s worth by putting me all over the Internet. My second thought was Hans telling me the cruise line had to keep an eye on their passengers. Was some guy in a video room watching me get covered with seaweed? My third thought was Solis telling me the cameras near Rawhide’s hat and Rick’s attack had been covered. Then I saw a carefully placed hank of sea kelp hung over the lens.

  Uh-oh.

  Before I could figure out how to move, handicapped by kelp, Saran Wrap, Dead Sea mud and whale ergonomics, something fell over my face and everything went dark.

  Fourteen

  I should have been scared, but instead I was just pissed off. Serene to psycho in 1.2 seconds. I yanked at the piece of material over my face and tried to sit up. The material wasn’t coming off easily, adhered to my head by something stubborn—duct tape, I’d bet. Or perhaps the mud had glued it to my face. I oozed off the table anyway, hitting a body, which yelped. I felt hands grabbing at me, my slippery antioxidant suddenly my ally. I’d have thought the kelp would be falling willy-nilly in my angered gyrations, but I suspected Valka had mixed in some herbal glue to make it stick.

  I sensed two people in the room, but the song of whales in full mating disoriented me as I banged into the jars against the wall. One fell to the floor with a sloshy thump and I grabbed at one on the wall and yanked off the top, brandishing it as a weapon. I hoped it was the baby poop- colored goo, and furthermore, that it smelled even worse than it looked. I heard a groan, then a muffled voice that could’ve been an alto or a tenor say: “Just throw her out the window.”

  Ack. I wondered if sharks liked kelp and Dead Sea mud. I knew that open window was a bad idea. Damn Valka.

  A hand tried to grab at me again and I flung the contents of the jar in the direction where the attached body should be. I heard a tortured gurgling and suddenly worried that I had burned the bad guy with acid. But then my preservation instinct kicked in—I threw the entire jar at him, apparently onto another vital body part because there was a distinct “oof.” Then I slid past the other bad guy, letting the breeze from the open window orient me, and dove for where the door to freedom should be. I knocked over two pieces of art on the wall before hitting the knob. I wrenched open the door and felt my head snap back as someone grabbed at my hair and the tail of the towel around my face. I ran forward anyway, wrenching the towel off my head, and taking half my hair out with the duct tape that had held it on. With a small yelp of pain, I kept going down the labyrinth hallway.

  I ran past the startled receptionist, down the corridor and straight into a six-foot hunk of man.

  “Whoa, mermaid,” he said, hands on my shoulders. “You’re pretty far from the water. It’s out there.” He pointed over the side of the railing.

  I struggled against him. “I don’t want to die.”

  He laughed. “There might be a lot of things on my mind right now, mermaid, but killing you isn’t one of them.”

  I looked up into the face of the Marlboro Man.

  Ack. Of course. Just my luck. I would win tonight in cards if I lived long enough to play because I was embarrassing myself beyond imagination. “What’s on your mind?” I asked weakly.

  He laughed, a nice, solid trustworthy laugh, and doffed his button-down short sleeved shirt, pulling it out of his jeans and unbuttoning it with amazing quickness. He put it around my shoulders and let me button it down.

  His chest, I noticed as I buttoned, was awesome. Smooth, tan, muscular six-pack that he clearly worked for. Total stud muffin. Brad Pitt perfect. He was gallant, an awesome specimen. And I still missed Frank. Dammit.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Where do I start?”

  “Wherever you want to,” he began patiently, then the phalanx of spa staff descended on us.

  “Miss Cooley,” a woman whose nametag said she was Spa Manager Gretchen spoke with a patronizing tone, putting her arm around my shoulder and trying to direct me back through the spa doors. I stopped outside. “We are so sorry you got upset. You should have told one of us you were claustrophobic.”

  “I’m not claustrophobic!”

  “She just didn’t like the kelp,” Valka told her boss, shaking her head at me. “You should not have such a closed mind. The toxins you lock in your body will kill you.”

  “What’s going to kill me are the men you let in the room who wanted to fling me out the window!”

  “Men?” The Marlboro Man asked in a quiet, hard voice. His face darkened, and he looked really upset, more than he should for a mere stranger. I was touched, but before I could say thank you, he pushed through the spa doors and disappeared.

  Meanwhile, Gretchen, Valka and the two other spa women who’d appeared shared a look that said I was crazy. Valka tsked. “I should not have turned on the whales.”

  “The whales?” Gretchen blurted. Valka nodded. Gretchen turned to me. “We need to get rid of the whale song. We’ve had some trouble with it causing hallucinations.”

  “I didn’t hallucinate being blindfolded, groped and threatened to be thrown into the sea.”

  “Groped, sure, she wishes,” one of the spa assistants, Moira, muttered.

  �
�Look,” I said. “Call security. If Valka didn’t let the bad guys out the back door, then they are still in the spa somewhere.”

  Valka straightened her spine until she was four inches taller. “I let no one in or out!”

  “Okay,” I said as Gretchen called security. “Let’s go find them, then. I will show you what happened.”

  “Don’t you want to wait until your boyfriend comes back?” Moira asked.

  “He’s not my boyfriend. I don’t even know his name,” I realized aloud. “He just caught me as I ran out and let me borrow a shirt.”

  “How do you know he’s not one of your bad guys?” Gretchen asked.

  “They were chasing me. He was in front of me.”

  All four women shared a raised eyebrow, then led the way back to the spa. I scanned the labyrinth hallway for the blindfold with half my head of hair with it, but it was empty. I started to get an icky feeling in the pit of my stomach. As we opened the door, I could see the place was a mess—and there was no proof I just hadn’t made it all myself.

  “It’s okay, the video camera will show what happened,” Gretchen said.

  They looked up and saw the lens covered in what I was still wearing. Four sets of eyes slowly looked back at me. Hans peeked in the door and reported the spa was empty except for one woman undergoing cellulite reduction therapy in another room who hadn’t seen anyone but Moira. No evidence of any intruders. He threw me a sympathetic look.

  “No towel blindfold and duct tape with auburn hair in it, by chance?” I asked.

  Hans shook his head. “Have you checked your purse? Were you robbed?”

  I reached under the table and opened the magnetic clasp on my Michael Kors. Travelers checks, check. Passport, check. Cabin key, check. Note? I riffled through cosmetics. No note. “Something’s gone.”

  “Your money?” Hans stepped forward. “Your room key?”

  “No, those and my identification are all there. A note is missing.”

  “What kind of note?”

  “A threatening note I just got at lunch.”

  Hans frowned. “What did it say?”

  “It warned me not to play detective or I’d be gone too.”

  Hans rubbed his forehead. “That’s the only thing missing?”

  I nodded.

  “Maybe the situations with Mr. Santobella and Mr. Jones have made you a bit overwrought. You were up all night, after all. I suggest you head back to your cabin and get a little rest. I’ll look into the note and intruders once you can give me a description.”

  “I didn’t see them.”

  “Were they men or women?”

  “Either.”

  There was much eye rolling. Hans sighed heavily. They obviously all thought I was a fruit loop. Great. The spa staff began to disperse.

  It was hopeless to try to make them believe me. I began to gather my clothes.

  “We won’t be charging you for the damage, Miss Cooley, since you are a poker star.” Gretchen said, obviously reluctantly. “Also, we are willing to begin your spa treatment over again . . .”

  “Oh, that’s not necessary,” I said as I slipped my shoes on.

  Moira, who’d begun to clean up, reached around the back of the potted vine and picked up something, holding it out to me. “You must have dropped this.”

  In her hand was a rainbow-jeweled phone case. Hmm. Maybe the bad guys weren’t all guys after all.

  There was no record of Kinkaid ever taking a spa treatment, although the receptionist admitted that cruise officials didn’t have to make appointments and often made private arrangements with staff for a quickie spa visit. None of those on duty at the time admitted to working on Kinkaid, but I supposed if she and Valka were in on some conspiracy she wouldn’t admit it.

  I was beginning to feel as ridiculous as the spa staff wanted me to feel as I tucked the phone case into the zippered compartment of my purse and took my now semi-sticky self out on the deck. I had rinsed my face clean, drew my hair back in a ponytail to hide the hunks missing and picked most of the wads of seaweed off, hoping Marlboro Man’s shirt would look like a swimsuit cover-up, making it appear I had spent the afternoon in the pool instead of getting kelped and almost killed.

  Marlboro Man had never reappeared. I wished I’d thought to ask his name. Still, I had to remind myself that, after the note, I couldn’t trust anyone on board except for the three members of my family. As kind as he’d been and as much as my instincts told me he was safe, the Marlboro Man did have incredible timing today—he’d been walking by the table just as I read the note, and later, just as I fled my attackers.

  I thought about the people who had known I was going to the spa—Ingrid, Kinkaid . . .

  “I thought you said you were busy all afternoon?”

  And, of course, Ian.

  I turned as he reached me, giving me an intense once-over, pausing longest at the shirt. “Busy with some afternoon delight, I suppose, when all this time I thought you were getting a massage at the spa.”

  Although I was flattered that he was jealous, he certainly had no right to be and that irritated me. “I was—a sea kelp wrap and Dead Sea mud facial.”

  “I thought you were supposed to look refreshed and relaxed after a trip to the spa. You look like you’ve been put through the wringer.” He squinted at my legs. “And I think they forgot to get some of the kelp off your right calf . . .”

  “My visit got cut short.”

  “Which is why you are wearing another man’s shirt?”

  “How do you know this belongs to a man? I could have an affinity for Ralph Lauren button-downs.”

  “Ten sizes too big? I’m a psychologist, remember, Belinda,” Ian said. “Plus, I’ve seen your sense of style and it isn’t masculine in the least.”

  “Don’t think you’ve got me all figured out, Ian Reno, because I will prove you wrong,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest and eschewing the elevator for the stairs. Halfway up I realized it was a bad idea since I had absolutely no underwear on and the shirt was indeed that much too big. The Marlboro Man had shoulders to rival Arnold Schwarzenegger. Too bad Ringo hadn’t saved me. His shirt would’ve fit me.

  I think Ian was enjoying the view from about fifteen stairs behind me because he wasn’t rushing. I put the Michael Kors at my rump. I was almost at the next deck when I saw a familiar pair of blue jean-clad legs saunter by. Marlboro Man! I turned on the gas.

  “Hey, Belinda, slow down,” Ian called behind me.

  Marlboro Man, wearing a new blue button-down, had disappeared around the corner of a billboard advertising the Hold ’Em tournament. He tapped my photo with an index finger as he went by. I bumped into a woman who gave me a queer look (who could blame her) before jumping out of my way. I rounded the billboard and saw Marlboro Man making his way through the double glass doors leading to the outside deck. I opened my mouth to call out, but stopped myself. What could I say? Hey, dude? Yo, cowboy?

  Ian caught up with me and saw me watching Marlboro Man, who’d stopped on deck next to the railing to talk to a man in a white and gold cruise ship uniform. “That’s him, isn’t it? My competition.”

  “That’s him,” I muttered distractedly. Both mens’ backs were to me, but their posture denoted an intensity in their conversation, although neither man gestured or moved much at all.

  “You were chasing him so hard, why didn’t you call to him to wait for you?”

  I looked at Ian, still trying to figure out why the cruise employee Marlboro Man was talking to seemed so familiar. “Because I don’t know his name,” I answered distractedly.

  Fifteen

  By the time I worked up the nerve to go interrupt Marlboro Man’s conversation, he and the ship employee had moved off in separate directions. As much as I wanted to know MM’s name, I was curious about the employee too. If I caught up with him, I could always ask the name of the big cowboy who he’d just been talking to. There was something about the way the employee strode with purpose that said pow
er, in a way that seemed at odds for a person who wore his name on his lapel. But before I could get within ten feet of him, he ducked into an employees-only door that clicked shut.

  “Damn, damn, damn.” I muttered.

  “What is going on, Belinda?” Ian demanded.

  I looked at him in surprise. I’d forgotten I had a shadow.

  I sniffed. Something smelled suspiciously like a familiar soap. I thought Ian wore Obsession. I sniffed again. “Do you wash with Dove?”

  Ian cocked his head at me, drawing his eyebrows together. “No. What does that have to do with anything? What is going on?”

  “I wish I knew.” I shook my head. I must be going crazy, missing Frank so much I thought I smelled his soap. Silly.

  “Do you think your boyfriend’s gay?” Ian asked, putting an understanding hand on my arm. “There was obviously something between those two out there. Is that what this is about, your hurt pride?”

  “Noooo.” I paused for a breath of patience. “First off, that’s not my boyfriend. Obviously, since I told you I don’t even know his name.”

  “That’s just the story you told me.”

  “That also happens to be the true story. I want to talk to him because I suspect he went looking for the guys who attacked me in the spa, and I want to know what he found out.”

  Ian gasped, grabbing my shoulders, looking into my eyes as if they would tell him more than my mouth would. “You were attacked? Are you okay?”

  I nodded. “I’m just pissed off and slightly embarrassed.” I paused to flash a fake smile at a couple who were eyeballing me in disdain. They hurried away.

  I’d expected Ian to jump on the overwrought band-wagon but he didn’t. “What do you think is going on?”

  I shrugged. “Someone has it out for me. I got a threatening note under my dessert plate at lunch. After you ditched me.”