Page 4 of Girl in the Water

After that, the missionary said she was too old for school. And he sat her in the very back in church.

Daniela had no one to hold her when lightning cracked overhead, and sometimes she cried at night, alone in the big hammock, missing her mother.

Pedro visited from time to time. She didn’t feel so alone then.

One day, after Pedro rolled off her, breathing hard, he said. “You’re wasted here, Daniela. Tomorrow, I’m going to take you downriver, to a great big house. You’ll like it there.”

But Pedro had lied about that.

* * *

Ian

All Ian Slaney wanted was a moment of oblivion.

He leaned against the cold brick wall in the alley behind Shanahan’s, one of the seediest bars in DC, with a hand on top of the woman’s head as she knelt in front of him.

Christ, she was like a fricking vacuum cleaner. On turbo setting. No finesse.

She’d come into his bar with three girlfriends: office girls, wanting a night on the wrong side of the tracks to finish off their year, clearly looking for trouble, and too dumb to know they were out of their depth.

The first time the blonde had sidled up to Ian, he’d ignored her. He’d already built a close relationship with half the bottle of whiskey on the bar in front of him. All he wanted was some private time with the other half.

“I’m Victoria.” The blonde flashed an expectant smile, as if she’d just given him a gift and was waiting for his thanks.

She wiggled closer, in the how-do-you-like-my-tits dance.

“I bet my girlfriends that I could get you to buy me a drink,” she said in a rich-girl whiny voice that probably got her boyfriend to buy her the expensive-looking shoes and matching purse that came from an alligator who, frankly, should have fought harder.

When Ian stayed silent, she said, “So do you work in construction or something?”

He couldn’t blame her for that. Theywerein a blue-collar neighborhood. And he clearly didn’t look like a stockbroker. “Used to be military.”

She perked up. “Navy SEAL?”

“Army.”

She only flagged a little. “Still, you probably killed like a ton of people, right?”

He kept his voice flat as he said, “Not at Shanahan’s.”

She had no response to that. After a few awkward seconds, she slinked back to her friends, and they ordered more drinks, watching him and whispering.

Ian’s bottle went down to the last quarter.

“She’ll be back,” Dean Shanahan predicted from behind the bar, then gave him a mock once-over. “Thirty, six feet even, two hundred pounds of mostly muscle. Face it, boyo, you look like a good lay.”

Ian stared into his drink. “Wish she’d realize I’m a hell of a bad bet.”

Even as Dean moved on with a nod, the woman was prancing over again.

In the same you-should-be-grateful tone she’d used before, she said, “Hey, so, wanna go out back?”

And Ian was in a dark enough mood to nod, still without fully looking at her. “Yeah. Sure.”

He knocked back his drink and gestured to Dean behind the bar not to put away the bottle.

He slid off his barstool and checked out the woman more thoroughly at last: overdressed for these parts in a black skirt and red silk blouse, flawless makeup, slick hair, fancy Christmas-themed manicure with snowflakes. She probably spent more on maintenance than Ian did on his apartment.