Page 55 of Omega

This earned me a chuckle. “Mai tais are more Hawaii, babe. You’re in Brazil. Have a piña colada.”

He called me ‘babe.’ I tried not to love that, and totally failed. “How about straight tequila?”

“Does tequila make your clothes fall off?”

“I hate country music, Harris.”

He laughed. “Yet you got the reference. Must not hate ittoomuch. And I bet tequila does make your clothes fall off.”

“Yeah, it kind of does. But then…so does whiskey, and rum, and wine.” I hesitated. “I can’t afford that many minutes, so I should go. Save them for emergencies.”

He laughed, and then sang a few bars of the Joe Nichols song, his voice surprisingly smooth and melodic. “Keep your eyes open,” he finally said. “Don’t trust anyone. And…do whatever you have to.”

“Just get here,” I said, and then ended the call before he could hear the knot in my throat.

I didn’t cry. I was just sweating…from my tear ducts. I had a little sniffle. A summer cold.

No big deal.

Harris is coming. Harris is coming. Harris is coming.

12

LOST AND FOUND

I made it to the ocean. The 248 ended in the middle of the city, which got me turned around and required a lot of circling and hunting before I found the shore, but I made it. I was puttering along a road whose name I couldn’t pronounce—something-something-da Fonesca, the ocean on my right, cars crawling slowly bumper to bumper and parallel parked and honking, tourists and locals moving in packs on the sidewalks, and the engine coughed, sputtered, and gave out.

Right in the middle of the road, the engine just up and died. I turned the ignition, the engine sputtered a few more times, wheezed, turned over, and then, surprisingly, caught just long enough for me to hang a left ontoAvenida Puglisiand drift into a handicap parking spot before the motor coughed like an asthmatic smoker and died again. I rested my head on the steering wheel, sweat dripping off my nose and sliding down my spine, smeared on my face and my shoulders and…everywhere.

Brazil is fucking hot.

I’d long since drunk the last of my water and the protein bar was also long gone. I had fivereal, and a pocketknife.

But Harris was coming.

Time to hide.

I spent a few minutes ransacking Pedro’s car, digging under the seats and in the glove box and in all the crevices, but only came up with a single crumpled one-realbill. I popped the trunk and checked in there, but he’d taken anything of value out of it, leaving only some garbage, an empty plastic bag, a tire iron and donut spare, an empty red gas can, and some empty baggies that had once held pot.

I found a scrap of paper and wrote “obrigado” on it, set it on the driver’s seat with the keys under the seat, and then set out on foot.

I trudged out from the relative cool and shade provided by the buildings of the downtown area and down to the beach, removing my flip-flops and stuffing them in my back pockets. The dry sand was hotter than Satan’s asshole, but I trotted through it to the surf, letting the water slosh over my bare feet. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky overhead, only a stiff, steady, hot breeze from off the water.

I just walked. North, I was pretty sure, but it didn’t really matter. The beach was actually fairly deserted, only a few couples and individuals here and there. I tried to seem at ease, as if I was just a lone tourist taking a walk on the beach.

I made it as far north as the beach would go until it ended at a cluster of high-rise condo buildings butting up right to the edge of the sea, hiding what looked like an outcropping of rock covered by a scrim of jungle. I kept walking, following the narrow streets uphill and around the ridge jutting out of the hillside and back down to the beach.

Know what I did then?

I walked.

And walked.

And walked.

Theoretically, I could probably just keep walking up the coast of Brazil until there was no more beach. In reality, I was fucking tired of walking. But what else could I do? I didn’t have money for a hotel, or food. I couldn’t just sit down on the beach and wait for the next ten hours. I didn’t want to stop, didn’t dare stop moving. If I stopped moving, I’d start thinking. If I started thinking, I’d have a nervous goddamn breakdown because I’d killed a man two hours ago. And once I started dwelling on that happy little fact, I might never stop bawling like a baby.

So I walked.