Michael Boni took a bite of his taquito.
“They were supposed to be rentals.” Shim leaned back in his chair. “But the company that built them didn’t have the capital. They didn’t take any of the necessary precautions. Not to mention they were careless about the people they hired. They ran out of money, they lost support. But where one man fails,” he said cheerfully, “another succeeds. I mean, think of the possibilities: real hotels, real restaurants. A real resort. Pure. Pristine.”
“Just what the world needs,” Michael Boni said.
Shim shook the last drops of beer from the bottle. “I don’t know about the world,” he said, “but it’s what they want.” He nodded toward the window into the kitchen.
Michael Boni saw the heavy-set, sunburned man in there talking to the señora.
“Have you met the mayor?” Shim asked. “The hotel’s his. The señora’s his wife. He’s the one that invited me here. I was skeptical at first, but he convinced me. The entire town wants it. This place is just wasting away.”
“I like it the way it is,” Michael Boni said.
“I think they might know a little more about it than you do.”
Michael Boni set down his fork. “What do you know about me?”
“Amigo,” Shim said, rising from the table, “it’s time for that drink I promised you.”
He went to the bar and came back with two glasses of tequila.
“To the village,” he said. “To prosperity.”
Shim drained his glass and went back to get the bottle. Michael Boni left his drink on the table, untouched. Then he heard music, the same music from two nights before, picking up precisely where it had left off.
Shim stood beside the tape deck wearing an immense smile.
Marisol came out of the kitchen and approached the table. Leaning against the bar, tapping his fingers against the side of his glass, Shim watched her clear away the plates and utensils, loading up her arms.
To get back to the kitchen, Marisol had to pass him again, and as she did so, Shim reached out and grabbed her.
“Dance with me,” he said.
Marisol pulled her arm away, but Shim didn’t let go. She pulled harder and broke free, but she lost her balance, and one of the plates fell and shattered.
“I don’t understand why everyone is so uptight,” Shim said as she hurried into the kitchen. “In a place like this. The ocean, the sun, peace and quiet, and no one will relax.”
Michael Boni heard the señora yelling, and Marisol returned with a broom. He stooped down to help with some of the bigger pieces. She didn’t seem to notice him. Then the song ended, and Michael Boni realized Shim had left.
Sitting alone at the table, Michael Boni tried to figure out what he should do. In planning his escape, he’d been thinking he’d need to go somewhere no one ever went — a town no one had ever heard of. But now he wasn’t so sure. Maybe in a place like this he was too exposed. There’d be nowhere to hide if they ever came looking for him. And would they? It was impossible to say. He could trust McGee’s silence. He wanted to believe the same of Darius, but he’d seen all too well how weak Darius could be.
A car was coming up the street from the square. Michael Boni could hear it from a long way off, the roar of the engine so loud it caused rings to form on the surface of his glass.
The car wasn’t at all what Michael Boni had expected. Not a souped-up roadster but a weathered compact with anemic tires, window tint bubbled and curled around the edges. The car rolled to a stop, just as Marisol emerged from the kitchen. A boy got out of the driver’s side, red jeans and shiny black shoes. The boy from the pavilion.
Marisol and her boyfriend got into the car and thundered off, leaving the dining room trembling in their wake.
A breeze traveled up the street from the water, stirring sand along the cobblestones and passing just as freely through the restaurant. And then the breeze moved on, carrying Michael Boni with it.
He wandered through the vacant village, to the square, then found himself following the road north. A few minutes later, he was at the spot where he’d found Shim earlier in the day. In the moonlight, the concrete shell of the bungalow beyond the gravel road looked like the tower of a sunken castle. The door and window holes had once been boarded over, but enough planks were missing that Michael Boni could climb through.
From inside, the place appeared relatively new, walls and foundation still solid. The windows offered a good view, the kind of view a person could spend the rest of his days and nights watching without feeling the passage of time. He wondered how long it would be before Shim would tear this place down, how long until the entire village would be demolished to make room for the resort?
Between a gap in the boards, Michael Boni watched the waves roll in and stretch along the shore. A bird swooped down, black against the setting sun, plucking something from the water. From somewhere in the distance, he heard a rumble. Like thunder, but when he poked his head back out through the hole, the sky was clear. Still, the rumbles continued, getting louder, coming closer, until at last Michael Boni recognized the familiar roar of Marisol’s boyfriend’s car.
Michael Boni arrived at the window overlooking the road in time to see the car come to a stop just a few yards away. Even at rest, the engine was deafening. Peeking through the window opening, he could see Marisol and the boy sitting side by side in the front seat, talking. How on earth could they hear each other?
Finally the boy reached for the ignition. The silence came so suddenly that to Michael Boni it was just as jarring as the engine itself. He stood there frozen.
From his vantage point, just slightly higher than the road, Michael Boni could see the boy’s free hand gliding across Marisol’s thigh — the blue of her handmade dress. The boy paused for a moment at her brocade hip, and then he kept going, past her hand and up her arm, stopping only once his fingers were cupped around the girl’s small breast. His mouth left hers, traveling down her neck. The boy was almost entirely out of his seat, pressing against Marisol, nearly on top of her.
But she remained still. She hardly even seemed to be paying attention. What was she looking at? Not at the boy. But not at the ruins, either, or at the ebbing ripples and eddies of the sea. She seemed to be staring off in the other direction, toward the row of palm trees marking where the land ended and the beach began. The sky above the trees had grown dark. The birds were gone. The sun at her back was nothing more than a match head fading into ash. It was as if she weren’t even here, as if she were dreaming of another place, of another life.
Michael Boni retreated slowly, silently from the window. He lifted his feet carefully out of the stray sand and dust. Clinging to the shadows along the wall, he worked his way back to the other side of the house. There was a big enough gap in the boards that he could climb out the other window. A short, easy drop to the sand below.
But just as he started to pull himself through the opening, Michael Boni spotted movement on the beach — a slim silhouette at the tide line, approaching from the south. The moment he saw the drape of the linen shirt and the bulky cargo pockets, Michael Boni knew who it was.
Shim didn’t seem to have spotted him. The man was walking slowly, his feet gently lapped by the surf. When he was about even with the house, Shim stopped, still gazing out over the darkening water. Michael Boni was surprised to see him doing something so pensive. But maybe Shim was just sketching out more details of the future he planned to build here. Maybe out on the horizon, where the sun was almost gone, he was seeing the cruise ships that would dock here for daylong excursions; he could see the fortunes they would bring.