Flirting with Disaster (16 page)

In spite of his feigned anger, Lisa could feel the love radiating from Dave as he talked about his family, and suddenly she was struck by an image of just how idyllic his daughter’s life must be in that alternate universe, the one where little girls ate fudge and popcorn and watched
Cinderella
while snuggled up next to people who loved them. And because Dave worried about dumb things like that, she knew what a good father he must be—kind and gentle and always, always there.

“So you never spoil her,” Lisa said.

“Of course not.”

“Liar.”

“Not like that I don’t!”

He glared at her. She stared at him pointedly, and after a moment he rolled his eyes. “Okay. Maybe a little. But only a little.”

“Let them spoil her, too,” Lisa said. “It won’t hurt her a bit.”

“Oh, yeah?” He pulled down the covers on his side of the bed and slid beneath them. “Wait until you have kids. You’ll eat those words.”

“Me? Please. I won’t be having any kids.”

“Why not?”

Lisa laughed, but it sounded hollow. “Come on, Dave. With the gene pool I’m drowning in, I’d be doing the world a favor if I sterilized myself.”

“Don’t say that.”

She looked away. “You know where I come from.”

“I don’t care. Don’t talk like that.”

“I have no desire for kids. Or a husband, for that matter. Family obligates you.”

“Yes, in some ways it does.”

“Well, I can’t deal with that. I fly charter, which means I have to be ready to take off at a moment’s notice if some oil company executive needs to be in Galveston pronto, or some widow with more money than sense decides to head to Jamaica for the weekend with a couple of friends to play in the sun. Thing is, if I go there, I get to play, too, until they’re ready to fly back. I never thought I’d have that kind of freedom, and I love it. I don’t want to depend on anyone, and I don’t want anyone depending on me.”

“I bet you’ve met a lot of people,” Dave said. “Seen a lot of places.”

“Yes. And it’s been wonderful.”

Dave flipped out the light and relaxed against the pillow with a weary sigh. Downstairs, the music grew louder, as if the Lozanos were gearing up for one hell of a party.

“Where family’s concerned,” he told her, “you have to think of it as trading one good thing for another.”

“What do you mean?”

“You trade a little of your freedom to have people to come home to who love you. People who’ll stand by you no matter what. People who worry about you.”

“Yeah, it starts with worry,” she said. “Then they ask where you are. What you’re doing. Who you’re with. When you’ll be home. In my case, it’s, ‘Why do you have to spend so much time flying?’ And pretty soon, if that keeps up, I’m not flying anymore.”

“Who’s done that to you?”

“Men. Always.”

“So you resent the fact that they expect you to cut back on your schedule to spend more time with them.”

“Yes.”

Dave shifted, tucking his arm behind his head. “Maybe they just weren’t the right men.”

Lisa thought about that, wondering if it was true. “Let’s put it this way. I have yet to find a man who makes coming down out of the clouds as exciting as going up.”

Several moments passed during which the only sound in the room was the reverberation of the music downstairs. Then Dave turned to look at her, his face barely more than a silhouette in the moonlit room.

“Someday,” he said, “you will.”

His voice was softer now, slipping down into a lower register, like a lover’s in the dark, and the very sound of it made her heart rush. In the few months after she left Tolosa, she’d had the most irrational daydreams, her mind making up a hundred wonderful fairy-tale scenarios that might bring him back into her life again. Not for a moment, though, had she actually believed that it would happen, and most certainly she’d never conceived of it happening like this.

Suddenly, even in the king-size bed, she was acutely aware of Dave lying next to her. She thought she could even feel the heat of his body, hear his soft breathing. She didn’t want commitment. She didn’t want forever. She didn’t even want tomorrow. She just wanted this moment to edge into something more. She imagined him reaching for her, here in the darkness of this hotel room where they were a million miles away from their real lives. He would pull her into his arms, say sweet, intimate things to her, and then—

“Good night, Lisa.”

He shifted. Turned away. He took a deep breath, exhaled softly, and was still.

Oh, you are
such
a fool
.

She let out a silent sigh, reminding herself once again why childish fantasies were dangerous things.

“Good night, Dave.”

Thirty minutes later, Dave’s eyes were still open.

Wide open.

He thought he was so tired he could sleep through anything, but not this. No way could anyone sleep through this. He swore he could feel the bed bouncing in rhythm with the undulating bass of the music downstairs. Not three minutes after he and Lisa stopped talking and started trying to sleep, the Lozanos kicked their party into overdrive.

Dave and Lisa lay on their backs, staring at the ceiling, listening to one explosive song after another.

“What the hell is going on down there?” Lisa asked. “Did Ricky Martin stop by with three thousand of his biggest fans?”

“No. That would be tame compared to this.”

Lisa flipped to her side, buried one ear in her pillow, and put her palm over the other one. “I know what it is. Before the dead can come back, they’ve got to
wake
the dead.”

A few more minutes passed. Another song began.

“Oh, God, no. ‘The Macarena’?” Lisa threw the pillow aside and sat up on the edge of the bed. “Where’s the gun? Gimme the gun.”

“No, Lisa,” Dave said. “No homicide.”

“Why not? It’s the Day of the freakin’
Dead
, isn’t it?”

“Not that you couldn’t get away with it. With that noise, nobody would even hear the gunshots.”

Lisa fell to her back on the bed and pulled the pillow over her face. “I’m going to have permanent hearing loss. I swear I am.”

Dave sat up with a weary sigh. “I’ll go down there and see if I can get them to drop the noise level a few thousand decibels.”

“Now, wait,” she said, sitting up again. “I know I was talking about hauling out the firearms, but really, you have to be diplomatic. Manuel was nice enough to give us this room, you know.”

“Of course I’ll be diplomatic. I’m a cop. I handle this kind of thing all the time.” He stood up and shrugged into a shirt, buttoning it half-assed and not bothering to tuck in the tail. “I’ll only be a minute.”

He ran a hand through his hair a few times, thought about putting shoes on, then decided what the hell and simply left the room. He trotted down the stairs and rounded the corner into the huge gathering room, astonished at what he saw.

Twenty or thirty people were dancing and tossing down alcohol as if this were the 1920s and prohibition had moved south of the border. Husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, friends, acquaintances, total strangers—hell, he didn’t have a clue who all these people were, but boy, did they like to party.

In the next room, Dave saw the bluish glimmer of a big-screen TV. He couldn’t see the screen itself, only the glow of it on the faces of a dozen drunk and disorderly people sprawled on the chairs and sofas around it. The only exception to the frivolity was an old woman sitting in a rocking chair in the corner of the room, holding what looked like a photograph. Just rocking back and forth and staring at it, as if the party of the century wasn’t going on all around her.

Manuel came up beside him. “Hello! Good party, yes?”

Oh, hell, yes. These people made Mardi Gras look like a church picnic.

“Actually, I was just wondering if maybe you could hold the noise down just a little. The music. It’s a little loud.”

“Eh?”

“The noise!” Dave shouted. “Could you knock it down just a little bit?”

“Oh!” Manuel said. “It is loud?”

“Yes,” Dave said, thrilled to have finally broken the sound barrier. “But just a little.”

Manuel waved his hand. “Ah. This is not a problem. Come with me!”

Dave wondered what was up, but he followed Manuel across the room to a table, on top of which resided a bottle of just about every kind of alcohol known to man, alongside a gigantic plastic bin filled with ice and beer bottles. Manuel reached into the bin, extracted a Dos Equis, and popped the top off. He held it out to Dave.

“Celebrate with us,” he said with a big grin, “and the music is just right!”

Dave slumped with frustration. He held up his palm. “No. Really. I can’t. We were just trying to get some sleep, and—”

A sudden roar went up from the next room where people were huddled around the television. Shouts. Whistles. Beers were held up, then drained.

“Ah!” Manuel said. “Touchdown! Cowboys sixteen, Redskins zero.”

“Cowboys?” Dave said. “The Dallas Cowboys?”

“There is a different Cowboys?”

“How do you get the games down here?”

Manuel grinned. “Satellite. A miracle, yes?”

“What quarter is it?”

“Second. You will watch?”

He thought about Lisa up there in that room, trying to sleep.
Damn.
He had a problem he had to take care of here. He’d promised her.

But really, though, when he thought about it, going back up to the room was probably the worst thing he could do. What if she’d fallen asleep? As tired as she’d been, she’d probably dozed off the minute he left. If he went back up there now, he’d just wake her up all over again, wouldn’t he?

Of course he didn’t want to do that.

And thinking a little more about it, if it weren’t for her calling him to come down here to Mexico, right now he’d be planted on his sofa at home, watching this very game with John or Alex and having a Dos Equis right out of his own fridge. That entitled him to watch at least a few downs, didn’t it?

He grabbed the beer from Manuel’s hand. “Maybe for just a minute,” he said, and followed him to the television.

chapter ten

Lisa looked at the clock on the nightstand. Dave had left the room fifteen minutes ago, and the music was as loud now as it had been the moment he walked out the door. So loud, in fact, that it had apparently paralyzed his nerve endings, leaving him unable to stumble back up the stairs.

It better have, anyway.

Lisa tossed off the covers, grabbed the only jeans she had—her dirty ones—and pulled them on. She yanked the door open, trudged down the stairs, and came around the corner to find the room filled with smoke and laughter and bodies moving with the music. She saw Dave across the room, his back to her, standing beside an ice-filled barrel. Unbelievably, he was popping the top on a bottle of beer.

As he tipped the beer up and took a long drink, she came up behind him. “Dave!”

He choked hard, coughing, then spun around. “Lisa?”

“What in the
hell
do you think you’re doing?”

He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Finally he shrugged weakly. “I’m . . . uh . . . just, you know, having a beer, I guess.”

“You’re having a beer, you guess? While I’m up there trying to
sleep
? Is that what you’ve been doing all this time?”

“Come on, Lisa! It’s only been, like, five minutes!”

“Try fifteen!”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Now, it couldn’t have been that long. No way.”

“Oh, yeah? I watched the digital clock click by, Dave.
Fifteen times!
”

“Oh,” he said sheepishly.

“Did you talk to them about the noise?”

“Yes. Now, I did do that. I mean, I tried, but—”

“But they stuck a beer in your hand and you forgot all about why you came down here? I thought you were an expert at handling this kind of thing!”

“I am, but—”

“When you break up loud teenage parties do you let them bribe you with alcohol?”

“Oh, all right!” Dave gave her a look of total disgust. “The Cowboys are playing, and I wanted to see the game. Which, of course, I’d be watching right now if I were at home. But I’m not at home, am I? See, I got this phone call late one night. There was this woman on the other end, wanting me to come to Mexico—”

“What did you say?”

Dave stopped short. “Uh . . . which part?”

“You said the Cowboys are playing? Is it the Redskins game?”

“Yeah.”

Lisa glanced toward the TV. “Which quarter?”

“Second.”

“Is there room for one more in there?”

“You want to watch the game?”

Was he kidding? If she hadn’t gotten stuck in Mexico, she’d be planted on her sofa in her apartment in San Antonio, watching this very game alongside a couple of friends from her apartment complex, having a Dos Equis right out of her own fridge.