“I’d say you’re nude, screwed, and tattooed,” Tuan said over this shoulder. Then turned away from his racks of radio, computer and maybe mad science death nukes and said, “Old navy expression. Picked it up from my mom.”

MeiMei, dressed in bad-fitting sweats and cupping a warm mug of chai, curled on the couch as if trying to diminish the very volume of space she took up. She felt subdued and chastened, tried to damp out the shock and terror of the night by keeping things light and flippant, and wasn’t doing all that well. “I like to see a man with a hobby,” she said brightly.

“Monitoring the news is sort of hobby,” he told her. “Scanning police and navy bands is sort of a crime. You sure know how to pick ‘em, lady.”

“Well, if you’d only warned me…”

He laughed and wagged a finger at her. “Told ya, told ya.”

She gave a rueful little smile and pointed to several cellular phones on the sweeping desk that seemed to take up half of this small, sealed-off, dehumidified bedroom: geek heaven, piled with gear and laced with no-nonsense cables. “Maybe we could call somebody. Find out…” Uh, oh; he was already shaking his head.

“Who owns Telmex?” he asked her, as if drawing a student out using Platonic methods.

“How would I know? Oh, wait, I do know. Sort of. Carlos something, also owns all the television networks.”

“Carlos Slim. Richest man in the world and he’s a Mexican. You have any idea how deep a level of corruption that speaks to?”

“And he’s tapping your personal phones? That’s kind of flattering.”

“Ronchel probably plays golf with him. Is probably related to him, padrinos to each other’s kids, belong to the same clubs, sit on the same boards, buy up the same officials and pass them around. It’s how it works.”

“Oh, man. Another fine kettle of fish I’ve gotten me into.”

“I think you should just assume from this point on that any move you make will almost certainly bring you to his attention. He’s combing the coast for you.”

“What, the navy and cops and everybody? But he’s a criminal!”

“No, he is one of a handful of the owners of the Mexican legal system. And you, apparently, assaulted him, attempted to steal his property, and killed several of his people. I’m nervous just being in the same room with you.”

“And he’s turned the whole countryside out after me.”

“Like I said, you can pick ‘em. It gets better. One of the young guys they say you killed was a nephew. You apparently ran over him with a jetski. Before turning it into a bomb that assaulted Rolandi’s, who’d probably be the richest and most influential people on the island if Ronchel hadn’t helicoptered in to direct the manhunt for you.”

“Woman hunt,” she said in a small, meek voice. She looked around the room, then back at Tuan, who was sipping calmly and eyeing her with patient expectation. She kept her voice calm as she said, “What am I going to do?”

“Flee,” he told her flatly. “You are certainly welcome to stay here, like, indefinitely. But my guess is there are going to be house-to-house searches.”

“What?”

“They have to know you bailed off that little hummer somewhere along here. They can do anything they want. I keep trying to impress that on you. Anybody he tells to do something, they can do it, whatever it is. Whatever.”

“I’m starting to get the picture.” She set the cup on a pile of papers, books and gadgets that probably had a coffee table under it somewhere and drew her knees up, hugged them. For dear life, she thought. “But you said any move I make I get screwed and tattooed. The nude part they already managed.”

“I noticed that right away.”

He smiled softly and it warmed her somehow, like the long shower he’d treated her to before he even asked any questions, and the long, deep sleep she’d fallen into on a soft white bed in a guest bedroom. She’d slept all day, wolfed down two plates of eggs he scrambled for her, and was starting to get past the ragged edge hammered onto her by the hours of fear, by seeing Curtsy dead, feeling that boy’s neck break under her feet. She looked at him for answers. There was nobody else. “So fleeing presents some problems.”

“I’ve been working on that,” he told her in the same flat prof voice. “And I think I have it figured out. You’re going to hate it.”

“It’s been that kind of trip.”

“To cross the great water furthers,” he said, trying to look owlishly Asian.

“Been there, done that,” she said.

He set down his cup and stood up, unconsciously dusting imaginary chalk dust off his hands. “This’ll probably be worse.”

MeiMei stayed in the shadow of the wide porch, staring out over the bay in her baggy black clothes and slouch hat. She’d even rubbed her face with the champagne cork Tuan had scorched. Pigment envy, she thought. She wished she could get to Aphra for help. She wished she could get to her Mommy, let’s face it. She pointed to the end of the dock, where Tuan’s sloop’s trim lines made it look like it was dancing even under moorage. “Why can’t we just take the ‘Boolean’, there?”

Tuan was standing on a table, undoing straps that snugged some long black hull to the bottom of his porch above. He pointed further out in the bay, where small craft zoomed about and spotlights played around somewhat larger craft. “Those aren’t fishermen out there,” he said. “They’re coastal patrol cruisers, and it looks like they have some volunteer help. Guess who they’re looking for? And guess what they’d do if somebody put out at night. Especially somebody who’s Navigating While Asian?”

“Well, when you put it like that…” she said, and moved to help him lower the hull. It was long and sleek and black, with a curved, raised skeg like a surfboard. He laid if over two tables and rolled it over. She’d been expecting a Nanook-style kayak with little round skirted cockpit, but this one had a long cockpit with two seats. He pulled two double-bladed oars out of the hull and checked them out. He pointed to the pile of waterproofed nylon sacks on one of the tables and said, “Stow them there in the stern. Push them as far back as you can.”

She grabbed a sack, which he’d apparently packed while she slept, anticipating her decision. She dumped it into the hull and started tamping it back into the tapered cavity as he did the same with the other pile of aqua-luggage. It just seemed like a lot of stuff. She said, “How long is it going to take us to get over there to the mainland, anyway? I hope you put in my flannels for shuffleboard.”

He pulled his head and arm out of the forward portion of the hull and grabbed another sack of canned goods. “The mainland won’t do. I told you: it’s not Isla you have to escape from, it’s Mexico.”

“So we’re going to paddle to where? Cuba? Key West?”

“Belize.”

Oh. Well that made sense. But then what? Suddenly she realized she didn’t care what then, didn’t want to think about it or know about it. For the first time since childhood she just dumped the responsibility for taking care of MeiMei Chiang onto somebody else’s shoulders and bought a ticket for the ride. If felt surprising good, actually.

MeiMei was getting into the rhythm, stroking in a gliding cadence with Tuan, who sat behind her in his own blackface/ninja get-up moving his paddle right behind hers in a sort of rotary water ballet as the long black hull slid across the dark water. They left an hour after dark to get some distance before moonrise, and hugged the coast all the way to the point. As she heard the thrashing, sucking sound of the currents rounding South Point, she realized that it was Land’s End: they were leaving terra firma, and also any illusion of shelter or safety. Once again she was putting out to open sea with dangerous pursuers somewhere behind. This could get old, she was thinking.

Not so Tuan DeTomaso. Man, what a guy, huh? Had anybody ever, in her life, stepped up so utterly and effortlessly? Putting his own butt on the line for her, too, she assumed, though he’d been circumspect about that part of it. It’s almost like he was just waiting for her to walk into his life. Cut that out, Mei, she told herself.

“You seem really prepared for this,” she said over her shoulder. “Are you some fugitive, too? Always ready to bolt off in your eskiboat?”

“Well, I do a bit of cruising and camping in it,” he said, “The lucky thing was that I had any clothes to fit you.”

If you want to call this fitting me, she thought. And they had the very faint odor of Some Other Female.

“But actually,” he went on, speaking in the same unconsciously hushed tones people use when fishing off piers at night. “I always had this dream of fleeing by night, chased by evil antagonists in the company of a beautiful woman.”

That stopped her, but she didn’t want to let the thought hang there too long.

“And I finally showed up.”

“Yep. So I guess you’ll have to do.”

She was about to make some cute response when she felt the boat rock under her, then roll sideways. Then there was a blurred moment ending up with another plunge into black water. She struggled, trapped as her own buoyancy pressed her up into the confines of the hull. Then hands grabbed her, pulled her out… and clamped tightly over her mouth.

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“Well I never mind getting my feet wet a little,” Aphra said, deadpan enough that she was sure the innuendo got through.

Town had stopped the cab at the entrance to the wood bridge to the Avalon, and then kind of mosied around, leaning over the rail and staring down where the water under the span. He pointed out a barracuda to her, and three pearlescent cuttlefish flitting through the cone of light underneath.mayancalendargirls.com The he’d looked around and said, “I kind of hate to go inside, it’s so nice. And this beach is just so perfect. Am I crazy to want to kick off my sandals and do a little moonlight wading?”

So get their feet wet they did. He kicked off his sandals off and was sloshing along the waveless shallows. She hiked up her skirt, to the desired effect, and fell in beside him. Slogging around the shallows by Na Balam, bumming along North Beach, chatting nicely, Aphra had to wonder. Did he know he was standing right in front of her place, talking about not wanting to go over to the Avalon? Stay down here on the sand and all? Be interesting to find out if he’s even registered at the Avalon. Aphra definitely reading him as competition at that point.

And he kind of had her. Obviously she’d rather snoop out his room and he’d rather do hers. But was she going to say, No, to hell with the tropical beauty, let’s go into your hotel? But know what, sometimes it’s just, See one, play one. So she hit him with the wet feet line, then sunk it with, “Know, what? We could have those drinks on my front porch. Right up there, behind the palm trees.”

“You’re staying here? Man, that’s so cool. I booked an all-inclusive over there, but now I see this place right on the beach, nice old buildings, I wish I’d known.”

Well come on over for some all-inclusive, Casper, Aphra thought. Said, “It’s a great little spot. You drink rum?”

“Don’t they call it grog around the Caribbean?”

“All I got is some Coke.” That was a probe, of course, but not a flicker. So, “Why do they call rum and Coke a ‘Cuba Libre’, anyway?”

“Government secret. I think they can pull your passport just for saying it.”

“Nah, the Democrats are in now. My man Obama be down there swapping spit with Fidel, sending them tractors and Mastercards.”

He spotted a round flat rock in a foot of water, picked it up and skimmed it on the surface. Aphra admired the clean, powerful delivery, the rock skipping completely out of sight. Man didn’t just look good and talk shit, he could move himself, huh? She had another of those weird moments when she looked a man over and thought; Not bad, not bad, oughta give it another shot. Whatever else he was, he was damn sure pretty.

Meanwhile Townsend was getting almost alarmed at the way his intentions were zigzagging between taking care of business and wanting to just wrap himself around this big, smart beauty and hang on until he knew how it came out. Fortunately, the two urges coincided at the moment, and were headed in a promising direction.

And it got more promising after two drinks, when she slipped inside to “visit the ladies” as she put it, and he could take a quick scan. He ran his art of the State iPod-disguised transponder over her purse and got nothing. Maybe it was reading something out in Langley or wherever the hyper-tech innards were routing things. He turned up the field, broadened it to maximum mayancalendargirls.comcardiac pattern, and got a blip or two from inside the room. He quickly slipped on the stylish sunglasses the guys called “X-Ray Spex” and leaned over to peer through the window. The displays fired in his left peripheral vision, and he spotted two different hot spots: the nightstand drawer and the pocket of that robe hanging by the bathroom door. Which was opening, so he ducked out of view and pocketed the shades and bug-buster. It had been a quick glimpse of the reads, but she was using some pretty trick stuff, herself. Then she was back on the porch. Wearing the robe. So much for heading for a whiz and copping her feed. On the other hand, he was electrified by the fact that she was standing there in a bathrobe.

And even more so when she said, in a rather smoky tone, “Know what I like about this place? Makes it easy to do a little skinny-dipping at night.”

He felt an unaccustomed, and not really desirable, leap in his chest at that. Damn! He was already on his feet. Totally ready to strip off and follow her delectable ass into the water. Leaving all his toys here in his clothes, and once they came back there wouldn’t be much way to snatch the stuff up, would there?

Among the characteristics Town shared with his father, that proved advantageous in his line of work, was the ability to make very quick decisions to take uncalculated risks. He stood up and faced her, looked straight into her eyes, and said, “How about we save that for after?”

“After, you saying?” she put a lot of arch and English on it. “After what, may I ask?”

“After all,” he said, and stepped right up to her: touching her breast with his, reaching to hold that wiry waist he could almost span with his hands, lifting his thumbs to loosen her robe’s terrycloth belt. “After us.”

She fixed him with a steely eye, from six maddeningly scented inches away, and said, “Will you please remove your hands from my ass, mister?”

Well, you give it your shot, he was thinking as he let his hands fall to his side and trotted out his boyish, sorry-ma’am grin. Which she wiped off quick by shrugging the robe off her shoulders and letting it slide down her to the ground. And saying, “That’s better.”

He actually took a step back. Taking her all in. Jesus frickin’ Christ on a crutch, was his assessment. Holy frickin’ shit. She smiled and tapped her foot. “Backin’ off already, white meat? I kinda thought you had more developed ideas.”

She stepped up to him with her hands cupped on her smooth, shaved crotch. Then cupped on his crotch. His impression was not unlike sticking his main unit into an electrical socket. He went to full erect position so fast he was surprised he didn’t fall over from the venous pressure drop.

She smiled appreciatively. “Now, that’s the kind of idea I’m talking about. Sometimes more is just damnwell more.”

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MeiMei had fortunately headed the right general direction and when she saw glare of lights from the Cancun hotel zone she used them to guide her jouncing flight from the pursuing gang. Twenty minutes after starting to look for it, she made out the outline of Isla Mujeres and headed straight for the South Point lighthouse. She’d gained some lead on the thundering Lords, but could hear them, relentless, behind her. She headed in close to the lee shore of Isla, aiming past the dock lights at Garrafon Park, trying to run closer to land. The Lords followed, keying on stray light catching the white robe that flapped out behind her like a comet’s tail.

Because she’d figured out the only place she really had a chance to find safety. Anywhere she tried to stop, those goons would be right on her, and there was small hope of any cops or vacationing Green Berets being around at this hour. So she nosed in close, meanwhile making what few preparations she could think of. She retrieved the camera and knotted the little lanyard around her left wrist. She used her teeth to tear a big strip of whatever Victoria’s Secret Weapon material the robe was made of. She had experimented a little once she figured out the Doods couldn’t catch her in a straight-out race, and learned that releasing the grips caused a deadman switch to cut power. But not when it was lashed down tight with the fuzzy, glittery hem of the of the robe from the Roman Polanski Collection.

Which made it easier to shrug out of the robe, which had been impossible when her velocity required her constant grip. She knotted the pulled the sleeves of the robe and looped hooked them on her right elbow. And nudged in closer to shore. Which was scaring the hell out of her because at the speeds she was going there would be no chance to avoid any sort of obstacle. mayancalendargirls.com Hope nobody’s out skinny-dipping tonight, she thought as she rocketed along the coastline, threading under the series of long, high docks that extended out over the silty shallows of the sheltered side of the island. Then she was there.

She reached under her butt to tuck the robe’s sleeves into the grab strap on the seat, then had only a second to set the Kawasaki on a course that would take it out away from the other piers. Then, as it passed into the shadow of one of the lower ones, she jumped off and splashed quickly to cling to one of the crusty pilings. She ducked her head under water as the four vengeful watercraft screamed through the gap under the wooden walkway, none of the Doods capable of being craven enough to run outside the piers when a mere bitch was slaloming under them. As soon as the Lords of Xibalba careened past she headed madly for the shore.

As soon as the flying Kawasaki came out of the moonshadow of the island and broke into the relatively open water off the Turtle Farm it was obvious that it was currently an unmanned projectile. The sudden deceleration of howling jetskis caused them to nose into the water, expertly flipped into little dive/turns by the various surviving Lords. Corcho, who’d trailed them since he’d been on the yacht when they took off, pulled up and summed it up. “The bitch bailed. We backtrack.” All four of them revved up and whizzed back along the shore, keeping a sharp eye for naked castaways.

It was only forty yards to shore, but tougher than she would have guessed. The bottom was gooey and gross, with creepy grass and god knew what else. But swimming was no picnic, either, especially in the dark beneath the pier, where odd things floated bumped squishily against her. Finally her crawl strokes were brushing relatively clean sand on the bottom and she put a tentative foot down to stand up in waist-deep water. Only to belly flop back as she heard the first jetski. The Lords were moving much slower now, their tweaked two-strokes grumbling as they poked along shining headlights under docks and scanning the beaches. MeiMei crawled in further, seeking the deeper darkness where the dock met the beach. When the last of them putted off to the south, concentrating their search around Casa O, she jumped up and sprinted for the house.

Which was totally dark. Maybe nobody was home. Setting up her next exercise: how to get out of this area and back to the Maria Del Mar in the middle of the night with no money and no clothes.

She approached the house from the side where there was a simple door, not wanting to be silhouetted slinking past the big sliding glass that covered most of the front. mayancalendargirls.com Once there she couldn’t decide how to do the simple act of knocking on the door. She hadn’t seen anything to cover up with and was too anxious to get out of sight to do much searching. Finally she located a spot under an arching bougainvillea, moved to the door to pound on it loud, long and desperate, then dashed back to the cover of the bougainvillea’s bower. Where she waited shivering and exposed and generally ready to freak out. She’d done a damned good job of keeping it together, she thought. Getting caught in a crime, then being an attempted rape victim and seeing her friend shot to death, then–face it–probably killing those two water bikers, then leading a hound chase across open sea at night, most of it stark naked. So what she wanted was to achieve a spot of relative safety and security, get some damned clothes, the exercise then exquisite luxury of falling completely apart.

No such luck. The door didn’t open, but three huge lights came on, the big kind they use for ballparks and prisonbreaks. One of them was directly over her head, so the bougainvillea provided no shelter at all. She grabbed one of the leafy branches, only to discover that it was covered with very nasty thorns. Then the door opened and Tuan DeTomaso stepped out, holding one hand behind his back and staring at the nude honey who had decided to call on him at four in the morning.

There was no point in being coy at that point, MeiMei decided. She stood up straight and walked over to Tuan as naturally as if she’d been wearing her jeans and lab coat. As he gaped, she said, “Help me, O.B. Tuan. You’re my only hope.”

Mitsy Fortnum liked lolling naked in the warm dark water. And last night it had been a real turn-on; sneaking out of their rooms in the wee hours to do a “From Here To Eternity” number in the gentle waves on the sheltered beach at Rolandi’s. mayancalendargirls.com But that was last night, and now it seemed, well, So Last Night. Tommy was all over her, as usual, but she just didn’t get that same forbidden tropical fantasy kick and was starting to fret. It was nice to go with a guy who had a Porsche and could take her places like this, but she was starting to wonder about the wisdom of a continued relationship with a guy who was basically just a dull ex-jock, when you got down to it. And was proving less and less capable of lighting her fire.

She tapped him on the shoulder as he moved over her in the warm shallows, incidentally grinding her Pilates-honed booty against some kind of unpleasant vegetation that had washed up there. That didn’t work so she grabbed a handful of his hair and pulled his head back sharply to make eye contact. “Listen, Tommy,” she said, but didn’t get any further than that.

Largely because something came whooping and screaming out of the night. It was big and black and she caught a flash of huge white teeth mayancalendargirls.comin an evil, gaping grin as it thundered up on them with a deafening roar. Whatever it was just missed plastering them or gobbling them up or whatever its hell-sent mission was, but might have grazed the back of Tommy’s thighs as it whined past them. He jumped to his feet in one spasm, coming out of her like a champagne cork. As she turned to see what it was–her stomach doing flipflops and triple axels–it rained all over them with this like fireboat waterspout out of its ass end. Just before it tore up the beach like that Normandy movie, knocked a couple of tables and umbrellas from there to eternity, and smashed into the stone wall supporting the restaurant deck at what must have been close to eighty miles an hour.

Tommy was standing there staring, all those lovely muscles clenched up, shaking like a wet Spaniel. She lay gaping, her innards doing odd things, her fists and pink little anus clenched tight as a streetfighter’s fist. Then the Kawasaki burst into flame.

That brought her to her feet as well… you could see burning gasoline splattered all over the beach lounges and massage tables, and even floating on the water. Holy shit, would they get burned in the ocean? She stared at the flames, her mouth lolling open and her belly churning.

Tommy turned to face her, no sign of that big, proud boner now. The fire seemed be spreading and lights were coming on in the hotel. She looked down and saw a play of hot colors all over her wet, beautifully augmented torso. “Come on,” he whispered urgently as he tried to pull her over to the lounge where they’d left their robes. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Mitsy asked rhetorically. She turned to him and just tackled him like a blitzing linebacker, grabbing him around the knees and carrying him over backwards into the water. “This is getting me so fucking hot!”

She broke off communications at that point, taking advantage of her position to get a mouthful of action and start the process of working herself into an oblivious frenzy.

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MeiMei tried the door, but it was securely bolted. Locks on the outside of stateroom doors, she thought, always the mark of a true gentleman. She cased the boudoir without much hope of finding the Secret Weakness Chamber. This guy probably does this all the time. A lovely bathroom (do they call it a “head’ on this class of boat?) with bidet, no less. But a notable lack of scissors or blunt weapons. The closet had nothing but some frilly nightwear and sleek lounging robes. In what looked like child’s sizes. Yuck. As she examined the barred portholes, she checked to make sure the camera was still tucked up behind her neck, the little lanyard securely lashed into her thick black hair. The one thing she desperately wanted to have if she got out of this fix. Then she heard shouts, then shots. Followed by a splash.

She jumped to the ports and saw bodyguards moving by at a run. Oh, shit! She was practically jumping around with anxiety when she felt a tremor run through the yacht, then the almost imperceptible sensations of movement. Another glimpse out the window confirmed that she was under way. Ronchel probably figured there might be more of us. She wished. She wished, in fact, that Aphra would suddenly show up, parachuting in blasting from the hip with twin UZI’s and kicking pervo ass with Seventies go-go boots.

Instead she got Ronchel. He slammed the door open, making her jump, then back away until her butt hit the bulkhead. He came into the room in an obvious fury. Along with other emotions equally obvious by a casual glance at his bulging crotch. He stared right into MeiMei’s eyes, neither looking at or speaking to the two bodyguards who flowed into the room behind him. They immediately moved towards MeiMei, who held her hands in front of her with her fingernails coiled like talons.

Ronchel laughed and raised his right hand from beside his leg, demonstrating that it clutched a huge stainless steel revolver. Which he pointed at Mei while the two thugs moved in and patted her down (pretty diligently, she thought) for nasty surprises. One of them nodded to Ronchel, who motioned them out of the room.

Quickly, MeiMei said, “You really think a big, tough guy like you needs that much gun?”

Ronchel laughed. “Need? Not at all. But it’s much more fun.”

As the torpedoes closed the door behind them, he moved close to MeiMei, staring with obviously growing pleasure. “Not bad, not bad,” he said. “For Plan B.”

“You can also choose two dishes from column A,” MeiMei said, holding his gaze while standing tall with no attempt to cover herself.

“I can choose whatever I want, Chinita. And I’ve got all night.”

MeiMei sighed and shrugged. “So why do you still have your pants on?”

“Good point.” He pulled the string tie of his pants and let them fall. Had to help them get around his dick, but then they fell to the floor and he kicked them at her, standing there with rampant hard-on and brandished firearm.

“I can see right now it’s true about guys with big guns trying to compensate,” MeiMei sniffed.

“I think I’m big enough for chink pussy,” he said stalking towards her like some sort of matador/flasher. “Are you getting a little excited?”

MeiMei raised the back of her hand to cover a yawn.

Ronchel grinned tightly and stepped close enough to extend the pistol within inches of her chest. With excruciating slowness he put the muzzle right on her nipple, the brown flesh sliding inside the gleaming barrel. She could feel the sharp edges of the rifling. She shook her head sadly. “Pitiful.”

Without any expression he flipped the gun sideways, hurting her tender tissue as it raked away, then swung it back, towards the side of her head.

MeiMei made two moves at once, a high Bang shou block of the gun and a plain old Chin Tom Toy kick to the area she was thinking of as gao wán, rather than “nuts”, since she always switched over to Chinese when practicing the arts her father had drilled into her from the time she could walk.

He fell to his knees making retching sounds, turned away as if trying to crawl for the door. She took cold aim and kicked him as hard as she could where his left hand was cupping his outraged basket. He screeched like a woman, threw up, and lost consciousness. MeiMei grabbed the gun and pointed it at him. She even inched the trigger back a sliver. But knew she couldn’t do it.

She stepped over and stood behind his knees, knelt and positioned the big gun right on his anus. And shoved if forward with her full strength, taking savage pleasure in the feel of the front sight tearing membrane as the seven-inch barrel plunged into his rectum. Again she felt the impulse to pull the trigger, but knew she wouldn’t. She stood and dithered a moment. God knows how long he would stay unconscious: the guy was like one of the movie monsters, kept rearing back up when he was supposed to be out of the picture. Finally she grabbed the most substantial-looking of the robes from the closet and ran to the door.

She had her mental fingers crossed as she tried it and gave a deep sigh when it opened. She dared a quick peek into the hall, hoping she wouldn’t have to run back over there and draw a shit-smeared sixgun to deal with bodyguards. This whole bit was just not her style at all.

She hit the main rear deck frantic for an escape plan. The boat had to be gone. She had unfortunately omitted helicopter lessons from her undergrad curriculum. If there were lifeboats or escape pods, they weren’t in plain sight. Then she heard the snarl of two-stroke engines approaching and looked over the rail to see a half-dozen JetSkis coming into the wake and drawing up to the water level stern catwalk. She realized that there had been a radio or cell phone call to notify these little dickheads that the mothership had weighed anchor.

As she watched, Corcho jockied in close, jumped his Yamaha up onto the little bathing deck and grabbed a dangling line from a davit. The other Lords were queuing up for docking procedure. All six of them would be up on her deck in minutes, and they looked like even less congenial rapists than her host had tried to be. She stared at the scene below as the Dood they called Chango eased his Kawasaki in close enough to snatch at a float-tipped mooring line Corcho had tossed astern. And heard shouts behind her, the soft putter of running deckshoes. Without giving herself time to think better of it, she jumped up onto the teak rail, then leaped off and plunged out of view.

The Lord known as Chango was in some ways very fortunate. Other ways, less so. After his humiliation ashore on the previous day, it’s unlikely his psyche would have been able to handle awareness of what happened as he leaned over to grab a floating line. Which was an aerial bombardment by a bitch. MeiMei fell almost thirty feet, trailing her shiny white robe like a geisha butterfly. At about the point when she would have reached terminal velocity, her feet impacted the top of Chango’s spine, the right heel striking at the point known as “the atlas”. The immediate result of her landing on him, smashing his chest into the hand-rubbed finish of his garish tank and cracking his jaw against his custom “ape hanger” handlebars was that he promptly ceased to be an impediment to her desire to leave the area. Beyond that, he ceased being alive.

Her landing cushioned by the abolishment of Chango, MeiMei fell to her knees on his shoulders, then quickly slid down his back into the saddle. In the moment’s grace bought by the sheer novelty of her arrival–naked Asian poon from the heavens being rarer than meteor showers in that area–she tugged the inert Chango around, grunting dojo monosyllables at the exertion of heaving him into the drink while his buddies watched, stunned.

Fortunately (as we’ve seen) operating a JetSki doesn’t require top-drawer intelligence, so she quickly figured out where to put her hands and what to do with them. The hopped-up response of the super-souped Kawasaki JS750 literally scared the piss out of her when she racked the throttle around. But even more so “Chimi”, wastrel scion of the Ronchel lineage, whose SeaDoo RXP-Turbo was directly in front of her. The hyperactive Kwaski hunkered down and bolted almost out of the water, the hull mostly dry as it smashed into Chimi and ran right over him, converting him and his RXP into an ad hoc ramp for an awesome jump that brought cheers from nearby yachts where attention had been gathered by the gunshots. She blasted straight over Chimi , carved a turn to port that terrified her, and became the proverbial blue streak.

Stung by having frozen up, infuriated by the demolition of their two comrades by some gookporn ninja who was pretty blatantly a mere woman, the remaining Lords recovered their usual aggressive velocities and pelted behind her. She headed towards where she’d last seen Curtsy.

And caught a glimpse of her, lolling over a swell, hair a faint yellow carnation floating in her headlight, surrounded by a nimbus of blood. She saw no signs of life–quite the contrary–and quickly realized that if she stopped the only result would both of them falling back in the hands of these assholes, and if Curtsy wasn’t dead already, she would be soon enough. She blasted by her accomplice, the Kawasaki’s wake rolling her over into a face-down float that spoke of finality.

Leaning low for less resistance, MeiMei felt tears being torn from her face by the force of the wind. The California girl had just been so cool, so vital, so… alive. And now? Last seen face-down in a slick of blood. Because she got sucked into this lunatic Mission Improbable scheme. She cried silently as she shifted her weight, searched out a position of low profile that didn’t kick her butt as she skimmed the waves, a kind of jockey crouch.

There was something oddly soothing about the jounce across the open sea. After a half-hour MeiMei had regained her usual inner calm and outer watchfulness. She was realizing that she had an edge over her pursuers. Her craft was just a fast as theirs–in fact, it dawned on her that in a male motorhead ratpack like that you couldn’t have a slower vehicle or they’d sneer and drum you out–but she was substantially lighter and offered less wind resistance. There were no tricks or techniques that would help them out in open water: this race would be to the swiftest and she had an advantage. The problem was… race to where?

And while she was browsing tropical destinations, there was also one of those niggling energy questions that pester us all these days–did she have enough gas to get wherever she dreamed up to go? She guessed she’d live or die on whether the Doods had filled their tanks on their trip to shore. And that she had the same reserves that they did. There was no way to know and her weight advantage would apply to fuel consumption as well as speed.

She didn’t look back at the Doods: she instinctively saw glancing over the shoulder as bad prey behavior. Learning while fleeing. She experimented with the controls–at one point touching a button that released a blast of “La Cucaracha”–before finding the switch that cut her running lights. She understood that the Lords would have to keep theirs on so as not to lose her: another edge that wasn’t much but was among the small advantages she held and hoped to maximize. She hung back from the handgrips with a stern grimace as she fled into the night. Run dark, run deep, was her mantra, her robe billowing out behind her like a superhero’s cape. She worked the camera out of her hair and placed in securely in the receptacle where the mp3 deck had been before she popped it out and lobbed it over her shoulder, hoping it clobbered one of the JetSki jockeys. Then ran out of things to do and just hung on for the duration.

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