To Die For

“You’ve had a brain fart,” I pointed out as kindly as possible. “Not trusting you means I don’t want to be with you.”

He snorted. “Yeah, right. That’s why we tear each other’s clothes off every time we get within touching distance.”

“That’s a chemical imbalance, nothing more. A good multivitamin will take care of that.”

“We’ll talk about it over dinner. Where do you want to eat?”

That’s right, distract me with food. If I hadn’t been so hungry, his ploy would never have worked. “Someplace with champion air-conditioning where I can sit down and some nice person will bring me a margarita.”

“That works for me,” he said.

Wrightsville Beach is actually on an island, so we drove across the bridge to Wilmington, where, in short order, he was escorting me into a crowded Mexican restaurant where the air-conditioning was cranked up on high and the menu boasted a huge margarita. I don’t know how he knew about the restaurant unless he’d been to Wilmington before, which I guess isn’t that much of a stretch. People go to beaches the way lemmings do whatever it is that lemmings do. There are a lot of beaches in North Carolina, but he’d probably been from one end of the coast to the other back in his hell-raising, college-ball-playing days. I’d been a cheerleader, and I certainly had hit almost every beach in the southeast, from North Carolina down to the Florida Keys and back up the Gulf Coast.

A young Hispanic man brought our menus and waited to take our drink orders. Wyatt ordered a beer for himself and a frozen Cuervo Gold margarita for me. I didn’t know what Cuervo Gold was, and I didn’t care. I assumed it was a special kind of tequila, but it could have been regular tequila, for all I knew about it.

The glass they brought it in wasn’t a glass. It was a vase. This thing was huge. It wasn’t actually a vase, but I wouldn’t call it a glass, either. It was more like a gigantic clear bowl perched on a skinny pedestal.

“Uh-oh,” Wyatt said.

I ignored him and gripped my margarita with both hands, which I needed to lift it. The huge bowl of the glass was frosty, and salt sparkled around the rim. Two slices of lime were perched on top, and a bright red plastic straw provided access to the contents.

“We’d better order,” he said.

I sucked on the straw and downed a sizable gulp of margarita. The tequila taste wasn’t very strong, which was fortunate, or I’d have been on my butt before I was halfway finished with the thing. “I like burritos rancheros. Beef.”

It was amusing watching him watch me while he gave the order. I took another big sip through the straw.

“If you get drunk,” he warned, “I’m going to take pictures.”

“Why, thank you. I’ve been told I’m a very cute drunk.” I hadn’t, but he didn’t know that. I had actually never been drunk before, which probably means I had an abnormal college experience. But I’d always had cheerleading practice, or gymnastics-or something unexpected, like an exam to take-and I didn’t think any of those would be a happy experience while suffering a hangover, so I simply stopped drinking before I got drunk.

The waiter brought a basket of hot, salty tortilla chips and two bowls of salsa, hot and mild. I resalted half the tortilla chips and dug one into the hot salsa, which was delicious and definitely hot. Three chips later I broke out into a sweat and had to reach for my margarita again.

Wyatt reached out and moved my vase-my glass-out of reach.

“Hey!” I said indignantly.

“I don’t want you getting pickled.”

“I’ll get pickled if I want.”

“I need to ask you some more questions, which is why I didn’t want you to leave town.”

“Nice try, Lieutenant.” I leaned forward and retrieved my margarita. “For one thing, the detectives are working the case, not you. For another, I didn’t see anything other than a man was with Nicole, and he left driving a dark sedan. That’s it. Nothing else.”

“That you know of,” he said, snatching away my margarita just as I guided the straw to my mouth for another sip. “Sometimes details will surface days later. For instance, the car’s headlights. Or the taillights. Did you see them?”

“I didn’t see the headlights,” I said positively, intrigued by the question. “The taillights… hmm. Maybe.” I closed my eyes and replayed the scene in my head. It was shockingly detailed and vivid. In my imagination I saw the dark car sliding past, and to my surprise my heartbeat picked up in response. “The street is at a right angle to me, remember, so anything will be a side view. The taillight is… long. It isn’t one of those round ones; it’s a long skinny one.” My eyes popped open. “I think some models of Cadillac have taillights that shape.”

“Among others,” he said. He was writing down what I’d said, in this little notepad he’d evidently dug out of his pocket, because it was bent like a pocket dweller.

“You could have asked me this over the phone,” I pointed out acerbically.

“Yes, if you were answering your phone,” he replied in the same tone.

“You hung up on me.”

“I was busy. Yesterday was a ballbuster. I didn’t have time to worry about your car, which, by the way, I couldn’t get anyway because you didn’t bother giving your keys to me.”

“I know. I mean, I didn’t know then. I found them a little later. But the paper only identified me as a witness and that made me feel uneasy, and Tiffany was whining, so I rented wheels and came to the beach.”

He paused. “Tiffany?”

“My inner beach bunny. I haven’t had a vacation in a long time.”

He looked at me as if I’d grown two heads, or had admitted to having multiple personalities or something. Finally he asked, “Is there anyone besides Tiffany living inside you?”

“Well, I don’t have a snow bunny, if that’s what you’re asking. I’ve been snow skiing once. Almost. I tried on those boots and they’re so uncomfortable I can’t believe people actually wear them without having a gun held to their heads.” I drummed my fingers. “I used to have Black Bart, but he hasn’t shown up in a while, so maybe that was just a kid thing.”

“Black Bart? He was your inner… gunfighter?” He’d started grinning.

“No, he was my inner maniac who would go berserk and try to kill you if you hurt one of my Barbies.”

“You must have been hell on the playground.”

“You don’t mess with a girl’s Barbies.”

“I’ll remember that the next time I have the urge to grab a Barbie and stomp it.”

I stared at him, aghast. “You’d actually do that?”

“Haven’t in a long time. I must have gotten the Barbie-stomping out of my system by the time I was five.”

“Black Bart would have hurt you bad.”

He seemed to notice his little notebook on the table and got a puzzled expression on his face, as if he couldn’t figure out how the conversation had devolved from headlights to Barbies. Before he could reroute, however, the waiter brought our plates and set them down in front of us with the admonition to be careful because the plates were hot.

The tortilla chips had kept me from total starvation, but I was still mega-hungry, so I dug into the burritos with one hand while I took advantage of his distraction to retrieve my margarita with the other. Being ambidextrous has its uses. Not that I can write or anything with my left hand, but I can definitely retrieve kidnapped margaritas.

Like I said, the drink wasn’t strong. There was a lot of it, though. By the time I finished my burritos, I’d downed about half the drink, and I was feeling very happy. Wyatt paid for the meal and kept his arm around me as we walked to the truck. I don’t know why; I wasn’t staggering or anything. I wasn’t even singing.