She was in his face, disorienting him. His mind was whirling, soaring. He imagined hitting her. He imagined kissing her. He snarled: “You’re about to get me killed, you’re all worried about Méndez. What is he, your boyfriend?”
“I don’t have a boyfriend.” Small steel fingers dug painfully into his forearm. “Watch your mouth.”
“Talks that shit to me. Then he turns around all smooth with you. Fuckin’ snake.”
“You sound like you’re fifteen years old.” She was up on her knees now, taut and quivering and furious. “Are you jealous of him?”
“Damn right I’m jealous.”
A pause. A hint of a grin.
“Oh,” she whispered. “Well, we got that cleared up.”
Taking advantage of her grip on his arm, he pulled her toward him. She let herself be pulled. He wrapped his other arm around her lower back and nuzzled into her hair, her throat, her face. After a moment, her arms encircled his neck. She pressed herself against him, her breasts full and round against him. His mouth found hers. They slid together down onto the couch.
He didn’t know if it was weeks of imagining it or the real thing, but she tasted like cinnamon. Her breath was warm in his ear. Her whisper was close to a sob.
“Don’t you worry, Valentine. Nobody takes care of you but me…”
The couch was vast and luxurious. Her body was light and lean and voluptuous in miniature. She moaned softly beneath him. Her eagerness mixed with seeming timidity as she guided him, as he caressed her and pulled at her clothes. She slowed him, controlled him, channeling his desire and rage and fear into a deliberate tenderness.
“Angel face,” he murmured, his lips brushing a delicate collarbone.
But the sneaky voice in his head wouldn’t shut up. OK, you finally got her, it said. Or she finally got you. Is she running a game? Does she feel bad because she’s about to get you killed? At least you’ll die smiling, right?
Eventually, they made their way from the couch to the bedroom. When he finally fell asleep, a long blissful slide into nothingness, the bay outside the window was filling with blue predawn light.
His dreams were demented holograms. He dreamed about her beneath him on the couch, above him on the bed. He relived the feel of her hips in his hands, her eyes blazing into his. The pleasure flooded him so vividly he thought they had woken up and gone at it again. But then he knew it was a dream: She disappeared. He was on the beach in the rain, holding his gun. Méndez and the Colonel and a bunch of bandits wearing ridiculous sombreros and bandoliers were stalking over The Line at him, hands by their holsters. Pescatore said, “Don’t you mess with me, hijos de la chingada, I got Isabel Puente from the Office of Inspector General watching my back.” Méndez jeered at him, except it was in his own voice, a snotty Mexican imitation of Valentine Pescatore, saying, “Yeah, Isabel took care of you good, you stupid pathetic pussy-whipped gabacho. Now draw…”
He thrashed awake like a man being asphyxiated. Isabel lay propped on her side. Her eyes glowed in the indirect light from the bedroom balcony. She stayed in that position with her cheek resting on her hand, watching clinically as he sat up, entangled in sweaty sheets, and figured out where he was. Only then did she reach out for him. They held each other.
“You’re like a big teddy bear,” she murmured.
He pulled back and touched her face with two knuckles.
“Good morning, chulita,” he said. “You surveilling me again?”
“Chulita?”
“Uh, yeah.” He blinked, feeling a little goofy. “This PA, Galván, he told me that’s what Mexicans call a beautiful woman. Chula. That wrong?”
“No.”
“What time is it?”
“About nine-thirty.”
“So now what?”
Puente got up and wrapped herself in a bathrobe. She walked to the doors of the bedroom balcony, her curves encased in black and white stripes.
“Good question, Valentine,” she said with her back to him.
He slid out of the bed and gathered her in his arms from behind. She leaned back into him. It was overcast, the kind of California-gray morning that had surprised him when he first arrived in what he thought was a land of nonstop sun. The marina was framed in the window like a painting, the sails sectioning the waters. The only movement came from circling gulls and the wind in the palm trees on the far shore. The giant blue arches of an amusement-park roller coaster interrupted the horizon near the ocean.
“Good question, meaning what?” he asked.
“Meaning I liked what we did. But we shouldn’t have done it. Now you’ve got something on me.”
The ice in her voice alarmed him. He tightened his hold on her.
“Oh man, that’s kind of a cold way of looking at the whole thing, huh?” he said into her ear. “Huh, Isabel?”
She tossed swirls of hair out of her eyes. He eased her back onto the foot of the bed. They sat side by side for a moment, not looking at each other.
“Hey.” He wondered why he was whispering. “I been wanting to ask you. How come you only spent a year in The Patrol? Something bad happened?”
Her eyes got luminous. He thought she was going to pull away, but instead she snuggled closer.
“I guess that’s what I like about you,” she sighed. “You’ve got this street act going, but you’re sharper than you let on.”
In a monotone, she told him she had grown bored studying criminal justice and dropped out of college. She joined The Patrol and got assigned to Nogales, a desert sector with a lot of action. One of her supervisors, a slick mustachioed bruiser, took great interest in her progress as a trainee. He asked her out repeatedly. She declined because she had a fiancé in Miami. But one night, after the unit celebrated a marijuana bust at a bar, she accepted the supervisor’s offer of a ride home.
When they arrived at her apartment complex, a dingy place on the edge of the desert, the supervisor killed the engine, turned and, using some lame pretext, asked her to hand over her gun so he could take a look at it. Then he locked the gun in the glove compartment and attacked her in the front seat.
“It was close to midnight.” Puente’s fingers were laced in Pescatore’s. She sounded as if she were describing a crime scene. “We were right in front of my building. We’re in uniform. He’s tearing my shirt. He’s like a dog. I’m terrified. I’m thinking if I could get back my gun. But what would I do, shoot my supervisor? Finally this viejito who lived downstairs walks by, thank God. He comes over to the car. And you know what he says? I’m being assaulted, I’m crying, hysterical. You know what this old desert rat says? ‘You kids keep it down out here. Take it in the house.’ I wanted to shoot him.”
“Damn. What happened?”
“The supe told me to be a smart girl and keep quiet. He left. Took my gun with him. You can imagine what he said around the station. The other PAs were all laughing and whispering.”
“Lowlife scumbag. What did you do?”
Isabel Puente pulled her robe around her. She showed her teeth.
“I bought a mini-tape recorder. I got him into a conversation about the incident, like I was flirting. I recorded his incriminating statements. He had this topless dancer he was sleeping with who was an illegal alien, so I found her. I recorded that interview too. Then I wrote up a complaint and went to the Justice Department. I played the tapes for them. I said I was filing charges and I was going to make a commotion if they didn’t do something. Then I went to his house and personally gave his wife copies of the tapes and the complaint. By the time I was done with him, that rapist hijo de puta wished he was never born. He was a fool to mess with me. Nobody messes with me.”