Rum Luck Page 13

  “Fine, Mr. Christianson. I did not ask what your ‘guy’ thought was in the bundle. I asked what you thought was in the bundle.”

  Ben’s back stiffened. Why hadn’t he thought of asking that?

  Chris opened his mouth to speak, and then paused. “You know, I never really thought about it.”

  Enrico gave him a small, patronizing smile. “Take your time.”

  “Well, he probably wouldn’t have stolen anything, because the police or, like, Ana would have noticed stuff was missing,” Chris said, thinking hard. You could practically see the steam coming off his dreadlocks.

  “Go on,” Enrico said.

  “Maybe he tried cleaning up after himself? The bar has cleaning supplies, right? He could have been, like, trying to cover his tracks.” Pleased with himself, Chris smiled broadly.

  “Very good, Mr. Christianson. That is all I needed to know.” Enrico swiveled the chair around, signaling the end of the interrogation.

  Ben was puzzled. So what if the killer cleaned up, and took the supplies with him? It was a new wrinkle, but what did it mean?

  After few moments, Ben whispered in Chris’s ear, “That means you can go.”

  They left together, and once Ben had closed the door behind them, he said, “Good job, Chris. I think Enrico felt sufficiently intimidating.”

  “Thanks, dude. He was pretty real. If you hadn’t told me it was an act, I totally would have bought it. All that swiveling scared the hell out of me.”

  “Quick thinking on making up a last name, by the way.”

  Chris looked at him blankly. “Who said it was made up?”

  Ben glanced at the bar’s wall clock. 6:23 p.m. Surprisingly early, given all that had happened in the past few hours. The sun had disappeared over the horizon, leaving a faint red band above the Pacific. A large crowd sipped and chattered beneath the strands of multicolored lights that crisscrossed above the lounge and dance floor. Not bad for a Sunday night. He looked for Jenni at the bar, but saw no sign of her.

  Miguel had roused from his nap while Ben was in the office and somehow managed to find a pint of beer. Now he was deflecting the ministrations of some local girls, who seemed to want to be nurses when they grew up. They wore neon tank tops and jeans so tight they looked painted on. Miguel laughed and shook his head, as though downplaying his injuries. He never was one to seek the spotlight.

  Ben tapped him on the shoulder. “Can you spare a minute?”

  Miguel said something in Spanish to the girls. They giggled as they stood up, waved goodbye, and headed back to the bar.

  “Thanks for the rescue.” Only Miguel would thank you for ridding him of attractive young women.

  Ben handed over his phone. “Can you look at this and see if there’s anything of interest on it? Chris has had it for the past few days, and I’m wondering if he made any calls or took any photos that might help us figure what’s going on around here.”

  Miguel took the phone and raised a gashed eyebrow. “You know it’s a long shot, right?”

  “I do, but I still think it’s worth a try. This is bigger than Antonio and his cash register.”

  “I’m feeling that too,” Miguel said. “Anything else I can do to help?”

  “The Diria keeps a doctor on call. He’s on his way here to check you out. Use your new room, if you’d like.”

  “Are you sure?” Miguel scanned the bar. “I don’t think we’re out of the woods yet.”

  “Me neither. But you’re no good to anyone if you have a concussion, or worse,” Ben said. “See the doctor. Get some sleep.”

  “Thanks, Ben.” Miguel started fiddling with the phone.

  Ben stood up and strolled through the half-demolished bar, catching snippets of conversation as he went.

  “. . . think Enrico will play?”

  “. . . murder this week.”

  “. . . glass everywhere.”

  “. . . third warm beer tonight.”

  “. . . glad that’s not my car.”

  “. . . see DJ School Mistress around.”

  By the time he reached the bar, it was clear no one knew what was going to happen at the cantina next, but they’d be damned if they would miss any of it. He was reminded of the Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times. It wasn’t the reputation Ben had wanted for the bar, but so long as it boosted beverage sales . . .

  The lone bartender was crouched down, rummaging in the fridge.

  “Ana, did you see what happened to Jenni?”

  The bartender turned around.

  “You’re not Ana,” Ben said.

  Luis smiled and pointed toward the ocean. “I think she’s in the beach lounge with your lady friend. I watch the bar while she is away.”

  “Uh . . . thanks. Good work, Luis. Keep it up.”

  He took his half glass of warm wine from the counter and made his way through the tables, past the dance floor to the strangely empty beach lounge. Above the darkening red band of sunlight, the first of the stars flickered beside an orange moon. The din of the cantina gave way to the wash of waves and the chirp of crickets.

  “Over here, Ben,” Jenni waved from one of the lounge chairs. She turned to Ana in the chair next to hers. “Did he really take the cap off the bottle without an opener?”

  The bottle of sauv blanc rested in a silvery ice bucket between the two lounge chairs, flanked on either side by flickering Tiki torches. A gentle breeze rolled up from the surf, bearing the scent of salt and damp cloth. Ana had done well. Very well, indeed.

  Ana rose to her feet as he drew near. She leaned over to freshen Ben’s wine, her voice dropping to a whisper as she flooded the glass. “Watch yourself,” she said, and went back inside the cantina.

  Ben struggled to keep his face impassive as he looked down at Jenni. Firelight danced across her delicate features, but her eyes shone with a strange intensity. It seemed as though her world began and ended within the arc of these torches. It was at once intoxicating and terrifying.

  “Ana was explaining how you ended up with such a fine little boozer,” Jenni said, shaking him from his reverie.

  Ben sat. “Who? Our other partner, Victoria?”

  Jenni laughed. “No, Ben. ‘Boozer’ is Aussie slang for a pub.”

  “Ah, right.” Ben leaned back in the lounge chair, Ana’s warning echoing in his ears. “Sorry about dashing off like that.”

  “No problem,” she said with a smile.

  You’d never know Ben had kept her waiting for half an hour while Enrico practiced his sinister swiveling.

  Wait, why had she stuck around?

  Enough. As much as it pained him to admit it, Miguel was right. Ben couldn’t look at another woman without imagining the many ways she could crush his heart beneath her heel. He needed—

  “Everything all right?” Jenni asked.

  “Pardon?”

  “Back inside,” she said. “You looked like you were about to get into a brawl.”

  “I wish you hadn’t had to see that. You must think I’m some kind of goon,” he said. “Believe it or not, I’m usually a very agreeable person. I can’t even remember the last time I got into a fight.” Not entirely a lie. After all, most of his earlier fights took place when he was in no state to remember his own name. And it’d been a long time since then, anyway.

  “Really?” Jenni asked.

  “You don’t have to sound quite so surprised.”

  “You’re doing better than I am, for one.” She spun the wine around in her glass, watching it catch the torchlight. “So, why did you decide to abandon your life of pacifism?”

  Ben searched for some sort of articulate argument as to why he’d accosted Chris and his customer, finally settling for: “They had my phone.”

  “That does take a lot of cheek, stealing your phone and selling it in your own bar.”

  “It wasn’t exactly stolen. Someone found it on the beach. I was a bit . . . spirited that evening.” Also not untrue. He had been full up of spirits that ni
ght, rum among them. “Woke up in the police holding cell, thinking I’d been tossed in the drunk tank. Then Victoria walked in and told me I’m the lead suspect in Antonio’s murder.

  “I still can’t remember what happened that night, but sometimes there are . . . echoes. When I saw that phone, I could feel that it was important. So I did what I had to do to get it back.”

  He looked over at Jenni. She gazed at him intently, the low flicker of torchlight accentuating her natural beauty. “That sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?” he asked.

  She rested a hand on his forearm. “It sounds brave.”

  “Thanks.” He smiled.

  “No, really,” she said gently. “The last fight in Tamarindo ended with one of the guys getting stabbed.”

  Time to change the conversation. “We’ve been talking about me all night. How did you end up in Tamarindo?”

  Jenni cocked an ear toward the cantina. “Oh, I love this song.”

  “Would you like to dance?”

  Ben couldn’t remember the last time he’d danced at a club. Two years? Three? Pubs were more his style. You could talk to people in pubs without shouting, and there was none of this . . . moving, and such. Ironic that he now owned a dance floor. At least he could keep the volume at a halfway decent level, if he wanted. Admittedly, the holes in the roof did help with noise control.

  The truth was he’d enjoyed dancing, at least before he’d settled down and become respectable. Until yesterday, he’d been unwilling to set foot on his own dance floor. He hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that it was a bit silly for a thirty-something man to bust a move in public.

  But Ben didn’t feel silly. Not even in his orange flip-flops. Not with Jenni leading him by the hand onto the cantina’s dance floor.

  He could feel the bass thudding through the floor, the melody tugging at his muscles. She was right. This was a good song. He started moving with the rhythm. He found himself relaxing, losing himself in the music. Green spotlights wheeled across the bar, then converged on the DJ booth. Victoria stood behind the decks, wearing her business suit, looking poised but flushed. It seemed she was stuck with DJ School Mistress as her alter ego. Perhaps she would feel more comfortable once she picked up a lighter-weight suit. She should have a spare one anyway, if only so she didn’t find herself delivering a closing argument in a jacket stained with coolers and glow-stick fluid.

  Ben felt a jolt run through his body. If Victoria was spinning, then who was minding Enrico? Jenni executed a flawless spin, moving in perfect time to the beat. In one flash of light, he saw her white-blond hair flit across her eyes. The next, her smile drawing him in. Ben was suddenly aware of the stress he was carrying, the endless concerns that had thrust themselves on him, blinding him to this paradise. He needed to live in the moment, if only for a moment.

  Ben cleared his mind of the death threat, Miguel’s accident, and the damaged bar; and pushed back thoughts of Tara, his debts, and the criminal charges. He even forgot the cheap flip-flops chafing his feet. Time blurred.

  A deafening screech of feedback shattered the music.

  Silence.

  Next, a few gentle taps on the microphone.

  “Ms. Holmes?” Enrico gave a dry cough and cleared his throat. “Ms. Holmes, that is quite enough. Leave your music boxes alone. There are important matters that require your attention. I shall see you in my office.”

  The speakers crackled, then flooded the cantina with generic Latin jazz. The usually unflappable Victoria was consumed with rage. She shoved a stack of albums to the ground and shouted something in Spanish. Ben had never seen her this angry.

  But then, she had been dealt the ultimate insult—to have her music interrupted mid-set and replaced with something else. To be interrupted by another DJ would have been bad enough, but to be supplanted by the kind of music you’d play in the waiting room of a Costa Rican dentist was unconscionable. This meant war.

  The dancers stood transfixed. Victoria’s hands darted across the console, twisting knobs and flipping switches. Then she paused, checked her work, and stabbed one last button. The jazz died and her turntables spun back to life. Her music resumed, louder than before, and so did the dancers, as though they had never stopped.

  It took all of Ben’s willpower not to rush to the office and lock Enrico in the safe, where he would no longer pose a threat to himself or others. Mostly himself. Because suddenly homicide no longer seemed so extreme an option. Ben peered about the cantina, straining to hear above the music, waiting for the other shoe to drop. He could have sworn he saw Enrico in the flicker of lights, never in the same place twice.

  The speakers cracked again—once, twice. Then, the same dry cough in the microphone. A graveled throat cleared itself. Ben braced himself for another admonishment.

  Instead Enrico said, “Very well, Ms. Holmes. If you wish to learn about music, then I shall teach you.”

  The lights spun round once more to the other side of the dance floor and converged on the great Enrico Morales. How had he managed that? In the span of minutes, he had somehow erected a small mountain of receivers and microphones alongside his famed bongo and conga drums.

  Enrico launched himself into his music, his hand skimming across the drums, tapping out an impossibly intricate beat. Every inch of the seven drums seemed to have a different sound, with each of Enrico’s fingers drawing out a different tone. Victoria’s music raised the hair on your arms, but Enrico’s had a direct line to raw emotion. People poured onto the dance floor, the crowd shaking in time to the beat.

  Victoria stood behind her decks, eyes narrowed. The dancers took no notice as she put her headphones back on and started to spin dials and slide bars. Enrico’s drumming built to an impossible crescendo, and then crashed to a finish. The silence rang in their ears.

  Enrico’s voice through the speakers. “Your move, Ms. Holmes.”

  His own music came back at him, remixed to create an entirely new sound and feel. Victoria had taken a recording of what Enrico had just played and, in minutes, crafted it to her own design. It could have been done to insult, but it wasn’t—it showcased his remarkable talent like an aural pedestal. The hair on Ben’s arms rose once more.

  The dancers turned back to the famous bongo drummer, awaiting his next move. Enrico started to drum alongside the recording of himself, a massive smile on his face.

  The battle raged on throughout the night. Enrico played until his hands bled, Victoria until she all but collapsed from dehydration. The overflowing crowd savored every moment.

  Miguel posted Oscar outside the bar as a bouncer to prevent the line of waiting customers from storming the cantina. He warned them repeatedly that the odds of their getting into the bar that night were exactly nil, and when they got the message, they moved over to the parking lot, content to stay within earshot and dance in the dust.

  Ben and Jenni danced for hours. She finally excused herself around midnight—she had a surfing competition coming up soon, and needed practice on the early morning waves. While he dithered about kissing her goodnight, she leaned in and pressed her lips to his cheek. “See you soon, Ben,” she said.

  After she had gone, Ben helped Luis collect the filthy glassware covering the tables. If this kept up any longer, they’d need to hire more staff, assuming they could pay more than promises. One more day until the bar closed for Antonio’s funeral, earning them a brief reprieve from grueling shifts that stretched until sunrise.

  Ben filled his tray and headed back to the bar with another load of glasses. Everyone had swarmed onto the dance floor for the finale, thinning the crowd at the bar. They would return with a vengeance once the last set came to an end. If he didn’t move quickly, he would be serving vintage champagne in unwashed coffee mugs.

  A customer leaned across the bar to get Ana’s attention. The man was young, tall, and powerfully built, clad in a denim jacket, black T-shirt, and faded jeans. He must be a local—no tourist would wear that much clothing in a tropical bar. He di
d not look happy.

  Ana stepped back from the bar, pressing her spine against the wall of bottles. Denim Jacket shouted at her in Spanish. She yelled back, her hands balled into fists. The music reached a fever pitch, and few noticed what was happening at the bar. Those who did pretended they hadn’t.

  Ben didn’t have that luxury. He set down the tray of glasses and stepped into the fray. Denim Jacket turned and glared at him, eyes filled with rage. Before Ben could intervene, he stepped back from the bar, shoved Ben with his shoulder, and barked out a few parting words. Whether they were meant for him or Ana, Ben couldn’t tell.

  “Are you all right?” he asked her, his heart thudding.

  Ana nodded and wiped her eyes with a shaking hand. Her other hand was hidden behind her back, but not so well that Ben couldn’t see her fingers gripped around the handle of a paring knife.

  “Mr. Cooper.” Enrico tapped his shoulder. “I need you to come with me.”

  “Mr. Morales, this is the worst possible moment—”

  “It’s important, Ben. It’s about the murder.”

  It must be important, if Enrico was addressing him by his first name. Only then did Ben realize the musical battle had ended and a wave of customers was poised to envelop the bar. He turned back to Ana. “You don’t have to stay here if you don’t want to.”

  She sniffed. “You go with Enrico.”

  He turned back to Enrico. “Let’s make this quick.”

  Enrico led him to the bar’s back door. He raised a finger to his lips before opening the door a crack, scarcely enough to see outside. There, Luis was hauling garbage bags from the kitchen to the cantina’s dumpster. Once the last of his bags had been flung inside, he stretched his back and brushed the dirt from his apron.

  Backlit by the street lights, Luis looked as though he was wearing a cape.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Ben struggled to make sense of Enrico’s revelation as he walked back to the bar.

  Could Luis have murdered Antonio?

  He hadn’t thought of the call from the Tamarindo Gazette since Miguel walked in the front door of the cantina, covered head to toe in bruises and airbag dust. After all, who would kill a man over a job rinsing dirty margarita glasses?