Ricci supposed he’d learned a few things about her that weren’t in the basic course requirements.
She crossed the room to the bed in her bare feet, a bottle of Drambuie and two crystal cordial glasses on the Melmac tray, their drinks already poured. She set the tray down on the nightstand, picked up the glasses, carried them over to him, and held his out.
Ricci looked at her fingers around the glass. Their nails were long and carefully painted and manicured. She paid a lot of attention to her appearance and he supposed some of that would be for professional reasons, too.
“Hair of the dog,” she said.
“Maybe we ought to try those morning-after pills.”
Devon kept his glass between them without lowering it, gave him a slight smile over its rim.
“I already took one, just a different kind,” she said, and wobbled the glass. “Come on. My arm’s getting stiff.”
“No,” he said.
“I thought we weren’t supposed to use that word.”
“Who says?”
“You,” she replied. “Last night.”
Ricci looked at her. The two of them hadn’t done a lot of sleeping, and her large blue eyes were a little bloodshot. In the timid light coming through the blinds, with her makeup off, he could see faint dark crescents under them.
By tonight, when she danced under the bright lights, she would have erased or covered up the dark spots, made sure she was looking fresh for her admirers. Keeping up that appearance.
“We’ve been drinking too much,” he said.
She put the Drambuie in his hand, reached for her own glass, and sat close beside him on the bed, her legs crossed yoga-style, the hem of her robe brushing up their bare thighs.
“Here, here,” she said.
They clinked and drained their glasses and sat holding them in silence. Ricci felt the warmth of the sweet, powerful liqueur spread through him.
“It’d be good if we went out for a walk,” he said. “Got some air, put something solid in our stomachs.”
She moved closer to him, put a hand on his shoulder.
“It would be better if we stay right here and mess around,” she said.
Ricci glanced at the display of his WristLink wearable. Nice that they hadn’t made him turn it in with his Sword tag.
“It’s almost noon,” he said.
“I’m not due at the club till five o’clock.”
“Happy hour.”
“Maybe for the regulars.” Devon shrugged her shoulders. “We’ve got all day.”
Ricci looked at her. “What about A.J.?”
Devon shifted her body a little but stayed there close against him.
“You didn’t have to mention him.”
“He might decide he wants to see you.”
“That’s what answering machines are for,” she said. “He never shows up without calling first.”
“And you won’t care about the phone ringing. Or him leaving messages on the machine.”
“I’ll turn off the ringer, and you can distract me from the blinking light.” She paused. “A.J. doesn’t decide who I will or won’t fuck.”
Ricci looked at her.
“Kind of obvious,” he said.
They studied each other awhile. Then Ricci lowered his eyes to his empty glass and smiled a little.
“What’s so funny?” she said.
Ricci shrugged.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “Maybe something about my sitting here with no clothes on, and talking about us having an affair behind your married boyfriend’s back.”
Devon massaged his arm with her fingertips.
“Since when does it bother you?” she said.
Ricci shrugged a second time, leaned across her, reached for the open bottle of Drambuie on the nightstand, and refilled their glasses.
“Bottoms up,” he said.
They drank and sat quietly on the bed. Then Ricci took the glass from her hand, put it on the tray alongside his own.
When he turned back to her, she had loosened the sash of her robe, let the robe fall partially open around her body.
He looked into her eyes. They were still a little red and also overbright now from the alcohol. Probably his weren’t any different.
He kept his gaze on hers without saying anything, and reached out, and tugged her robe the rest of the way open a bit roughly, and holding it like that moved his eyes down to her breasts, and let them linger there before taking a long look at the rest of her, and then slowly brought them back to her eyes. He was aware all the while of her touch on his leg, her hand probing, taking hold of him as greedily as his eyes had taken in her body.
“We don’t have any shame,” Ricci said.
“Like you said, we drink too much.”
Ricci looked at her, his head swimming.
“That our excuse?”
“If you need one,” she said, and then shrugged out of the robe, and fell into his arms.
He kissed her, and she tumbled onto her back with her mouth against his, biting his lower lip, running her nails over his shoulders, and down his back, and down, digging them into his skin.
The smooth silk of the open robe bunched in his fist, his face tightened into what almost might have been a look of pain, Ricci moved over her, a hard thrust that she arched her hips to receive.
“What about our walk?” she said, the words coming out in a broken moan.
“We’ve got all day,” Ricci said.
TWO
It was after midnight when the Lincoln Navigator reached the outskirts of Devoción, a tiny dust spot on the road some forty miles south of the U.S. border and roughly midway between Mexicali and the smuggler’s hive of Tecate. Unmarked by direction posts, excluded from most maps of the Peninsula for its slumbery irrelevance to tourists, Devoción was known to locals as the birthplace and original home territory of the brothers Lucio and Raul Salazar, two of the three Magi of Tijuana—Los Rayos Magos de Tijuana, in Spanish — so called for the blessings and protection they had once bestowed upon their underlings and lesser allies in a widespread theft, money laundering, and narcotics trafficking empire they built from scratch.
Devoción translates directly into English as “devotion,” a word defined as a profound, earnest attachment or religious dedication.
The Spanish give it another meaning as welclass="underline" to be at another’s full and absolute disposal.
For the three decades that the Salazars controlled their native stronghold, it was the latter definition that its sparse peasant community might have best understood. Yet while fear was a constant for them, and obedience to the cartel law, they were grateful for the many tangible dividends of their loyalty. It had meant a meager but steady income, food on the table, and good clothes gifted to the children at Christmas. It had meant paved sidewalks for the town’s main street, a new church, and even a movie house that screened first-run American films. Disloyalty would bring swift retribution, but the magnanimity of those who governed was never without strings, and the clear-cut threat of knife and gun could be easier to abide than the hypocrisy of corrupt Federales and their stacked courtrooms.
This state of affairs had undergone an explosive upheaval when Lucio Salazar and his rival Enrique Quiros were killed on a night of vengeance and rumored double-cross up over the border in San Diego. No one in Devoción seemed to quite know what ignited the bloody violence. But the warfare between their formerly cooperative families had left the Salazars on the losing end of the struggle, and allowed Enrique’s successors to extend Quiros dominance into their vacated borderland territories, including the village at the real and symbolic heart of Salazar power.