Surfing Detective 02 - Wipeout

impression remained in the blue comforter, but she was gone.
I knew I shouldn’t have left her alone.
    Ten minutes passed. I imagined as many scenarios in which she played victim to Sun’s goons, as those in which she played their accomplice, compliant with their plots to an extent that did not threaten her “widow’s” inheritance.
    When she finally let herself in, I asked where she had been.
    “Reliving beautiful memories,” she explained, reclaiming her comfy spot on the poster bed.
    “You and Corky stayed here?”
    She nodded, her smile becoming annoyingly serene.
    I walked over to the phone, definitely feeling more relaxed at the thought of Maya not being one of Sun’s pawns. “I hope you liked the food then, because I’m about to make reservations for dinner. Seven suit you?”
    She nodded.
    I phoned in the dinner reservation, then pulled a frosty Heineken from the wet bar and offered it to Maya.
    “I don’t drink.” She said, recovering her voice.
    I popped the cap and began to down the Heineken myself. As I was nearing the bottom, the phone rang. I let it go.
    Maya looked at me as the phone rang and rang. “Aren’t you going to answer it?”
    “No.”
    I sat silently and watched Maya. She didn’t move. Finally the phone stopped ringing. A message light began blinking.
    I picked up the handset and played the message.
    “Kai . . . ?”
    Leimomi had tracked me down. And she sounded desperate
    “I did what you asked. I bought a pregnancy test kit. We need to talk. I can’t bear this alone.”
    Pilikia.
I shook my head. Trouble.
    “And, Kai, why did the hotel operator say she was connecting me to the room of ‘Mr. and
Mrs.
Cooke’? Who’s Mrs. Cooke?”
    “What’s the message?” Maya was asking in my other ear.
    “Wrong number.” I hung up the phone.
    Maya rose abruptly from the poster bed. “I’m going to take a bath in that blue tub. Do you mind?”
    “Why should I mind?”
    Maya said nothing more as she ambled toward the gleaming tub, leaving the door partway open behind her.
    I could see her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Behind her, powder blue was the dominant hue, with soft, indirect lighting and fixtures of polished brass. Gauzy shower curtains, draped from a brass rod the size of a canon, fell into sweeping festoons with plenty of pomp and circumstance. Cream-colored throw rugs and fluffy terry towels made the scene that much more luxurious.
    Maya began to undress, revealing the shapely breasts I’d been glimpsing at all day. The freckles on her face, I discovered, had cousins elsewhere. And they were sexy—each and every one. She definitely didn’t look her forty-plus years. Her slender limbs were smooth and gracefully sculpted. Only around her neck could I detect the first faint lines that someday would show her age, but not yet. When she shed her panties, the triangular puff of copper hair between her legs sent shock waves through my brain.
    “Join me in the bath?” Maya’s voice snapped me out of my reverie.
Say what?
    Maya bent, gorgeously naked, toward the brass tub faucets and cranked on the hot. A steamy flood poured into the deep blue tub. There was something more than a little unsavory about climbing into that steaming tub with the redhead whose “husband” had just died violently only hours before. Then there was Leimomi, whose looming pregnancy had my future hanging in the wind
.
    I watched as Maya sprinkled in a packet of bathing crystals. A rich, dewy, seductive scent instantly perfumed the room.
Jasmine.
I could see the hot water rising, bubbling and shimmering.
    Maya swung one long bare leg over the baby blue tub rail, then another. She slipped down into the steamy bath. Soon only her slender neck and fiery hair showed above the rising water.
    “Ahhhh . . .”
was all she said.
    I don’t know how it happened exactly. It wasn’t a decision I consciously made. When I slid in behind her, she didn’t say a thing. She turned and glimpsed the shark teeth marks on my chest. But even they didn’t move her to speak. The water was almost too hot—on the edge of scalding. But before long I got used to it. I breathed in deeply and the jasmine sent of the bath oil filled my lungs. I cupped my hands around her breasts as she eased up onto me. Instantly she was moving and communicating, not with words, but with sighs.
    We climbed higher and higher, taking each other up to an invisible summit. When we finally tumbled down together, Maya screamed and