You can have Las Vegas, Sherry thought. This is the life.
The Princess Hotel in Acapulco was a fifteen-story Aztec pyramid of a building perched on something like five hundred lushly tropical acres. The marble-floored honeymoon suite with its pale shades of yellow and green and turquoise had floor-to-ceiling glass sliding doors onto a private terrace and a view of the sparkling azure Pacific.
They had been here two days with a spa for her and two golf courses for Nolan and four restaurants for them both. As for that endless beachfront, the sand was golden, the water warm.
They were twenty minutes from a downtown teeming with dining, shopping and nightlife, and a plaza strewn with festive outdoor music. Yesterday evening they had watched a cliff-diving show that lasted till a sunset caught the ocean on fire.
Laying out mornings in the skimpiest of white bikinis, Sherry was careful not to burn, already halfway through a bottle of Coppertone; she could hardly even detect its salty, orange-blossom scent from the ocean air anymore.
She had never been around so many other foxy young women in bikinis, but she didn’t feel particularly intimidated. Afternoons, like right now, she stretched on a beach-style lounge chair beneath an umbrella near the pool, in white short shorts and matching tank top; she wore ivory-rimmed sunglasses as she read a paperback edition of Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow.
Nolan, also in sunglasses but wire-rimmed, in black swim trunks and a lightweight short black robe, ambled over from his trip to the poolside Bamboo Hut Bar. His body was just hairy enough and his scars added a sense of life having been lived. He came bearing zombies. He handed her one and she sipped it as he settled into the lounge beach chair beside her.
She said, “You ever going to tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“What happened that night.”
He sipped his zombie. “What night?”
“The night you sent me away and dealt with our smoker.”
“No.”
“Not even where all that money came from?”
When he’d summoned her home roughly twenty-four hours after packing her off to a room at the Blackhawk, she came in to find the kitchen table covered with jars and shoe boxes and canisters and what have you, all brimming with money—cash, no coin. Mostly twenties or higher. It was the damnedest thing.
“If I told you,” he said, “you might think less of me.”
“Why is that?”
“Maybe I scared an old woman to death and stuck around to loot her premises, before her body was even cold. But money is money.”
She chuckled. “Right. That’s what you did.”
“Not the worst of it. But if you knew, you’d be party to it, and I like you innocent.” He nodded toward the book fanned open on her lap.
“Well,” she said, and sipped her zombie, “I’ll give you one thing, Mr. Nolan.”
“What’s that, Mrs. Nolan?”
“You do know how to show a girl a good time.”
Some young fool cannonballed into the pool and got gleeful screams from pretty, nearly naked females frolicking.
“I try,” he said.