Category Five, page 12
She was mad at him, but he sure was gorgeous.
Carlos’s face appeared next to Javier’s, dark eyes sparkling, flawless light brown skin glowing, and lips curled in a rock-star smile. He wasn’t too shabby either. “Damn, girl! What you doin’ up so early?” They spilled out of the car in a cascade of handsome boyness.
“I could ask you two the same thing!”
Carlos stepped in front of Lupe and held his arms out for a hug. “It’s not early when you never go to bed! Bring it in, beautiful,” he said, and he pulled her into a full hug.
She breathed deep, his scent of expensive spice and lime heady and soothing. Then she held him at arm’s length. “Looking good, Papi Gringo! I like that new ‘Tormenta’ song you dropped last month. So glad you stopped singing entirely about women’s butts.”
He didn’t blush, per se, but she could see she’d touched on something delicate, so she turned her attention to Javier, hugging him, too. This time when the length of their bodies pressed together, her skin sparked across the surface and the air became thin, as if they were suddenly up very high. She pulled away and tried to shake it off so she could concentrate.
“I think they found another body. My uncle left in the middle of the night.”
Javier stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Yeah, we just came from seeing him.”
“What?” It wasn’t that she was jealous, she was glad her uncle had bonded with her friends, but she had a serious case of FOMO—particularly when it came to zombie sightings, murders, and other supernatural occurrences.
“Yeah, they did find another body.”
“Ghost sightings?”
Javier nodded. “Yeah. But he agrees with you and doesn’t think it is the ghosts who are committing the murders.”
Carlos nodded at her. “You saw ’em, too, Lupe?”
“Yep.”
“Do you ever have a dull summer?” That famous grin spread across his perfect lips.
“No, but I’d sure like to try one!”
Javier was rocking back and forth on his heels. “Lupe, I overheard two cops talking.…”
The swaying was starting to make her nervous. Something was up.
“They were saying that if your uncle doesn’t solve this case, and soon, the governor and the police commissioner are going to fire him.”
If he had punched her in the gut she couldn’t have been as thrown.
“What?”
No.
Her uncle was her foundation, the only truly solid thing in her life, and policing was that for him. His entire identity was tied to his job.… She wanted to sit down on the sidewalk. Then she wanted to punch someone. The emotions came one after another, like trains. “What, all the work he’s done till now doesn’t mean anything? After all he went through helping people during the hurricane?”
Carlos put up his hands. “Hey, we’re on your side, hermana!”
“I know, I know.” Now she was pacing like a tiger in a cage. “They can’t do this! They just can’t.”
“Agreed. What should we do?” Just Javier’s use of the word “we” was enough to calm her. This “friends who have each other’s back” thing was new to her, so she was constantly amazed.
“Marisol and I went to see Professor Quiñones yesterday.”
Carlos and Javier comically gaped at each other at the mention of the cranky old scholar’s name, then broke into tear-producing laughter.
She tried not to join in, but it was hard. “Okay, okay, but the old coot was actually pretty helpful.”
“At what? Cranky Old Bastard 101?”
“Or wait! How about Mocking the Gringa, graduate level?” They gave each other high fives, and Lupe lost patience.
“All right, all right, enough, you two! He actually told us that these ghostly appearances aren’t new. They happened in the late 1920s also.”
Carlos’s bodyguard/driver guy stepped out of the SUV and called over to them. Why didn’t that man have a neck? He nodded at Lupe with his unchanging serious expression. “Jefe, you have rehearsal at the resort in ten minutes.”
Carlos looked at his phone. “Right. I gotta go. You two wanna come with? I’ll drop you off at work, Javi.”
Lupe grabbed her backpack and put it on the hood of Carlos’s expensive car. Wait, why was it wet? Had she put it in a puddle? She unzipped the main compartment. “I might have to stop at our condo before we go, I’m not sure I have—” Her words backed up in her throat, and whatever she was about to say no longer mattered.
She was aware of the guys continuing their conversation, and then stopping as they noticed that she was just standing there. A rushing sound entered her ears and took away all other sound, her stomach lurching up, up, until she had to lean over and vomit in the gutter. A black, white, and red pattern was spinning before her eyes as she put her hands on her knees and swayed.
The first thing she became aware of was Javier’s face in hers, his mouth opening and closing. His words started to come into focus.
“Lupe! What happened? Are you okay?”
His eyes were worried, so she nodded automatically though, really, she knew for a fact she wasn’t okay at all.
Then Carlos’s voice, pulled thin and tight. “Javier. You better come over here.”
Then she remembered, and she gagged and vomited again.
Javier’s voice then. “Jesucristo.” She imagined he was making the sign of the cross.
She stood slowly, the street spinning a bit, until she could stand upright without feeling as if she would fall over. Then she looked over at the guys as they and the driver stared into the backpack, their faces pale.
“Lupe, how did a human heart get into your backpack?”
Chapter Eighteen
Javier
“LUPE! SLOW DOWN!”
Javier and Carlos had to practically run to keep up with Lupe. They’d been trying to talk to her, but once she’d recovered from the shock, she’d demanded Carlos’s jacket, wrapped up the blood-soaked backpack, and started walking very fast toward the condo.
Carlos pleaded, “Can we just stop and talk for a minute, hermana? This shit is real!”
The Escalade was driving slowly, keeping pace with them from the street, the driver watching the proceedings through the dark lenses of his sunglasses. The dude had to be horrified, too. It’s not every day that someone finds a human heart in their backpack. But it had to look almost comical from a distance. An “unaware of the body part being carried down the street” distance.
Javier jogged up so that he was next to her, and Carlos followed suit on the other side.
“Lupe, we have got to call your uncle; you shouldn’t be carrying it around. Isn’t it evidence or something?”
“Yeah, and why can’t we just put it in the back of my car?” Carlos offered for the tenth time.
Lupe glared at him. “I am not gonna be responsible for getting the blood of a murder victim in the back of your car, Papi Gringo. Can you imagine the press?”
“So, you use my two-thousand-dollar Armani jacket instead.”
She shrugged. “It had to be leather. Otherwise it would have soaked right through.”
“I’ll never get that stain out,” Carlos whined, as if this were about a piece of clothing.
“Oh, we’re going to have to burn it.”
Carlos gaped at her.
“Would you rather forever be associated with this?” She held up the leather-jacket-encased backpack.
“I see your point.”
Javier was losing his patience with the two of them. “Look, I really have to insist we talk to Chief Dávila.” He was barely able to talk, he was so winded. How much farther was the damn condo, anyway?
“Once again, he’ll know about it.” She didn’t even seem out of breath. “I’m going to leave this outside our condo, let someone find it and report it, and he’ll know.”
“Can we just address the real issue? Someone broke into the condo and put this in your backpack. Not your uncle’s, yours.”
“Yes, I know that, Javier.”
“But what we don’t know is who the hell would have done this? It damn sure wasn’t ghosts!”
“Why?” she asked over her shoulder.
His blood pressure was rising, he was certain. “Why what?”
“Why couldn’t it be ghosts?”
“Well, first of all, as your uncle pointed out, they don’t leave footprints.”
“True. I’m still not ruling anything out.”
Javier was exasperated. Wasn’t she the one who had ruled them out two days ago? “The point is, you don’t know who did this! And it’s the danger to you that I’m concerned about.” Javier realized he was beginning to sound like a grown-up. He didn’t want to sound like a grown-up, but someone had to talk some sense.
She stopped.
“Thank God,” Carlos wheezed, holding his hand to his chest.
Javier was grateful to have a moment to catch his breath, too.
“Maybe I was too quick to dismiss the captain based on the Facebook post.”
Javier and Carlos stared at her.
Carlos sputtered. “Facebook post? What Facebook post?”
Javier added another question to the pile. “Captain who? Torres?”
She waved her hand at them. “Oh, it doesn’t matter.” And then she was off again, walking even faster than before.
“So, the top cop on the island could have put a human heart in your bag and ‘it doesn’t matter’?” Javier asked as they rushed to keep up.
“No, it matters. I mean, I can figure out who did it later, in the meantime I need to get rid of this … thing.”
“Lupe!” Javier yelled, loudly. An old couple taking an early-morning walk gave him a look from across the street. He smiled and waved in apology. Not a good idea to call attention to the group when one of them was carrying the internal organ of a murder victim. But she still didn’t stop. “We need to tell your uncle.”
“No shit! Lupe, you’re not making sense,” Carlos said in a pleading voice.
She slowed for a second, looked at them, and said, “Guys, I appreciate your concern, but if he finds out about this, he’ll send me home! Besides, given what you just told me, he has more important things to worry about. I have to help him solve this case so he doesn’t lose his job.”
Argh! Javier was doing his best not to scream in frustration, but it was so hard. She was the most stubborn person he’d ever met. And the most fearless.
“Girl, I don’t want you to go, and I’m totally with you on helping your uncle, but I ain’t gonna lie, that is the creepiest-ass shit I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen some creepy-ass shit.” Carlos had such a way with words when he was talking street.
Behind them Theo, the driver, echoed, “Some serious creepy-ass shit.”
Lupe looked at the parcel. “Yes, it is. But I’m staying.” And then she was off again, but they had arrived at the street where her uncle’s rented condo was. She looked around the entrance and found that between the front steps of their building and the next, there was some space where garbage cans stood in a neat row like squat soldiers. She used the jacket as a sling and dropped the backpack into the corner, shadowed by the railing of the building’s entrance.
“Isn’t your uncle going to wonder why it’s in your backpack?”
She shrugged. “I’ll just tell him I lost it. They just emptied the garbage, so the maintenance guy will be pulling them inside later today and should find it. Now, where to burn the jacket…”
Carlos groaned.
Chapter Nineteen
Lupe
THEIR ARRIVAL AT the resort was very different from the first time Lupe had visited. Well, beyond the fact that the first time she hadn’t just found a human heart in her backpack. But she was shocked by how much had been finished on the grounds in just a few days. When they dropped Javier off to start his workday, she saw that the fountain was spouting sparkling crystal-clear water into the morning air, there were trees and grass and flowers where there had just been sad dirt, and there were uniformed staff bustling in and out of the front door. But it was the reception that was markedly different. They were guided to a different building, the spa and entertainment center, on the other side of the property (the part that Lupe now knew was supposed to be protected under the nature reserve classification), and the SUV had barely rolled to a stop when they were surrounded by a crowd of people, all eagerly smiling at the vehicle.
“Wait, I didn’t think there were this many press people on the entire island!”
Carlos smiled. “Oh, the owners have made sure to invite all the press for this event. From everywhere.”
He stepped out, then offered her his hand in a showy way to help Lupe out of the car. Normally she rejected this kind of patriarchal gesture, but truthfully, she was a bit overwhelmed by the press of people all wanting something, and holding her friend’s hand was a comfort.
Carlos stood close by her and whispered, “It’s all right, amiga. They don’t bite. Usually.”
“Carlos, I’m a misanthrope from a town of, like, twenty people. This is way too much for me.”
Among the calls and the assistant pleading for him to follow her, Lupe could hear the snap of photos.
“Papi Gringo! Papi Gringo! Is this your new girlfriend?”
Lupe sputtered, and Carlos put his arm around her. “No, no. This lovely is a dear friend of mine, Lupe Dávila from Vermont.”
She could hear her name echo like it had been yelled in a canyon. “Vermont, is that in Canada?” She could sense frantic googling. Boy, were they going to be disappointed in her backstory.
Then someone hit internet-searching pay dirt. “Wait! Papi, you’re dating the police chief’s daughter?”
That one got Carlos sputtering. Talk about a reputation killer for a musical “bad boy.”
Lupe called out “Niece! I’m Esteban Dávila’s niece!” Not correcting anything else, kind of intentionally. Giving Carlos a hard time was a favorite hobby of hers.
Carlos was squirming now. She could get to like seeing him that way. It made him so much more … human.
“As I said, Lupe is just a friend.”
She looked over at him. “Just?”
He smiled, beads of sweat rising on his forehead. “A very important friend.”
Lupe watched one of the reporters turn to the other and air quote “important friend.” This was too funny. But when she looked over at Carlos, she could see he was very uncomfortable, and she felt bad. He’d always been so good to her.
“Lupe!”
She spun around, only to see Sam’s blond head bobbing through the press of people, a backstage pass hanging around his neck. She couldn’t help but smile—the boy was so cute and so damn bouncy.
“Hey, Sam!” She gave him a big hug, then turned around to introduce him to Carlos. “Carlos, I’d like you to meet—”
Carlos held out his hand with a tight smile. “Hey, Sam. How’s it going?”
They pumped each other’s hands in that “mine is bigger than yours” way that men had and stared at each other tensely. “You know each other?”
Carlos shuffled a bit. “Yeah, Sam’s dad’s company sponsored my last concert.”
“I think it was your best so far,” Sam offered.
And they stood there.
“Okay…” Lupe was entertained. What was it about this Sam guy that brought out all this competitive weirdness in the men around her?
“I gotta go do a sound check before rehearsal.” Carlos pointed to the stage, where technicians and staff crawled all over scaffolding like worker ants. “Lupe, you can hang out in the audience, if you like. Might be boring for a while though. Lots of ‘check one, check two.’”
“I’d be happy to give you a tour of the property, Lupe. A lot’s been done since you were last here,” Sam offered.
“Yeah, I noticed that.” But she still couldn’t take her eyes off the two. So interesting. “I’d like that.”
Sam took her arm, and he and Carlos grimly nodded at each other before they walked in different directions.
They weaved in and out of the crowd of staff, onlookers, and random people like a video game. The colors and faces and press of bodies made Lupe’s head feel light. And this wasn’t even the actual concert. What was it going to be like when there were a couple of thousand people pressed into the space? When they finally broke out of the crowd and arrived at the side of the main building, Lupe stopped and leaned on the wall.
“Damn, I have to catch my breath after that.”
“Weird, huh? That guy draws a lot of people.”
“Yeah, what’s it going to be like tomorrow night? Totally out of control?”
Sam looked back over the heads of the crowd. “I don’t even want to know.”
She watched him as she straightened back up. “What’s up between you two?”
His head snapped back. “What are you talking about?”
“Some weird tension.”
Sam shrugged. “We’re just from totally different lifestyles, I guess.”
“Yeah. Tense between you and Javier, too.”
Sam smiled. “That’s because of you.”
Lupe could feel the blood rushing to her face and took that opportunity to turn around toward the beach and let the breeze cool the blush. That’s when she saw Javier standing at the edge of the patio, staring at them. She smiled and waved, but he just turned around and disappeared behind the building. Her waving hand dropped like a popped party balloon, and she felt a spark of anger light in her chest.
“Ready for the tour?” Sam held out his arm for her to take again, and she hooked hers in his gladly. She was not going to play Javier’s petty game.
So why did she feel sick to her stomach?
They walked around the grounds, admiring all that had been done, talking about where tomorrow’s events would take place, ending at a bandstand set up adjacent to the concert facilities. They climbed the metal scaffolding stairs and sat halfway up, admiring the view, listening to the “check, check” amplified from Carlos’s concert stage area. She tried to enjoy the moment of relaxation, but the news Javier had shared that morning was haunting her, even more than the heart incident.
