Tango Key (5 page)

The blindfold begins to give, rolling off her forehead to her brow. She presses her cheek harder against the floor and moves her head up and down, faster and faster, and now, oh God, now her right eye is blinking open, now a slice of the floor swims into view. She sees dust. Knots in the pine. Ribbons of sunlight. Her left eye is still covered, but she keeps moving her head, and presently the blindfold begins its low descent over her brow, her lid, and now the hanky crosses the bridge of her nose and she can see.
See.

Tears gather in the corners of her eyes; she blinks them back. For several long moments, she simply absorbs: the peeling baseboard, the way the motes of dust lift like tiny balloons when she exhales, the edge of the platform on which the mattress rests, a fat roach skirting past her fret.

She tilts her head back as far as she can and sees the window, the filthy slats of the cheap venetian blinds, and the light, oh Christ, the light is beautiful. If she gazes into it long enough, it will take her into itself. She and the light will make love.

Push toward me,
whispers the light.

So she does, painfully, slowly, pressing her bare toes against the floor until the light is a hot strap across her forehead. Her right arm is now dead to her. Her right thigh tingles from loss of circulation. Her bladder aches with fullness.

Press your feet against the edge of the platform,
instructs the light.

She does.

Roll onto your back and try to hook your toes under the platform. You can do it.

Now the light's voice is the voice of her old man.
You can do it do it do it.

She pushes with her right foot, twists, starts to flip onto her back and knows she will crush her hands if she does. She works her wrists for a while. Doug used to kiss the insides of her wrists. If it was her left wrist, it meant he was appreciating her or thanking her for something. If it was her right wrist, it meant he wanted her, and if he'd been drinking it meant it didn't matter to him where they did it: the bathroom
floor at someone else's house, on the deck of the sloop at high noon at the marina. But that was only in the beginning when he was courting her, when he was trying to snare her like one of those animals he'd hunted on his African safaris. She was his greatest trophy, he used to tell her. What he never realized, not until later, was that she had also hunted him.

The ropes around her wrists are so tight, they've burned the skin raw. She is too weak from hunger, thirst, from her earlier exertion, to loosen them. She screams in frustration, the gag muffling the sound and slicing painfully into the corners of her mouth.

And then she hears it.

A car.

His car.

She hears the familiar chug of his engine, the shriek of his brakes, the car door slamming. She squeezes her eyes shut, tries not to cry. She tries not to think about what he will do to her when he finds her like this on the floor, her eyes free.

Chapter 3

T
he night, Aline thought, was conspiring to keep her awake. The heat, the resolute cry of the crickets, the slow, monotonous turning of the ceiling fan in her loft, the distant pound of the surf: the treachery of an insomniac's world.

Then, of course, when she closed her eyes, she would see Doug Cooper's decapitated body or Murphy's face when he had first come into the room and seen Eve. She tried counting backward from a hundred, and found herself wondering why Murphy had never seen Eve around. She finally attributed it to Tango's caste system, subtle but insidious: the folks from the cove—and everyone else.

She took a hot bath and even put a couple of clear crystals into the water to clear her head. She'd gotten that idea from one of the New Age books Whitman's stocked, but it hadn't worked, and now she wondered if maybe the crystals should've been larger or smaller or maybe a different color.

She shifted positions in the hammock; it swung a little. Moonlight struck her face. She finally sat up, and Wolfe, who'd been curled in the windowsill, lifted his head, sniffed, and leaped out the window onto the porch, pursuing some vagrant scent.

Tea. She needed a cup of hot tea. What would work fastest for insomnia? Was it lobelia? Chamomile? Comfrey? Angelica? —Or maybe her chamomile and honey with a touch of mint and eucalyptus.

She threw off the sheet, turned on the lamp, pulled a T-shirt over her head. It was one of Murphy's T-shirts and reached almost to her knees. Written across the front of it in small black letters was: TANGO KEY CHALLENGE CUP RACE—the annual July 4 powerboat race. Last year, Murphy and Dobbs had placed second in Murphy's forty-three-foot black Wellcraft Scarab Lamborghini racer, a Darth Vader of the high seas.

The boat had been impounded during a drug raid six years ago, and Murphy had bought it for peanuts at an auction. Its two V-8 engines, with spinning surface-piercing propellers, provided 450 horsepower that catapulted the boat through
offshore waters at speeds of up to 110 miles per hour. He'd added about $5,000 in electronic gear over the years, repadded the steering wheel and covered it in leather, repadded the dashboard and covered it in vinyl. He'd also bolstered the seats so they would hold him and his crew firmly in place during a race.

She knew all about the boat. It was Murphy's conversation piece, the central focus after Monica died. He'd even renamed the boat after her.

Aline descended the ladder from the sleeping loft and padded into the kitchen. She eyed the two dozen or more jars of herbs in her pantry, and finally got out what she needed for a Nightmare Chaser. She boiled water and began steeping the herbs in a strainer. Twenty minutes later, she emptied three ice trays of cubes into a pitcher and poured in the tea.

The ice crackled and steamed. She switched on the ceiling fan and went into the living room, settling on the thick couch cushions in front of the tube. Just as she started flipping through the channels, she heard a car pull into the driveway.

The nice thing about living where she did, at the top of a hill on a dead-end road, was that cars rarely came this far just to make a U-turn. That meant the car outside probably belonged to someone she knew, and there were only a few people in her circle of friends who would stop by this late at night without calling first.

She remained where she was, eyes closed, hands cupping her sweating glass of tea, waiting for the sound of the key in the door. When she heard it, her heart gave an excited leap. She lifted her head from the back of the couch and smiled as Murphy strolled in, shoulders stooped with fatigue, his briefcase swinging in his hand. The briefcase, which was really more of a small overnight bag, went everywhere with him. It contained a change of clothes, an extra toothbrush, running shoes, his notes on whatever case he was working on.

"Hi,'' he said.

"Hi."

"I didn't think you'd be up."

"Couldn't sleep." She aimed the remote control box at the TV and hit the button for Cinemax. "You just leave the Coopers'?"

He sat beside her on the couch and set his briefcase on the floor. "No, the station." He stabbed a thumb toward the ceiling fan. "Your air on the blink?"

"Yeah."

Murphy chuckled and shook his head. "Your appliances are jinxed, Al. I'll take a look at it in the morning."

In the morning: he planned to stay the night. Hey, yeah, great. He hadn't bothered to so much as call her for a week, not much had happened in the sex department since May, and now here he was, ready to stay the night because they'd run into each other a couple of hours ago at the scene of a murder where the widow looked like Monica.

"Want some tea?" she asked.

"With a shot of whatever you've got handy. Thanks."

As she crossed the room toward the kitchen, she felt his eyes on her. "You still pissed at me?" he asked.

She swung around the counter and glanced at him. "Is that what I was?"

"I kind of got that impression, yeah."

She fixed him a glass of ice tea and added a shot of bourbon. She set it in front of him as she sat down again, knees pulled up against her. She stared at the tube, where a man and woman were sliding into a tub filled with bubbles. "I wasn't angry, Murphy. I just think that Eve Cooper looks so much like Monica that it's going to be, tough for you to be impartial."

He drew his eyes away from the TV. "I don't have to be impartial. The case is yours. The only reason I went up there was because Roxanne insisted. I'll give you my notes and stuff tomorrow."

"Oh. I thought . . ."

He glanced back at the screen. "Yeah, I know what you thought."
But 1 don't want to talk about it
, said his tone.

Several tense and awkward moments passed in which they both stared at the couple on the screen. The man's mouth was sliding down the woman's bare and soapy shoulder. Aline didn't need this at the moment, thank you very much, and switched the channel.

"You didn't like his technique?" Murphy's smile, she knew, was intended to be conciliatory. He was telling her he didn't want to argue. He was asking, in his way, that for tonight they forget about Eve Cooper.

"The bathtub looked a little awkward."

He took the remote control box and switched the channel back to Cinemax. Now the couple was horseback riding on what looked like an English estate—rolling green hills, a lake bluer than any Tango sky. Murphy stretched his arm across the back of the couch, and after a few minutes she felt his fingers working at the clip in her hair. It tumbled to her shoulders; he ran his fingers through it. She felt like purring and moved closer to him, into that sweet and specific scent that was his, of summer, wind, salt. Now they were as comfortable together as an old married couple, sipping at their tea, working up to a languid ascension of the ladder to her sleeping loft.

She was too easy. She told herself they would talk about it tomorrow, but she knew they wouldn't, unless she brought it up. Yet, if she mentioned it first, he would slide into his
I gotta run
mode. And now it was too late to say anything at all because he was stroking the back of her neck, pressing his mouth against the top of her head. Then he touched her chin, turning her face toward him, and kissed her mouth. His tongue curled around hers. Her hand found the back of his neck, where the skin was damp and sunburned.

"Maybe it'd be cooler to sleep down here," she said, drawing back from him a little.

"We could drive over to my place."

She stood and his eyes followed her up. "I've got a better idea."

"The maid's room?"

"Yeah."

The room off the kitchen really wasn't a maid's room; it had been intended as a storage area and had been built shortly before Aline was born. But when she'd moved here permanently, her double brass bed couldn't be hoisted to the sleeping loft, so she'd stored it in there rather than sell it. She then had an air-conditioning unit installed in the window, figuring she could use the room for guests.

Aline turned on the nightstand lamp and Murphy crawled across the bed to reach the air conditioner. It hadn't been used for several months, and it sputtered and coughed and dripped, then settled into a noisy clatter. Murphy slid off the other side of the bed. There was so little space between it and the wall, he had to move sideways and then around the foot of the bed to reach the door.

"Cold, but hardly peaceful," he remarked.

"Tonight, cold counts and peace doesn't."

"You mind if I use your shower, Al?"

Since when did he have to ask permission? "You know where the towels are. I'll make up the bed."

"Be back in a jiffy."

A few minutes later, Aline slid between the cool, clean sheets. With the door closed, the din of the air conditioner echoed, but the thing was blowing cold air that was sure to frost the window within an hour. Despite the noise, this was the best she'd felt all day. When she closed her eyes, there were no instant replays of the scene at the Cove, no sudden visages of Doug Cooper's headless body, of Eve's face, none of that moiling dread she'd felt earlier. Her ghosts had evidently packed their bags and left for the night.

When Murphy came back, he turned off the lamp and rolled in beside her. His hair was wet, his skin was warm from the shower, and he smelled faintly of soap. The shower had washed away the cop in him, the boat freak, and he was simply Murphy, a man as familiar to her as her own skin. They reached for each other, his mouth seeking hers. She took him in her hands, stroking him gently, then more deliberately until he swelled, until she knew part of him had drifted away on a dark tide of desire. His mouth slid from her mouth to her throat and lower still to her breasts. His tongue circled her nipple languidly, then he took it gently between his teeth.

"Please," she whispered, not entirely certain what she was asking for, what she wanted, except for things to revert back to what they'd been until . . . when? When did things start to change? She clutched his head against her chest, then felt his hands at her hips, lifting her over him. She lowered herself against him, acutely aware of how long it had been, of how much she had missed him, missed this, his hands at her hips, fingertips trailing over the insides of her thighs, of how he held her in place as they rolled again. He lifted up on his hands, sliding deep inside her, moving slowly, the din of the air conditioner drowning out the sound of their breathing.