Racing the Devil Read Free

smelled heavily of musk.
    “Mmmm. That was nice.” She leaned over and planted a wet kiss firmly on my lips. “Wait here, and I’ll go get us a drink.” She peeled the condom from between my thighs, kissed the place where it had been, and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. “I’ll get rid of this on the way to the fridge.”
    I watched as she padded to the wastebasket, then to the refrigerator. She was thinner than my ex-wife, with sharp, jutting hipbones and a small, flat behind. Her breasts were soft and pear-shaped, with long pink nipples that stood up like the ends of a big man’s thumbs. I could count her ribs and the vertebrae that ran like a knotted chain down the center of her back.
    She had two tattoos in addition to the rose on her left breast. One was a circle of barbed wire and blue roses around her right ankle, the other a small yellow butterfly on her left shoulder. Her lipstick was smeared, and there were dark smudges in the hollows beneath her eyes where her mascara had run. Her hair was tousled, and since I was the one who had tousled it, I found it both erotic and endearing.
    “Service with a smile,” she said, and held out a brimming wineglass. She slipped beneath the sheet and sipped her drink, holding it delicately, between two fingers and a thumb. “I know it’s not expensive, but I love sweet wine. Don’t you?”
    I tipped my head noncommittally.
    She brushed her fingers across my upper arm, where a thin white scar stood out against the skin. The pale hairs on my arms prickled.
    “What happened here?” she asked.
    “Vice squad. Undercover. Crackhead with a switchblade.”
    “And this one?” Her index finger traced a short jagged scar a few inches to the right of my navel. At her touch, the muscles of my stomach jumped.
    “Broken bottle.”
    Her hand swept upward, palm flat against the hard contours of my abs. Her fingers tugged gently at the blond hairs on my chest, slid across my pectoral muscles, and came to rest beside the small round scar halfway between my armpit and my heart.
    The one that had ended my marriage.
    “And this?” she said. Just before her finger touched the puckered skin, I closed my hand around hers and said, “That one, I don’t talk about.”
    “Ah.” After a moment, she cleared her throat, slipped her hand from beneath mine, and said, “So. What’s it like being a detective? It sounds exciting.”
    “Sometimes.” I brushed my lips across the butterfly on her shoulder. “Mostly, it’s a lot of waiting.”
    “Waiting?”
    “Waiting for a cheating spouse to come out of a motel room. Waiting for a guy defrauding his insurance company to sneak out of his wheelchair and go dancing. Waiting for interviews. We talk to a lot of people. That’s about it.”
    “You think about it being car chases and murder mysteries.”
    “P.I.’s don’t do murder,” I said. “Once in a blue moon, if we’re hired by an attorney. But mostly, it’s missing persons, insurance fraud, personal injury claims, spousal misconduct . . . that’s the kind of stuff we do. We leave the homicides for the cops.”
    She made a wry face. “Too bad. I think a murder would be interesting.”
    “I worked homicide for seven years,” I said. “And believe me, murder isn’t interesting. It’s nothing but a waste.”
    We moved on to other topics then. She told me about Ronnie, the soon-to-be ex-boyfriend.
    “He seemed so sweet.” She wrapped one arm around her knees and held her sangria glass with the other hand. “Guess you never know, huh?”
    “Guess not,” I said, though there had probably been signs.
    “Here, hold this.” She handed me her glass and headed off to the bathroom.
    When she came back, we had another glass of wine, made love again, and sometime after that I drifted into sleep, her body curled against mine like a Siamese cat’s. I woke up once, with my head spinning and my stomach roiling, realized it was still dark out, and sank back into a sleep too