Angelina scanned his face, refrained from saying, yes, but what he'd found was someone else's passion, not his own. As that thought rolled through her mind, however, it trailed behind it a hunch about Michael that surprised her. She heard herself saying, "You're really kind of bashful, aren't you?"
He looked away, and she wasn't sure she should have said it. But after a moment he answered. "Meeting people. It's really not so easy."
Angelina dabbed her lips.
"A lot of straights," he said, "they have these wild notions, they think it's all disco dancing and meet me in stall three. But if you're talking about really finding someone . . ."
He broke off, drank, glanced up at the wet, black, spongy clouds.
"Little secret, Angelina?" he went on. "Men talk big. Straight men do. Gay men do. There's a little bit of wishful bullshit in all of us. Or a lot . . . But when you're out there, looking, there's all this insecurity, all this doubt. I'll tell you—you can take a guy with a fabulous body squeezed into six-hundred bucks worth of perfect leather, and inside he's just like a kid at a high school dance."
They drank Faint orange lightning was pulsing deep inside purple clouds, the glow came through like a candle on an egg. Angelina felt it was only fair that she answer confidence with confidence. "That dating stuff," she said. "I've spared myself a lot of that." She ran a finger over the rim of her glass. "You know—by being strange."
Michael looked at her briefly, then his eyes slid off her face.
"It's okay," she said. "I know I'm strange. I don't feel bad about it."
It started raining. It wasn't gradual; from the first instant it was a hammering downpour, the way it happens in the tropics. Angelina sat there in the rain, her pouffed hair flattening as she waited for Michael's eyes to lift back to her own. "Hey," she said, "it's really okay. You're queer, I'm strange. You don't know I know I'm strange?"
* * *
"'S'raining," slurred a tourist at the bar where Ziggy worked, as drops the size of grapes slammed through yielding foliage and clattered like BB shots on metal roofs.
Brilliant deduction, asshole, thought the bartender, as he threw the man a small tight smile.
The evening had been even steamier than usual, the air was like some fat guy's underpants. The weather, and on top of it the endless parade of jerks, made Ziggy feel even grumpier than normal. He let off some private huff the safest way he knew: he stood there amid the clamor of the teeming rain and he thought about quitting. A job, a love affair, sometimes life itself—a big part of what made them bearable was knowing you could quit, reminding yourself. When you stopped believing that, that was when you got a bellyache.
This job, thought Ziggy—could he afford to blow it off? He made okay money with Salazar. But who knew how long Salazar would keep him on? Then too, it was a good idea to have a legitimate source of income, something to point to in case people got curious as to how you paid the rent. Besides, tending bar at Raul's wasn't all bad; like a savvy trout behind its rock, he could linger behind his arc of varnished teak, and the endless current of the tavern brought him sporadic amusement and sometimes business opportunities.
But then again, always, in unending supply, there were the assholes.
Like the guy coming in right now, motioning for a drink before he'd even got his butt up on the barstool. He was soaking wet from the rain, and plastered to his chest was a shirt that said i'm shy— but i've got a big dick.
Wrong on both counts, douche bag, Ziggy thought. What kind of fucking idiot would wear something like that? He was so disgusted that he barely looked at the guy as he took his order for a Virgin Heat.
Which was exactly how the man in the unspeakable shirt, whose name was Keith McCullough, wanted it. When you were working undercover, your goal was to distract your quarry, cause him to look away or to notice nonessentials, to focus on anything except your face.
9
"Maria, this is Louie."
"You want Paul? He's in the shower."
"No, Maria. I wanna talk to you. About Angelina. Have you heard anything? Is she back?"
It was around eight the next morning. Maria, in a quilted robe, was making coffee, telling herself her movements around the kitchen were purposeful, productive, not just aimless pacing. She hesitated a second before she answered Louie's question. She was surprised that her shriveled heart warmed a little toward her husband's youngest brother.
"No Louie, she isn't back, I haven't heard a thing."
"I hardly slept last night," said Angelina's uncle.
For this there was no answer, so Maria nestled the phone against her ear and resumed her shuffling across the cold tiles of the kitchen floor.