staring into it, his eyes so wide Bruford could see their bulging whites from where he stood.
He rushed forward, thinking maybe he shouldn’t be too eager to find out what inside those boxes could have sent a pair of grown men into crazed and seemingly unashamed fits of hysteria, but letting his feet take him over to the skid truck anyway, moving up to it with three or four long, hurried strides.
And then he was standing there looking down into the crate, feeling his stomach seize with horror and revulsion.
There were body parts inside. Instantly recognizable
Both looked like they were male to Bruford, though he couldn’t be sure. He had also had no way to be positive the severed limbs packed in the crate belonged to the same two people. The only thing he
Everything but the heads, and the hands.
He turned away from the horrible sight, clapped a palm over his mouth to fend off an attack of nausea. He was aware of Hendricks behind him now, peering over his shoulder at the gross butchery inside the crate. His radio up against his ear, the inspector was calling out for assistance in a cracking, excited voice — either from airport security or the police, Bruford was too far out of his skull to tell. He heard a response squawk from the Customs inspector’s handset, jerked his head around, and knew at a glance that Hendricks was struggling with the same kind of paroxysms he’d managed to subdue a moment before.
Their eyes met for an instant. The color had drained from Hendricks’s cheeks until they turned an ashen gray.
Then he covered his stomach with his hands, doubled over, produced an awful retching noise, and threw up all over his shoes.
“Hey, you!” said Marissa Vasquez without slowing her jog in the sand. “Watch it!”
Felipe, who’d fallen a step or two behind Marissa, reacted about the way she would have expected and ignored her. Of course her zippy tone wasn’t what she might have called high in the intimidation factor…
Before she could finish protesting, Felipe caught up to her, hooked an arm around her waist, and drew her into his embrace.
“Sorry.” He gave her a slyly playful smile. “Tried to check myself.”
Marissa threw her hands around his neck and stood facing him on the beach in the chill early morning breeze.
“You’re hopeless,” she said.
He shrugged and pulled her gently but irresistibly closer.
“You’re also fouling up my pace,” she said.
Felipe pulled her still closer, kissed her in the middle of her forehead.
“Bringing me down off my targeted heart rate,” Marissa said. And who did
He kissed her again, lightly, his lips touching her left brow, her right, her eyelids, the tip of her nose, then brushing down over the corners of her mouth, and further down to her neck as his hand glided up and up over the front of her running jacket.
Marissa felt ripples of warmth. “Felipe…”
He tilted his head back, a glint in his dark brown eyes.
“I think you’re heartbeat feels just fine,” he said, putting his hand right
“Fine as can be,” he said huskily, and raised his other hand to her cheek, stroked her hair back behind her ear with delicate fingertips, a few strands at a time, and then guided her mouth to his mouth, and kissed her long and fully and deeply.
Her lips parted wide, hungry for him, Marissa felt his hand slide under her jacket and pressed herself against him to make it clear he could keep right on doing what he was, all the while surprised and further excited by her utter lack of modesty and self-consciousness. The early hour aside, this little beach on the Miller-Knox shoreline was a public place, and before Felipe Escalona entered her life that would have her made her far too uptight to carry on like a teenager having her first heavy make-out session. But this was what he did to her, and was how it had been for her since they’d met here almost a month ago to the hour, both out for Sunday morning jogs on the weekend before Easter.
They were yin and yang, opposites attracting, choose your favorite advice column canard for two very different types of people who seemed to make an ideal fit.
The only child of a Latino entrepreneur who ran a large San Francisco construction and real-estate development firm of his founding, Marissa was a few months shy of her twenty-first birthday, which would roughly coincide with her graduation from UC Berkeley, where she’d studied toward a BA in business administration and a minor degree in political science. Felipe, who was five years her senior, and whose trace of an accent hinted at his Mexican origins — he’d told her that his parents had immigrated from Guadalajara when he was a boy, and that he’d spent a couple of years in his native country earning a master’s in Spanish language and literature — made his living as a freelance writer of bilingual educational materials, and was presently contracted with a software designer called Golden Triangle to work on a program meant for high school classrooms. Easygoing and spontaneous, his tongue partially in cheek (or so Marissa assumed), Felipe insisted the key to his happiness and productivity was wearing sweatpants in his home office, and claimed the prospect of having to put on a suit and tie five days a week canceled out whatever lure a guaranteed wage might present.
By sharp contrast Marissa was pragmatic, sober, and normally controlled to an extreme, traits she believed came straight from her father, a man of strict discipline who had raised her as a single parent since she was ten, when terminal uterine cancer had claimed a still-youthful Yolanda Vasquez to deprive Marissa of a mother’s affection. All her life Marissa had found that her success within ruled social and scholastic lines had been the surest way to please him, and pleasing him remained as important to her now as it ever was. She felt the need to channel her considerable energy and intelligence within the structure of an imposed routine, thrived in the academic grid of scheduled classes and exams, and could not envision a career without organizational security and a regular weekly paycheck. On entering the employment market after commencement, she hoped to expeditiously find a position with one of the corporate multinationals that would utilize her specialized academic skills.
In her amorous affairs Marissa’s patterns of behavior always had been much the same — partitioned and ordered so as not to upset her normal balance. She’d cared for her two previous lovers and enjoyed the physical aspects of those relationships, but in each case the divide between their sexual intimacies and Marissa’s reserved expressions of emotion had left both partners ultimately dissatisfied, and made her wonder if she suffered from an irremediable personality glitch. Yet from the very beginning with Felipe, their sex had been a sort of catalytic conversion, an act of abandon binding her heart and body to his in a wholly fulfilling way she had never believed she would experience.
Still Marissa knew that she and Felipe were really, essentially different from one another in
