by Alice Orr
“What’s the story on the hombre I was talking to just now?”
Slater motioned toward the table on the other side of the restaurant. He figured the bartender had been keeping a close eye on what happened back there just in case it escalated into a shoving match. The bartender slipped his palm over the cash then peeked at it between his fingers, probably checking out the amount before deciding how much he would tell.
“Name’s Porfiro Sanchez,” the bartender said. “He comes in here sometimes, mostly to check out the women or maybe to pick up a drive-around job from the turistas.”
“He’s a tour guide?”
“Sí. Drives a big, black car for one of the outfits down on the Costera.”
Slater had examined the Acapulco map on his way here and recognized the name of the main drag, La Costera Miguel Aleman, through the center of town.
“You wouldn’t know the name of that outfit, would you?” he asked.
“I couldn’t tell you that.”
Slater understood that might mean the bartender knew the answer but wasn’t giving it up.
“What can you tell me?”
The man swept the already immaculate surface of the bar with a white rag before responding. “Sanchez hangs out at one of the big hotels out on the strip by the airport. Does tours out of there in the mornings, sometimes afternoons when it’s not too hot for you gringos to take.”
“Which big hotel would that be?” Slater slipped a twenty-peso note across the bar this time.
The bartender palmed the note and slipped it into his pocket. “I think maybe the Princess.”
“Thanks,” Slater said as the bartender went off to get the drinks Slater had ordered.
Slater knew maybe he didn’t need to spend that much cash to find out about some stud making passes, but it was Laurent’s expense account money, so why not? What Slater really wanted to know about was Matty Farraday or Phoenix or whatever she was calling herself now. He figured he’d tapped this bartender enough for one night. Besides, Slater had made contact with the woman. He could pick up what he needed to know first-hand. And he’d already done enough research to come here with a picture of what to expect of her in his mind.
Slater liked to know the territory he was scouting in advance. He didn’t care for surprises. He researched the scene up front so any situation he walked into was already half-familiar to him. In ninety-nine percent of the cases he handled, Slater could figure a person out from top to bottom ahead of time, like putting a puzzle together. People are predictable, even criminals. Slater was good at psyching out their patterns, and he didn’t intend to let a little bit of a thing like Miss Matty Phoenix whatever screw with his system.
Of course, she wouldn’t be considered a little bit of a thing by most measures. She was five seven or so. Still, next to him, she seemed pint-size. She had a fair amount of flesh on her bones though, and all in the right places. Those places and how good they looked had registered somewhere below his belt buckle as soon as he saw her sitting there with that Mexican blouse pulled down just far enough and the outline of her breasts visible under the white cloth. Slater put those dangerous thoughts out of his head right then and told them to stay out. She was a wrongo, a thief, whether she was stealing from another wrongo or not. A thief was forever on the other side of the fence from the solid citizens of the world as far as Slater was concerned.
It was a code of honor for him never to cross that fence in a personal way. Other guys on the force might get involved with women they collared, but not Slater. Especially off-limits were the ones who auctioned off their honesty for money. That’s what this woman had done. She’d seen a chance to put her hands on her boss’s cash, and she’d done it. Then she’d skipped out of the country. She’d even changed her name, or at least part of it. Only criminals did that. She’d run to Mexico with its long history of harboring outlaws and never asking question number one about why they were on the lam. She’d known enough to choose an out-of-the-way hotel, too. She was smart all right, just not smart enough to keep a pro like Slater from finding her.
All the way down here from New York, he’d studied her photograph. He couldn’t stop studying it. Those big, blue eyes had intelligence behind them. She operated her own business, which required brains, even if she used them for making a creep like Beldon Laurent look good to the world. Image Enhancement she called it, which amounted to whitewashing the blackhearted in Slater’s estimation. Still, it took some savvy to be good at what she did, and, according to the information he’d come up with about her, she was good at it. She’d also managed to steal from Laurent who was no mental midget himself. She had to be pretty smart to manage that, though maybe not so wise. Crossing a man like Laurent was about as smart as stepping on a rattlesnake at high noon.
Slater looked back toward where she was sitting and was surprised to see her walking across the restaurant toward him. He couldn’t help indulging himself in a fantasy of how it would be to pull that Mexican blouse off all the way. She was only a couple of feet away when that fantasy made him smile the kind of smile a woman is probably looking for when she comes strutting straight up to a man in a café like this one. He was waiting for her to flash him a matching smile in return when she did something that didn’t fit the pattern he had her plugged into. He was looking right into her blue eyes when it happened. He couldn’t have misread what he saw, and what he saw was fear. In fact, if he hadn’t reached out and grabbed her arm, he’d bet a lot of pesos she’d have run away.
“Hey, what’s the matter?” he asked. “I thought we were going to have a drink and get to know each other a little bit.”
“Please,” she said, resisting his grip without making a scene of it.
She sounded scared, too, but her job was showing people how to act like something they really weren’t. Maybe she was doing that herself now.
“Please,” she said again. “I made a mistake. I don’t think this is a good idea.”
So that was going to be her dodge. The old hard-to-get routine.
“You’d rather be by yourself on a beautiful night like this? Is that what you’re telling me?”
She stared him straight in the eyes for a moment.
“No,” she said. “I’m lonely, and the last thing I want to be is alone.”
He hadn’t expected that. Maybe she was shrewd enough to figure this for the kind of situation where truth is the best gambit.
“Then why are you leaving?”
She couldn’t hold the stare any longer. She took a deep breath and looked down at the floor.
“I just think it’s the smart thing to do.”
She was really good at this. She actually sounded awkward.
“Look,” she said. “I’m grateful to you for getting rid of Porfiro what’s his name, but I really have to get back to my room now.”
She tugged against his grip. He’d pretty much forgotten he was still holding on to her. She glanced up at him long enough for him to see that her cheeks were flaming red, and not just from too much sun. Could she fake a blush like that? Slater didn’t think so. He let go of her arm.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to clamp on to you like that.”
“You’re not the one who needs to apologize. You helped me out and now I’m giving you the brush-off. It’s just that I don’t do this kind of thing, if you know what I mean.”
“That’s okay. I understand,” he said and told himself he wasn’t actually falling under her spell. He stood up from the bar stool anyway, remembering that maybe he should act like a gentleman whether he thought she was a lady or not. “Please, sit down,” he said indicating the next stool.
Sometimes when women gazed up at him and had to strain their necks to do it, as she was now, he felt like a too-tall freak who needed’ to be shrunk back to normal size. She didn’t make him feel that way. She gazed up at him as if she were taking him in, the way she might take in a statue or a mountainside, because she liked the look of it
“Come on, sit down,” he repeated. “You’ll get a charley horse in your neck if you don’t.”
She smiled, and the lights came on in her eyes. That, plus the high color in her cheeks which were dusted by a scattering of pale freckles, made her even more dazzling. In that instant, Slater knew he’d have to work at keeping his head together around her.
“Let’s just have that one drink we were talking about. I’ve already ordered it,” he said.
He’d pulled the stool away from the bar for her to sit down. She looked at the stool then back at him. She was either sincerely reluctant or the best actress he’d ever met. He smiled down at her. Some women had told him he had his own brand of dazzle. He did his best to put whatever that might be into his smile. Maybe it worked because she actually did sit down, though on the very edge of the stool as if to be prepared for a fast takeoff.
“Why’d you do it this time?” he asked.
She looked at him as if she hadn’t a clue what he was talking about.
“You said you never do this kind of thing,” he explained. “I assume you meant you don’t usually ask men you don’t know to have drinks with you. What made you do it this time?”
She stared directly into his eyes, the same way she had before. He had the feeling she was deciding whether he merited more truth, or if she cared enough to bother telling it.
“I told you. I was feeling lonely,” she said.
Her eyes drew him in when she said that, so much so he heard himself nattering, “A woman like you? Lonely?”
He could hardly believe he’d come out with such a drugstore variety line. He sounded like a jerk, trying to palm himself off as a pickup artist
“You know what I mean,” he added and wondered if his cheeks might be red, too, now. He was certainly blushing inside.
She laughed a full, rich laugh that tinkled down his spine from one vertebra to the next.
“I know what you mean,” she agreed. “Nobody ever admits to being lonely because it’s so uncool to be thought of that way, as if it makes you a real loser to be by yourself. Actually, I came to Mexico to be just that. Then all of a sudden tonight I found I was tired of my own company. You happened to come along just after I made that discovery.” She dropped her eyes.
Winsome, she definitely was that.
“So you traveled all the way to Acapulco to be by yourself?”
“Among other things.”
“What other things?”
The minute he said that, he knew it was a mistake. He’d pushed too hard, and now she’d probably run off. Instead, she answered him.
“I came here to be in the place my grandfather used to tell me stories about”
Well, it was an answer anyway. What had he expected? For her to blurt out that she ripped off her boss and came here as a getaway?
“Your grandfather was from Mexico?”
“No, but he lived here for a while, right in this hotel, back in the fifties.”
“I saw the sign out front,” he said. “This place was pretty hot back then.”
“Yes, it was.”
The sign on the front veranda said that La Escarpadura had been a favorite hangout for a lot of Hollywood types back then. Movie stars came down here to get away from the limelight. And maybe from the law, too, Slater thought. He looked around at the colorful decor, the view from atop a high cliff over the ocean. The place had a lot of character. He could imagine some pretty wild parties going on here back in the old days.
“Your grandfather hung out with that Hollywood crowd?”
“So he used to tell me when he was alive.”
The guitar and keyboard combo had come off their break and were beginning to play. The tune they struck up first was “My Way.” Slater would have expected something a little more native. He looked at Phoenix. He saw the laughter in her eyes, and he couldn’t help but laugh himself.
“I guess they’re honoring yet another Hollywood gang,” she said.
Slater stared. He hadn’t a clue what she might be talking about.
“You know,” she said. “Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack.”
“Right. Right.”
“Bad joke. I apologize again.”
“No, not a bad joke. Maybe I just don’t have a sense of humor tonight”
“That’s not the way it works. The joker has to make the jokee laugh. That’s the first rule of joke telling.”
“I see.”
Slater nodded his head, the same one he’d vowed to watch around this woman. Except that, when he’d made that pledge to himself he had no idea she’d turn out to be so likable. He had to remember what he was here for.
“Here are our drinks,” he said as the bartender set the frosty glasses in front of them.
She moved even closer to the edge of her stool, as if the spell of the laugh they’d shared had just been broken and she was about to run away after all.
“Oh, come on,” he urged. “Just one drink, in honor of all Hollywood gangs past, present and future.”
She sighed and settled back a little. “All right, just one. You did tell him to make it light on the tequila, didn’t you?”
Slater stared into her blue eyes and felt a little awkward himself for a moment. He’d had his reasons for coming to the bar to order the drinks. He’d wanted to do so out of her hearing. That way he could ask for one heavy on the alcohol for her. She’d be more forthcoming with the information he needed if she was a bit liquored up, and with all that lime taste in a margarita she wouldn’t be likely to notice the difference. He looked at her now in the soft, peach-colored lighting that was intended to be flattering. He couldn’t help thinking she’d be beautiful even under the starkest of fluorescents. She gazed back at him with a small, tentative, even dreamy smile on her lips, and he found himself wishing he knew the content of those dreams.
Slater turned reluctantly away from her smile and called to the bartender. “Hey, amigo, I made a mistake on that drink order. Make one of those very, very light on the tequila.”
Chapter Three
“Whaddaya want?”
Phoenix stepped back from the closed door at the sound of the harshness in Slater’s voice. She’d felt a tension under his charming exterior back in the restaurant before she’d gone to her room, supposedly for the rest of the night. She’d sensed there was another, not quite so charming side to him even then, but this impatient bark through his hotel room door was much farther down that darker side than she’d expected.
“It’s Phoenix,” she answered, well aware that if she had a brain in her head she’d make a run for it instead.
There was silence from behind the door. Maybe he wasn’t as interested in her as she’d thought. When he took his room key out of his pocket and left it on the bar long enough for her to be sure to see the number on the tag, she’d assumed he was passing on information for possible future use. Maybe he hadn’t intended any such thing. Maybe she should take her own good advice and get out of here right now. She was about to do just that when the door opened, first a crack, then wider, until he was standing full in the doorway leaning against the frame. He was even taller than she remembered him to be, or maybe she was just feeling suddenly small.
The night had been sultry as she walked over here from her room. Now it was sultrier still. She understood that he was the reason for the rising steaminess she couldn’t ignore. She couldn’t breathe easily because of it. He’d made her a bit breathless back in the restaurant, but this was much worse. The size of him took up too much of everything around him, including the air. Or, maybe it was the way his green eyes, dark now in the shadow of the doorway, seemed to pull the night into their depths that made her feel almost giddy. She couldn’t help wanting to see into those deep regions, all the way to the bottom of them, though she suspected that their secrets might frighten her.
“Come in,” he said in a voice as deep and almost as mysterious as his eyes.
Phoenix would have liked to say she hesitated, but she didn’t. She
nodded a thank you and stepped over the threshold.
“I hope it’s not too hot for you,” he said.
Phoenix almost jumped out of her skin, as if he might have heard her thoughts about how sultry he made her feel.
“I don’t like air-conditioning,” he continued. “I prefer real air to the canned kind.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I feel the same way.”
She wasn’t sure why she said that. She could use a blast from a truly frigid air-conditioning unit right now if only to cool her blood some. But then, she hadn’t come here to cool off, had she? She’d come here because, even after their talk in the bar and the laughter they’d shared, she was still unbearably lonely, and he was an extremely attractive man. Of course, she couldn’t give that as an answer when he asked why she was here as he was bound to do.
“Can I get you a drink?” he asked.
“No, thank you.”
“Are you sure? You’re looking a little flushed.”
Her hand flew to her cheek. She was warm, and maybe flaming red as well, even in this subdued light from the one light he had on by the bed. She really was embarrassed now. He must see her as the hot little number she really wasn’t cut out to be. That must be why he didn’t ask why she was here, because he knew she couldn’t resist finding out what it would feel like to be in his arms, in his bed. She had to know if that was what he thought.
“Aren’t you going to ask me why I came to your room?” she heard herself say.
“I already know.”
He’d walked to the dresser and picked up one of the glasses that was sitting there on a tray next to a bottle of water and another bottle that looked like it might be liquor. He turned back toward her. His smile came slow and lazy over the angles of his face. The sensuousness of that smile simmered across the room toward her. Of course, he knew why she was here.