“It is that one,” Pablo said. We’d followed him out of the pool area and around the back of the hotel and through the (intentionally) overgrown botanical gardens, which subtly hid the villas from sight. Nothing says “privacy” quite like plants grown to twice their normal size. That and water features burbling away in some hidden crevice-boutique hotels are always big on hidden crevices that contain very small fountains-make celebrities and the very rich feel like they are one with nature.
“Which one?” Sam said.
Pablo pointed in the vague direction of a twelve-foot thrust of fountain grass. “There,” he said. He was still sweating profusely and my glasses kept sliding down his nose, so that he had to continually push them up. He turned to me and handed me a room key card. “Take this,” he said.
“One minute,” I said. He hadn’t said a word since we left the pool and had grown consistently more nervous as we walked, which made me think we were walking into an ambush. “What’s in the villa?”
“Bad men,” he said.
Fiona groaned in exasperation. She reached over and snatched my glasses off Pablo’s face and handed them back to me. They were a bit too damp for my taste. “Pablo,” she said, “I’m not as patient nor as willing to spend money on frivolous information as my two simian friends. So I’m going to need you to speak only in complete sentences now. I know you’re scared of something, but if you aren’t more forthcoming with information, you will actually have a reason to be scared, versus the normal, unfounded fears of your sex.”
“Uh, Fi,” I said, but she waved me off.
Pablo’s sweaty fear was now wide-eyed anguish, so that was a nice change. “The man who rents this room? He tells me not to come and clean. But you understand, if I do not clean the rooms, I can lose my job. They track our security cards, so they always know if we’ve gone in the rooms and villas, you see. So they know. And I cannot lose my job. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” Fiona said. She put her hand on Pablo’s wrist. Very gentle. Very caring. She had that ability for kindness, too, but she could also snap his wrist if she decided she didn’t trust him. “Please, continue.”
“So I wait until I see the man leave and I go and just slide my card in, so it registers. You see? But then the door is open and curiosity, you see, it gets the better of me.”
“Killed the cat,” Sam said, which was entirely the wrong thing to say at that moment.
“I know. I know. I know,” Pablo said. “I find guns. Many, many guns. And much money. Much money. But it isn’t real. The money, that is. I find this out the wrong way.”
“Please, tell me you did not steal counterfeit money and then use it to pay your water bill or something,” I said. Pablo’s eyes got wider, if that was possible. He wiped his face with his sleeve, but he didn’t say anything. Whatever he did with the money, it was the wrong thing to do. “How much did you take?” I asked.
“One thousand,” he said. “I bought a round of drinks at the bar here and paid with a fifty that was apparently not such a good copy. So, so, I try to take the money back, but by that time, I’d already spent maybe five hundred, so I cannot afford to pay back another real five hundred.”
“When was the last time you went into the room?” I asked.
“Three days. I slide my card, but I do not go in. But the men who come and go, they do not look like the kind of people I’d like to anger.”
“And what do we look like?” Sam said.
Pablo stammered for a moment, but then Fiona applied a slight bit of pressure to his wrist, which seemed to focus his attention. “I figure you are good guys, or else why would you want to know what’s happening?”
I handed Pablo back my sunglasses. He needed them more than I did. “Fiona,” I said, “give him your earrings.”
“What?”
“Your earrings,” I said.
“They’re diamond,” she said.
“Did you buy them?”
“They were a gift,” she said.
“From who?”
“From a gentleman who didn’t have quite enough money for a fair-priced assault rifle.”
“Consider it karmic reparations,” I said.
Fiona took off her two rather large diamond studs and handed them to Pablo, who didn’t quite know what to do with them, mostly because Fiona was making noises in her throat like a cornered tiger. It can be slightly disconcerting to those who don’t know Fiona’s noises.
“What am I to do?” Pablo said.
“Go home sick,” I said.
“For how long?” he asked.
“Forever,” I said.
Pablo looked down at the diamond earrings in his hand and then back at Fiona. He plucked up one of the earrings and tried to hand it back to Fiona. “Maybe one is enough?”
“They’re a matched set,” Fiona said.
“Go,” I said to Pablo, “before I change my mind.”
Pablo deposited the earrings in his pocket and then scurried out of sight in what must have been record time.
“Guess it’s true,” Sam said once Pablo was gone, “that you can’t trust the help at hotels not to go through your shit.”
I handed the key card to Fiona. “Why don’t you see if you can accidentally open the door to the wrong villa,” I said.
“And get shot?” she said.
“No one shoots a pretty girl in a bikini,” Sam said. “And besides, with all that oil on you, a bullet would slide right off you.”
“Or I’ll instantly ignite,” she said.
I had a better idea. I called the front desk and asked to be connected to the villa. I hung up after five rings. “There’s no one there,” I said.
“Would you feel better if Uncle Sam was standing next to you with his big, mean gun, Fiona?” Sam said.
Fiona gave both of us one of her patented “I could live a better life without both of you” glares and stomped off toward the villa. Sam and I followed behind her at a slight distance, and then lingered out of sight in the nuclear-treated fountain grass as she approached the door. Though Fiona didn’t have a gun on her-hard to hide a gun in a bikini-I was certain she could handle herself in the face of danger. Plus, Sam was right: No one shoots a pretty girl in a bikini. It just goes against nature.
Fiona slipped the key card in just as anyone might when they’re returning to their villa-which is to say, she portrayed no nerves in the least-and opened the door. I listened for screams or gunshots or even a muffled yelp, but heard nothing. The door closed behind her with an audible click.
A few seconds later, my cell phone rang.
“Darling,” Fiona said when I answered, “why don’t you come back to the room? I’m lonely.”
“I’ll even bring a friend,” I said.
Sam and I checked for unwelcome visitors and then headed to the villa. Fiona stood in the doorway, sipping a bottle of water.
“Where’d you get the water?” I asked.
“The mini bar,” she said. “Just four dollars.”
We stepped inside, and Fi closed the door and bolted it behind us. The villa was decorated just like the rest of the hotel, which is to say, at some point the designers began thinking of the 1970s as a period worth revisiting. For added kitsch factor, the walls inside the villa were covered with framed, blown-up photos of B-list celebrities-Zsa Zsa Gabor, Barbie Benton, Ricardo Montalban, the guy who played Potsie on Happy Days-partying in Miami during the period.
“Who would pay to stay here?” Sam said. “I had to live in the 1970s. And let me tell you, it was no vacation.”
“Hipsters,” Fiona said, “love to revisit the time period their parents suffered through.”
The living room and small galley kitchen looked lived-in, but not messy. There were cups in the sink, the garbage had take-out containers and coffee grounds in it and the sofa in the living room was dented from people sitting on it. There were no guns and no stacks of money, at least not in the open. The room was well lit by the sun coming in through a sliding glass door, which opened out to a small patio overlooking the canal. I opened the door and stepped outside. On the patio table was an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. Two chairs were pulled slightly away from the table, as well, which told me more than one person had been here.