inch.
"You want a deal, pendejo?" he said calmly. "Bring me the bitch. Or tell me where she's buried. Then we can talk. Until then, you've got nothing I want."
Zeta stood. He strolled to the barred door, rapped against the window, and told the guard he had a basketball game to get back to.
Chapter 33-34
Chapter 33
Fifteen minutes after I'd decided she wasn't going to show, Ana DeLeon walked into my apartment.
She wore boot-cut jeans, the hems tucked into black Justins, her white collarless blouse overlaid with a denim work shirt, the sleeves rolled up. Her short black hair was tied with a red bandanna, the triangular flap hanging loose in the back. She looked like a Sandinista poster girl.
"I'm here," she said, like she was trying to come to terms with the fact.
I was sitting cross-legged on the floor between the futon and the coffee table, the final stack of undergraduate papers in front of me. I'd saved the freshman-comp gems for last. I had my trusty red pen in one hand and a Shiner Bock in the other and Robert Johnson draped across my shoulders like a fox stole - a habit that was somewhat cute when he was a kitten but many years and twenty-one pounds later had become chiropractically unsound.
On the kitchen counter, my aging Sears boom box was blaring out Son Becky's blues band, live from a San Antonio roadhouse in 1937.
I sized up DeLeon's outfit. "You look - "
"Different," she interrupted. "That's the point. Anybody asks who doesn't need to know otherwise, I'm your girlfriend."
"My girlfriend."
"That's right."
I started to laugh.
Her eyes flashed me a warning. "What?" she demanded.
"Sorry," I said. "You just don't seem like the girlfriend type."
"Oh really."
She came over and sank next to me on the floor. Robert Johnson evaporated from my shoulders. DeLeon calmly grabbed my neck with hard, warm fingers and pulled me forward. I figured my neck was going to snap like a twig.
It was a rough kiss, meant to cut off circulation rather than show affection. Her face smelled like apricot scrub. The force of her mouth left me seeing black spots, left my lips doing funny things for several seconds after she pulled away.
"What's the problem?" she asked. Her face was completely dispassionate, freezer steel.
I tried to say, "Wow." What came out instead was a muted honk.
"Sex crimes division, Navarre. Two years. I learned to play a lot of roles. A woman with her own identity, not belonging to anybody - people remember her. But somebody's girlfriend? Girlfriends are invisible."
"Invisible. Sure. Just don't ask me to stand up for the next ten minutes."
She tried to backhand me with her fist. I caught it.
"I'm your girlfriend," she repeated.
"Far be it from me to mess up a woman's cover."
I pushed her fist away.
On the boom box, Son Becky started pounding out eighth notes on his barrelhouse piano with enough gusto to put Jerry Lee Lewis to shame. "Black Heart Blues."
DeLeon looked down at my paperwork. "What are you working on?"
My body kept circulating blood around at unnatural speeds. Parts of me were just now feeling the punch of DeLeon's kiss, notifying my brain that she was still sitting there, shoulder to shoulder with me, and what the hell was I going to do about it? With effort, I focused on the stack of essays. "Grading."
Her lips pursed in a controlled smile.
"What?" I asked.
"Nothing. You just don't seem like the grading type."
I showed her a hand gesture.
She picked up the paper I was halfway through, flipped back to the title page. She raised her eyebrows at me. ' 'The Symbolism of the Boiling Pot in Three Medieval Plays?"
"Aaron Brandon had a taste for the violent. I suppose it got the better of him in the end."
She pressed her mouth into an M. "I didn't tell you - I'm sorry about George. Kelsey caught the Hector Mara murder from the night squad this morning."
"That makes me feel tons better."
"Don't underestimate him, Navarre. Kelsey's dedicated."
I let it pass. "The shooting changed your mind about coming with us?"
"My mind hasn't changed. It's still a shitty idea."
"Then why?"
She got up from the floor, offered me a hand, then pulled me into standing position. "Besides the fact it beats you and Ralph Arguello on the loose by yourselves? Maybe if I had a few more months, I wouldn't do it. I'd keep picking away. But since I have exactly three days before they throw me to the cold-case squad, I feel