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“What is wrong, querida?

“I... I don’t know. I feel very shy. Very strange. Why should I be frightened of you?”

“Just rest in my arms. Let me hold you.”

He held her quietly until her body relaxed. But then, at his slightest caress, she would give a little start, a little gasp. Tenderly, gently, carefully he brought her along until all at once she wrapped her slender arms around him with a desperate strength and with her breath fast and hot against his throat, she said, in a voice an octave lower than he had ever heard her speak, and in that special accent of the best blood of the tropic city of his birth, “You are my life. You are my heart. You are my love. You are my soul.”

With stinging eyes he knew that he, Raoul Kelly, had at last wooed and won the lovely daughter of Don Estebán, to have, to hold, to cherish for as long as he might live.

Chapter Twenty-one

IT WAS ALMOST nine o’clock when Crissy looked again at her watch. She was standing at the bureau in Staniker’s ten-by-twelve bedroom. A mirror was fastened to the wall above the bureau. Enough of the silvering was gone from the back of it to make a fragmented image of the room behind her as she fixed more drinks. She moved slightly so she could see Staniker’s face. The buff-colored windowshade was pulled down to the sill. Though the window was wide behind it, there was no air to move the shade. The rusty electric fan, for all its whining and whirring, did not seem to stir the air.

Staniker lay on the double bed, in pale blue boxer shorts, his mass and weight deepening the hollow in it. He was propped on two pillows. There was an oily gleam of sweat on his face and body. His big face was slack, his speech slow and thick.

She poured him another bloody mary from the big, widemouth Thermos, holding the ice back with the fingers of her free hand after two cubes had clumped into the glass. She took it to him, feeling between the cool glass and her fingertips the crackly crust of colorless nail polish she had applied to the pads of fingers and thumbs. He took the glass from her, and in lifting it to his lips, spilled some on his broad chest, wiped at it with his other hand.

She went back to the bureau and fixed herself a weak bourbon and soda. She wore navy blue slacks. She had rolled them up to just below her knees. The dark kerchief was in the pocket of the slacks. The waistband of the slacks was damp with sweat. She had taken off the forest green silk shirt with long sleeves and tossed it onto a chair. The roots of her hair were damp. A drop of sweat ran down between her breasts to soak into the brassiere band under her breasts, and another trickled from her armpit down to the side of the slacks. She wondered how long he was going to hold out.

“Absolooly dead,” he said in a tone of heavy complaint. “Grayse broad’na worl’ could walk ina here bare ass, n’I couldn do a thing forrer, blieve me. Worryn bout it alla time, baby. Alla time.”

She came with her drink to sit on the side of the bed. “Crissy’ll fix, honey. You drink up and get just a little more stoned and Crissy’ll take care.”

“Sure, sure, sure. Suppose to make it worse.”

“Drinking? It works both ways, friend. It’ll stop a motor that’s running and start up one that’s dead.”

“Whadaya know about it anyway?”

She looked mildly at him. “All there is to know. Drink up, buddy boy. When I met the Senator I was a first class hooker. That’s how I met him. I got talent you need. Drink up.”

When he lowered the glass there was an inch left in it. He stared owlishly at her. “Figures. B’God, it figures.”

“Did I make the marys too spicy, Captain?”

“Just right, baby. Got a real stick in ’em. Hittin me pree good.”

Damn well told there’s a stick in them, lover, she thought. Four of the big bombs, the blue and yellow ones. Fer brought them when I was having trouble sleeping. Never take more than one, he said. After the first one, I wasn’t likely to. It scared me. It reached up and yanked me under, like a barracuda hitting a floating gull. That left two, and I flushed them down, just in case.

“Gedda work, kid,” he mumbled. “Get busy.”

She lifted the glass out of his slack hand and went back to the bureau. She had made a small sample first, taken a cautious sip. If there was a taste to the drug, the tomato juice, salt, pepper, lime juice, tabasco, worcestershire and vodka overwhelmed it.

“Better have a fresh one handy,” she said. “This is a celebration, Garry. Right?”

“Funny about at guy knowing about the money...” His voice trailed off. She ran back to the bed. His eyes were closed. She shook him.

“Hey! Garry. What guy?”

“Uh. Brother.” His eyes wavered, trying to focus.

“What brother, dammit?”

“Boy — Boys — Boylston. Nice fella.” His eyes closed and his jaw sagged. She shook him. She plucked a fold of belly flesh and twisted it. She thumbed his eyelid back. She straightened and took a long breath and let it out.

She took both glasses into the bathroom and rinsed them out. She took them back to the bedroom and packed the glasses, Thermos, the bottle of soda and bottle of bourbon back into the dark overnight bag she had brought. She took it into the dark living room and put it down by the front door. She remembered how she had worried about him not seeing her car out there. But when he had asked about it, and she had said with a practiced casualness, “I can’t get the damned thing into reverse gear, so I had to leave it down the street,” he had accepted it without question.

She found the living room light switch beside the door, clicked the lights on and off once, quickly. She looked out the window and saw Olly emerge from the shrubbery and come quickly to the front door. It stuck. She yanked it open and he brushed past her. “Is he...”

“Out cold. Yes. You don’t have to whisper, honey.”

“What took so long?”

“He’s a big man. He kept hanging on and hanging on. Come on.”

Following her down the short hallway he whispered, “Why have you got your shirt off?”

“Because it’s hot as the hinges of hell, friend.”

Oliver came to an abrupt stop just inside the bedroom doorway and stared at the big man asleep on the bed. He licked his lips. His adam’s apple slid up and down his throat as he swallowed.

She went to the bed and undid the snaps at the waist band of the underwear shorts.

“Why are you doing that?”

“Will you stop whispering? Please! I’m doing it because it would look damned funny if I didn’t. Will you please help me instead of standing there like a statue!”

He helped her work the shorts off the sleeping man and pull them down and off his limp feet.

“Take the head,” she said. “Come on. We’ve got to get him over to the edge of the bed first. Once more. Fine. No, you idiot! Not by the wrists. We don’t want to drag him. Sit him up and get your arms under his arms and lace your fingers across his chest. There!”

She turned around and backed and lifted his legs and locked a big ankle into each of her armpits, and held tightly to her left wrist with her right hand. “Now!” she said. She heard the boy’s gasp of effort as the big body came free of the bed and hung between them in the air. The weight of him pulled her back a half step and as she bent forward to compensate for the stress, she felt the sweat bursting and trickling all over her face and body. “Come on,” she said in a voice grating with effort, and walked under the burden, taking small steps. The bathroom was directly across the short hallway from the bedroom, and the tub was opposite the door, against the wall, under a window.