"And my fault?"
He wouldn’t look at me. "I'm a dowser. You're something else. A conduit. A medium. I don't know what you are and I doubt you do either. It's not your fault, but I can't just dowse any more. Thanks to you, I'm a tuning fork. I vibrate to their presence as if they were alive and I were dead, a mere medium to be activated. I feel their pain, their undone deeds, and their broken hearts. It's too much."
What could I answer? He was right that I didn't know anything when it came to these matters. So I asked.
"When you dowse for the dead now, do you feel the same electricity we generated in Sunset Park together?"
"No. That's ours. And theirs, the dead couple's. Oh, I've sensed lust and greed in these sex killings, but nothing as positive as that."
"It was positive, for us, then, wasn’t it? I've never felt anything like that, over a grave or anywhere, with anyone." I put my hand on his on the steering wheel. "Ric. I missed you."
He turned to see me, really see me, and his mouth melted.
"Oh, Del. Delilah. Take me away. Take me away tonight."
I saw the despair in his dark eyes and nodded. I knew a prime assignment when I heard it, and I wanted this one very, very much. The tension between us had changed from our own professional problems into an unspoken need to shake ourselves loose of them.
Ric was shimmering and glinting in his soft, expensive clothes, which I now recognized as a defensive barrier against the death he wrested daily from the brutal earth.
I felt quite the glamour girl, all soft and silken folds and uncertain emotions. He read me like a book, dowsed me, and understood what I offered, wanted what I was willing to give. Only I didn't really know what that really was. So I also felt nervous, as usual.
The Los Lobos parking lot looked mundane, filled with cars not quite old enough to be interesting. Ric's was low, sleek, sexy, a quick getaway. Another barrier against death.
This time the place looked under-patronized. I noticed the frayed edges of the country-music posters on the walls and saw the gouges in the wood plank floor.
I ordered an Albino Vampire to my specs, watching the waitress scribble down the directions. Ric ordered the same, cocking a dark eyebrow at me.
"That's a pretty potent cocktail. You trying to get me drunk, Querida?
"Not until we get home, hombre."
"Su casa or mi casa?”
"Do you have uno perro?"
"No. No dog. Do you have uno Spanish dictionary?"
"Si."
Trumpets and mariachis hailed us to the dance floor.
I was beginning to get the rhythm. One-two-three. Oomph. I didn't care this time what the onlookers would think. I was desperate to distract Ric from the awful job he'd had to do. Werewolves did the two-step, but so did my disordered emotions, wanting to soothe him, envelop him, ease him, please him, and end the angst.
When he jerked my elastic waistband down over my hips, below my navel, I put my hands on his shoulders. One-two-three, seduce. He buried his face in my neck and shoulder, pushed my torso into his. I so wanted this man to find salvation in me, or that elusive state that haunted Edgar Allan Poe kept searching for, surcease. Was this sex? Or something else?
Right now I was haunted by something that ate at my stomach and burned in my throat. I had to tell Ric, warn him. He needed to understand that I might be even more…touchy…now.
"Ric, this wasn’t anything like what you experienced in Mexico, but while you were gone-"
"What happened?" His profile had grown sharp before his face turned to me. He'd interrogated hundreds of suspects. He knew when they were aching to conceal something.
"Haskell happened."
"That pig. How? Why?"
"When I was investigating the Inferno I ran into one of the Seven Deadly Sins' lead singer's groupies."
"Cocaine. Yeah, I've heard of him. A very bad player."
"His groupies are crazy. This one and I had a brief encounter."
"You into girls, chica?”
"Not that kind." I slapped his shoulder playfully.
Making a joke of my story was a calming technique. Ric could sense the tension in my back muscles. I could feel his hands smoothing them even as we danced.
"Short story: this Cocaine character was out pressing the groupie flesh in person and stopped to play with my hair in passing. The video cameras recorded this one woman trying to get a lock of my hair afterward as a souvenir. That creeped me out, so I told her back off. She turned up dead the next morning in the hotel Dumpster. Haskell came to my cottage and arrested me."
"For what?"
"For questioning."
"Arrested? Just for questioning? That's not procedure. Oh. You don't mean handcuffs?"
He had stopped dancing so we just stood there while other couples flashed their moves around us. We stood motionless, in each other's arms, so close our breaths fell into comforting sync. It was getting harder to pretend I'd shrugged off an ugly and traumatic moment.
I just nodded. "I knew a very personal pat-down wasn’t procedure."
"How personal?"
"For the barrel of his gun, very."
Ric dropped my hands, a good thing because his had become very hard fists. He muttered some Spanish curses too low and too fast for me and my handy little Street Spanish book to translate.
"Hector's security system got the incident on tape," I told Ric, wanting to defuse him. "Haskell's screwed."
"Jesus! You were taped being manhandled?"
"Hector's destroyed every security tape but a copy he gave me, to use if I want to bring charges. Or destroy. I'm only mentioning that I might be a little…twitchy about being touched right now."
"Querida." Ric pulled me closer, put his forehead to mine. We began swaying to a slow dance, a slow-motion floating island amid a stream of frenetic salsa-dancing couples.
"Forget that. Forget Haskell. You're with me now. I'll make it better."
"It just might have triggered my old phobia. I might not be…what you expect or want. Too much trouble."
"You're trouble, all right. The kind that makes me very twitchy. Let's get out of here. I know just the place to soothe all your cares and woes."
"Really? Where?"
"My place."
We left before the werewolves had really begun to dance, but it wasn’t a full-moon night anyway.
Ric opened the Corvette's passenger door. The car was a low-riding hammock with rocket power. The seat was already half-reclined by design, but at least he didn't bother snapping the seat belt for me. Not being belted in didn't worry me. Ric drove as if he was one with the car, fast and powerful, outrunning everything… Juarez, Haskell, my old nagging fears.
The low car thrummed along the asphalt as it wove its way out of the mountains, clinging to every curve with a dreamy sense of deja vu. Again the powerful engine vibrations massaged my spine. Again Ric's hand moved on the stick shift, up, down, across, and I felt my body sway with the motion. After a while, all my cares and woes had been outrun. I was only here, only now, only with him.
He seemed to sense my evolution from edgy fear to edgy interest.
No full moon flirted with us through the Vette's blue-tinted glass roof. No werewolves haunted the hills as they ran through the freedom of their change.
It was just us and the night, and this time he wasn’t taking me to be dropped off primly at my cottage door.
This time he was taking me home with him.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Ric's car stopped, purring. The end of motion disoriented me. Ric opened the car door, pulling me up and out. My ankles wobbled as my hands returned to his shoulders, his to my hips. We had cruised past a gated entry and were in a newer housing development, nice but not palatial. He waltz-walked me inside, past a courtyard where wind chimes and a huge central fountain made aural love to each other.