Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 763 & 764, March/April 2005
- Автор: Dean David, Dempsey Timothy F.
- Год: 2005
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines
- ISBN: ISSN 1054-8122
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 763 & 764, March/April 2005». Краткое содержание книги:
Under the dining hut, the other tourists gorged themselves on Mexican wraps and hamburgers, guzzled Sol cervezas, an almuerzo paced with the mariachi brass and strings. From within that shade came Jorge wearing his turquoise resort-staff T-shirt. He strangled the neck of a tequila bottle and pinched a shot glass.
“Aperitivo?” he asked them through his postcard grin. Anne had been swooning over his charm ever since she’d arrived, even though she suspected his tone was dictated by staff rules.
Jorge sloshed the tequila, even as Gloria slurped the last of her margarita and nodded consent. He poured a shotful and tipped the liquor through Gloria’s lips in one lewd gulp. Another staffer sprang from nowhere to drop a sombrero over Gloria’s head and to puff a shrill kazoo as Gloria swallowed, cringing.
“Y tu, senyorita?” Jorge asked Anne.
“No, no, thank you.” Anne slouched, eyeing her hands in her lap. She waited for the sombrero and kazoo and scrutiny to pass away.
“Abstinencia is a tender virtue, si, Santa Anna?” His accent swam like ice water through Anne’s heat and liquor daze. Maybe that was why she agreed to meet with him later that night after-hours at the hotel club, where the open bars drenched tourists in a torch-fire fiesta just beneath a mountainside jungle that was alive with iguanas and fist-sized tarantulas.
But instead of meeting him that night she stayed inside her hotel room. Instead she lay on her bed and fingered the beads that a peluquera had braided into her hair; she scratched the thigh and calf bites she’d earned on horseback in the mountains. She’d been saddled, and she couldn’t swipe the mosquitoes away or else she’d have collapsed into the dirt. They’d pierced and gorged with her blood, and she’d been forced to watch.
She knew Jorge was sitting out there at the bar with his amigos, puffing American cigarettes, waiting for her, fuming like the cherry tip of his smoke. She couldn’t chart the exact moment she’d crumpled — just small hesitations, minutes burned away until she realized she’d stalled too long to salvage an excuse.
Eventually, Jorge came searching, as she knew he would. She expected he’d come bearing down and demanding reasons. She’d worked herself into anticipating such a threat. But he gave only a quiet knock, and then said, “Santa Anna? Senyorita? Do you forget me? Estas aqui?”
She gazed unblinking nowhere. She’d almost wanted his anger; it would have offered the excuse that she’d been waiting for. But no movement, nothing but the translucent, dime-tiny crabs shuffling laterally beneath the bed.
She wanted to go back, but they were bound together in this cramped bedroom — Richard and Anne, and Daniel unconscious on the floor. Richard dropped the rock onto the carpet. He bunched the front of his cobalt work shirt in both hands, even while the knife still jutted from his clenched fist. He moaned and whirled and swung his clawed fingers into her open closet, tearing down outfits. The metal hangers shimmered.
“Richard,” Anne said. “We have to call an ambulance!”
“No! We can’t call anybody! We can’t!”
“Please! He’ll be all right! He’s just knocked out for a second. He’ll be okay. Just please call!”
“Don’t yell! No yelling! We have to wait!”
“For what?” she asked.
“Gloria,” he said.
“Richard, please—”
“She thinks she can just call me up on the phone and break up with me — on my answering machine. There’s no way, you understand? I won’t let that happen.”
“Don’t hurt anyone else. Please. You’ve already—”
Richard’s lips spasmed. He tightened his jaw beneath the bristles on his face and scowled at Daniel. Then he hunkered down on his knees, crawled toward him. He raised the chef’s blade and pricked the tip against Daniel’s sternum. The knife shivered there against Daniel’s skin.
“Richard, what—” Anne said.
“You got to be quiet,” Richard said. He was poised like some amateur magician that Anne couldn’t move to stop and couldn’t speak to dissuade. He groaned and lurched his shoulders as if a wave of nausea had splashed him. The blade sank down to the black hilt now pressed into Daniel’s stomach.
“There! There you are, dammit! You’re done!” Richard howled, jabbing one sharp finger toward Daniel’s head. He crawled back to the doorway, groaning through his teeth.
“You killed him!” Anne screamed.
The knife hilt hovered in place. It ticked gently like a stuck metronome. It beat as a heart beats. Blood rivulets rushed all at once, snaking across Daniel’s ribs onto the carpet. His weak hand clawed at the rug as if clutching for something. For Anne.
“No yelling! You have to wait,” Richard said. He inched toward Daniel again, crouched like an ape. Anne lunged whatever she held in her hands — a useless mass that puffed against Richard’s head and fell. Her pillow. Without it, she felt her body exposed to Richard and the cold air. She tried to pull the comforter over herself but everything was tucked so carefully, and her seizure-struck hands couldn’t grasp a thing.
“I’m going to lock you in the bathroom,” he said.
He grasped her wrist and yanked, and her body tumbled as if it was already a corpse. He dragged her off the bed. In one step, Daniel’s warm blood seeped against her left sock heel, and only the force of Richard’s pull kept her from collapsing as they shoved through the living room where the remnants of her and Daniel’s dinner sat on the coffee table — wine and shrimp-stuffed chicken, French-cut green beans. They’d been too anxious to eat much of it.
Across the kitchen and into the bathroom — a windowless closet where a bathtub, sink, toilet, and radiator were wedged together. It was an eyesore of peeling paint, of jutting porcelain and cabinet doors scuffing into each other. But the dusty radiator heat blasted her chill skin back to life. The door clicked shut behind her and she twisted the doorknob lock. Kitchen light seeped under the door. Out there Richard’s boots crunched the linoleum.
A tiny socket-bulb cast its light onto her skin. For a moment she forgot her nudity — this body that she’d prepared for Daniel, shaved and oiled and perfumed like a ritual. In the full-length mirror on the door she saw a woman hunched and diminished. A stranger.
She wanted the woman in the mirror to cover herself. But there were no towels for covering; all of them dirty and set for washing in the overflowing laundry basket in Gloria’s bedroom.
The radiator heat bled into Anne’s legs and her back. As each stretch of her body warmed, it melted away until she had no sensations left. She thought she could almost drift off like a dream of herself, but the instant Richard threw open the bathroom door she would slam back into all her pain and cold. She would feel whatever he wanted to inflict.
A month ago Anne had sat with the cordless in her hand, waiting for eight o’clock when she’d call Daniel on his cell phone. She was sometimes ashamed of her constant longing for his voice, but love was not easily stalled or reversed; it only plowed headlong forward.
Richard was there in the bedroom with Gloria, like always. Nights when he slept over, Gloria’s bedroom sounds drifted through the walls to where Anne lay on the couch in her pajamas, sipping chamomile tea and trying to read through European travel guides. Gloria lost her innocence at age thirteen. “And why not?” she asked Anne, with her voice already raspy from smoking since at least that same age.