Ocean Burning Read Online Free Page A

corked the bottle, glanced around the boat before I locked it up.
    Things certainly couldn’t get any worse.

Chapter 3
    I PUMPED OUT one hundred pushups right there on the deck, trying to evaporate the booze into the fading twilight. I jumped up and grabbed the overhang of the conning tower and cranked out some pullups. There was a time I could remember doing fifteen without breaking a sweat. Tonight I counted five, and the last took everything I had to give.
    Then I took a shower in the marina’s locker room, walked back to the Regal Purple , put on a breathable knit shirt, and headed into town on the bicycle I keep stowed away on land.
    I broke a sweat again, pumping my legs up a couple of hills, but didn’t think anything of it. The heat down here was omnipresent. Sweat wasn’t dirty, just a fact of life. I knew the light fabric of the shirt would do its job, wicking and evaporating. My legs had it worse, burning up in a pair of oil-soaked jeans. They started to burn and throb as I reached the top of the last hill and braked.
    The clock in the little town square was edged in adobe and read five after seven as I locked up the bike. Dinner wasn’t until seven-thirty, but I had plans for those extra twenty-five minutes. I picked a side street with promise and wandered up and down the shops, peering into windows until I found the one I wanted.
    The little store had class, but not too much; quality, but without the exorbitant price tags meant for tourists. The proprietor was a short, dark-skinned man with a drooping mustache and a bad toupee. He found me a pair of slim light-colored pants that looked like chinos, but when I slid them on the material was silky and smooth.
    “Cuales son estos?” I asked, and ran my fingers down the fold line.
    “For golf,” he said in English. I nodded, retrieved some crumpled pesos from the back pocket of the wrecked jeans, and paid him. I asked if he had had a garbage can, and he pointed toward a cut-off fifty five gallon drum stowed behind the counter. I crumpled the jeans up and stuffed them inside.
    At two minutes to seven I strode into the restaurant, bursting with the confidence only a pair of new pants can provide. I had never been inside the place before, though I had lived here for more than two years.
    One glance around and I knew why. The place was candlelit, with waiters in tuxes and busboys in ties. I felt sure I could guess the menu price of Mahi Mahi without even looking. Somewhere in the stratosphere, I bet myself, and I could catch them by the dozens any time I dropped a line more than a half-mile off shore. Tourist prices, I thought.
    I caught sight of Carmen in a private alcove in the back. She looked resplendent in red sitting at a table for three, the light of a candle flickering off her. Alone.
    I threaded my way between the other small, intimate settings, and sat down.
    “Where’s Ben?” I asked.
    She smiled. “I told him dinner was at eight.”
    My heartbeat quickened into a two-step. “Why would you do that?”
    “So we could be alone, of course, so you could ask me the thing you want to ask me.”
    I said nothing.
    “So ask already.” She batted her eyes at me.
    The plan to play it cool evaporated. My hands clutched at the side of the table. “What happened to you? What happened to you five years ago? Where did you go? I went down to get the engraving plates, and when I came back, you were gone.”
    She reached out and put a hand on top of mine. A single tear rolled out of one of her big green eyes. “I know, Frank. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for you.”
    I brushed a strand of hair out of her face, then reversed my hand and used the back to wipe her cheek. “I was worried. I mean, I was mixed up in some stuff there for awhile. I know you weren’t really involved, but I thought there was an outside chance…” I trailed off.
    “That I’d been killed?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Nothing nearly that dramatic. The police pulled me over in