Emily Kimelman - Sydney Rye 03 - Insatiable (10 page)

“So Alejandro believed that he could help the people of Chiapas by turning to your mother’s opponent?”

“He hoped.”

“And this was on the day that your parents called Blane for help.”

“Yes, it appears so.” Ana Maria dropped to her knees. “Please,” she said, clasping her hands together. “Don’t force me to go out on my own. I’ll never survive without you.”

I looked down at her. “I don’t know…”

“Please, I know I can help you. I just know it. Give me a couple more days.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said, standing up. “I’m going out for a bit. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

“I’ll come with you.” She stood, smiling.

“No, stay here. I don’t want anyone to see you.”

“What?”

“For all we know, your parents reported you as kidnapped.” She started to speak, but I cut her off. “Look, I’m in enough shit as it is, getting caught for kidnapping is not on my ‘to do list’ so if you want to stick with me, you’ve got to do what I say.”

Her mouth was a tight line of discontent. “Blue will keep you company,” I said. She didn’t smile. “You can leave any time you want, just not with me.”

“No, I want to stay with you.” She grabbed my hand. “Please don’t make me go back to them. Please.” She started to cry. Ana Maria bowed her head and her whole body shook. What was I supposed to do? I put an arm around her.

“It’s OK,” I told her. “Everything is OK.”

She hiccupped and looked up at me.“You won’t leave me, will you?”

“We will see,” I said.

Her face crumpled and she leaned against me. “I’ll die if you leave me. My parents will kill me.”

“Shh,” I said. “I’m not going to let anyone kill you.”

“You won’t?” she said, looking up at me again.

“I promise.”

She smiled. “Thank you, Sydney. Thank you.”

I left her and Blue in the room and headed down to the lobby. I got a cab right out front that dropped me off at my bank. Mulberry set up my account with me soon after I joined his agency. The thing I loved about my bank was it didn’t care where my money came from or where it was going. After pleasantries with a teller, the manager, a tall woman with long hair piled into a bun at the nape of her neck, appeared with a big smile on her face.

“Ms. Rye, we are very happy to see you again,” she said leading me to her office. “Can I get you a drink?”

“Sure, a glass of water would be great,” I said. “It’s hot out there.”

She smiled, stark white teeth against her pitch black skin made a gorgeous contrast. “Certainly, have a seat and I’ll be back in just a moment.”

She was gone just long enough for me to check out the photos of two cute as button kids on her desk. “Yours?” I asked, when she came back in holding a glass of chilled water.

Handing it to me she answered in the affirmative. “4 and 6.”

“A handful, I’m sure.”

She laughed. “Yes. Do you have kids?”

“No,” I shook my head.

She nodded, “Smart,” she said with a laugh. “And you are still young.”

“Sure.”

“What can I do for you today?” she asked.

“I need a new checkbook, I’ve lost mine.”

“No problem,” she wrote a note on a pad. “Anything else?”

“I’m going to need some traveler’s checks and some cash.”

“No problem. How much?”

“Let’s say $20,000 in traveler’s checks and another $10,000 in cash.”

She wrote on her pad for another second then turning to the computer, started typing. “I’ll get those brought in for you. Are you on the island for a couple of days? We can have the checks rushed if necessary.”

“The quicker the better please.” While not positive where I was headed next, I knew that staying in the Caymans didn’t make sense. Mulberry knew I banked here and Bobby Maxim wouldn’t have to be a genius to figure out where I stashed my cash.

“Tomorrow morning then?” she asked.

“Perfect.”

A knock on the door announced the arrival of my traveler’s checks and cash. The manager counted them in front of me to double check and within 15 minutes I was back out on the street.

THE BAR AND THE BALLROOM

That evening as I walked across the hotel’s deck, the sun rolled down the west side of the world and darkness crawled toward the top. A translucent moon hung on the horizon waiting for the light to leave.

The hotel was big and filled with people eating, drinking, and nursing their sunburns. Mostly Americans and Brits, I blended in enough. I found the buffet by following the flow of the crowd. A large ballroom that long ago might have been used for dancing now housed a table the length of a basketball court. The food, hidden behind sneeze guards, glowed under florescent lights. Men, women, and children lined both sides. What started out as clean white plates at the front of the room ended as the bottom of a questionable balancing act by the end. I passed a small girl with pale white skin, stringy brown hair, and a plate filled with donuts.

A high-pitched wail came from a nearby table and I turned to see a child forcing a fistful of broccoli into another kid’s mouth while their dad dug into a juicy hamburger. I was looking for the kitchen door, but I was thinking about how I was on the run from something I didn’t quite understand, I had no friends or family to turn to, and the fact that I was completely alone in this world except for a mutt with a slight limp and a teenage girl on the edge of hysteria. Looking around at all the families, at the couples sharing a third plate of food, the groups of girls in bikinis giggling, I felt my loneliness like a pointed blade in my gut.

I ran back the way I came. Racing through the lobby, out into the driveway, and past a line of taxis, I stopped in a quiet grove of palm trees. I started crying, which I hadn’t done in a long time. It was one of those cries where you’re not thinking about anything in particular, it’s just that the emptiness inside you becomes overwhelming. My stomach tightened and I sobbed.
 
The last three years I’d worked so hard to become a detective. I pushed my body to the limits of its physical strength. Lies became second nature. The truth a beacon of hope. And here I was, leaning against a tree in paradise alone and without a plan.

Even before I was on the run I’d been alone, so very fucking solitary since James’s death. I laughed through the taste of tears in my mouth. I spent all my time trying to solve mysteries for other people. Trying to make the world fair and right. What did it get me? There was no solution to this problem. Pedro and Juanita controlled too much. I was just one woman. And I didn’t even know if any of it mattered.

I sat down resting against a tree. It was dark now. The stars hung low in the sky and the moon shone brightly. The Caribbean dipped up and down turning the sky’s reflection into a blurry mess of black and white. I wiped my face with the hem of my shirt. I looked down at my hands, turning them palm up and then palm down. My nails, unpainted and kept short, matched the rest of my hands: utilitarian. When I was eighteen I painted my nails burgundy. Six months in New York City, my nails long and red, I remember looking at them gripping a silver pole on the subway. I thought they looked like the hands of an adult woman.

Looking down at my hands now I decided they needed a drink. It wasn’t hard to find a bar. Never is in Paradise. The bartender was a guy with curly hair and a slight slur in his speech who introduced himself as “Scotty”. He was pale and sweating. I ordered a shot of tequila and a beer. He asked if I wanted to buy him a shot, too. I smiled and quickly agreed.
 

We clinked glasses and I threw the shot into my mouth, using my tongue to force it down my throat. A shiver ran through my body and tears welled in my already swollen eyes. Scotty swiped the empty glass away and replaced it with a beer so cold condensation poured off it, soaking the bar. I sipped it long and hard before saying, “thanks.”

Scotty smiled. “Anytime.” Then he laughed. The laugh of a man who laughs for a living. “Here on vacation?” I wondered how many times in a day he asked that same question and then got the same answer.

“No,” I said. A thought ran across my brain. I wanted to tell him everything. Shock the hell out of him. Then again, watching him wash dishes, taking each glass and rubbing it first in one sink, then a second, finally a third then shaking it out in the air and placing it on the side-board I thought maybe he’d heard it all. Then again, maybe he just heard the same thing over and over again.

“Business then?” He looked over at me. His eyes were a light green framed by blonde lashes the same colors as his curls. I shook my head. A large man bellied up to the bar a couple of stools away from me and yelled for a Mai Thai.

I looked over at him and was filled with loathing. I hate guys like that. The ones who think they should order people around without even a hello or any modicum of human interaction. I felt like taking my beer bottle and smashing it on the bar. In my head I started to play out my revenge on this fat fuck. I’d smash the bottle, which would shock the hell out of him, and I’m thinking Scotty might be surprised by that too. Then it would be two steps, maybe three to get right up in the guy’s face. Grabbing him by the collar, I’d take the sharpest corner and lay it right next to his eye then watch his pupil grow to take it all in.

I shook my head banishing the violent image from my brain as the man waddled away carrying a plastic cup full of liquor and cheap juice. “Another shot?”

“Yeah, Scotty. I think that’s a good idea.”

As he poured the tequila he asked, “Here on your own?”

“At this bar, yeah, all alone, Scotty.”

He smiled, the tequila kissed the edge of the glass and he stopped pouring. “I meant at the hotel. I can see you’re alone here.”

“I’m not staying at the hotel.”

“Just heard about my fine drinks, then?”

He slid the shot down the bar, not spilling a drop. “Can I get one for you, too?”

Scotty smiled. “Always.”

“Guess I’m not alone now.”

“Never.”

We clinked glasses and some of the tequila spilled onto my hand. The second shot never hurts as much as the first. I slammed the empty glass onto the bar. I felt more awake, more able to laugh. And Scotty was a funny guy. He told me about this one night when he was doing body shots off this chick when her husband showed up and tried to kick Scotty’s ass. But Scotty’s tended bar a long time and he used his spray gun on him. Scotty pulled it out of its holster next to the ice bucket and showed it to me. He showed me how he sprayed the guy right in the face with a stream of Pepsi by shooting Pepsi out onto the bar. I was rolling.

On the way back to the room, I was unsteady on my feet. I was humming Bon Jovi’s “She’s a Little Runaway” because it was the last song that Scotty played. I was smiling, feeling like maybe there was a solution to this problem. I had enough money I could just do this forever, get myself a nice boat and hop from island to island drinking with the likes of Scotty. God knows they made good company.

I stumbled over a curb that came out of nowhere and landed on my knees and hands. I rolled onto my back and looked up at the sky twinkling up there. I breathed in the clean air and thought about that girl on the subway who took pride in her long red nails; I tried to remember what it was like to be her.

She, so unlike me, was scared of physical confrontations. When a man looked at her, it made her nervous. She thought that he might try and take her bag, or worse, force himself on her. But she wasn’t afraid to make mistakes. She was scared but she was filled with hope and an insatiable urge to do. Do anything, something. “Well, I do do,” I said out loud. The last three years I’d been listening to other people tell me what to do.

My decision to follow orders was a simple one based on the fact that I could not control myself. Last time I was on my own, I killed several men. Granted, they were murderers who deserved it, but that wasn’t a side of me I liked to explore.

“Off the reservation” was how Mulberry put it. I came out on top but that might have been luck. There was a general consensus that I was not the best at making plans where everyone survived.

But what plan would get me out of this one? There was nothing to do. And I was alone. I laid there listening to my heart beat, the breeze rustle nearby palm trees, and the sea lap at the shore. “Alone, alone, alone,” I muttered under my breath, staring up at the never-ending space above my face. Then I felt a flicker in my chest. “Alone?”

I’VE BEEN LIVING ON THE EDGE OF A BROKEN HEART

“Ana! Ana!” I called, as I pushed into the hotel room. Blue greeted me at the door and followed me into the bedroom pushing his head against my hand looking to be pet. Ana Maria was on one of the beds , the TV controller in her hand.

“What?” she said. “Did you bring dinner?”

“Ana, you’re on that website about Joy, right?” She nodded. “How many people are on there?”

“I’m not sure,” she said sitting up and muting the TV. “There’s at least a thousand members in Mexico.”

“Jesus Christ. Any in the Caymans?”

“I could check.”

“Do they have profiles or something? I mean can you find out who the people are?”