by Kim Oh
I was glad to have found him, but I wasn’t happy to see who was there with him.
A girl.
The two of them were head-to-head over Donnie’s laptop, resting on his knees. He didn’t even look up when I was standing right there in front of them.
Neither did she, whoever she was. All I could see was the top of her unkempt spiky haircut as she jabbed a finger at the numbers on the laptop’s screen.
“Okay, then you run your regression analysis –” She poked the computer so hard it rocked back and forth. “And that’s when the numbers start getting interesting.”
Whatever she was talking about, Donnie wasn’t buying it. He shook his head. “I still say you’re overlooking too many variables. You’re not taking into account all the difference the crew chief makes on a driver’s performance –”
“That’s the whole point.” Another hard jab at the numbers scrolling by. “That’s noise –”
“Excuse me –” I tried to get their attention. “Yo.”
“That’s what you want to eliminate –”
“Sure,” said Donnie, “if you want to screw up all your league picks –”
“All right, that’s it.” I reached down between them and slammed the laptop closed. “Time to pay some attention to the real world. Which is me, right now.”
They both looked up, the girl blinking behind her glasses.
“This is my sister,” Donnie explained to her. “Her name’s Kim.” For my benefit, he pointed a thumb toward the girl. “This is Mavis. We’ve been talking.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Hi.” Mavis smiled at me. “I never heard about all this NASCAR stuff before. I mean, I’ve heard about it, of course – I just didn’t know there was so much to it.”
“True enough,” I said. “More than you probably want to hear about.” I had to give her credit for broadmindedness. The crowd she hung with back on campus probably associated stock car racing with Klan rallies and pickup trucks with Confederate flag stickers in the rear window, just below the gun rack.
“She’s not into it –” Donnie nodded toward me. “Not the way I am.”
I’d had a closer look at the girl by this time. “Are you sure you’re on the right plane?” She was obviously way younger than the party crowd filling the coach section ahead of us. “I mean . . . you’re not going down for all that spring break action, are you?”
“Oh, no.” She gave an emphatic shake of her head. “I’m on an anthropology research project. That’s my major.”
Good, I thought. The little hussy might’ve charmed the pants off Donnie by talking NASCAR stats with him, but if she was going to be walking around some Third World-ish village in the center of this Meridién place we were headed to, with a clipboard and digital recorder in her hands – while we were holed up in an air-conditioned hotel on the coast – then so much for her putting any more moves on him.
I felt a tap on my shoulder and glanced behind me. “We’re going to be landing soon,” said the flight attendant who’d steered me back here. “So we need to get these kids back to their seats.”
Looking past her, I could see that the other attendants were having some success in getting the amped-up university students in line and ready to descend. Then again, they probably had some motivation for being marginally well-behaved, since they figured there’d be more scope for raucous fun – and alcohol! – once they were on the ground.
“Nice meeting you, Mavis.” I straightened up, getting ready to head back to first class. “Pack it up,” I told my brother. “Seatbelt light just came back on.”
At the front of the plane, I settled in beside Lynndie.
She glanced over at me. “Everybody treating your brother okay?”
I realized what her little smile meant. “That was something you arranged?” I pointed a thumb over my shoulder. “With the flight attendants?”
“You know . . .” Her gaze sharpened a bit. “We’ll get along a lot better if you don’t react so negatively to everything I do. It was just something nice, okay? I figured your brother would be a little uncomfortable back there with all those clowns, so I was happy to do it. That’s all.”
Actually, I figured, it was her money that had done it. It wasn’t exactly like the flight attendants loved her for her radiant golden self. But then again, for somebody like Lynndie, what was the difference? I mean, between her and her money? Nothing that I could see. So for the sake of interpersonal diplomacy, I let it slide.
“Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate it.”
“De nada.” She turned her gaze back to the pages of her glossy celebrity magazine. “No problem.”
If she knew much more Spanish than that, I would’ve been surprised. I leaned forward, looking past her and out the window, at the small, two-runway airport the plane was tilting toward.
“Besides,” said Lynndie, “my father’s good for it.”
“Okay . . .” I gave a nod. “Nice of him.”
“Oh, yeah.” She noisily flipped another bright-colored page. “He’s a real saint, all right. Sometimes . . . he even uses his own money.”
I wondered what that meant. “Who else’s would he use?”
“Don’t you know?” She turned her head and looked at me. “About my father? And my money?”
This didn’t sound good. “No,” I said. “What’s the deal?”
“All the money in our family came from my mom.” Lynndie lowered the magazine. “Real old money – and a lot of it. My father didn’t have jack when he married her. And when she died – I was just a kid – it all went into a trust for me. Because she knew how much of a bastard he was. He gets cut a pretty good wad just for administering the accounts.”
“Don’t tell me. He was dipping into them.”
“Big time,” said Lynndie. “Soon as I was old enough to figure out what was going on, I had everything audited. Hired my own accountant and everything.” Her face set hard. “I was sixteen. Wound up in court, with him sitting at one table, and me and my lawyers sitting at another.”
“Couldn’t have been much fun.”
“Actually . . .” A shrug. “I enjoyed it. In a way. My mom – she would’ve wanted me to do it.” Lynndie held up a thumb and forefinger, pressed together. “He came this close to going to prison.”
Sometimes when I hear things like this, I’m almost glad that Donnie and I have been orphans almost all our lives. Except I’m pretty sure our folks wouldn’t have pulled this kind of crap.
I glanced out the window. We were pretty close to landing.
“So . . .” I looked over at her again. “Did everything get sorted out all right?”
“Oh, sure.” Lynndie set her hands down flat on the magazine in her lap. “We get along . . . just fine now.”
I wasn’t so sure about that.
“Anyway . . .” Lynndie smiled a little as she closed her eyes. “It’s not important. Let’s just have fun. Some real fun.”
† † †
Turned out that Lynndie wasn’t done doing little favors for me. Or to be precise, she’d been doing them even before we got on the flight to Meridién.
“Excuse me –” I turned to the hotel porter behind me. “This isn’t the room I booked.”
“Que?” He had our bags under his arms; my brother and I had brought down so little stuff that the porter was able to carry it all without using one of the hotel’s chrome baggage carts. Which was just as well, since they’d all been commandeered to handle Lynndie’s amazing collection of expensively matched luggage.
Donnie rolled past us in the wheelchair that the hotel had provided – I supposed I was getting billed for that, too – and started checking things out.
Meanwhile, I stopped the porter from carrying our bags back to the bedroom – or one of the bedrooms, I saw now. This wasn’t a hotel room; it was a whole suite. Which meant that, in my usual cheapskate fashion, I hadn’t booked it. I’d been planning on sticking Donnie in the bedroom and then sleeping
on the couch myself, just the way we had in our grimly dark little apartment back East. I didn’t want our living expenses while I was on this job to eat up any more than was necessary from what I was going to get paid.
“I’d better go back down and talk to the front desk.” Standing in the suite’s entry hallway, I scanned around, noting more signs of scary expensiveness. Gilt-framed paintings, furniture a lot plusher than anything you’d see in a Motel 6 – there was even a huge gift basket sitting on the table in the main room, complete with a couple wine bottles tucked in among the glistening fruit. “No way am I paying for this.”
Meanwhile, Donnie had rolled over to the big sliding window and out onto the room’s balcony. “Cool!” He grabbed the rail and hoisted himself up in the wheelchair so he could get a better look at what was happening down below. “All right!”
Just from the noises, I could tell what was going on. The splashing and shouting and inebriated laughter didn’t just drift up to the hotel room, it got driven aloft on a wave of annoyingly loud hip-hop music, the kind that’s like putting your head on the sidewalk and inserting a slow jackhammer into your ear. The bass from the over-amped outdoor PA system sounded like a basketball landing in a bowl of oatmeal, over and over. Cutting through the din were those screeching noises that drunk girls need to make in order to show that they’re having way too much fun.
I stood behind the wheelchair and looked over my brother’s head. It was all going down at the hotel pool area just the way I figured it would. Still daylight, and still early in the week, so things were just getting started. So the serious one-on-one action wouldn’t be happening for a while yet. Right now, it seemed to be mainly tequila shooters and multiple cerveza ingestion – and either nobody was checking ID’s, or these college kids had state-of-the-art phony driver’s licenses. Some of the more obvious freshmen and sophomores, of both sexes, already were in full hurl over by the agave plants alongside the hotel’s garishly painted cinder-block walls.
Naturally enough, Donnie wasn’t interested in that action. What’d caught his attention was the same thing that the more predatory and relatively sober college guys were aiming their cell-phone cameras at, namely the girls in and out of the jam-packed pool. There was even a video crew from one of those online operations that specialize in streaming high-res footage of barely eighteens either yanking their tops down or up, depending upon whether they were wearing bathing suits or T-shirts.
“Okay, pal, that’s enough for you.” I grabbed the wheelchair handles and pulled Donnie back inside the suite. “That’s not exactly the kind of studying you’re supposed to be doing while we’re down here.”
I figured he’d be right back out there watching the spring break action soon as my back was turned; I mainly just wanted to indicate to him my big sister-type disapproval, seeing as I’m more-or-less in charge of bringing him up. There were enough continuing hassles I had with the Child Protective Services people without the chance of Donnie letting it slip that he’d wound up with a bird’s-eye view of all these carrying-on’s. Even though I’d pretty much cleared it with them beforehand, it’d been on the basis of this kind of thing not happening around him.
Which was why, soon as I got Donnie dragged back inside, I was heading down to get this sorted out, ASAP. I still had a job to take care of, so I didn’t have time to screw around with our accommodations.
Only it turned out, I didn’t have to go back down to the front desk. I guess it’s one of the advantages of being considered a VIP – they come to you. The friendly porter guy had figured out that something was wrong and had used the room phone to call the head desk clerk. The next thing I know, the man in suit and tie was there in front of me, being all solicitous.
“First thing,” I told him, “I know I didn’t book this room. I asked for something a lot smaller and a lot cheaper. And in the back, away from all the action.”
“I like this room –” That was Donnie, chiming in. “The view’s great.”
“Zip it.” I turned back to the desk clerk. “When I made the reservation, I specifically said –”
“Sí, of course –” He nodded with businesslike vigor. “But when your friend called and gave us her credit card number for the upgrade, we naturally –”
“Excuse me. My friend? What friend?”
The desk clerk pulled some paperwork from his coat pocked and showed it to me. “Miss Heathman,” he said. “She was very – what is the English – insistent that you have the best available. So of course . . .”
I should have known. Another part of Lynndie’s scheming to get on my good side. She must’ve really been hoping to pull something over on me.
“Okay; that’s fine.” I returned the manager’s nod. “I forgot . . . that she was taking care of this.”
“Is there anything else we can do for you?”
“No – it’s all good.”
“Just call if there is.” He smiled and backed out the door, while the porter resumed toting the luggage into one of the bedrooms.
Turned out that the porter spoke some English as well. I suppose that’s an advantage when you’re working in a hotel stuffed with gringos. We found out when Donnie rolled over to one of the windows, looked out, and pointed. “What’s that?”
The porter set down the last bag and came over and stood beside Donnie’s wheelchair. “Colibrí,” he said. “You say, hummingbirds.”
“Kinda big.” Donnie’s expression turned doubtful. “And they look like statues.”
“Statues – sí. Because here in Meridién – many, many hummingbirds.” The porter made an expansive gesture with both hands. “So the government – they ask all the artists to make statues of the birds. Big statues. And the artists paint them all different colors. Muy lindo.”
I came over and took a look. Out in the distance, just before the ocean, there was a big, empty expanse of concrete. It was studded with what looked like stone pillars, which probably would’ve reached over my head if I’d been standing there next to them. Each pillar was topped with a giant varicolored hummingbird, caught in flight.
“And they were all put there on the malecón. The waterfront. For people to go and look at.”
I squinted. “I don’t see anybody out there.”
“Ah.” He gave a philosophical shrug. “Not such a good idea. Nobody goes to the malecón. Too far away, nothing there. And –” He smiled. “To look at statues is not why people come to Meridién.”
“Guess not.”
“I tell you something.” The porter squatted down beside the wheelchair and leaned close to Donnie. Maybe he had a son the same age. “In Meridién, there are three kind of hummingbirds. The big ones, the not-so-big, and the pequeño – the little tiny ones. The big ones, they stay by the flowers, to keep all the sweet nectar for themselves. Then the not-so-big ones come, and they fight the big ones for the nectar. And while they are fighting, the little ones come and steal all the nectar.” He tapped the side of his head. “Smart, eh?”
It sounded like a metaphor for something, but I wasn’t quite sure what. I overtipped the guy, just for being so cool with my kid brother. Then we were by ourselves.
“So we’re staying here?” A hopeful tone sounded in Donnie’s voice.
“Not if I can help it.” Maybe it’s an occupational hazard, from what I do for a living, but I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t like surprises of any kind. And I particularly don’t like getting schemed on. “You stay right here while I go sort things out.” I didn’t bother telling him not to go back out on the balcony, since I figured he’d do it anyway, no matter what I said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
I already knew that Lynndie was ensconced in the even bigger suite that took up the whole top floor of the hotel, since we had all checked in together. Now I knew what had been meant by the big, knowing smile she’d flashed when Donnie and I had gotten out of the elevator, and she’d continued on up.
My card key gave me access to the top floor; that
’d been programmed in at the front desk. I ran the plastic rectangle through the slot just inside the elevator, hit the top button, and felt the car slide upward. When the doors parted again, they showed the entrance to Lynndie’s suite.
No answer came when I knocked. That could mean anything; maybe she was in the shower, freshening up after the flight down here, or she could’ve made her way already to the pool area, wasting no time to hook up with the rest of the party animals.
I fished the other card key out of my pocket, the one I’d been given at the front desk. That was something that had been prearranged by Lynndie’s father, that I’d have access to her suite – or at least I would as long as she didn’t go in there and put the chain on the door. The little green light came on when I swiped the card through the door slot. I gave it a push – no chain – and stepped inside.
