The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [153]
He stood, pulled his opened shirt around him. “You want something to eat? I forgot to eat today. Mexican?” He held out his hand to help her up.
Annie looked at the young man then took his hand. “Mexican what? Food, art, architecture, trip?” Why had she said that? She knew what he meant.
“I was thinking food,” he said, letting her hand go, slowly. “Art’s good too. Architecture’s good. I love the music. Furniture.”
She flashed on an image of the blue-painted wooden bed inside his house. Again she blushed. “There’s a restaurant at the Dorado we could go to. Then I could show you the Queen.”
He shook off her suggestion. “I’ve got bad memories of the Dorado. Melissa loves it there. Let’s grab some Mexican at La Loca. But I do want to see the Queen. Is she real?”
Annie shook her head thoughtfully. “I don’t know.”
“Hang on, I’ll change.”
She gestured at his disordered yard. “Your clothes or your life?”
He laughed. “Stick around. Maybe both.”
Chapter 41
It Happened One Night
Back at La Loca for the second time that night, Annie sat with the Miami detective in another of the blue-netted booths. In a retro jazzy shirt and taupe pleated trousers, Daniel Hart looked like a radical makeover of the man who’d been staggering around in his boxer shorts with his eyes glued shut only half an hour earlier.
“You clean up nice, Sergeant,” she admitted.
“Lieutenant, you stay that way. Don’t you ever get a speck of dirt on those white clothes?”
“Nope.”
He smiled back at her, lifting a small clay pitcher. “Have a margarita with me.”
She rested her hand over her empty glass. “Thanks but I don’t handle alcohol very well.”
“That’s just because you don’t practice.” He poured her half a glass.
By now the Coconut Grove nightspot was all razzle-dazzle, neon hot, crowded noise, and frenetic young people who shouted at each other over thumping salsa and clattering dishes. Some of them kissed seemingly random partners in booths, others gyrated, tightly sweaty on the small dance floor. With a bemused shake of his head, Hart gestured at the dancers. “Desperate search for elusive alliance.”
She followed his glance to the writhing couples. “That’s one way to put it.”
“Hook up, unhook, hook up…Am I getting old?”
She thought he’d said he was twenty-six. She hoped that wasn’t old. It was her age.
“That’s just years,” he said. “My mileage is high. I do a lot of skydiving. It takes a toll.”
“Really? You free fall? I’ve parachuted but never a free fall.”
He looked at her for a long moment. “You’d like it. So tell me, why’d your marriage fold?”
Annie had already warned herself not to let her guard down with Dan. She felt like a small plane blown by a strong wind irresistibly toward a wide-open field where he stood. A field where there was no place to hide. She tried to brake, circle back, but instead she heard herself revealing how it had broken her heart when she’d caught Brad having an affair. “His backup excuse was to claim Melody was just a one-night stand. Turned out, their affair had started like a week after we got married.”
Dan nodded sympathetically. “You feel like a fool, don’t you? Melissa claimed Jeffry was just financially advising her. I guess he could think better naked.”
She countered. “I can top that. Brad actually told me his girlfriend had drugged him.”
Dan’s grin was contagious. “Listen to us, competing about loving people who didn’t have the sense to love us back.”
In the next half hour, Annie told Dan almost as much about her breakup with Brad Hopper as Georgette knew—from her jealousy over Brad’s winning their first flight competition at Annapolis to her crying alone in her Chesapeake condo night after night.
They finished their mole and Dan leaned back comfortably in the corner of the booth, his leg bent, arms around it. “Can we go see your dad’s gold statue now?”
“Now?” Feeling out of focus, Annie stared, surprised, at her watch. It was late and she was exhausted; she was in a bar that seemed all too appropriately named