I STOOD IN the hotel room stunned at the new information relayed by Dan Chulack, deputy director of the FBI. I couldn’t get my mind around it. Otis was the cold, calculated killer who shot dead six people.
Otis, a drunk, someone who sat at the bar all day, every day in the same sour-smelling seersucker suit, drinking sugary drinks. Fat, out of shape Otis. How could he have stepped up onto the bar stool, then up onto the bar that night in El Gato Gordo while carrying all that weight? How could he have a steady enough hand, one that could target six people without missing? Steely cool accuracy.
He’d said he could take any torture I could hand out. He had black ops training in his background.
Unless that was just braggadocio.
He was the one: he’d done it.
From the bathroom came a long, low moan.
“Ah, shit.”
“What?” Dan asked.
“Hey, thanks for the phone call. I really have to get moving.”
“I understand. You call me if you need anything at all.”
“I will. Thanks again, Dan.”
I hung up and peeked back into the bathroom. The ringing in my ears had masked the other low-level ambient sound from the shower spray that hit the curtain and wall. The warm water made steam that rose in the air, filling the space with a misty cloud that roiled out.
On the other side of the curtain something hit the plastic in a blurry shadow, a hand. I jumped out of the bathroom then peeked around the doorframe.
I eased into the bathroom and pulled the curtain aside. A woman, soaking wet. She barely filled the bathtub. Petite, tanned, leggy.
A naked woman.
My God, another naked woman.
She moaned again and turned to her side away from me, still unconscious from the Mickey Finn.
What was it with the women in this hotel and their clothes?
The woman’s dark hair—darker with the water—plastered across her face kept me from identifying her.
On her lower back just above the cleave to a perfectly heart-shaped bottom, a tattoo of a dolphin leapt from the ocean, small, expensive, done with great detail and color and, most of all, tasteful.
I pulled up the blackmail picture Otis sent me on my phone, held it up for comparison. Yep, the same woman, thank goodness. I mean, if it had been a different one—well—I’d start looking around for Sean Connery.
The way to handle the situation wouldn’t endear me to her, but I couldn’t see any other way. I took the fluffy white hotel robe hanging off the back door and held it open. Then I leaned down and turned off the hot water. The cold water hit her. She held up both hands to fend off the unfair treatment, coughed, and sputtered and choked. She cried out, “Stop. Turn it off. Turn it off.” She smeared the hair out of her face.
I stepped back yet again, stunned.
Holy shit. Rebecca Sanchez from News Six.
The Darling of Costa Rica.
Otis really put me in the jackpot this time.
She struggled to her feet, a newly born fawn on weak legs, her eyes dazed, trying to figure out what had happened, how she ended up in a strange black man’s bathtub when the last thing she remembered was partying at the cabana bar.
I knew the feeling.
Her mouth dropped open when she looked down and realized she was naked. She straightened up, her eyes going steely like strong women tended to do when confronted with adversity.
She stepped from the tub. I stepped back still holding up the robe, trying not to look. I said, “Wait. Just wait a second and let me explain.”
She pulled back and hit me with a palm strike to the chest. “You bastard.”
“No, wait. It’s not what you think.”
The evil Bruno inside me took control of my eyes and wouldn’t let them move back to hers, not soon enough anyway. They lingered on her wet breasts … her lovely wet breasts, slick with beads of water, breasts that jostled together when she gave me the palm strike to the chest.
I pulled my eyes away.
The residue from the Mickey Finn clouded logical thought, obscuring good manners. I wouldn’t have peeked in normal circumstances. I know I wouldn’t have.
Right?
I held up the robe and backed away from her. “Wait. Wait. I was drugged too.”
She didn’t hear me. Unabashed, she followed me into the bedroom, still stark naked.
In the large mirror on the wall, Waldo had risen again and rested his head on the bed, watching the domestic interplay in his front-row seat.
Rebecca swung again.
I ducked.
Her momentum skewed from the miss left her off balance. I scooped her up around the waist, tossed her on the bed, and pinned her, lying across her slippery wet body. She fought, slapping and clawing.
“Hold it. Hold it. Let me explain. Let me show you something.”
“I’ve seen plenty enough already, mister.”
She wouldn’t give in and continued abusing my fifty-year-old body. I ducked my head and held on. She ran out of steam and stopped flailing, my face pressed to her chest that heaved for air, her heart racing.
I got up, recovered the robe from the floor, and covered her. My face and back and arms stung from her nails raking off top layers of skin. These new injuries would help foster a claim of rape, burying me deeper in the jackpot. Waist deep like the dead Russian in the sand trap.
She sat up breathing hard and tried to shrug into the robe. I turned my back and allowed her some privacy. The good Bruno having won out over the evil one. With my back to her I said, “I was drugged, too. We were both set up.”
She must’ve seen the used condom package on the floor. “You bastard, you raped me.” She attacked again, punching and clawing. I stood and took it, ashamed for the situation, ashamed that I’d been ignorant enough to fall for Otis and his honeytrap.
She again ran out of steam and sat down on the bed, out of breath. I found the second robe, put it on. “I didn’t rape you. I was unconscious just like you, so I couldn’t have … ah, performed even if I wanted to.”
“Likely story. Of course, you’d say something like that. I’m going to have your ass in prison. You’ll do twenty years.”
Her words took my breath away. I couldn’t allow her to report this to the police. No way could I be wanted in another country, the country we’d chosen to call our own. The country where we chose to raise our kids.
My God, what would the kids think of their surrogate father?
The old Bruno straightening my back as my now deceased boss, Robby Wicks, whispered in my ear. “Son, looks like this time you’ve gone shit the bed but good.”